Bulletin Articles
Wrestling with God
The narrative of Jacob includes the intriguing account of Jacob wrestling with God (Gen 32:22-32). Jacob had been out of the land for a couple of decades and finally came back. The night before meeting Esau again, Jacob was left alone, and the text says, “a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.” The “man” was not prevailing, so he touched Jacob’s hip socket so that it was out of joint. Jacob persisted, however, and refused to let go until that man blessed him. The man then told Jacob that Jacob’s name from then on would be Israel, “for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then, “Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.’” Jacob would keep his limp from this wrestling match. We can be sure that this was a constant reminder to Jacob of his struggle.
We wonder how Jacob could prevail against God here but note that Jacob recognized his opponent’s superiority by asking for a blessing (as Scripture indicates, the lesser is blessed by the greater). The only way this could have happened like this is for God to allow it to happen when He could have, at any time, taken Jacob out. God must have deemed it good for Jacob to go through such a struggle, to persist in his fight, to hang on and thereby come out better for it. At this point, the sun, which had gone down, had now come up again in his life. He would be forever changed.
Others in Scripture wrestled with God in other ways — perhaps not literally — but they still struggled to understand and grasp God’s will and purposes in their lives. Abraham tried to bargain with God over the destruction of Sodom. Moses struggled to plead with God over whether He would destroy Israel. Job thought of God as his adversary and wished to have an audience with him to plead his case. We can see how the psalmists (like David) would wrestle with God to understand the suffering they had to endure or why God allowed enemies to apparently prosper (e.g., Psalm 73). Habakkuk struggled to understand how God could use the Babylonians to judge His people. There are many such examples throughout Scripture. People wrestled with God, and while they did not always understand why God did what He did, they did not lose faith in Him.
These examples show us that two ideas that may seem at odds can both be true: 1) We can wrestle and struggle to understand God and His purposes in our lives, and 2) we need not lose faith in going through the struggle. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. For some, faith is fragile enough that they might think that if they must struggle with God in any way, their faith is gone. However, biblical cases demonstrate that faith can be strengthened through working out the difficulties. We may not understand at times, but never do we need to let go of our faith.
We think it odd, perhaps, that “wrestling with God” can be good for us. Perhaps, we think, if God really wanted us to serve Him, He would make it all easy. There would be no struggles, no difficulties, and no times at which we would need to put our trust in Him when we can’t see what the next step in life will be. We wrestle with doubts and fears, with anxieties and deep concerns. Why would God let this happen to us? Why must it be so difficult? We ask, with Job, where God is (see Job 23:8-9), and divine hiddenness seem incongruous with a God who wants us to find Him and take refuge in Him. Is there a purpose to this? Again, do these struggles necessitate giving up faith? Must we quit believing altogether when we have these uncertainties or a lack of answers? In all these examples, the answer is a resounding No! When we take our faith seriously, we will wrestle with God at times. We may even find ourselves with a permanent limp when it’s all over, but the struggle can strengthen our faith and resolve.
Faith is not always easy. The testing of faith may serve to weed out those who are not so serious about their commitment. Yet such difficulties can produce greater endurance, which leads to a more perfect faith (see James 1:2-4). That faith, once tested, can “result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet 1:6-7). Jacob knew that he had been delivered by God, even though he had prevailed. God will deliver us through the struggle, too, but we must be tenacious, holding on to the Lord through the process. The outcome of the struggle is a changed life, a stronger faith, and a blessing from the One who allowed us to prevail. By faith, and with steadfastness, we will be victorious in Jesus Christ.
