I don’t have some clever fact or story or joke to start this sermon. Nothing can top the text itself:
Genesis 32:22-32
That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants 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 men 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.
Honest, when I began searching for stories for this series on name changes, I wasn’t looking for passages that were some of the most strange – but here it is! Jacob wrestles God, or an angel or some manifestation of God, at least. For years I’d read this passage in wonder, and today…I still do!
Like so many other passages of Scripture this one can be especially challenging because of what’s not there. So, I think the first thing we need to do is be careful not to get hung up in what we don’t know. What can we know and learn from this story?
This story really began with a guy who wrestled even before he was born. It’s not a joke. While Rebekah carried her twins, they
Genesis 25:22
The babies jostled each other within her, and she said, "Why is this happening to me?"
When delivery day came, Jacob was still wrestling. Esau was born first. He was all hairy and red, so they named him a name that means that. Follow this kind of logic, and there must have been a lot of kids given names like “sticky,” and “wrinkly” and “screaming meemee,” Now, hanging onto Esau’s heel was his twin brother! So, they gave him the name, “Jacob” = heel grabber. It’s a figurative way of saying, “someone who unseats or deceives – a supplanter.” Sure enough, both figuratively and literally, Jacob lived up to his name. His whole life, he was aimed to get ahead of his older brother, and he did fairly well at it. In a way, he was a good wrestler.
Then comes the bout of the millennium – Jacob vs. God. That’s even better than Rocky 6! The strangest thing is, Jacob did OK! In fact, I want you to see that Jacob walked away a winner that day – not because God lost. God’s goal was to have Jacob wrestle, not to have someone defeated. Why this weird story? Why’d God do this? I think the answer is, Jacob needed to wrestle with God. At the end, God said “you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”
So, let’s consider that need – to wrestle with God, and see how it might fit into our own lives.
G.K. Chesterton once said, “Christianity hasn’t been tried and found empty…it has been found difficult and left untried.”
Jacob needed to deepen his relationship with God. Jacob needed an object lesson that would teach him some things about the way he related to God. And Jacob needed a name change – because this is another one of those places where God changes someone’s name.
There are a lot of people who need to have their Christianity “tried.” For too many it’s in name only, or it’s flabby and shallow, and it needs to be thrown in the ring to see if it can go a few rounds. There are a lot of people who have never really wrestled with God – your faith is still based on what your parents told you and it’s not your own; or you’ve never had to put it into practice on the front lines – you’ve never asked God “God, why did my child die? Why do I have his disease? What do you want me to do with my life?” – you need to wrestle with God…and to win. No, I don’t think you need to get jumped by Hulk Hogan on the way home today. I think that this happened to Jacob as an object lesson for him and for us. So, let’s look at this obviously literal account and try to wrestle from it the way it applies to us this morning.
How can we wrestle with God…and win?
I. Get Alone With God
God didn’t start this rumble publicly. He waited until Jacob had sent everyone else on ahead. He was there all alone. There’s a repeated scene of this in Scripture. Some of God’s best work is done to us when we’re alone.
Jesus set this course for us while He was on earth. 1st thing, after He was baptized, He entered into the desert alone for 40 days, where He went head-to-head with the devil. He frequently went off to lonely places to pray. The night He was arrested and put on trial, we find Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, wrestling in prayer, alone with God.
Jacob has a rather large group of animals, servants, and family members. But the wrestling match doesn’t start until v24 “So Jacob was left alone.”
I believe that the first part of wrestling with God means creating the time to get alone with Him. Otherwise, there are hindrances that might interfere with the work that God intends to accomplish in our lives.
1. Remove preoccupations
William Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Just to get in touch with this myself, I began to make a list of the stuff in my world that has the ability to preoccupy me and keep me from being alone with God. They’re things that, by themselves, aren’t evil, but they can all become their own preoccupation. Things like: a computer, yes – ministry work, music, TV, reading good books, physical exercise, the list goes on. I have no problem keeping busy. We make busyness our new ethic, and God is not impressed.
Quote - Eugene Peterson – “Busyness is the enemy of spirituality. It is essentially laziness. It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing. It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions. It is taking charge.”
We can’t get alone with God if we let everything else be in the way.
2. Remove self-reliance and other false hopes to which we cling
Up to this point in life, Jacob had often been relying on the wrong stuff to make something of himself. It began with his brother Esau’s shallow thinking. Esau, driven by his appetite, in a matter of seconds traded his rights as the 1st-born in the family for a bowl of lintel soup and some bread. Granted, Esau was being shallow and after immediate gratification, but Jacob was also taking advantage of his brother’s weakness, and using it for his own gain. Some time later, when their father Isaac was nearing death and wanted to give his blessing to his 1st-born son, Jacob deceived him and got the better blessing for himself. The wrongness of what Jacob did was apparent even to someone as shallow and simple as Esau. Later Esau said,
Genesis 27:36
Isn’t he rightly named Jacob? He has deceived me these two times: He took my birthright, and now he’s taken my blessing!
Jacob ran for his life from his twin brother and found a home with his uncle Laban. Jacob meets someone much like himself – shifty-eyed and underhanded. But even there with Laban, Jacob manages to turn life his direction. Somehow by his own creativity and sneakiness he makes a lot of gains. By the time he slinks away from Laban, he has built up a huge family, servants, and livestock galore. And up to this point in his life, Jacob had the potential to look at it all and say, “Yeah, I did that, didn’t I?”
One of the lessons I see that God wants us to learn from this text is how necessary it is for every one of us to have times in our lives when we get alone with God and wrestle through life’s issues.
I know that’s not the norm for many people. Instead we tend to surround ourselves with stuff, with distraction, with stresses and concerns, and then wonder why we don’t feel very full of God. The reason is simple: we’re too full of the world to give God the room He requires!
Story –14 years ago, our little family moved from St. Joe, IN to Hillsboro, OH. We had acquired some stuff, and needed to rent a Ryder truck to get it all to OH. Being the analyzer and organizer that I am, I studied the furniture and appliances of our house. I read the moving help booklet from Ryder. I calculated the exact cubic footage, and used it to determine exactly which size truck we would need. After all the hours of study and planning, I told Carrie about it. She looked at me and said, “I think we’ll need the truck the next size up.” I was insulted. I assured her I had done all the homework, and that I was right…of course, I was not. We looked pretty interesting, pulling into the parking lot at Hillsboro, in a yellow Ryder truck, with an orange U-haul trailer on its hitch! The truck was just too full to fit everything in.
That’s where a lot of us leave ourselves when it comes to the room that God needs to work His purposes in us. We’re not always the best calculators. When we’re too full of all the other stuff, there’s not enough room, and we can end up looking pretty silly trying to tack God on at the end.
What I’m saying is: we’ve got to get alone with God. He’s not going to give us the one-on-one treatment if we’re always in a crowd, whether that crowd is people, or entertainment, or money, or bodybuilding. Fill your life up with everything else, and there’s not room to let God have His way.
One of the ways you can tell if your life is too full of everything else is to simply do some inventory and measure how much room God is taking up in your decision-making, your calendar, your choice of friends, your time, and your checkbook. If there’s not much of God in the middle of all that, you need to start creating the places where you’re going to be alone with God.
II. Be Authentic With God
Quote - James Houston in “The Transforming Power of Prayer” - Behind much of the rat-race of modern life is the unexamined assumption that what I do determines who I am. In this way, we define ourselves by what we do, rather than by any quality of what we are inside. It is typical in a party for one stranger to approach another with the question "What do you do?" Perhaps we wouldn’t have a clue how to reply to the deeper question, "Who are you?"
Would you?
There’s a great irony that reached up and slapped me a couple of weeks ago from Psalm 139. It’s a Ps. of David, the one that begins with
Psalm 139:1-2
O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
And David proceeds to testify that there’s just no place he can go that’s outside of God’s sight. Yet, at the end of the Psalm, there’s this invitation:
Psalm 139:23-24
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Turn to it. Underline it. Highlight it. Pray it. It’s an exercise in being authentic – to place ourselves in front of God without pretence, with bared honesty and say, “Here I am, Lord. Whatever You see that shouldn’t be here, please, help me deal with it.”
You can also turn to the text we’re using today. One of the lessons we can learn from this story is what it means to be authentic with God. To walk away a winner from the wrestling match, you’re going to need to be able to do this.
1. Humble
This was a fixed fight. You do realize that don’t you? And, in case it wasn’t obvious to Jacob, as it went on all night, and Jacob sees himself still holding his own, the Lord touches his hip socket, and BAMB! it’s out of joint. That’s all it took. So Jacob goes from wrestling to now just “clinging.” There’s a certain humbling effect in that.
I’ve heard humility defined as seeing ourselves the way God sees us. It’s only when we reach that point that we really even have a reason to seek God’s blessing. Otherwise, who needs the Lord? If we’re enough on our own, if we have it all together, if everything is all set forever, who needs the Lord? Without humility, we don’t have a reason to seek Him.
Spend some time wrestling with God and you’ll end up a humbler person. Talk to God about your achievements and plans, about your weaknesses and tendencies, and about your disappointments. You’ll end up a humbler person when the match is over.
2. Needy
Jacob realized, in the match with the Almighty God, that he was not the self-sufficient entrepreneur and con-artist who had all he needed. He didn’t need stuff. He needed a blessing. So, he’s now desperately clinging to God and struggling for a blessing. The last time he had asked for a blessing was when he tricked his father.
When was the last time you were tenacious in prayer? When was the last time you said to God, “Lord, there’s a real need here, and I’m not going to stop talking to You about it until You answer!” Jesus taught that we’re not supposed to give up in our praying. He said to ask, seek, and knock. Sounds like a persistent prayer life to me. Even sounds like wrestling with God.
Ill - There’s a movie called “Shadowlands” about the life of C.S. Lewis. At one point, Lewis is told by a friend, "I know how hard you’ve been praying .... Now, God is answering your prayer."
"That’s not why I pray, Harry," Lewis says. "I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God; it changes me."
That’s what we find in this wrestling match. To walk away a winner, you must…
III. Find Yourself Altered by God
You can’t enter into God’s arena and be the same as when you started. Consider the change in Jacob.
1. New Name
If I’d been Jacob, I’d been ready for a different name. Here’s this name that means the same as calling someone “cheater” or “swindler.” Imagine, when your mom called you for dinner, or the kids wanted you to come out to play, “Hey, Thief, dinner’s ready!” or “Can Liar come out to play?” Imagine the 1st day at school: “My last name’s Isaacson, and my first name’s ‘Cheater.’”
Jacob’s new name meant a change of situation in his life, and a call by God for him to live in a different way.
To get him to come face-to-face with this, God asks him, “What is your name?” Of course God already knew it. Jacob needed to hear it and think about it. The last time he asked for a blessing, he was lying about his name and tricking his father.
-Jacob – deceiver, heel grabber. Yes, you’re now going to be called “Israel” – it means Prince of God, or “Struggles with God.” You’ve finally turned to the One Who will help you succeed. You get a new name.
I like the fact that when we accept Christ, we’re given a new family name. In fact, if any person is in Christ, he’s a new creation. Old things have passed away. New things have come. We get a new name. Our old name doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, God changes it to “child of God.”
2. New Walk
Jacob also had a new walk – a limp, that is. The hip joint is the largest joint in the body, and the femur, your thigh bone, is the largest bone. Having his hip pulled out of joint would have hurt…a lot! So, he’s limping when it’s over, and may have been limping the rest of his life.
When you wrestle with God, your walk changes. You can’t just live like you did before. Really wrestling with God means that, at some point, He’s going to touch you in such a way that you can’t walk just like you did before. There should be a new walk.
3. Notable Change
Once Jacob explained his limp, people must have realized the significance of what had happened across the Jabbok Brook. It was so important, they turned it into an early Jewish tradition – to not eat not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip from any animal. That was to commemorate the whole wrestling match with God and the life change in Jacob.
There are other examples of people who wrestled with God: Moses, Jonah, Paul, Elijah, Gideon – each one having an excuse, a reason, to not be God’s man for the time to which He called them, but then the wrestling match begins, and God wins, and both come out in the place they are supposed to be: God, in control and the One Who is setting the agenda, and the other guy, humbled, adjusted, and ready to fit into the place God has for him to be.
Conclusion:
Ill - John Milton - We read not that Christ ever exercised force but once; and that was to drive profane ones out of his Temple, not to force them in.”
Pause on that thought for a while. I Co. 6 tells us that we’re now the temple of God. If we were to follow the example of Jesus in this case, the one time that we’d become forceful – scary even, in the way we take action – is when we take extreme measures to drive ungodly things out of our lives. That means something other than saying to the ticket person at the theater, “Here’s $7.50 to let me sit in your garbage-filled environment.” Jesus said that wrestling with issues that keep us from God deserves radical action. If your right eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. If your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away from you.
I fear that too often in our lives we hesitate to wrestle. We don’t want to make a scene or create a stir. Right around the time someone is standing in front of a car about to be hit, we make a stir. Right around the time a child is about to stick something in his mouth that could harm him, we make a big stir. Should we fear jumping into the spiritual wrestling ring when eternity is on the line? I think not.
Theodore Roosevelt - "There has not yet been a person in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering."
If Jacob had wrestled only with man, it wouldn’t have been enough.
We all need to wrestle with God. To fail at this is to be less than He has called us to be.
Some have been avoiding Him
Some aren’t being honest, authentic people (as if God doesn’t know!)
So, you haven’t changed, or you’re not changing.
I’m going to be asking a question that I hope will challenge you over the next months: What are you changing for God this year? What about you is going to be better by the end of this year? What thing that has been hanging, nagging, sagging, getting in the way of what God wants to do in your life? What are you changing for God this year?
Christian life is all about change. Jacob’s name change is just another illustration of that.
