God Plus Sense Equals Blessing
(Genesis 32:1-32)
1. It takes all kinds of people to make a world.
2. Some Boeing employees on the airfield decided to steal a life raft from one of the 747s. They were successful in getting it out of the plane and home. Shortly after they took it for a float on the river, they noticed a Coast Guard helicopter coming toward them. It turned out that the chopper was homing in on the emergency locater beacon that activated when the raft w as inflated. They are no longer employed at Boeing.
3. Or take this one: A pair of Michigan robbers entered a record shop nervously waving revolvers. The first one shouted, ’Nobody move!’ When his partner moved, the first bandit shot him.
4. We could make a grid. On the horizontal line, we could have, "sense and no sense."
On the vertical line, we could have, "saved" and "lost."
5. The quadrant we want is "saved and sense." There are quadrants that would be "saved and no sense," "lost and sense" and "lost and no sense."
Main Idea: Sense is a virtue, but God plus sense is out of this world!
I. Jacob Started with Sense, But GOD Added Himself to the Equation (1-32)
A. God emboldened Jacob by OPENING his eyes to angels (1-2)
Jacob exemplifies great wisdom in his actions.
B. Jacob tried to TACTFULLY contact Esau (3-5)
1. He expresses humility: "your servant" (3-4)
2. He expresses that he does not need Esau to help him (5)
3. In other words, he was not claiming his birthright inheritance: he was neither above Esau nor dependent upon a double portion of Isaac’s inheritance.
4. Some people cannot surrender their rights… because they can legally do something dictates that they must…they pay for it in many ways…
5. As Matthew Henry puts it, "Yielding pacifies great offences."
C. Jacob reasonably assumed Esau’s 400 men implied HOSTILITY (6)
Jacob knows human nature. He had no reason to believe that Esau’s hostility had subsided, so naturally he would think this.
D. Jacob makes CONTINGENCY plans (7-8)
• Maybe at least half of my family will survive. We called this, "not putting all our eggs in one basket." In economics, it is called a "diverse portfolio." Spreading out risk is typically a wise move.
E. Now Jacob prays, claiming God’s PROMISES (9-12)
• In some ways, Jacob’s prayer is a model prayer. There are certain things that really please God. One of those is repentance. Another is when we seek His help based upon our desire to glorify Him. This is what Jacob does.
F. Jacob sends a LAVISH gift to Esau (13-20)
Proverbs 21:14 says: A gift given in secret soothes anger, and a bribe concealed in the cloak pacifies great wrath.
G. Jacob WRESTLES with God (21-30)
1. He spends the night ALONE (21-23)
2. He WRESTLES with a man all night (24)
3. This man supernaturally DISLOCATES Jacob’s hip (25)
4. Jacob refuses to let the man go until He BLESSES Jacob (26)
5. The "man" proves to be GOD (27-32)
Probably "the angel of the Lord," the preincarnate Son of God who often appears in the Old Testament as an angel or a man…
6. He changes Jacob’s name to ISRAEL (28)
• Israel = "he overpowered Elohim"
• We call this an example of "prevailing prayer"
7. The Israelites do not eat the hip tendon as a MEMORIAL (32)
Only the forequarter of a Kosher slaughtered animal is brought to Kosher butcheries. The hindquarters are not brought into Kosher butcheries. In Genesis (32:25-33) the Torah recounts the fight that Jacob had with an angel who dislocated his sciatic nerve. Because of that injury we are instructed that the Jewish people do not eat the part of a Kosher animal that contains the sciatic nerve. [source: www.uos.co.za/kashrut/defaultFull.asp]
Sense is a virtue, but God plus sense is out of this world!
II. This COMBINATION of Faith and Sense is Generally a Good One!
A. Some of us WRESTLE with logic but not with God.
Hosea 12:2-4, “ The LORD has a charge to bring against Judah; he will punish Jacob according to his ways and repay him according to his deeds. In the womb he grasped his brother’s heel; as a man he struggled with God. He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor.”
1. Jacob wrestled with his emotions, he wrestled with a logical plan, but when his plan seemed to fail, he was ready to wrestle with God.
2. To wrestle with God means to haggle with God, like Abraham did when he tried to bargain God down from destroying Sodom and Gomorrah out of concern for his nephew, Lot.
3. To wrestle with God is to trust Him while taking your unanswered questions to Him, like Job did.
4. To wrestle with God means to complain to God, to struggle with God, to take our anxious thoughts and share them with God, as David did in the Psalms.
5. To wrestle with God means to pour out our agony before Him, as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane.
6. To wrestle with God means to relentlessly petition Him, as Jesus taught in the parable of the Unjust Judge (Luke 18)
7. To wrestle with God is to beg Him time after time to take away our thorn in the flesh, and then to accept that His grace is sufficient for us, and when we are weak, then we are strong-- even if He does not grant our request as we ask it.
B. Clinging to God in our desperate times can TRANSFORM us.
1. Jacob would be a different after this; God would become His God
2. It is during life’s transitions that we are most open to change
3. Change can be away from or toward God
C. God experiences life with us because He WANTS to do so.
1. God seemed to be evenly matched with Jacob; He wrestled him all night; yet just a touch dislocated Jacob’s hip. What does this imply? Accommodation.
2. God seeks to break His children of self-reliance
D. Devotion without SENSE can be misleading.
• Some people go to the mission field without a mission board or support commitments, and then return in shame; you never read their stories. It is a shame, because we need to.
• The Lord can lead you to do something that doesn’t make great sense; and if you are a sensible person noted for wisdom, thinking ahead, and a reasonable amount of caution, such leadings are usually clear. If, on the other hand, you are not noted to be particularly wise and prudent, such "leadings" are suspicious.
• Part of developing wisdom is the recognition that God may occasionally lead you in a path that does not seem to be wise, but wise people recognize that only God sees the end result…
• God will never lead you contrary to His Word, and His Word emphasizes the development of wisdom (read Proverbs)
E. The Priority: God’s Word FIRST and Sense Second
Sense is a virtue, but God plus sense is out of this world!
1. Are you strong in sense? Wisdom is something you cultivate. If wisdom is your weak spot, try moving into the book of Proverbs--- and stay there a long time!
2. But maybe you have a lot of sense. Is that sense blunting your trust in God? Do you consult God, and give Him the right to "veto" what seem sensible to you? Or have you totally eliminated the mystical from your Christian life and turned your faith into a sort of sacred physics?
3. Do you know what it means to wrestle with God in prayer? Not always, and not usually. But have you ever done so?
Sense is a virtue, but God plus sense is out of this world!
