First Presbyterian Church
Wichita Falls, Texas
July 31, 2011
YOUR CHARACTER ARC
Isaac Butterworth
Genesis 32:22-32 (NIV)
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 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.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
28 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.”
29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. 32 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.
Every great story has great characters. And in truly great stories, the characters go through significant change. This change is called a character arc. For example, if you’re familiar with the Harry Potter series, you know that Harry starts off in the story as an unloved orphan who would do anything to get back with his family. Only, the members of his family are dead. Of course, in a fantasy story like Harry’s, that’s not a huge problem. All you have to do is sell your soul to the wicked and powerful Voldemort, and he can make all your dreams come true. So, what does Harry do? He chooses to do the right thing, which is to resist Vodemort, even though it means giving up his deepest desire.
It’s not just fictional characters, of course, who have character arcs. In fact, you have one. If you’re a person of faith, you are a person in process. It’s process guided by the Holy Spirit, of course, and what he’s doing is -- he’s transforming you from building your life around yourself to building it around God.
We see this going in biblical personalities all the time. Take Jacob, the patriarch, for one. Jacob starts off life as a self-centered man, taking whatever he wants from others -- often doing it by deceit and trickery. In time, he becomes a God-centered man, not perfect, of course, but much wiser, and more attentive to the needs of others. Starting out as a taker, he emerged as a giver.
What we see in Jacob -- and in ourselves if we but look -- is the process of transformation. And transformation always begins with God. In 2 Corinthians 3:18 the Apostle Paul writes that ‘we...are being transformed into [Christ’s] likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.’
You and I, of course, contribute to this process in a secondary sense. Paul says to us in Romans 12:2: ‘Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’
As I said, transformation is seen in the lives of numerous characters in the Bible. There is Abraham, who was called by God and given his promises. Yet Abraham learned to trust God only after failing to do so time after time. Despite the fact that God promised Abraham that his wife, Sarah, would bear a son, he took matters into his own hands and had a son with his wife’s servant. Despite the fact that God had given him the Promised Land, he set off for a time of sojourn in Egypt. He lied about his wife, saying she was his sister, so that no one would kill him to get her. Abraham is called the ‘Father of Faith,’ but at every turn, it seems, he failed to trust God. Until, at last, when God told him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the son of promise, he finally put his confidence in God. He made all the preparations and showed that he would obey God even though he did not understand.
There is Simon Peter – impetuous, impulsive, slow to think but quick to speak and act. He asks to walk on the surface of the sea with Jesus, and when our Lord invites him to do so, he actually gets out of the boat. But then he loses heart and begins to sink. On another occasion, when Jesus tells him and the others about the Cross, Peter contradicts the Lord. ‘This shall never happen to you,’ he says. Later, in a clumsy effort to protect Jesus from a mob, he cuts off the ear of Malchus, the servant of the high priest. At one point, he swears that, although all others should forsake Jesus, he will never do so! And yet, when Jesus is on trial, a peasant girl points him out as one of Jesus’ disciples, and he denies knowing the Lord. And not just once but three times. Simon was so undependable that it is something of an irony that Jesus nicknamed him ‘Peter,’ which means ‘Rock.’ He was anything but! And yet, on the day of Pentecost, it is Peter, newly filled with the Spirit of God, who stands before three thousand people and proclaims the gospel of the resurrected Christ. And, subsequently, as you know, he became one of the chief leaders of the Christian movement, a ‘rock’ to be sure.
Our guy today, of course, is Jacob, the patriarch. He was born a twin, and he emerged from the womb grasping the heel of his older brother, Esau. He was from the start a schemer, an artful conniving manipulator, and he would take whatever he could get from those foolish enough to trust him. No one suffered from this more than his brother Esau. He tricked Esau into giving him his birthright in exchange for a bowl of soup. And, later, with his mother’s help, he tricked their father into giving him the blessing reserved for Esau. He stirred up such contempt in his brother that his mother sent him away for his own safety. He was to go stay with her brother, Laban, a trickster in his own right.
On the way, Jacob had his famous dream, in which he saw a ladder extended from earth to heaven and the angels of God ascending and descending on it. It was his first brush with the Holy One, and it became something of a foothold for God to begin to work a change in him.
God used his untrustworthy uncle, Laban, to turn up the heat on Jacob. Jacob fell in love with Rachel, the younger of Laban’s two daughters, and Laban agreed to give Jacob her hand in marriage in exchange for seven years’ labor. The Bible says, ‘Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her’ (Gen. 29:20).
But when the dust settled, Jacob found himself married not to Rachel but to her sister, Leah! Laban had out-tricked the trickster. ‘It is not our custom,’ Laban explained, ‘to give the younger daughter in marriage before the older one’ (Gen. 29:26). And he slyly offered to give Rachel in marriage to Jacob, if Jacob would – what? You guessed it! – work for him another seven years! ‘And,’ according to Scripture, ‘Jacob did so’ (v. 28).
Uncle Laban cheated Jacob in a number of other ways, until Jacob could abide it no longer. And he set out with his wives and his children to go back to his homeland. As he neared home, though, he realized that he would have to face his brother, Esau. So he sent a messenger to tell Esau that he was coming. The messenger returned to tell Jacob that Esau got the message, and he was on his way to meet Jacob with four hundred horsemen.
The Bible at this point speaks of Jacob’s ‘great fear and distress’ (Gen. 32:7). As a precaution, he divides his family into two groups – he had a lot of children, as you know – and he thought, ‘Well, if Esau attacks one group, the other group may escape.’ Then he talked to God. ‘Save me,’ he prayed – much as you and I do when the stakes are high. ‘Save me…from…my brother, Esau,’ he said, but he may as well have said, ‘Save me from the consequences of a life spent in using and abusing others.’
Jacob was changing, but some things, no doubt, never change. He engineered a plan to ‘pacify’ his brother with extravagant gifts and flattery. He sent the gifts by his servants, wave upon wave of cattle and goats and sheep and camels. ‘Peace offerings,’ we would call them. His plan was to space them out so that the impact of each gift would top that of the ones before. He sent his servants ahead, ‘but, the Scriptures say, ‘he himself spent the night in the camp’ (v. 21). And what a night that was!
God got down and serious with Jacob that night. Incrementally, over the years, he had allowed Jacob to get a taste of his own medicine, poisonous as it was. But tonight, God would close the deal. At a ford of the River Jabbok, Jacob sent his wives and sons across, and he ‘was left alone.’ It was then that ‘a man’ took hold of him and wrestled with him through the night. The prophet Hosea tells us that this ‘man’ was an angel. ‘He struggled with the angel,’ Hosea says (Hosea 12:4).
And he ‘overcame him.’ Jacob prevailed in the struggle! But make no mistake. God pulled his punches. God wasn’t in the struggle to win; he was in the struggle to win Jacob. Job once asked, ‘Would [God] oppose me with great power?’ And his answer was, ‘No’ (Job 23:6). Nor did heaven come against Jacob with all its might that night. God was not there to utterly destroy Jacob but, rather, to destroy the old Jacob. He was there to transform him, to change him and make him a new man.
When Jacob asked the angel’s name, the angel would not say. He would not be possessed by Jacob, as though Jacob had some control over heaven; he would not indulge Jacob in a false understanding of his victory. Instead, he gave Jacob a name, a new name. ‘Israel,’ he called him. He was no longer Jacob the schemer, the manipulator, the self-obsessed strategist. He was the person who had wrestled with God.
This is the script for all of us -- potentially, at least. As you look at your own character arc, as you observe how you have changed or might change, as you take note of the journey of faith you’re on and how God is ‘working you’ – not to your disadvantage, not at all, but in service to your redemption – you may find yourself to be in a hand-to-hand, heart-to-heart struggle with God.
Often, there is a limp, or something like it, when you emerge from the struggle. For Jacob it was a wrenched hip. For you the cost may be different. But you and I should never think that we will not be changed in some way when we struggle with God. Else, why would we ask, as Jacob did, for a blessing. The wound is part of the gift. You know when someone has the mark of God upon their life. They’re never again the same.
That could be you.
