God's New Name For Jacob

The Narrative

Rachel not happy - “Give me children, or I shall die!”

Jacob - “Am I God?”

Gets really crazy at this point

Rachel gives her servant Bilhah to Jacob as a surrogate mother

Has Dan and Naphtali

So then Leah, who no longer can have kids of her own does the same thing with her servant Zilpah

Has Gad & Asher

The sisters then are selling Jacob with mandrakes.....right, like really crazy!

Leah bought Jacob, and became pregnant with Zebulun and then a girl named Dinah

Then Rachel finally has a son of her own

Named him Joseph

And at this point in the story…Jacob’s family us huge, and his wealth is massive. If goats and sheep = massive amount of money today, Jacob would be a millionaire

Then there’s a really interesting story about speckled and spotted sheep and goats in chapters 30 & 31

Again..filled with deception

God tells Jacob to return to his home country....which was where Esau was, which we’ll come back to

And to do so, Jacob flees from Laban because he’s angry he’s losing his cheap labor essentially

Which brings us to chapter 32, where we’ll be studying from tonight

Teaching Plan

What have we seen from Jacob so far?

He stole Esau’s birthright for a bowl of soup

He’s tricked his father into blessing him instead of Esau

He’s fled from home

He found his wife at a well

He was deceived and ended up with two wives

And has a bunch of kids (11)

So, even in the midst of all the lies and deception, God was still working perfectly, and God was still keeping his promise that Jacob (and Abraham) would be blessed, so that all mankind would be blessed

Read

Jacob sent messengers with a peace offering essentially

They report Esau is coming to meet him with 400 men

So Jacob, true to his nature, devises his own plan to handle what he perceives to be an incoming attack

He wraps up a massive present of goats, rams, camels, cows, donkeys to send and meet Esau on this warpath

And broke them into “droves”

He divided his family into two camps, so that at least one would survive when Esau attacked

Read

Alright…So Jacob, takes his family, servants, everyone left with him across the river Jabbok…and then he himself stayed on the other side of the river

And verse 24 tells us that he was left all alone

Why exactly? We’re not entirely sure why he did…maybe to pray, maybe to psyche himself up…but we just know that he was left alone and everyone else was on the other side of the river!

27

What happened to Jacob while he was all alone that night is pretty phenomenal

READ TEXT

So…doubt any of us can ever say we’ve wrestled with God…but Jacob can.

How this wrestling match started, we’re not told....it could have been a bell, there was no crowd, and no judge, although, well technically there was a judge because God is the judge…

But what we do know is that a they wrestled until day break.

Why?

Well, there could be a couple of reasons:

1st - We see God confronting Jacob, much like He will confront Moses in the near future (which again is an absolute insane true story)

See, God had plans for Jacob, God wanted to use Jacob…but Jacob needed to be changed. Every stop in Jacob’s life up to this point we have seen Jacob take control, and Jacob form his own plans, and Jacob deceive, etc…Jacob needed to be humbled

And while none of us have ever wrestled with God physically, we do wrestle with Him daily as we live our lives

2nd - We see a picture of us needing to be broken…of our pride, of our deception, of our sin....

And sometimes God will work through difficult circumstances to humble us

2nd - God touched the socket of Jacob’s hip, and dislocated it

Me on a bus after a soccer game

Super painful…why God did that, again, we may not know every reason, but I think we can also read into this that sometimes we just need to be broken in order to be humbled

Like, they go hand in hand....when everything is going your way…it’s harder to be humble right?

And again, for me, this is most evidently demonstrated in Karington’s diagnosis

Which, btw, you guys can be praying for us

In verse 27, God had asked for Jacob’s name, which Jacob responded by saying, “Jacob”.....logically

Do you know what the name Jacob actually means? Anyone?

It has several meanings, that all kind of mean the same thing: trickster, supplanter, heel-grabber, deceiver, cheater....etc....we catch the drift

Does anyone know what their name means? Look up names (Denny for sure, Derek....www.behindthename.com)

Now God uses names to make statements in the Bible…His names for instance tell us so much about who He actually is

Remember Abram’s name was changed to Abraham, which meant “father of a multitude”

And now, here, with Jacob, we’ll see his name changed as well

READ TEXT

So we see here that God changed his name while they were wrestling to “Israel”

How many of you knew that that was where Israel the nation got it’s name from?

Israel means - “strives with God” or “God fights”

And they both make sense. Jacob needed to realize that his main striving needed to be with God and not with others. Jacob needed to stop relying on himself and his plans and his deception, and rely on God

And it will also prove to be very true that God fights for Israel.

But we also see Jacob leaving that wrestling match limping, a reminder to him of this epic night in the history of his life.

Which also, interestingly enough, is the very reason people of Israel to this day do not eat the sinew of the thigh connected to the hip

Takeaways

The Bible is so interesting, I hope you guys see that, and it is relatable to us today

Again, we aren’t gonna go all WWE with God....sorry Shmuff

But at some point in your life you do need to wrestle with who God is and decide if He is going to be your God or if you are going to continue to deceive yourself

This is extremely clear all the way through the Bible…we are seeing it in Genesis and it’s true in the New Testament.

, “ And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

Have you humbled yourself before God?

And while when we get saved we don’t change our names today, we are to change our hearts and our desires…

The Bible tells us we have a new heart ()

And that we are a new creation ()

Meaning we can’t say we love God, we can’t say we’ve humbled ourselves before God if we are living the exact same way we’ve always been

Someone tell me when you made Jesus Lord of your life

Now, look at your life pre-Christ and post-Christ…are you any different?

If I asked your friends, your family, your teachers, what would they say?

If you asked me what I thought, what would I say?

Not that it’s up to man to decide…but where are the markers in your life that are laying down the claim that you are a Christian?

See, if you are a believer, you should see God working to change your heart and mind and soul and give you a new identity in Him

You can’t be the same person, it’s not logical....it’s completely illogical

If we died to our sins how can we still live in them as Paul says?

In a few lessons, we’ll get to the story of Joshua, and how they laid down some markers after they crossed the Jordan, so that they wouldn’t forget

Why don’t you tonight, lay down a marker and say, you know what, from now on, I’m going to live my life as if it is no longer my own.