Part of a series, The Man God Mastered:
A sermon preached at St Alban’s Highgate 20/8/2017
For some of us life can be good, but others look back on it as a great burden. I don’t think that many of us will get through without a struggle somewhere along the line. Some people see the struggle as positive; others see their life spoiled by tragedy. Sometimes a piece of bad luck can turn your life in a terrible direction; sometimes it is something that has been done to you – by someone – and you seem never to be able to escape. It is hard not to be bitter.
This morning I want us to consider one of the strangest stories in the Bible: Jacob’s struggle with an angel at the River Jabbok. This is one of those stories in the Bible, which more than the others, has the ring of truth about it. Edwin Ngubane was a dear friend. He grew up worshipping his ancestors and offering them sacrifices like other Zulus. That was how you got blessings, he said. You sacrifice chickens and they respond with good luck. He didn’t feel he was getting fair deal. He became disillusioned with African Traditional Religion. He got a scholarship to study as a teacher but had no money so lived and studied under a bridge in Durban in South Africa – until a fellow student took pity on him and her father gave him a room in return for work. They were Muslims so he set himself to read the Qur’an. As he read he asked himself whether this book might have come from God, or might someone have made it up? When he reached the end he thought, “No, I could have made that up myself.” He was coming home one night a little drunk when he ran into a group of Christians preaching in the street. He tried to get around them, but one of them chased him and gave him something to read. He took it home and decided he would read the Bible himself, again with the question, “Must this have come from God, or might someone have made it up?” He got all the way to 1 Corinthians and was reading about the cross as God’s way of saving sinners, when it hit him hard: “This is not natural; this can only be from God.” That was when he gave his life to Jesus. I tell you Edwin’s story only to say that if I was reading the Bible for the first time with the same question in my mind, I doubt I would have got past Genesis 32 before I realized I was reading something strange, something with the fingerprints of God all over it.
Angel stories used to be popular: Touched by an Angel , Meet Joe Black. They are often explorations of human hardship. Going along with the cold materialism of our scientistic age there is a longing that there might be something more to life than what we see, that behind all the suffering there might be something good. We call it Romanticism. You go to sleep and dream you are picking wildflowers. When you awake, there is a flower in your hand. That’s how Jostein Gaarder illustrates Romanicism. “I believe in angels: something good in every thing I see,” sang Abba. Usually the angel comes in with the comforting touch to put things right. But in Jacob’s case, it was no gentle and comforting touch – no delicate blue flower – but a blow to the groin, which wrenched his hip from its socket and left him with a limp for the rest of his life. And it was not just any angel, but one who is described in the story as God himself.
I am fascinated by this story. It touches me somewhere deep. I suspect it holds the key to a great amount of history, and perhaps a great amount of my own life – and perhaps yours. It is not much understood. You would think the Jews would make a lot of it, since it is how Jacob’s name became Israel. But I can find little of any help in the old Jewish writings. Perhaps the implications are too terrible. Artists love it, but for most preachers it goes into the too hard basket. So forgive me if I try to tell you what it means and get it wrong. Please don’t think we spend all our Sundays discussing the antics of angels. We have been following the adventures of Jacob, the father of the Jewish people, and you just can’t avoid angels when you think about Jacob. He ran into them at various points of his life.
Mostly it is understood as a prayer thing. We talk about struggling in prayer and this can be real enough. Jacob did struggle in prayer, but if you look carefully you will see that this was before the contest at the river. And when we struggle in prayer, it is usually with ourselves, not against God.
No, Jacob’s contest is something unusual. There is nothing else like it in the Bible. The key to understanding it, I think, is the new name God gave him when he finally broke free: Israel, not only his name but the name of the nation that would come from him. “Your name shall no more be called Jacob (Grabber), but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” (Genesis 32.28) Somehow Jacob’s fight with the mysterious man brings to a head something that has been going on for a long time. His name, Jacob, is already something to do with struggle: the supplanter, the grabber. But this has become something else: “You have striven with God and with men and have overcome.”
Jacob’s life has been one long struggle with other people. Before he was born he fought with his twin brother Esau in Rebekah’s womb. Jacob’s character was set from the beginning, and also his destiny. When his mother in her agony inquired of God she was told that two nations were in her womb, one stronger than the other; that the elder would serve the younger. A battle had begun. When the two boys were born Esau (Hairy) came out first, but Jacob’s hand was clamped to his foot as though he had been struggling to get out first. They named him Jacob (Grabber). Esau won that round!
For a battler, like Jacob is destined to be, it is a strange twist that he is described as a plain man, dwelling in tents: a stay at home type, mother’s favourite, where Esau was an expert hunter and a man of the open country. The day when Esau came in from hunting with nothing but an enormous hunger and begged Jacob for food from his pot; Jacob traded him his birth right. That was a round to Jacob, though it cost him in his relationship with his brother and probably also with his father. In any case he grew up knowing that his brother was the favourite, and that Isaac’s sights were set on Esau to be his heir and the heir of Abraham’s promise of blessing. How many of us have struggled under the shadow of a sister or brother?
The next round came many years later when his father was old and blind and close to death. You know the story. As well as dressing up, Jacob must have done an effective imitation of his brother’s voice. And Isaac was taken in. Grabber grabbed the blessing, and Esau got only leftovers. Another round to Jacob, but that cost him too, for now Esau is so angry he plots to kill him and Jacob has to flee. He will be away a long time. The guilty wandering fugitive, makes his camp in the vicinity of Bethel and in the night has his first encounter with angels. We have explored the meaning of that.
Arriving at the well in Haran and meeting Rachel, Jacob must have thought his struggles were at an end: falling in love, Uncle Laban’s offer to take him in and let him work for the hand of Rachel. Seven years, but it seemed like a day for the love they shared. And then the betrayal, and Jacob has a new wrestling opponent, his wily uncle, who sees Jacob as a cash-cow. Everything he touches succeeds; just keep him going and Laban will be a rich man. Fourteen years of struggle follow, not only with Laban and his sons, but with the jealousies of his two wives, not to mention all those sons – and then another seven years. And now we come to where we are up to in the story today. Jacob has realized for a long time that his uncle is exploiting him, and now God has given him the signal that it is time to return home. He knows he wont get away easily, and probably not with his family, so he waits till his uncle is away shearing and makes a bolt with his two wives and their maids, his eleven sons and one daughter, and the herds of sheep and goats and donkeys he has built up over the past seven years. They manage to get a three day start before Laban discovers and sets off in pursuit. And after seven days of chase he runs them to ground to the east of Israel and the Jordan in the country that would one day be called Gilead, commemorating the heap of stones they left behind as a witness to their treaty. Laban would have killed Jacob and taken his daughters and everything else, had God not told in a dream to him to go carefully.
I don’t know whether you have ever lost your temper big time. I did once at an army camp with some guy who was annoying me. I was always careful never to get into a fist-fight. I knew I would come off second best. But this time I snapped, and suddenly the words poured out. I was rather pleased with myself afterwards; I never knew I could so fierce. So listen to Jacob when Laban has searched the camp for his household idols and found nothing; he had a lot to get off his chest.
“What is my offense? What is my sin, that you have hotly pursued me? For you have felt through all my goods; what have you found of all your household goods? Set it here before my kinsmen and your kinsmen, that they may decide between us two. These twenty years I have been with you. Your ewes and your female goats have not miscarried, and I have not eaten the rams of your flocks. What was torn by wild beasts I did not bring to you. I bore the loss of it myself. From my hand you required it, whether stolen by day or stolen by night. There I was: by day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes. These twenty years I have been in your house. I served you fourteen years for your two daughters, and six years for your flock, and you have changed my wages ten times. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side, surely now you would have sent me away empty-handed. God saw my affliction and the labor of my hands and rebuked you last night.” (Genesis 31.36-42)
That was a struggle. But an even greater struggle lay ahead. Jacob had left home a fugitive from his brother’s threats of murder. Now he is returning to Esau’s territory. God has ordered him home; he must obey. But what awaits him? What can he do? He moves on towards the Promised Land.
Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him. And when Jacob saw them he said, “This is God’s camp!” So he called the name of that place Mahanaim. (Genesis 32.1)
He left the Land to a dream of angels going up and down a stairway into heaven. He returns to the Land and is met by angels. The meaning is the same as before. This is angel territory, the place where God will deal with human beings. This is the bridgehead for God’s mission to the world. Israel is becoming littered with place names that commemorate God revealing himself to the patriarchs. Mahanaim means “two camps”. This is a divine outpost.
He sends messengers to Esau, and when they return Jacob learns that Esau is coming to meet him with four hundred men. He is terrified. On one side of him is the promise of God to bring him home safely, on the other an approaching military force: the real world. Here we witness Jacob at prayer.
“O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O LORD who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, that I may do you good,’ I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two camps. Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, that he may come and attack me, the mothers with the children. But you said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.’” (Genesis 32.9-12)
What can he do, but remind God of his promises and throw himself on his mercy. Jacob is beginning to pray like a Christian. What I mean, of course, is that God is teaching us all to pray like people of faith.
So now he makes his plan. Trusting God never means we don’t need to make the best of our circumstances. Some Christians say, “Leave it to God; be still and trust.” There is a time and place for that, but when it lies in our power to do something, we must do it. God has called us to manage his creation. Jacob has a family to care for.
So Jacob prepares a gift for Esau and sends it ahead. Get a look at the size of this gift: 220 goats, 220 sheep, 30 camels with their young, 40 cows, 10 bulls and 30 donkeys. This is one wealthy, worried man. This is what we call a propitiatory offering, a gift to soften Esau’s anger. But don’t give it to him all at once. Let him receive the animals one group at a time. Perhaps by the time be reaches the first family group he will not be feeling so murderous.
The party has now reached the River Jabbok. The Jabbok runs east to west and flows into the Jordan, roughly opposite Shechem. When they cross the Jabbok they will definitely be in the Promised Land. Jacob splits his family into four groups and send them across the ford: the two maid-servants and their children, then Leah and hers, and finally Rachel and Joseph; they may be all who will survive. And then Jacob is ready to cross the river himself and put himself in front of his family. He will be the first to meet Esau after his gifts have possibly done their work. And this is where it happens.
[Jacob left alone] The same night he arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, 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. (Genesis 32.22-24)
It is time we had a little discussion about angels. What are they like? We see them in stained-glass windows in every old church. But nowhere in the Bible is an angel ever depicted as having wings. Almost always they are mistaken for humans, and only in hindsight identified as messengers of God. Such is the case here. “Angel” means messenger. Not that God needs to use angels to carry his messages; mostly he employs providential means The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that God uses wind and fire as his messengers. He is in total control and can use anything in his creation as a messenger. One night I was returning from a game of cricket to our mission in Busselton. For some days we had been talking to the teens about God, urging them to believe in Jesus. A rabbit ran across the road into the car’s headlights. Bang!
There was silence in the car the rest of the way back. When we arrived the young man in the seat next to me wanted to give his life to Jesus. God had sent him a message.
But sometimes – not often – mostly in relation to his salvation purposes, God sends a heavenly being in the form of a man, and it was one such angel that fought with Jacob that night, though at first he did not know it was anything other than a man.
What is happening here? The Bible doesn’t spell it out; we must do the best we can. Jacob is alone, the last to cross the river. A man comes out of the gloom and stops him – stops him entering the Promised Land. And Jacob pushes back; he wants to cross over. They wrestle, and what a struggle it must have been. Remember that Jacob is the man who, twenty years ago, trekked a thousand kilometres, moved the big stone that no one else could move from the mouth of the well, has been living in the outdoors for twenty years, and is now on the journey home. He is a strong man.
But they seem to be evenly matched. Jacob pushes forward, the man pushes back, backwards and forwards they go all night. Did it ever occur to Jacob to give in, to back off? After all, this man might be saving him from a fatal encounter with Esau. But no, he must cross the river. So he struggles on, and as dawn lights up the sky, there is a change. Jacob begins to get the upper hand: his assailant is tiring. But then suddenly he wrenches at Jacob’s thigh, tearing his hip joint out of its socket. And just as suddenly God opens his eyes to realize that his opponent is not human at all, but one of God’s angels. And now it is not the mystery man barring Jacob’s way, it is Jacob not allowing the angel to get away.
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.” (Genesis 32.25-28)
If I am reading this story correctly, this is the moment of revelation for Jacob. He knows this is a messenger of God and he must secure his blessing. “What is your name?” asks the messenger. “Jacob,” (Grabber) he replies. “You shall no longer be the Grabber,” says the messenger, “but Israel, the one who has struggled with God and with men; and you have won.” The awesome truth dawns on Jacob that all night he has been wrestling with God.
His life has been one long struggle with men, but now he learns that really he has been struggling with God. Was he consciously fighting God? No, of course not, but as often as he pushed and shoved and insisted on his own way, he was fighting God. So is it that he pushing at God demanding to have his blessing? Yes, at times that was true, but that was not all. The bigger truth, it seems to me, is that God was fighting him. In all those difficult moments of his life God was fighting against him. He thought it was Esau, and it was, but only because God was using Esau in a greater struggle. Couldn’t God have made him the firstborn, and spared him that? Couldn’t God have given him his father’s love from the beginning? When the blessing almost passed from him, he thought he was wrestling his father, but actually it was God. When they put the wrong woman in his bed, he thought it was Laban, but it was God. God could have given him the woman he loved, given her twelve sons, spared him twenty years of hard labour, and one hundred other things along the way. The truth is that God was the author of Jacob’s struggles: his great enemy, though he never saw it. And now as he thinks he is about to face the greatest challenge of his life, that too is God, and he has first to recognize that he has a greater challenger than Esau.
If the meaning of this strange struggle is that Jacob’s life is to be understood only as we grasp the truth that God was fighting against him, is it also true of us? It is absurd isn’t it? If God was fighting Jacob, how could he ever win? Couldn’t God have overpowered him in a moment? Of course, but he doesn’t. Every time the angel appears to be pushing forward and Jacob is falling back, somehow the angel seems to weaken and Jacob’s strength is renewed. So it seems that God does not wish to win, but he wants Jacob to struggle. It is like a father wrestling with his small son: the son does not feel it, but the father is measuring his strength to that of his son, and encouraging him. Calvin saw this: “The God who fights against us with his left hand, strengthens us with his right hand.” And in the end it is Jacob who wins. And he learns at that moment that from the beginning his great enemy was God. I ask again, is it also so for us?
Jacob gets the blessing; he is also given a new name, and that name tells us that this is not just a peculiar lesson Jacob had to learn about his own life, but a clue to the history of a nation. For the new name is not just Jacob’s name, but the name of a nation: Israel is the nation that strives with God and with man, but will prevail.
This is a frightening thought, for I believe I am speaking not only of Israel in Bible times, but of a people who has survived many struggles and is now a modern nation, but is also a people dispersed around the world, yet hanging on to its identity, still determined to be different, still determined to be God’s people – some of them, anyway. Many of them atheists now, but they still cling to their specialness, not understanding what they are doing.
Is God the author of Israel’s struggles – this nation almost wiped out by Assyria, destroyed and deported by Babylon, ruled by Persians, Greeks, Romans? Jerusalem destroyed by Roman armies not once, but twice, then ruled by Arabs, Crusaders, Turks, British?
In 1977 I visited Yad va Shem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It is a sad and solemn place. In one part there is a large black polished stone floor in the shape of Europe. Wherever there was a death camp there is a flame coming up from the floor. When I emerged into the street I was depressed, my head hanging down. Perhaps that was the reason I saw what I had never in my life seen before: a sparrow lying dead on the footpath. My mind jerked back to Jesus’ words, “Not s sparrow falls to the ground outside of your Father’s will.” I found myself arguing with God: “But Lord, six million Jews?”
Yet for all this, Israel is not destroyed – and her struggle goes on. Is it God who fights against her? Why? According to Scripture, that ultimately he might bless her! How long will it go on? Jesus gave the answer to this when he said, “You will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” The struggle will continue until Israel faces the man who wrestles with her and begs his blessing.
Now I ask again, can what is true of Jacob and Israel be true also of us? Of you?
Take the woman who came to see me, whose family had been ruined by incest. Her struggle was with men; she hated her father. But was it not also with God? Could God not have allowed her to be born into a different family?
I recall a visit one night to a women’s hospital. By the time I arrived the babe had died. The nurses and social workers were worried. The mother seemed so controlled, so unemotional, seemingly so unaffected. I was there to baptise the baby and I did so anyway. It seemed to me then that the division between life and death had little meaning, at least in terms of what I was doing. Jesus arrived late at Jairus’s house. His daughter had already died. But he healed her anyway. The mother of the dead child told me earnestly that she and her husband did not blame God. I disagreed with her: “You can, you know. God could have given you a healthy baby.” I do not remember the exact words, but that was the gist of it. And that was when she screamed. She was coming out of her world of unreality.
If we are really honest isn’t it God who always stands in our way? As unbelievers isn’t it God who blocks us from achieving the happiness we desire. And as believers, doesn’t he throw up obstacles against us, seeming not to answer our prayers? And making us fight, yet also giving us countless blessings. And when the truth dawns in what is perhaps the great struggle of our life, that it is God who fights against us, either we will hate him or trust him. There is no alternative.
Brothers and sisters, you who name the God of Jacob as your God, understand this, that it is God who fights against you, but who also strengthens you for the struggle, that you might have the ultimate victory and receive his blessing.
There are real wounds in this conflict. Jacob crossed the River crippled in his hip. His son Joseph would spend many years in an Egyptian prison. His son Jesus has nail holes punched in his hands and feet, and still bears the scars. Some of us will cross the River seemingly damaged beyond repair.
Like Jacob, we also will receive a new name. Revelation 2.17 says “To him who overcomes … I will give a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it. ”You will be the only person in the universe who wears that name, for it will sum up everything you are and have been through. It will be your true eternal name. You cannot have it now, because you are not yet who you are going to be. It is to make you that person that God fights against you, and you must fight back.
So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel (God’s Face), saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the people of Israel do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip on the sinew of the thigh. (Genesis 32.30-32)
God gave him that limp; he would have it to the end of his life. But God also caused the sun to rise upon him and warm him. Jacob now goes to meet the great fear of his life, only to find that God has been their a long time before, and there is nothing to fear.