WWE
NL Year 2 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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I know that the story we are looking at today is about Jacob when he wrestles this divine figure who he later says is God, but what I feel is one of the most important things that we need to piece together is that this is just one of many stories that we see Jacob wrestling. In fact, Jacob has been wrestling with people his entire life. Now I am not talking about Olympic wrestling nor am I talking about the WWE wrestling that you can watch weekly on TV. Nevertheless, Jacob has been a wrestler even before he was born.
If we take a look at his birth story we see that the boys pushed against each other while they were still in Rebekah’s womb. Now the text doesn’t say specifically, but if we are to keep on reading the story of Jacob and Esau we will see that the instigator of all this wrestling comes from Jacob, so I’m going to take a little liberty and say that Jacob was the primary one pushing around in Rebekah’s womb. They aren’t even born yet and Jacob is already wrestling with his brother.
Then a few verses later we see that after Esau was born first Jacob was literally holding onto the heel trying to be born first, or at least continuing to wrestle with him even as they are being born. Then he is named Jacob or Ya-acob, which can mean he grabs the heel or he supplants. His name that he is born with can, I believe, quite easily be seen as a wrestling word. Jacob is trying to wrestle with and supplant the place of Esau, which we find out that he does, by stealing both his birthright and his blessing.
Then as we continue with the story of Jacob, we see that when he leaves home he then wrestles with Laban when he tries to marry Rachel and ends up marrying both Leah and Rachel in order to be able to marry Rachel. Then he wrestles again with Laban when he decides to leave and they are trying to figure out the whole issue of who gets what flock. This wrestling Jacob does this time is more to defend himself and get what is rightfully his but we do see that he continues to wrestle and struggle with people in his life. Last week for the children’s message we heard Sharon talk about names and how sometimes names really fit a person, and now we can see that Jacob’s name really fits who he is. He has been struggling and wrestling with people his whole life and sometimes he is the reason for the struggle and other times others cause him to wrestle with them.
Now if we think about and look at our lives I think we can all agree that, even though we might not do it as often as Jacob, we all struggle with wrestle with people and events in our lives. It could be our boss or a co-worker, it could be the guy at the gym who always takes the workout station that you want to use. Maybe it’s the server at the restaurant that always gets your order wrong or who for some reason just doesn’t seem to like you and you have no idea why. Perhaps it’s not even a person, but another struggle that you deal with in your life, maybe it’s health related or addiction related and we all struggle with those things.
Now, while Jacob as we have seen has been wrestling with people his whole life, we now see a different way in which he wrestles. What is interesting is that even though I have been using the word wrestle with what Jacob has gone through his whole life it’s not until the story of him wrestling with God that we actually get the word wrestle. What is so great about finally using this word by the Biblical author is that if you read some commentaries and take a look at the Hebrew you will see that the word wrestle written here is Ye-abeq which is almost identical the Hebrew way of pronouncing Jacob that I mentioned earlier Ya-acob. So as the Word Biblical commentary puts it: the man or God wrestles Jacob we could very easily hear it in the Hebrew as the man Jacobed Jacob. God literally wrestled or struggled with the struggler.
Out of the wrestling match God blesses Jacob and gives him a new name. While the name still has the same undertones of wrestling, it is no longer about wrestling with other people, but it is now that he has wrestled with God. It is out of this wrestling with God that we see Jacob, now Israel, reunite with his brother Esau and all the ways that he had wrestled with his brother in the past and the ways he was planning to avoid wrestling with him now have completely changed. In fact, I believe that as Jacob grew up and matured and wrestled in his adult life with Laban, he had already begun to change and begin to understand that always wrestling and struggling with other people is not necessarily the way to handle things.
Which is a great way of understanding our own lives and our own struggles. Now I know that we aren’t always the reason we struggle with others, just like Jacob wasn’t always the reason for the struggles he had in his life, but perhaps when we encounter the wrestling matches we face, we shouldn’t always just go in ready to pin the person or the situation, but instead we need to spend some time wrestling with God to discover the best way to handle a situation. We talked this summer about how inviting God into all the different aspects of our lives instead of trying to do things on our own is a very healthy way to engage our faith. This is another example from Jacob of how we do that. In the end of Jacob’s struggle he is a changed man. It was literally his name that was changed, but we have to understand that name changes in the Bible we done because of the change in a person. So through this encounter Jacob was changed, and he became Israel. Perhaps through our own encounters and struggles with God we too can come out changed and with a better understanding of what God wants for us in that situation or with that relationship.
Something else to be mindful of is that not only is Jacob’s name changed to Israel, but he also has his thigh muscle hurt and he has a limp as a result. While reaching the other end of our wrestling with God may bring us to a better place, we have to understand that the journey to that place may not be as easy as we hope, but that the result for Jacob and for us is worth the work we may have to put into the change we are hoping for. In fact, we don’t see resentment from Jacob for the thigh, but we actually see Jacob name the place after his struggle with God, which is a sacred sign of what had happened there. Jacob declared this a sacred event despite everything that happened to him as he wrestled for his life throughout the night.
So in all of life’s struggles, in all the ways that you wrestle with things in your life and with things in your faith, may you know that God will be with you in the wrestling and that you may even wrestle with God at times, but know like Jacob did that, even in the struggles there is a dawn on the other side and that you will be blessed in the struggle, by the God who loves you and has claimed you his own from the day you were born until the day that you join with God in heaven. Amen.