Conflict

The Struggle Of Your Life

10.19.25 [Genesis 32:22-30] River of Life (19th Sunday after Pentecost)

Mercy, peace, and love are yours in abundance because you have been called by the Holy Spirit, loved by God the Father, and kept in the firm grasp of Jesus Christ. Amen. 

In life, it won’t for you to run into a bridge-burner. It will, however, take you longer than you’d like to figure it out. No one ever introduces themselves as a relational arsonist. It’s not them, they’ll tell you, it’s the people around them. Always. 

Their parents were controlling, selfish, and cruel. How, no matter how much they tried, nothing they did was ever good enough to win their approval. Their siblings, too, were nasty, deceitful, and vicious. 

Past jobs included overly critical supervisors and co-workers who didn’t respect their boundaries. Former friends were fake or judgmental, too dramatic, too negative, or too gossipy.  Their romantic history, too, is littered with jealous and toxic exes. 

Once you have all the dots, you begin to make some connections. Any one of those things can happen to any one of us. But when these things always seem to happen to one person everywhere they go, they might be a bigger part of the problem than they realize. 

In Genesis 32, we run into a serial bridge-burner, Jacob. From his first breath, Jacob had been fighting to get the upper hand. As he was born, he was clutching his brother Esau’s heel. That’s where his name came from—Jacob means heel-grabber. While this name literally suited him at birth, it figuratively fit him through the rest of his days. 

Jacob was always looking for a way to get the upper hand. Like a skilled wrestler, he was resilient & patient, but strategic & technical. 

When his brother Esau returned from an unsuccessful hunt, Jacob saw an easy mark, rather than a hungry sibling in need. Instead of sharing a bowl of the red stew he had already made with his famished family member, he insisted that Esau, Gen. 25:31 first sell him his birthright. Not only that, but he demanded that Esau swear an oath to him, before he gave him a single ladle of lentil stew.  A bridge burned. 

When his father, Isaac, was old and his eyes were so weak that he could no longer see, Jacob dressed up and acted like to his brother Esau, to get the special blessing Isaac intended to give to Esau. When Isaac figured something was amiss, Jacob lied to his blind father three times. Another bridge burned. 

Esau was furious. Jacob had stolen his birthright and his blessing with a couple of meals. Esau plotted to kill his brother, as soon as his dad died. Rebekah told Jacob to lie low with her brother Laban. A bridge, re-burned. 

In Haran, the heel-grabber met his match. As devious as Jacob could be, Laban was always a step ahead. Jacob wanted to marry one of Laban’s daughters. Laban had Jacob work for him for seven years, and then still gave Jacob the daughter he didn’t like for a bride. After the wedding night, Jacob made it loudly known that Leah was not the woman he wanted. When Jacob confronted him, Laban spun a yarn about how it wasn’t proper to marry off the younger daughter until the older was married first. If Jacob worked for another seven years, he could also marry Rachel. Over the course of twenty years that Jacob worked for his uncle, Laban changed his wages ten times. 

After that many years, despite growing wealthier than Laban, Jacob got fed up. He gathered up his family, picked up his possessions, and fled without a single word. Another bridge burned. 

But in our text, all this bridge-burning seemed to be catching up with Jacob. As he went back home, the guilt of his past was re-awakened. Jacob had cheated his brother twice. He remembered Esau’s anger. 

Maybe you think, can’t Jacob just claim he was a young, immature man back then? Shouldn’t twenty years have put this silly feud to bed? Well, it’s probably important for you to know that Jacob was in his late seventies when he tricked his father into blessing him instead of Esau. 

As he returned to his homeland, Jacob wanted to suss out Esau’s frame of mind. He sent messengers to Esau. They came back and said, Esau’s coming to meet you and he’s got four hundred men with him. 

When Jacob heard that, he panicked. He divided his family into two camps. He assembled gifts of livestock and sent them ahead in an attempt to pacify Esau’s decades-old wrath. Then the night before their reunion, Jacob woke up his wives and kids and made them cross the Jabbok River so that they would be further from Esau’s fury. 

That’s when Jacob met his match. All alone in the wilderness, he was confronted by a man who came to tussle with him. It’s a strange story. 

After this prolonged struggle, the mysterious man who could not overpower Jacob, demonstrates that he has immense power. With just a touch, he wrenches Jacob’s hip out of its socket. You’d think that would be enough to get Jacob to cry uncle. But he refused to let the man go until he received his blessing. Then this man asked Jacob his name and promptly changed it to Israel and blessed him, but refused to divulge his own name. Jacob limps away from the match with gratitude, saying Gen. 32:30 I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared. And if all that doesn’t leave you scratching your head, I’m not sure what would. 

But the big question we have to wrestle with is, why does God tell us about this wrestling match?

Doesn’t it teach us something about how God deals with heel-grabbers? You probably haven’t done half of what Jacob did to his family, but like Jacob, you and I are always struggling for the upper hand in some way. Maybe it was at work. Or in some relationship. Perhaps it was, like Jacob, with your parents or your siblings. It could be with your own kids. You wanted the credit. The respect. The power. The admiration. Their love. You wanted to be needed or wanted or appreciated.   

Each of us is always looking for subtle ways to tip the scales in our favor. We’re looking for every edge. We slip our thumb on the scale. We try to do things our way, on our timeline, perfectly according to our plan. And then, like it did for Jacob, it blows up in our faces.

In that moment, what do we do? We get agitated. We may even panic. We hatch a new plan. We grow tense and terse. We get anxious and angry. We end up driving everyone away.

And then God comes to us in his Word. And he tells us things we do not want to hear. Truths that wrestle us down to the dust. He tells us that we don’t have half the control we think we do and we have even less an idea of what is actually good for us. He rejects our “helpful suggestions” to his plan for our lives. He almost never honors our demands to hurry up. Not only that, but he tells us that his perfect plan includes us going through many hardships, being humbled, feeling weak, being insulted, disciplined, and even suffering painful losses for his name’s sake.  

With each of these words from the Lord, we tense up. We get agitated. 

The last thing in the world that we want to hear from the Lord is that he is not interested in giving us the upper hand. But it’s the best thing. 

Because instead of giving us the upper hand, the Lord puts us into his hands. Instead of letting us have the final word, he gives us the word of his blessing. Like Jacob, we have struggled with humans and with God to get the upper hand. And by God’s grace, we are still crowned victors. 

Because God has fulfilled for us Jacob’s second request. We know his name. We know the name of the fullness of God, his Son, Jesus of Nazareth. Who came into this world of struggles and hardships and hard-headed sinners and did not burn bridges with righteous wrath. He reached out in a spirit of reconciliation. He humbled himself and became the servant of arrogant sinners. He stepped into the ring and fought our old, evil foe for forty days in the wilderness and many more. He pursued people who were trying to hide from their past iniquities. He gently restored those who had gone astray, trying to get their own way. Not only that, but this same Jesus suffered for selfish sinners like us. He allowed his heel to be pierced, crushed, for all the times we, like Jacob, have tried to grab the heel of another. He died, but the grave did not overpower him. It could not hold him. After three days, he told Mary Magdalene: Jn. 20:17 Let me go, but go tell my brothers I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. After everything the disciples had been and done, had not been and had not done, Jesus was not ashamed to call them his brothers. They struggled with God’s kingdom. They sparred with his patience and his timing. They bucked at his cross. But Jesus held them close and he blessed them with his name. My Father is your Father. My God is your God. I have put an end to your hostility to holiness and have revealed how my righteous plan is far better than your plan. Exactly what you need. That is why Jesus kept repeating a message of peace after his death and resurrection. We are at peace with God because we have received his blessing. 

We have been given his blessing and his name. It was the name God revealed to Isaiah as Immanuel. God with us. Even though he should be our adversary, because of our rebellion, God, in his grace and mercy, is with us. For us. God dwells in us. God works through us. God changes our name from enemies to children, from sinners to saints. So we declare what Jacob did at Peniel. We have seen God face to face, and our lives have not just been spared, they have been saved.  Amen.