64 Rebekah also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel 65 and asked the servant, “Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?” “He is my master,” the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself.
There is a healthy modesty that seems to be slipping out of our culture. In our sex-crazed culture, anything goes. This slide happened in my lifetime. When I was young, modesty was the norm. People knew there was something shameful about exposing too much of themselves in public. Near-nudity only happened at the beach. In our section of Scripture today, Rebekah finally arrives after he long journey. She has traveled a long distance with Isaac’s servant. When she sees Isaac, she doesn’t know who he is. She is in a strange place. When she finds out who Isaac is, she covers herself. I get the feeling that the servant who accompanied her on this journey saw her without her veil when he first met her on her home turf. She was just out getting some water at her well. She probably didn’t have a veil on. She met the servant and he saw her face. Now she is meeting the man she will marry. They know nothing about each other and her veil goes back on. We look at this and think, how silly. But we do this same thing every day when we meet someone. We don’t let them know all our secrets at our first meeting. We hold some things back, and rightly so. We don’t know their character. It makes sense not to be too open with strangers. We don’t hand our credit cards to a stranger to keep for us. We don’t share our back account passwords with them. We don’t tell them all about our intimate life with our spouse. If we do, we have probably been taken advantage of many times. We keep some information “close hold”. This is a healthy thing in our society. But this is not part of the original plan. Remember Adam and Eve. They were naked and felt no shame. Everything was exposed and in that setting, there was no fear, no need to cover up. But sin changed everything. So next time you see someone who seems to let their life “hang out there”, perhaps you can be the cover for them. You can help them not spill all the beans. You can help put a veil over their shame so that they are not taken advantage of.
The Arnold Journey 