What a mixture Jacob was. He knew, for instance, that contacting his brother Esau was highly risky because Esau had wanted to kill him back in Genesis 27:41-45. But Jacob was willing to take that risk, which was remarkably different for him, because so much of his life was about conniving for his own benefit.
But Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men, which filled Jacob with “fear and distress,” Genesis 32:6-7. And Esau himself was no pushover either. He’d fit in very nicely at a Scottish Highland games – and look the red hairy part too – flinging telephone poles and hammers around.
But Jacob did a very different thing again, because instead of depending on his own wits to wrestle his way through a difficult situation, this time he cried out to God in verse 11, “Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children.”
At this point in his life, then – “Wrestle or rest – which was it to be?” – he’d chosen “rest.” He was going to trust God.
But, being Jacob, it would include a strategy of his own too. He came up with the idea of “pacifying” Esau (20) by sending him a sizeable gift of “two hundred female goats and twenty males, two hundred ewes and twenty rams, thirty female camels and their young, forty cows and ten bulls, and twenty female donkeys and ten males” (14).
But not all at once. Jacob instructed his servants to keep each of the five large herds separate from the others, so as Esau got closer each herd would be introduced to him in waves as a gift from Jacob, each wave designed to soften Esau up (17-21). It was an elaborate operation involving a lot of mental wrestling.
Imagine Jacob’s embarrassment, then, when “Esau ran up to meet him and threw his arms round Jacob’s neck” – not to throttle him, but in a happy and emotional embrace (33:4). So Jacob could have totally rested in God, spared himself all that worry – and not given away five hundred of his animals too.
But in difficult situations what do any of us do? When it comes to wrestling or resting, perhaps Jacob’s story is ours too? Taking note too, though, that in these situations “Jacob’s trust in God grew”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 