Bible Passage: Genesis 32:22-30
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: October 16, 2022

Bulletin October 16, 2022

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

Martin Luther said our text is one of the most obscure sections in all of Scripture.  There are things about it that are hard to understand!  It is difficult to understand why God comes out of nowhere in the form of a man and wrestles with Jacob.  Why does he do it on the night before Jacob is going to meet his brother Esau?  Why doesn’t he make quick work of Jacob?  Why does God dislocate his hip?  And finally, why does God let himself get pinned?

If a theologian like Martin Luther admitted this is a difficult text, we may have to concede that we may not find answers to all our questions.  But there are certainly some lessons we can draw from this account for our own prayer life.  So let’s examine this nighttime wrestling match when God Gets Pinned.

Jacob is all alone.  He has moved his wives and children and possessions across the Jabbok River.   He is thinking strategically about the best approach to the next day.  He is returning to Canaan and he has heard that his twin brother Esau is coming out to meet him with all his men.  Recall that Esau has vowed to kill Jacob because of the way Jacob tricked their father into giving him the blessing of the firstborn.  The reunion could get ugly.

After positioning his family where he wants them, he is all alone.  A man comes out of the darkness and begins to wrestle Jacob!  The Hebrew word for wrestle has at its root the word “dust.’  We sometimes speak of a “dust up” between people.  Jacob was in a “dust up” with God!  It is difficult to determine exactly when Jacob realizes he is wrestling with God.  But at the end of our lesson, it is clear Jacob knows he has seen God face-to-face!

As the match goes on into the wee hours of the morning, the divine Grappler sees that Jacob is just not going to say “uncle”!  I’ve watched wrestling matches like that, where one wrestler, though overmatched, just fights and struggles and just when it looks like they will be pinned they will pull their shoulder an inch off the mat and wrestle on!  So God does something.  Something for which we might yell, “Foul!  Cheat!  Not fair!  You can’t do that!”  God touched Jacob’s hip and dislocated it.  That is a very painful injury!  But still, Jacob does not quit.

The sun begins to rise.  Jacob’s opponent says it’s time for the match to be over.  “Let me go,” he says.  Sweaty, dusty Jacob, with searing pain shooting through his hip, replies, I will not let you go, unless you bless me.  (v. 26)  He’s got God in a pin hold!  He is holding God to the mat, he is “pinning” God to his Word!  He is pinning God to his promises!  You see, the Lord had promised to bless Jacob.  He had appeared many years before to Jacob on the first night he was running away from Esau.  There at Bethel, in that dream of the stairway and promised to be with Jacob and bring him back.  Jacob was now returning home because the Lord had told him to return and he had promised once again to be with him.

Now Jacob was going to “pin” God to his promises!  Think, once, how different this was for Jacob.  Jacob, his name means the “heel-grabber,” the trickster, the deceiver.  In the past, when he wanted a blessing, Jacob was kind of sneaky about it.  There is the story of how he “buys” the birthright from Esau for a bowl of beans.  There is the story of Jacob dressing up like Esau to trick his weak-sighted father into giving him the blessing.  Jacob has BOUGHT blessing.  Jacob STOLE blessing.  But now Jacob desperately, helplessly clings to God’s Word for it!  He has learned to sing:  “Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on Thee!” (CW257:2)

The Lord underscores this change in character in Jacob.  He tells Jacob he will no longer be “Jacob,” “Heel-grabber,” “Deceiver.”   That no longer fits the man.  “Israel” is his character now.  “You have fought with God and with men,and you have won.” (v. 28)  With a smile, God says, “You pinned me!”  Jacob was no longer the “Heel-grabber.”  He has become the “God-grabber.”

That is really what prayer is, isn’t it?  It is grabbing God.  It is “pinning” God to his promises.  Martin Luther also said this about this text…it feels wrong to talk about God like that.  It feels like we shouldn’t say that we grab him and pin him.  But it’s not wrong!  It’s right!  God wants us to grab hold of him, pin him to his Word, and say, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”

Have you ever wrestled, I mean REALLY wrestled, with God in prayer?  I’m not talking about praying for a sunny day for your picnic.  I’m talking about prayer in the middle of the night.  Prayer that kicks up dust.  Prayer that exhausts.  Prayer that wrestles with God because it feels like your life and the promises of God have come into conflict.  Friends, at times like that, wrap your arms around God and say, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”

How can you do that?  How can you get God in a pin-hold like that?  Why wouldn’t, why shouldn’t, the almighty God treat my voice as an annoyance, like a mosquito buzzing around his head, and slap me dead?  The answer is…Jesus.  In a wonderful verse in Ephesians, the apostle Paul says this:  In [Jesus] and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence. (Ephesians 3:12)  Jesus is why you are not an impertinent and obnoxious irritant to God.  Your obnoxious and irritating and damnable sin has been wiped away in the blood, death, and rising of God’s Son.  Jesus is your “Peniel.”  In Jesus we have seen the face of God come to save us!  In Jesus, all your prayers become Peniel, a seeing of God’s face in prayer.

And what happened with Jacob also happens with you.  When Jacob was done wrestling with God, pinning God to his Word, we are told:  Then he blessed him there. (v. 29)  And so it is, when you are done wrestling, when you in faith “pin” God to his Word, when, exhausted, you say, “Amen,” then it will be said:  “Then God blessed him/her there.”  For Jesus’ sake.

Amen.