Sermon Summary: A Wrestling Match with God

Bible References: Genesis 32

Key Themes:

• Encountering God: Jacob’s encounter with God in the night is a powerful reminder of God’s personal involvement in our lives.
• The Power of Prayer: Jacob’s honest and heartfelt prayer demonstrates the importance of seeking God’s help in times of trouble.
• Surrendering to God’s Will: Jacob’s wrestling match with God symbolizes the need to submit to God’s sovereignty and trust in His plan.
• The Transformation of Character: Through his encounter with God, Jacob experiences a profound transformation, moving from a life of self-reliance to one of dependence on God.

Sermon Overview:

Jonathan begins by introducing the context of Genesis 32, where Jacob is preparing to meet his estranged brother Esau. Despite the fear and uncertainty, Jacob recognizes God’s presence and seeks His guidance.

The sermon delves into Jacob’s prayer, highlighting his humility, honesty, and reliance on God’s promises. Jonathan emphasizes the importance of praying with both faith and humility, acknowledging our dependence on God while also trusting in His character.

A significant portion of the sermon focuses on Jacob’s wrestling match with God. This encounter symbolizes the struggle between human will and divine purpose. Jacob’s insistence on receiving a blessing from God before letting go underscores the transformative power of encountering God personally.

The sermon concludes by emphasizing the importance of submitting to God’s will and trusting in His plan. Jacob’s experience serves as an example of how God can use difficult circumstances to shape our character and deepen our faith.

Additional Points:

• The Role of Fear: Jonathan discusses how fear can motivate our actions but that it’s essential to trust in God’s provision and protection.
• The Importance of Reconciliation: Jacob’s desire to reconcile with Esau highlights the significance of forgiveness and restoration in relationships.
• The Power of God’s Name: The change of Jacob’s name to Israel signifies a new identity and a deeper connection with God.

By exploring these themes, Jonathan encourages listeners to seek God’s presence, trust in His promises, and surrender their lives to His will.

Transcript

Good morning everyone.
Still going through Genesis and today we’re going to be looking at chapter 32 of Genesis.
Now I’m reading from modern translation, Genesis’ first book in the Bible, so it will be fairly
early on if you’re looking for it.
But this version I’m reading from is the New Living Translation, so don’t hold it against
me.
Verse, chapter 32.
As Jacob started on his way again, angels of God came to meet him.
And when Jacob saw them he exclaimed, This is God’s camp.
So he named the place Mahanaim.
Why can’t this give it just a place like, you know, sort of our house or, you know.
Never mind, it’s another story.
It means two camps anyway.
And Jacob sent messages ahead of his brother Esau, who was living in the region of Seir
in the land of Edom.
He told them, Give this message to my master Esau, humble greetings from your servant Jacob.
Until now I’ve been living with uncle Laban, and now I own cattle and donkeys and flocks
of sheep and goats and many servants, both men and women.
I’ve sent these messages to inform my Lord of my coming, hoping that you will be friendly
to me.
After delivering the message, the messengers returned to Jacob and reported, We met your
brother Esau and he’s already on his way to meet you with an army of 400 men.
Jacob was terrified at the news.
Yeah, I bet he was.
He divided his household along with the flocks and herds and camels into two groups.
And he thought, If Esau meets one group and attacks it, perhaps the other group can escape.
Then Jacob prayed, O God of my grandfather Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord,
you told me, Return to your own land and to your relatives.
And you promised me, I’ll treat you kindly.
I’m not worthy of all the unfailing love and faithfulness you have shown to me, your servant.
When I left home and crossed the Jordan River, I own nothing except a walking stick.
Now my household fills two large camps.
O Lord, please rescue me from the hand of my brother Esau.
I’m afraid he’s going to attack me along with my wives and children.
But you promised me, I will surely treat you kindly and I’ll multiply your descendants
until they become as numerous as the sands along the seashore, too many to count.
Jacob stayed where he was for the night.
Then he selected these gifts from his possessions to present to his brother Esau.
200 female goats, 20 male goats, 200 ewes, 20 rams, 30 female camels with their young
and 40 cows, 10 bulls, 20 female donkeys and 30, oh sorry, 10 male donkeys, that’s my eyesight.
He divided these animals into herds and assigned each to different servants.
Then he told his servants, Go ahead of me with the animals, but keep some distance between the herds.
It’s going to be like the 12 days of Christmas this you see.
He gave these instructions to the men leading the first group.
When my brother Esau meets you, he’ll ask, whose servants are you and where are you going?
Who owns these animals?
You must reply, they belong to your servant Jacob, but they are a gift for his master Esau.
Look, he’s coming right behind us.
And Jacob gave the same instruction to the second and third herdsmen and to all who followed behind the herds.
You must say the same thing to Esau when you meet him and be sure to say,
Look, your servant Jacob is right behind us.
Jacob thought, I’ll try to appease him by sending gifts ahead of me.
And when I see him in person, perhaps he will be friendly to me.
So the gifts were sent on ahead while Jacob himself spent that night in the camp.
During the night, Jacob got up and he took his two wives,
his two servant wives and his 11 sons and crossed the Jabot River with them.
And after taking them to the other side, he sent over all his possessions.
This left Jacob alone in the camp and a man came and wrestled with him until the dawn began to break.
When the man saw that he wouldn’t win the match, he touched Jacob’s hip and wrenched it out of its socket.
Then the man said, Let me go, for the dawn is breaking.
But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me.
What’s your name? The man asked. He replied, Jacob.
Your name will no longer be Jacob, the man told him. From now on,
you will be called Israel because you have fought with God and with men and have won.
Please tell me your name, Jacob said. Why do you want to know my name, the man replied.
Then he blessed Jacob there. And Jacob named the place Peniel,
which means face of God. For he said, I have seen God face to face and yet my life has been spared.
The sun was rising as Jacob left Peniel and he was limping because of the injury to his hip.
Even today, the people of Israel don’t eat the tendon near the hip socket
because of what happened that night when the man strained the tendon of Jacob’s hip.
You don’t have to win every fight or every argument to be a winner.
See, Jacob had this uncanny knack of making people angry.
It was something that had happened throughout his life. In the last chapter 31,
we saw how angry his Uncle Laban had got with him and why he’d left in such a hurry.
He’d left without saying goodbye.
He’d wanted to get out of what had been a pretty abusive relationship for 20 years,
where this Jacob, who’d arrived as a con man himself,
who had been conned and tricked for 20 years by his Uncle Laban into working for this guy,
not being paid properly, not being looked after properly,
everything that Laban did to try to trip him up, God seemed to bless Jacob.
He said goodbye. Well, he hadn’t said goodbye, he just rushed off.
But Laban had caught up with him and he said, look, we scarpered because I was scared of you.
Thankfully, he kind of resolved his relationship with his uncle,
but it was now out of the frying pan and into the fire,
because he was going home in obedience to what God had asked him to do.
You read that in the previous chapter.
But in doing so, his past was going to catch up with him.
He was returning to a place where things had gone wrong.
He wasn’t anymore escaping from a problem.
He was going to have to face it face to face.
God had promised him this land that he was returning to,
but that promise included challenges as to how he would rebuild relationships that had been broken.
We read in Genesis 27 that Esau, his brother, hated Jacob.
Why? Well, you know, our family issues can be really challenging for all of us,
can’t they, at times? You know, family breakups.
It’s marvelous. And there’s nothing that causes more problems in a family than a will.
And when a will doesn’t work out that somebody doesn’t get something that they expected
and the other person has got it,
well, what had happened is Jacob basically, with the help of his mum, had conned his brother,
his elder brother, out of what was rightfully, as far as the way society worked, his.
He’d done it by guile. He had received a blessing, you know, by default.
He basically conned his way into a blessing rather than actually received it graciously
and willingly and openly.
He’d actually made something happen. Esau was so cross about this.
He said, I’m going to kill him. Read the inscription. I’m going to kill him.
Mum got word of this. Mum of both Esau and Rebecca.
And she said these classic words that you can read in Genesis 27.
She’s told him to go to his uncle Laban’s and she sent off with this message.
She says, stay there with Laban until Esau cools off.
And when he calms down, I’ll send for you. Now 20 years have passed
and she hasn’t asked him to come home.
He’s had 20 years away from home
and he’s not had a message from Mum to say it’s all right now.
You can come home. Everything’s fine. He’s calmed down.
But God’s told him to go back.
In the midst of this family breakup, what do you do to mend a broken relationship?
How do you build that reconciliation back?
You know, Esau felt he’d been fiddled out of what was rightfully his.
But God says, you’ve got to go home and you’ve got to face the music.
Jacob may have grasped a blessing that was not necessarily his to receive.
Isaac had meant to give it to his son Esau.
It hadn’t been given willingly or knowingly to Jacob.
And Jacob really lived up to his name.
The word Jacob means deceiver or displacer or supplanter.
Somebody who takes something that’s not necessarily theirs.
What was Jacob going to come home to?
A fight or a friendship?
I desperately wanted a friendship.
And he knew he couldn’t actually change the past.
The past is gone.
You can’t actually, you know, we’re not time travelers.
We can’t go back there and undo what we’ve done before.
He just knew that he had to do something about this situation.
He sorted things out with Laban.
He now needed to sort things out with his estranged brother.
And he was face to face with his crisis.
And what did he attempt to do?
Well, Jacob was always quite cunning, crafty, had good ideas.
He had cunning plans, a bit like Baldrick.
He was that kind of person.
And he attempted a strategy of appeasement, as we read in this chapter.
Groveling and gifts, basically, I’ve called it.
It’s the way he was going to try to win it over.
He said, I’m hoping I can get around Esau.
I can buy his friendship.
I can buy my way back into his good books.
I can say the right things and do the right things
that will make him friendly towards me again.
And then he gets this report that Esau was on his way to meet him,
but with an army of 400 men.
Now, you know, that’s quite a big army in the context of this.
This passage is quite interesting because fear is a major motivator
in Jacob’s actions, in his prayers and in his plans.
There’s no doubt about it.
And he seems to have forgotten something that started right at the start of this passage.
Because when he actually obeyed the command of God,
knowing what he was about to face with his brother, potentially,
he has another one of these wonderful experiences with God,
which, I mean, Jacob had so many of these encounters with the supernatural,
it’s amazing, where he suddenly sees a great host, an army almost, of angels on the road.
And he says, because this is a great place right at the start of the chapter.
This is a place of two camps.
My camp’s here.
God’s camp of angels is here.
It’s as if God’s saying, come on, Jacob, you can do this.
I’m with you.
You can do the right thing.
I’m alongside you.
I’m there for you.
I’m with you.
And he recognized it.
He had discernment.
He understood that God’s presence was there too.
And it didn’t stop him from being afraid.
And Jacob’s response is so typical of us as Christians,
and I include me in this.
We face a challenge.
We wrestle with it.
We struggle to find a solution or a plan or a way of getting out of it.
We make our plans to try to make the best of a bad thing sometimes,
and we fear in the worst.
And yet all the time we’re also praying.
We’re praying on the basis of what the Bible says, what God says,
you know, the promises of God.
We believe this because God has said this.
Lord, you’ve said this.
We can trust you for this.
We’re doing that.
We kind of like pray on the basis of our great need.
We say, help, Lord.
God, deliver us.
God, help us.
God, be in this for us.
While we’re still doing our plans,
we pray on the basis of God’s character.
You’re kind, you’re loving, you’re all these things.
And then we return to our plans.
If you want to use a term that’s often used in the House of Parliaments these days,
now being used of Labour, was used at the Tories beforehand,
he’s flip-flopping.
He’s going from planning to praying to planning to praying to planning to praying.
And he’s, you know, he’s caught in the tension of this fear of Esau
and the consequences of going back there
and thinking I’m going to lose everything.
We’re going to be massacred.
You know, my family’s going to be destroyed.
Everything’s going to go down.
I need to split the camp into two.
So if he gets one half, the other half at least can survive.
He’s got that at one side and the promise of God.
I’m not going back.
I’m not going back to Labour.
I’m not going back to what was.
I’m going forward into what God has called me to do.
I’m going forward into the promise of God
and going forward into what I’ve been asked to do.
You’ve promised me God that, you know, my descendants are going to live.
They’re going to multiply.
You’ve promised me a future and a hope.
And yet he’s struggling with the tension, isn’t he, of the reality of a problem
and the truth of what he believes about the God
who is bigger than all those problems.
It’s this tug of war.
And it’s a tug of war that we all face at times.
A tug of war that goes on in our hearts and our minds.
And I think, you know, it reminds me of the dad of a very troubled lad
that we read about in Mark chapter 9 who came to Jesus.
And Jesus said to him, you know, if you believe, everything’s possible.
And this guy said, well, I do believe that anything’s possible.
But help me overcome my unbelief.
It’s one thing to think God can do something.
God will intervene.
God will support me.
God will protect me.
God will do this.
God will heal.
God will deliver.
God will strengthen.
God will rescue.
It’s another thing when you’re in the challenge of the battle itself to believe
God will do it for me.
We can believe, all of us can believe that God can.
The issue is God will, will God.
Jacob is wrestling with real doubts and fears
before what he anticipates to be a struggle with his brother Esau.
I just want to go back briefly to this prayer that’s in the middle of this chapter,
I think verse 9 onwards, isn’t it, or something like that.
Because I think it’s just a lovely prayer.
Despite all his struggles,
there is something about the honesty and the rawness of Jacob’s life.
I think God wants from all of us.
He’s basically saying a very real way, an honest way.
He says to God, look, you told me to come here.
I’m here in obedience.
I’m obeying you.
I’m kind of trusting you in this.
I’m here because you’ve made a promise to me about this land
and about my descendants
and about this being the place you want me to be.
I’m doing what you’re asking me to do and I’m trusting you for that.
I’ve not run away from it.
I’ve not fled from this conflict from 400 armed men.
And it’s also prayed not from a place of entitlement,
but a place of humility.
I’m not worthy, he says,
of all your unfailing love and faithfulness.
Now I just want to say something about unworthiness
or feeling not worthy.
It’s a great thing to be humble before our God.
It’s what God wants us to do, what humbly before him.
It’s an unhealthy thing to have an unworthy attitude that says,
I am not worthy of the grace, the mercy, the favor, the love of God.
Many of us miss out on what God wants to do in our lives
because they think, well, we’re not good enough.
We’ll never make it.
We’ll never get there.
And there’s a balance here in Jacob’s prayer.
He recognizes, yes, the grace of God.
I am unworthy.
I have messed up at times.
But he understands something
that God doesn’t just look on our unworthiness.
He is a God of grace and mercy and loving kindness towards us,
which is totally undeserved.
He prays with humility.
He prays on the basis of his act walking in obedience
and in the God’s promise.
And he also acknowledges the blessing of God on his life.
He’s saying, thank you.
Without God, he said, I’d have nothing.
All I’d own, he says in verse 10, is just my walking stick on my staff.
That’s all I’d have.
And the irony you will see at the end of this chapter
is that will become a mark of what God is going to do in his life.
It’s the one thing that will be a reminder to him
of when everything else is stripped away.
He’s got something to lean on.
Someone to lean on.
And in the midst of this raw prayer, he’s praying for rescue.
Lord help, I can’t do this.
This is beyond me.
And he’s not just praying for himself.
He’s praying for his family, his kids, his wives.
But he goes straight back afterwards.
Flips, like so many of us to say.
If I pray my cards right, this is not what in the Bible.
If I play my cards right, I’m going to salvage something out of this.
I can make something at least.
I can get something out of this.
He’s still trusting God, but not totally trusting God.
It’s almost like the limited partial faith that we all have.
The Bible says walk by faith, doesn’t it?
I think most of us limp by faith, but not because of what we’re going to see happen with Jacob.
But we struggle to actually put faith into practice in our lives.
Jacob is wrestling with this problem and night falls.
But he can’t sleep.
We know that because in verse 2 it says during the night he got up.
He’s tossing and turning, wrestling with the problem.
What’s going to happen tomorrow?
What’s going to happen when I see Esau?
What’s going to happen with my family?
What’s going to happen with my goods?
What’s going to happen to me?
How is Esau going to treat me?
And he gets up and he sends his family and his possessions that are with him to the relative safety across the river.
And he’s left alone with his thoughts considering what the next day is going to bring.
But of course, he was never alone.
God’s camp was just up the road.
He wasn’t alone.
God was there.
You know, often we feel we’re just alone in this problem that you face.
There’s people in this room think you’re alone in the problem you face.
I think God wants to say to you this morning,
you’re not alone.
You’re not alone.
See, God was there.
And God finally wants to get to grips with Jacob.
Jacob had spent his whole life struggling and striving from birth with Esau,
then with Laban, trying to get ahead of the game using his cunning and his wits.
And tonight he was going to learn a wrestling move.
He was going to learn to submit.
I used to watch the wrestling on the TV, not this American stuff, you know,
but the old ITV Channel 4 o’clock.
Some of you are old enough to remember it, you know.
And the next round, eight rounds, eight four-minute rounds, two submissions, two falls or a knockout.
And in one corner we have Big Daddy.
God, and the other one we’ve got, you know, like conniving little so-and-so, like Jackie Paolo, you know.
So we’ve got Jacob in one thing, the Jackie Paolo,
and we’ve got the Big Daddy God in the other one,
and there’s going to be a wrestling match.
Submission.
Jacob, well God knew that actually,
Jacob needed to meet him before he met Esau.
And God made it happen.
God wants Jacob to submit to him, to learn what it is to lean heavily on him,
to learn what it is to cling to him, to learn what it is,
not to hang on to his own achievements and his own abilities,
but to hang on to God, to know that this would be the place of real blessing in his life.
A blessing that would be graciously given, not taken by guile,
that would be given freely by God himself.
After wrestling with God all night,
Jacob could no longer rely on his own strength to fight his battles
because God broke him, crippled him, if you like, dislocated his thigh.
And for all of you who’ve ever had dislocations, and I’m not one of them,
you’ll know how painful it is, won’t you Leslie, and others.
You know, this is before the days of hip joints and all the rest of it.
This guy was left powerless and helpless to continue his struggle with God.
Jacob, as he was going through this wrestling match,
knew that he wasn’t wrestling one of Esau’s men or even Esau himself.
And the more the struggle continued, the more Jacob’s determined that this is God,
and God’s blessing on my life.
He gets the point after his hips put out, you know, he’s clinging on, clinging on, one leg, clinging on.
You know, a bit like in a boxing match where they go into, you know, the hold.
So just trying to have a breather, but he’s clinging on to God.
And he’s saying, I will not let go unless you bless me.
And all that mattered to him at that point, remember,
he started this evening not being able to sleep worrying about Esau.
Now all he’s concerned about is that he encounters God in a way that he would know God’s blessing upon his life.
Suddenly Esau doesn’t matter anymore.
What really matters is his relationship with God and what’s happening there and then in his life with God.
He’s no longer consumed by these thoughts that he was wrestling with, he’s wrestling with God himself.
The night had begun with him wrestling with his fears, wrestling in his mind about what he’s going to do with Esau,
and it ended with him having wrestled with God.
And it was a night that he would never forget, because he realized in the darkness,
he had been face to face with God.
God leaves the scene before dawn breaks.
There’s this phrase in the Old Testament, no one can see God and live.
And there’s almost the grace of God in that, in actually withdrawing before the light comes.
But you’ve got this little phrase that’s used in the Bible that says, you know, about the sun rose.
I think it says on one version of the Bible that we use, one translation.
The sun rose upon Jacob.
It’s a new day.
The lights dawned, and he limps away, not thinking about Esau, saying,
I’ve met with God a changed man, because he submitted to God.
Hosea has these words to say about this incident in Hosea 12 verses 3 to 6.
Even in the womb, Jacob struggled with his brother.
And when he became a man, he even fought with God.
Yes, he wrestled with the angel and won.
He wept and pleaded for a blessing from him.
And in Hebrews 11 verse 21, that chapter of these champions of faith, we read of Jacob.
That it was by faith that Jacob, when he was old and dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons,
and bowed in worship as he leaned upon that walking stick, that staff.
Jacob is a changed man.
He’s broken, he’s bowed, and he’s blessed.
And as a result, or as in the past, he’s not been a particular blessing to his family.
He’s now able to bless others.
He’s changed physically, but he’s also changed spiritually.
He not only leans on his staff now for support,
but that is in itself a constant reminder that he needs to keep leaning on God.
His limp is a constant reminder of his encounter with the living God.
I was told years ago by someone, I can’t remember who,
always trust a man who walks with a limp.
I was talking in spiritual terms.
I think that means always trust somebody who leans heavily on God.
Someone who’s vulnerable.
Someone who’s aware of their own weakness.
Someone who doesn’t come across as some sort of super saint that’s got everything sorted.
And he’s empowered and powerful and, you know, the super saint stuff that people are drawn to.
The person who has encountered God, who walks with a limp,
is broken and bowed in terms of humility and in terms of worship and blessed.
And there’s a character change comes out as a result.
You see, the name of a person, particularly in Genesis in the Old Testament,
actually meant something.
And this is a mark of God’s grace upon his life.
No longer you are going to be called the heel, the displacer, the deceiver, the supplanter,
whatever this word Jacob means.
Now you are going to be known as Israel, the God persevera, the God striver.
You have changed.
You’re a changed man.
You’re a changed person as a result of meeting me.
You see, I always say this character really matters.
And for all the great experiences that Jacob has had to this time,
you think about it, Bethel and all the rest of it.
There’s amazing things that have happened in his life.
There’s still a lot in Jacob until this moment, which is all,
I’m going to sort this out myself.
I’ll try to make it this work.
I can do it in my own strength.
You know, I believe in God. Thank you, God.
Please help me, God. Please rescue me, God.
But really, I’ll try and wangle my way through it as I’ve done in the past.
At this point,
all he can do is that he’s going to be limping towards his brother.
He’s not going to be going there with 400 armed men.
He’s going to be walking towards an army like this.
You read what happens in the next chapter as a result at that time.
And I come to a close.
What I love about the stories in Genesis is that they’re very real,
thousands of years old,
but they go to the heart of the human condition,
the character of who we really are, the real us,
the ones that aren’t just turn up on Sundays and say our prayers
and do our singing and say all nice things at the front,
but the reality of life with the struggles that we face and encounter and how we live.
And we are so much like Jacob.
Well, if you’re not, maybe not, but I am.
Wrestle. We wrestle with life.
We have struggles with life. We wrestle with people.
We wrestle with our families.
We wrestle and struggle with what God’s will is in our lives.
Doing the right thing in the right way.
Many of us in this room have known and are aware of God’s promises
and have had encounters with God and visions and dreams and words and experiences.
I mean, I have. I’m sure you all have.
But yet it doesn’t stop us at times thinking.
I’ll try and plan this one out and God please help my plans.
I’ll try and work this out in my own strength.
I’ll still do that. You know, we start at the place where we ask God to bless what we’re doing.
And we try to get out the scripts we get into and the problems that we’ve made ourselves,
you know, asking God’s help in it, but we try to do our bit as well.
The example of Jesus at Gethsemane is an example of brokenness,
a bowedness and a blessedness.
Not my will, but yours be done.
God’s will, you see, is not always going to be easy for us.
At times it may be painful.
But it is the way that we become a blessing to others.
And we may know his blessing for ourselves.
I finish with this, James 4 verse 7 says, submit yourselves to God.
Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
Andy used to often say in the leadership team to me,
it’s not about you. I never did think it was about me, to be honest.
Remember, it’s not about you. But I want to say, it’s not about you.
Politely. It’s not about the leaders. It’s not about Nick.
Not about Erica. Not about Andy and not about any of us in this room.
Not about me. It’s about him.
It’s about him.
Take this cup away from me.
Yet not what I will. But your will be done.
A meeting in a garden at night that Jesus had.
An encounter at night that Jacob had with God.
History changed. God bless you.
Amen.