Jacob at the Jabbok

We often don’t realize that Jesus is all we need until Jesus is all we have. I cannot honestly say that I’ve been in that position. Or if I have, I haven’t stayed there very long. For days, weeks, months, even years after the death of our son, I felt at times as if I had been stripped down naked and that Jesus was all I had. Yet even in such desperate times, I found my soul could all too easily slip back into a complacent status quo spirituality that relishes the gifts more than the Giver and the blessings more than the Blesser.

During such times, the biblical account of Jacob began to take on fresh meaning in my own pilgrimage toward a different kind of happiness—a happiness the Bible sometimes calls God’s “blessing.” As Jacob's story begins, he walks with a strut; as the story ends, he walks with a limp. Throughout we discover that the crooked contours of his life only serve to highlight the matchless beauty of the grace of God who calls himself the God of Jacob. The crucial turning point in Jacob’s experience is graphically recounted in Genesis 32:22-31.

In the shadows of the night Jacob gets up, takes his two wives, maidservants, and eleven children and sends them over the Jabbok, a winding river located midway between the Sea of Galilee in the north and the Dead Sea in the south. The place name Jabbok speaks of a wrestling, crooked, twisting river. What better image to describe Jacob’s life up to this point. Indeed, the trickster Jacob was just as crooked as the river he is about to cross! Before Jacob can cross the Jabbok and enter into God’s blessing, he must fight.

Having sent his family members and possessions to the other side of the Jabbok, Jacob is alone.⁠ It’s time for Jacob to grapple in solitude not only with who he is and who God is, but also with what God’s blessing truly consists of and how to attain it. After all, Jacob’s real problem was not Esau, but God. His intimacy of relationship with God (or lack of it) invariably determined his view of himself and his relationship with people.

Like Jacob, we sometimes need to be sealed off and isolated. God often makes wise use of suffering to slow us down, to help us put on the brakes in our fast-paced lives so we can consider who we are, what we are doing, where we are going, and who God is. It might be an unexpected illness, a midnight phone call, a financial crisis, or the loss of a loved one that awakens us to our urgent need of soul care, and most importantly of God’s care.

Yes, Jacob is alone. Or at least he thinks he is! Suddenly out of nowhere, a “man” abruptly initiates a no-holds-barred wrestling match with Jacob. To describe the all-out struggle, the author chooses a term that derives from a word meaning “dust.” Jacob got dusty in this wrestling match! Within minutes, there was a takedown, an escape, a reversal, and a near fall. There was no referee to call illegal holds or technical violations. The long, indecisive bout continues on throughout the night. Round one, two, three. Alexander Whyte describes it well when he writes: “Whether in the body, Jacob to the day of his death could never tell; or whether out of the body, Jacob could never tell; but such a night of terror and of battle no other man every spent.”⁠

It would not be until round three that Jacob discovers he is fighting a heavenly heavyweight. It’s clear from other Old Testament passages that this unidentified “man” was not just any angel, but the Angel of the Lord (cf. Exodus 3:1-6; Numbers 22:31).⁠ The prophet Hosea confirms this understanding with his inspired commentary: “He struggled with the angel and overcame him; he wept and begged for his favor . . . the Lord God Almighty, the Lord is his name!” (Hosea 12:3-4).

Jacob did not choose the struggle, the God-Man did! Here, as at Bethel, the Hound of Heaven takes the initiative. Up to this point, Jacob had expended a great deal of energy wrestling with others, trying to get what he wanted. It was always Jacob, the “heel catcher,” who chose his opponents as well as his strategy. I’m certain Jacob tried every move in the book—cradle, crotch lift, duck-under, and even an aggressive gut wrench. Each move speaks of Jacob’s varied attempts based on heredity and trickery to experience God’s blessing. That’s what made this midnight match with the God-Man so relentless, lasting until daybreak.

Jacob finds himself in God’s gymnasium, not his own. The term comes from an ancient Greek term meaning to be “stripped naked.” For the first time, Jacob had to truly fight. He could no longer depend upon his shrewd strategies and cunning deceit to obtain what he wanted. No, he had to be stripped naked and taken to the mat so he could see himself for who he really was before God. In this wrestling match, Jacob could only win by losing.

Our toughest battles in life are not with ourselves, with others, with adverse circumstances, or even with our archenemy, Satan himself . . . but with God. As so often happens with us, Jacob finds himself fighting against the very One who can help him overcome his secondary opponents. Indeed, when God is no longer our ultimate refuge, he becomes our ultimate threat. Some directly blame God for the suffering in their lives, believing that if he controls all things he necessarily causes all things—including their suffering. Others indirectly blame God, reasoning that if he did not plan the suffering, he most certainly should have prevented it. Why didn’t he? So we wrestle on through our night of misery, stubbornly resisting the ever persistent, but deeply compassionate bark of the Hound of Heaven.

When the God-Man saw he couldn’t get the best of Jacob, he simply “touched him,” dislocating his hip (v. 25). If God’s finger could dislocate the heel catcher’s hip, think of what his strong arm could have done! But the God-Man chose to touch Jacob rather than crush Jacob. Satan crushes, God touches. Satan wants to destroy us, sifting us like wheat (Luke 22:31). God wants to touch us, purifying us like gold (Job 23:10). Even as years later the seraphim’s purging touch of Isaiah’s lips brought forgiveness (Isaiah 6:7), so here the angel’s loving, compassionate touch of Jacob’s hip brought brokenness.

God’s discipline in our lives, though intentional, is more often than not gentle. The entire wrestling match may have resembled the Japanese art of self-defense termed aikido, which uses an opponent’s own momentum to work against him. As is often the case in our experience, it may be that Jacob harmed himself in his aggressive wrestling match with God. Though God does not coerce, he does intentionally, wisely, and lovingly work through the harsh circumstances of our lives to bring us to the end of ourselves and to the beginning of an intimate encounter with himself.

Jacob must have felt this strategic move on the part of the angel was unfair. But God has a way of afflicting the comfortable as well as comforting the afflicted. When he does, we cry out: Not fair! We feel that God has done us wrong, that we don’t deserve such difficulty, or that God isn’t playing by the rules. But in Jacob’s case, God did play by the rules. For more than twenty years, he allowed Jacob to exercise his self-determinative freedom to go east in his flight from the land of promise. Though Jacob ran from the land of promise, he could never escape God’s hand of promise. And that divine hand now deliberately but lovingly touched Jacob at his point of greatest strength. God needs to throw us off balance at times and take us to the mat. That’s what suffering does. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, it “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.”⁠ (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 59).

Jacob was broken and recreated at the same time. Jacob’s physical disability became a testimony to his spiritual victory. God chose him, God loved him, but God needed to break him. The God-Man’s deliberate touch apparently resulted in musculoskeletal damage as well as neurological injury to the sciatic nerve all the way to the heel of the “heel catcher.” But more importantly, in touching Jacob’s strongest sinew, it shriveled, along with the wrestler’s persistent self-confidence. Until now, the only wrestling hold Jacob knew was to steal a man blind. But now, God broke Jacob’s physical strength in order to bless him with true spiritual and moral strength. Jacob’s resulting limp would teach him to lean on God rather than himself. The “heel catcher” had finally come to the point of wanting God’s blessing more than his own selfish desires.

In the morning twilight, Jacob could not see. But he was able to hear his heart, a heart that had now begun to be weaned away from the good in order to know and experience the best. The divine touch allowed Jacob to move from fighting his foe to tenaciously embracing his foe. Whatever the cost, he wanted God’s blessing. Jacob, the schemer, finally comes to realize that the blessing of God must be obtained on God’s terms, not his. Up to this point Jacob, in his scrappy persistence, had wrestled with God because he thought he had a chance of winning. Now he begins to understand what it really means to win with God.

Divine blessing begins with human brokenness. For us who are, like Jacob, so frequently obstinate of heart, God has to rip the “Jacob” out of us, stripping away every plausible source of false happiness to bring us into authentic happiness. Timothy Keller states it well: “But to grow into a true “free lover” of God, who has the depth of joy unknown to the mercenary, conditional religious observer—we must ordinarily go through a stripping. We must feel that to obey God will bring us no benefits at all. It is at that point that seeking, praying to, and obeying God begin to change us.⁠” (Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, 283).

We can only be successful with God to the degree that we are crippled in our own self-sufficiency. Just as water always flows to the lowest level, so God’s greatest blessings flow down on the humble of heart. To become victors, we must be vanquished. This is the paradoxical nature of the pilgrimage of faith, of which Jacob’s birth order was a consistent reminder.⁠ But that’s just like God, constantly reversing the expected order of things.

As the sun set, Jacob was fearful and apprehensive. As the sun rose, he was broken and blessed. Having confronted and confessed his own crookedness, he was now ready to cross the crooked Jabbok and enter the Land of Promise. He does so having received what he wanted and what he didn’t want. He wanted God’s blessing. But with the blessing came a limp, which characterized Jacob’s gait for the rest of his life. Jacob entered this midnight match physically whole, but spiritually lame. He now crosses the Jabbok physically lame, but spiritually whole.

Having won with God, Jacob was now ready to win with men. So he limps and leaps into the arms of his estranged brother. In fact, the loving touch he received from the God-Man kept him limping and leaning for the rest of his life (Exodus 47:31). The epitaph of this unlikely hero is recorded for us in Hebrews 11:21: “By faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph’s sons, and worshiped as he leaned on the top of his staff.”