Āḇaq: Jacob Wrestles With God Series

Are you a fan of wrestling? I remember watching wrestling growing up. And I remember seeing a few fights during junior high and high school where people were wrestling. What happens when people wrestle? They start fighting, and they inevitably end up on the ground, tossing up dust, spinning around, turning red, trying to do harm until one of them gives up. I remember my cousin Travis and I used to wrestle when we were kids, he was always much bigger than me, so I didn’t do too well. But I held my own.

Wrestling is a struggle of strength, but also a struggle of wits. It’s just as much physical as psychological. Which brings us to our Hebrew word for today, 'a?aq (aw-vak) which means: “to wrestle, grapple (get dusty), bedust.”

Today we’re talking about a man who “wrestled with God” his name was Jacob. The name Jacob means “deceiver.” But we will see that one day, Jacob would receive a new name.

Jacob had manipulated and cheated his brother Esau. And he had been on the run from his brother. During his wonderings, though, God was with him, and seeking after Him.

In fact, something very special happened to Jacob one night as he traveled through the wilderness.

It says in Genesis 28:10-17 Meanwhile, Jacob left Beersheba and traveled toward Haran. 11 At sundown he arrived at a good place to set up camp and stopped there for the night. Jacob found a stone to rest his head against and lay down to sleep. 12 As he slept, he dreamed of a stairway that reached from the earth up to heaven. And he saw the angels of God going up and down the stairway.

13 At the top of the stairway stood the Lord, and he said, “I am the Lord, the God of your grandfather Abraham, and the God of your father, Isaac. The ground you are lying on belongs to you. I am giving it to you and your descendants. 14 Your descendants will be as numerous as the dust of the earth! They will spread out in all directions—to the west and the east, to the north and the south. And all the families of the earth will be blessed through you and your descendants. 15 What’s more, I am with you, and I will protect you wherever you go. One day I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have finished giving you everything I have promised you.”

16 Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I wasn’t even aware of it!” 17 But he was also afraid and said, “What an awesome place this is! It is none other than the house of God, the very gateway to heaven!”

I was reading today from 2nd Chronicles about after David had upset the Lord by calling a census, the angel of the Lord relented from destroying Jerusalem, and David was instructed to begin plans to build the first temple, at the base of a threshing floor. I wondered to myself, if this might’ve been the same place that Jacob laid down and had the dream of the staircase to heaven.

I’ve heard it said also, that though the ark of the covenant had been lost during Israel’s wanderings, some have suggested that perhaps on the hill of Calvary where Jesus bled and died for us, his blood trickled into the ground, and deep under the Earth, and dripped onto the ark of the covenant, buried and lost hundreds of years earlier. No way to prove that, but I was mystified by the suggestion.

In any case, a few chapter later we see Jacob has changed directions and he is on his way back to meet with his brother, to make amends, and to make things right. And I can only imagine how afraid he must be. The last time he saw Esau his brother Esau had desired to kill him.

Have you ever had a difficult moment in the future? An appointment that made you terribly nervous, or a disciplinary meeting with a supervisor at work, I remember I used to dread basketball camps my dad had me go to growing up, I would worry for weeks about these camps. Tossing and turning in bed, filled with fear.

So Jacob must’ve been tossing and turning, worried about this meeting with his brother. I bet he didn’t want to go.

So it says in Genesis 32:23-32 “23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 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. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”