The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children,e and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”
? Jacob’s getting ready to meet Esau again
We continue on our “From Dust to Life” sermon series on Genesis. Last time pastor Brian covered how Jacob is dealing with his past. Two decades ago Jacob had fled from Esau to Laban, and now he was fleeing from Laban only to be confronted by Esau (and not only Esau, but his 400 men)!
We have to deal with our past too, we’ll have to Face it sooner or later. It might be really scary!
Jacob is afraid, he’s panicking, but then in the middle of the chaos he encounters the Lord.
? Jacob wrestles with the Lord
He has sent his family to a relatively safe place, and now he’s alone. Now he meets the Lord face-to-face, one by one again. It gets very personal.
We know Jacob is pretty stubborn that he was wrestling with all the people that are close to him. And why so? Because he never wanted to lose! And now he meets God in a wrestling session.
And they have a pretty long wrestling session! It goes till the morning! Jacob keeps resisting, until after a very long time the Lord finally dislocates his hip! He struck Jacob’s hip. “The Hebrew for struck is naga’. In many instances it is sufficient to translate it simply as “touch” (Gen. 3:3 being the first instance of meaning “to lay a finger on”).” Why didn’t God just overpower him in the first minute? When you’re training in a wrestling sport or boxing, the trainer lowers down his power so that you can actually train until the trainer needs to show you who the actual master is.
We can be stubborn with God for a long time, we may think we would be fine and there are no serious consequences, but then life happens and something in your life is dislocated. Which is painful. And it’s not that God hated Jacob, but this was the way Jacob could finally be transformed.
In wrestling with God…
? Jacob wrestles with himself
We are constantly wrestling with God, I definitely do!
I wrestle about my faith, my identity, there are times I do not understand God at all..
Often when we’re wrestling with the Lord we’re actually wrestling with ourselves. Jacob could not truly see who he was until he wrestled with God. God gets as close to Jacob as was imaginable, it was personal.
Jacob has to meet himself, having to answer the question of who he is! What is his identity? He’s facing the problems, he’s facing his past, he’s facing everything as Jacob (with all of his cunning and rational human solutions), but God had another plan for him - to become Israel - “to struggle,” or “one who wrestles with God”.
Wrestling is the competition where you cannot use any tricks, it’s either you or your opponent, pure strength.
He shouldn’t run from his problems, his issues, his identity, he needs to face them courageously and figure them out together with his Lord.
If that was me, and I was wrestling, I would be wondering what am I actually wrestling for? Are there people, things seen and unseen that you wrestle with? I wrestle with a lot of things like everyday discipline, faith issues, and understanding difficult people. Am I trying to figure things out in my own strength and wisdom or am I relying on God, we’re all in the same boat. And often we think we’re not the ones who need to change, but in the end of the day:
The way to win is to lose to the Lord.
The only way to live for God is to die to self.
Jacob was wrestling with God and he didn’t want to change. He thinks he can wrestle with God and still go on with his own life, staying in a comfort zone.
But Jacob did not name the place according to his struggle-but according to what came out of it.
Here’s my question to you:
What was the outcome of the wrestling match?
He lost miserably! What did he get from it? Jacob says he’s seen God face to face and his life has been delivered. What was God rescuing Jacob from?
The encounter Jacob had with the Lord was a transformative event, but Jacob still had a long way to go. Though God had given him a new name (Israel), he was still Jacob. Yet there had been a spiritual advance. He left Haran, his character having been forged from conflict, he came to the place where he wrestled with God, and now as the tired, wounded, God-struck patriarch, he would need the relentless, intrusive, tenacious grace of God more than ever for the way forward.
Let’s read Genesis 33. Would somebody like to read the passage?:
And Jacob lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two female servants. And he put the servants with their children in front, then Leah with her children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all. He himself went on before them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother.
But Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. And when Esau lifted up his eyes and saw the women and children, he said, “Who are these with you?” Jacob said, “The children whom God has graciously given your servant.” Then the servants drew near, they and their children, and bowed down. Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down. And last Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. Esau said, “What do you mean by all this company that I met?” Jacob answered, “To find favor in the sight of my lord.” But Esau said, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.” Jacob said, “No, please, if I have found favor in your sight, then accept my present from my hand. For I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God, and you have accepted me. Please accept my blessing that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have enough.” Thus he urged him, and he took it.
Then Esau said, “Let us journey on our way, and I will go ahead of you.” But Jacob said to him, “My lord knows that the children are frail, and that the nursing flocks and herds are a care to me. If they are driven hard for one day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord pass on ahead of his servant, and I will lead on slowly, at the pace of the livestock that are ahead of me and at the pace of the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.”
So Esau said, “Let me leave with you some of the people who are with me.” But he said, “What need is there? Let me find favor in the sight of my lord.” So Esau returned that day on his way to Seir. But Jacob journeyed to Succoth, and built himself a house and made booths for his livestock. Therefore the name of the place is called Succoth.
And Jacob came safely to the city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, on his way from Paddan-aram, and he camped before the city. And from the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, he bought for a hundred pieces of money the piece of land on which he had pitched his tent. There he erected an altar and called it El-Elohe-Israel.
Jacob was:
1. Humbled by God
2. Humbled by Life
3. Humbled by Grace
Let’s look at Jacob’s experience:
1. Humbled by God
We learn from the example of Jacob. If we are to accomplish what God has called us to do, it has to be by faith in who He is and not belief in our own strength and ability to accomplish the task. God will often bring us to the place, as He did with Jacob, where our self-sufficiency is proven insufficient.
God wrestled with Jacob, wounded him, weakened him, leaving him, in a sense, powerless. We don’t know how long he walked with a limp but Jacob would learn to walk in this new normal and there is no record of him ever being healed.
Why does God do this?
Is it because of our tendency towards pride and self-sufficiency? The apostle Paul said:
So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited (2 Cor 12:7).
Whatever this thorn was (physical, spiritual, or emotional affliction—or something else entirely), Paul recognized that God’s goal in allowing the thorn in the flesh was to keep him humble. This thorn was a source of real pain in Paul’s life and God would not take it away though he prayed. Nevertheless, God gave him more overwhelming grace and more compensating strength. Paul learned that God’s “power is made perfect in weakness.”
Could it also be that it is so we identify with Christ’s suffering?
Often in contact sports players get wounded, they may sit out for a while, they get patched up and go back into the game, one American football player said, “We are never operating at 100% but because the game is more important than our injuries, we get back in the game, we have learned to play wounded.”
So is it in our families, in our friendships, in our marriage, and ministry. We will get hurt and need times of patching up so we can get back in the game (for lack of a better word) because life is not all about us, it's about God and putting His Kingdom first, even when we aren’t at 100%. What is our end goal as Christians? What does the Westminster catekism say the chief end of man is? “It is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Would we even seek to glorify God in each circumstance of life if we were only watching out for ourselves?
Would we really put God first If we have everything we need physically and materially? Probably not. Jacob was humbled by God, and because of his poor decision he was also...
2. Humbled by life
We see that after 20 years of a self-imposed exile, Jacob’s life comes full circle. After wrestling face-to-face with God he now comes face-to-face with Esau, expecting to have to wrestle with him in his wounded state. Life and time has a tendency to remind us of how frail we are. So what does Jacob do? He frantically arranges his family for a formal presentation to his brother and greets Esau as a servant. And what does Esau do? Runs and greets Jacob like a brother, embracing him, kissing him on the neck. God had answered Jacob’s prayer, Esau was no longer a brother filled with rage and revenge. He wasn’t there to wrestle but to be reconciled with Jacob - not the outcome that Jacob was expecting with Esau and the four hundred men accompanying him.
They were reconciled but sometimes reconciliation can take a long time. I’m reading a book written by a friend and mentor who tells the story about a man who was fired by the board of his own company. These people were his friends and ones he was close to. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but as a Christian, he knew he needed to forgive these people. He thought it would be a one-time decision to forgive but forgiveness is a process - one that is usually proportionate to the severity of the pain. He said it is more like writing a book than writing a letter. For him it was a long process of wrestling with his hurt until he could forgive every person involved. It takes humility and God’s grace to forgive others.
Like Daniel said, Jacob had to wrestle with God, before he was ready to meet Esau. If you think about it, all of Jacob’s life was wrestling to get blessings - wrestling to get the blessing from his dad, wrestling to get a blessing from Laban, to get a blessing for his future family. He was looking for approval from his father, looking for beauty in a wife, looking for financial blessing all his life but what he didn’t realize until now is that what he needed was for the blessing of God’s presence in his life. That is what he needed to fill the void. At first Jacob was the center but after the wrestling match, God is at the center. How would we apply that today? Can anyone think of a time you were wrestling with so many things and people and then you met God? Life had humbled Jacob, but more so he was…
3. Humbled by Grace
Throughout this conversation Jacob's awareness of God and His grace is all over this Genesis passage. After all the hurt and harm he caused, he was humbled by the underserved goodness and grace of God. God was with him in his prodigal ways, waiting to be gracious. It was after he got a revelation of God’s grace toward himself that Jacob could be willing to generously give his material “blessings” back to Esau to make the proper restitution of all that he had stolen from him. Jacob was expecting his brother’s wrath but when he received his kindness and forgiveness he said it was “like seeing the face of God.” At the Friday night prayer meeting, Petro mentioned that sometimes the greatest turning points in our lives is when God ambushes us with his unfathomable grace. God’s kindness and patience is meant to bring us to repentance. When we are expecting God’s rebuke and instead receive grace from His hand, it’s humbling, it breaks us and makes us love Him more.
Esau invited his brother to come down south with him to Seir but Jacob kindly declined the offer knowing God had called him to return to his home in Canaan. They parted ways peacefully - Esau went to Seir and Jacob to Shechem which according to archaeological finds was a thriving town, green, lush and full of natural springs. Jacob safely arrives and settles down, he buys a piece of land and builds an altar and calls it El-Elohe-Israel - a strong and mighty God - a God who keeps his promises.
Jacob could look back and see it was God who had been gracious to him. It was God who had changed his brother's heart and brought him safely and peacefully home - just as He promised.
This is such a picture of the Gospel. We wrestle through life, looking for the blessings - seeking for a good quality of life, good health, seeking to make enough money to make us happy and comfortable. Like Jacob I think we many times make the blessings the end goal instead of enjoying God and making our end goal to glorify Him. God had patiently pursued Jacob, wrestled with him, wounded him, weakened him so Jacob could see that the greatest blessing was God himself. It is God who paid the highest price to pursue sinners, the price of His own Son to pay the debt we could never pay for our sin so that we could experience the greatest blessing - the blessing of reconciliation with Him, a reconciliation that brings peace between us and God and a promise of His eternal presence.
