Names were important in the Old Testament. When God changed Jacob’s name to Israel, it was a hugely significant event. It defined Jacob’s relationship with God – he wrestled and struggled with Him. He didn’t always get it right, but he kept on clinging to God’s promises! Later in the chapter, Israel changed the name of his youngest son from “Son of My Sorrow” to “Son of My Right Hand.”
But it wasn’t just people that got new names in the Bible. It was also places. This chapter talks about Bethel, which means, “House of God,” which was where Jacob saw his vision of the ladder to heaven. And another place was renamed in this chapter. “And Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel. So he called its name Allon-bacuth” – the Oak of Weeping.
There were three important deaths in this chapter: Deborah, who as Rebekah’s nurse would have helped raise Jacob and Esau; Rachel, who was Jacob’s favorite wife; and finally Isaac, Jacob’s father.
There are times in life that we need an Allon-bacuth.
It is good and right to grieve the death of ones who are dear to us. Death, after all, is a consequence of sin. We weren’t made to die. It’s UN-natural.
Thanks be to God that, even as we grieve, we can have hope and joy because Christ has come and has broken the bonds of death and given us the certain hope of eternal life and resurrection! “By his death he destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light!”
But it’s not just when people die that we grieve. Many significant changes in life can put us into the grief cycle. In Psalm 137 singing songs of Zion brought grief to the Israelites in captivity.
The thing that is odd about grief is that we feel this need to make it go away. We feel that we should cheer the person up, or show them that their situation is not so bad, or . . . or . . . something! We feel powerless when we face grief. What can we do?
In Romans 12:15 we are urged to, “Rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep.” I think this is a good verse us to think on when we face grief and loss. Sometimes it is good and right to sit under our own Allon-bacuth and weep.
It’s okay to be sad for what you’ve lost. It’s okay to embrace the fact that things have changed and you don’t like it. But don’t grieve to stay stuck in sorrow. Grieve to move forward; to let go of the past. We cannot live at Allon-bacuth, for God has new blessings every morning.
Remember it is in Lamentations 3:22-23 that we learn, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
Father, help to grieve the losses of this world appropriately. Help me to cry over the right things and let them go, trusting in you to secure my future with your steadfast love and unending mercy. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
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