Wrestling with God

 Read Genesis 32

And so we come to one of the most unique stories in the Bible.  If you have subheadings inserted into your Bibles, most of them probably say: Jacob Wrestles With God.

I’m thinking that’s not a fair fight.

I wrestled for about 30 seconds in high school.  The assistant football coach had been a Marine and had gone to college on a wrestling scholarship, probably in conjunction with the GI Bill.

I was in the weight room one day in the spring.  The coach was there and there were some mats in the corner of the weight room.  He said, let’s wrestle.

I said I don’t know anything about wrestling.  I was bigger than the coach but really had never wrestled.  The school didn’t have wrestling and I was already playing 4 sports, so I doubt that I would have been a wrestler anyway.

He said, just do your best.

We both got on the mat and he said “Go!”  I think I got lucky because I got my arm around his neck and started choking him from behind. He was really choking.  I thought, how hard can this wrestling stuff really be?

Coach managed to squeak out, “That’s not legal.”

So, I let go.  In that instant, he grabbed me and threw me against the wall.  The wall was made of cinderblocks and they were not padded.

I think I said, “That wasn’t legal either.” I didn’t know for sure, it I didn’t think it was.

We didn’t wrestle anymore after that, but that was the extent of my wrestling experience, other than as a kid when you wrestled with classmates and cousins.

But Jacob wrestling with God, and that just seems bizarre.  Here’s the scripture.

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.

Was it God? Was it an angel?  Was it a man sent by God?

Jacob was convinced that he had been face-to-face with God.  He didn’t say that he held his own.  He said that God spared him.

Jacob—now Israel—lived to tell about this.

Now God had walked with Adam and Eve.  He had visited Abraham, but most of the time, God spoke in dreams and visions.

But here we see God or someone with supernatural powers wrestling with Jacob and when the match was a draw, he touched Jacob near the hip and twisted it to the point that Jacob would walk with a limp.

Jacob didn’t cry out, “That’s not legal!”  He focused on the fact that he had been face to face with God and God had spared his life.

It’s still a crazy story about wrestling with God, except that we do this all of the time.  We don’t wrestle physically, but we wrestle in our decisions.

Trust in the Lord or trust my own understanding?

You think by this point we would do more trusting than leaning, but the wrestling matches continue and it seems that God lets us win every once in a while.  We get to do things our way.

Most of the time we limp away from doing things our way. Sometimes the limp doesn’t show up until later. In hindsight, we realize the wisdom of God’s way.

Our human nature leads us to wrestle with God again and again in spite of directions that we know and have memorized and should be written on our hearts.

I think that sometimes, God lets us walk with a limp for a while whenever we rely on our own understanding over God’s promises.  That’s my take on it.

What I can tell you with certainty is that God is faithful even when we are not.

Even when God permits us to have our own way—and that brings us briefly to 2 words not used together in the Bible:  Free Will—he is faithful to his promises.  One of those is that he will never leave or forsake us.

Sometimes in hindsight, we wish God had just body-slammed us into the right way, but we do get to choose how we respond to God’s great love.  Sometimes we wrestle with that response.

So, we will probably have a few more wrestling matches with God in our remaining years.  Hopefully, we wrestle less and trust more, but remember that God still has good plans for you.

So what do we take into our week?

Trust more. Wrestle less.

Amen.