Wrestling With God.

Image © by Brian E. Faulkner

Jacob was 97-years-old when he wrestled with God on the banks of the Jabbok.  He was a tough old bird, it would seem, because he held his own against the Messenger of God who initiated the match, which continued overnight and was still underway at dawn.  The mysterious theophany, which Scripture calls an Angel of God, wearied of trying to best Jacob, so crippled him by touching his hip socket, knocking it out of joint and limiting his movement. But Jacob fought on.

“Let me go because the day breaks,” the Man says, to which Jacob replies, “I will not let you go until you bless me!”  I don’t imagine exclamation points appear all that often in Holy Scripture, but a sweaty scene in which a descendant of Abraham and Isaac wrestles with the Lord would seem to deserve one.  Jacob got his blessing: a new name – Israel – and an assured future for his descendants.  “You have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed,” the Lord told Jacob as the sun rose above the horizon. You’d think, after that strong a confirmation, that the man’s life would have been a bed of roses going forward, but that’s not how things turned out as Jacob grappled with the future. I can easily identify with that part of his story, the part where we insist on dealing with life’s challenges entirely on our own rather than waiting on God to work them out as he will, in his own time. 
 
The name Jacob means deceiver.  Charles Spurgeon called him a believer with “too much planning and scheming about him,” so I can identify with that, too.  Let’s set the scene.

After swindling twin brother Esau out of his birthright, Jacob fled to the family’s ancestral home after Esau vowed to kill him when Isaac, their father, died.  He stopped along the way one night, laid his head on a rock and experienced his famous dream of a ladder set upon the earth with its top in heaven, where “the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.
 
“And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: ‘I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.  Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.'”  As if that wasn’t assurance enough of blessings to come, the Lord added: “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.” Jacob was impressed and, I would have thought, completely transformed by the Divine awesomeness he’d just experienced.  But it wasn’t long before he returned to the planning and scheming noted by Spurgeon.

His destination was Haran, where he was taken in by his mother’s brother, Laban the Syrian.  All sorts of deception proceeded from there, and it’s hard to tell who was the biggest schemer in the long run, Jacob or the uncle – despite all the embracing and kissing that greeted his arrival.  The bargaining began within a month, and for Jacob, the prize was Laban’s younger daughter Rachel, who was “beautiful of form and appearance.”  Jacob agreed to serve Laban for seven years in return for Rachel’s hand, “and they seemed only a few days to him because of the love he had for her.”  When the time had been fulfilled, Jacob asked Laban for permission to marry Rachel.  The uncle complied, but after nightfall brought Rachel’s older sister Leah to Jacob’s bed.  Jacob discovered Laban’s deceit in the morning (one wonders why it took so long) and confronted Laban, to which he replied something about it not being right to marry off the younger daughter before the older one.  Jacob agreed to work seven more years if Laban would include Rachel in the marriage deal, which he did, leading to years of tension between the two sister-wives about childbearing (Leah started off strong, but Rachel appeared barren, although she eventually begat Joseph).  Jacob and Laban also went round and round about wages and livestock and speckled chickens – each trying to deceive the other, the net of which was that Jacob became “extremely prosperous”, to the chagrin of Laban’s sons, who felt cheated. 

“Then the Lord said to Jacob, ‘Return to the land of your fathers and to your family, and I will be with you.’”  Jacob complied, driven no doubt by the tension mounting in Haran plus fear that Laban would not allow his daughters to leave.  So he, his wives, children, servants, camels and livestock snuck away in the dead of night.  Laban and his forces followed, put out at not getting to say goodbye but likely also burning with anger at their stealthy departure.  Unknown to Jacob, however, the Lord had come to Laban in a dream and asked that he “speak to Jacob neither good nor bad.”  As a result, their meeting turned unexpectedly cordial and Laban pronounced a now-familiar blessing on Jacob as they parted: “May the Lord watch between you and me when we are absent one from another.”  Jacob then journeyed on to meet his brother Esau. 

It's interesting to note that God was active on many fronts during this time Jacob's life.  For instance, Laban left for home frustrated that he could not find his “gods”, stone idols he presumed had been stolen by Jacob (Rachel had hidden them in some saddlebags).  But now, because of his dream, Laban had begun a conversation with Jacob's God, a relationship which seems to have continued, although Scripture does not say so directly. 
 
Now we find Jacob, a man of advanced age (at least from our perspective) walking overland toward his father’s home with a vast entourage of people and animals and fear in his heart.  “He doubts, yet he believes,” wrote Spurgeon.  Having just been rescued from his father-in-law by the Lord, Jacob now is afraid of his brother, with “fear and faith battling together,” so much so that he divides the livestock gifts sent ahead to Esau in similar droves – ewes with ewes, rams with rams, camels with camels and so forth, each separated by some distance so as to arrive at different times and thus “appease him with the present that goes before me.”  As mentioned earlier, this wrestling with fear noted by the great Victorian-era preacher strikes uncomfortably close to home.  Spurgeon, in fact, claimed to know a person like that.  “I will not say that I live with him,” he related, “but I will confess, with sorrow, that I have sometimes been that very person.”   

Finally, Jacob sends the last of his group over the Jabbock.  At last alone, he settles down with that rock for a pillow and ends up grappling with the Lord for his blessing until dawn.  He ends up crippled – and more dependent on God, but he had seen the Lord face-to-face and had his life “preserved”.

“Now Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and there, Esau was coming, and with him were four hundred men.”  So what does Jacob do but divide his entourage in two that one half may flee if the other half were to be attacked by Esau’s forces (“maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children behind, and Rachel and Joseph last”).  This may strike one as prudent but also can taken as another nod to fear.  The meeting with Esau turns out well, however, with lots of hugging and kissing and gift-giving and bowing down.  Beyond that, Jacob and his offspring (eventually 12 between Leah, Rachel and their handmaidens) would go on to found the “company of nations” that the Lord promised his wrestling partner later at Bethel.

What I take from this 5,000 year old story so rich with complex human relationships is how thin our trust in God often is in the face of threatening situations or seemingly intractable circumstances – despite the Lord’s promises and blessings.  It's easy to understand why even believers so often choose to devise their own escapes from the difficulties that cross their path (is it not the American way?).  Spurgeon describes this two-sided sword as doubting and believing at the same time.  Not only that, we want our problems to be solved right away, lacking what might be called Spiritual patience.

Then there's the relative perspective of time.  These days, dramatic life situations that can take decades to work out are presented and resolved in the span of a two-hour movie or 13-part TV series.  It took something like two years for Jacob and his entourage to journey from Haran to his meeting with Esau.  The longer faith journey chronicled in Genesis 28-33 spanned 23 years can be read in about 20 minutes, even with discernment.   
 
My prayer on this early January day in 2018 is that God will slow me down and bless me with greater trust during the coming 12 months (while perhaps allowing me fewer clever schemes of the sort I like to dream up).  This heartfelt hope can't possibly expressed better than by C. H. Spurgeon:

“If this New Year shall be full of unbelief, it will be sure to be dark and dreary,” he declared from the pulpit of Metropolitan Tabernacle in London as the clock ticked into 1884. “If it be baptized into faith, it will be saturated with benediction.  If we will believe our God as he deserves to be believed, our way will run along the still waters, and our rest will be in green pastures.  Trusting in the Lord, we shall be prepared for trials, and shall even welcome them as black ships laden with bright treasures.”

Amen!

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