Why on earth would God allow himself a wrestling match with Jacob? Or put another way, why – if it wasn’t actually God himself – would he let Jacob think he was wrestling with God, which Jacob really thought he was, Genesis 32:30.
Why? Well, choosing such an odd thing as a wrestling match was obviously meant to reveal something important about Jacob. Which it did, because Jacob wasn’t phased one bit that he was fighting with God. It didn’t matter to him at all that he was resisting God. Even when his hip was put out of joint (25) Jacob kept on resisting. And when told to stop resisting, Jacob refused, unless God blessed him (26).
It’s interesting, then, that “to this day (32) the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob’s hip was touched near the tendon.” So the Israelites felt the need to remember this occasion – and so they should because Jacob’s resistance pictured the problem that would plague Israel for centuries to come. God, in other words, was making it clear in this wrestling match with Jacob, that resisting him is asking for trouble.
He allows us to resist him though – but, the author of Hebrews tells us, take a leaf out of the story book of Israel (the new name given to Jacob in Genesis 32:28), because Jacob’s Israelite descendants got themselves into all sorts of trouble in their history for resisting God.
For example, Hebrews 3:8-9, the Israelites, in true Jacob fashion, rebelled against God, hardening their hearts against him all during their 40 year stint in the desert after their escape from Egypt. Result? Verse 11, “So I (God) declared an oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.’”
Whatever that last phrase means, it does picture perfectly for all us humans that we’ll never be “at rest” while resisting God. And here we are today as proof of it, having to live with constant global unrest too. But who among our leaders sees any relevance in the story of Jacob?
It’s a pity they don’t because what happened to Israel was “written down as warnings for us,” 1 Corinthians 10:11, to spare us from the trouble we get into when ignoring and resisting God. And “It’s all there in the story of Israel”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 