Jacob is returning home after twenty years in Mesopotamia. He left in a hurry after stealing his brother Esau's birthright and his father Isaac's blessing. He fled from his father-in-law Laban, whom he has deceived. He arrives on the borders of his family's land, and sent messengers to Esau to announce his arrival. He hears that Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men. Jacob is in great fear of his brother. He divides his people into two groups, so that if one is attacked the other can escape. He prays: "Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack m e, and also the mothers with their children. But you have said, 'I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.'" (Genesis 32:11,12)

He sent ahead of him a generous gift of several hundred goats, camels an d donkeys to be presented to Esau. He thought, "I will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me." (Genesis 32:) Then he sent his wives, his eleven sons and all his possessions ahead of him, and stayed behind alone all night. He was seriously anxious about what would happen the next day. He gave himself to prayer.

All night Jacob wrestled with an angel of the LORD until his hip was displaced. But still Jacob continued to wrestle. He would not let go even when the angel asked him to. Jacob said, "I will not let you go until you bless me." (Genesis 32:26) Then the angel named him Israel, and gave him a new identity: Israel means 'he struggles with God.' The angel blesses him. "So Jacob called the place Peniel (which means 'face of God'), saying, 'It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life is spared.'" (Genesis 32:30) "The conflict brought to a head the battling and groping of a lifetime, and Jacob's desperate embrace vividly expressed his ambivalent attitude to God, of love and enmity, defiance and dependence. It was against God, not Esau and Laban, that he had been pitting his strength, as he now discovered; yet the initiative had been God's, as it was this night, to chasten his pride and challenge his tenacity. The crippling and the naming show that God's end s were still the same: He would have all of Jacob's will to win, to attain a nd obtain, yet purged of self-sufficiency and re-directed to the proper object of man's love, God Himself.. After the maiming, combativeness had turned to dogged dependence, and Jacob emerged broken, named and blessed. His limping would be a lasting proof of the reality of the struggle: it had been no d ream, and there was sharp judgment in it. The new name would attest his new standing: it was both a mark of grace, wiping out an old reproach (27:36), and an accolade to live up to." Derek Kidner, Genesis, p.169)

Jacob represents all of us who have struggled for God's blessing all our lives. We have hung on, even when we have been wounded. We have faced anxiety, and having done all we humanly can to escape disaster, we go to prayer. We recognize that there is something greater going on in our lives over which we have no control. All our human ingenuity will not get us out of this on e. Walter Brueggemann says that Jacob, or Israel "is not formed by success o r shrewdness, but by an assault from God." (Genesis, p.269)

The prophet Hosea calls upon all God's people to strive with God as Jacob did. "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." (Hosea 12:3,4)

Have you ever been there? We are reduced to weeping and begging for God's favor. This describes a condition of human extremity when we are at the end of our resources. Jesus in his humanity, in the garden of Gethsemane, spent the night wrestling with his Father in prayer, trying to find a way out of having to face the suffering of the day ahead, the brutality of the Passion, his public humiliation and the terrors of the Cross. But that was not the only time in his life that he wrestled with the Father in prayer. Scripture records that, "During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission." (Hebrews 5:7 )

We find our identity, our strength, not from our human endeavors, but through struggling with God in prayer. James writes, "the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything." (1:3,4) Peterson puts it this way, ""You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the op en and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way." (The Message)

Tim Chester (The Message of Prayer p.97) comments, "The story reveals an important dimension to our relationship with God that our sentimental age often fails to see: God is dangerous. He is the aggressor in the narrative. He is not comfortable to have around. Yet in the struggle with God our relationship with him grows and our faith is immeasurably deepened. Calvin says we should think of 'all the servants of God in this world as wrestlers.' He continues:

'God himself. as an antagonist descends into the arena to try our strength. This, though at first sight it seems absurd, experience and reason teaches us to be true. For as all prosperity flows from his goodness, so adversity is either the rod with which he corrects our sins, or the test of our faith and patience. What was once exhibited under a visible form to our father Jacob, is daily fulfilled in the individual members of the Church.' (Genesis, vol.2, pp.195, 196)" God tries our strength as we wrestle together over the issues of our lives. Why does he not just reassure us that he will be with us to take care of the problems we take to him? Why do we have to go through all this pain, and co me out limping like Jacob? We are never the same again. Why do we have to go through all this struggle?

P.T. Forsyth wrote, "We shall come one day to a heaven where we shall gratefully know that God's great refusals were sometimes the true answers to our truest prayer. Our soul is fulfilled even when our petition is not." (Soul of Prayer, p.14)

If God were to grant us answers to our prayers too quickly and easily we would not develop into healthy and strong disciples of Christ. No matter how we might want it to be different real life is struggle and conflict, not superficial peace and premature reassurance. Jim Packer writes,

"Biblical Christian experience, whatever else it is, is active battling throughout, inwardly against the flesh, outwardly against the world, and in both against the devil. Awareness and acceptance of the fight. is itself gauge of spiritual authenticity and vitality. God may actually resist us when we pray in order that we in turn may resist and overcome his resistance, and so be led into deeper dependence on him and greater enrichment from him at the end of the day." (David Hanes (ed.), My Path of Prayer, p.59)

Paul describes Epaphras as "always wrestling in prayer" for the Colossians, that they may "stand firm in the will of God, mature and fully assure d." (Col.4:12) "Our relationship with God often involves struggle. Sometimes it is a struggle with temptation. Sometimes it is a struggle with the circumstances of life. Often it is a struggle with ourselves. But sometimes it is a struggle with God himself. God gives us this struggle to refine our faith and to deepen our relationship with him. He wants us to cling to him, like Jacob did - holding out for blessing. As Forsyth says, 'too ready acceptance of a situation as His will often means feebleness or sloth.'" (Chester, p.9 8)

The life Jesus modeled for us, and urged upon us, is not a passive acceptance of life's circumstances, a resignation or fatalism, but the strengthening of the will to "wrestle, and fight, and pray." Sometimes we have to hang on, not let go of God, until we are sure that we have divine blessing. We are not to give up or give in prematurely. Surrender is not always the right thing to do.

There is another element to this struggle with God. That is the anxiety of the human struggle with Esau. Jacob carries this anxiety, this threat, into his tossing and turning with the angel of the Lord in prayer. What we struggle with in our daily life is taken into our wrestling with God in the night. When we are faced with a life-threatening crisis in our lives, we find that it controls our prayers for a long time: days, months, even years, before we win through to a blessing. On the way we may be disabled or wounded in our emotions, but eventually the light dawns and we find that we have been given a new identity in Christ, a new maturity, where we can "stand firm in the will of God, mature and fully assured."

Isn't this what parenting can do to us, or battling cancer, or other debilitating diseases? Can we not win through to the blessing of becoming a better person, a more mature believer, because of our struggles?

"In the National Gallery of Scotland hangs a painting by Paul Gauguin called The Vision of the Sermon. Gauguin believed that art should represent not only what was there but the way it made you feel. In The Vision of the Sermon a group of devout Breton women have heard a sermon on Jacob wrestling with God. It is so real to them that they see it before their eyes. Gauguin distinguishes between the literal reality of the women and the reality of their vision. The grass is red and they are separated from the struggle by the line of a tree. Yet the struggle is real. Indeed one of their cows has strayed into the fray. The reality of wrestling with God is as real as their cow. " (Tim Chester, p.101)

Wrestling with God is not some myth or some far-fetched idea reserved only for mystics. It is part of everyday life. It can happen to any of us at any time we are face with a crisis. When you are in the midst of it, and are tempted to give up, or think that God wants to destroy you, that life is against you, and that there is no hope, remember that God wants to bless you. "If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things." (Romans 8:31,32)

The Rev. Ted Schroder is the rector of Amelia Island Plantation Church in Florida

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