“O Lord, the God of my master Abraham,
Genesis 24:12-14
Please grant me success today, and show lovingkindness to my master Abraham.
Behold, I am standing by the spring, and the daughters of the men of the city are coming out to draw water.
Now may it be that the girl to whom I say, ‘Please let down your jar so that I may drink,’
and who answers, ‘Drink, and I will water your camels also’—
May she be the one whom You have appointed for Your servant Isaac; and by this I will know that You have shown lovingkindness to my master.”
This prayer by the most elderly and high ranking of Abraham’s servants further illuminates several themes already developing across the earliest prayers of the Old Testament. First, we see that this senior servant names God, calling him then to be who he is and to do what he does. Recall that Abraham has told the servant what to expect, based on God’s own covenant promise to him.
The Lord, the God of heaven, who took me from my father’s house and from the land of my birth, and who spoke to me and who swore to me, saying, ‘To your descendants I will give this land,’ He will send his angel before you, and you will take a wife for my son from there.
Genesis 24:7
Second, we note the theme of water, which represents both judgement and salvation across the Biblical text. By this time, Abraham and his house have settled in the Negev, a place to whose edge he had first journeyed after God first called him. The Negev is a place of extreme beauty, wild with desert but likewise with springs of water, of life, of joy, of love. In Numbers 13, Moses sends 12 spies to spy out this same land of promise, also the place which Achsah, daughter of Caleb, riding on a donkey, would later request as a wedding gift (Josh. 15). “Give me a blessing,” Achsah says, “Since you have given me the land of the Negev, give me springs of water also.”
And then finally, in this prayer is a request for physical refreshment, later echoed and extended in Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:7-26). There, our Messiah reveals the meaning of Abraham’s servant’s prayer in all its fullness, that by the name that is Jesus, through the water of the Spirit, we who are appointed for the marriage of the Lamb shall never thirst, even to eternal life.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” It was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen, bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.
Revelation 19:7-8
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