Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #6 of Genesis, chapter 29, and we will begin reading in Genesis 29:11-14:

And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept. And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother, and that he was Rebekah's son: and she ran and told her father. And it came to pass, when Laban heard the tidings of Jacob his sister's son, that he ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed him, and brought him to his house. And he told Laban all these things. And Laban said to him, Surely thou art my bone and my flesh. And he abode with him the space of a month.

We were discussing Jacob’s marriages to Leah and Rachel, and how the Bible is clear that he loved Rachel, but he did not love Leah as much.  That is what it says in Genesis 29:30:

And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more than Leah…

Then it tells us in Genesis 29:31:

And when JEHOVAH saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.

Again, this does not necessarily mean that he had strong negative feelings toward Leah.  Biblical “hatred” is not like that, just as Biblical “love” is not defined as the world’s idea of love.  The world views “love” as a feeling, and having a “soft, tender emotion” toward someone.  As far as the world really carries love, one can go in and out of love; you can love someone and then a few years later, you say, “Well, I do not love that person anymore.  Now I love someone else.”

In the Bible, love is action.  Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”  The act of keeping the commandments of God is what God considers as love shown toward Him, and feelings can accompany the act (of obeying) and can grow stronger and stronger over time, but that is not really necessary. 

Likewise, the world’s definition of “hate” is different than the Bible’s, and since the world is fleshly and carnal, we should not be surprised that they define these things as “feelings” and they describe their feeling: “I cannot stand that person.”  It is really the idea of despising or loathing someone, and you just want that person far away from you.  Now the latter is more accurate, as far as the Bible is concerned, if we go to Luke 6.  (And we are jumping ahead a little bit here, and we will get to this again later on when we get to these verses, but it does not hurt to have a preview discussion of these things.)  It says in Luke 6:22:

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

The word “separate” is key to Biblical “hatred.” You know, the people of the world in their hatred of God’s people do not want to be with us.  They do not want to associate with us or spend too much time with us because the light of the Gospel and the light of Christ shines forth, and, ultimately, it is their hatred of God that causes them to move away and flee from the light.  If the elect of God are light bearers because we carry the Word of God and keep the commandments, then the world will move away from it. 

And that is what Jacob has done, and I think we can understand that he loved Rachel, so he naturally went toward her and wanted to be with her.  In being drawn to Rachel and wanting to spend his time with her and care for her, he was removing himself from Leah.  He did not want to be with Leah in that same kind of way, so he was “separating himself” from Leah.  He did not view her as his wife, or at least, the wife he wanted.  Yes – he knew she was his wife, but we know the circumstances.  It was not a marriage that was arranged in a proper way, so he drifted away from her.  So, how this would work out is that, let us say, it was a nice day and he would seek out Rachel and say, “Rachel, let the two of us go out for a picnic,” and the two of them would go out to the field, leaving Leah back.  There was no concern for her, and he would tell Rachel all his deep-down thoughts and share things with her.  They would laugh together in a way that Jacob did not, and could not, laugh with Leah, because he did not feel strongly toward her.  He loved Rachel, so his actions were geared toward her and not toward Leah.  Leah was just someone that was “there.”  He was married to her, but his focus was always on Rachel.

So God saw this, and God blessed Leah with children.  That is what we read in Genesis 29:31:

And when JEHOVAH saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.

Again, we see that Jacob had two wives – one he loved, and one he did not love.  Notice the similarity between that situation and the situation between him and his brother Esau concerning the blessing that Isaac had intended to give to his firstborn Esau.  But Jacob usurped that whole thing, and he received the blessing by pretending to be his older brother Esau.   It is interesting that we find the word “kiss” here, if we go back to Genesis 27:26:27:

And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me, my son. And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which JEHOVAH hath blessed:

Isaac kissed Jacob, thinking it was Esau, but in this “kiss,” he is blessing him with the blessing of the firstborn son.  And, so, too, we see in Genesis 29:11 that is says, “And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept.”  Again, the spiritual context is that the stone has been removed away, and it is the second outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the second Jubilee, and the Latter Rain period, and God is going to bless His people with the blessing of eternal life (salvation).  So Jacob “kissed” Rachel.  It is almost as though he is loving her already, so this is really a carryover of that same picture that God used with Jacob and Esau, where one is blessed and the other is not, and where one is loved and the other is not.  As far as the Gospel is concerned in its painting of spiritual pictures, this same situation is carried over to Jacob and his wives; he loved Rachel, but he did not love Leah, and God says that Leah was hated.

And remember how we discussed a little while back the children of Rachel and Leah.  Leah had six sons of her own, and her handmaid also had two sons that she counted as hers, so the picture is that she had eight sons.  Eventually, Rachel had two sons born of her, and she also had two sons by her handmaid that she counted as her own, so Rachel had four sons.  And there we see that ratio that appears frequently where God breaks the human race into the “one third” that typify His people and the “two thirds” are not His people.  That is the figure in Zechariah 13:8-9:

And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith JEHOVAH, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein. And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, JEHOVAH is my God.

“One third” are the people of God, and “two thirds” are cut off and die.  Why would God cut them off and cause them to die?  It is because He hates them.  He separates from them.  They are outside of the kingdom of heaven and outside of His favor.  So that is the imagery with this picture, as Jacob is a type of Christ who would serve for a wife, as it says in Hosea, “…Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.”  For seven years he will serve, and at the end of seven years, he would get his wife Rachel, but he also got Leah as a result of his service.  So the Lord Jesus Christ has done the work.  He submitted Himself to the will of the Father.  He kept the commandments of God from the foundation of the world and into “time” itself when He was born of the Virgin Mary and entered into the human race, and He was obedient to the commandments of the Father.  He submitted on every point and was obedient even unto death, the Bible tells us.  This is all in view with this language that Jacob “kissed” Rachel.

What does it mean to “kiss,” according to the Bible?  Now I will not say that we can carry this spiritual definition that we are going to arrive at to every single verse, but it is in view in certain Scriptures.  Given the relationship between Jacob and Rachel and what that represents (Christ and His bride, the eternal church of all those that are saved), I think the definition we see for “kiss” in the Bible would apply to Jacob kissing Rachel.

Let us go to 1Kings 19 and a familiar verse, in 1Kings 19:18:

Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.

God is speaking of a very apostate time in the nation of Israel, a time of unfaithfulness, which we are familiar with and which does typify the apostacy of the churches at the time of the end.  We can just look around at the churches and see the situation of Israel at that time – it would have been similar.  God had commanded Israel to carry out His Laws and to do certain things concerning ceremonial laws, feast days, sacrifices, and so forth.  They were to obey Him and keep His commandments, and Israel failed to do that.  Not only did they fail to do that, but they established “high places” and their own idolatry and bowing the knee to the false god Baal.  And, yet, within Israel were seven thousand people that God had reserved that did not bow the knee or do service to Baal, which means that they were obeying God.  They would have been the elect, a remnant out of the whole.  We do not know the population of Israel at that time, but it would have been hundreds of thousands or up to a couple of million, and seven thousand would have been a small remnant.  So practically all Israel had lost sight of the commandments of God or they had no regard for them, and they were not keeping God’s commandments on point after point of doctrine.  Yet these few were still faithful, and, undoubtedly, they were grieved and vexed in their hearts on a daily basis (as Lot was when he lived in Sodom), vexed with the wickedness of the rest of the people of Israel.

God recognized it.  That is a comforting thing, is it not?  God was not unaware of the situation in Israel at that time, just as He is not unaware of the situation of those that profess to be Christians in our time.  He is fully aware.  He knows everything that is happening under the sun.  God knows the hearts of everyone who is alive on the face of the earth, and He knows the “idols” that are set up in the hearts of those that pay lip service to serving Him and that simply profess His name.

So God was fully aware that there were seven thousand that had not bowed the knee to Baal.  They were His people and gave evidence of being His people.  So the reason we came to this verse is because of the word “kissed,” and notice how the idea of not kissing Baal is tied to not bowing the knee or worshipping or doing service to Baal.  And that is the spiritual definition of what it means to “kiss” or “not to kiss.”  If you “kiss” Baal, it is like bowing down to him, but if you do not kiss him, it is as though you are not bowing down to him.  That is, you are not doing service to this false god or idol.  Underneath that idea would be serving sin and Satan.  You are not doing that.  You are not “kissing” him.

We see this same idea in the Psalm 2:11-12:

Serve JEHOVAH with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

It says, “Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.” If one is serving Christ and obeying God from the heart and doing the will of God, will they perish in the way?  Will God be angry?  No, of course not, and that is why to “kiss the Son” means to obey God and do service to Him.  That is what the previous verse said in Psalm 2:11: “Serve JEHOVAH with fear, and rejoice with trembling.”  Then it goes on to simply state it in another way: “Kiss the Son.”   Serving JEHOVAH with fear, would be equivalent to “kissing the Son,” just as the Scripture in 1Kings 19, where if you do not bow down, then you do “not kiss Baal.”  If you do bow down, you “kiss Baal.”  If you do service to Baal, that is the equivalent to kissing him.  And, here, if you serve JEHOVAH, it is equivalent to “kissing the Son.”  And if you fail to do service to JEHOVAH, then God is angry, and you perish from the way when His wrath is kindled.

You see, this is the spiritual definition that we can apply to our verse in Genesis 29.  But let us go to a couple of verses in the New Testament.  Go to Luke 7, where we read of a time when the Lord Jesus went into the house of a Pharisee, and it says in Luke 7:36-38:

And one of the Pharisees desired him that he would eat with him. And he went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat. And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.

We are told that she “stood” at his feet behind him, weeping, but it would seem that she would have had to then kneel down, because she cannot stand and wipe his feet with the hairs of her head.  It would have been necessary that she lower herself to his feet, so she would have had to come down, bowing, and as she knelt down, she kissed Christ’s feet and anointed them with the ointment. 

The Pharisees were being critical, saying that if He were a prophet, He would know what manner of woman she was, and so forth.  So it says in Luke 7:44:

And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet.

When we think of that spiritual definition of “kissing the Son” as doing service to the Son and to serve and obey God and keep His commandments, we can see that the Pharisee, the “religious” person that had an outward identification with God, did not “kiss the Son.”  And that is why God is angry with him.  He is not doing service to God.  He has no concern for giving Christ a “kiss,” and, yet, the woman bowed down at His feet.  And the feet of Christ would be another picture that points to the body of believers, the elect company, and the tears would identify with ministering the Gospel as we went forth in the day of salvation, weeping and carrying precious seed, as Psalm 26 declares, and doing service as Christ commanded us to go into all the world and preach the Gospel.  And, yet, the Pharisee had no concern at all.  He thought so highly of himself, and he was critical of Christ and the woman, so the Lord admonished him and rebuked him.  But, again, we can see how a “kiss” identifies with doing service to God.

Or, we can go to 1Thessalonians 5:26:

Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss.

This kind of statement is made a few times in the New Testament: “Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss.”  How can you give a holy kiss?  Can anybody kiss someone with their lips, physically, and then say, “I just gave a holy kiss.”  No – there is no such thing.  This is spiritual language.  A “holy kiss” means something spiritually, and we are to do it to all the brethren.

We are helped when we look at 1Peter 5:14:

Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity. Peace be with you all that are in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Instead of a holy kiss, it is said to be a “kiss of love,” as “charity” is a Greek word that is also translated as “love.”  And the Bible defines love as keeping His commandments.  We are told in 1John 5:2-3:

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments…

Service to God is a “kiss of love,” and that ties back into Psalm 2 and 1Kings 19:18.  So we see that Jacob kissed Rachel.  And she kissed Jacob.  So there is this “kiss of charity,” the kiss that is between Christ and His people, the elect children.