Genesis 35:18

The general language of Scripture is that death means the departure of the soul and spirit from the body. Rachel, as her soul was departing, named her son Ben-oni (Gen. 35:18). As they stoned Stephen, he said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59).

How deep, how absorbing her grief must have been! She tried to make her innocent baby carry the memory of it all his life. As she died she called her child Ben-oni — the son of my sorrow. But the child never bore that name. His father covered it at once and forever with Benjamin — the son of my right hand.

He was the son of his mother's sorrow, and so she would have called him Benoni. But she died at his birth. Jacob lost a treasure he had worked long for, and a wife and friend he loved deeply. Yet in a faith that rose above his loss he named him Benjamin, son of his right hand. Jacob's weeping lasted for a night, and his joy came in the morning. He wept as though he did not weep, and the son of sorrow became the son of power and of victory.

There, near Bethlehem, where the true Son of the Right Hand would come into the world, Jacob shows his faith in God by the name he gives his son. In that place the door seemed to close on Jacob's deepest joys. Yet that same place held his brightest hopes safe, in the Baby to be born at Bethlehem.

She named him in keeping with her own condition, calling him Benoni, the son of my sorrow... She said Benoni as though she looked with the eye of faith down the passage of history. She saw that blessed Person of whom Isaiah wrote, "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." When Jacob renames his son, he too looks down the page of history with the eye of faith. He takes account of the Christ of God — not in relation to all that failing, sinful man could heap on Him, but in the light of the purpose and calling of God... So very early on the page of divine history God stamps two things: the path of the suffering of the Christ of God, and the path of triumph and glory that was bound to follow.

Benjamin, the son of the mother's sorrow, became the son of the father's right hand. Jacob's prophecy of the last days foretold that his tribe would be the warrior-tribe of the nation. He is clearly the type of Christ exalted and in power on the earth. The nation clings to a reigning Messiah, but they do not see that only through the Sufferer can they find the Conqueror. When the hearts of the remnant in the last days turn to the suffering Christ they have rejected, then their restoration begins.

So Rachel dies. In the picture, Jacob gives up his strong desires. But Benjamin takes Rachel's place, a type of Christ as "the Man of God's right hand." The Lord Jesus is now exalted at the right hand of God. Only when He becomes the true Object of our hearts do we give up the useless ambition to improve ourselves morally and spiritually.