Crippling in a Chasm
The picture of Jacob
wrestling one lonely night with the God-man in the gorge of Jabbok has fired
the imagination of poets and mystics down through the ages. It has often been
depicted as a heroic struggle in which Jacob, crippled and exhausted, overcomes
the divine resistance to his longings and succeeds in extracting what he wants
from God. It becomes the model of prevailing prayer and presents us with a very
lively question: Who among us will wrestle in prayer as Jacob wrestled and
prevail as Jacob prevailed? That is - to prevail over God?
This is a complex question. We
live in an era when there are many competing spiritualties and many claims and
counter claims about prayer and prevailing prayer. In order to reflect on this
we need to explore the narrative and look at the long back-story of Jacobs’
journey and experience. Why was there a struggle at all? Why would God wrestle
with a man? If God is almighty and a person feeble, why is Jacob not
immediately overwhelmed? Does God need to cripple Jacob? Would an elephant even
be concerned if a mouse were to strive with it? Does a whale even notice all
those little fish that swim with it and if one started to bite would it not
just flick the tail to get rid of it?
The first thing we should
reflect on is that Jacob is not the aggressor. The wording is very clear. ‘A man wrestled with Jacob’. If someone
hits you, you have two choices. You can run away or you can stand and hit back.
If someone wrestles with you, you have no choice because you are obliged to
wrestle with them. Whether you wish to flee or to fight back, you’re stuck with
them as they cling to you. I have an older and a younger brother. As kids we
would often play tag wrestling. It would go on and on until either our parents
couldn’t stand it any longer or someone ended in tears.
In this story the struggle to
either break away from the persons grip or to teach the person a lesson. Jacob
wasn’t wrestling because he chose to but because he was obliged to. The ‘man’ was trying to throw him to the
ground.
The question, if not the
problem, of why God would bother to strive at all is an awesome one. He, in
effect, reduces himself to Jacob’s size. He refuses to take unfair advantage of
him even though he could easily overpower him. Eventually God will prevail but
only after it has been fully established that Jacob has no intention of giving
up. After all, the clinging and the wrestling go on all night!
What does it all mean? Is
this another strange Old Testament tale that is hard to imagine and even harder
to work out?
What it means is that Jacob
had been struggling with God all his life. The conflict at the Jabbok
symbolises that lifelong struggle. His early life led down to this point, and
the rest of his life would ascend up from it. Up until this crisis his life had
been a long endeavour to resist God’s goodness. It was a struggle against a God
who was determined to both bless and to help him.
The Struggle Begins
Jacob’s struggle with God
commenced even as he was in the womb! We read in Genesis 25 that ‘the babies
jostled within her’.
Womb wrestling!
Rebekah enquires of the Lord
and the answer is a prophetic word
‘Two nations are in your womb,
and two peoples from within you will be separated;
one people will be stronger than the other,
and the older will serve the younger.’ (v. 23)
She had twin boys, one came
out with hair all over him and was named Esau. Jacob followed next but was
grasping the foot of his older brother. As they grew Esau was an outdoors type
and a skilful hunter. Jacob was an indoors type and preferred to hang around
the tents.
Neither Jacob or his mother
seemed prepared to trust God about the prophetic utterance before his birth.
As it turned out Jacob
struggled half his life to gain what God had intended to give him in the first
place.
First, he gained the
inheritance. When Esau came in from hunting one day he was starving. Jacob was
able to extract from Esau his inheritance in return for a carefully prepared
meal.
Next, he gained Isaac’s
blessing. When Isaac was very old and knew he was close to death he sent Esau
out hunting in order for him to return and prepare the meal at which he would
give his farewell blessing. Esau was Isaac’s favourite and the eldest and it
would clearly go to him. Rebekah their mother sprang into action and quickly prepared
the sort of meal Isaac was expecting. They
dressed Jacob in Esau’s clothes and covered his neck with hairy fir and they
sent him before his father for the blessing. Isaac was blind and gave the
blessing to Jacob. It is a pitiful story.
The blessing pronounced over
Jacob predicted that he would be ‘lord
over his brothers’ and all four players knew that it now belonged to Jacob by
deceit.
Jacob by deceit and human
effort had gained what God had planned to give him anyway. His name means
‘supplanter’ or ‘deceiver’ and he certainly lived up to it. As this sorry saga
continues it is curious that Jacob continues to struggle to win what he could
have had freely. Along the way he lived with fear and anxiety not peace and
security.
Neither Peace nor Protection
When Esau returns, he is
enraged and threatens Jacob’s life.
Jacob is forced to flee. It is arranged for him to go and live with his
relative Laban on the pretext of finding a wife. Along the way he had his first
encounter with God.
As he slept one night under
the open sky with a stone rock as his pillow, he dreamed he saw a ladder by
which angels made their journeys to and from heaven. The Lord stood before him
and made an astonishing series of promises. He said that the land all around
would become his and his descendants. In fact, he promised that Jacob would be
the means by which the whole world would be blessed. He assured him of his
presence and his protection until he returns safely home.
Jacob was awed and scared
when he awoke. He made a pillar of stone to commemorate that this was the place
where God had appeared before him. He swore an oath, which was a conditional
commitment.
‘If God will be with me and will watch over me on this
journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and cloths to wear so that I
return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God would
become his God …. and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.’ (28.20-22)
It would be easy for us to
look upon Jacob’s prayer with disdain. Surely you and I might think if God
appeared to us personally, we would pledge him our absolute loyalty and
obedience. Yet most of us have no real basis for boasting. Most of us have a
rich spiritual heritage and have been blessed by God in all sorts of ways over
many years. We have scriptural promises by the hundreds. Hopefully we’ve all
seen God answer many prayers big and small in our lives.
Most of us here if we’re
honest struggle with allowing God to be Lord in our lives. The desire to be independent
is deeply ingrained in us. In a context like ours we don’t have to really rely
upon God for our daily bread and most other necessities as well. It is easy to
go through life as if God doesn’t really matter all that much. At present there
are many Christians, who attend church only occasionally and some never at all
and yet they claim that it makes no difference to their commitment and walk
with God.
So how do we live according
to God’s promises? We’re often told that God helps those who help themselves.
We should be lifters not leaners! Each
of us must seek to trust God and yet we have to live out our lives and we have
work to do and many other responsibilities. If we are self-reliant and squeeze
God out, then we sin. Sometimes, like Jacob, we want to ensure the promises of
God are fulfilled and we work incredibly hard to ensure that is the case. It
is true to say that there is activity that springs from faith, and another that
arises from a lack of it. All of us live with the tension of that reality.
In an era of high level external accountabilities and Boards that demand clear
goals and reporting all of this can get very complex.
In Jacob’s case we know what
we are dealing with. Jacob makes it clear he has a lack of faith. ‘If God and
if, and if’ characterise his response to God. When we ask God for something, we
must be honest with God as Jacob was. If, for example, you already know the
will of God, say in an area where Scripture is clear, is our prayer that God
would strengthen and enable us to live faithfully or is it a form of insurance on the assumption that it isn’t going
do us any harm if we pray?
So Jacob joins Laban and
agrees to work for him for 7 years at which time he will be able to marry
Laban’s daughter Rachel. At the time of the marriage Jacob was tricked and
ended up with sleeping with the older sister Leah. Jacob is forced to agree to another 7 years
of service before he is free to leave. During this time Jacob has to resort to using
trickery in order to outflank Laban.
Jacob’s life was hardly a
happy one. He worked like a slave. There was constant rivalry between his two
wives and he had the on-going guilt and fear of Laban and Esau.
Jacob had received amazing
promises from God, yet he lived with constant anxiety and had little joy.
Jacob’s Escape
Eventually Jacob and his
family plus his large herds escape. At the same time, he received word that
Esau and 400 men were on their way to meet him. Jacob was terrified so he
carefully organised his men and their flocks so as to form wave after wave of
welcoming parties with sheep as gifts. This was to be followed by his wives and
children.
Jacob crosses the Jabbok and
finds himself alone in a chasm anxiously awaiting the outcome. It was then and
there that God approached and began to deal with him forcibly.
How should we understand this
wrestling with God?
I want to suggest that we
shouldn’t see this as Jacob seeking to win something from God. It was God who
initiated the wrestling and it is Jacob who is clinging on in dependency. This
is an important distinction. Each of us can approach God about many things –
our families, our work, our church, the world etc. We can be determined that as
we pray it through God will accede to our request and in doing so we are in
danger of relying on our own efforts. It was our prayer that changed God’s
mind!
It all depends on what one
means by praying it through. To some people it means to wait for God that one
might find clarity in the midst of confusion, to gain an understanding of God’s
outlook, a changed perspective. This sort of praying through can only be good. [This
is what we saw Abraham doing last week as he engaged with God about the fate of
the City of Sodom.]
For others this can seem like
some extreme action in order to gain God’s attention. It means praying long and
hard and pleading with God to act or answer. It is as if we have to do a lot to
somehow arouse God’s attention.
Some may suggest that we will
sometimes face resistance in prayer from the forces of darkness. That may be true but here it is God who is
wrestling with Jacob not Jacob wrestling with Satan.
It is always wrong to work up
some sort of pseudo fervour. It is self-defeating and it will get you nowhere.
You’ll either think it was all your efforts and you’ll swell with pride or
you’ll end up despairing because your efforts will have seemed to be pointless.
From this we can conclude
that we shouldn’t always assume that there will be strong emotion associated
with prevailing prayer. Sometimes there may be and other times there may not
be. Faith is an attitude of will which says,
‘whether I feel that God is there or not, whether I feel he will heed me or
not, his Word tells me he hears me and answers and I am going to count on
that.’
A number of years ago Mother
Theresa’s personal diaries were released. This was against her own instructions
before her death. One of the surprise revelations was that she had an extended
period over several years when she had struggled without any clear strong sense
of God’s presence. We would assume that someone like her would have the exact
opposite experience. Nevertheless, she kept praying and trusting but it was a
genuine struggle.
Conquered by Dependency
Jacob wrestled with God
because he had no choice. He was defending himself, not attacking. Yet at the
end we read that he had won a great victory. ‘Your name will no longer be called Jacob but Israel, for you have
struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.’ (32.28)
Israel means ‘God strove’. If God strove, then God
was the initiator.
In what sense then did Jacob
prevail?
We have to see the wrestling
as God seeking to help Jacob to understand something. God is helping Jacob to
come to terms with truths that Jacob did not understand. He wants Jacob to see
that he means him no harm and that his intentions are not malicious but
merciful. As we know God could have
crushed him in one move.
But Jacob clings on. He is
afraid. All his life he has learned one basic principle: Don’t trust anyone;
Fight your own battles, do it your way.
So he wrestles on and on,
terrified but unyielding. Then suddenly, there is incredible pain and a useless
leg.
Most of us wouldn’t consider
having to wrestle if we have put our back out or we’re injured in some way. If
you’re in that situation you have no choice but to cling. You either cling or
you fall.
God speaks to Jacob and says ‘Let me go, for the day is breaking’
Amazingly, in the fog of pain
Jacob realises who it is that he is clinging to. For once his tenacity is
turned in the right direction.
‘I will not let you go unless you bless me’.
These were the words that God
had waited forty years to hear. He would have preferred that Jacob had come to
his senses in a more normal way. Goodness knows he had had many opportunities.
God had humbled him and confronted him in such a way that Jacob was left with
little choice. Jacob had been conquered by his helpless dependency.
So, we have to ask
Is God wrestling with you?
Are you resisting God?
Why?
Each of us has been employed
because we are very capable people and there can be a strong temptation to be so
hooked on our own abilities and live as if you don’t really need God?
Over the years I’ve known many
leading figures in all sorts of spheres – one of them was a brilliant and
noteworthy surgeon who humbly prayed before every surgery. Did he need to pray,
he knew exactly what he was doing.
Are we afraid that if we
yield to God, he will want us to do something that we won’t like? To give more
of what you possess than the token amounts you give now or to obey in such a
way that you will have to move on from some entrenched ways of behaving?
It strikes me that one of the
things that living through protracted lockdowns is doing is to take away our
sense of control over our lives. Many things are outside of our control – where
you can go, what you can do, who can see or not see. None of us can plan a
holiday with any confidence. We like to be control and suddenly that is gone.
All of us at many points are
either greedy, foolish or pig headed.
God doesn’t wrestle with
people all night all that often. Not in a literal, physical sense but he will
do what is necessary to help us to face the hard choices required if we are to
yield to him and cling to him in dependency.
Prayer is an expression of
our dependency on God. As followers of Jesus we should do it willingly and
freely. Often, however we don’t, and God will do what we need to bring us back
to him and to give us the chance to cling to him again.
All of us as we go through
life have to wrestle with this one reality.
‘I am helpless in myself and
I have no hope except in him.’
In end the ‘man’ has
disappeared, and Jacob is left alone panting and seeking to work out how he
will get around with his semi-disabled leg. He says, ‘I have seen God face to
face’. He names the place Peniel (face of God). He will walk the rest of
his days with a limp. It will be a permanent reminder that he is a new man,
with a new name but also a new attitude.
He had learned to conquer by
dependency.
What about you and me?
Are we allowing him to
conquer by dependency?
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