Jacob may have been the...
Illustration
Jacob may have been the first person of faith to wrestle with God, but he was certainly not the last. In this puzzling story of Jacob's encounter with this entity -- a man, an angel, God? -- Jacob survives, but he is forever marked with a limp as a reminder of his striving. Just as God called Jacob to a new place, to escape from his father-in-law, to a confrontation with his brother, to a new life in a new place, so too, God calls us to things we may not want to do and places we may not want to go. Jacob's outcome of a blessing and a new identity may be ours as well when we wrestle with God.
Charles Wesley understood Jacob's striving with God, understood the wrestling that leaves Jacob with both a blessing and a limp. In 1742, Wesley put the story to song and though our hymnals usually only contain a few stanzas, Wesley wrote fourteen of them! One of them summarizes the human desire to understand the trials of life and the place of God in those trials:
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.
Jacob's wrestling match reminds us that the greatest of our human striving is our desire to know and understand God.
Charles Wesley understood Jacob's striving with God, understood the wrestling that leaves Jacob with both a blessing and a limp. In 1742, Wesley put the story to song and though our hymnals usually only contain a few stanzas, Wesley wrote fourteen of them! One of them summarizes the human desire to understand the trials of life and the place of God in those trials:
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.
Jacob's wrestling match reminds us that the greatest of our human striving is our desire to know and understand God.
