[Machine transcription]
So Jacob called the name of the place Piniel, saying, “I have seen God face to face, and my life has been spared. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints of God, Jacob is 91 years old in the text, 91. That makes his brother Esau also 91; they were twins, remember? And they had been at it for 91 years. Here’s the back story. You’ll remember when Jacob and Esau were born, even before they were born, they were wrestling in the womb. And the Lord had given the promise that the older Esau would serve the younger Jacob. But the problem was Esau didn’t really like that promise, nor did Isaac really. Esau was the strong one. He was kind of a military guy. He was the one who was out in the field stirring up all the support. And so, it looked like Esau should be the one to have the inheritance. Esau was the one who got married; he had two wives, he had a bunch of children. Jacob, until he was 77, was a bachelor, didn’t have a family.
And so, Esau and Isaac were working to give the inheritance to Esau, while Jacob and Rebekah were working to get the inheritance to Jacob. Remember the first time that happened was when Esau was out hunting and he comes in and he’s famished. And he says to Jacob, “Give me some of the red lentil stew,” and he says, “I’ll do it for your birthright.” And he says, “Fine, what is my birthright to me? I’m starving to death anyways.” And so, he sells Jacob his birthright. He despised the very thing that he was trying to keep.
But then, instead of treating Jacob as the one who was now to have the inheritance, he went on to assume that he would get it. When they were older, and this is when Isaac had started to lose his eyesight, he knows that his own time is short, and so he wants to make sure that the blessing is handed on. He tells Esau, “Go out and hunt and get some game and cook it for me, and we’ll have a feast and a celebration, and I’ll ordain you. I’ll pass on the blessing to you; you’ll be king and you’ll be priest.”
So, Esau goes out to hunt, and this is the occasion that Rebekah and Jacob take to come and get the blessing to the right guy. They kill the goat, remember? They put the goat skin on Jacob’s hands. You have to wonder how hairy was Esau that they needed a goat to fool him. He puts on the priestly robes. He goes into the house, and Isaac gives him the blessing. And he leaves, and Esau comes in with the stew; no doubt he had his wives and his family and his friends all there with him, that he himself gets dressed up for this occasion. He is, after all, about to be made king, we think of it like the coronation that happens in England or something like that. He comes in for this great ceremony, and Isaac says, “Who are you? I gave the blessing to Jacob, not to you.”
Now, this was as the Lord willed, and as it was supposed to happen according to the promise, but Esau is enraged, and you see that his unbelief comes out in this. He wants to murder his brother Jacob, and in fact, he knows that murdering Jacob will end up killing his own father’s life. He says, “I’ll murder Jacob; Isaac will die.” He doesn’t care; he’s enraged, and he’s going after them, so Rebekah says to Jacob, “Time to get out of town.”
So, he leaves. He goes to his Uncle Laban’s house. There, remember, he works for seven years and then marries Leah, even though he hoped to marry Rachel, and then marries Rachel, and then, sorry, Rebekah, and then he comes back fourteen years later. So here he’s coming back, and this gets us to the text. Fourteen years later, he has two wives, he has eleven children, the Lord has blessed his efforts so that he has a huge amount of wealth, herds of goats and of sheep, and he comes now back to the land that the Lord has promised.
But the one who is dwelling in the land is Esau, the brother who hates him, the brother who wanted to kill him. So Jacob is afraid. And we see it because he comes now to the river Jabbok, and this was the boundary line which he was going to cross over. He comes to that river, and he is slow to cross it. In fact, he sends out some of his servants, and they go and they find out that Esau knew that he was coming, and they come back and they report the news to him that Esau knows that you’re coming, and he is coming to meet you, but not alone; he’s coming with 400 men, an army.
And Jacob is now worried that Esau is not coming to greet him, but coming to do the work that he wanted to do fourteen years earlier and kill him. So he comes up with a plot. He’s going to send—he separates his herds and all his wealth, and he sends them in waves as gifts to Esau. So, “Here’s a flock, what’s this? It’s for you, it’s for you, it’s for you.” And he’s giving him all these gifts hoping that it might soften him and butter him up so that he won’t murder him when he finally gets to him. He does all this plotting, and then last he sends his family over, and then he prays.
And he prays, “Lord, you’ve given me these promises; you’ve given me these blessings, but I’ve got none of them.” In fact, we have to say, what kind of king was Jacob after all? He was, as soon as he was crowned the king, he wasn’t given a king’s staff; he was given a walking stick, and he wasn’t sat on the throne; he was given a backpack and shipped out of town. So it seems like the more that the blessings come to Jacob, the less blessing he actually has.
And so he prays, “Lord, you’ve given me these promises; Lord, you’ve given me these words; Lord, you’ve given me these blessings, but I’ve got none of it. You’ve promised to be with me, and now my brother Esau is coming to attack me, and I think that I’m not going to even live through the day.” It’s quite a stunning moment in the text when you read it. When Jacob at last sends his family over the river and he’s standing there by himself, maybe kneeling there by himself, praying, and he opens his eyes, and there in front of him is the Lord. Jacob just sees a man.
Now, I like to do this with the kids in confirmation class, especially if they don’t know the story. I like to say, okay, tell me what you think is going to happen next. Jacob is praying, and he opens his eyes, and there before him is Jesus. What happens next? Let’s make it a multiple-choice question. A. Jacob builds an altar and offers a sacrifice to the Lord. That’s what he did when he was leaving and he was sleeping in Bethel and he saw and he had the dream of the stairs going up to heaven and the Lord going up and down on the stairs. He wakes up and he makes an altar and he makes a sacrifice. He names the place Bethel. A. Or B. Jacob falls down on his face before the Lord and begs him to deliver him and to have mercy on him and to help him as he goes back into the promised land. Or, C. Jesus gives Jacob a pile driver.
Now you think, well, you thought of C because you just couldn’t think of anything else, but that’s… You see, this is what actually… it’s the craziest thing. Jacob opens his eyes from prayer, and he sees the Lord in front of him, and maybe if Jacob is thinking about falling down on his face to worship him, the Lord looks at him and runs at him and tackles him and drives him down into the mud. And Jacob, I imagine startled at first, rolls over, and they are throwing each other, grappling, and one gets the other in a headlock, and the other twists him over and throws him in the mud, and the other one puts his foot on his face, and then he twists his ankle, and this goes on all night. Can you imagine it?
This 91-year-old Jacob wrestling with Jesus all night until the sun starts to come up. And there they are, muddy, panting, covered in blood and sweat, robes torn, exhausted. And Jesus says to Jacob, “Let me go,” and he says, “Not until you bless me.” So Jesus touches his hip, knocks it out of socket, “Let me go,” “Not until you bless me.” So the Lord says to Jacob, “You are no longer Jacob. You are Israel.” Israel is just the Hebrew word for the one who wrestles with God. “You are Israel, for you have wrestled with man and with God, and you have prevailed.”
And then Jacob says, “Who are you?” And he says, “Why do you ask who I am? You know.” And he departs and leaves Jacob there alone again. Now this is not what you expect. This is not what we expect when we’re reading the Bible, and I think even more and more importantly and to the point, this is not what we expect from life. We don’t, when we’re baptized, expect life to be one long monstrous wrestling match with God. But you are Israel. No, that means that you are wrestling with God, and you are wrestling with Him most importantly and primarily in your prayers.
It sounds like this: “Lord bless me,” and he says, “Here’s a broken hip.” And you say, “Lord bless me,” and then he says, “Here’s the blessing.” We are limping along with Jacob across the river because we wrestle with God. Now I do not, dear saints, I do not know why it’s like this. I do not know why the Lord has chosen to deal with us this way. I don’t know why He says this is what your life is supposed to be like, but it is. And so, with joy, or with as much energy as we can muster, we wrestle with God.
Now the story continues, and it’s quite amazing because Jacob names the place Pineo, which means the face of God, and he says, “I’ve seen the face of God, and I’ve lived.” He can’t believe it. But the key question for us that we wonder about is, what did the face of God look like? And we get a hint later on in the text. Because Jacob goes across the river, and he sees his brother Esau coming to him, and Esau, it’s almost like the story of the prodigal son, Esau runs to his brother and scoops him up in his arms, weeping, and kisses him. And we say, “Wow, we weren’t expecting that either.”
And then listen to what Jacob says. This is in chapter 33, the next chapter, 33 verse… well, let me pick it up in verse 8. Esau says, “What do you mean by all this company that I met along the way?” In other words, “Why did you do all that rigmarole to try to soften me?” Jacob answered, “To find favor in the sight of my Lord.” But Esau said, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.”
And then Jacob says, “No, please, if I have found favor in your sight, then accept my present from my hand, for I have seen your face, which is like seeing the face of God, and you have accepted me.” Now think about what that means. When Jacob saw Esau, he didn’t see Esau mad and angry and running at him to kill him. He saw Esau’s face smiling full of joy and gladness that Jacob had come back. And when Jacob sees that face on Esau, that smiling, welcoming, joyful face on Esau, he says, “You look like God.” In other words, the whole time Jacob was wrestling with the Lord, Jesus was smiling at him. The whole night when they were throwing each other around, Jesus was laughing with joy.
Now this is hard, but this is the point of the whole sermon, and maybe the point of the whole text, that you are wrestling with God, but this does not mean that God is mad at you. On His face is a smile. Why? Because He loves you. And all the struggle, and all the difficulty, and all the challenges, and all the nonsense of life, all the temptations, and the torments, and the struggles, and the affliction, and the sadness, all of it, all of it comes with God’s smile, with His love, with His comfort, with His peace, with His promise that He will never leave you or forsake you, that He will be with you always even to the end and with the confidence that He loves you.
That face of Esau, that face of Jesus, that is what awaits us on the other side of life, to close your eyes in death and to open them and see the face of the Lord and to see on that face a smile. Dear saints, you are those who are wrestling with man, with God, and by God’s grace, you prevail because Jesus is dead and risen and all of that for you.
So may God grant us His Spirit. May we wrestle with joy and peace, knowing that the Lord loves us. In the name of Jesus, amen. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.