Jacob Wrestles With God (Genesis 32:24-30)

When Jacob is born he comes out second, grasping his brother’s heel, and so they call him ’Jacob’ meaning ’grabber’, and as he grew up he made it his habit to go on grabbing everything he could for himself, especially those things that belonged to his brother Esau.

Jacob, as I read him, was a nasty child and he became a rather nasty man. Yet he was also the ’child of the promise’ through whom God had promised he would make a great nation. Jacob knew that, and it would appear that his wheeling and dealing was his attempt to achieve for himself that destiny that he had already been promised by God. But he had to do it his own way.

Jacob struggled with Esau and stole his birthright. He struggled with his father and fooled him into giving him Esau’s inheritance. Then he left town because Esau wanted to kill him, and he went and struggled with his uncle Laban in a far away land, who turned out to be a bigger grabber than he was. In the end Jacob wrestles from Laban most of his wealth too, and Laban joins the growing list of persons who would like to see Jacob dead.

So Jacob heads back home with all the wealth and his women and his children and the servants that he has managed to acquire through the grabbing and grasping and wrestling techniques that he had perfected over many years. As he nears his homeland, with Laban behind him, he hears that his brother is coming out to meet him with an army of four hundred men - a force that is clearly greater than anything Jacob has with him. And so Jacob realises that all his grabbing and grasping and cheating and wrestling is all about to come an end.

So Jacob sends on ahead of himself gift and offerings aimed at appeasing his brother. He divides up his entourage into two groups, so that one might hopefully escape while the other is destroyed. Finally he sends all the women and children across the river in front of him, in the hope that, presumably, even if they don’t sway Esau’s sympathy, at least Esau’s arrows might hit them first. And he spends the night alone on the other side of the river - alone perhaps for the first time in many years. Alone with time to think, to plan, to pray perhaps. But God jumps him!

It seems clear to me that in all Jacob’s wrestling and grasping, his issue had always really been with God. He knew he was the ’child of the promise’. His mother had been telling him this since he was a tiny tot, so he figured that it was his destiny to be a millionaire by the age of 30. And so if he wasn’t raking in the millions from the word go, it must be somebody else’s fault.

It was his dumb brother Esau’s fault, or it was his dotty old dad Isaac’s fault, or it was his conniving uncle Laban’s fault. Because he had a right to his millions, and he had a right to all the women he wanted, and he had a right to good health, to good relationships and to constant happiness, and if he didn’t have all these things then it had to be someone else’s fault.

Yes, there’s something very contemporary about the character of Jacob, and we know full well what he’d be doing if he were growing up today in this society. He’d be suing everybody - divorcing his parents, taking out AVO’s against the rest of his family, entering into pre-nuptial agreements with his women, and tying up all his assets in trust funds.