Wrestling with God

The Limp and the Blessing

I came across a refreshing alternative reading to the story of God wrestling with Jacob, an angle I had never considered before. It was refreshing and worth sharing.    More than any other story in Scripture, Jacob’s narrative confuses and challenges. As we prayerfully ponder it, we find insights that assist us in persevering in our faithfulness as Christians.  It reveals to us an invitation to bring our turbulent, struggling selves before God, to engage with the Divine in ways that may seem to some to be contentious, problematic and even downright blasphemous. 

Many details in this brief account remain unknown and the editors have only preserved the bare bones.   What we do know is that Jacob is isolated and vulnerable, experiences that are new to him after a life insulated by wealth and prosperity.  However, on this night, he has nowhere to hide. He has no chance to hide behind his vast wealth, his many servants, or his large and complicated family.  These have all vanished. He is alone in the dark in a desolate place at least up until that moment when a nameless, faceless stranger, a man who will later be revealed as an angel, leaps out of nowhere and throws him to the ground.  A torrid battle erupts. 

For many of us, this experience of being alone, isolated and struggling in a desolate “place” is not unknown.   We have all been there at one time or another.   We also know what it is like to engage in a solitary battle with something we do not even recognise as God until much, much later. 

God’s view of victory may be different from ours

Scholars have debated for years about “what is happening” in the Jacob story but the historical details are not significant.    These details are irrelevant because there is a powerful message in the overall story that extends beyond the details.  All the epic “battles” of our lives — skirmishes with guilt, shame, fear, doubt, grief, or unforgiveness, our wrestling matches with family, friends, enemies, community, church, or creed — are ultimately battles with and about God. 

 Those battles are with God, and speak to our relationship with God.  More importantly, these battles take place within God’s all-encompassing all-loving presence.  These are battles that have the potential to make us or break us and so God is there as our pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night.   Our victory is guaranteed because God is with us even if we do not recognise the outcome as a victory. 

It is in God’s company that we can face down the demons

 It is in God’s company that we face down the demons within us and around us.  It is God alone who brings us to the extreme edges of our strength.  In the end we have no alternative but to acknowledge that the only way forward is to surrender and to allow ourselves to be saved by God. 

Whether we recognise the stranger in this story as God, a man or an angel. It is always God with whom we struggle.  God is always the one who battles with and against us — not to our detriment, but for our transformation.

Jacob and “the man” wrestle, the text says, all night long.  They wrestle until Jacob is almost sure he will prevail.  They wrestle — their limbs entangled, their eyes fixed on each other; sweating, grunting, slipping and sliding on each other’s limbs until the darkness breaks and they see the dawn.

 The God who goes toe to toe with Jacob is not a God whose first concern is our ease and comfort.  He’s not a God who maintains a polite distance, minds his manners, and “makes nice” so that we live in a constant state of happiness.  No, Jacob’s God here is wild and mysterious, unpredictable and strange.  We know that Jacob’s God has shown that he will not hesitate to roll around in the mud for several hours if that is what it takes to bring us to our knees.  The Hebrew word for “wrestle” means “to get dusty.”  What we find in this narrative is not a God who is aloof, living in a clean shiny distant heaven. Our God is a God of dust and sweat and blood and tears.  A God who is willing to “become dirty” so that we can be lifted out of the dirt.       

Jacob’s God might break new spiritual ground for us

Jacob’s God is not the God I grew up with, the God about whom I was taught in school and at home.  Looking back, I think that God was much   too fragile to risk “rolling around in the dust” with us.   The God I was told about in primary school was easily offended, easily upset, easily put off and constantly looking for fault in what I was doing.  My job as a good Christian was to obey the commandments and keep this refined divinity happy. At all costs. One false turn, one cheeky question, one sullied bit of doctrine — and God would shatter like an eggshell dropped on the rocks. Alternatively, like lightening he would strike me down for the sinner I was.

That God was not one likely to spend a full night wrestling with Jacob on the banks of the Jabbok River.

Jacob’s God engaged with him, initiated the combat and showed a willingness to roll around in the dust with this chosen patriarch.   Jacob’s God does not turn away when we throw ourselves against him in anger and disappointment; question him and wonder about the apparent absurdity of the path along which he seems to be leading us.  He is a God who knows that when we wrestle with him, we do so in faith, and he enters the fray in love and with mercy.   This is a God who will never let go of us but instead will pursue us like the Hound of Heaven:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days.

I fled Him, down the arches of the years.

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter… By Francis Thompson (1890)

As the night wears on, and the stranger sees that Jacob has no intention of giving up and even worse, that he might be victorious, he strikes Jacob on the hip socket, dislocating his hip and causing him to limp.  Therein we have a magnificent miracle:  Jacob is winning.  But then, suddenly, all is reversed.  

Jacob is left lying there, crippled and helpless.  Looking at it from the perspective of our present time, most of us would presume that the whole battle was fated from the beginning to end this way, that the stranger had simply held back until now.  He was biding his time.   By letting Jacob exert all his strength so that he was close to winning was teaching the patriarch an important message.   

Apparently, appearing to lose might well be a victory

No matter how strong he was, how smart he was, how devious and skilled he was; for all his strength, wisdom and power he was defeated.  He was unable to continue.  At this point in the struggle, the relationship has changed.    Jacob’s grip is not one of a violent pugilist.  He was holding on because he was a drowning man.  He was in desperate need. 

We live in a culture today that celebrates success and turns its back on defeat, a quality preached and witnessed to by national leaders like Donald Trump and his supporters.   

Because we are followers of Jesus Christ, our defeat can be a blessing, and strange as it may seem, it is in our defeat that we are victorious. The story of Jacob teaches us that in God, blessing and bruising are not mutually exclusive.  Even stranger, we can both limp and prevail at the same time.  We can experience healing in brokenness.  A cross can be a celebration of victory and new life. 

If we want to engage with God, then we must expect that we will be changed in the process.  The closer we come to God, the more profound the divine presence will transform us, bringing about a transformation in ways that might not always be painless, comfortable or easy.  As Jacob had to learn the hard way, we are not the ones who dictate the terms of blessing. We are not able to insist that while we want the blessing, we do not want the limp. Unlike the way Jacob stole the blessing from his father Isaac, God’s blessings cannot be hijacked, no matter who we are. 

Here is the contemporary world-shattering news: Sometimes, the blessing is a limp.     

Then, as dawn breaks, we are left with a magnificent insight into the way our relationship with God works.  The stranger asks Jacob to stop fighting but Jacob thinks he was made of sterner stuff.  As dogged and suborn as ever, he says no way: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.”   He places conditions on God:  I will do this thing you ask of me if you do this thing I want from you. 

God wants us hot or cold, never lukewarm

In the strange ways of Hebrew narratives, winning now means a great deal more than not giving up.  Sometimes, the spiritual life is about little more than hanging on for dear life to a God who feels mysterious, nameless, opaque, bewildering, and frightening.  Sometimes the whole of Christianity comes down to us confessing we are a little in the dark now, unsure of what is happening and how we can find a way forward in through it all.  However, our faith gives us hope. We hold onto our certainty and believe that somewhere in this darkness a divine light is shining.  I truly believe (hope) that God is walking with me through this mess and that alone is why I am going to persevere until that blessing is revealed. 

That is exactly what Jacob does.  He perseveres in the battle believing that if he hangs on long enough something good is bound to happen.  And so it does.    The stranger consents to his request for a blessing.  But there is a hitch.  He first asks Jacob the problematic question upon which the blessing is predicated: “What is your name?” 

What is the point of asking that question at that specific time?    To answer that we need to go back twenty years earlier from our story, an episode when this question first arose.  Back then he was standing outside his father’s tent, pretending to his brother Esau to trick his father into giving his blessing to himself rather than to Esau.  He was attempting to steal the blessing by deception.   

 He knew a father’s blessing was something that brought with it immense power and privilege which is why Isaac was wary, suspicious and wanting to proceed slowly.  He senses… something.  His father is blind but not without wisdom.  He certainly does not want to bestow his blessing on the wrong son.  This is why he inquires as to the identity of the one standing outside the tent.   Jacob — trickster Jacob, manipulative Jacob, deceitful, selfish conniving Jacob whose very name means “heel grabber” or “go-getter,” — looks into his father’s failing eyes, and lies:  “I am Esau, your firstborn son.” 

Now, twenty years later, the heel grabber gets his comeuppance.  Still groaning in pain from the wrestling, he hears the question on the stranger’s lips: “What is your name?”  What is your identity?  Who are you?  “You shall no longer be called Jacob,” the stranger tells his weary opponent.  “You shall be called Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” 

At this moment in the story, I am not sure of my feelings.  Do I laugh or do I cry?  It makes me cringe and laugh at the same time.   Is this really the great blessing Jacob receives?  This?  A new name that guarantees for him a lifetime of holy struggle. “You shall be called Israel.”  It is God’s way of saying: that you shall spend the rest of your limping life wrestling with me.  Battling with God.  Contending with God.  The great news in all of that is we are now saying goodbye to the Trickster, to the usurper.  From here on out, he is the Wrestler. 

And then God gives his blessing

This might not seem like much to us today, but it was a significant gift in the Ancient Near East.  The image of wrestling we have in this narrative is not meant to be an act of irreverence.  It stands out because it is the opposite of apathy, the opposite of resignation, the opposite of quitting, the opposite of complacency.   It's even the opposite of loneliness.

The image conveyed here is one of Jacob in an embrace with the angel, fighting is to stay close, to keep his arms wrapped tight around his opponent. The fight went on for a long time and so it means he was not walking away from God, and God has not walked away from him.  Both are committed to continue the engagement.  All through the night.

This narrative for us is both a challenge and an invitation to avoid the temptation to believe that our relationship with God must always be smooth and trouble-free.  Adversities coming our way are not indications that we have been abandoned.    The God of Jacob delights in those who wrestle with him, just as he loves wrestling with Jacob.  

The opposite of loving God is not fighting him.  The opposite of loving God is discovering that we cannot even raise enough passion to even contemplate wrestling.  We should not fear divine wrestling because, strange as it may seem, this kind of wrestling with God is our best protection against spiritual apathy. God wants us either hot or cold, not lukewarm.   Wrestling keeps God personal and a force to reckon with each day.  This wrestling God is far more alive than a divine dusty relic we stick on a shelf and speak of only when we are in trouble.  Who is going to wrestle with someone with whom they have no passionate relationship?

As that biblical story continues, the sun comes up, and it becomes Jacob’s turn to rename the place of his wounding.  He names the muddy wrestling ring, “Peniel,” saying, “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” That is the divine gift enabling him to carry out his ministry of patriarch to both Judaism and Christianity.  It is the gift of looking into the face of God and knowing that it does not kill him.  In the closeness of the wrestling’s embrace, he/we find a hope that surpasses all.

Bishop Michael Hough                                                                            April   2025