Wrestling with God

Conflict is inevitable in any relationship, even in our relationship with God. Real relationships require real struggles.

Note: This transcript was auto generated and may have errors.

Well, growing up, I would, uh, race home to do what every young kid wants to do after school, after spending grueling days at school learning and watch cartoons. And, uh, I’d have to compete with my grandmother. She. She didn’t work, so she was always there. And so she didn’t believe in vacuums. And so what she did is she would actually, like, fold her knees and she, like, like, would lay on her legs and she just would picks up off the ground. I never saw her use a vacuum. I think she just was very frugal, I don’t know. And and of course what was on TV. But her soap operas. And so I grew up watching General Hospital, The Young and the restless and Days of Our Lives. I remember that big sand clock with the sand. I had dreams about that. Right? I was like, what’s going on here? And I asked my grandma, hey, grandma, can I watch cartoons, please? Right. So I played outside a lot because she never let me watch my cartoons. And these soap operas are kind of funny. And I grew up in California, so there were things called telenovelas there. Even more funny. Um, this seems like a, a very much like a soap opera. This is real life. And let me give you the back story of the passage we just read. Jacob is a twin. He’s got a brother named Esau. He’s the younger of the twins, and it says that they were striving from day one.

If you go back a few chapters, Rebecca, the mom has the babies in her room. She’s like, I feel like there’s nations warring. They’re fighting already. They’re already wrestling. Some mama’s going, oh, I know what that feels like, right? And Jacob’s name means heel catcher or supplanter. And you can almost picture Esau and Jacob. They’re wrestling to be who first born. And Jacob was like, catching or grasping for Esau, saying, no, you don’t. I’m going to win this one. He doesn’t. Right. And he’s, he’s the second born of the twins. And they couldn’t be more like oil and water. You relate to that? Do you have family members? Siblings? You’re like, man, my brother and I, my sister and I, we are night and day different. In fact, the division even goes to the parents. The parents pick favorites. It says that Isaac favored Esau, and Rebecca favored Jacob so much, to the point that Jacob and Rebecca schemed to steal the blessing of the birthright away from Esau, which only goes to the firstborn. What’s this birthright? Well, in that tradition, the firstborn son inherited the mantle, if you will, of the tribe. He was the next the leader on all the authority that came with it. He would receive the lion’s share of the birthright, the land, the power, the authority. And Jacob schemed with his mom and tricked Isaac into giving him the blessing. And we read in Genesis chapter 27, verse 41, this verse.

Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him. And Esau said to himself in his mind, the days of mourning my father are approaching. Then I will kill my brother Jacob. Translation. When dad dies, Jacob, you’re a dead man. This is like a telling nuevo. This is like a soap opera, right? This is like days of our life right here. I’m watching it. Real life. And so this is the division. This is the backdrop. So much so that Jacob flees his home. His mom, which adores him and loves him, kisses him goodbye, says Jacob. You need to go. This is real, I’m afraid. And they both are scared that Jacob’s life is in danger. And so he goes off into a distant land, far away country with his uncle. That’s a whole other sermon series in itself. Years and years later, he comes back. Back to his place of birth. Back to his birthright, to face his brother. And this is the backdrop of what the passage we just read. And we find Jacob has, has, is coming back and Esau catches wind. Oh. Jacob’s returning. Well, let’s go send a greeting party of 400 armed men to welcome him back home. And this verse, I’m sure, is in the backdrop of Jacob’s mind going, uh oh, he’s going to make good on his promise that he swore to kill me. Father’s gone now. And so Jacob says, how am I going to sweeten this? I know I’ll give him gifts.

So he sends servants and gifts and said, hey, your servant Jacob’s going to bless you and give you these things, and then he’s going to send his family. He breaks them up into parties, right? He sends half one way and half another way and says, hey, if Jacob does or Esau does, come after us and overtake one party, maybe the other family can get away, and he sends them in the middle of the night across the river, which is dangerous. And now we find Jacob alone in the dark and by himself, and a mysterious interloper enters in and begins to grapple and wrestle with Jacob. If I’m Jacob, I’m thinking this is an advanced scout. Maybe this is somebody who’s out to get me. And so he wrestles back with him, and they wrestled the entire night. It said, it says into the break of day, the next day. That’s exhausting. If you ever wrestled somebody. And then Jacob begins to realize as the day is breaking, this is not any person, this is God himself. Verse 28 says that he was wrestling with God. And what this story teaches us is that an encounter with God sometimes can feel more like a wrestling match than a cup of afternoon tea. Isn’t it true that even the ones that we love the most, that they can also feel like they wrestle against us? And it’s no different with your walk with God.

In fact, I would go as far to say that you’re wrestling with God actually deepens your relationship with him, deepens your understanding. And so my prayer this morning is that we break down this passage of Scripture and Genesis is that you also wrestle with this text and with your walk with God. And so before I go any further, let’s pray. Father, I ask for Your Holy Spirit now to speak through me, God, that it be your words and your message, that it would be you that be glorified through this passage, that God we would be transformed by the hearing of the word that you give us understanding and the faith that not only, you know, have knowledge. But application. God that we be honest with ourselves where we’re at with you. That we learn to submit ourselves to you. But trust that you are good. Are you a god? Well that we would be honest. That we sometimes we. We don’t want to submit. That we think we know what’s best. That we operate in our own strength. God would you show us today? There are ways better and in weakness. God. Your grace is sufficient and you’re perfecting us. I love you. Thank you. In Jesus name, Amen. So we’re going to get three things from this passage in this counter with Jacob wrestling with God. Here’s the first one. An encounter with God is first and foremost. It’s personal. An encounter with God is personal. It says here in verse 24 that Jacob was alone.

And it wasn’t until that Jacob was alone that he actually met God. Why is that so important? Well, let me contrast to you what a personal encounter with God looks like versus maybe a religious experience that you’ve that you’ve had. A lot of people have these religious experience in a religious atmosphere, in an environment, something along the lines of going to church, right? There’s nothing wrong with going to church service. You’re in one right now, I welcome you. I’m glad that you’re here. That’s great. But maybe you attend with your family regularly. Maybe a friend brought you here for the first time. Maybe you’re visiting us. Maybe you’re also very active at church. But then something happens. You go off to college. You run into the real world. Your work becomes demanding of your time and your attendance slips. Maybe even something difficult happened in your life. And you’re pulling away from God even now. Maybe you had a different experience. I called them mountaintop experiences in life. You got on a mission trip, a retreat, a concert, a camp. You were deeply moved and you had this, this moment in that environment where you felt close to God. I get nothing wrong with these, I encourage these. I lead mission trips. I do these things with our students here at Calvary. But then you come off that mountaintop experience. And you come back to the valley of the real world.

Go back to school, back to work, back to the everyday grind of life. Your your focus turns from the spiritual. To the natural and that spiritual experience you had fades away like mist. You don’t practice ongoing worship, Christian living, spiritual disciplines, or even the Christian community you found attractive once. Begins to stop. You may feel very spiritual in this atmosphere with the music and the teaching the people around you, but when the music fades and all the people go home. Maybe you feel disconnected with God. Why? It’s because you never met him alone. You never met him personally. You may. You met him in a group. You were swept along with this group, but you never met him yourself. You never met him personally. In other words, when you experience God in the environment and when the environment changed, you had no need of him. When was the last time you had a deep conversation with somebody else? When a heartache was shared. When secrets were revealed or confession admitted. Were you by yourself with that person? What was the environment like? Were you alone? When was the last time you poured out your heart to someone you loved, or listened intently as they shared the first time? A real deep struggle with you? Were you by yourself with that individual? You have to meet God alone. Like Jacob, it can’t just be the religious environment you were introduced to, but a personal meeting with God, the living God himself.

Before Jacob wrestled with God, he was facing a very difficult life crisis. He was going to meet his brother, who was sworn to kill him. He found himself alone. And in the dark. Well, we all have to face things in life alone at times. Why is that? Because the people that are with you, you can’t always be with you. The environment that you’re in will change here at Calvary. We have this tradition with our seniors, our graduating high school seniors, the senior banquet where we celebrate their graduation from high school, and we invite all their friends and family and we say, hey, look at this room filled with people who love and support you, who have poured blood, sweat, and tears into your life. And they’re here for you. They care for you and they love you. And then I say this as a speech I give almost identically every year. And I say, but life’s about to change. You’re going to enter into a new chapter of life where the physical presence of these people who love and care for you deeply will diminish. You can’t take these people with you. You will go off to school, to work, to military, wherever God calls you. And their physical presence will diminish. You know it doesn’t. You know who doesn’t leave you is God. And that’s why he has to be the most important relationship that you pour into. That you connect with. And like Jacob, all of us will have to face even our big challenges on our own.

A loved one passes away. A relationship breaks down, a crisis at work, a crossroads looking for direction and guidance in life. Eventually, all your friends will go home. And you have to face it alone. Unless, of course, you have God. And in Jacob’s account with God at a pivotal moment in his life, he not only meets God, but check this. He grapples with him. Which leads me to my next point and encounter with God is personal wrestling. When you meet God, you won’t always see eye to eye. I don’t see eye to eye with people. I love my kids, my wife, my family. We we disagree all the time, right? God’s no different. He’s holy, his understanding is perfect, and his ways are past our finding out. And sometimes, let’s just call his methods unorthodox. God, that’s not the plan I would call. That’s not the play I would do. I would have put myself in that situation. But God is different, set apart, unique from all of us. And so when you meet God, don’t be surprised if it turns into a struggle, a submission of your will to his, that real relationships require real struggle. And so at times you may find yourself wrestling with God. I find it interesting that God was actually the person who initiated the wrestling the internet text. Jacob was alone and by himself on the other side of the river Jabbok. And then here comes God and grapples with him.

He came after Jacob. And maybe you find yourself right now, this morning in the grasp of God yourself, wrestling with him. Let me assure you, you’re in good hands. What do you mean by wrestling? There’s three qualities of wrestling. I just want to highlight real quick that I see in the text. First and foremost, wrestling requires an intense focus. You can’t be in a headlock and think about butterflies, right? If you ever wrestled somebody and you’re daydreaming, you’re done. You’re toast. And as Jacob and got a wrestling it’s it’s it’s full on intense focus on God. And your struggles, the things you go through in life. The wrestling’s, that’s when you really grapple with God. Acquires intense focus. Two. There’s contradiction. Both parties are contradicting each other’s motions in wrestling. Otherwise we wouldn’t be wrestling. It’d be tango. It’d be dancing, right? Wrestling is the opposite of dancing. When you. When you dance, you compliment. You honor your partner in wrestling, you’re standing face to face in contradiction. There’s a difference there a difference goal. And thirdly, they wrestled all night, says in the text. And to the break of day. I don’t know, I didn’t wrestle growing up in high school. I didn’t play that sport. But I do wrestle. And when I wrestle with people, I find that I have muscles I never knew I had right. It is an all body intense workout, fully focused. It’s agonizing and I can’t imagine wrestling the whole evening.

The kind of energy, the kind of power it consumed and drained out of Jacob. And so let me, let me give those in a spiritual context. When you have encounter with God one, you need intense focus. Nothing else matters but your relationship with God. The Bible calls this being single minded, fully devoted, fully thinking, intently focused on God. Because God becomes the biggest in your life, he becomes your priority. Jacob was wrestling with this man even before he knew it was the Lord. So if you’re here this morning and you’re a seeker, you don’t know God. You can still pursue that with that intensity and devote yourself to finding the truth about him, that you leave no stone unturned in your pursuit of the truth, of knowing God, that you pursue him. Do you pursue God with that kind of intensity in your walk? To the contradiction in your pursuit of God. You start asking questions. I’ve heard questions like, hey, if God’s a good God, why does he do A, B, and C? You’re starting to reason with him. Maybe you’re starting to find yourself actually in opposition to certain things. The Bible teaches certain doctrines, certain things you hear preached from God’s Word. Anybody who’s meeting with a real God will do that. And that’s okay. But watch out. You’re not wrestling against any mere person but God himself, and in wrestling he will contradict you if I can. What I mean by that.

Let me let me give you a turn that I hear the youth that you have to allow God to square up against you as well. You see, a lot of people think they’re wrestling with God when they have struggles, right? They can question God. Why does God allow this? Why does God do that? They’ll contradict what they see in Scripture, but it’s not real wrestling unless you allow God to contradict you, unless you allow God to question you and Jobe’s wrestling. He asked all these questions. Why does God do this? And God lets them go on for a little bit. He gets some advice from some friends that aren’t the best. And then God questions him. Question after question. God really never answers why? Why Joe went through what he did. But but job realized I God, I have no leg to stand on. Who am I to question you? Do you let God wrestle with you like that? Or you’re wrestling against nobody, which weirdly isn’t wrestling at all. You may say, I don’t believe in certain things of the Bible. I feel narrow minded or primitive, outdated, archaic. You don’t have a living God you’re wrestling with. Because you’re not wrestling with anybody at all. You have to. You see, you have to be willing to let God question you. For it truly to be wrestling at all, even in the deepest of our relationships. A best friend. A spouse. A neighbor, a parent. They contradict us.

In my marriage. If I could be honest for a second. I have found myself wrestling through a lot of things there, and there’s been times where I felt like things are falling out of place in that relationship. I take a step back and I realize things aren’t falling out of place. Falling into place as as the people who love me call out the things in me that need to be changed. They contradict the areas in which I know are sinful and in rebellion. That they love me enough to tell me the hard truth. Reminds me of one of my favorite Proverbs. Proverbs 27 six says this. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy. A true friend will wound you not to. Not to bring you down, but to break you down. Not because they don’t love you, but because they want what’s best for you. And God will wound you in your wrestling. Because he loves you and knows what’s best. Remember, his methods are unorthodox at times. Third thing I seen we mentioned in wrestling is the the pain, the suffering, the agony. Why did God come in the darkness of night? Why didn’t God just turn on the lights, say, hey, here I am, Jacob. Get together. Listen up now. Why did God put him through a gradual wrestling? He was in in the night and it wasn’t until morning. That’s a lot of gradual suffering. As a father, I love my kids deeply.

And in them I see me. I see them making some of the choices I wish I didn’t make in life. I see a lack of wisdom at time, a lack of knowledge, a lack of experience. I see them heading down at times a path that will only lead to grief. And sometimes without pain and suffering. Without the wounds, we don’t become wise. There are times we need to learn the hard way. Why is that? Or human beings. We’re not programmed. It’s in our nature to be stubborn and stiff necked. Since the fall, we’ve been in rebellion. My way versus God’s way. What I want. And it’s no different. Here’s the thing about pain that God allows in our lives. Pain can be a good teacher because it wakes us up. As C.S. Lewis is famously quoted about pain, he says this, and I quote pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Faithful are the wounds of a friend. So in review, an encounter with God first and foremost is personal. It can’t just be the environment or the people around you. You need to meet with God personally, one on one. You and him. To an encounter with God is personal wrestling. Do you have this focus where you’re not just there with God, but you’re with him? That he is all that you’re pursuing in that moment, in that time, and for the rest.

That you are single minded, not double minded, having your feet in the world or feet in God, but you’re all in on him. Intensely focused, even in the wrestling. Are you allowing God to contradict and question you? He’s God. He knows what’s best. He is good. Can he even question your deepest of emotions and feelings? Can you take away the thing that you’re finding the blessing inside of him in your life? And what kind of pain is he using to process and mature you and grow you? So you see, your true need for him leads me to my last point. Number three an encounter with God is winning through losing. Who won the wrestling match? Who was the stronger one? If if we read the text right and I just ask the question, hey, who would win in a wrestling match? You’re a god. And who would be stronger? Almost 100 of us would say, oh, definitely, for sure. God, there seems to be a contradiction here in the text then, does it not? In verse 25 it says, and when he, the Lord saw that he could not overcome Jacob. What? God cannot overcome Jacob. Now we know Jacob from from the from the previous chapters was a strong man. He he took a rock off a well and and moved it aside like he he was showing off to some girls there.

But he did that right. He he labored hard. He worked a hard manual job. So we know Jacob was strong, no doubt, but here overpowering God. The very next verse, verse 26 says, um, that God said to him, let me go as if Jacob could restrain God. Let me go. A real contradiction here, and here it is. And then God said enough, and he touched the hip of Jacob, and he came at a socket. He didn’t smash it. He didn’t pull it. He just touched it. Reminds me, sorry, this youth pastor, I mean, coming out, it reminds me of Kung Fu Panda. Skadoosh. That was it. And. And Jacob was like toast, right? The whooshy finger hole. That was it. It all was gone, right? And Jacob was crippled forever. What does that show us? Shows us that God is enormously strong. The all that he was doing was keeping his power in check so that he wouldn’t outright destroy Jacob. That’s meekness. Power under control. Jesus came. We should celebrate him in Christmas, right as his baby, his suffering servant. He dies on the cross. It’s all power under control. So powerful and yet meek. And God was wrestling with him. So who won? Well, it says in verse 28, God says, you have wrestled with God and man, and you have prevailed. God says, you won, Jacob. And yet God walks away from this instance and Jacob is crippled. That’s winning. Walking away with a limp for the rest of your life.

In pain as a reminder. You see, the night before, when Jacob was, uh, telling his family to go across the river and preparing to meet with his brother Esau. Um, before Jacob knew it was the Lord he was wrestling. He was trying to overcome this opponent, this interloper that came into camp with his own strength in wrestling. The hips and the legs is where your strength is. It’s where your power lies. When the hip was dislocated, the fight was over. Jacob lost. He was toast. God often does this with you and me as well. It is often our strengths that keep us away from God and obedience to him. We feel confident in our workload, our relationships, our future, you name it. We’re pretty good about being independent. Therefore, we are not dependent upon God as we should be, if at all. So often God touches your strengths and places of confidence to help us depend on him more. For some, he touches your intelligence. Others he touches your finances. Maybe it’s your health. Others your your friends and your family. Wherever our pride, our strength or our focus is outside of God, God often touches it so we can see our weakness in our wrestling. God often touches our perceived strengths so we can know our true weaknesses so we can cling to him like Jacob clings to him after that. As Frederick Buechner, who wrote on this event in Genesis, says in his book that God, he calls it the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.

The magnificent defeat of the human soul. At the hands of God, it finally begins to dawn on Jacob. This is no man he’s wrestling, but the Lord himself. Two things happen that gives Jacob this indication that it’s God. First, it’s the skadoosh, right? Oh, man. This is not a man. Boom! Crippled. Done. Toast. Only God could do something like that. That this power was veiled in their wrestling. And God undid him. Second one in verse 26. The man that was wrestling with Jacob says, let me go for the day has broken. Jacob knew what that meant. Because it says in verse 30, nobody sees the face of God and lives. Yet he was delivered. Jacob knew he was wrestling with God. He knew the power of God and he experienced it face to face. So what did Jacob do? He changed his tactic. He changed his tactic from fighting and strength. Let me wrestle him. Let me overpower him to clinging to God in His weakness. He held on to Lord and said, bless me. Bless me. Clinging on to a feeble attempt. Bless me. What was that blessing that he got from God? When he saw the face of God Himself, he experienced God face to face personally for the first time. And in that moment, Jacob was changed. Do you realize what God was doing in this moment? All the history of Jacob’s life converging in this moment of time.

Remember our story? Jacob was, was, was preparing to to meet his brother Esau, who wanted to kill him, right? He thought he was going to wrestle his brother in a moment, that he was fighting his whole life against him. And then God jumped in this mysterious invader. What was God telling him? Jacob, don’t you see? You think you’ve been wrestling with Jacob or sorry? You think you’ve been wrestling with Esau your whole life? You’re not wrestling with Esau. You’re wrestling against me. You’re wrestling against control of your life, doing things your way in your own strength. And so I made you weak. So you cling to me. Jacob. You think the blessing is the birthright? You think that’s what’s going to bring you fulfillment? Satisfaction is what you’re wanting. Jacob. The blessing is standing before you. It’s no other than God himself. Not things of this world. But God himself. Now, instead of fighting against God, he was fighting for God. Instead of struggling for dependence, he was struggling for dependence. It’s through this losing. When all of us find that we can rely on God and not our own strength, and we find our true blessing. This is the gospel that you would lose your life to find it in Christ. Jacob won through losing. Jacob won through weakness. I submit to you this morning that the source of all your wrestling is not finding your rest in the love and security that God provides for you.

Let me close our time together with one last thought. Why was Jacob smitten in grace? You see, when God striked him, he did enough just to hurt him, but not enough to to undo him, to kill him or destroy him. Do you know why God struck him on the hip? And your translation may say thigh. Those words can be translated either way. Why did he strike him in the arm? Why didn’t he sweep the leg or suplex him? Right? He strikes him on the hip. If you want to do a very interesting exercise, take a concordance. You can go online or you have an old book. You can look it up there too and look up this word for thigh throughout the Old Testament. And you’ll find something very interesting that this word for thigh has a symbolic meaning. Just a few chapters earlier, in Genesis 24, Abraham sends out or calls his servant and says, hey, go find a wife for my son Isaac, this is Jacob’s dad. Go find a wife in this certain place and and swear to me you’ll do all these things. And he says, he takes his hand and he he puts his hand under the thigh of Abraham. Same word here for hip for Jacob, and says, swear to me what is going on there? You’ve never done a handshake like that. I haven’t either, right? What is happening? Why do you know what the thigh symbolizes in the in the ancient Near East? The thigh was a euphemism for the organ reproduction.

And Abraham was saying, swear in my descendants you’ll do all these things. It’s the same word here used for Jacob’s hip. And God was able to strike Jacob with grace and deal kindly with him, only to enough to wound him, to wake him up. Because he was going to smite one of Jacob’s descendants with the full justice and the full weight. Of the penalty of our sins. That to send it. We celebrate during Christmas and his name is Jesus. His name is Jesus Christ. And it says here in Isaiah 53 four through five says this surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken. Smitten by God and afflicted. But he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. Isaiah 53 four through five. Real relationships require real struggles. The story of Jacob illustrates for us even in our wrestlings. In our struggles that God bears alongside you and me. Wounds that he gives us by his grace, so that we can see our sin, so we can admit our weakness. And in order that we may confess our need for salvation. Our need for Jesus and embrace him as our Savior. For him. In him he is the blessing that we all need and desire. Let’s pray.