"Face to Face with God"
Genesis 32:22-32
May 30, 1999

Text Comment

v. 23    Readers of this passage have always wondered why Jacob crossed the Jabbok at night, instead of the day when it would have been easier, and why, having crossed with his family -- the herds apparently had already crossed the day before -- he then returned to the far side of the river? It may simply be that all of this activity is a demonstration of Jacob's disturbed state of mind, his worry about what would transpire when Esau arrived with his four hundred men. Too worried to sleep he pressed on, even at night; but too worried, too preoccupied, to be with anyone else, he returned to the other side of the river to be alone.

v. 24    The struggle is described from Jacob's viewpoint. He was attacked by an unidentified and unidentifiable man and made to fight for his life all night long. The reference to daybreak indicates that it was a long fight, but also, apparently, why Jacob had not recognized his attacker. It was dark. We are not told precisely how Jacob recognized that he was fighting with the Lord. The Lord's presence is always self-authenticating! There is a world of meaning to ponder in the fact that Jacob is said to have fought this man to a standstill who had but to touch Jacob's hip to make him lame!

v. 26    Why does "the man" wish to end this contest before daybreak? It seems he wishes to continue to hide his identity. Perhaps there is also something of the idea that human beings are not able to look upon God. In any case, it is a disclosure of the supernatural character of Jacob's opponent. He's not here, in any case, to chat with Jacob or satisfy his curiosity.

v. 27    The angel of the Lord obviously knows who Jacob is. The point of the question is to force Jacob to say his own name. Remember the use that has already been made of Jacob's name ("the supplanter" or "the deceiver"), e.g., in 27:36 when Esau says, "Is he not rightly called Jacob? He has deceived me these two times." By telling the angel of the Lord his name Jacob is divulging his character; confessing his guilt.

v. 28    The blessing comes in the form of a new name (as had happened before -- e.g. Abram, Sarai). It presages the fulfillment of God's promises to Jacob and recognizes Jacob's new character. His old name recalled his underhanded and selfish dealings with others. His new name will recall this incident when he wrestled with God and prevailed. Within the episode, of course, the new name is a promise that he will have a successful meeting with his brother Esau.

v. 29    God withholds his name from Jacob. Jacob does not control God. He must live his life trusting in the mysterious, but unseen God. He blessed Jacob and then disappeared into the dark. Luther's "Deus absconditus."

v. 30    "Peniel" means "face of God." No one can see God and live the Bible says. The glory of God is a mortal danger to men and women. But Jacob had seen God, if only in the form of a man and if only in the dark, and had survived. Obviously he will now survive his meeting with Esau.

v. 32    Though God had permitted Jacob to prevail in this encounter, he had left his mark on his servant. This whole scene is like a wrestling match a father has with his little boy in which the little boy wins because the father wants him to win! Jacob walked away from Peniel with a limp, a permanent reminder of this contest with God and, for Israel later, recollected by means of this custom of not eating the hip tendon, a reminder of the promise of victory that the Lord has made to those who trust in and cling to him.

This is not, of course, the only time that the living God appeared to one of his servants in the form of a man. He had so appeared to Abraham. He would to Joshua. Whether we call him the angel of the Lord or the Lord himself matters not. It is clear that God made an appearance to Jacob. This, with other such appearances in human form, are anticipations of the incarnation, when the Son of God, or God the Son, would take a human nature to himself forever and live and suffer and die as a man in the place of men for their salvation. And this appearance reminds us that the life of faith in that ancient time, in Jacob's day, was the same as it is today and must be lived as it had to be lived then.

For what we have here in this momentous incident in the life of Jacob is one of those revealing moments in which all becomes clear, in which the nature of faith and the true issue of life are stripped bare for all to see. You and I have had such moments ourselves, or, at least, many of us have had them. And we saw in those moments, whether a crisis of repentance, or illumination, or joy, what it means to trust in God, the true significance of our lives, and how indescribably great a thing it is to know God and to be known by him. As Frederick Faber once wrote, "The biography of everyone of us is to ourselves as luminously supernatural, and as palpably full of divine interferences, as if it were a page out of the Old Testament history." [Cited in Barbour, Alexander Whyte, 649]

Like Jacob, these experiences of ours were often intensely personal. We were, in one way or another, alone. And in our solitude, the Lord drew near and showed himself to us. It was Jacob's fear of Esau and Jacob's troubled mind, and confusion, and inability to sleep that created the opportunity that God then seized to show himself to Jacob and to draw out of Jacob a powerful faith that Jacob himself didn't know he had and to confirm to Jacob's mind and heart the victory of faith. "To him who overcomes I will give a new name," the Lord says to the Churches of the Revelation, which is just what he taught Jacob that night by the Jabbok almost two thousand years before.

How many times and in how many ways has this happened to the saints of God!

We have begun reading at the table Monday nights the little book of reminiscences of his missionary life in India by Dr. John Taylor, a medical missionary in India for fifty years, the father of Gordon Taylor, whom we have known for so many years through his work at the Bhogpur Children's Home, a ministry, founded by Dr. Taylor, to care for the children of leper parents in NW India. But he began those reminiscences with something of his early life as a farmboy in Kansas in the later years of the 19th and early years of the 20th century. His father, a veteran of the Civil War, died when he was a teenager and he confesses to an unbounded admiration for his saintly mother who, through difficult times, raised five children with an eye always to the interests of Christ in their hearts and lives. John himself, however, struggled spiritually after the death of his father. He was a dutiful son, but he knew the rebellion and confusion in his heart.

"Our church young people were having their Christian Endeavor meetings on Friday evening. One particular meeting the girl I liked best was the leader and she appointed me to be the leader for the next Friday. I wanted to be a good leader to impress her! (For a teenaged boy, the need to impress a girl is as great a pressure as Jacob's having to face his brother Esau.) It was the custom that the leader take the opening prayer. This I feared. If I tried to rush through a memorized prayer I knew I would get into trouble; also, it would be evident to all that I was a fake and my heart was not right. I knew well where the trouble was but I did not want to do it.

"Awareness of what I had to do, came to me very clearly that night as I rode, horseback, one mile north of Stafford, Kansas on my way back to my job. Neither could I solve the problems of others nor would I be called upon to answer for them, however I would be called upon to account for my own sins. Being at my wit's end, I had to call for help. At that point I gave up, called on Jesus Christ, and agreed to do His bidding. My heart found rest. I resolved to do what I could to heal the sores of others. I saw I would have to love the unlovely and serve them as Christ would have me serve and love them. This has been my goal every since that night. I was given this verse: 'Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you' (Matt. 6:33)." [pp. 12-13]

Like Jacob, Dr. Taylor's Peniel was in the dark of night, when the stimuli that play upon our eyes and ears and distract us from the reality of the divine presence lose much of their force, and we are left alone to be visited by God. Like Jacob the Lord met him when he least expected it, had done nothing to bring such a meeting to pass, had not, so far as we can tell, even sought it, though we can't be sure of that. As the great Martin Lloyd-Jones observes, in a sermon he preached on our text, that there is always an element of surprise, of the utterly unexpected in God's dealings with his people.

Jacob had no idea that the night would turn out as it did and change his life forever; nor did John Taylor, or multitudes of other Christians to whom at one time or another the Lord drew suddenly near. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he was set upon by some stranger and forced to struggle with him through the night! One of the marks of true Christian faith and life is just this recognition that much has happened to him or to her, much has happened within the heart and in the life, that he or she never anticipated, never planned for, never expected. God has altered things in his own way.

Some of you can well remember how the Lord met you and turned your life in a direction you never imagined you would take and has caused you to think thoughts and to care about things that never entered your mind before. And many of us can remember how the Lord, in the course of our Christian lives, visited us and completely blasted out of mind and heart those things that we were thinking and planning and worrying about at the time and replaced them with nothing but thoughts of his own glory and the joy of knowing Him. It must be so when the Almighty God draws near that our tidy set of little expectations is stood on its head! [OT Evangelistic Sermons, 22-23]

And then there is this also that is common to all such experiences of which Jacob's encounter with the Lord at the Jabbok is a pattern or paradigm. We see tend to our lives in worldly, temporal terms, we judge our problems, our needs, our wants in those terms.

Jacob saw his life at that moment in terms of the approach of Esau. That, he thought, was his problem, the issue, the matter of supreme importance, the true threat to his happiness. He could see nothing but Esau, he feared nothing but Esau. But, little as he knew it, it was not so. His state of mind was fundamentally mistaken. We live today in a world that, I suppose, works harder and thinks longer and talks more about solving its problems than the world has ever done before. But the problems are never resolved, they regularly worsen. It is always this Esau or that. If we could just get by this or that. If we could just get people to do this or that. But the people of our world have misdiagnosed their problem, they are paying attention to the wrong things. Christians can do this too. They worry about this and that and imagine that if only they could change this or get that all would be well.

But, then, God draws near, and in a moment Jacob forgot all about Esau. He realized in a moment of stunning spiritual clarity that all that mattered, all that ever mattered was that he would be with God and that God would be with him. No matter what his circumstances, if only he were with God all would be well. And so he clung to the Lord and refused to let him go; demanded, plead for the blessing of the Lord upon his head.

Writing about his coming to true and living faith in Christ when he was fifteen years of age, John Henry Newman, then a protestant, later, alas, a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said this:

"When I was fifteen a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured. Above and beyond the conversations and sermons of the excellent man, long dead, who was the human means of this beginning of divine faith in me, was the effect of the books which he put into my hands, all of the school of Calvin.... I was then, and I still am, more certain of my inward conversion than that I have hands and feet. My conversion was such that it made me rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator...."

I love that line and it beautifully describes Jacob's experience that night by the Jabbok. He started by worrying about the safety of himself, his family at the approach of Esau, but in that moment of dazzling, electrifying realization, there were now but two luminously self-evident beings left in his universe: himself and the living God with whom he struggled, from whom he sought and demanded blessing because now he knew that divine blessing was all that mattered, absolutely all that mattered. Without it the greatest success and pleasure in the world was nothing but a dismal prelude to misery; with it the greatest danger and difficulty were but those occasions when God's strength would be made perfect in his weakness. "If God be for us, who can be against us." That is Christian theology, but only from time to time, does that truth penetrate with its wonderful power and effect to the bottom of a Christian heart as it did that night by the Jabbok.

What is true faith, after all, but just that state of mind in Jacob that caused him cling to the Lord and then to say, "I will not let you go unless you bless me." It is what a man says who realizes that he has no other hope. Throw caution to the wind for what else is there? "Christianity is not for the well-meaning," someone has wisely said, "it is for the desperate." The other religions of the world may well be for the well-meaning, but the gospel of divine grace is for those who know themselves hopeless without it.

It is a daring thing for a sinful man, a Jacob, a deceiver, to say that to God, but it is a gracious and merciful God, a tender-hearted and compassionate heavenly Father, who allows himself to be vanquished by such a faith and such a confession of need and dependence. What brashness on Jacob's part: to demand a blessing from God; to threaten -- the little worm -- not to let the Lord go, as if he could prevent it really, limping as he was from one touch of the divine finger. But it is the faith that God approves and loves, the faith he condescends to reward and bless always and ever.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
Swear by thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, Thou hast done,
I fear no more.

Like Jacob, with his brash demand, John Donne in his famous poem asked God to swear an oath to him, as if God couldn't be trusted or as if Donne himself had any right to such an assurance by God. But the Bible itself teaches us to demand this of the Lord, who swears by himself again and again in Holy Scripture, precisely to encourage and to strengthen the faith that his people have in him. And why should we not be at our most urgent, our most determined, our most demanding when we are before God in prayer (and what is Jacob at the Jabbok wrestling with the Lord but one of the great pictures of prayer in the Bible) -- for if we have the Lord and his blessing, we have everything, everything for now and everything forever!

A few weeks ago I was visiting Mrs. Paist in her home in Olympia and in the course of that visit she showed me, written in a little notebook, a confession of faith written by her husband something more than a year and a half before he died in October of 1986. Only some of you will remember Jack Paist, who came years ago with his dear wife to retire in Olympia and whose coming was one of the Lord's great blessings to this church and one the Lord's key instruments to effect its renewal. Before long he was an elder here and a superb elder he was. I owe more to Mr. Paist than I can possibly say and perhaps no one else knows how much this congregation owes to that faithful man, now so long dead, as I do.

In his reminiscences, Dr. Taylor recalls his mother saying many times to her children about their father who had died while some of them were still quite young: "Oh, how I wish you all could have known what a good man your father was -- his love, his integrity, his faith: he was such a fine man!" Well, I can say the same thing about Jack Paist, brothers and sisters, to you who did not know him, or who did not know him well.

Here is what he wrote in that little notebook one day in March of 1983:

"It seems to me to be an appropriate time to set down in writing some thoughts of my God. The one whom I desire to honor and to serve, yet whom I fail so miserably day by day.

"My God is Jehovah the one who, out of nothing, brought into being everything that is. He is the one also who sustains and holds together the whole creation. He is a personal God who knows the mind and heart of everyone. He has absolute control over everything infinitely and eternally. He has all wisdom, all power and is perfect love. All praise is due to Him.

I have committed my life to Him and pray for His grace to think, speak, act, and desire that He will be served, honored, and adored. I pray that I will love Jesus, God the Son, my Lord and my Savior more and more each day. My love seems so cold to me but maybe it is that I am not a warm and emotional person.

I ask the Lord for grace to grow warmer and more loving during the next year that He may be glorified in me." Jack Paist [March 3, 1983]

There is it again. God and the believer -- the knowledge of the Lord and his salvation, my dependence upon him, and the greatness of his salvation, the bottom facts of life, the facts that gives meaning to every other fact of life. "I will not let you go unless you bless me." "Lord, to whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." Whenever someone sees the face of God, as Jacob did at Peniel, whenever anyone encounters God and God's presence as Jack Paist did, it is always the same: "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

In the experience of life, it is often not an easy thing to come to this point, this determination before God, this clearest possible sight of what is truly important. Think of all that went into making it such a moment and such an experience of crystal clarity for Jacob. All his sin and another year of struggle resulting from his sin, all that God had done for him and promised to him and all the danger of his life building to this climax by the Jabbok. And then it took Jacob an entire night of wrestling -- there was a long struggle before the breakthrough, before it became clear to him what all of this meant. Prayer will take more out of you, true, honest, faithful, prevailing prayer, prayer that seeks from God's hand what is most necessary for your own soul, honest prayer that lays bare the soul and the life before God, will take more out of you than anything else you ever do in the world. It will exhaust you and leave you as if you were limping! But it will have gained you the Lord and the blessing of the Lord and compared to that all the most diligent and impressive labors of mankind produce nothing of any importance whatsoever.

Is it possible that there is someone in this congregation today who, having heard these things, does not want to say with Jacob, "I will not let you go!" "Not until, not unless I have your blessing." Is there not someone here who, like Jacob, finds himself or herself so surprised by the course life has taken and by what God has made plain to him or her and even by the struggle that he or she has had with God. And is there someone who knows that he or she stands very much in need of God's blessing: of forgiveness of sin, of hope, of peace to overcome the fears, of love to replace the hatred that darkens the life, of a sense of high purpose for living? You say to God, like Jacob, "I will not let you go! Not until I have that blessing from your hand. The Scripture teaches me that those who come to God and refuse to take no for an answer will be heard. I will not let you go." Is the day about to dawn for you in your struggle with the Lord?

Say it in regard to what ever you must have from the Lord; say it and say it again throughout the long night. Say it until he blesses you; for he will. Is there this brashness before God in you and in your prayer?

In vain thou strugglest to get free,
I never will unloose my hold;
Art thou the man that died for me?
The secret of thy love unfold.
Wrestling, I will not let thee go,
Till I thy name, thy nature know.
(Charles Wesley)