The Blessing of Doubt

Don: Doubt is a double-edged sword. It can be a Christian virtue that drives one to seek deeper spiritual understanding, to open one’s mind to god. Or, it can be destructive and lead to spiritual disillusionment, leaving one paralyzed in faith.

Jacob’s story provides a window on some of the struggles we have with our faith, and what god does about it for us and with us.

Some people struggle with god because he seems so remote, unapproachable, and uninterested in their needs and in their points of view. Some struggle with god because they see the relationship with him as a contract rather than as a covenant, and therefore feel aggrieved when god apparently fails to uphold his part of the agreement and answer their prayers. Some just don’t like the way god runs the universe—allowing little children to suffer and letting bad things to happen to good people.  Some struggle with the very concept of god, but many more people question the way god operates than question his existence.

Jacob’s story showed us that god seems to want to meet us in our darkest hour, when we are at our wit’s end. God does not shy away from darkness. He will struggle with us there and ultimately enlighten the darkness with his blessing. The intimacy of the struggle, as suggested by the wrestling metaphor, and the apparent inability of god to end the match by defeating his human opponent hint that there is something deeply important about the struggle itself.

In a wrestling match, the legs are perhaps the most vital limbs. They have the strongest muscles in the body. God chose to inflict a disability to Jacob’s legs by dislocating his hip. It was as bad a break as any wrestler could fear, yet still Jacob struggled until he was assured of god’s blessing.

What exactly was the blessing he wanted, and what was the blessing he got?

At the start of the story, in Genesis 27, Esau is born and immediately followed out of the womb by his twin brother Jacob, who emerges grasping Esau’s heel. The twins grow up to be very different characters in terms of physique, interests, abilities, ethics, and parental relationship, in all of which Esau is a better man. Eventually,  Jason deceives his father, Isaac, by disguising himself as Esau and thereby obtains Isaac’s dying blessing—and with it, the birthright as firstborn that properly belonged to Esau.

Isaac is frail and blind yet alert enough to recognize that the person asking for his blessing does not quite sound, feel, or smell exactly like Esau, so he asks his name. Jason assures him that he is Esau, and the deception works. But when Esau discovers the deception, he vows to kill his brother, who promptly flees and goes to live with his uncle, who proceeds over the years to deceive Jacob over a number of things. Jacob is now at the receiving end of deceit, but eventually he succeeds and becomes rich.

Jacob’s name is associated in Hebrew with the sense of grasping, holding onto things. He grasped for his brother’s heel, for his brother’s birthright, for a beautiful wife, and for riches. And in wrestling with god, he is grasping for God’s blessing. And just as Isaac asked Jacob his name (though receiving the deceitful answer “Esau”) and then proceeded to bless him, God likewise asked Jacob his name just before blessing him.

It seems clear that Jacob knew with whom he was wrestling, yet he was prepared to continue wrestling with god for the blessing even at risk of death should he see god when day broke and the darkness was lifted.

So what was the blessing? The answer lies in Jacob’s answer to god’s question: “Who are you?” He said: “I am Jacob.” I think this is meant to be understood as a confession. He is no longer trying to deceive. He is saying, given the Hebrew connotation, “I am a deceiver, a supplanted, a grabber, a sinner in need of God’s grace, and I hereby relinquish my old ways.” And god’s grace and forgiveness is exactly what he then got.

So in wrestling with god, Jacob not only learned something about god but perhaps more importantly he learned something about himself, and that is perhaps the message for all of us in this story. If we open ourselves truthfully to god, god will forgive us, and he will not take us to task for our sins.

But Jacob nevertheless paid a price, in the form of the disability following god’s dislocation of his hip. Someone suggested last week that this disabling might refer to the relinquishment of one’s will to god.

The blessing reminds me of the 103rd psalm (verses 1-10):

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul,
And forget none of His benefits;
Who pardons all your iniquities,
Who heals all your diseases;
Who redeems your life from the pit,
Who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion;
Who satisfies your years with good things,
So that your youth is renewed like the eagle.
The Lord performs righteous deeds
And judgments for all who are oppressed.
He made known His ways to Moses,
His acts to the sons of Israel.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
Slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness.
He will not always strive with us,
Nor will He keep His anger forever.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins,

…that is good news!

Nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.

This is exactly the blessing that Jacob realized. He was not dealt with as Jacob. Instead, he was transformed into Israel. His identity, his character, his very being was transformed. So the blessing is a self-realization brought on by a recognition of our character defects, imperfections, weaknesses, and of our need and desire for a more gracious relationship with a forgiving god. Like Jacob, we tend to try to disguise our wickedness, to pretend that we are not the sinful person we really are. More so than our new awareness of god, it is this self-recognition that opens the door to the blessing of god’s grace and forgiveness.

While Jacob went to great lengths to hide his true self, god was even more relentless in struggling to save Jacob, when god had the power so easily to force Jacob to change. This is the lesson for all of us. It is a story of judgment. God does not judge us; he helps us to judge ourselves.

Harry: It is hugely significant that god does not seek blame, accuse, or correct Jacob in any way. This god does not fit the standard picture of him, and is hardly the god of Israel.

Pastor Ariel: God wrestles with us, he plies us with questions to get us to confess to ourselves. I was long puzzled why, whenever Jesus appeared to people as a glorified being, as in Daniel or John, they would fall down in a dead faint. Perhaps it is because the perfect image of god reveals just how horribly imperfect we are. We sing that we “dare to be like Daniel” but Daniel too fell flat on his face when he looked upon true perfection. The only righteousness that will cover our imperfection is the righteousness of god himself. No amount of self-righteousness will do it. In wrestling with us, god seeks to get us to take off our cloaks of self-righteousness.

Robin: The struggle seems to reflect our darkest, most desperate hour, when we are not sure if god is with us or not.

Don: The promise is that if you hold on and continue the struggle, dawn will come and it will reveal that you were wrestling not with your demons but with god himself.

David: The darker things get, the brighter will seem to shine the inner light. When there no more help to be obtained from the outside, then there is nowhere left to look but inside ourselves, and it is a blessing that at that point, the inner light is inevitably more distinct and discernible.

Harry: The word “Israel” means a people—a nation—that struggles. Over the centuries, Israel the nation has certainly matched that description. Jacob’s story troubles me in that god does nothing except to change Jacob’s name to Israel. It is a brutal story, and I worry that we try to sanitize it.

Kiran: To surrender to god after wrestling with him is a blessing in that it brings the inestimable peace of knowing that god’s grace is there, no matter what.

Robin: Jacob’s fear of his brother led him despicably to use his family as a shield. When one’s fear is that great, there is nowhere left to turn for help but to god for forgiveness.

Pastor Ariel: After god gave Jacob his new name, Israel, Jacob asked god who he (god) was. God responded only by blessing him. So the blessing was not the change of name, it was the duel. It is the confrontation with our own dishonesty, our human tendency to camouflage ourselves and deceive others. The dislocation of his joint clearly did not diminish one bit Jacob’s positive embrace of the outcome of the struggle, since he goes on to honor the place where it took place by renaming it.

David’s prayer, Psalm 51, has a similar context to what Robin just mentioned: Verse 8:

Make me to hear joy and gladness,
Let the bones which You have broken rejoice.

It is unusual to thank someone who has seriously injured one, but that is just what David does in the psalm. God had pierced through David’s deception concerning Bathsheba. David describes the experience of being pierced by the light of god’s knowledge and being confronted with his own unholiness in the presence of god’s holiness as being so painful that it felt like a broken bone inside him. So wrestling is not isolated to Genesis 32. It’s also in Acts 2: “And they were pricked to the heart”—stabbed in the heart, a mightily painful inner experience. The key to Genesis 32 lies not so much in the dislocation of Jacob’s hip socket than in god’s piercing of his heart.

Robin: Is Jacob’s sin like Abraham’s in that it was foretold? They both got tired of waiting for god to fulfill his promises to make them great, so they decided to lend him a hand, as it were.

Don: Many stories in scripture tell of people who tried. It is human nature. But the stories also tell that although there are consequences to the people who do it, it does not affect god’s love for them. His grace and forgiveness are always there, even in the face of willful sins.

Harry: That is the positive in the Jacob story.

David: That is the blessing, and it does not have to be requested. It is there for us anyway.

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