Israel at Penuel

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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 32:22-32

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Well, in some ways ever since we began the Jacob cycle, I've been looking forward to this morning.
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There's certain mountaintops in the narrative that we've been reading and I think we've seen that with Abraham perhaps in a few places.
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My mind goes to chapter 15, chapter 22, and this would be in my mind
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Jacob's mountaintop, a watershed moment in his life and in the work of God's grace within his life.
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And so this morning we look to complete chapter 32. Truly, there's four or five sermons in any given direction just in these ten verses, but we're gonna try to do it, keep it all in front of us, try to keep our eyes on the forest more than the bark of the trees.
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But I have to admit that is a challenge and so we'll we'll try to get through economically as best we can.
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We left Jacob last week in the beginning of a very long night and it would have been long no matter what happened.
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However, the night as we'll see beginning in verse 22 becomes a lot longer than Jacob anticipated.
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Of course, he's expecting Esau and Esau's militia, 400 men, screaming toward him in what
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Jacob perceives or understands to be a murderous rage, an intent of vengeance upon him, his family, and all of his possession.
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As far as Jacob knows, this could be his last night in God's camp. This could be the night that costs him everything that God has given him over the past 20 years, his flocks, his servants, his wives, and his children.
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It could ruin him. But he prayed as we saw last week in the midst of that crisis.
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He prays to God. He prays with thanksgiving. He circulates
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God's promises over and over in his mind rather than his fears, which rise up like the floodwaters within his soul.
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And he lodges himself, emphasized twice in the passage last week. He stays that night in the camp.
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He lodges himself in God's camp. God steals his nerve, causes him to stand in the day of trouble.
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And as fearful as it may be, he knows that he is in God's place and that this is God's will for him.
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So we left Jacob at the end of verse 21, staring as it were, sleeplessly, through the flapping door of his tent, perhaps staring at the shining stars of the night, knowing what
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God has promised as he's rehearsing it over and over in his prayers, but wondering,
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God, I know what you've promised, but how are you going to fulfill it? 400 men are marching toward me in mine, perhaps like Abraham, staring in the night sky, counting the countless stars, pondering how, yet knowing, trusting, that God will fulfill his promise.
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Last week we looked at the passage in five parts. I'll remind you. Jacob's path, his panic, his prayer, the present that he arranged, and the peace that prayer brought about.
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And this morning in the last ten verses of the chapter, we also have five parts, and I'll give you that ahead now.
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Jacob's prospect, Jacob's pursuit, more specifically God's pursuit of Jacob, Jacob's prevailment,
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Jacob's preservation, and Jacob's portion. Really had to bust out the Scrabble dictionary for these five, but we'll explain as we go.
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So first, Jacob's prospect. We read, beginning in verse 22,
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He arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and he crossed over the ford of Jabbok, he took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had.
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I can't imagine that Jacob was able to get a lick of sleep. I can imagine that he was stirring and turning and pacing about, going in and out, trying to lay down, and eventually his fears just kept him restless, not with the prospect of 400 men and Esau coming toward him.
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So keep that in mind as we go through the next ten verses. All of this is happening, perhaps on no sleep for Jacob, on an empty tank.
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And in the still dark of the night, in the middle of the night, we don't have an exact time frame, but while it's still pitch black, he rises.
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And verse 22 reminds us of this brief inventory that we've already become acquainted with through the arrangement of the present.
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He takes what's in his camp, remember he's divided his possession, what's in his camp, his two wives, his two female servants, his eleven sons.
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And then we have, and there's a textual issue here, we should understand all that he had, not just what he had, all that he had.
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He takes everything that is with him, and he passes it ahead. He crosses it over the brook of Jabbok.
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Now a few things to note here. First, the mention of eleven sons. This is a little narrative foreshadowing.
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Dinah's not mentioned, which is interesting because the story of Dinah is coming. But first, we're led as readers to expect the arrival of Benjamin in a few chapters.
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And this is bringing us closer to the next stage of this patriarchal cycle. Second, notice that he's stirring up his camp, and you can just picture the scene.
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We read simply, he rose in the night and took what he had, his wives, his female servants, his children, and sent them over.
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With all that he had, he sent them across. You can picture what this would have looked like. He's restless, he's back and forth on what to do.
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Finally, he decides, I need to cross over. We just need to get moving. We need to to draw closer to where Esau is.
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And so he begins stirring up the camp. He begins going and shaking up his little ones and his wives, and the little ones go back to sleep.
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And no, he gets them back up. They're gathering all their belongings. Whatever is present, he gathers it all up, takes it to the babbling brook of the
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Jabbok, and he sends it all ahead of him. So picture that. In the glint of the moonlight, in the middle of the night,
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Jacob takes everything that is with him, and it crosses over, it passes by the
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Jabbok. Very significant here is this language of crossing over or passing by.
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It's theologically loaded. The verb has appeared, not translated, but appeared four times just in the past two verses.
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And this is not only in reference to the physical land promise, where crossing in or passing into the land is very significant.
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Of course, that's important for Jacob drawing near to the promised land bordered by angels.
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But also this language is used of his moral transformation. As a result of encountering
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God, Jacob himself has passed over. He's become, as it were, a new creation.
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He's gone from the old and dead ways of his former self into a new creation designed by God's grace.
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And as we'll see later this morning, this new transformation will require a whole new identity, a new name.
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This is a culmination of God's work in his life. And this transformation is signaled in other ways, and we'll see some.
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But it also likely stands just behind the mention of the brook
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Jabbok. There's really no need. It's not a significant brook. It's not really, is there any such thing as a significant brook?
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It's not significant that we have the name Jabbok here. So why is it mentioned? Jordan is significant.
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In Jacob's prayer, he talks about the Jordan, which would have been within view. But here we have the description of the
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Jabbok, and this is part of the sophisticated wordplay of our passage. It's a little more obvious in the literal, in the
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Hebrew, rather than in English. But I'll try to explain it. What you have here, as you approach the context, is
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Jacob. Ya -Ya -Kob. Ya -Kob, technically, but we'll just say
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Ya -Kob. It's the same consonants in Hebrew. And he's about to, as we know, wrestle with the
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Lord. He's about to abbec with the Lord. And when you put that in a certain stem, it becomes
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Ya -Bok. Ve -Ya -Bak is actually the Hebrew. And that's going to take place on the banks of the
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Yabbok, of the brook called Jabbok. So you have Ya -Kob, who's going to Ya -Kob at the
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Yabbok. This is all part of the wordplay. But, of course, significantly, Jacob is not only crossing over, but even the consonants of his name are being crossed over.
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Ya -Kob at the Ya -Bok. And so that's a passing over, a crossing over, if you'd like, an untwisting of the twister.
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And so God is doing in the text what He's doing in the place what He's doing in the man.
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That is all part of the literary beauty of this episode. Picture the scene.
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Maid servants buzzing about. Little boys crying for more sleep. Being prodded along like cattle, and perhaps there's cattle with them.
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Little bags of Cheerios spilling over. And all of this in the middle of the night, step -by -step, as they go further, further ahead of Jacob.
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All of this is representing 20 years of hard labor, and lots of prayer, and lots of long sleepless nights.
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It represents God's blessing. It represents the wives that He's given Him, the children that have come from them.
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There's memories, compacted weeks, and months, and years, embedded within the servants and the flocks.
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This is all of His God -given gain. And there's this existential moment in this night when He comes to the brook of the
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Jabbok, and He crosses it all ahead of Him. Everything that is with Him goes ahead of Him, but He Himself stays on the banks of the
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Jabbok. You get the sense that He wanted to make sure there's nothing left behind. Did we forget that special teddy bear in the tent?
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Is everything truly ahead? And He watches it pass, splash -by -splash, beyond the
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Jabbok, into the thick of the night, and He's left utterly. You can almost hear, the way
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I imagine it, is you can hear just the whimper, and the activity, and the bustle, and the cries, and the cooing of the cattle, slowly fading into the darkness until all that's left is the silent breeze, the noise of the gentle rolling brook, and it's just Jacob.
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He's left utterly alone, and we've come full circle in the life of Jacob.
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When He was running from Esau, He was out in the middle of the night, clutching only the staff that was with Him, didn't have any game plan whatsoever.
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He was a fugitive on the run, completely alone, vulnerable, and in that fearful night, God opened up the heavens and gave him the vision of Bethel.
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But now, He's not running from Esau, He's running toward Esau, and here He is, alone, vulnerable, in a fearful night.
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Once again, He is compelled to feel utterly alone, back to square one.
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It's like, in this scene, everything that His life has been has been erased, just like it was 20 years ago, when
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He was on the run from the house of His Father. Everything that His life had been there was, in that night, erased.
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And He was left utterly alone, with a stone for His pillow, and God found Him. And God seized
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Him, as it were, by His grace, gave Him promises, established Him, and sent
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Him toward Haran. And now, on His way back, it's like everything's been taken from Him, so to speak.
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He's wiped clean and left utterly alone, utterly in a place of dependence upon God.
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And so, we have it in verse 24, Jacob was left alone. But because we've been reading so carefully the story of Jacob, we know that nothing could be further from the truth.
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Jacob has not been left alone, as we're about to see, quite literally, in the mysterious encounter.
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But even in this encounter, it demonstrates God's faithfulness to His promise. At Bethel, He said,
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I will be with you, Jacob. I'm going to keep you, your ways going in and out.
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I will be with you. And so, He's watching everything that He loves, everything that would define
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Him and give Him joy day by day. He's watching all of that pass beyond Him. And He's at the banks of the
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Jabbok in the dead of the night, and He's utterly alone, but Jacob is not alone. God is with him.
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And that leads us to the pursuit, secondly, Jacob's pursuit. We read mid -verse, a man, good translation, capital
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M, we'll talk about that, a man wrestled with Him until the breaking of the day. We don't even have this as a new sentence.
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This is embedded. This is sort of coming right out. He was left utterly alone, and a man wrestled
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Him until the breaking of the day. That's meant to catch us off guard, and it's mimicking Jacob's surprise at being caught off guard.
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It's sort of an ambush that happens in the middle of the sentence, even as it does in that night.
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And so the reader, in some ways, is led to the shock of this encounter in the same way that Jacob was.
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Who is this? We're reading it for the first time. Did Laban cross the pile?
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Did Esau rush on ahead? Is this some assassin that Esau sent? What's going on here?
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Who is this man of verse 24? There's a delay in the revelation. There's a delay in the divine identity of this assailant, as mysterious as he is.
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Does that ring a bell? This delayed revelation of divine identity. We should be thinking back to Abraham in Genesis 18, when three visitors show up, and Abraham rushes around to create this elaborate feast for them.
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And it's only as a result of what follows that the divine revelation comes. Abraham is speaking with the
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Lord, interceding so that Sodom and Gomorrah would not be destroyed. So again, we see just like Abraham, Jacob is being pursued.
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And though he does not know it perhaps just yet, we, with Jacob, will soon discover that this is a divine pursuit.
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And it's not a divine pursuit that belongs just to this night on the banks of the Jabbok. It's a divine pursuit that belongs to Jacob's whole.
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And so the twister that God has been faithfully untwisting, as you get toward the end when he's on his deathbed in Genesis 48, and he can say,
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You've been my shepherd my whole life. You've pursued me and guided me, fed me, led me, protected me.
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You've been with me my whole life. As with Abraham's visitors, this opponent's identity would almost be entirely hidden, except Jacob responds in a way that reveals what he understands.
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And he names the place Peniel, and we'll talk about there when we get there, showing that he understood that this was no man.
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This was indeed a divine man, so to speak. This delayed revelation, it highlights the hiddenness of God.
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He's even hidden from us until we make it several verses down, what Luther would call deus abasconditus, the hidden God.
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So God's hiddenness is preserved, and coupled with it, we see this amazing condescension of the
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Lord. And as with Abraham's hastened meal, we also see the physicality of this encounter.
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This was not food that was, you know, like plastic tea sets like I have with my girls.
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This is not fake food, because it was just a vision that Abraham was having, and this is not a vision or a dream of a wrestling match.
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He really is limping. This really was a physical encounter. And then in approaching the capital
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M of this man, at the very least, based on how
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Jacob relays the identity of his opponent, we have to say this is at least a theophany.
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In other words, it's a manifestation of God's presence. The question would be, can we take a step further and go with so many commentators and scholars that I think rightly argue this is not just a theophany, a manifestation of God's presence, this is specifically a manifestation of the second person, of the
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Godhead. This is a pre -incarnate manifestation of the
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Son. This is a Christophany, a manifestation of the presence of the
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Son. Now, almost all of that hangs upon Hosea chapter 12, 3 and 4, which we will read later.
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So you'll have to be patient, because I'm not going to read it quite yet. But there we will read that Jacob prevails against the
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Angel of the Lord, and that ought to be, it must be, capitalized, capital
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A, the Angel of the Lord, because it's rightly understood to be a pre -incarnate appearance of the
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Son. The Angel of the Lord enigmatically arriving in other places, arguably 22, that's who
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Abraham is speaking with, Exodus 3, Judges 6. This is Christophany before us.
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And so this mysterious encounter, the capital A, Angel of the Lord, is not just a mere messenger like those that Jacob encountered when he entered
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Mahanaim, but actually it is one who was able to bless him. And that's why it must be a divine identity.
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I will not let you go until you bless me. So this is not a relay of a message or the presence of protection via angels.
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This is the Lord Himself. Well, he wrestled with this capital
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M man until the breaking of the day. What a poor summary that is, if we were to actually go back and watch this struggle minute by minute.
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And he wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. We want to just keep moving. It's like, just pause there, can you consider that?
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It was the middle of the night, he's without sleep, just the Herculean effort of gathering all of his wives and children and getting them across the brook, that would have been enough to exhaust the man.
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But then he's ambushed and he begins to wrestle and grapple with this mysterious assailant, and that goes until the breaking of the dawn.
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Minute by minute, pivoting, maneuvering, struggling, striving to get the upper hand in this wrestling match.
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Some of you, perhaps, I don't know why, would maybe watch MMA, you know, mixed martial arts fighting.
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You watch these professionally trained fighters who spend months preparing for this encounter.
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They put trash bags over and do all sorts of exercises to make weight, and they're absolutely ripped, and then they go into a cage and they fight like animals for, what, 20 minutes?
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And by the third, fourth, or fifth round, they're completely gassed. They're heaving and they can barely stand up, and eventually they just sort of tap out because they're just too exhausted, and it hasn't even been half an hour.
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This is a wrestling match that goes on from the middle of the night to the breaking of the dawn. This is combat unlike anything we could imagine.
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We knew that Jacob was strong. I mean, he does what it would take multiple servants to do in dragging that whalestone off to impress the ladies, as we said.
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But this is really stretching him to his limit, and he does not tap out.
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We have, perhaps, hours of wrestling with sleepless Jacob. He's a mighty man, and this mighty man is giving every strain that he has within him.
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And I wonder if this is a physical manifestation of what we call irresistible grace.
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Irresistible grace. It is more, I think, it is more of an assault than a mere encounter when we receive
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God's grace, and the effect it has on our lives, and how it brings us all the way down so that we can be lifted all the way up.
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Please note that this is not like Bethel. Jacob is not lulled by the glory, the radiance of an angelic vision.
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He is plunged into combat with the Lord, and so he's entering the kingdom, as it were, quite literally, the way that Jesus describes in Matthew 11.
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He's taking it by force, and he's having to grapple with it down to the very last straw.
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I love what Matthew Henry has to say. The kingdom of heaven was never intended to indulge the ease of triflers, but to be the rest of those that labor.
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Oh, that we would see a great number, with a holy contention, forcing themselves into it.
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And that's what Jacob is doing with all the might that he has, minute by minute. He's grasping, clutching, maneuvering, looking for the upper hand.
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This is Jacob's fight of faith in a very literal sense, and yet, he recognizes who really has the power, who really has the strength.
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He'll say it by the time we get to verse 30, my life has been preserved. Better translation here,
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I think, my life has been delivered. My life has been delivered. I shouldn't stand,
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I shouldn't speak, I shouldn't have been able to grapple with you. You let me go, you preserved my life.
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And so, we see throughout this night, into the breaking hours of the dawn,
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Jacob now striving for the real blessing. He was born grasping the heel of his older brother
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Esau, and he spent his whole life striving after Esau's blessing.
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And God, of course, took him out of that home and out of that relationship, and he's been estranged from Esau now for these 20 years, and God has been patiently, but purposefully, untwisting this twister, sanctifying him, giving him integrity and righteousness, causing him to stand, protecting him from the schemes of his equal, really,
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Laban, making him after God's own image, a man after God's own heart. And he's bringing him now back to reckon with Esau, to reconcile with his estranged brother.
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And for the first time now, Jacob is striving for the real blessing. He's grappling, he's clutching for the real blessing.
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The fact that he can survive for a microsecond is actually somewhat impressive.
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The fact that he makes it to the morning is something that might be surprising to us. But of course, we recognize that the
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Lord is simply condescending to be where Jacob is. The Lord, who encounters him, who, as it were, ambushes him by the brook of Jabbok, he matches his strength.
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He condescends to where Jacob is, so that Jacob can grapple with him and wrestle with him and contend and pour himself out and come to the weakest point of his life.
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We see the Lord, remember, this is a Christophany, I'm going to argue.
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We see the Lord, the manifestation of the Son, humbling himself to the flesh of Jacob.
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Not in order to harm him, but in order to bless him. And so this is saying something of the whole storyline of the
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Bible when we have this encounter with the angel of the Lord, this unique manifestation of the
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Son. It's enigmatic. It shows that the Son, who will come as the promised seed of Genesis 3 .15,
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here already we see this intent, this desire to humble himself and match the strength and the place and the time of his servant, so that he can bless his servant, bring his servant to an end of himself, so that he might find his all in him.
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And just as the Lord humbles himself to the flesh of Jacob, so that he might bless
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Jacob, we find in the fullness of time, as one born under a woman, under the law, the
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Lord humbling himself to our flesh, matching himself to our weakness, in order to bless us.
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In the hours that roll by, this condescending Savior is wearing
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Jacob down. I'm sure it was a lot more impressive, you know, in terms of the grapple and the heaving and the sweating and the clutching and the tearing, and it must have been a sight to see, but I can't help but think maybe the reality was something like this capital
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M man holding Jacob by the forehead and Jacob doing this until he was too tired. He's wearing
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Jacob down, untwisting him all the way back to flat, stripping away all of the self -reliance that is still clinging to him, causing him to fear, causing him to want to go back to old ways, all the capability and latent potential within him.
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Jesus wants to lay claim on all of it. We read in verse 25, when he saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip, and the socket of Jacob's hip was out of joint as he wrestled with him.
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In this wrestling match, verse 25 would be the definitive moment, the slow -motion highlight reel that would be on replay for about 14 times.
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This is the definitive moment of the match, and it would show all the different angles on ESPN of the man touching the hip of Jacob, and then it's the
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TKO as he goes down because his hip is out of socket. Basically, the
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Lord puts the patriarch out of his misery. Okay, you can see you've got nothing left. Let me just boink.
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He drops like a bag of potatoes. Now the translation, in some translations, it's struck, which seems to make sense.
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How can a touch dislocate a hip? Shouldn't we translate this verb as struck?
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It could be translated that way. Hebrew is interesting. Sometimes you have the same word, but when you put it in a certain verb stem, it has a different translation, a different significance.
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And so you have a certain stem in Hebrew that's an intensifying stem. It's called the PL. And if touch was meant to be strike or hit, then this verb should be in the
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PL stem. It should be intensified, and it's not. So the restraint here on the part of the translators is very wise.
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It is touch. The shepherd -like gentleness of a touch that has the terrifying effect of dislocating someone's hip.
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I don't know a lot about hip replacement. I've heard my brother wax about it before, and just how strong you have to be to do a hip replacement.
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How much blood and core there is. And you think structurally of how strong that part of the body is.
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And here, just a touch, the equivalent of a pat on a back, dislocates Jacob's hip. In other words, we might be in awe about the sheer power of the touch of the
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Lord. When in fact, I think we're meant to say, look at his restraint.
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If a touch has that kind of power, throughout this night, think of how the
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Lord is restraining himself. Okay, be careful. You almost got my eyelash, and that would have devastating consequences for you.
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Think of the restraint of the Lord's power. I think that's what comes across. This is, in fact, the touch of our gentle, lowly, and meek
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Savior. And of course, it seems at first, in this passage, to intend harm. Finally, the upper hand.
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Finally, I brought ruin to you. But we know that that is not at all the case here. In fact, this touch is part of this desire to bless
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Jacob. And so it's not a casualty of circumstance. It's actually crucial to Jacob receiving the grace of God in his life.
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And so I think, again, it's important to translate this as touch. Because that's still how the
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Lord is touching his people today, isn't it? It's a touch that has every intention of blessing, like the high priest putting his hand to anoint and bless someone.
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And yet when our faithful high priest touches, sometimes he dislocates. Sometimes he brings something into our lives or into our bodies that rocks us to the core, makes us drop to the floor.
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And you say, Lord, why did you strike me? No, it's a touch. And this is so that I might bless you.
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So he said, now he doesn't have any choice, let me go for the day breaks.
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This is beautiful. The man who was just dislocated Jacob is now saying, let me go. You can picture the scene, can't you?
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As soon as Jacob dislocates, he drops and he's pulling down on whatever he's grasping. And now he's clinging it harder than ever.
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White knuckle, his fingernails digging into his palms, maybe blood trickling down. I'm not letting go.
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Whatever may come, I am not letting go. Not until you bless me.
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And verse 26 would be the revelation. Jacob knows he's not wrestling with a man, but he's wrestling with the
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Lord. And here we see Jacob's faith flower into maturity, persevering through the night in the midst of the trial and refusing to let go until that trial results in the blessing of the
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Lord. He's been wrestling through the night. That's been emphasized in about ten ways since we began this passage.
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And that's very instructive for us. It's not missed. It's vital to the story. The call for the believer is to wrestle through the figurative night.
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In other words, through that which is dark and mysterious, through that which is unknown. Those places and times where you're reflective and you feel vulnerable and completely alone.
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That is the night, figuratively speaking, in Scripture. And you are to wrestle through that night, through that place of vulnerability and the unknown and the fear and pressure and anxiety of the night.
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You're to wrestle through that until the light breaks through, until the breaking of the dawn, because God's blessing comes with light.
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That light corresponds to his own revelation, his own presence, his own blessing. The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
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The light which Peter says dawns in our hearts. Jacob has been brought low.
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But if we ever see Jacob's faith, it's here. When he's brought to his weakest, he only grasps tighter.
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Christian, when you're brought to your weakest, you have only but to grasp tighter.
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Jacob could say, Though he slay me, yet I trust him.
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Though he cripple me, yet I trust him, and I will not let you go until you bless me.
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To paraphrase Paul, Jacob literally beat his body into submission for the sake of the prize, for the sake of his blessing.
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I can't imagine the pain that he was in. At a certain age, breaking a hip is a death sentence, isn't it?
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I can't imagine the pain that he was in. But he's completely focused on the blessing of God.
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You can break my other hip, Lord. I'm not letting go until you bless me. Jacob has effectively been brought to heal, not by some
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Herculean effort, but just with this touch, and yet if the Lord was looking to defeat
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Jacob, this match would have been over before it even started. And so as a reader, now that we have the divine revelation, this was indeed the
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Lord who's wrestling with Jacob, it spurns the question, why? Why encounter
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Jacob in this way? Couldn't you just kind of let him find a stone along the brook, lay down, give him another vision, you know, kind of give him a little jump in his step, get him over there, ready to meet
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Esau, something glorious, something uplifting, something encouraging. Why did you actually have to ambush him, fight him, and then break his hip?
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Why was that part of the divine plan of grace in the life of Jacob? Why allow him to go through a night when he's already exhausted, already filled with terror and fear and anxiety, and the stress of seeing all that he had passed beyond him?
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Why do you choose that moment, Lord, to strive and contend and bring Jacob to a place where he's confronted by his own weakness against your immovable strength?
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Why do you do it that way? And I think the answer is simply, there is no other way.
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There is no other way. All the work that God has done in Jacob's life has been wise and patient and perfectly designed to bring
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Jacob to even this point of his faith, and yet where Jacob needs to go and and who
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Jacob needs to become, there is no other way to strip
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Jacob of that self -sufficiency that is still within him, that tendency to want to slink back to the serpentine ways of dealing with trouble and conflict in his life.
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And the only way that the Lord can bring him to a place where he can actually receive the blessing he's seeking is to cripple him.
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It's to bring him to his weakest point. And so it's not an intent to hurt, but an intent to bless.
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It's mercy that is rendering Jacob helpless. And the whole point is so that Jacob, from this place of weakness, will find his help in God.
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God will not allow Jacob to stand before Esau with an ounce of self -reliance.
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God makes it abundantly clear, Jacob, you are not to slither and manipulate like you have in the past.
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You're to go in humility and brokenness before your brother, and you must be reconciled with me before you dare to be reconciled with him.
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As we know from the ten lepers in Luke 17, reliefs rarely bring people back to the
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Lord. If it was just a vision of relief, don't worry.
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It's all gonna go really well. Thanks, Lord. Hey family, wait up. He runs across the brook. He would have been like the other nine lepers who were healed and they just went on their way.
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Relief came and that was as far as they, that was all that they really needed from the Lord. It's all that they wanted. They're still completely focused on themselves and their life and what they have to do and what they can do now that they have relief.
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But that's not God's desire for Jacob. For Jacob to truly be blessed, for Jacob to truly be the heir of the
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Abrahamic Covenant. He needs to understand what it looks like to cling and depend upon the Lord, to seek after the face of the
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Lord. Our reliefs rarely bring us back to the
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Lord and when we recognize that, we see that trial and difficulty in our lives are in fact mercies, touches on our hips that are designed to bless us.
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We've already seen that the way God's blessing works is through speckled blessings. And now we see that our walks are so often in the
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Christian life, they're meant to be crippled walks. The scriptures develop this theology of weakness.
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When you get to the New Testament, Paul is perhaps its chief expositor.
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And for Paul, this theology of weakness centers around the cross, the cross of Jesus.
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And everything is in orbit around that. He was a mighty man.
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He could do amazing things. Things that any other man would want to make a YouTube account and become famous and where Air Force Ones on a stage in front of a plexiglass lectern and just, you know, look at what
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I'm gonna do today. But for Paul, when he senses that that's what the people want, they want that acclaim.
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We want you to come with a demonstration of power, at least show your wisdom. You're a man who not only has studied the scriptures and has all sorts of tremendous insight, you have divine revelations.
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You've been brought to the third heaven. Come show us your power by demonstration and in word.
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And Paul says, Church of Corinth, you want me to come speak in wisdom and boldness.
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You want me to come like the mighty speakers in the agora. You want me to stand on the steps and amaze all and do works that that draw all this attention to me.
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And I pretend to deflect it to God. But I came among you. I desire to know nothing among you but Christ and him crucified, his weakest point.
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And that's what you must know, Christians. And so Paul himself can look at his own life when he prays for that thorn to be removed.
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And the Lord does not remove the thorn. But he brings Paul to a place where he can understand why he won't remove the thorn.
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And Paul can say in 2 Corinthians 12, The Lord said to me, my grace is sufficient for you.
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My strength is made perfect in your weakness.
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Jacob, I know it hurts. I know it's hard. I know what kind of man you were and I know what kind of man
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I'm molding you to be. And you need to know as you're writhing and gritting your teeth in the pain of a dislocated hip, you need to know something spiritually about this encounter.
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My strength, Jacob, is made perfect in that kind of weakness.
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When we are weak, to paraphrase Paul, then we are strong. We want to emphasize the last part of that verse.
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Please look at Genesis 32 carefully, brothers and sisters. When we are weak, when we are weak, when we are weak, then we are strong.
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What is the blessing of God? So much of our lives we spend trying to obtain the strength of the
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Lord, but we run away, we reel from the ways that God brings us into a place of weakness.
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Brothers and sisters, you cannot have both. You cannot have it both ways. If you're seeking the blessing of strength in your walk, strength in your life, spiritual integrity, if you want to be untwisted from those sins that so easily entangle you, those besetting sins,
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God's greatest mercy in your life is that he brings you to a place where you're crippled in your walk with him, whatever that may look like in his divine wisdom.
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Because when you are weak, that is when you are strong. It's a hard thing to invite trouble into your life.
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Who dares even pray that God would cripple, that God would touch in this dislocating way? And yet we have walking parables all around us, people who have lived their lives going from strength to strength in a very fleshly way.
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And when you look at their lives and you look at that Psalm 77 outcome of their lives, you can say,
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Lord, let me limp after you. Keep me near the cross.
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Keep me near the place of being brought to the floor and brought to myself and brought to my lowest point that I might cling to you.
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And in clinging to you, I might be blessed. God is saying to Jacob, this is how you prevail.
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This is how you will prevail. Not from dragging wellstones, not from mustering and maneuvering, but from dropping to your knees in abject dependence upon me because you are so weak.
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This is how you prevail. And that brings us to the prevailment. In verse 27, he said to him, this is the
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Lord, he said to Jacob, what is your name? And he said, Jacob.
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This is so instructive. Notice that the Lord will not bless Jacob without first bringing a mirror in front of Jacob's face.
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I won't let you go until you bless me. All right, fine, I'm going to bless you. There's some work to be done first. First, he brings, as it were, the existential mirror in front of Jacob, the mirror not only of who he is right now in this encounter, but of who he has been, of who he must be in the road that lies ahead.
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All of that's contained within this question. What is your name? In naming himself,
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Jacob is forced to identify himself with his whole sordid past. My name is
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Twister. My name is Supplanter. My name is
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Usurper. My name is Grasper. That's my name.
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That's who I am. That's what I've been. And the Lord is not asking this because he needs new information he does not possess.
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He's omniscient. He's asking it for the sake of Jacob in order to reflect and recognize himself.
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As he's about to encounter Esau again, and the flood of that past comes before him, and the terror of the prospect of meeting
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Esau lies in front of him, God is saying, Do you remember who you are? Do you remember what you've been when
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I called you from the house of your father, when I made a covenant to be your God and to be with you, when
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I've been faithfully untwisting you for twenty years and I've brought you to this place now, and I'm here and you're clutching and laying hold of me.
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Do you know your name? Do you know who you are? Esau is lying beyond the
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Jabbok. This is such a meaningful statement. Remember back in chapter 27, in verse 36, when
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Esau, who had just been Jacobed, just been twisted out of his blessing, just been cheated by this
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Laban -like twister, and what did Esau exclaim? Is he not rightly named?
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When the Lord says, What is your name? That's in the background of this encounter, this inevitable encounter with Esau.
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Am I not rightly named? Yeah, I've been blessed and I'm definitely different, but am
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I really that different? There's so many things within me that I'm doing the things
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I really don't want to do, but I just do them, and there's so many things that I just want to do, and I really want to do them, but then
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I just don't do them. Remember when
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Jacob put on that ridiculous goat camouflage, and he slithered into the tent of Isaac like a serpent to deceive his blind father, and in 2718 his father said,
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Who are you, my son? He was about to receive the blessing, and there he is in this ridiculous deceit, lying, slithering, cheating, having no concern for any relationship or anyone but himself, not even a concern for the
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God who stands over him, and his poor father, who has a fear of God, says,
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Who are you, my son? And in order to receive the blessing, Jacob lies, and he twists, and he supplants, and he usurps, and it's like here on the
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Brook of Jabbok, the Lord has Jacob brought to his knees in pain, and he's clutching him, and it's like the
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Lord's saying, Who are you, my son? Who are you? He's about to receive the blessing.
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God's question forces Jacob to answer his identity. Who are you? What have you been?
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What is your past? Do you acknowledge the guilt of your ways before me? This is the first step to receiving the blessing of God.
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This is the hardest step to receiving the blessing of God. The hardest step to being reconciled with God and with man.
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And as is evident, just from the prayer before this ambush, Jacob has seen his guilt. And therefore, he's ready to receive
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God's grace. And because he's seen his guilt, and he's ready to receive
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God's grace, he's now ready to receive a new identity from God.
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Verse 28. Your name's no longer Jacob. Israel will be your name because you've struggled with God.
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You've contended, you've strived with God and with men, and you've prevailed.
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This is sort of the watershed moment in Jacob's life because this is where the grace of God has so fully formed that mold within this pressure of the crisis that he has now a need for an entirely new name, a new identity.
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Jacob, my work has been so powerful in your life. My grace has been so sufficient in your weakness that it's not sufficient for you to go on as Jacob any longer.
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You will now be called Israel. You will now be defined by this moment, by this encounter, and all of my grace and intervention up to it.
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You are now, as it were, a new creation. And you can walk in boldness before Me who you've been reconciled to and before your brother in this new identity
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I give to you by grace. He receives a new name. A name that will correspond to the promises
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God made to Abraham and to Isaac. A name that will reach all the way back into the garden when
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God promised the woman that there would be a seed which would come and though His heel would be struck by the serpent,
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He would crush its head. And He would undo all of the consequences of their guilt and their shame.
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He would bring about hope and glory as He intended from the very beginning. All of that's embedded within this name,
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Israel. And Jacob, fourthly, confesses that God preserved him.
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Beginning in verse 29, Jacob now turns the table on the Lord. He asks Him a question. Tell me Your name,
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I pray. And this is almost structured in a way. There's certain ways you can structure
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Hebrew to have an effect, to connote something. One way is you can add a demonstrative pronoun with an interrogative construction and it's meant to convey surprise.
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And here, the surprise belongs to the Lord. Why is it that you ask this?
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My name. That's literally. The Lord almost seems surprised. And yet,
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He does not give an answer. Why is it that you ask about my name? Why is it that you want to know me,
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Jacob? Why is it that when you received the blessing in the tent of your father,
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I was your very last thought? You wanted to know nothing about the God of your father. Nothing about the fear of Isaac.
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You weren't seeking my blessing. And now, it's not just that you're seeking my blessing, Jacob. You're actually seeking to know.
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Now, it's not just this man who's striving for blessing. He had all that gain of 20 years. And what did he do with it?
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He sent it all ahead of him. And now it's just him and the Lord. And he says, I want you to bless me.
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And for that blessing, I want to know you. I want to seek you.
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The Lord's non -answer is all the answer that Jacob needs. It underlines everything about this new identity as Israel.
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It's a new hope. A new ambition in Jacob's life. Jacob has contended and struggled with God, not just on this night, but throughout his whole life.
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He's been struggling and contending with God's purpose between him and his brother. His destiny, his calling, his prospects, his difficulties and trials.
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He's been wrestling with God. But on this night, he's received grace. And he has prevailed.
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And he's prevailed by being crippled and brought to his weakest. That's when God blessed him.
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And now he seeks to know Him. In grasping to the Lord in the midst of this crisis, Jacob received a name.
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And in seeking that name, he had something of God's revelation. He was blessed.
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We've become familiar with Jacob's life so often, wayward from the Lord, slinking back to old ways.
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And for this encounter to just be more grace, if we're being honest about the kind of man that Jacob was, it may be surprising, maybe even upsetting.
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And that's what makes grace, grace. God's grace never seeks us for any condition, any potential, any cause within us.
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It's not why God's grace pursues us. I think this one will actually work out pretty good. This one will be really good in my collection of saints.
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God's grace does not seek us for any reason, any condition within us. But when it pursues us, it never leaves us as it found us.
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We see that with Jacob. God's love for Jacob was never conditioned upon Jacob himself.
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It was conditioned upon God's love, God's faithfulness, God's purpose and plan. And as a result of this night, this remarkable transformation in Jacob's life has brought about a new identity, a new intimacy with God, a new preparation for the difficulty and the promise ahead.
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Not in a radiant vision or a stirring dream, but in a vulnerable and lonely night in the pitch black left all to himself, fighting a fight of faith and wrestling with God, being snapped out of his self -reliance.
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And so what does Jacob do in verse 30? He calls the name of the place Peniel. I have seen
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God face to face. My life is preserved. Of course, we recognize that no one can see
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God and live, Genesis 48, Exodus 19, Judges 6, but this is not so much seeing, as it were, the unveiled glory of the
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Lord. This is not requiring him to be hidden in the cleft of the rock and watch the afterglow pass by.
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This is a manifestation of the presence of God. And here, this word face is going to again be significant.
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We touched on that last week. I've seen God face to face, all of this face language related to Esau.
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Perhaps he will forgive me. In other words, he will lift up my face when
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I seek his favor, when I seek his face, and the gifts passed to him pass over my face.
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And we're going to see this again next week, this language of face and how it relates Esau to God.
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So we'll leave that there for now. Jacob prevails with God's blessing, not as an unflinching titan, but as a limping dependent.
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I love what Bruce Waltke has to say. The limp is the posture of the saint, not walking in human strength, but in divine strength.
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God's severe mercy allows Jacob to have victory, but it is a crippling victory.
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So often in the Christian life, our victories are crippled victories. And so one question we ask ourselves is, how are we walking with the
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Lord today? Do we have the arrogance to think we're going from strength to strength as we continue to rely upon ourselves, or have we been brought by God's mercies to a place of weakness where we're limping after him?
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And the sun might be shining outside this morning, but it's a night in the experience of our lives, and we're wrestling with God.
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And all the lactic acid in your spiritual muscles are screaming, just let go, just give up, just walk away.
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And the fight of faith is saying, grasp tighter, grasp tighter, don't let go until He blesses you.
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God's purpose is to keep His children humble so that they won't falter, so they won't backslide, so they won't depart from Him.
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And when they're prone in their arrogance and pride and self -reliance to flirt with departing, by making the first of a series of a thousand small decisions that lead them from being a son of God to a son of Belial, our
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Shepherd so wisely touches our hip. He cripples us, makes us dependent upon Him so that we can actually be blessed.
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I'm often amazed when I read, if you've read stories of some of the great missionaries in church history, and it's hard to find a single missionary of any length of service that hasn't had profound suffering in their lives with their health, with their spouse, with their children.
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And when you read this account, you're saying that this person left everything they knew, their home, their livelihood, their possessions, their loved ones, they went into a place that they knew nothing and knew no one.
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They were completely vulnerable. They took their whole lives and prospects and ambitions in this life, and as it were, they threw it beyond the jabbock, and here they are now just to serve the
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Lord, and they're in the jungles or in the field hospitals. They're in the deepest parts of sub -Saharan Africa, and they're suffering, and they're diseased, and they've lost loved ones, and their life is difficult.
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And you read that and you go, why? Why ambush them like this? Why make them limp here?
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They're serving you. They love you. They've given all for you. Why are you allowing them to suffer and limp after you in this way?
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And it's like God's saying, so that they will prevail. So that they will prevail, so that they'll be blessed.
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This is not my design to harm. This is my design to make them more dependent upon me.
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The mission field is hard, and serving me for 40 years, that's hard. And there'll be no other way that they will stay to the narrow way and the hard steps unless I touch their hip, unless they suffer like the faithful Savior suffered.
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And that's true for a missionary in another part of the world today. Brothers and sisters, that's true for us. When that shepherd -like touch hits our lives and we're floored by it, know so that it's you may prevail, that by faith in this weakness, you may prevail, that you will be blessed indeed.
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God does not just want Jacob to know this. And so we read in verse 21 about Jacob's portion.
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To this day, the children of Israel. He doesn't just want Israel to know this. He wants the children of Israel.
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We are the children of Israel. To this day, they do not eat the muscle that shrank, which is on the hip socket, because he touched the socket of Jacob's hip in the muscle that shrank.
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So here you have this reverential, almost ritual memorialization of this encounter.
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And by this ritual, by this act of devotion, the Israelites are to remember this was an encounter with the
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Lord. This is what the Lord did to our father Israel. This is how our father struggled and wrestled and sought the blessing of God when it was the most painful and the most difficult.
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And therefore, we, like him, will not let go. We will clutch. We will grasp.
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We will strive to be blessed by God. In Genesis 32,
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Jacob, now named Israel, he's on the verge of the Jordan, about to enter the promised land, but the threat of the inhabitants on the other side of the promised land, that's
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Esau and his men, are looming down upon him and filling him with fear. And when
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Moses is writing Genesis 32, the children of Israel are on the verge of the
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Jordan approaching the promised land, facing the threat of what lies beyond it. And Moses is saying, if you want to prevail, if you want to experience
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God's blessing and favor and presence in the land, you need to wrestle, you need to contend, you need to strive with Him.
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You need to be brought low by your weakness. Don't walk in arrogance or self -reliance.
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Don't stumble at that stumbling stone. Humble yourselves before Him. Acknowledge all your guilty ways before Him.
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And He will show you favor. And He will help you prevail. They that seek the
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Lord, the God of hosts, they must seek His favor, wrestling with Him, contending for Him, walking in mercy and in justice, waiting on Him continually.
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That's what Moses would have the children of Israel understand in reading this. That's what God would have us understand in reading this.
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And so we come to Hosea 12 where this is recounted. And we read this very thing.
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Remember the context of Hosea. Judgment is coming on the northern kingdom. Judgment is coming on Israel.
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They've given themselves over to serve the Baals and the false gods in the high places.
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They've become like prostitutes to God's covenant. Whoring after false lovers.
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And so it's enacted in Hosea's own marriage. This is what it's like for me to be in this marital covenant with Israel being unfaithful before me.
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And so there's this pronouncement of woe upon Israel, but even here, this encounter with Jacob is meant to guide them and instruct them in what
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God requires of them. The Lord brings a charge against Judah. That's to the south. He will punish
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Jacob according to his ways, according to his deeds. He will recompense him. He took his brother by the heel in the womb and in his strength, he struggled with God.
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Yes. He struggled with the Angel. Capital A. He prevailed. How did he prevail?
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He wept. He sought favor from Him. He didn't buck up.
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He didn't dig deep. He didn't give it his all. He just wept and asked for blessing.
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He came to an end of himself. That's how he sought favor. He found him in Bethel, and there he spoke to us.
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That is, the Lord, God of hosts. The Lord is His memorable name. What is your name?
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And Hosea's here saying, The Lord. The Lord is His name. So you, by the help of your
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God, return, observe mercy and justice, wait on your God continually.
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I have four applications and I don't see how we'll get through them all.
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I had a feeling this would happen. Let me try to briefly, briefly summarize these four points, four takeaways from this text.
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First, we see something of self -identity and God's encounter.
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It's glowing. The issue of identity is glowing through the whole passage. Who is Jacob? Who are you,
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Lord? There's this exchange about identity. Jacob has to know who he is and what he's been before he can receive a new identity from God.
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When he was born, in that prenatal struggle, when he grasped the heel of Esau, he thought his foremost wrestling was with the blessing of his elder brother, but here in 32 he knows his foremost wrestling is not with Esau, but with the
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Lord. His foremost concern cannot be Esau ahead of him, but the
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Lord in front of him. And so it is with all of us. We need to understand that it's the encounter of God that shapes our identity.
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Jacob spent his life as a twister between his home and Bethel. We saw the fruit of that twisting, and yet between Bethel and Penuel, God has been untwisting him, and now his grace is so complete, so perfected in Jacob's weakness that he needs a new name to boot.
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A new identity. That's to say, encountering God has everything to do with understanding ourselves.
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Calvin makes this point at the very beginning of the Institutes. Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating
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God to scrutinizing himself. You cannot know yourself unless you encounter
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God, unless you look upon God's face. We see around us modern man has a profound identity crisis.
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They don't know who they are. Even at a simple biological level, they don't know who they are.
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They can't even define by chromosome who they are. That's how thick the identity crisis of secular man is.
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But as Christians, we ask, well, where do I derive my identity from? When God says, what's your name?
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When God says, who are you? How do I raise an answer? Is it my possessions that define me, my achievements, my hopes, the prospects in front of me?
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Is it my relationships, my friends, the things that I've built, all those things that have to pass beyond the
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Jobbik eventually? What is it that defines me when I'm standing, clutching the presence of God?
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From the encounter with God, we are given an entirely new identity when from seeing the face of God, we're brought to an end of ourselves.
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God gives Jacob a new identity, and so it is with the Christian. Second thing we see, self -humility in God's reconciliation.
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I'll pass briefly over this. Before Jacob can be reconciled to Esau, Jacob must be reconciled to God.
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That is the primary relationship of every image -bearer, and every other relationship in the human life is dependent upon that primary vertical relationship with the
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Lord. We put the cart before the horse when we spend time trying to reconcile with our neighbor, but we have not reconciled with God.
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Psalm 51 is an example of this. Don't go seeking after Bathsheba and do damage control toward the family of Uriah against you, only
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God have I sinned. That's the primary relationship. Everything in my life primarily affects that relationship, and only in addressing and reconciling myself with the
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Lord can I begin to address all those things at a horizontal level. And of course, the touching of the hip, the trial, the fight of faith, all of this is meant to prepare
01:06:24
Jacob for reconciliation, not just with God, but with man. So in reconciling with God, don't forget that the second commandment is also like it.
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Don't forget that we are to be reconciled to our neighbor, to our brother. And it's from this very place of a pride -crumbling touch of the
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Savior, by a crippled limp in our walk with him, that we are actually prepared to reconcile with men.
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Remember, that's what the Lord says to Jacob. You've wrestled with God and with men, and you've prevailed.
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And that's what Jacob's going to have to do. C .S.
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Lewis says, I can't resist reading this, In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself, unless you know
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God like that. And therefore, you know yourself as nothing in comparison. Know God in order to know yourself.
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You don't know God at all. As long as you're proud, you cannot know
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God. A proud man's always looking down on things and people. And of course, as long as you're looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
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Jacob spent so much of his life looking down, looking down on his lot, his circumstance, looking down on his family, his brother, seeking only what was of interest to him and his immediate needs.
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And when God touches his hip and brings him low, perhaps in the most significant way, he's forced to look up. Now he knows
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God, now he knows himself. Third, we see hard trials in God's wrestling.
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Of course, trial is a part of the Christian life. We know that even after Penuel, Jacob's troubles are not over.
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Even after the great and sharp pains of our lives, we know that hardship in life is not over.
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It's the usher of our life to the hope we have in the end. And learning how to bear such burdens, learning how to intercede through trials, learning as Christians how to grieve with those who are grieving is part of why
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God has knit us together into a body. And he's pruning us so that we can be more fruitful, and that fruit is not just for us, it's also for our brothers and sisters.
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When we see someone that's suffering and they're faithful to come and worship, we're eating of the fruit that God is growing in their life.
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We're being nourished and blessed and protected by the example that God is making them as he molds them more and more to be like Christ.
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But the most amazing thing in my mind is God condescends to be wrestled with.
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God matches his strength all the way, all the way down to our weakness.
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I remember seeing a scale model at a nautical museum in the Cape. There was a sort of scale model of the
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Titanic rover that was deployed to take footage of the wreck.
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And so they had a scale model of the little exploration ship and then a sort of piece of fishing line that, from this little tiny ship, went all the way down to the ocean floor.
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When you see the scale like that, it's just amazing. And that's nothing compared to God's condescension when he says,
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OK, come wrestle with me. Here's this trial, here's what you're facing, and now come struggle with me.
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We see it here in Genesis 32 in a concise way. We see it for 38 chapters in the book of Job.
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Wrestle with me. God invites himself to be wrestled with. He invites his people to struggle against him in order that he might show them his purpose and his wisdom and his goodness.
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He does not ask us to face suffering like the queen's guard sitting in the booth and you can't move or blink or scratch your nose.
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Amazing training that these guys have. Incredible. What does he do? He says, no, no, not like that.
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Come, contend with me. Lay out your complaints. Seek me out. Grapple with me. You don't have words to say?
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You don't have songs to sing? I'll give them to you. Read the Psalms. Look at the suffering servants. Read their songs.
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Look it, I'm giving you a poetry of affliction. And some of that is just complaining. Some of that is just Holy Spirit -inspired complaints and grievances toward God.
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He's inviting you to do that with him. If you ever needed proof of God's father -like care and love for his people,
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I think that speaks volumes. All of that's to say, Castor cares on him.
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He cares for you. And then fourth and last, we see
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God's pursuit of prodigal lives. God's pursuit of prodigal lives.
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We began with Jacob left alone. And it's a prodigal moment for Jacob. He's come to the end of himself, standing on the brook of Kojabek, facing the dark prospect, the unknown prospect of what lies ahead.
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All that he had is passed over beyond him. All his money, his goods, his ambitions, they have dried up.
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If there were swine pods to be eaten, Jacob would have looked after them. And of course, when
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God's grace pursues a prodigal, it doesn't mean they instantly enter the banquet and everything's made right. There's a long journey.
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There's a lot of recognizing of what they've done and who they've been. There's a lot of naming themselves as Jacob. We see that in the prodigal.
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We also see that Jacob must first wrestle with God, confronting his past, his guilt, who he's been, his hope, all of these things in order to be truly blessed.
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The amazing thing about the life of Jacob is he thought he knew what he was seeking all those years ago in the tent of his father.
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He thought he knew the blessing that he was seeking. That he was striving, struggling, contending for.
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When we get to Genesis 32, we see Jacob receiving the blessing that he never knew he had been seeking his whole life.
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It's an amazing thing when God gives the blessing that his people, unbeknownst to them, have been seeking their whole life and their seeking it looks like running away, stubbornly resisting, chasing after every other avenue that the world or the flesh or the devil may offer them.
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Seeking, maneuvering, striving, like serpents to receive a blessing. What in their minds is the blessing and when they receive
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God's blessing, they realize this was actually the blessing I was seeking my whole life. It's you,
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Lord. What's your name? It's not what this life can afford me.
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It's you. My joy. My contentment.
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My satisfaction. My identity. My hope.
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All of it is bound up in you. You can cripple me.
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You can take all that you've given me in this life and you can drag it across the brook. Drag it beyond the
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Jordan. You're the blessing that I want. You made me to be eternally blessed in you.
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You made me for yourself. That's the blessing that even though he didn't know it at the time,
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Jacob has been seeking his whole life and brothers and sisters, he could not find it grasping on to the heel of Esau.
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He could only find it grasping on to the Lord. Grasping on to the heel of the
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Lord. From a place of weakness. From a place where he's been crippled and brought low.
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That's where he grasps on to the Lord and the Lord that he's grasping on to is not some unmoved, arbitrary angel.
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We know that in the fullness of time, the heel that this weak believer is grasping is in fact the heel that's been struck by the serpent.
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And yet it smashed the head of the serpent in that place of ultimate weakness on the cross and it's there at the foot of the cross that the believer grasps the heel of the promised one.
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It's there that he receives the blessing indeed. I close with something
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I have to read. I won't read it in full. I'll just read the beginning and the end of it. It's an amazing when we talk about God pursuing the prodigal, there's a poem that was written at the very end of the 19th century by Francis Thompson called
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The Hound of Heaven. You ought to read the whole thing in full. You ought to read it because maybe some of it will be lost, the language is thick and poetry is one of those things that you can't really modernize without ruining it.
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But I hope you'll get the gist of what's being said. Francis Thompson is recounting what it was like to actually seek a blessing, to actually seek goodness and joy and contendence in life in all of the wrong ways, the ways that brought damage and devastation, just like Jacob, how he fled from the
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Lord, but the Lord pursued him. And the further he wanted to run and hide and he wanted darkness to cover him, the more the
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Lord spoke and pursued and the footsteps grew. And so it's The Hound of Heaven, in other words, God's grace, restlessly, ceaselessly pursuing the souls that he loves.
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I fled him down the nights and down the days. I fled him down the arches of the year.
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I fled him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind. In the midst of tears I hid from him.
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And under running laughter, in my deepest sorrows, in times of real pain, but also in my laughter, in both of these ways,
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I was hiding from him. I was fleeing him. Up visted hopes
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I sped and shot precipitated down titanic glooms of chasmed fears. From the highest joys to the lowest points of depression,
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I was running, and yet from those strong feet, capital
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F, that followed, followed after. That pursuit from the worldly highs and the worldly lows, this divine pursuit, but with unhurrying chase.
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It's patient. It's patient. There's this sort of recklessness, the highs and the lows, and there's just this patient pursuing of the steps.
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With unhurrying chase, unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, majestic instancy they beat.
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You think of the metronome of God's pursuing presence. And a voice beat, more instant than the feet.
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God's word going ahead of him. God's word echoing in the conscience of a fleeing sinner. And this is the voice.
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All things betray thee who betrayest me. What are you seeking in this life that's going to give you anything you're seeking?
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Everything you think you'll find that fullness, that all in, it betrays you.
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And it means nothing. And it betrays you because you're betraying me who is everything.
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And this is the very end. Now of that long pursuit comes at hand the brute, which is the report.
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The voice is round me like a bursting sea. And here's the voice. Is thy earth so marred, shattered and shard on shard?
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Lo, all things fly thee because thou flyest me. Everything you're seeking, like the prodigal, it's running through your hands.
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Everything you're trying to say, this will be it, this will do it, this will bring something in my life. And it just, it flows through your fingers.
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Why? Because you're fleeing from me. Strange, piteous, futile thing.
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Wherefore should any set thee love apart? Why should anything in this life, anyone in this world love you?
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A prodigal, a Jacob, a twister that's damaged every relationship, that's brought heartbreak to his family, to his parents, to his brother.
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Why should anyone, anything in life, favor you? Seeing none, but I make much of not.
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Seeing there is nothing that should, but I make much of nothing. And human love needs human meriting.
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How hast thou merited? Of all man's clotted clay, the dingiest clot. What is the value of your contribution to the world around you that the dingiest merit should be given to you?
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Alack, thou knowest not how little worthy of any love thou art. This is the voice.
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Think of this man fleeing from highs to lows, recklessly running away from the presence of God that's patiently pursuing him, patiently seeking him.
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And this is as much the voice of the Lord as the voice of his conscience. No one loves me.
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I don't deserve anything in this life. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee? Save me, save only me.
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What love is there for you out there, except mine? All which
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I took from thee I did but take, not for thy harms, but just that thou might seek it in my arms.
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I'm allowing these things to fall through and betray you and flee you, for you to find no satisfaction in anything in this life, to have a restlessness, not just about the unknown prospects in the dark of the night of your life, but a restlessness because you have eternity within your hearts.
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As much as you try to repress the truth of God and unrighteousness, he's not allowing you to do it. That voice, those footsteps keep drawing near.
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And all that God is taking from you, it's not for your harm, it's so that you'll seek it in him, to find the meaning of it, the value of it, in him who means all.
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All which thy child's mistake fancies is lost, I've stored for thee at home. Rise, clasp my hand and come.
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It's the prodigal father saying, you think you've lost everything, I've been taking it from you, storing it for you to return to.
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Come home. And now the poet catches himself in the midst of that voice, halts by me, that footfall is my gloom after all.
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He's saying, even here I hesitate. I halt. Halts by me, that footfall is my gloom after all.
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Shade of his hand, outstretched caressingly. And here's the voice, the very end of the poem.
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Oh, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am he whom thou seekest.
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From the place where he's been brought to his weakness, that he knows the pursuer of his soul.
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And in acknowledging who he is and what he's been and all of his guilt, and being brought low to that place of self recognition, he can look up, as it were, up the foot of the cross.
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And he can be blessed by the lover and pursuer of his soul. Let's pray.
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Father, we thank you for your word.
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We thank you for your divine love. There's nothing in this life that we merit, Lord, nothing that we deserve.
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Who or what should show us any love, any favor, and yet you've set an everlasting love upon your people, undeserved.
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We thank you, Lord, for your grace. We thank you for your faithful pursuit, the footsteps that never falter, the strength that never gives way.
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We thank you, Lord, when in those times of trial and darkness we clutch to you so tight and we, by the grace that you've given us, have a faith to say we will not let go, and yet we recognize
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Lord, looking back, it's always been you who's been grasping us. We pray that we would be humbled by reflection on our own lives in your grace for us, and that we would be lifted up in our reconciliation with you so that we can look to reconcile with our fellow man.
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Be used of you to advance your kingdom, knowing that those who make peace will see
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God. These things we ask in your son's name. Amen. Now's our time for interaction.
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I realize our time went quite long this morning. I had a fear that would happen, but it's a mountaintop passage, so it is what it is.
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So now's our time to interact on it. So, I'll share something quick.
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I think I was going to share a little of this with communion, but we don't have that much time.
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You know, it's easy when you read this passage, at least for me, to think of just this overcoming that God did of Jacob's flesh, you know, his physical strength, right, in a sense, and how
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Jacob was a striver in the flesh, right, and learned to be a striver with God.
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And sometimes, and Ross, I think you did a really good job to show this. I just want to kind of reiterate the point that God didn't just defeat his physical body, meaning his muscles and his joints, right, that he could not raise any strength, in a sense, against him.
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He changed, as the scriptures say, he changed his mind, right, he gave him, he gave him, you know, he changed his name, right, as someone who was a supplanter, right, and he gave him a name of someone who strives with God, right, and that's what
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Israel was meant to do, was to strive with God, to desire God, that God would be his all, and that's what he did for Jacob.
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It wasn't just this physical submission, it was a renewing of his mind to desire
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God more than he desired anything else, and I know that when we look at our lives, you know, we can, sometimes it's easy and sinfully to give him half of that, you know, to give the
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Lord that, hey, you know, I'll just kind of give up in the flesh, not including, the mind is part of the flesh, but in the flesh, meaning
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I'll just submit in that way, but he, you know, he requires much more than that, you know, and he deserves much more than that because of what he's done through Christ, and Christ comes to meet us, that our mind will be his, and that our thoughts will be his thoughts, follow his thoughts, and that we will desire him and desire his ways with our minds enthusiastically, right, and that's the difference, because it really is what's behind, you know, your hands and your feet, that drive your hands and your feet, and that's why the
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Lord comes for his children, to renew your mind, to give you a new mind, a new heart, and that your limbs and your flesh will follow him, you know, let's not forget that, let's not forget to judge ourselves correctly, especially going into communion, to judge ourselves correctly, like, okay, it's great you go to church, it's great, you know, at home you kind of fall in line maybe, right, but that's not, that's not
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Christianity, Christianity is giving your mind to him fully, right, and desiring him in ways that you love to, and you learn to walk with him with your thoughts, and your affections, right, all those things.