The Redemption Paradox

“So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.”

Love gives us a different perspective on the difficulties of life. Seven years of hard work, day in, day out, is a high price to pay for a wife. Elsewhere, Jacob talks about serving Laban, and he says, “By day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes.” So he was not unaware what Rachel cost him, but love gave Jacob a different perspective. He had a goal in front of him. Compared to that, seven years became but a few days.

Contradictions and Contradistinctions

Yesterday I was listening to a secular scholar again. (Okay, it was JP.)

He was speaking about the Bible, its value as a text and its importance in human history. At the same time, he was expressing disbelief about how it had persisted. It’s a “strange old book”, he said. It’s “contradictory” and “cobbled together”. He puzzled over how it was possible it could ever have “such an unbelievable impact on civilization”. But at the same time, he concluded, “However educated you are, you are not educated enough to discuss the typological significance of the biblical stories.”

And then he went on to try.

Contradictions and Contradistinctions

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