It would be most natural for me to comment on the Abraham/Isaac situation that comes about in this portion of reading, so I'd like to instead look at one partial sentence 24:67, "she became his wife and he loved her." I think our culture defines love a lot differently than Isaac defined love. In our culture love is built on attraction, and in the culture of Genesis love was built on commitment. How is it that Isaac was able to love Rebekah even though he had never met her before? We do learn that Rebekah was attractive, but didn't they need to spend time finding out if they were compatible? The Bible seems to indicate that that did not happen. Apparently love comes down to a decision to be committed to another person more than it comes down to some level of attraction or even compatibility. I wonder how our world would be different if we saw love as commitment.
I would agree to the fact that our culture has a miss the mark when it comes to love and marraige. If you ever speak with a Christian from India you can see a prearrange marriage is not such a bad idea. The thing to remember is that love, no matter if in marriage or not is defined in the Bible as actions. I find that the trust that Abraham had in God and his servant to provide a wife that would be good for Issac a level a faith that is not in our culture.
Yeah, but don’t you think he was the slightest bit relieved that she was a babe? I like the part that says “and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.”
I agree with JTB about having faith in God to help us find mates. As far as letting my parents chose a mate for me – SCARY THOUGHT! I’ve been thinking about this term we use “compatible”. In this day and age we are so selfish and we do things we want to do, the way we want to do it. Me Me Me Me Me. We get the act of two becoming one to a point and that scares us a bit. (Although, not as much as having our parents choose our mates!) Therefore we must choose someone who is compatible with us and what we like to do so that we don’t have to change anything about ourselves in order to become one with this other person. Does that make sense? I like football and the beach. I don’t want to give up Sunday afternoon ball games or trips to the Outerbanks. So, in today’s society I would choose a mate that enjoyed a noisy living room and/or cold stadium seats and found lighthouses to be some of the most amazing things in the whole entire world. Perhaps they would just rather take a nap on Sunday. I really don’t care as long as they don’t nag me to go do something else that they want to do – like walk the dog that I never wanted.
I do feel that if a believer really were to put the choosing of his/her mate into the Lord’s hands, God would most likely pick someone they are attracted to and “compatible” with to a point. He knows what He’s doing and He knows how we all tick.