Let's Get Ready to Rumble!

This to me is one of the strangest stories in the Bible.  Jacob, the Israeli patriarch has a strange encounter with an Angel or perhaps God in the flesh.

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.”

But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

The man asked him, “What is your name?”

“Jacob,” he answered.

Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”

Jacob said, “Please tell me your name.”

But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”
Genesis 32:24-30

What is happening in this passage?  One thing is certainly not happening; Jacob does not actually overpower God.  If God chose to be physically detained while wrestling with Jacob, it was at God's design.  Perhaps God's purpose could have been to test Jacob's resolve.  In my last entry, I mentioned a passage from Luke 18, the parable of the Unjust Judge.  In that passage, we were advised to come to God repeatedly with our prayers.  How many Christians today can say that we have literally spent the entire night wrestling with God in prayer?  Perhaps this is why the modern church, particularly in America has become so ineffective.

If our prayer lives look more like "Now I lay me down to sleep..." and less like wrestling with God to the point that we are physically injured, we should not expect God to attend to our prayers.  There's a fine line to walk here.  On one hand, God is sovereign and we need to accept that He knows what is best for us.  But on the other hand, we are instructed to bring our prayers to the Lord again and again.  Even if our prayers are never answered in this life, we have the assurance of a better life to come.