Genesis 32: 22-32
Olympic or Smack Down?
Prosper CRC: Falmouth, MI
April 8, 2001 PM
On a Thursday night not to long ago I caught a few minutes of WWF Smack Down, trying to get a current picture of what comes to mind when the word wrestling is mentioned. It has been quite a few years since I watched wrestling -- not since the days before Hulk Hogan, when Dusty Rhodes was the ageless warrior and Rick Flair was plotting to overthrow him as the world champ. In fact, wrestling as we know it today was just beginning to blossom.
Vince McMann, the force behind wrestling’s current manifestation was still an unknown. With his ascension to wrestling’s ruling class, today’s particular breed of wrestling has become as much a caricature of what pro wrestling used to be as pro wrestling in my youth was of olympic wrestling. Today, pro wrestling is a sub-culture all its own where the men in the ring portray and are perceived as super-hero types. To watch WWF is to watch a world all its own. The drama outside the ring is just as important -- if not more so -- than what goes on inside the ring. If you want to see wrestling today, you have to sit through a parade of skits and endless banter offered by gravel-throated titans. Oh, for the days when all that was needed to entertain a young mind was the senseless violence of Ricky Steamboat giving the atomic throat chop off the top rope to the evil Mr. Wrestling.
After getting an idea of what wrestling has become today, I began thinking about how it compares to its noble predecessor, olympic wrestling. Olympic wrestling is a contest of endurance, skill, and passion. Those who wrestle for competition are fanatic in their discipline -- using extreme measures to make weight, pushing their bodies beyond all reasonable thresholds as they grapple with their opponents. It is far removed from the choreographed, exaggerated action of the pro wrestling scene. Olympic wrestling is a true contest of athletic prowess and heart. WWF, while requiring acrobatic skill, fakes competition for the sake of entertainment -- its matches are predetermined and movements carefully planned to look like the real thing.
I initially wanted to title this message "WDJD Smack Down!" Or "What Did Jacob Do" Smack Down! I was going to open with an announcer type dialogue that ended with "Let’s get ready to rumble!" But as I thought about the nature of pro wrestling compared to Olympic wrestling, I was forced to acknowledge that our passage this is closer to Olympic style.
Genesis 32:22-32 tells us of Jacob’s bout with a beloved opponent -- who is later revealed to be God. An intriguing notion -- wrestling with God. What does that mean? How does one wrestle with God? What happens when we wrestle with God? These are the questions before us to answer this evening. To answer them we will first need to look at the venue for the wrestling match -- how did Jacob get into this match with God? Second, we will need to look at the match itself -- what happened and who won? Finally, we will look at our own careers as wrestlers -- what kind of wrestler are we, olympic or professional?
So what lead Jacob to this match? Well, the best way to set up the venue for his bout with God is to read Genesis 27-31. But since this sermon is only supposed to be 45 minutes….just kidding -- Let me summarize its content quickly. Jacob, through deceit, has stolen the blessing of the eldest son from his brother Esau. Naturally, Esau is a tad upset and forces Jacob to flee for his life. Jacob’s flight, however, is not simply running away, he’s running to the house of Laban, his uncle in Haran, to get a bride. On the way, as he sleeps one night, he has a dream -- the dream of Jacob’s Ladder. In the dream God promises him that he will be with Jacob and extends the same promise he made with Abraham to Jacob. God will make him a great nation and all nations will be blessed through him.
Once with Laban, Jacob gets more than he bargained for -- he gets two wives, Leah and Rachel. After much hard labor and prosperity, Jacob feels the tug of home, so he packs up the wives, etc. and heads back toward his father’s house. As he approaches the boundaries of his homeland Beersheba, Jacob becomes increasingly anxious. Then he hears the news that his brother, with a sizable band of soldiers, was coming to meet him. So he does what any one of us would do in his place. He divides his entourage, in hopes that some would survive the wrath of Esau and then, he prays. His prayer is crafted to do one thing -- remind God of the promise he made Jacob twenty years before as he was fleeing Esau. Listen:
O God of my father Abraham, God of my father Isaac, O Lord, who said to me, ’Go back to your country and your relatives and I will make you prosper.’ I am unworthy of all the kindness and faithfulness you have shown your servant…. But you have said, ’I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.’
Can you believe the gall of this man? He goes back to his homeland because – as we find out in the prayer -- God has told him to go. Then the moment he hears the news that Esau and his minions are on their way, he challenges God! It’s like he is saying, "Uh, God. Remember when you said I would be a great nation…. Well now is the time to prove it!"
Now please, don’t get me wrong. Boldness in prayer is a wonderful thing. In fact, we would do well to take a page out the Hebrew prayer manual. One of the staples of Hebrew prayer is reminding God of the covenant he has established with us. The Psalms are full of such references, Psalm 30 being a prime example. Recounting God’s acts in redemptive history is a great way to bolster our faith in the midst of prayer. But the actions Jacob takes after the prayer leads me to believe his prayer is a challenge to God to act, not an acknowledgement of God’s faithfulness to prop up his own sagging faith.
In vv. 13-21 of chapter 32, after Jacob prays, he immediately begins plotting his own course to appease Esau. He lines up some of his live stock in five flocks and herds as a gift for Esau. Then he sends them out toward Esau, one a little while after the other so that as Esau closes in on him, he keeps running into these extravagant gifts. Jacob hopes that by doing so, Esau will be placated by the time they meet. So what Jacob does is he prays "God, take care of it!" and then sets about choreographing how God will take care of his problem with Esau. Sort of like WWF wrestling. What Jacob gets, however, is far different than what he planned.
So, Jacob has laid the groundwork for the match to take place. In his mind, he’s even fixed things so that the odds favor him. But he is still not at ease. Now, I want to point something out here to help us get a little insight into the character of this patriarch. In Jacob’s day and age, a name meant something. It reflected the character of the person who bore it. “Jacob” means “the one who grasps the heel” or put in plainer terms “the one who trips up.” This was a euphemistic way of saying “the one who deceives.”
So, here is “the one who deceives,” he’s still worried sick about Esau. So he gets up in the middle of the night, moves his entourage across the river while he stays on the far side. Now think about this for a moment. He’s already divided his entourage into two groups, so that one might survive if Esau attacks. Then, he places them across the river between himself and Esau – like decoys or something – while he stays on the far side out of harms way. And this after he has prayed “God, you take care of it.”
But God had other plans for Jacob. He had a lesson for our beloved patriarch that he will never forget. Look at vv. 24-28
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.”
Picture this. Jacob is standing in the dark beside the river, intently watching the shadowy outlines of his entourage across the water for any signs of attack. His ears and eyes are piqued to max efficiency. Then, without warning, strong arms lock about his and the match is on. He was probably too terrified to scream. He must have thought that Esau had found him out. Fearing for his life he fights back.
Now, when Moses wrote this story for the children of Israel, his view of wrestling was much closer to the olympic model than the WWF model. Wrestling consisted of grappling on your feet with your opponent, trying to win a battle of balance, the object being to throw the competition to the ground. So Jacob and his beloved opponent are standing, locked in a vice-like embrace, each looking for an advantage. We don’t know how long this battle went on, how late in the night it began. What we do know is that the unnamed assailant wanted it to end before daybreak and he was having a difficult time overpowering Jacob.
As the two struggled – something odd happens. Whether the beloved opponent lightly touched or struck heavily at Jacob’s hip, I am not sure. Whatever he did, however, wrenched Jacob’s hip, laming him. For those of us who have sustained strains, sprains, breaks or tears in our leg muscles or bones, we know that it is nigh on to impossible to have enough leverage on one leg to do much more than stand up! Not to mention wrestle someone to the ground when you lose use of the injured leg. So Jacob does the only thing he can – he latches on even tighter to his assailant, using him to maintain his balance. He becomes helpless to stand on his own two feet without the assistance of his attacker, so he tries to wrest that assistance from him.
Now it is obvious that the assailant has Jacob at his mercy. Jacob is in a totally defensive posture – probably waiting for that dreaded touch to his other hip. Instead, the assailant says simply, “Dawn is here, let me go.” But Jacob refuses, not unless his attacker blesses him. Then the blessing comes – Jacob’s name is changed from “the one who deceives” to Israel, “the one who struggles with God.” Why? Because he has struggled with God and with man and has overcome. Jacob, now Israel, appears to have won.
What’s going on here? Why does God, through the hand of Moses, tell us this story? Well, let me explain by equating wrestling with prayer. You see Jacob, by nature, is a WWF-type wrestler. He wants all the moves choreographed and the outcome to be known well in advance. In the language of the street, Jacob wants to “get over.” He doesn’t want to struggle, he doesn’t want to fight, he wants to find a way he can “get over.” It’s that simple. He puts on a good show in prayer, but there’s no depth, no struggle, and no heart to his prayer. He offers a caricature of prayer and then sets about in his own strength making his prayer come true.
God, on the other hand wants to teach him how to be an olympic style wrestler. To strain, to struggle, to put his heart into every syllable. To pray as if his life depended on it and then, having prayed, trust God to answer in his time and in his way – which by the way is perfect. God wants Jacob to know the true nature of prayer, not just its format.
An elder in a church I served once asked why God wants us to pray even though he already knows the beginning from the end and has ordained how history moves from one to the other, let me submit to you just one answer.
Notice what God does to Jacob. He takes his feet out from under him so that Jacob has no choice but to lean on him. Jacob is helpless, and yet he prevails, how? “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Jacob prevails by surrendering. By asking for a blessing, Jacob admits he’s outmatched. He acknowledges God’s prerogative and submits his way to God. Warren Wiersbe says it this way:
Keep in mind that Jacob was not wrestling to get a blessing from God; rather, he was defending himself and refusing to yield. The Lord wanted to break Jacob and bring him to the place where he would honestly say, “Not I, but Christ” (Gal. 2:20). All night long, Jacob defended himself and refused to surrender or even admit that he had sinned. Then God weakened Jacob, and the wrestler could only cling! Now instead of scheming for a blessing or bargaining for a blessing, he asked God for the blessing—and he received it.
In other words, the message here is the same one we find in the book of Revelation: God wins.
You see, prayer is not to sway God to our will as much as it is to mold our will to God’s. When we pray, we acknowledge that our times and moments are in God’s hands and that whatever the outcome we will say with Job, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” Or probably more to the point, we can join in the prayer of Christ in Gethsemene; “Not my will but yours will be done.” Submission to the will of God is one of the primary purposes of prayer.
Now, let me begin my third point by saying this is probably one of the more difficult sermons I have preached. Not because the material or the passage is particularly tough, but rather because it involves me in my own wrestling match.
I mentioned earlier what my original title for this message was going to be. When I first wrote this message, I reflected on the nature of prayer and how it relates to wrestling. As I did so, I became increasingly uneasy. You know why? Because the more I thought about it, the more convicted my heart became. The Holy Spirit wasn’t going to let me get away with some antiseptic exegetical work – in other words, God wasn’t going to let me just preach his Word. One of the dangers of preaching is that inevitably your going to run into a message that wounds you – that touches your hip, so to speak. God wounds you through your own words. But what a blessed wound it is – a wound, believe it or not, to be coveted.
You see, as I mused on the nature of wrestling in relation to prayer, I began to realize that my own prayer life is more like the WWF variety than it is the Olympic. My prayers were choreographed, each movement calculated to say the right thing, in the right way for maximum efficiency. I appeared to wrestle, but if I am honest, I have to say that I followed the format of prayer and miss the true nature. Like Jacob, I was a Smack Down champion. Real and vital struggling with God was avoided in preference to the calculated holds and throws of a professional. I wanted control, something diametrically opposed to submission. To wrestle with God means that pray until something happens – we continually submit ourselves to God’s will until he reveals his ways to us. Then, knowing his ways, we follow him. It means that we latch on to God and refuse to let go until he blesses us.
So, as I engaged myself in a study of how God wrestled with Jacob, I found myself taken up by strong arms. And as I finished this sermon, I knew that in preaching it I would be seeing the approaching dawn. My preaching this sermon is me saying to my beloved opponent, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
In the next week, the church will celebrate Holy Week – the week of Christ’s passion. One of the significant moments of that passion is Christ in the Garden of Gethsemene, wrestling in prayer – so strenuously that he sweats drops of blood. Many theologians say that the real battle against sin and death ended when Christ said "Not my will, but yours be done." The suffering at the hands of Pilate and the crucifixion come because of Christ’s prayer in the garden. The prayer paves the way for the resurrection.
In this next week, let us prepare ourselves for Easter – our celebration of Christ’s victory over death – by joining our Lord in Garden. Let us commit ourselves to being Olympic-style wrestlers, putting aside pretense and offering ourselves daily to joining Christ in the prayer "Not my will, but yours be done." People of God, our way is the way of struggle – of the Olympian. We may get lamed in the process, but through our struggle the nations are blessed. Amen.
