The unknown author of the following story captures the value of a name. “After the American Civil War the managers of the infamous Louisiana Lottery approached Robert E. Lee and asked if he’d let them use his name in their scheme. They promised that if he did he would become rich. Astounded, Lee straightened up, buttoned his gray coat, and shouted, "Gentlemen, I lost my home in the war. I lost my fortune in the war. I lost everything except my name. My name is not for sale, and if you fellows don’t get out of here, I’ll break this crutch over your heads!"
The question “What is your name?” is an important question. As we explore God’s question to Jacob, we need to drop in on our host family and explore their interesting family dynamics which will help us appreciate the question later in the story.
• Genesis 27 – The eldest son Esau was to receive a customary blessing for prosperity from his father Isaac.
• While Esau was out hunting to prepare a meal for his father, a condition set by his father before he would issue the blessing, his brother Jacob (under his mother’s direction) pretended to be Esau so that his nearly blind father did not know the difference and as a result he stole his brother’s blessing, not to mention lying to and deceiving his father.
• Esau was enraged to learn Jacob stole his blessing. He vowed he would Kill Jacob when he finished grieving for his father who had now died. Jacob did what any opportunist would do – he ran from the truth – to his uncle’s home in Paddan Aram (27:41).
• Jacob was an opportunist. An opportunist will do things and make decisions to get what they want regardless of the sacrifice of ethical principles they break to get results. This opportunist, like thousands more, lived a very blessed life, though not without its challenges:
- He started out working for his uncle, having forfeited the inheritance of his father
- Married his uncle Laban’s two daughters (Leah and Rachel) –This was the result of his uncle tricking him into marrying Leah when Jacob worked for seven years for his uncle Laban to have Rachel as his wife. So, he worked another seven to get Rachel’s hand! Deceit ran in the family it seems.
- Lots of children – eleven (28:31ff) – questionable practices since he fathered children for his two wives and their servants.
- Private enterprise was prospering and he was becoming very wealthy (30:25ff) This was not without the burden of his stock dropping, long hours of work leading to sleep deprivation, and fluctuating wages for twenty years (31:38-41). His primary stock holder, his uncle, was somewhat of an opportunist himself (Jacob got his trade techniques from his mother and her side of the family). Finally, Jacob started his own private business and broke away from his uncle. He decided he would not be exploited any longer. What’s that verse in Galatians 6:7 – “{a person} reaps what they sow.” Go figure.
Before we delve into this story, we need to keep one other thing in mind, as offered by a writer: “Facts {of the Bible} were often given an imaginative and poetical form.” (The Speaker’s Bible, Volume I) As a result, poetic language of the Bible means we can’t often take much of it literally. The poetry is lost when we treat it as simply historical facts and realities. While we consider the story from an historical, factual point of view, it bears a tremendous amount of poetical realities as well. For instance, did Jacob really wrestle with God physically, or does it represent something more mysterious and not so obvious? You decide as we explore this gold mind. It will be hard work and requires a lot of digging, but there’s an amazing discovery to find!
Several years had passed and we catch up with Jacob wanting to go home. Having received word that Jacob was heading home, Esau started out to meet him. It’s been twenty years since they spoke to each other. Add to that a dysfunctional family life and also the fact that Esau was bringing an army of 400 hundred men with him, well, suddenly the past was looming as large as life and Jacob was terrified (“great fear and distress” – 32:7).
- Jacob a strategist, just like his mom and her brother:
- Divided his family and flocks into two groups – if one was attacked the other could escape (32:8)
- A special gift of livestock would go ahead of him (32:13-16) – four large companies of gifts (hoping as Esau drew closer and saw the offerings he would become less angry and more loving
The only way to deal with and communicate to a strategist is to out-maneuver them. God showed up. He taught Jacob some powerful, life-altering lessons.
1. I must face the obstacles that are destroying me
Jacob sent his family and possessions across the river and was having one final scout of the area before heading across with his family (Verses 22-24). Suddenly Jacob saw a stranger in this dark night (Esau? What a scare!). Someone was blocking his path, standing between him and everything he treasured. For the night the heavenly visitor separated Jacob from everything that mattered to him. He would demand Jacob face his destructive behaviour
Discovering your name sometimes requires experiences of dark nights and aloneness. God must test our behaviour to depending on ourselves. He pushes us to see things that are not good for us, things that must change. He loves us far to much to leave us to destructive behaviour.
• Battle Royal began for Jacob in the night. It was a long and difficult fight as Jacob fought this mysterious opponent into the morning. As darkness gave way to morning light, Jacob was overpowered through pain as the heavenly visitor wrenched his hip from its socket (v. 25) to end the struggle.
• Who was Jacob’s opponent – was it the angel of God, Michael? Jesus before he came to earth? Because Jacob declared, “I have seen God face to face” (v 30), some believe he wrestled with Jesus. Whoever it was, God had to subdue him through pain. Being crippled through the remainder of his life, Jacob learned dependence on God and submission to his purposes and will. It was only now Jacob would be truly blessed.
• Not letting go did not mean he won the fight. Being beaten and crippled he did the only thing he could do – CLING. Being beaten, he cried for the only thing left, he sought the only benefit he could hope to receive, now that he had reached the end of himself – a blessing. Jacob did what Esau had done with their father when he learned Jacob stole his place in the family.
• If Annie Johnson Flint had been around to write her hymn (song 579) for Jacob, he would have been front-row-center to sing it in church:
“When we have exhausted our store of endurance,
When our strength has failed ere the day is half done,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving is only begun.
God has great plans for you. Those plans may demand you face some things that God needs to deal with before you can reach your full potential.
2. I must face the truth to experience wholeness
Verses 27-28…
Poet, Robert Browning said, “When the fight begins within himself a man is worth something.” This is where Jacob was on this dreadful night.
The Question: “What is your name?”
“Jacob” – “deceiver”. Pastor Mike Turner (The Rock Baptist Church, GA) speaks of Jacob the “schemer, cheater, or one who grabs from behind" (as a reference to Jacob grabbing his twin brother Esau’s heel when they were being born. This spoke of prominence in Hebrew thinking.)
“What is your name?” is not a question meant for a trite answer of that title by which people addressed him. It was a question that spoke to the soul of the person. It probed to the deepest places of his being that exposed Jacob for who he was – and he knew it. This was the moment of truth whereby Jacob had to face his deceitfulness, shame and corruption. It is a question that really asks, “Who are you – really?”
• Had to answer before they could go any further – E.g. I am a deceiver, a cheat, a liar. I have sinned, etc.
• NOW GOD COULD ACT! Name change – “Israel” – “he struggles with God”
If the discoveries have not gripped you so far, I am truly hopeful this next lesson will grab your heart! Here’s my earlier mention of this passage possibly being poetic language so that the lesson is not simply historical facts or realities. Jacob could have been having an emotional, mental and spiritual wrestling match with himself. The struggle could have been his higher, God-like self fighting against his lower, vile self. As he contemplated facing his brother, he was facing realities of deceit (father and brother), theft (Esau’s birthright and blessing), selfishness (working for his uncle was really Jacob’s way of working for himself to gain what he wanted) and even now as he prepared to meet his brother he was crafting up schemes to make himself favorable and acceptable. These things were coming to the surface. For twenty years he was able to hide from them, or at least suppress them. But now they came to him in their glaring, ugly reality after being buried for so long. And like a zombie coming back from the dead, Jacob would not outrun the rancid, rotten and grotesque realities of his behaviour any longer. As he battled and struggled with his vile nature which battled against everything godly within him, the godly overcame!
Whatever Jacob is or is not, we see him yearning to be right with God. But before this desire could become reality he had to come to terms with the lies, the cheating and the stealing and bear responsibility for his actions.
Jacob’s greatest battle was overcoming the barrier of accepting himself. If only he could know at this point that his brother is not coming to kill him but to embrace him! He is coming to forgive, not repay. As someone so masterfully reminds us, “The barrier in the way of forgiveness may lie not in the unreadiness of the wronged to give, but the inability of the one who has done wrong to receive.” (The Interpreter’s Bible, pg 722)
Jacob’s guilt had gotten the upper hand. He feared for the future, a day when his sins would catch up with him and take his life and the lives of his family.
Who of us have never known an experience that we’d sooner forget; an experience of theft or maybe deception; or recounting those times when we were selfishly motivated, yielding to sin’s tempting tug and losing to its hold and persuasion. We know struggles of one sort or another as our three enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil, do their best. But the best battle we’ll ever fight is the battle where we “struggle with God” because in it we go deeper with God and discover our name!
Getting there requires we face the ugliness of being a Jacob while all the while wanting to be Israel. We must face who we are if we will know the ultimate blessing of whom God means us to be. Purging must come before purity. To quote one writer, “What we may become is challenging what we are.” (Speaker’s Bible Volume I).
God must purge us. Otherwise, guilt has a way of chasing us all our lives and robbing us of peace and the relationship God so desperately wants us to have. Guilt makes us believe we’re never good enough, we can never be good enough and the best we can hope for is the opportunity to keep pleading for God not to destroy us.
When we come to the point of struggling with our God-like self and our vile self, or that struggle “with God and man”, one of them wins out over the other.
3. My battles reach beyond my personal realities
• Verse 28
• Even beyond the obscure possibilities, a broader application
Jacob striving with God is so honorable to God that He gives Jacob what he desires. The really wonderful lesson here is that Jacob represents the greater community of faith, the Church. To this, John Gibson, Bible Scholar and Reader of Hebrew and Semitic Languages offers, “God wants us to care with an Old Testament fervour and to fight with him not only for our own salvation but for the salvation of the world…It should banish from our minds the thought that God’s blessing is there for the taking, and concentrate our attention where it ought to be concentrated, on the bruising battle for our own souls and the souls of all [people] which we in the church ought to be engaged in, that battle with God which alone can bring his Church “power with God” (AV) and draw from him his blessing for all the families of the earth.”
Who best to help a drug-addict reform than a reformed addict? Who best to guide a pregnant teen than one who walked the road and survived? Who best to offer prayer to the frightened cancer or aids patient than one who stands recovered? Who best to comfort the broken family than one who survived divorce or death and can smile again?
It is not God’s design that we waste our life’s experiences simply for our own benefit. While we must certainly learn from and grown through dark times, God would have us invest those experiences in other people; to take the lessons and experiences to help another who is in need of hope and guidance.
• (33:4) Sibling reunion - forgiveness; healing began; restored relationships.
Let’s close with the rich image of poetry that we can draw from this whole lesson!
• Jacob returning home – our returning to God
• I cannot help but see Esau as a type of Christ, representing God’s relationship to us. We selfishly and sinfully took whatever advantage we could of God. We have lived for our own pleasure and self-satisfaction. God of course had every right to vindicate himself and give us what we deserve. When we realized that and understood the judgement we thought we were reaping on ourselves, God reaches out to us and tells us that he did not send Jesus to destroy us. He sent him to bring us home! We experience the full blessing of God when we experience his forgiveness, his mercy and his unconditional acceptance.
• The broader lesson – we are restored in relationship with God. We are united with Christ, our estranged sibling! Me a sibling, a brother or sister of Jesus? Most certainly! Read Matthew 28:10 Hebrews 2:11 or Hebrews 2:17.
WRAP
• Are there obstacles destroying you, eating away at your soul?
• Will you face the truth to experience wholeness?
• Will you allow your battles to reach beyond your personal realities?
When we have exhausted our own resources and have come to the end of ourselves, we find God now ready and able, to “accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask or hope!” (Ephesians 3:20, NLT)
