Every time an Israelite rested on the Sabbath Day it pictured GOD doing all the work of making him holy (Exodus 31:13). But instead of trusting God to make them holy, the Israelites ‘did a Jacob’ and “sought to establish their own righteousness” by their own means and effort (Romans 10:3). We learn from the story of Israel, then, that keeping the Sabbath-rest – by trusting GOD to fulfill his purpose in us – isn’t easy, and the writer of Hebrews 4:11 echoes that when he writes, “Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest.”
So that’s where our human struggle lies: It’s putting our entire life in trust to God, rather than taking things into our own hands like Jacob. And it’s a struggle all right, because situations keep cropping up that tempt us to ‘do a Jacob’ – even when we know God is always here to help us (Philippians 4:13, 19).
It wasn’t easy for Jacob later in his life either, because even after he realized he’d actually seen “God face to face” in his wrestling match (Genesis 32:30), he still got anxious fourteen chapters later in Genesis 46:3 when faced with uprooting his entire family of 70 people and heading off to Egypt. But God promised to be with him, verse 4, and this time Jacob trusted him.
But even though God promises to be with us, it can still be a real struggle believing it. It was a struggle for much of Jacob’s life too, just as it was for Ephraim in Hosea 12, and for the entire nation of Israel all through its history. They all resorted to prevailing with God and man by their own ways and means, rather than trusting God to sort things out. They preferred wrestling to resting.
According to the writer of Hebrews, though, there’s only one wrestling match we’re involved in, and that’s the one in our own heads. When we “make every effort” to enter God’s rest, it’s by steeling our minds to trust our great high priest to help us in our time of need (Hebrews 4:14-16). When tempted to take things into our own hands in scary situations, or in our upsets with people, or being anxious about anything, it’s to him that we turn.
Because that’s the moral of the story of Jacob and Israel. It was written for our sakes too, and the choice is still the same: “Wrestle or rest – which is to be?”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 