Genesis 35:17 Daily Devotional & Meaning – Fear Not, Thou Shalt Have This Son Also
Daily Verses Everyday! Day 231
“And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.”
“And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.” There is a dangerous idea that can quietly enter the Christian mind: if our relationship with God is strong enough, if we pray enough, obey enough, worship enough, and faithfully follow Him, then somehow our lives should become easier. We may never say it quite so plainly, but we can begin to expect it. When difficulties come, we can even wonder whether something has gone wrong between us and God. Yet Genesis 35 gives us almost the exact opposite picture. Jacob has just returned to Bethel in obedience to God. He has purified his household. He has built an altar. God has appeared to him. God has spoken to him. God has reaffirmed his name as Israel. God has renewed the covenant promises given to Abraham and Isaac. Jacob has erected a pillar, poured out a drink offering, poured oil upon it, and worshipped the LORD. His relationship with God has never been clearer. Yet only a short distance from Bethel, Rachel is in such severe labour that her life is about to end. The closeness of God did not prevent the hardship. In fact, Scripture never promises that it would.
Jesus specifically taught His disciples the opposite.
On the final night before His crucifixion, during what we commonly call the Upper Room Discourse recorded in John 13 through John 17, Jesus spoke some of the most intimate words He ever gave His disciples. These were men who had walked beside Him, listened to His teaching, witnessed His miracles, left their former lives to follow Him, and would soon be entrusted with carrying the gospel throughout the world. If a close relationship with God guaranteed a life free from suffering, surely these men should have been the safest people on earth.
Yet Jesus prepared them for hardship.
In John 15:18 He said, “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you.”
He did not tell them that following Him would make everyone love them.
He warned them that it could produce the opposite.
Jesus continued in John 15:19, “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.”
Then He told them in John 15:20, “Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.”
That is one of the clearest corrections to the idea that strong faith should produce an easy life.
Jesus Christ had a perfect relationship with the Father.
No one ever walked more faithfully with God than Jesus.
No one ever obeyed more completely.
No one ever prayed more perfectly.
No one ever lived more righteously.
No one ever loved more purely.
Yet His earthly life included rejection, betrayal, false accusations, hatred, exhaustion, grief, temptation, persecution, abandonment, torture, and crucifixion.
If suffering were necessarily evidence that someone was far from God, then we would be forced to conclude that Jesus was far from God.
But the exact opposite is true.
Jesus was perfectly obedient to the Father, and His obedience led Him directly toward the cross.
Philippians 2:8 says that Christ “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
Sometimes obedience does not lead away from suffering.
Sometimes obedience leads directly through it.
This is precisely what Jacob’s family is experiencing in Genesis 35. Jacob is not running away from God when Rachel enters hard labour. He has been following God. God commanded him in Genesis 35:1, “Arise, go up to Bethel.” Jacob obeyed. He went to Bethel. He worshipped. God spoke. Then Jacob continued travelling, and tragedy entered the journey.
The road from Bethel to Ephrath was still a road under the sovereignty of God.
That is important because Christians sometimes interpret painful circumstances too quickly. Something goes wrong, and immediately we ask, “What did I do wrong?” There are certainly times when suffering results from sinful choices. Scripture teaches that clearly. But Scripture also contains countless examples of righteous people suffering precisely while walking faithfully with God.
Job suffered even though God Himself described him in Job 1:8 as “a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil.”
Joseph suffered after refusing the sexual advances of Potiphar’s wife. His righteousness did not immediately result in reward; it resulted in prison.
David was hunted by Saul even though God had already chosen him to be king.
Daniel was thrown into the lions’ den because he continued praying faithfully.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace because they refused to worship an idol.
Jeremiah was persecuted because he proclaimed the Word of God.
The apostles were beaten because they preached Christ.
Paul was imprisoned because he carried the gospel.
And Jesus was crucified though He was perfectly sinless.
Scripture gives us no foundation for believing that intimacy with God means insulation from hardship.
Instead, Scripture teaches us that intimacy with God gives us what we need to endure hardship faithfully.
That distinction changes everything.
Jesus makes this especially clear in the Upper Room Discourse.
As the disciples faced the greatest crisis they had ever known, Jesus did not promise to remove every painful circumstance. Instead, He promised His presence, His peace, His Spirit, and ultimately His victory.
John 14:16-17 records Jesus saying, “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth.”
Jesus knew the disciples were about to experience sorrow. Their Master would be arrested. Their expectations would collapse. They would scatter. Peter would deny Him. Christ would be crucified. The world they thought they understood was about to be shaken.
So Jesus promised them the Comforter.
Notice what that means.
The promise of the Comforter assumes there will be times when comfort is needed.
God does not promise a life in which His children will never need comforting. He promises to be the God who comforts them.
Second Corinthians 1:3-4 later calls Him “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; Who comforteth us in all our tribulation.”
Again, notice the wording.
Not necessarily before all our tribulation.
“In all our tribulation.”
God often demonstrates His faithfulness not by preventing us from entering the valley, but by walking through the valley with us.
David understood this when he wrote Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”
David did not say there would be no valley.
He said God would be with him in it.
That is the Christian promise.
Not that there will be no hard labour.
Not that there will be no diagnosis.
Not that there will be no funeral.
Not that there will be no betrayal.
Not that there will be no persecution.
Not that there will be no financial difficulty.
Not that there will be no seasons of confusion.
Not that there will be no grief.
The promise is that none of these things can separate the believer from God.
Romans 8:35 asks, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
Then Romans 8:38-39 declares, “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come… shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
That is much greater than a promise that nothing difficult will happen.
God promises that whatever happens, it cannot remove us from Him.
Jesus made another extraordinary statement during the Upper Room Discourse in John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you.”
At first we might think that Christ’s peace means peaceful circumstances.
But look at the circumstances in which Jesus said it.
Judas was betraying Him.
The cross was approaching.
Peter would soon deny Him.
The disciples would scatter.
Jesus would be arrested.
Violence was coming.
Death was coming.
Yet Jesus spoke of peace.
Christian peace therefore cannot mean the absence of hardship.
It must mean something deeper.
The peace of Christ is the ability to rest in God while hardship is occurring.
The world says, “I can have peace when everything around me is peaceful.”
Jesus says, in effect, “I can give you peace even when everything around you is falling apart.”
That is why Philippians 4:7 speaks of “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.”
It passes understanding because circumstances alone cannot explain it.
There are moments when a Christian should, by worldly standards, be completely destroyed by what is happening, yet there is still something beneath the grief that says, “God is here. God is good. God is sovereign. God has not abandoned me.”
That is not denial.
That is faith.
Rachel was in hard labour.
The text does not soften it.
It does not pretend she was comfortable.
It does not tell us that because Jacob had just been speaking with God, the delivery suddenly became effortless.
“She was in hard labour.”
The Bible is remarkably honest about suffering.
Christians should be as well.
Faith does not require us to pretend painful things are painless.
Jesus Himself wept.
John 11:35 simply says, “Jesus wept.”
Jesus knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, yet He still wept at the tomb.
Knowledge of God’s ultimate victory does not eliminate legitimate grief in the present.
We can trust God and cry.
We can have faith and hurt.
We can believe Scripture and still feel overwhelmed.
We can know that heaven awaits and still grieve someone who dies.
We can know God is sovereign while admitting that something is terribly painful.
Those things are not contradictions.
This verse contains both hardship and encouragement in the same moment.
Rachel is in hard labour, and the midwife says, “Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.”
The suffering is real.
But so is the encouragement.
“Fear not.”
That phrase runs throughout Scripture because fear is one of humanity’s natural responses when circumstances move beyond our control.
God told Abram in Genesis 15:1, “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield.”
God told Isaac in Genesis 26:24, “Fear not, for I am with thee.”
God told Jacob himself in Genesis 46:3, “Fear not to go down into Egypt.”
Moses told Israel in Exodus 14:13, “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the LORD.”
God told Joshua in Joshua 1:9, “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid.”
The angel told Mary in Luke 1:30, “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.”
The angel told the shepherds in Luke 2:10, “Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.”
Jesus told His disciples in Luke 12:32, “Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”
The repeated command “fear not” does not mean fearful circumstances will never appear.
It means those circumstances are never greater than God.
Rachel’s midwife could not promise that everything would turn out exactly as Rachel hoped. Indeed, the next verse will show that Rachel is dying. But she could tell Rachel that the son she had long desired was coming.
“Thou shalt have this son also.”
There is something both beautiful and heartbreaking in those words because Rachel had once cried in Genesis 30:1, “Give me children, or else I die.”
When Joseph was finally born, she named him with expectation. Genesis 30:24 says, “And she called his name Joseph; and said, The LORD shall add to me another son.”
Now that son is coming.
Rachel’s prayer is being answered, but not in the way anyone would have wanted.
This is another difficult reality of walking with God: answered prayer does not always arrive in the form we imagined.
We may pray for something good and receive it through circumstances that are painful.
We may pray for God to change us, only to discover that He uses trials to do it.
We may pray for greater faith, then encounter situations in which faith is required.
We may pray to know God more deeply, only to discover Him in valleys where we have nowhere else to turn.
James 1:2-4 says, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.”
Peter similarly writes in 1 Peter 1:6-7 that believers may be “in heaviness through manifold temptations,” but the trial of faith is “much more precious than of gold that perisheth.”
God does not delight in pain for pain’s sake.
But He can use pain.
He can form perseverance through it.
He can deepen faith through it.
He can expose idols through it.
He can teach dependence through it.
He can display His sufficiency through it.
Paul learned this personally through his “thorn in the flesh.” He asked God three times to remove it, but God answered in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.”
God did not give Paul the answer Paul initially requested.
He gave him something greater: sufficient grace.
Paul’s conclusion is extraordinary: “Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
A close relationship with God did not cause Paul’s difficulties to disappear.
It changed how Paul understood them.
And this leads us to perhaps the clearest statement of all in the Upper Room Discourse.
Jesus concludes much of His instruction in John 16:33 by saying, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace.”
Then He immediately says, “In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
Not “you might.”
“Ye shall.”
Jesus does not hide the reality from His disciples.
He tells them plainly that tribulation is coming.
But He does not stop there.
He finishes, “but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
That single verse gives us an entire theology of Christian suffering.
“In me ye might have peace.”
“In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
“I have overcome the world.”
Peace in Christ.
Tribulation in the world.
Victory in Christ.
All three truths exist simultaneously.
Christianity does not promise that receiving Christ means we leave suffering behind. Christianity promises that in Christ suffering will never have the final word.
That is very different.
Jesus was speaking these words shortly before the cross. The disciples were about to watch what appeared to be total defeat. Their Messiah would be arrested and killed.
Yet Jesus could already say, “I have overcome the world.”
Why?
Because the outcome was never in doubt.
Calvary would not end the story.
Sunday was coming.
Death would be defeated.
The grave would be emptied.
Christ would rise.
That is why Christians can face hardship differently—not because hardship is imaginary, but because hardship is temporary.
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”
And Romans 8:18 says, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”
This does not make present suffering insignificant.
It places it in the context of eternity.
Rachel’s suffering was very real.
Jacob’s grief would be very real.
Rachel’s death in the next verse will be very real.
But death itself will ultimately be defeated by the descendant promised through this very family.
That is the larger story unfolding behind Genesis.
The covenant God has just reaffirmed to Jacob will eventually lead to Israel.
Israel will lead to Judah.
Judah will lead to David.
David’s line will eventually lead to Jesus Christ.
And Christ will enter death Himself so that death will not have the final victory over those who belong to Him.
First Corinthians 15:54-55 celebrates that victory: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
Genesis 35 reminds us just how desperately humanity needs that victory.
Even covenant families bury people they love.
Even those who know God experience grief.
Even those surrounded by God’s promises encounter death.
The gospel never denies that reality.
The gospel answers it.
Jesus said in John 11:25, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
This is why the Christian hope is greater than the promise of an easy life.
An easy life eventually ends.
Even the healthiest person eventually dies.
Even the wealthiest person eventually leaves everything behind.
Even the person who avoids countless tragedies cannot avoid mortality forever.
If Christianity merely promised us greater earthly comfort, it would be offering something painfully small.
Christ offers resurrection.
He offers eternal life.
He offers reconciliation with God.
He offers a kingdom that cannot be shaken.
He offers the promise of Revelation 21:4, where “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain.”
Notice when that promise reaches its complete fulfillment.
Not necessarily now.
There is pain now.
There are tears now.
There is death now.
There is crying now.
But they are temporary.
The day is coming when they will end.
Until then, Christians live between Christ’s warning and Christ’s victory:
“In the world ye shall have tribulation.”
“I have overcome the world.”
That is exactly where Jacob stands.
He has heard God speak.
He has received the promises.
He has worshipped at Bethel.
And now his beloved Rachel is suffering.
One does not cancel the other.
God’s blessing does not cancel hardship.
Hardship does not cancel God’s blessing.
God’s presence does not guarantee a painless road.
A painful road does not mean God is absent.
That may be one of the most important truths we can carry into our own lives because hardship will come in different forms for every person.
There will be days when prayers are answered exactly as hoped.
There will also be days when they are not.
There will be celebrations.
There will be funerals.
There will be births.
There will be deaths.
There will be seasons of abundance.
There may be seasons of loss.
There will be days when God feels extraordinarily near.
There may be days when we pray and hear nothing but silence.
But none of those circumstances change who God is.
Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.”
Our circumstances change.
God does not.
Our emotions rise and fall.
God does not.
Our understanding may fail.
God does not.
Our bodies weaken.
God does not.
People enter and leave our lives.
God remains.
And perhaps that is why Jesus spent so much of His final evening preparing the disciples for suffering. He did not want them to interpret the coming cross as evidence that everything He had taught them was false.
John 16:1 says, “These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be offended.”
In other words, Jesus warned them beforehand so that when suffering arrived, suffering would not destroy their faith.
He continued in John 16:2, “They shall put you out of the synagogues.”
Then He warned that some would even kill them while believing they were serving God.
Christ did not sell His followers a false promise.
He told them the cost.
He told them hardship would come.
He told them hatred would come.
He told them persecution would come.
He told them sorrow would come.
But He also promised that the Holy Spirit would come.
He promised that their sorrow would be turned into joy.
John 16:20 says, “ye shall be sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
He promised peace.
He promised answered prayer according to His purposes.
He promised the Father’s love.
And ultimately He promised victory.
That is Christianity.
Not the absence of trouble.
The presence of Christ in trouble.
Not immunity from grief.
Hope through grief.
Not escape from every valley.
A Shepherd who walks with us through the valley.
Not a guarantee that we will never die.
A Savior who conquered death.
Rachel’s midwife tells her, “Fear not.”
That command is still meaningful for us.
We do not need to fear hardship as though hardship has the power to separate us from God.
We do not need to fear tomorrow as though God will somehow cease being sovereign when tomorrow arrives.
We do not need to believe that every painful event means our faith has failed.
Sometimes strong faith is demonstrated precisely by trusting God when circumstances hurt.
Anyone can praise God when everything is easy.
Job said in Job 1:21, after unimaginable loss, “the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Habakkuk looked toward economic devastation and still declared in Habakkuk 3:17-18, “Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines… Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.”
That is mature faith.
Not “I believe God because everything is going well.”
But “I believe God because He is God, even when everything is not going well.”
There will be Bethel moments in our lives, when God’s blessings seem obvious and His presence feels near.
And there will be Ephrath roads, where hard labour begins unexpectedly.
The same God is Lord over both.
We should therefore never measure the quality of our relationship with God simply by the difficulty of our circumstances.
Jesus Himself destroys that theology.
The One most beloved of the Father suffered more than we can comprehend.
The apostles closest to Christ suffered.
Paul suffered.
Peter suffered.
John suffered.
The prophets suffered.
The patriarchs suffered.
And Christians throughout history have suffered while faithfully loving God.
What differentiates the believer is not that suffering never comes.
It is that suffering is never faced alone and never faced without hope.
Jesus said, “In me ye might have peace.”
That is where peace is found.
Not in perfect circumstances.
“In me.”
And this is why the midwife’s words, “Fear not,” reach beyond Rachel’s difficult labour and speak into one of the central truths of the life of faith.
Do not fear because hardship has arrived.
Do not immediately assume God has departed.
Remember Bethel.
Remember what God said.
Remember who God is.
Remember Christ’s warning that tribulation would come.
And then remember how Christ finished the sentence:
“Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
The road may be hard.
The labour may be painful.
The future may not unfold as we would choose.
But the God who met us at Bethel still reigns on the road to Ephrath.
And because Christ has overcome the world, no hardship encountered along that road can ever overturn the final victory He has promised to those who belong to Him.
If you would like to explore Genesis in a sustained, verse-by-verse way with space to reflect, journal, and trace how these foundational truths unfold through Scripture the Verse by Verse book expands these reflections into a unified reading experience. The book gathers these meditations into a structured journey through Genesis, designed to help readers linger in the text and engage God’s Word more deeply over time.
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