The Fight of Your Life

We'll be looking, once again, at this man's life: Jacob. And in fact, we've been going through Jacob's life, haven't we, over so many weeks and months, in fact. Each time we've been looking at Jacob, we're reminding ourselves that the stories in the Bible are different than the stories from other cultures and stories from other religions. Because invariably, with other religions and either ancient cultures, you get together and read their stories—great stories. But they're always stories about their heroes.

Their purpose is to celebrate what these people have accomplished, the qualities and the virtues they have: their courage, their spectacular leaps of faith. They're all honoured and revered. They're things that the followers of those religions are expected to follow and reproduce in their own lives. Trouble is, if you were to read the Bible that way, and particularly the story of Jacob, you very quickly get frustrated. And so many of the stories of the main figures in the Bible show us how very human they were.

Times may have changed, but they are still about men and women who lie, who cheat, who are deceptive, who steal, who lack integrity in terms of who they say they are. Very often, we'll read about these people and find that they have absolutely no virtues at all, nothing to commend themselves. And isn't that the point? The Bible's there not so much to show us how to live a good life as it is how to meet with God, whose grace we need, and then we can respond and live a new life. Now, when you get to the story of Jacob, you get that with ever increasing clarity.

Perhaps here, no more than anywhere else in the scriptures. Because when we look at the life of Jacob, we almost invariably never ever see him doing the right thing. But now we come to this very famous place in the Bible where he's wrestling. And it's a fascinating, dramatic scene as it plays out, and it's going to remind us in so many ways of the scene that's going to play out for us here this morning, and at home around the TV, when we participate in the Lord's Supper together. Because we're gonna learn something about God, who God is, and what's involved in a life-changing encounter with God.

What it means to meet with God. And as we shall see, being here and being in this room together is one thing, but eating and drinking together is quite another. So, how do we meet with God? And how do we experience Him this morning? Well, three things come to us from this passage.

Three reasons why Jacob was able to meet with God. Three things that I think are good for any one of us who wants to have an encounter with God today. One, we have to meet God ourselves. Two, we have to meet God in our weakness. And three, we have to meet God in His weakness.

One, we have to meet God ourselves. Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? Consider verse 24. After he'd sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions, so Jacob was left alone. Now, what's happened up to this point?

Remember, Jacob had to run away from his brother Esau. His very life was being threatened. And in order to survive, he had to flee. Esau, you see, had sworn to kill him. But now he's coming back.

Going back to his homeland with all of his family. His entourage has grown to be quite large with wives and servants and kids and all manner of livestock. But he hears now that Esau is on his way, and with 400 men coming towards him. Quite frankly, Jacob is terrified. Jacob thinks, surely this means we're going to be attacked.

So what he's done is sent on ahead of himself his entourage and all his livestock. He sent them ahead in waves. And with each wave, the servants are instructed to lavish gifts—all kinds of presents—on Esau. Presents fit for a king, only the best. Clearly, it's Jacob's way of trying to win his brother's heart and perhaps earn a few favours and then avert a potential disaster.

But now it's the night before and he's due to cross the stream himself. Tomorrow, he's due to meet with Esau. Jacob's not sure about what's happened to everyone he sent on ahead of him. For all he knows, they're dead, including his immediate family. He decides to send them on ahead as well. Tomorrow's the day of crisis, and we know that Jacob's left alone.

He has this time to reflect and he wants to pray. The first part of chapter 32 that Tom read to us, we see that he's already begun to pray to God. And it's when he wants to be alone by himself that he has this encounter with God. And this is the first point this morning. If you want to have an encounter with God, you've got to meet with Him personally, individually, yourself, alone.

Now, what I've said doesn't contradict all the things that we normally say in this place about the importance of community. Not at all. What I've said does not go against how it is that we need to have Christian friends in our lives, or quality relationships in our own small groups, or what we experience here together in this place in community. It is so important. The Christian life was never designed to be lived alone.

In fact, community is what we celebrate when we come together around the Lord's table as well. We're saying something very powerfully to one another about the kind of fellowship that we have, about the importance of the gospel for all those who will partake. These things are absolutely necessary for growing in God, for discipleship. I'm not against those things. But here's what I'm saying this morning.

How many people do you know who grew up at Open House and they really liked it. They enjoyed being here. They knew all the people in the church. They were very much a part of church life. And like you, they felt moved by the services.

Like you, they were passionate about the singing. They believed what they heard in the messages. They may have even been part of youth coffee or the assemblies or catechism classes, or a vibrant member of your own small group. But then the day comes and they stop going. And they move away.

Maybe for legitimate reasons—reasons concerning work or study. Maybe they had to go to Brisbane or the Sunshine Coast or somewhere down south. And then you hear how they tried to go to a new church. They might have gone once or twice, but God seemed totally unreal to them. He seemed so far away.

So these people go church shopping and they check out several places. They may even ask you to pray about it. It just seems so hard for them to settle down. They don't find this great need to commit, and nobody's asking them to step up and take on some responsibility, some job that they used to have back when they were at Open House. And suddenly, all the disciplines they used to have in the Christian life are gone.

And eventually, they don't find a need to pray anymore, or to worship. It just becomes so unreal. You've gotta ask yourself why. It is possible to be caught up in the church and church culture, and never meet God yourself. I'll say it again.

It's possible to be so caught up in church and in church culture that you never meet God yourself. Or to put it this way, it's possible to listen to other people's experience of God and never have experienced Him yourself. It's not until you leave Open House, when you move away from community, that you realise you haven't really met God yourself. You haven't experienced God yourself. He hasn't penetrated you.

He hasn't entered your soul. And all you're doing really is living off other people's experiences of God. They're filling you with a certain amount of hope and encouragement. Are they sure evidence, as far as you're concerned, that God is real? But you haven't met God yourself.

Let me put it in the starkest terms I know how. The most important issues in life that you're ever going to face, you're going to face alone. For example, let's say suddenly you discover you have some kind of life-threatening disease. And you're in hospital. And you're going to face an incredibly dangerous procedure.

And nobody's quite sure what the outcome will be. Now, here's what everybody's gonna do for you. They're gonna surround you with your friends. You'll be there with family. Your small group will get around you and say, you'll not face this alone.

Your pastor may even go there to visit you. And that's what we ought to do and say. And in a way, that's right. You're not gonna face this alone. We're here for you.

And boy, do you love that. You need to hear it. They're surrounding you and the flowers come and the people pray for you and you don't know what you would do without them. But I want you to know this: that when they finally do wheel you into the operating theatre, they're not gonna wheel in your family or your friends or your pastor. You know what they're going to do, don't you?

They're just going to wheel you in and you're going to be alone. Unless you have God in here, in your head and in your heart. You will have God talking to you, being with you, even if you think you're utterly alone, all by yourself. But to have God in here, you need to meet with Him.

You need to know Him. You need to meet God yourself. There'll be a time in this service when we come together and we're going to be eating and drinking at the Lord's Supper table. There's gonna be a certain kind of buzz in the building, a certain kind of togetherness, knowing that we're all doing this in unison as one.

And the people you know will be eating and drinking with you, and you should join them. It is communion, after all—common unity that we have in the gospel. But you can't live off what other people are doing here. The time comes in the service when you need to take the bread yourself. You need to drink from that cup yourself.

And nobody has the responsibility to do that except you. And in order to partake, you need to know God. You need to experience God. You need to know Him for who He is. You see, it's very easy to come to church and go through the motions and think you are experiencing God.

When all along, what you are really experiencing is other people's experience of God and not your own. We have to meet God ourselves. The second thing we can learn from Jacob is this: we have to meet God in our weakness. And I'm talking to myself here too.

I mean, I need this too. Look at how Jacob's life is finally coming together. This is the first place where we actually start to see Jacob doing things right. First, why is Jacob there? Why is he there that night?

And you know why. It's obvious. He hears that Esau's coming. He's got every reason to believe that Esau is coming to kill him. He's not alone. He's got a small army with him.

Well, why doesn't Jacob just turn and go back and head in the opposite direction? Why doesn't he just leave? And the answer to that is in the previous chapter, chapter 31, verse 3. God appears to Jacob and says, I want you to go home. It's time to go back to the land of your fathers.

Go. The fact that Jacob is not turning around and running, the fact that he's there, is because he's willing to obey God on this, even at the very risk of his life. So there he is, obeying God even though his life's at risk. And the other thing we see him doing there is praying. He's all alone.

He sends his family away so he can pray, to reflect and pray. Earlier on in the chapter, in verses 9 and 10, we see Jacob is beginning to develop a kind of a prayer life. And what he prays for there is a good prayer. Now, let me ask you a question. What in all the teaching you have received, in all the expectations you have from God about how God operates...

How do you expect God to respond to a man who obeys Him at the risk of his life, and is now seeking Him in prayer, who's filled with fears and is at the end of his rope? How does God respond? He whacks him. He knocks him down. Literally, he's wrestling with him.

He grabs him and puts him in a hammerlock, and then maims him for the rest of his life. What? What kind of a God is this? Is this the traditional God? Is this the God that you and I were raised on?

You know what I'm saying. Because I've always heard this: if you obey God, even when it hurts, even when it costs you, and if you do everything right according to God's will, and you pray and have your quiet time and you go to church and you study your Bible and you go to small group and you do everything right with God, then God will what? Wrestle you? Assault you? Knock you down?

Cripple you for the rest of your life? Would you want a God like that? This is a God who, as C.S. Lewis puts it in the famous line in the Chronicles of Narnia, and there is a place where Lucy is talking about Aslan, the lion. He is the Christ figure. And she says this about him.

Safe. Who said anything about him being safe? Of course, he's not safe. But he is good. He is the king, I tell you.

This text, more than any other place I know of in the Bible, tells us that God has to wrestle with us in order to penetrate us, to get into our heart and our minds. God has to come and wrestle us for our hearts. Now, when does Jacob figure this out? When does Jacob get to the turning point and realise that the man he's wrestling with is God?

When you get down to verse 28, the cat's out of the bag. In verse 28, this mysterious wrestler says, you've wrestled with God and with men, and you have overcome. And he says who he is. But at the very beginning, Jacob certainly did not realise who this man was. But at the very end, he certainly did.

Jacob knew all about the struggles with men. We know about that from what we have seen in the snapshot of his life. Certainly, Esau was one of the biggest struggles that he had. And it was Esau that he was going to have to face in the morning. But at night, this man is God.

God who he is facing. And this is God who he has in his arms. At what point does Jacob begin to realise this? When does he start to cling to God? And when does he say, I don't want to lose You?

I want to hold on to You. I will not let You go unless You bless me. Where does that happen? Well, commentators and scholars say it happens at verse 25, when the man touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. The NIV uses the word "touch" and that's a good word to be using.

In the Hebrew, it's a word that implies the slightest touch, just a faint tap. When Brendan plays the drums in church, we like it, don't we? When we hear him give the drums just the slightest tap with a snare brush, it helps us to stay together, to keep in time with the music. The slightest touch, and that's what Jacob receives.

After hours of wrestling, suddenly the man reaches over and gently taps his hip. But immediately, there's incredible pain. So much pain that he realises his leg has become utterly useless. And all of a sudden, he realises that the person who was in his arms could have incinerated him, turned him into toast if he wanted to.

And that's the turning point where he begins to not let him go. You see, when you are wrestling with someone, the object of the wrestling match is to get the other person away from you, is it not? You want to overpower them and be released from their grip. But look at verse 26. Then the man said, let me go for it is daybreak.

But Jacob replies, I will not let You go unless You bless me. Here's Jacob hanging on to this man, wrestling with this man to keep him there with him. I will not let You go unless You bless me. I want You in my life, is what he's saying. I wanna have You.

I wanna have You deeper. I wanna know You. Don't leave until You give me Your blessing. And when did that change happen? At the moment of the slightest touch that caused the greatest pain.

A moment of weakness. A moment when he realised he was utterly vulnerable and defenceless. This is the God who says, I want to bless you. Change your life. I want to wake you up to who you really are, for you know now who I am. And the only way I can do that is to wrestle with you, wrestle you into a transformed life. I can't comfort you.

I can't say just come or welcome because that's not the way I work. I know that's not true in my own life. And most of you, I would suggest, know that's not true in your life either. You know that famous phrase: God whispers to us when things are going well, but pain is His megaphone. And you would be deaf not to hear Him.

God comes out of love and brings us into weakness so that we can be woken up, so that we can begin to grow up and become part of who we were created to be, our new self with His blessing. So, meet God ourselves alone. We meet Him in our weakness. But one more thing this morning: we have to meet Him in His weakness. Verse 25: when the man saw that he could not overpower him. Now, remember, the man is God, God incarnate. He could not overpower who?

Well, Jacob, a mere man. On the one hand, don't forget the power touch. In absolute terms, of course, God did have the power. We can't minimise this. We can't dismiss it.

Then how do we understand this? Why didn't God unleash all His power? I can understand it something like this. When my kids were little, but big enough to have play fights on the lounge room floor, we used to wrestle with one another. So in those days, as a young father, maybe eighty kilograms or less in those days, how does a man wrestle with, you know, two toddlers?

And then do that without killing them, without crushing them with his own weight? Well, it's actually very easy. You just don't use all of your weight. So typically, what happens is I would lie on my back and let my weight fall on the floor, and that prevents me from possibly falling on the kids. And then I would say, okay boys, let's wrestle.

But I'd be up at just far enough to wrestle at their level, not my level, and I'd begin to wrestle with them. And the point is the two of them could use their entire weight to wrestle me, but I would use very little. But I would struggle and I would wrestle with them. I intentionally made myself weak. And sometimes, and especially as I got older, I could not overpower them.

Although, in absolute terms, I suppose I could if I wanted to. But I didn't because I was on my back. I made myself weak. Now God made Himself weak. So much so that He failed to overpower Jacob.

And yet, He didn't fail. And yet, He did fail. You see, if He'd won, if He'd incinerated Jacob and done to him what He did to Sodom and Gomorrah, he would have been toast in a matter of seconds. But then he wouldn't have received the blessing. He wouldn't have got what he wanted.

And what he wanted was verse 26: I will not let You go unless You bless me. Now Jacob had heard the blessing before, even from his own father Isaac, from God Himself, when God spoke to him at the bottom of the staircase in the dream that he had. But this time is different. Now he wanted it. He really wanted it.

Desperately he wanted it. His heart was changed. His life was changed. There was an awakening happening from within him. So God lost and Jacob overcame.

And then the man said, your name will no longer be Jacob but Israel. And Israel means he struggles with God. And now he has overcome. Today, right now, here in this place, if we have any claim to know God, to believe in Him, then we too are wrestlers with God. He comes into our lives and we fight.

We wrestle with Him. So that what we know in here ends up in here. And when it does, then we overcome. And according to Paul, we are counted among the new Israel of God, wrestlers with God, because we want to do life with God. Now, look what is before us this morning.

Be thinking in terms of the Lord's Supper. Jacob's wrestling match with God is pointing to the ultimate place where God, through losing, actually won. He triumphed through defeat. And it's the only place that answers Jacob's confusion and our questions this morning as well. Where did God become weak?

Not just here in Genesis, but on the cross. Jesus wrestled with God, with the full weight of God. Remember, Jacob didn't get the full weight. With Jacob, God took off most of His weight. God made Himself weak.

So all that Jacob got was just a little tap on the hip that had the effect of waking him up, but it didn't destroy him. But on the cross, Jesus Christ went into our place and took the penalty we deserve. In other words, He took the full weight of God's wrath. He got the full weight of God's justice. But Jesus held on.

Jesus said, I won't let go. Why not? Until they, until you and I get the blessing. Because what's He doing on the cross? He was taking the curse of the law which we break in order to get the blessing for us.

So, in a way of speaking this morning, Jesus is the ultimate Jacob. He took the devastating blow of God's justice so that we just get the blows of love and kindness that wake us up today. And here's the reason why you can only meet Him in His weakness, in His weakness on the cross in the face of Jesus Christ. I invite you to go to Him this morning, to meet Him at the cross in weakness, to meet Him in the Lord's Supper this morning. Remember His weakness for you in broken pieces of bread and wine that is poured out.

Those things bring us immense blessings. We meet Him in community, but we meet Him alone. We have to be meeting in weakness, but we have to meet Him in His weakness too. Otherwise, we'd be toast. We can only meet Him because He became weak for us.

This is the only reason His grace comes to us. How can this be? I'm so unworthy. It is the wonder of His grace. Let's pray.

Thank You, Father in heaven, for giving us time and opportunity to think about how You and Your love are prepared to wrestle with us. And when You do, thank You for making that connection with us right down into our heart and into our soul. Lord, this morning, we don't wanna go until You give the blessing. And we wanna pray, Lord, that You'll make it possible for all of us to do some wrestling with You so that what we do in this place will result in our faith being nurtured, encouraged, and our walk with You and with one another being richly blessed. So Lord, we invite You to touch us this morning.

Reveal to us the weakness that we have so that we may have the experience of Your strength and Your blessings. Don't treat us as our sins deserve, we pray, but treat us only because Jesus Christ took our place. And that's our confession this morning. We want to remember Him in the way we partake together of the bread and the wine and give Him the glory for all He's done, for all who know You. We thank You for Jesus.

And together in His name, we pray when we say, amen.