WRESTLING WITH GOD

It seems that Jacob had a pattern of encountering God but not realizing the importance of his encounter until the next morning. This time, he was at another transition point in his life, returning to the land where he had been born and preparing to meet his estranged brother. He had been a runaway; now, he was returning with a growing family and flocks of animals that marked him as a wealthy man. This was one of those moments in life when we reflect on how far we have come and, simultaneously, how little we have changed or achieved. Despite his seeming success, Jacob was uncertain, afraid, and alone.

To make a dark night darker, he was attacked by an unknown assailant in the night and began wrestling for his life—or so he thought. Throughout those hours, Jacob desperately fought until he had expended all his strength. Then his attacker, who seemed anxious to leave but also to have the upper hand, simply touched him in a way that put an end to Jacob’s struggles, revealing Himself as a stronger but different kind of opponent, and Jacob immediately asked for a blessing. In Jacob’s story, he had sought blessings in a variety of ways—tricking his brother, lying to his father, outworking and outwitting his father-in-law.

But this was a different kind of blessing. “Not a blessing that he can have now by the strength of his cunning or the force of his will, but a blessing he can have only as a gift.”* Marking Jacob as one who had wrestled with God but whose life had been spared (see Genesis 32:26–31), God gave him the new and more noble name of Israel.

And the new morning dawned around him, and Jacob was both truly beaten and truly blessed.

* Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), 18.