Has God Wrestled with You?

Genesis 32:22-31
Richard Spencer | Sunday, October 30, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Richard Spencer

This morning we are going to consider an account of what may be the most important day in the life of the patriarch Jacob. Now, Jacob was a proud man. He was a strong man. And, at this point in time, he was a successful man in the eyes of the world. He had two wives, eleven sons, one daughter that we know of, and great numbers of sheep, goats, cattle, camels and donkeys. He was, in a word, wealthy.

More than twenty years before he had left Beersheba in disgrace, all alone, and had nothing. But as we saw in Chapter Twenty-eight, God graciously appeared to him in a dream as he was on his way to Paddan Aram and showed him a stairway to heaven. At that time, God promised to be with him and watch over him, and God had kept that promise. God always keeps his promises.

And we know of at least two times when God spoke to Jacob while he was in Paddan Aram. The first was in a dream. We aren’t told how God spoke in the second instance, but in Genesis 31:3 we are told that “the LORD said to Jacob, ‘Go back to the land of your fathers and to your relatives, and I will be with you.’” And in obedience to that command, and also fleeing his deceitful and abusive uncle and father-in-law Laban, Jacob was on his way back to the Promised Land.

But there was a problem. You will recall that when he left Beersheba his brother wanted to kill him. And his mother had told him that when his brother’s anger had subsided and it was safe to return, she would send word for him to come back (Genesis 27:45). But we aren’t told that he had received such a word and his own words and actions make it clear that he had not. So he must have been thinking that there was a very real possibility that his brother Esau still wanted to kill him. In the beginning of Chapter 32 we are told that Jacob sent messengers to his brother and that they returned with the disturbing word that his brother was now coming toward Jacob, accompanied by a small army of four hundred men.

Therefore, we see Jacob, ever the schemer, coming up with a plan of his own to appease his brother by sending numerous large gifts to him. But there was no way that he could be sure his plan would work. And so, in our passage this morning, we see him sending his family and possessions across the river Jabbok and then returning to the other side alone. Many think he came back to be alone to pray, which is possible given that he was praying just before sending his family and possessions across the river. We are told in Genesis 32:11 that he prayed, “Save me [] from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children.” But, as we heard last week from Dr. Wassermann, Jacob’s life was not characterized by prayer. Many people will offer a quick prayer when in deep distress, and so Jacob may have prayed some more, but I don’t think he was truly crying out in humility and seeking to know God’s will for how to proceed. After all, he had already made his own plans and acted on them.

This scene, with Jacob alone and afraid, forms one of a pair of bookends to his time in Paddan Aram. When he left Beersheba, he was alone, afraid, a failure, with nothing of his own, resting his head on a rock. And now here he is, over twenty years later, alone and afraid again.

But this time there is a difference, he was, as I’ve already noted, prosperous; he had, as he put it, become two groups. His twenty plus years in Paddan Aram had been successful in a human sense, although he had himself been deceived and cheated as we heard last week. Nevertheless, he had, as we will hear later, in some sense struggled with men and overcome. And yet, there was trouble. Jacob was still depending on his own strength and scheming. And no matter how strong or successful we become in this world we can never know for sure that we won’t be horribly defeated in the very next encounter.

And so here he was, alone and afraid, at night, in the middle of nowhere again. And just as God blessed him before, so he blesses him again. What amazing grace God shows to his chosen people! This time, however, God doesn’t appear to Jacob in a dream. Rather, it is a most amazing and wonderful encounter; a mysterious man shows up and starts to wrestle with Jacob, and that man is God himself.

In examining this passage I want to consider four points: First, the match. Second, the contestants. Third, the outcome. And then, fourth, some applications for us. Let’s begin with my first point, the match.

I.       The match

We aren’t told how long Jacob had been alone before this wrestling match began, nor are we told anything about where the man came from or how or why they started to wrestle. We simply read in Genesis 32:24 that “Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.” It would seem as if this man simply appeared out of nowhere, grabbed Jacob and started to wrestle with him. And this is not a metaphorical wrestling match. This is not Jacob wrestling with God in prayer, it is Jacob in a real, physical wrestling match with someone; note that he had a life-long limp as a result. And that injury wasn’t the result of wrestling in prayer. We aren’t told when the wrestling started, but the phrase “till daybreak” certainly implies that the match lasted some reasonable portion of the night.

Now wrestling is an intense activity and extremely tiring. Wrestling matches usually only last for a few minutes, but here we see these two men wrestling for an extended period. And it would seem likely that Jacob thought he was fighting for his life. And he was depending on his own strength as he had always done. But Jacob couldn’t win this match. We are told in Verse 25 that the man couldn’t overpower him, which is incredible, but we don’t see Jacob winning either. It would appear to be a draw at this point. But then, in the latter half of Verse 25 we are told that the man, “touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched”. Now that is a very interesting and information-packed statement, especially given the circumstances. This man couldn’t overpower Jacob, but he was able to dislocate or somehow severely damage his hip with just a touch.

And that leads to an obvious question, “Who was this man?” So, let’s move on to my second point, the contestants.

II.      The contestants

We aren’t left wondering who this man was. In Verse 30 we read that “Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.’” Jacob was wrestling with God himself. I agree with those who conclude that this was a preincarnate appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Hosea 12:3-4 the prophet also tells us about this encounter and says that Jacob, “struggled with God. He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor.”

But independent of whether this “angel” was the preincarnate Christ or another heavenly representative, we are told that it was God with whom Jacob wrestled. And the minute we realize this, the whole episode makes a great deal of sense.

Jacob was, like many young people raised in Christian homes, raised in a home where the existence of the God of the Bible was taught as fact. He had heard about God’s many great deeds in the past. His father was Isaac, the man of God, the son of the promise. His grandfather was Abraham, the father of all believers and the recipient of God’s promise to bless all men. In addition, God had even spoken to Jacob himself and he had, in some fashion, obeyed.

I’m quite confident that those around him thought he was a believer and he himself probably thought he was as well. But I don’t think he was born again until this wrestling match, which is why I said earlier that I think this may have been the most important day of his life. Now let me be clear that whether or not I’m right about that doesn’t change in any way what we can learn from this passage.

But independent of whether or not he was saved before, he was a man who had not been living an obedient Christian life. As we heard from Rev. Broderick a couple of weeks ago in his sermon on the Headless Household, and in Dr. Wassermann’s sermon last week about Jacob leaning on his own understanding, Jacob’s life and family were severely out of order. He was a man who continued to live an independent life, getting by on his own strength and scheming. Amazingly, God had helped him on occasion, but there is zero evidence that he had truly surrendered all to God, so I simply don’t see convincing evidence of new birth.

Jacob reminds me of most confessing Christians today. They claim to be believers. They may, indeed, intellectually assent to the truth of the gospel. They may read God’s word on occasion, they may pray on occasion, and because of common grace, they may live a reasonably moral life. But there is no serious submission to the will of God. No willingness to put their agenda aside and seek to know and do God’s will. No recognition of their own weakness, inability and sinfulness. No submission to God-ordained authorities. They may fool many people, they may even fool themselves, but they can never fool God.

In Matthew 7:22-23 we read one of the most terrifying passages in all of Scripture. Jesus declared that “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” The ESV does a better job of translating this statement. Instead of saying “Away from me, you evildoers!”, the ESV has, “depart from me, you workers of lawlessness”, which is what it says in the original Greek.

In other words, there will be many people on that day who are expecting to get into heaven, but will, instead, be surprised by hell as Pastor Mathew has put it. They may have lived very moral and decent lives by human standards. They may have been kind and honest, gone to church regularly, worked in a soup kitchen once in a while and so on. They may even have been ordained pastors! But they were workers of lawlessness.

True faith has three elements: First, knowledge of the basic facts of the gospel. Second, mental assent to the truth of those facts. And third, and most important, a whole-hearted trust in God alone for salvation.

A true Christian is submitted to God’s rule; to God’s law. As has been said many times, we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, but not by a faith that is alone. If you have been born again, you have a new heart, a new mind, a new will and a new set of affections. You want to please your heavenly Father. You see and acknowledge that you are a sinner and that your way is not the right way. You read God’s word not just to be comforted, but to be conformed; to learn how to please God. You want to be a law-keeper, not lawless. You listen and obey when God speaks in his word or through his delegated authorities.

The apostle John wrote that “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4) We must be careful to define sin in a biblical way; it is lawlessness. Many professing Christians equate sin with those actions they personally find objectionable, like rape or murder. But the Westminster Shorter Catechism gets it right when it declares that “Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.” Or, to put it in more modern terms, sin is any violation of the law of God, either by failing to do something God requires or by doing something that God forbids. And we find God’s law in God’s written word – the Bible. As John wrote, sin is lawlessness!

Now, it is true that if you are one of God’s children, he has covenanted to write his laws on your mind and heart (Hebrews 8:10), but our subjective understanding of God’s laws can be wrong. It must never be allowed to overrule what is clearly taught in his word.

We don’t have the right to overrule the word of God. And yet, as just one example, many professing Christians today will say that homosexuality is not sin. They will argue that God is love and he made people to be that way, so surely it can’t be sin. They will say that the statements in the Bible against homosexuality are just cultural norms that were in place at that time and that they don’t apply now. But you cannot defend such a view from the Bible. That view takes one biblical statement, that God is love, absolutizes it, modifies it by applying an unbiblical definition of the word love, and then uses that perversion of the truth to overrule other perfectly clear statements in the Bible. That is an example of lawlessness.

The reality is that the Bible clearly declares that sex outside of marriage is sin and that marriage is between one man and one woman. Therefore, if you don’t agree with and, more importantly, regulate your life by those statements, you are sinning. You are lawless. You have not been born again.

And there are many other examples we could give. The Bible also condemns laziness, drunkenness, abortion, disrespect for authority, selfishness, disobedience to police, pastors and parents, and so on. Now we must admit that true Christians still sin, but they also repent and strive to put their sins to death. And they don’t disagree with God about what constitutes sin. They don’t accept our wicked society’s ideas of right and wrong. A true Christian will stand out like a sore thumb in our wicked culture. If you are comfortable with most of the values of our society, then you have a serious problem to deal with. You need to make your calling and election sure.

But, praise God, if we are God’s elect, he will not allow us to run away forever. He will come and wrestle with us. Notice that in our text it says, in Verse 24 that a man wrestled with Jacob – it does not say that Jacob wrestled with the man. Both statements are true, of course, but there is a slight difference. The implication is that it was the man who initiated the wrestling match, not Jacob. And this agrees with what the Bible tells us about ourselves and our relationship with God. In Romans 3:11 we are told that there is “no one who seeks God.” And in John 6:44 Jesus himself told us that “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him”.

In other words, independent of whether Jacob had been born again before and was backsliding, or had never been born again, either way it was God who came to him. It was God who initiated the wrestling match. It is always God who initiates and it is God who guarantees the end result. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden, they didn’t go running to God seeking forgiveness, they hid from him in fear. And that is always the case with sinful man.

God is perfect in every way. He is holy, just, loving, merciful and gracious. If we were not sinners by nature, we would love him more than anything else simply because of his perfections. He is worthy of our love and obedience. But because of our sinfulness, we find his holiness and justice terrifying and we try to hide. We do this even though it is impossible to hide from God. There is nowhere we can go and be out of his sight. But unless and until God causes us to be born again, we cannot and we will not confess our sins, repent and believe in the redeeming work of Jesus Christ. We will remain lawless. As Paul puts it in Romans 8:7-8, “the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.”

And so it was with Jacob. On his own, he could not seek God or trust in God. But in God’s wonderful plan and indescribable mercy, he had chosen Jacob for salvation. As Paul tells us in Romans 9:13, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” We see Jacob’s new nature displayed in Verse 26 of our passage, where we read that “the man said [to Jacob], ‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’ But Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’” At this point Jacob had obviously concluded that it was God with whom he was wrestling. And once God has enabled us to see him by faith, we will want to hang on with all of our might. We will not want to let God go, but we will, instead, seek his blessing. And that is what Jacob did.

But before God could bless him, Jacob had to acknowledge his sin. And so, in Verse 27 we are told that the man asked him, “What is your name?” Now, to really understand this question, we must realize that names had much greater significance in those days than they do now. Names were chosen to reflect something important about the person or the circumstance of his birth. In this case, if you look back at Genesis 25, where we are told about the birth of Esau and Jacob, we find that Esau was born first and, then, in Verse 26 we read that “After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob.” The name Jacob means “he grasps the heal”, which metaphorically means he goes behind your back, or he deceives you. When God asked for his name and he responded, “Jacob”, he was, in effect, confessing, “I’m a deceiver, a deceitful man.”

But then, after this confession, God blesses him in the most wonderful way. Genesis 32:28 tells us, “Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.’” What a wonderful blessing! God gave Jacob a new name, which is also representative of the fact that he now had a new nature. He was an adopted child of God. And he was, henceforth, to be known as Israel, which may mean “struggles with God” as most commentators suggest, or as James Boice and Arthur Pink both persuasively argue, it may mean “God rules”, or “God commands”, or “God prevails”[1]. In any event, it indicates a new creation, a new nature.

Everyone whom God has chosen will be given a new name. We are Christians. And it isn’t just a new name, everyone whom God has chosen to save will be changed in the very core of their being. God tells us through the prophet, in Ezekiel 36:26-27, that “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” God takes lawless sinners and makes them law-keeping and law-loving saints. Praise God!

And God always wins the wrestling match. No one can successfully oppose his will. As Paul wrote in Romans 8:29-30, “those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.”

Which leads to my third point, the outcome of this match.

III.    The outcome

Jacob asked God to bless him, but he could not have understood the full extent of the blessing he received. In fact, none of us can fully grasp the blessing we have received from God. We were, like Jacob, sinners deserving God’s wrath. We were headed for eternal torment in hell.

But when God comes to his chosen people, he changes them in the very core of their being and he changes their eternal destiny from hell to heaven, from eternal death to eternal life. Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life.” (John 5:24) And Paul wrote in Romans 8:1 that, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.

Hallelujah! If God has wrestled with you and caused you to be born again, you have been brought from death to life. You were an object of God’s wrath, on your way to eternal death in hell, but through faith in Jesus Christ God has given you eternal life; there is now no condemnation for you! Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.

Salvation is of God from beginning to end. He chose us in Christ before the creation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). At a specific point in time he came to us and caused us to be born again (Ephesians 2:5 and Colossians 2:13). He works in us by his Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of Christ (Ephesians 4:13). He gives us all grace necessary to abound in good works (2 Corinthians 9:8). And he will complete the work he has begun in us (Philippians 1:6). We are to “to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:24)

It is God who brought Jacob to confess his true nature and he does the same for each of us. Repentance and faith are gifts from God, by grace (Ephesians 2:8-9). And all true Christians must come to a place of complete surrender to Christ. God brought Jacob to surrender by touching his hip and he will find a way to humble every single one of his true children. Jesus said, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) And John said, “Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” (1 John 2:15)

Brothers and sisters, you must put everything on the altar. God will not allow his children to have divided affections. The first of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3) And, in Mark 12:29-30, Jesus said that the most important commandment is, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

In other words, we must see our own sinfulness, our own weakness, our total dependance on God and we must then surrender all to him and trust in him alone for our eternal salvation. The amazing truth is that by surrendering all, we win. Verse 28 tells us, “Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.’” But what does this mean? It is probably an ironic statement.[2] Jacob had struggled with men and won; or had he? By winning in one sense, he had lost in a more important sense. He “won” by cheating Esau out of his blessing, but earned his enmity in return. He “won” by deceiving his old and blind father, but lost his integrity and fled in disgrace. He “won” in his battle with his father-in-law, but lost good family relations, was taken advantage of, and had to flee again. But now, in losing his wrestling match with God, he had won, or more accurately been given, the one thing needful. He had gained eternal life.

And the blessing was not just for Jacob. There is the entire history of God continuing to bless his people, Israel. In Romans 9:6 Paul tells us that “not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.” And in Verses 7-8 of that chapter he argues that the true children of Abraham are not his physical descendants, but, rather, they are the children of the promise. We are also told in Galatians 3:7, “Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham.” Therefore, if you are a true believer, the blessing was for you too. Jacob was not just Abraham’s physical descendent, he was also a child of the promise, and you can be too.

And so now, let’s move on to my fourth point and see what lessons we can learn from this wrestling match.

IV.    Application

The first and most important application is that we must make our calling and election sure. We can fool others and we can even fool ourselves, but we can never fool God. He knows our heart. We must be certain that we have surrendered all to God. We must look carefully for evidence in our lives that we truly desire to know and do God’s will. That we are ready to hear when God’s written word or a proper delegated authority speaks into our lives. We must be sure that God’s word overrules our ideas. In other words, that our confession Jesus is Lord, is true. In Luke 9:23-24 we read that Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”

Therefore, examine your life carefully in light of this command. And if, after examining your life, you aren’t sure that you see such surrender, cry out for God to have mercy and wrestle with you. Ask him to touch your hip and show you your own weakness. As Paul said in
2 Corinthians 12:10, “for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.” And Jesus told us, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Brothers and sisters, we must realize the truth of Jesus’ statement. Yes, apart from Christ we can accomplish great things in the eyes of the world. We can become wealthy. We can win all kinds of awards. We can be famous and influential. But apart from Christ we can do nothing that really matters. Because, “this world in its present form is passing away.” (1 Corinthians 7:31)

We need to see our weakness and our great need for Jesus Christ. If God comes to wrestle with you, count your blessings! The match may be hard because we are stubborn and we resist surrendering. But when trouble comes, seek God. Call on him and ask him to show you what he wants you learn. Surrender all to him.

Arthur Pink wrote, “One of the principal designs of our gracious heavenly Father in the ordering of our path, in the appointing of our testings and trials, in the discipline of His love, is to bring us to the end of ourselves, to show us our own powerlessness, to teach us to have no confidence in the flesh, that His strength may be perfected in our conscious and realized weakness.”[3]

We must come to the end of ourselves. That doesn’t mean we become passive, sitting back and waiting for God to work, quite the contrary. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10 that “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.” If we have been born again, we should work hard for God’s glory. Galatians 6:10 says, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.”

We must use all of our gifts, opportunities and resources for the good of others. And everything we do must be done in love. If you are serving others to feel better about yourself, or to earn a reward, or to look good in the eyes of the world, or anything like that, your service is not truly being done in love. Love is, “the most excellent way” as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 12:31. Go home and read 1 Corinthians 13:1-3. Without love, all of our efforts are futile. They simply demonstrate that we are not born again.

So, the first application is to carefully examine your own life. And the second application is to confess your sins to God, and this application applies to you independent of whether or not your examination provides confidence that you are, in fact, born again. Either way, you must tell God your true name. You can’t hide it from him anyway. He didn’t ask Jacob for his name because he didn’t know it. God doesn’t need any information from us. He asked Jacob his name in order to bring Jacob to real repentance.

We must clearly see our own need for forgiveness and restoration. And we must see that we are incapable of doing anything on our own to secure it. All we can do is plead God’s promises. He tells us that “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13) And in Romans 10:13 Paul tells us that “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Paul also says that “if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9) Therefore, seek God. Call on the name of the Lord. Believe in Christ. And ask God to help you with your unbelief. Truly submit yourself to him as Lord. He not only wrestles with you, he died to pay for your sins! And as Christians, we must keep on confessing our sins to God all of life.

And then the third application is to cling to God. But that begs a question, how do we cling to God when we can’t see or touch him? I quoted from John 15 a couple of minutes ago, but let me quote a longer section. In John 15:4-10 Jesus tells us, “Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love.”

First note that when Christ begins this passage by saying “Remain in me,” it is not a suggestion, it is a command. In the Greek the verb is first, emphasizing its importance, and it is in the imperative mood, meaning it is a command. Second, notice that the word remain shows up ten times in this short passage. It is important! We need Christ. We cannot do anything good on our own. Third, notice the terrible consequences of not remaining in Christ – such people are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. That is eternal hell. Fourth, notice the purpose of remaining in Christ – that we can bear much fruit for the glory of God. Without him we can do nothing, but with him we can do all things. Fifth, notice that we are given two clear instructions about how to remain in Christ. First, his word must remain in us. In other words, we must study God’s word daily for the purpose of knowing him better and knowing what he wants us to do. His word is to guide our thinking and our living. And if we do this, he promises to answer our prayers. And then, secondly, we remain in Christ’s love by walking in obedience. Therefore, to cling to Christ, we must read God’s word, understand God’s word and obey God’s word.

In summary, we have three applications: First, make your calling and election sure. Second, confess your sins to God, and do it daily. Third, cling to God by walking in the obedience of faith.

Our passage this morning closes, in Verse 31, by saying that “The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.” What a glorious picture this is of a Christian! The sun is rising on him, he is moving on from the place in his life where he first saw God by faith, and he is limping because God has touched him and shown him his weakness so that he might be strong in his reliance on God.

As we move on and look at Jacob’s life further in the coming weeks, it will immediately be evident that although he was changed, his sin was not completely removed. We will see that he still deceived his brother and failed to obey God completely. But God continued to work in him to bring him to greater and greater obedience and submission to the will of God. And that should be a great comfort to us as well. It should not make us complacent about sin, but the reality is that we do all still sin. What a great comfort it is to know that if God has called us to be his children, he will not let us fail. He will discipline us, sometimes severely, but he will complete the work he has begun as Paul says in Philippians 1:6.

Therefore, we can rejoice even in our sufferings as Paul says in Romans 5:3-5, because we know that our sufferings produce perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character hope. And that hope will never disappoint us. God will wrestle with us and touch our hip or do whatever else he needs to do to bring us to a place of surrender. And so my counsel to all of us is to make the wrestling match as easy on ourselves as it can be. We are bound to lose, so surrender now and be blessed.

 

[1] James Boice, Genesis, an Expositional Commentary, Vol. 2, Zondervan, 1985, pg. 335 and Arthur W. Pink, Gleanings in Genesis, Moody Paperback Edition, 1981, pg. 292

[2] I am here following Boice, op. cit., pg. 335

[3] Pink, op. cit., pg. 291