Genesis 32
v.12
But you have said, āI will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.ā
When God gave his promise, he did, as it were, put himself in the power of those who know how to plead the promise. Every promise is so much strength given to the man who has faith in the promise, for he may with it overcome even the omnipotent God himself.
v.19-20
He also instructed the second, the third and all the others who followed the herds: āYou are to say the same thing to Esau when you meet him. 20And be sure to say, āYour servant Jacob is coming behind us.āā For he thought, āI will pacify him with these gifts I am sending on ahead; later, when I see him, perhaps he will receive me.ā
Again we see Jacob the planner and the schemer. As he had taken Esauās birthright and blessing, as he had taken the best of Labanās herds, so now he had taken the best of Labanās herds, so now he had a plan to pacify Esau. However, it was not Jacobās plan that succeeded but his prayer.
v.24
So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.
Jacob didnāt wrestle with the Man. Instead, a Man wrestled with him. Jacob didnāt start out wanting anything from God; God wanted something from him. God wanted all of Jacobās proud self-reliance and fleshly scheming, and God came to take it, by force if necessary.
It does not say that he wrestled with the man, but āthere wrestled a man with him.ā We call him āwrestling Jacob,ā and so he was; but we must not forget the wrestling man, ā or, rather, the wrestling Christ, ā the wrestling Angel of the covenant, who had come to wrestle out of him much of his own strength and wisdom.
Nick Kang uses Jacobās wrestle with the angel as evidence for his orphan spirit. When we are in Christ, we no longer have to beg for Godās favor since His righteousness is imputed onto us.
Similar to how the Word clings onto us in Titus 1:9.
v.26
Then the man said, āLet me go, for it is daybreak.ā But Jacob replied, āI will not let you go unless you bless me.ā
It is evident that, as soon as he felt that he must fall, he grasped the other āManā with a kind of death-grip, and would not let him go. Now, in his weakness, he will prevail. While he was so strong, he won not the blessing; but when he became utter weakness, then did he conquer.
v.28
Then the man said, āYour name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome.ā
In C.S. Lewisās novel, Till We Have Faces, he tells the story of Orual, queen of Glome. The book was written as a letter of complaint to the gods. She knows only the mysterious Ungit who lives in the dark and devours human blood when necessary. Her complaint is wide-ranging, including the trauma of being born with disarmingly grotesque facial features and the impact of a wise Greek slave who tutored her in a distrust of the gods. Her life of loneliness and disappointment is only relieved by a younger half-sister, Psyche, who is beautiful and kind and loves her. Of all of of Orualās complaints, the most virulent is that the gods take Psyche away.
As Orual bitterly recounts the experiences of her life in the pages of her book to the gods, she yearns for the opportunity to look the gods in the face and throw her accusations at their feet to demand an accounting of their actions. She feels justified in her anger and is self-righteous in her vilification of their motives. At the end of the book she finally finds her self in the divine court with the opportunity to file her complaint. Her closing arguments summarize her grievance. You stole her [Psyche] to make her happy, did you? Why, every wheedling, smiling, cat-foot rogue who lures away another manās wife or slave or dog might say the same. Dog, now. Thatās very much to the purpose. Iāll thank you to let me feed my own; it needed no tidbits from your table. Did you ever remember whose the girl was? She was mine. Mine. Do you not know what the word means? Mine! Youāre thieves, seducers. Thatās my wrong. Iāll not complain (not now) that youāre blood-drinkers and man-eaters. Iām past that. At this point Orual is interrupted and realizes she has been repeating her complaint over and over. But she also realizes that the voice that reads it is strange to herāit is her real voice. And in the silence of the court she finds the answer. The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox [her tutor] would say, āChild, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; thatās the whole art and joy of words.ā A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which. you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, youāll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble of that we think we mean? Orual may seem to have little to do with Jacob and her complaint to have no correlation with any that Jacob may have. š„ But is is her next sentence, the one that gives us the title of the book, that draws the two together: āHow can they meet us face to face till we have faces?ā
In this sense, Genesis 32 tells the story of the night Jacob got a face. He could not see God face to face till he had a face. By this expression, Lewis meant that we have to be able to see ourselves from Godās perspective. When Jacob gained that perspective, he came to recognize his need for God in the ruins and the bankruptcy of his self-reliance. He saw what a sham his life had been. He was brought to his breaking point just as Abraham had been in Genesis 22. The greatest sacrifice Abraham could have been asked to make was his son and the covenant promises that attached to him. The greatest sacrifice Jacob could be asked to make was his self-sufficiency.
Each of us must ask what is necessary in our lives for us to see God face to face. What reality do we need to learn about ourselves, what sacrifice do we have to be asked to make in order to stand before God and look him in the face? It may not be self-reliance that we have to recognize. Perhaps it is vanity; maybe selfishness; maybe greed; maybe the need for approval. Whatever it is, our usefulness to God depends on it. We cannot expect to look God in the face till we have faces.