THE STORY                                              

Reading for Sunday, October 2    

THE STORY, Chapter 2
(Genesis Chapters 12-13, 15-17, 21-22, 32-33, 35; Romans 4, Hebrews 11)


A Significant Part of Faith is Wrestling with God

“So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 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.
Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered.   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."  Genesis 32:22-28
        
A Strange but Important Story

Jacob was not a great guy. He was a conniver and a mamma’s boy who stole his older brother’s birthright. He rightly feared that Esau was out to kill him. Just before they were to meet up after decades apart, the above encounter took place. Today this encounter is huge in the Jewish Christian story. It is where Jacob becomes a man. It is where he gets the name Israel. It is where at least some Jews derive their practice of not eating the sciatic nerve of large animals (memorializing Jacob’s hip as a badge of his having “wrestled with God and won”). It is where he is legitimized as a Patriarch and spiritual ancestor of all Jews and Christians. This passage implies that “the man” Jacob wrestled with was God.
 
Have you ever wrestled with God? Do you ever find your will pitted against God’s will? I have and I think it’s impossible to be a Christian without such a struggle.    The Christian life is hard. But most things worth discovering and achieving come through struggle. And the best things come when God wins. “All salvation is the story of glorious defeat”. Although Jacob “won” it is actually the story God winning. Jacob refused to let go of God. Jacob refused to settle for less than God’s best.  When I seek God like that, then God’s got me where he wants me. 

Does this describe you?

Prayer

“Lord, please let me never, never, never let go of you. Help me today to seek, listen, pursue, argue, yes wrestle with you until I am experiencing all of You that want for me. Lord, I don’t want to settle for less than you full blessing no matter how different it be from what I imagine. Amen"