How to Struggle With God and Win

22nd Sunday after Pentecost, 10/24/10
Genesis 32:22-30


How to Struggle With God and Win


That night was the defining moment in my life. As I stood there all alone, my sins of the past came back to haunt me and my fears about the immediate future filled me with anguish. Tomorrow I was either going to live or die and for the first time in my life I realized I had no control over it. There wasn’t a single thing I could do about it. I was helpless.

To understand my situation that night, you have to know my past—all of my past. You’ll recall I was the younger of twin boys. And my brother Esau and I didn’t see eye to eye on much of anything, even before we were born. Like the Bible says, we jostled with each other in the womb of our mother so much that she prayed to the Lord about it. He informed her what was happening and he foretold that the older twin would serve the younger, meaning Esau would serve me.

And, indeed, Esau was born first but not by much. In fact, I was holding onto his heel with my tiny hand and seconds later I came into this world. My parents, Isaac and Rebekah, named my brother Esau perhaps because he already had a good head of hair. They named me Jacob and not by accident. You see, my name means “heel-grabber.” In my culture a heel-grabber was someone who tripped people up by what he said and did. It was another term for a deceiver.

And it didn’t take long for me to live up to my name. Do you recall the stories? To me it seemed completely unfair that my brother should receive the birthright from my father as the firstborn when he was only that by a couple seconds. That birthright guaranteed him the lion’s share of my father’s inheritance, no small sum even in those days. So I devised a plan to get it from him. One day he came home from one of his hunting trips famished. Being more of a home-boy than my brother, I had learned to cook. And so I offered to make him my award-winning lentil stew recipe and some freshly baked bread if he would give me his birthright. In fact, I made him take an oath. And right then and there he sold it to me—most of my father’s possessions for the price of a pot of stew.

But there was more. Recall that the Lord had promised to send a Savior through the family of my father Isaac. It was up to my father to give one of us that blessing. The Lord had told my father that the blessing should come to me, not Esau, but my father favored Esau while my mother favored me. So again, I hatched a plan of deception, this time for my father. When I found out that he was ready to give his blessing to Esau, I disguised myself as my brother and offered my father the meal that he had told Esau to bring him. Since his eyesight was so poor, he couldn’t tell that I wasn’t Esau. When he asked, I lied and said I was. And then he blessed me. No sooner had he done it than my brother arrived with a meal to receive the blessing. My father realized he had been deceived, but there was nothing he could do. My brother was so angry that he was determined to kill me.

That night I left. It was the last time I saw my brother or my parents. You’ll recall my first night’s sleep as I fled for my life and my dream of the ladder reaching to heaven with angels coming down to me and going back up. That night God promised that I would one day return. That was 20 years ago. And during those 20 years I learned some valuable lessons about myself and about life in general.

I fled to the home of my uncle Laban and I experienced what it was like to be deceived. I worked 7 years for him in exchange for the hand of his daughter Rachel in marriage but on my wedding night he switched Rachel for his other daughter, Leah. So I had to work another 7 years for Rachel.

When those 14 years were over, I worked another 6 years for Laban in exchange for some of the animals in his flocks and herds, but Laban changed the agreement 10 times over those 6 years and each time my wages got cut. But what was I supposed to do? I had met my match. Laban was better at the game of deception than I was.

And when I had just about had it, the Lord said to me, “Go back to the land of your fathers and to your relatives and I will be with you” (Gen. 31:3). I had no idea what would happen when I returned, but the Lord told me to go and he said he would be with me, just as he had promised on that first night when I had fled from home. I was beginning to realize that the Lord had been with me all this time and it was because of his blessed presence that things had gone well for me as I lived with my uncle Laban. In spite of the way Laban had deceived me, the Lord still turned it into a blessing for me and my family.

So, with the promise of his presence, I gathered my family and my flocks and headed south for home. I knew this was what the Lord wanted me to do, but I also knew who’d be waiting for me when I got there. Not just my father and mother, but my brother, Esau, as well. I hadn’t seen or heard from him for 20 years. I had no idea if he still hated me enough to kill me or not.

But in 24 hours I was about to find out. So I formed a plan. I decided to take several hundred of my animals and divided them into several groups. I put them in the care of some of my servants and sent them ahead of me and my family. I told them to keep some distance between each group. They were to be a gift to my brother Esau. Wave after wave of gifts would be presented to him the next day. Perhaps that would soften his attitude toward me and he would spare the lives of my wives and children as well as my life.

But I knew that was no guarantee. My plan to offer Esau gifts of flocks and herds might fail me, but there was one thing that could never fail me—the promises of the Lord.

And so I decided to go off by myself and spend the night in prayer, holding my God to his promises to me. My God had promised to go with me and I held him to that promise. I called on him to go with me that next day as I faced Esau.

And then the most mysterious thing happened. I was deep in prayer to the Lord when all of the sudden a man jumped out of the pitch black darkness of night and pounced on me. We began wrestling and like the Bible tells you, it lasted all night. The guy just wouldn’t give up. At first I had no idea who this man was or why he was wrestling with me.

But then it became clear. With a mere touch of the hand he dislocated my hip. It dawned on me that this must be the Lord himself. I was wrestling with God, the almighty God! If he had wanted to overpower me, he could have done so in the blink of an eye. He could have reduced me to ashes with the snap of his fingers. But he didn’t do that. Instead, he let me wrestle with him and make a match of it with him. But my dislocated hip left my lower body powerless to wrestle any further, so I pounced on him like a bear and held him to the ground.

When he said, “Let me go for it is daybreak,” I replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He had promised to be with me and I wanted him to bless me with his presence as I faced the most critical day of my life so far.

So he asked me my name. Of course he knew what it was, he just wanted me to hear myself say it. “It’s Jacob.” I recalled that my name meant heel-grabber” or “deceiver.”

And the Lord said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.” And then he blessed me.

And with the assurance of God’s blessing and presence, I went forward the next day to meet my brother Esau. If you’ve read my story, you know it couldn’t have turned out any better. Esau received me with a hug and a kiss. And I realized that none of this was my doing; it was all the Lord’s.

I understand that your worship focus today is persistence in prayer. While that aptly described me on that night before I met my brother, that certainly didn’t describe me in the first few decades of my life. I relied on my own schemes to get what I wanted, not on the Lord. How about you? One way of determining that is by your attitude towards prayer. Is prayer a last resort for you, or is it your first option? And perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, I tried prayer and it didn’t work out the way I wanted.”

So let me share with you how to struggle with God and win. First, it starts with a proper self-assessment. A proper prayer attitude realizes that we have no right to demand any good thing from our God, nor the expectation that he deal fairly with us. Every one of us has trashed his holy law and violated his holy will. For that we deserve punishment, not blessing. But our gracious God decided to punish our Savior for our sins instead of us. He graciously forgives us. Through the good news of a Savior in his word and in our baptisms he has made us his own children and has given us the privilege of prayer. Your relationship with the holy God is based on faith in Christ. And so is your prayer life. Struggling with God and winning is based on your trust in the promises of God. As I struggled with him in prayer I held him to his promise to go with me. I knew that with him at my side I could face my brother.

You have that same promise from the Lord. Since you are his dear child he has promised to be with you forever. And with the Lord at your side, you can face whatever comes your way—bust or boon, sickness or health, sorrow or happiness. Struggle with God in prayer and win, confident that he will bless you as he sees best. Amen.