Alba 4-21-13
A Wrestling Match With God
Genesis 32:22-32
Most of you probably know about the song called “A Boy Named Sue” that was recorded by Johnny Cash. It is about a boy whose father left him and his mother when he was little, but before leaving named the boy Sue. Part of the song goes like this:
Well, he must o' thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue".
You couldn't blame a boy named Sue for wanting to change his name. Today we will look at a guy who had change in his name. He had a name that had a bad meaning but then was given a really good name. But it took a wrestling match to get it done.
I am talking about Jacob. We find this story in Genesis 32:22-32
Here we find Jacob deciding it was time to go home. Twenty years before, Jacob had left home alone with nothing but the clothes on his back. Now he heads back with flocks that number in the thousands, scores of servants and eleven sons.
But it could be hard to go home. Would he be welcome? Would his parents accept his children? Would Esau try to make good on his twenty year old threat to kill him? Would he be accepted back as a grown man? Or would he still be little Jacob “The Cheater?”
As he neared the border of his homeland, Jacob sent word ahead. It wouldn’t be good to surprise everybody after all of this time.
His messengers return with word that his parents are overjoyed. Apparently his brother Esau is too. Esau even was heading out to meet him with band of four hundred armed men.
“A security force to insure your safety,” the messengers suggest. Jacob doubts it. Four hundred men sound more like a threat.
Jacob panics. In his distress he does something unusual. He prays. It is not that he never prayed. In fact, he had gotten pretty close to the Lord just after he ran for his life twenty years before.
But prayer had never been his first impulse. Yet alone, on the night before he goes home, Jacob prays. “God help me. I don’t deserve it, but help me.”
Does God hear his prayer? Will he rescue him? Jacob never liked uncertainty. There’s enough of the old Jacob still there that he determines to hedge his bets. He makes a plan. He sends his messengers back with a gift for Esau. A little bribery couldn’t hurt.
He then orders his herds and servants divided into two groups. If Esau attacks, maybe the second group can get away, and he puts his family at the rear. The last group crosses the border just as the sun goes down. The next day, Jacob will be home—one way or another.
Then Jacob finds a place to be alone. Just as the darkness settles in, Jacob hears a noise in the brush behind him. Before he can reach his weapon, a man grabs him and throws him to the ground. What follows is hard to describe.
Two figures wrestle. It is hand to hand combat. Jacob is fighting for his life. At first, he probably thought it was Esau or one of his men. At some point, he realizes that this is no mere man in whose grasp he found himself. Later, he would say he had wrestled with God. Hosea the prophet describes Jacob’s opponent as an angel (12:3-4).
However you describe it, Jacob was in the hands of God. He had prayed for God’s help. But this wasn’t what he had expected. Let's read the text.
Genesis 32:22-32
22 And he arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. 23 He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had. 24 Then Jacob was left alone; and a Man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. 25 Now when He saw that He did not prevail against him, He touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as He wrestled with him. 26 And He said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.”
But he said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” 27 So He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” 28 And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
29 Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me Your name, I pray.” And He said, “Why is it that you ask about My name?” And He blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” (Peniel means face of God) 31 Just as he crossed over Penuel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the children of Israel do not eat the muscle that shrank, which is on the hip socket, because He touched the socket of Jacob’s hip in the muscle that shrank.
Wrestling wasn't new for Jacob, he wrestled even before he was born. That’s not a joke. While Rebekah carried her twins, it says in Genesis 25:22 “But the children struggled together within her; and she said, “If all is well, why am I like this?” She wondered what was happening.
When delivery day came, Jacob was still wrestling. Esau was born first. He was all hairy and red, so they gave him a name that means that. When Jacob was born, he came out grabbing his twin brother’s heel as if they had been fighting to see who got to go first.
So, they gave him the name, “Jacob”, which means “heel grabber”. It’s a figurative way of saying, “someone who unseats or deceives.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, people used the same term for a cheater or swindler.
Imagine growing up with a name like that. When your mom calls you for supper or your friends want you to come out and play, it would be, “Hey, Deceiver, dinner’s ready”, or “Can Cheater come over?”
Sure enough, both figuratively and literally, Jacob lived up to his name. His whole life, he aimed to get ahead of his older brother, and he did fairly well at it. In a way, he was a good wrestler.
Then comes the greatest of wrestling bouts – Jacob vs. God. The strange thing is, Jacob did OK! In fact, the reason that Jacob seemed to be the winner that day was not because God lost.
Obviously, God, or even his angel, could have easily handled the likes of Jacob with the flick of His finger, like we might a pesky mosquito. But He didn’t. Maybe it was like a father arm wrestling with his little boy.
Dad can whip him any time he wants. But he doesn’t. He knows this is not about winning or losing. With hands locked in combat, a father can teach his boy about persistence, endurance, and character.
God’s goal was to have Jacob wrestle, not to have someone defeated. Why? The answer is, Jacob needed to wrestle with God. At the end, Jacob was told, “you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.”
Jacob needed to deepen his relationship with God. He also needed an object lesson that would teach him some things about the way he related to God. Because Jacob needed a change. Most of us need that too, both the lesson and often the change.
So let’s look at this and consider our need to wrestle with God, and to think how we can deepen our relationship with God.
I. Get Alone With God
Notice that Jacob's wrestling match doesn’t start until verse 24 where it says, “Jacob was left alone.” God didn’t start this rumble publicly. He waited until Jacob had sent everyone else on ahead. He was there all alone. Some of God’s best work is done in us when we’re alone.
Jesus set this course for us while He was on earth. The first thing, after He was baptized, He entered into the desert alone for 40 days, where He went head-to-head with the devil.
Jesus frequently went off to lonely places to pray. The night He was arrested and put on trial, we find Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, wrestling in prayer, alone with God the Father.
The first part of wrestling with God means creating the time to get alone with Him. Otherwise, there are hindrances that might interfere with the work that God intends to accomplish in our lives.
So we must remove preoccupations. We could all make a list of the stuff in our world that has the ability to preoccupy us and keep us from being alone with God.
Most of the things, by themselves, aren’t evil, but they all can become their own preoccupation. We can’t get alone with God if we let everything else be in the way.
We tend to surround ourselves with stuff, with distractions, with stresses and concerns. And then we wonder why we don’t feel very full of God. The reason is simple: we’re too full of the world to give God the room He requires!
Sherman Nichols, who used to preach at Villa Heights Christian Church, told about a time when he and his family were moving. They were going to rent a Ryder truck to get all their stuff to their new home.
He says he considers himself to be an analyzer and organizer so he studied the furniture and appliances of their house and read the help booklet from Ryder. After making all the calculations he determined exactly which size truck they would need.
After all the hours of study and planning, he told his wife about it.
She looked at him and said, “I think we’ll need the truck the next size up.” He was insulted. He assured her he had done all the homework, and that he was right…of course, he was not.
They looked pretty interesting, pulling into the parking lot in their new town, in a yellow Ryder truck, with an orange U-haul trailer on its hitch! The truck was just too full to fit everything in.
That’s where a lot of us are when it comes to the room we give God to work His purposes in us. We’re not always the best calculators. When we’re too full of all the other stuff, there’s not enough room, and we can end up looking pretty silly trying to tack God on at the end.
Here is the point: if we fill our lives up with everything else, there is no room to let God have His way. We've got to get alone with God
in order to learn the lessons He wants to teach us.
So one of the things we learn from this text is how necessary it is for every one of us to have times in our lives when we get alone with God and wrestle through life’s issues.
Another of the lessons from this story of wrestling with, and developing a deeper relationship with, God is learning to...
II. Be Authentic With God
The time came when Jacob told the Lord, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Jacob realized, in the match with the Almighty God, that he was not the self-sufficient entrepreneur and con-artist who had all he needed.
He didn’t need stuff. He needed a blessing. Remember, the last time he asked for a blessing was when he had tricked his father. So, he’s now being persistent, desperately clinging in this struggle asking for and needing a blessing.
When was the last time you were persistent in prayer? When was the last time you said to God, “Lord, there’s a real need here, and I’m not going to stop talking to You about it until You answer!”
Jesus taught that we’re not supposed to give up in our praying. He said to ask, seek, and knock. Sounds like a persistent prayer life to me. Even sounds like wrestling with God.
Like David in Psalm 139. David begins the Psalm (verses 1-2) saying, O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
Yet, at the end of the Psalm, he gives this invitation (verses 23-24), Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
It’s an exercise in being authentic – to place ourselves in front of God without pretense, with full honesty and say, “Here I am, Lord. Whatever You see that shouldn’t be here, please, help me deal with it.”
And, when we spend time alone with God in an authentic way, we will...
III. Find Ourselves Altered by God
You can’t enter into God’s arena and be the same as when you started. Jacob developed a new walk – a limp, that is. After hours of battle, this God-Man-Angel reaches down and touches Jacob’s hip.
His hip slides from its socket. He winces in horrible pain. Having his hip pulled out of joint would have hurt…a lot! So, he’s limping when it’s over, and may have been limping the rest of his life.
When you wrestle with God, your walk changes. You can’t just live like you did before. Really wrestling with God means that, at some point, He’s going to touch you in such a way that you can’t walk just like you did before. There should be a new walk.
God asks Jacob, “What is your name?” Of course God already knew it. But, Jacob needed to admit what that name meant in his life. He was Jacob – deceiver, heel grabber. God gives Jacob a new name which brings a change of situation in his life.
His wrestling opponent says, Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel. That means “Prince of God,” or “Struggles with God”.
It's as if God is saying, “You’ve finally turned to the One Who will help you succeed. You get a new name. Yes, you’re now going to be called Israel!” God calls for him to live in a different way.
I like the fact that when we accept Christ, we’re given a new family name. In fact, if any person is in Christ, he’s a new creation.
Old things have passed away. New things have come. We get a new name. Our old name doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, God changes it to “Child of God.”
This was the day Jacob was trying to go home. He never made it. Instead, a man named Israel limped home in his place.
Twenty years before Jacob ran away. He thought he was leaving his problems behind. But like they always do, real problems have a way of following us. We can blame our difficulties on circumstances, or our family, even our enemies.
Trying to change those things makes about as much sense as trying to outrun our own shadow. The real problems of life are never OUT THERE. They are always IN HERE.
No matter who we are, how much of a dirty rotten scoundrel we’ve been, how far we’ve strayed, or how proud and self-willed we’ve been, when we want God’s blessing more than life itself, we will get it. Every time! Guaranteed!
And if we’re lucky, we’ll learn what Jacob learned sooner rather than later.
CONCLUSION:
Until about the year 1100, most people in Europe had only one name. But with an increase in the population, surnames began to be added so people could more easily be identified. These came from four primary sources:
1. an occupation, such as Cook or Miller;
2. a location, such as Overhill or Brook;
3. an ancestor, such as John’s son (Johnson);
4. or a personal characteristic, such as Small, Short, or Longfellow.
When God wanted to name an entire people -- His chosen nation -- He looked past occupations, locations, and ancestors to base a new name on one man: Jacob.
The story of Jacob is an example of the extremes to which God will go in order to help a person break free from the chains of the past. And to what extreme God will go in order to bring about the needed blessing in ones life.
If you ever feel unimportant, you don’t feel as though God really cares, or that no one really understands. Remember, God is known for being the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
God associates Himself with those in need of a blessing.
