Wrestling God- Gen 32
I
think sometimes we present the Christian life a bit too simplistically. We can
sometimes make it sound like becoming a Christian will solve all your problems.
We can respond to people’s complex problems with cliché’s like, “Let go and let
God”. We can walk away feeling like we
have reassured the person, but they are still left with their problems. When we
oversimplify life with God we can run the risk of becoming like Job’s friends
who tried to give Job simplistic explanations for his suffering. At the end of
the book God says to Job’s friends that only Job spoke rightly about God, while
the friends spoke falsely. Job brought his complex troubles and questions to
God. We need to be careful about oversimplifying the Christian life.
Sometimes things do seem to go well and
simply. We have moments in our lives when it seems like there is a flow. Our
prayers are constant and easy. We read our Bibles and we are grounded and
inspired. We meet life with faith, hope, and love. Hopefully we have long
stretches of our lives that are like that. But, if we are serious about our
life with God we will have times and seasons when we struggle.
At times life is a struggle. At times it
feels like we have to fight for every breath, and for every inch of ground. It
might even feel like we are wrestling with God. I know that’s not the pious
things to say. We are supposed to say that God is on our side. He is fighting
for us, not against us. He loves us. He has our best interests in mind. … I believe
all that, but I also know that sometimes I can feel like I am wrestling with
God.
In Genesis 32 we read, “Jacob was left
alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did
not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the 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 is breaking.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless
me.’ So he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then
the man said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for
you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.’ Then
Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you
ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying,
‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.’”
We don’t know who the mysterious
stranger is, but after the event it is implied that Jacob has wrestled with God
and has seen God face to face and survived. After this encounter Jacob is given
a new name that will mark God’s people for the rest of history- Israel. Israel,
we are told, means in part to struggle with God. Jacob, and God’s people with
him, are renamed to imply a struggle with God.
If that renaming is accurate then
perhaps we are overly simplistic in the way we describe the Christian life.
Perhaps we are meant to have moments where we have to understand our relationship
with God as a struggle- even as a wrestling match. I’m sure Job felt like he
was wrestling with God. He was innocent and had done nothing to deserve his
pain. He called out to God for justice and to explain his suffering. Perhaps
even Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane felt like he was wrestling with
God. His human prayer was to have the cup of suffering removed from him so that
he would not have to endure the cross. The stress of the struggle caused him to
sweat drops of blood. Eventually his human will was drawn in line with his
divine self, but the struggle was very real. His prayer to have the cup removed
is an unanswered prayer spoken by Jesus’ own lips.
Saints are those who have a deep
relationship with God and they will resist easy and simplistic descriptions of
life with God. John of the Cross, when writing on the life of prayer, wrote
extensively on the Dark Night of the Soul. The Dark Night is a painful
experience of the absence of God and of having all joy taken away. No pleasure
is found in anything. It is a spiritual and emotions desert. Prayer feels like
a waste of time in this moment. St. John tells us that God permits the Dark
Night ultimately to purify the soul, but it is a painful experience.
I’m sure we all have moments in our
lives that are full of doubts about God, the Church, and our faith. Doubt is a
normal part of the life of faith if we are honest. Usually the place of doubt is
where our faith is transforming and growing. Sometimes we struggle because we
know what we should do but we really don’t want to. St. Augustine once said, “Lord,
grant me chastity… but not yet”. He knew what God wanted him to do, but he
resisted doing it. He wrestled with God. We might experience trials, such as
sickness, or depression, or abuse, or the death of a loved one, and we are
challenged to understand how this works with God’s world and God’s creatures
and God’s permissions.
It’s funny we can so simplify the
Christian life when at the very center of our faith is a bloody man on a cross.
It is an image of the separation of God and human beings, and the tremendous
cost of that division and reunion. It is an image of struggle- an image of suffering
love. Not love alone- Suffering love. The life of faith is a life of struggle-
even, at times, struggle with God.
I know in my own life I feel like I am
sometimes struggling with God. There is part of me that resists God. There are
times when prayer is hard and even painful. There are times when prayer feels
like wrestling. It drains my energy. There is a darkness I am keenly aware of that
fights with God. There is a part of me that doesn’t want to submit to God.
We
hear some of Jesus’ words, “whoever does not carry their cross and follow me
cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27). “Those of you who do not give up
everything you have cannot be my disciples” (Luke 14:33). There are plenty of
other passages I could read. Isn’t there a little part of you that says “No, I won’t”?
Isn’t there a little part of you that begins wrestling with God when his
commands threaten our pleasure, or our security, or our bank account, or the comfortable
lives we have built for ourselves? Isn’t there part of you that resists and
says, “No, you ask too much”? In the
Hymn Come Thou Font of Every Blessing
the third verse says, “Let thy grace Lord like a fetter/ Bind my wand'ring
heart to Thee/ Prone to wander Lord I feel it/ Prone to leave the God I love/ Here's
my heart Lord take and seal it/ Seal it for Thy courts above”. That verse
always strikes me so powerfully because I feel the truth of it in my bones.
While
there is a part of me that fights against God, there is also another part of me
that refuses to let go. Job’s wife tells him to give up the struggle and just “curse
God and die”- Just walk away from God and stop the struggle. Sometimes that seems
like the easier thing to do rather than be constantly dealing with the tension
of being drawn into God’s will. As Jacob is wrestling with the strange God
figure we read, “When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he
struck him on the 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 is breaking.’ But
Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go, unless you bless me.’”. Jacob was wounded
in the struggle- a wound that would cause a limp for the rest of his life. The
stranger told him to let him go, but he still hung on. He refused to let go
until the stranger gave him his blessing. I sometimes feel like Jacob. There is
a blessing there and even though I might be tempted to walk away I refuse to
because I believe there is a blessing. I want to fight for that blessing. I
refuse to let go. The fight itself could be seen as a kind of intimacy- a kind
of embrace. The Medieval Jewish Commentator, Rashi, said, “for so is the habit
of two people who make strong efforts to throw each other down, that one
embraces the other and attaches himself to him with his arms.”
Jacob
meets the mysterious stranger when he is on the way to meet his brother, Esau,
who wanted to kill him 14 years earlier. In some ways it would have been easier
to stay where he was, but God had promised a blessing of land and family and
that God would use his family to bless the world. So Jacob returns to his father’s
land to face his brother. He knows it is God’s will for him, but no doubt it was
a meeting that produced anxiety. To soften up his brother he sends gifts ahead
of him, hoping that Esau’s vengeance would be extinguished by the gifts before
they actually met. Jacob, no doubt is consumed by anxiety. Jacob wrestles with
his own anxieties about meeting his brother and to pursue God’s promise. It was
an internal struggle. That is when he wrestles with the mysterious stranger and
receives both a wound and a blessing that comes with the new name, Israel. As
Jacob left his family and travelled to find a bride he encountered God and saw
a vision of angels moving between heaven and earth. Now as he returns home to
the land of promise and to his family, he again encounters God, but this time
it is a struggle. Having faced God, Jacob finds the courage to face his
brother.
This
passage is strange and mysterious. We don’t usually think about God this way.
We want to think about God as the peaceful Good Shepherd. In C.S. Lewis’ book The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe the children are nervous about
meeting Aslan the lion and they ask if he is “safe”. The beavers reply, “Who
said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” The God Jacob
met was not safe, he was left with a limp, but he was good in that he received
a blessing and God was faithful to His promise.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
the character Eustace is full of character defects- he is greedy, selfish, and a
coward among other things. Without getting into too much detail Eustace gets
into trouble because of his selfishness and greed. To his horror, he ends up being transformed
into a dragon. Aslan eventually guides Eustace to become human once again. This
begins by the dragon shedding his skin like a snake, but eventually Aslan has
to help remove the dragon flesh. Eustace says, “I was afraid of his claws, I
can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on
my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I
thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin
off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.” Eustace is a changed person
after this encounter. He is healed, but it was painfull.
Like
Aslan, God is not safe, but he is good. He is not about meeting all my wants
and making me feel warm and fuzzy. He will struggle with us, and tear at us. In
a way, he is even dangerous. But, ultimately God\s efforts are to transform us.
He will tear away our sin and struggle against our self-destructive desires. He
will fight against all that is bad in us- all that will destroy us, even if we
want it desperately. We might walk away with a limp, but we will also be more
whole.
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