The Revelatory Power of A Crippling Encounter
TEXT:
Gen. 32:22 (CEB)
Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the Jabbok River’s shallow water. 23 He took them and everything that belonged to him, and he helped them cross the river. 24 But Jacob stayed apart by himself, and a man wrestled with him until dawn broke. 25 When the man saw that he couldn’t defeat Jacob, he grabbed Jacob’s thigh and tore a muscle in Jacob’s thigh as he wrestled with him. 26 The man said, “Let me go because the dawn is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.” 27 He said to Jacob, “What’s your name?” and he said, “Jacob.” 28 Then he said, “Your name won’t be Jacob any longer, but Israel, because you struggled with God and with men and won.” 29 Jacob also asked and said, “Tell me your name.” But he said, “Why do you ask for my name?” and he blessed Jacob there. 30 Jacob named the place Peniel, “because I’ve seen God face-to-face, and my life has been saved.” 31 The sun rose as Jacob passed Penuel, limping because of his thigh. 32 Therefore, Israelites don’t eat the tendon attached to the thigh muscle to this day, because he grabbed Jacob’s thigh muscle at the tendon.
OPENING ILLUSTRATION & INTRODUCTION:
In His Book, "In the Eye of the Storm," Max Lucado tells us about Chippie... Chippie, the parakeet, never saw it coming. One second he was peacefully perched in his cage. The next, he was sucked in, washed up, and blown over. The problems began when Chippie's owner decided to clean Chippie's cage with a vacuum cleaner. She removed the attachment from the end of the hose and stuck it in the cage. The phone rang, and she turned to pick it up. She'd barely said "hello" when "ssssopp!" Chippie got sucked in. The bird owner gasped, put down the phone, turned off the vacuum, and opened the bag. There was Chippie -- still alive but stunned. Since the bird was covered with dust and soot, she grabbed him, raced to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and held Chippie under the running water. Then, realizing that Chippie was soaked and shivering, she did what any compassionate bird owner would do . . . she reached for the hair dryer and blasted the pet with hot air. Poor Chippie never knew what hit him. A few days after the trauma, the reporter who'd initially written about the event contacted Chippie's owner to see how the bird was recovering. "Well," she replied, "Chippie doesn't sing much anymore -- he just sits and stares." It's hard not to see why. Sucked in, washed up, and blown over . . . That's enough to steal the song from the stoutest heart. (Max Lucado, In the Eye of the Storm, Word Publishing, 1991, p. 11.)
Have you ever had a moment or a series of moments like Chippie? The Bible character Jacob did. In fact it seems like his entire life was one episode after another of being sucked in, washed up, blown over... Trauma. When we first meet Jacob, he is in the womb. The womb is a place God intentionally created as an incubator where the creature that he has chosen to place His image in grows and becomes for 9 months before they are born. When we first meet Jacob he is wrestling with his twin brother, in the womb. He is matched with a wrestling partner from the first moment of life. Jacob was struggling, kicking and shoving even before entering the world. It was before the invention of ultrasound and so she went to the local shrine to ask for a word from God. She was told that there were two children in her womb and the older one would serve the younger one.
Jacob lived his life continually fighting his limitations. Prophetically, he grabbed his brother’s heel as he came out of the womb. He tricked his brother into selling him his birthright. He did not like the he was only going to receive one-third of the family’s inheritance. He did not like the limitation of being second born. He and his mother sought to overcome this with trickery. He wanted his father’s blessing. He dressed up and disguised himself as his older brother and went in to his elderly father and again tricked him into giving him the blessing. When his brother found out about it, he was so angry he wanted to kill him. So Jacob ran away. He went back to the old country to find a wife.
On his way he stopped one evening and made himself a bed in a place called Luz. Here he had the famous dream of the ladder reaching up to heaven and a host of angels going up and down it. The Hebrew text can be translated as the LORD standing at the top of the ladder and speaking to Jacob or standing next to him. Either way Jacob is laying there immobilized by sleep. Sleep has limited him. He is unable to do anything but listen. No wresting, no trickery. All he can do is listen. It was in this moment that God became real to Jacob. God reveal to him that He was the God of his ancestors and that He would be his God as well. God promised that He would protect him, and gave him promises that He said He would stay with Jacob until they were fulfilled. It was in his moment of the paralysis of sleep that God revealed Himself to Jacob. There is a revelatory power in our moments when we can do nothing but listen.
When he wakes up, Jacob says, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I wasn’t even aware of it!” 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!” (Gen 28:16-17 NLT). It was there that he met his match.
But, God's calling and promise did not keep Jacob from the difficulties of life. Jacob went on to the old country. It was here that he fell in love with a girl named Rachel. It was here that he was tricked by his uncle Laban into marrying the older sister of the girl he loved. It was here that he wound up marrying both sisters. It was here that he fathered eleven children. It was here that he experienced one difficulty after another. When he finally gets fed up after twenty years of difficulty, his uncle chases him down. Jacob responds giving this speech:
Genesis 31:38-42 (NLT)
38 “For twenty years I have been with you, caring for your flocks. In all that time your sheep and goats never miscarried. In all those years I never used a single ram of yours for food. 39 If any were attacked and killed by wild animals, I never showed you the carcass and asked you to reduce the count of your flock. No, I took the loss myself! You made me pay for every stolen animal, whether it was taken in broad daylight or in the dark of night.
40 “I worked for you through the scorching heat of the day and through cold and sleepless nights. 41 Yes, for twenty years I slaved in your house! I worked for fourteen years earning your two daughters, and then six more years for your flock. And you changed my wages ten times! 42 In fact, if the God of my father had not been on my side—the God of Abraham and the fearsome God of Isaac—you would have sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen your abuse and my hard work. That is why he appeared to you last night and rebuked you!”
Like Chippie, Jacob had been sucked in, washed up, and blown over. Life was filled with limitations, frustrations, and stuck places. But, right in the middle of it, God was revealing Himself. Jacob's children were the ancestors of the twelve tribes of Israel. God was revealing Himself and it would have been very easy for Jacob to lose his song. Jacob finally gets away and heads home. On the way, he knows that he is going to meet his brother who wanted to kill him twenty years before.
In our text, Jacob is once again trying to conive and work things out and wrestle things into working his way. He sends his wives and children ahead of him. Jacob’s act of sending his family across the river was an act of self-limiting. He was crippled by fear and anxiety about what lay ahead. He was left alone. And in this self-imposed moment that turned into a season Jacob found a new wrestling partner. The Bible says that "A man wrestled with him until the dawn broke." This time it was not Jacob who started the wrestling match, it was a mysterious Man.
To wrestle is to entwine, intertwine, embrace. To wrestle is to take part in a fight, either as sport or in earnest, that involves grappling with one's opponent and trying to throw or force them to the ground. Grappling means to grab, hold onto. This Man Who wrestles Jacob, holds onto him until the sun rose. Jacob had such a hold upon the Man that the Man saw that He could not get away from him, the Man forcibly hit Jacob's hip and tore the muscle. The Man got ahold of Jacob and Jacob got ahold of the Man. It was a moment that Jacob could not get away from. His fear of what was ahead caused him to grapple with God. The Man gave Jacob the opportunity to let go, but Jacob refused. He held on and said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me!" He was not satisfied with what he had. He was not satisfied with his limitations.
Then came a revelatory moment. You see those crippling encounters have revelatory power. When we have nothing more that we can do, we may find ourselves wrestling with more than we anticipated. The Man asked Jacob, "What is your name?"
Crippling Moments Reveal Who We Are
They reveal our weaknesses. The name "Jacob" had defined this man all of his life. It meant "heel-grabber." The only other person to be associated with doing something to another's heel in Genesis is the seprent who would one day bruise the heel of the Seed of the Woman. It was generational. Abraham told a few lies. Jacob told the same lies. Jacob's life was characterized by deception and trickery.
The Man wrestling with Jacob wanted Jacob to see himself as he was. As Jacob looked into the Face of the Man, it was as if he were staring into a mirror. Crippling moments reveal who we are. In the places of our limitations it causes us to see what we cannot do.
But this is not the only thing these moments reveal. There is also another revelation.
Crippling Moments Reveal Who We Can Become
After Jacobs reveals his name, the Man tells him that from that moment forward that he would not anymore be called Jacob. His name would from that moment forward be called "Israel." Our crippling moments also reveal our strengths. These moments reveal who we can become. The Man told Jacob that the reason for his change of name was that he had wrestled "with God and with men and won.” Jacob was grappling with things that he did not even realize that He was.
It is our moments of greatest distress that reveal hidden inner strengths that God has placed within our lives. Jacob only knew one way to do things, trickery, and lies, and deception. But, God intended to draw something out of Jacob that he did not know was there.
Crippling Moments Reveal Who God Is
In Jacob’s first encounter with God, the LORD was stood at the top of a ladder or beside him as he lay in the paralysis of sleep.
In this encounter with the LORD, God had descended the ladder and put Himself in a position where Jacob could handle Him. God does not want to be distant from us. He wants to be near. This is the Incarnation.
Hosea (12:3-5) read this story and comes to this conclusion:
In the womb, he grasped his brother’s heel; as a man he struggled with God.4 He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor. He found him at Bethel and talked with him there—5 the Lord God Almighty, the Lord is his name!
Jacob walked away limping. The writer of Hebrews said that it was something he lived with for the duration of his earthly pilgrimage. When he blessed the sons of Joseph, he was leaning upon his staff (Hebrews 11:21). Encounters with the LORD of the kind we are talking about this AM leave us changed. Sometimes we do not even realize who we are wrestling with or who is wrestling us.
CONCLUSION:
We started out talking about Chippie. There is a story about another bird. She was at Winston Churchill's side during Britain's darkest hour. If she is still living now, Charlie the parrot is well over 104 years old... and still cursing the Nazis. Her favorite sayings were "expletive Hitler" and "expletive the Nazis." And even today, decades after Churchill's death, she can still be coaxed into repeating them with that unmistakable Churchillian inflection. Many an admiral or peer of the realm was shocked by the tirade from the bird's cage during crisis meetings with the PM. But it always brought a smile to the war leader's face. Churchill bought Charlie - giving him a boy's name despite the fact she was female - in 1937. She took pride of place in a bizarre menagerie of pets, including lambs, pigs, cattle, swans, and, at one point, a leopard. He immediately began to teach her to swear - particularly in company - a few years ago she was still keeping up the tradition. She is still fighting old battles. Some of you are wrestling. Some of you are in a place where you're like Chippie. God is inviting you to see yourself, strengths and weaknesses, and what you can become, and He is inviting you to look into His Face and see Him. It changes everything.
