Wrestling with God
Opening Prayer
Holy Spirit, encourage me today to “be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power” (Eph. 6:10).
Read GENESIS 32:22–32
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”
But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
27 The man asked him, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
28 Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
29 Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”
But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. 32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.
Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
“Lord, You are our Father. We are the clay. You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand” (Isa. 64:8). Resolve today to cooperate with God’s shaping hand.
In these few verses we find Jacob being taught a key lesson. It is God who held Jacob’s destiny in his hands, however much Jacob tried to do things his way. “We too face the need for radical realignment of our lives. There is a call, which will never go away, to work consciously against the ‘me first’ mentality which is so ingrained in our human living, and to align our hearts instead with a deeper sense of gravity, who is God, our only solid ground” (Margaret Silf).
This well-known wrestling match reveals a God who engages with us intimately, face to face, with sweat and effort and relentless purposefulness. It points us forward in time to the crucifixion, where God himself bleeds, sweats and feels intense pain in the intentional pursuit of our salvation. However, because we don’t see or touch God physically, we can have an image of him as a remote and
somewhat emotionally reserved figure. Familiarity with our faith—and the sometimes-colorless expression of it in western Protestant church services—can reinforce this distorted image. Scripture, on the other hand, often describes God in visceral terms—as a God of passion, who feels deep emotion about his people (Hos. 11; John 11:33–36; Luke 13:34), and works through the earthy reality of the world he created.
Take a few moments to imagine that you are observing this wrestling match. What do you see? Now imagine that you are Jacob. As the bout continues, how do your feelings and perception of the one with whom you are wrestling change? As with Jacob, God creates opportunities for us to choose not merely to wrestle with him—and some of us need to risk doing that (!)—but also to recognize afresh our absolute dependence upon him as the one who holds our destiny in his hands.
Apply
Ask the Holy Spirit to put his finger on anything that you are avoiding doing business with God over. Then risk really grappling with him in prayer about it.
Closing prayer
Heavenly Father, whenever I wrestle with You, winning is losing! You are the One who knows what is best for my life. You have my destiny in Your hands.
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