Wrestling with God (1)

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.” Genesis 32:22-32

Epaphras, who is one of you and a servant of Jesus Christ, sends greetings. He is always wrestling in prayer for you… Colossians 4:12

“He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favour.”

That’s how the prophet Hosea describes the mysterious story of Jacob’s encounter with God at Peniel (Hosea 12:4). It captures the paradox of the story – Jacob’s strength in wrestling and overcoming; and his weakness in weeping and pleading.

Jacob might well qualify for that ugliest of descriptions, “a nasty piece of work”. From birth a trickster, liar and cheat, he is yet conscious that the hand of God is on him, and that he is intended for great things. Not even the awesome experience of Bethel (Genesis 28), when he saw the staircase to heaven and heard the voice of God, has succeeded in humbling him. Nor has his treatment at the hands of Laban (Genesis 29) – a splendid case of the biter bit. Still he pursues his devious way.

But now crisis point has come. He is about to meet his twin brother Esau after many years; and he knows that Esau has every right to harbour a pretty hefty grudge against him. Will he in fact kill him?

This is the background to Jacob’s night-time wrestling-match with the “man” of Genesis 32:22-32.

Various aspects are worth noticing…

1 The lead-up to the encounter.

For one thing, Jacob, perhaps for the first time in his life, offers God a humble and sincere prayer. Going back to 32:9-12 you find that he is thoroughly scared – and it shows. He takes elaborate precautions to protect himself, but most telling of all is his simple prayer of humility and helplessness: “O God… I am unworthy…”

It’s a fact that often our prayers only come alive and authentic when we are face to face with the bitter truth about ourselves and the kind of people we have allowed ourselves to become… I’m not really a very nice person at all: no, I have been selfish, jealous, vindictive and spiteful; I have thought only of myself and what I want; I have looked down on people who are far better than me…

God has to bring us low before he can lift us high; but the thing we may not learn until much later is that he does so out of love.

It’s worth noticing too that the encounter takes place in total solitude. Jacob has ferried his family across the brook Jabbok, as if sensing that something is about to happen that will change the course of his life. He needs to be alone.

Praying with others, as far as I am concerned, is one of the great joys of the Christian life, not least of course within marriage. But how much we need also to make time and space for solitude! How else can we expect God to cut through the blanket of noise and activity in which we wrap ourselves, in order to meet with us and re-channel our lives?

Jacob named the place of this encounter “Peniel” – “the face of God”. Are any of us overdue for a solitary, face-to-face session with God?

2 The encounter itself.

The image of two figures grimly wrestling is a powerful one. Can you see them? – grunting, sweating, straining. Could anything be more primal?

But a clinch, of course, can signify more than one thing: love as well as enmity, dependence as well as defiance. Jacob clings for dear life to the God he fears.

Isn’t this sometimes mirrored in our own experience of God? Sometimes we fear him and feel angry with him – even, perhaps (dare we admit it?), hate him. Yet who do we turn to in times of greatest need but to him? You think of a child bursting into tears of rage at its mother’s rebuke – only then to throw itself into that same mother’s arms for comfort. (A friend told me of a time when his little daughter had fallen out with her mother and decided to write her an angry letter: “Dear Mummy, I hate you. Love, Becky.”)

God can sometimes seem our direst enemy; in reality he is our dearest friend.

The truly striking thing is that Jacob is said to have overcome! He grapples with God and gets the victory, his desire for divine blessing so overmastering, so utterly intense, that even God cannot prevail. “I will not let you go unless you bless me” he breathes through gritted teeth (to my mind one of the most magnificent utterances in the Bible). And the stranger is forced to draw on supernatural resources of strength in order to get the better of him; with a touch he dislocates Jacob’s hip.

Do we ever think of “overcoming” God with the sheer intensity of our prayers? The very idea seems almost blasphemous. But perhaps this is exactly what God is waiting for – perhaps he prefers a holy boldness to a bland apathy.

I love Paul’s little comment about Epaphras (Colossians 4:12): he wrestled in prayer for the Colossian Christians.

Lord, teach me to pray!

As well as the lead-up to the encounter, and the encounter itself, I intended to reflect also on the aftermath of the encounter. But I’m afraid that will have to wait until next time…

Lord God, I know that I cannot have a personal Peniel to order, but I do pray that you will give me a greater desire for intimacy with yourself, and something of Jacob’s intensity in clinging to you until the blessing comes. Amen.