Jacob Wrestles: insights from Alastair Roberts

Laban ‘feels’ about in the tent (v.34), just as Isaac ‘felt’ Jacob (27:21-22). The description of Laban’s actions in terms of ‘feeling’ might suggest a recurrence of the darkness/blindness motif. He had used the darkness of the wedding night to cheat Jacob and Rachel out of their rightful marriage.

Now Laban receives poetic justice at Rachel’s hand, as he gropes in vain for his idols. The woman the tyrant had tricked now tricks him. As we have seen, the deception of tyrants is a key exodus motif, and also, as this deception typically occurs through the actions of a woman (e.g. the Hebrew midwives and Pharaoh, Rahab and the men of Jericho, Jael and Sisera, Michal and Saul, Esther and Haman), a reversal of the Fall. The father who is deceived by the daughters that he treated shamefully recalls the story of Lot.

The Jabbok is an important location in a number of respects (the word may be a play on the verb for wrestling, and perhaps also even a confusion of Jacob’s name). The Jabbok is a tributary of the Jordan (v.10). To cross the Jabbok is to cross the Jordan and symbolically to re-enter the land.

The reference to wrestling with God is important. Jacob’s entire life has been characterized by wrestling with God and man, with Esau, Isaac, and Laban. By connecting Jacob’s wrestling with these figures with Jacob’s wrestling with God, Jacob learns that all of the time God has been wrestling with him through these persons. Wrestling with the unknown person in the dark, Jacob may have wondered whether it was Laban or Esau, but it turned out to be God. Later on he will make the significant statement that seeing Esau’s face is like seeing the ‘face of God’ (33:10; cf. 32:30 – ‘Peniel’). Perhaps this is a reference to the fact that Jacob now recognized that it had been God wrestling with him all of the time. While Abraham was marked out by patience, Jacob was a man marked out by patienceand wrestling, a man who struggled with God and man to receive that which was promised.

After wrestling with God, Jacob’s eyes are opened to the fact that God has been dealing with him throughout, that all of the things that had befallen him had been used by God as means of preparing him as a champion and a sacrifice. We see a similar realization in the story of Joseph (45:7-8). The Angel on the banks of the Jabbok is like the ‘boss’ at the end of the game. Having wrestled with the Angel and prevailed, Jacob’s life as a wrestler largely comes to an end. He is given a new name as a mark of his success.

Greg Haslam: The Man Who Wrestled With God

Chapter 1: Pulling Down Strongholds

A chapter on the transformative nature of the wrestle, linking it to the need for us to have strongholds demolished from our lives. He makes the point that we often resist God's involvement in our lives with a lot of effort and pride:

He illustrates this with the story in the 1962 Oscar winning film Alamo in which 130 heavily outnumbered Texans fought against more than 4500 Mexican soldiers of General Santa Anna in the former's defence of the mission station near the town of San Antonio.

We make heroes of 'freedom fighters' like Davy Crocket, Jim Bowie and Major Travers. Their resistance and violent death became an icon of American bravery and the defence of liberty. But our resistance to God has nothing to commend it, for it is not a fight to defend freedom but a bid for self-centred autonomy and rebellion ending in some for of slavery and there is nothing at all commendable or inspiring about it.

Chapter 2: Faith's Rubicon

He likens Jacob's crossing of the ford at Jabbok to the story of Julius Caesar in 49BC bringing an army into Italy form Gaul and crossing the Rubicon river. 'The die is cast' said Caesar. This event was pivotal for Jacob.

Jacob was to come away from this encounter with a painful torn ligament and a conspicuous limp, a permanent reminder of his struggle with the Almighty. For us, as for Jacob, God wants us to learn through such events how to seize hold of him who first seized hold of us.

He says:

I have met believers who have no dread of God in their hearts. God is more like their comforting club mascot or 'best mate' than their almighty Creator, King and master, someone to fall back on when they hit an emergency or they need something, but safe to ignore much of the time. 

Chapter 3: Jacob's Fight Preparation

At some point in our life, especially if it's 'inherited' faith from our parents, must becom first-hand faith and a fully renewed and revived faith if it is to mean anything at all. If you have never felt the horror and awe of what it means to stand in the presence of a terrifying, holy God, then you have not as yet fully encountered the God of the Bible. If you've just 'accepted' Jesus but your real God may be David Beckham, Brad Pitt, Coldplay or Kylie, then you need to have a fresh encounter with the one true and living God!

Smith Wigglesworth:

The only thing I'm satisfied with is the fact that I am dissatisfied!

Jacob had to learn that he was not in charge any more.

Not surprisingly many important encounters wit God recorded in the Bible are connected in some way with water. Jacob crossed the Jabbok, Moses the Red Sea, Joshua, Gideon chose his army by a spring, Jesus consecrated himself at baptism.

The nature of commitment to Christ is this: we are under new-management.

Chapter 4: Subject to examination

A critique of 'seeker-sensitive' church:

Walter Brueggemann: In a culture-bound church such as most of the US Curch is, our preferred strategy for evangelism is to invite people in, with the winking assurance that 'everything' can remain the same.'

This of course is not true at all. Once we have invited someone as great as Christ in, everything is going to change!

Further critique:

I wonder whether childlike beginners in a dumbed-down, user friendly Christianity will ever grow up - whether such seekers will ever become finders and keepers of the faith once delivered to the saints.
-- Ralph Wood 

On the geography and meaning of the place:

Jabbok means 'pouring out' or 'wrestling'. the Hebrew word is closely related to the word abbak which means 'to twist'. Presumably this little stream that enters the river Jordan midway between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea was a 'twisting' tributary and so it earned itself the name. But how interesting that the name implies wrestling and twisting, conveying the idea of manipulation and deceit. The twister is going to be twisted; the crooked man is going to be 'bent double' in order to be straightened out!  

Consider the statue made by Sir Jacob Epstein in 1940 just after WWII broke out entitled  'Jacob and the angel.'

Perhaps Epstein recognised in this story as so many others have done down the ages, something of the story of our own struggle to believe, to make progress, our struggle with fear, pain and self-doubt. Epstein's Jacob is both locked in combat with the stranger and yet he also, in a way, being supported by him.

Unless we decide to do things we have never done before, we will not see things we've never seend before. We'll never experience anything different from the 'same old, same old'. Jacob the grabber releases his wives, children, flocks, herds... eventually left standing alone in the darkness on the banks of the river. Never before had Jacob 'let go' of anything

As all of his possessions are sent away, it is as if Jacob is stripped of his former identity before God. All the trappings of his wealth are gone for the time being and only he is left. All he has are the clothes on his back. Sometimes God says to us, 'Get rid of everything. Get rid of your toys and free yourself up for what I am about to do in your life.'

Jacobs example teaches us that we must be separated from so that we can be consecrated for.

Chapter 5: Darkness, Separation and Silence

The dark.

God has to take us out of the familiar, the comfortable and the easily seen, in order to deal with us in ways that we've never been dealt with before.

God created the universe in darkness:

Unlike us, God doesn't need the lights on to go about his greatest work in our world or our lives. Maybe God has turned all the lights out on you right now, because unbeknown to you he is about to do something entirely new and creative in your life?

Two types of knowledge: descriptive and experiential

Jacob sends 'sweeteners over to Esau':

In the M. East, goats were the least valuable of all livestock; sheep were slightly more valuable, then came expensive camels and finally, cattle and asses that were worth the most to a rural farmer. Jacob calculated that these 'protection money' bribes would mount up in his brother's eyes and serve to turn away his anger.

Walter Lavage Sandor called solitude: an audience chamber with God.

'Jacob was left alone' - the phrase hits us with searing force.

Bonhoeffer: let no one expect from silence anything but a direct encounter with the Word of God.

George Campbell Morgan: interpreted the name given by God - Israel - to mean 'a God-mastered man.'

Chapter 6: Faith's Showdown