Your name will no longer be Jacob… From now on you will be called Israel, because you have fought with God and with men and have won. Genesis 32:28 (MSG)

With God – Jacob Series – Part 6

Go to PART 1  |  PART 2  |  PART 3  |  PART 4  |  PART 5  |  PART 6  |  PART 7

The word/name Israel means: “You have struggled with the Divine and you have succeeded.”

In the Old Testament, there are three things called Israel: A land, a group of people, and a man who was once named Jacob. These three ‘entities' have many things in common, one of them being ‘struggle.' In Ancient Hebrew culture, a struggle was not a bad thing. Still today in Jewish culture, it’s not looked down upon as a weakness, or even as darkness. It’s a positive and life affirming process. For them, if you’re not struggling and wrestling with something on any scale, be it large or small, then you’re not really living. You're not asking questions. You're going where the flow takes you, swallowing everything fed to you, accepting the status quo, not adventuring into the unknown, stepping out in faith (you get the idea).

Jacob knew what it was to struggle: He wrestled with his identity; he wrestled a birthright out of his brother and father’s hands; he wrestled and struggled for love. And by the time we find him in Genesis 32, about to meet his brother for the first time in more than a decade, he spent a night wrestling with a man and came out both injured AND blessed.

Injured and blessed.

Afterward, the man he had wrestled with said to him, “Your name will no longer be Jacob… From now on you will be called Israel, because you have fought with God and with men and have won.” (v28).

It's interesting that you can fight with God and win. It’s not that God comes out the loser in the fight, but by engaging with God, and wrestling out the stuff in your life – asking the questions, voicing your heartaches, declaring your angst – there’s blessing to be found. You can’t wrestle with God and fail. In fact, Jewish culture would suggest that if you’re NOT struggling something out, that is a failure regarding engaging life and living it fully and meaningfully. There is so much going on around the world, and in our communities, and in our hearts, we SHOULD have questions and things to wrestle out with the Divine.

Sacred messages can come to us in ways that are both scary and heavenly, scarring and healing: like wrestling with God and man and coming out blessed and injured as Jacob did that night in the dessert. Too often we look for God in the sublime and picture perfect moments of life. I tend to find him more in the wrestle, in the struggle, in my questions and my nagging curiosity; in my heartaches and pains, in my injuries – heart and body alike – that turn out to be blessings when I live out my life all the way through them. It’s not God who desires perfection; that's a human hang up. All God wants is our awareness and willingness to wake up to him and walk with him through whatever comes our way as best we can.

Wrestling with God often means losing something that we were wishing for, to gain what we were born for.

Sounds a little bit like something Jesus said: “Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” (John 12:25 MSG).

And look, wrestling with God doesn’t have to mean that you’re in opposition to him. It’s part of the learning process. It’s part of living. It’s part of seeking him out through it all.

The writer of Genesis said that after the man had left, “Jacob named the place Peniel (God’s Face) because, he said, “I saw God face-to-face and lived to tell the story!”” (v30).

Face-to-face with God: in doubts, in questions, hopes, dreams, failures, successes, mistakes, heartaches, neglects, abuses, sins, lies, loves… all of it. Wrestle it out. There is much beauty and truth to be found.

What have you got to wrestle with God about? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Go to Part 7 – Thank You »

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