Clough Genesis Lesson 76
Jacob
wrestles with God; renamed
I have a feedback card that I’d like to respond to about Laban; we’ve been studying Genesis and the patriarchal era. What was it about Laban’s pagan faith that convinced him that the covenant would be good according to the God of Jacob, in Genesis 31:49-50? Was it Jacob’s excellent track record? If I were Laban I would have pulled my idol of covenant making from the shelf and thrown it unto the Mizpah. Let’s turn to Genesis 24:31, Laban was not a total pagan, and that he wasn’t is seen by the fact that the patriarchs sent out two generations of boys to get their girlfriends up there and had Laban been a total pagan the girls would have be in no better shape up there than they were in the land of Canaan. In Genesis 24:31 when Laban responds, earlier when Isaac got Rebekah he says, “Come, thou, blessed of Jehovah,” and it clearly shows that Laban had a Yahwehistic faith. The problem with Laban was that he mixed the Yahwehistic of Jehovah faith of the Old Testament; he mixed it together with paganism. That’s how he had the idols, that’s how he would use divination to find out why he was prospering on his job and so on, and we call that mix eclecticism. It’s an eclectic mix of a lot of different diverse elements and this often happens.
In the office we were reading a week or so back an archeological magazine that had come and I was pointing out to some of the people working here that the way we read the Old Testament is somewhat deceptive. If you and I were to get in a time machine and transport ourselves back into the 8th and 7th and 6th centuries before Christ, and walk around and interview the people that lived during the time the Bible was being written, we ought not to expect that they would all be thinking, talking and worshiping like we see in the Bible; not that the Bible is an inaccurate reporter of what happened; it’s just that what the Bible, remember, is written by the prophets. The Bible is written with a divine viewpoint of what was going on. To visualize this better imagine if somehow when the curtain is pulled on the 20th century and all of us are long gone, that there remains for future generations only two kinds of literature, those written by C. S. Lewis and that written by Frances Schaeffer. And imagine if, in the year, say 2100, someone who had studied Schaeffer and studied Lewis’s writings said boy, this is really good, that 20th century must have been a really sharp era. And then they would come back and walk around, hey, you know, how representative was that? It wasn’t. Well in the same way, when you read your Old Testament, remember, you are not reading what was representative of the people at large. You’re reading what was representative of what God wanted from the people, you’re reading things from His viewpoint. But you’re not reading as it would have appeared to you.
Recently in archeology, for example, they found a traveler’s hovel in the Sinai where the travelers would come down to Egypt and they were obviously Jews that were coming by this place, and on the walls of the place they had “May Yahweh be with you” and so on, they had all the Jewish verses and then they’d say, right in the middle, “May Baal also bless you.” And it’s just completely interwoven, the same doorpost had both of them on it, and then on one big urn that they found, they found a picture of what they believed, first time they’ve ever discovered in archeology, evidence that Yahweh was conceived to have a consort, that is a female deity to accompany him. Now this is true of all the other gods in the ancient east but the first archeological evidence that we’ve ever had that the ancient Jews thought that same way about Jehovah. Well, if they thought that way about Jehovah then that tells you that things are in really bad shape because the Bible advises against this whole belief system. So the average Jewish way of looking at things in those days is not what we’re looking at here. Laban is an illustration of an eclectic type of person.
Let’s go to Genesis 32 and continue our
study of Jacob. Remember, Jacob is a
model; he’s one of the model men of the Bible and each model man of the Bible
gives us certain characteristics of godly men and gives us wisdom as to how God
works with men. Jacob was a model of the
productive, persevering man. Jacob
though, didn’t do anything spectacular like Moses, waving the wand and making
the
Jacob also, as we saw last time, had a little problem with sanctification. Every person has their –R learned behavior patterns, most of these we have learned as children in our family setting. Jacob had learned a bad one in his family setting, because Jacob had a dad, Isaac, and Isaac was the kind of fellow that preferred Esau over Jacob. And the result was that Jacob, apparently, never really had a healthy relationship with his father, and this caused him to have problems later on in life in one particular area. It seems like Jacob, whenever he got in a situation with a radical disagreement with another man could never sit down and articulate this thing and get it settled. Rather, what he would do is just turn his back and go away and try to be nice about it, but never resolve it. And this was just a pattern that he had and he would kind of shrink away from confrontations.
Back in Genesis 31:36 we see one of the two reasons that God corrected him for this. One reason was that in shrinking away from confrontations, not necessarily incidentally, the Bible is not teaching to go ahead and relish in confrontation. It’s just saying that sometimes there does arise those situations where you just can’t go on because it eats away from the inside and if it’s going to eat away from the inside then let’s take care of it. Well Jacob, when he got to that point, wouldn’t take care of it, he’d still slink away and pretend everything was okay. And so in verse 36 finally he becomes angry enough, remember in the confrontation, and now it all comes out, which was encapsulated bitterness for 20 years. And that’s what God says, you just can’t keep bottling it up, and bottling it up, and bottling it up and bottling it up; if you’ve got to deal with it, deal with it but don’t sit there and bottle it up. And that’s what he did, and that’s what he’s un-bottling here in verse 36 and following.
The second reason why God wanted him to do this is found in the same chapter, verse 26; not only did it affect him because it was ruining his soul from the inside, but in verse 26 it was ruining other people’s relationships, in particular his wives relationship with their dad. The father/daughter relationship is a very strong one in most homes and it’s very critical because a girl’s patterns, her response to men largely over her response to her own father. And so in this situation, the father/daughter relationship is important. In verse 26 Laban said to Jacob, why have you taken my daughters away. And you remember the second reason for dealing with it was that he had not made a wise severance of the father/daughter relationship so God said hey, wait a minute, lest you have seeds of destruction in your relationship 20 years from now because you didn’t do it right here and then later on these girls are going to grow and they’re going to get resentful of this and how that whole thing was handled, rather than let that situation crop up let’s just deal with it right here and now.
So there were two reasons why God confronted Jacob with this matter. However, the method God used is very interesting and the method God used to deal with this man is the method He uses in your life and mine. First of all, you notice that Jacob was basically obedient. Notice in Genesis 31:13, there is the will of God stated for Jacob. So the first thing you notice is that Jacob is basically obedient; he is in fellowship, he is responding to the known will of God. Verse 17 is his response to verse 13, and it’s right on; he’s going along in life. The man who led me to Christ tried to teach me something about divine guidance one day and he was using the illustration, he said always remember that God cannot steer a parked car. And his point was that you’ve got get moving, generally, in general areas of obedience before you can expect him to start steering. Don’t expect Him to give you a road map of what He’s going to do because He’s not going to do that. What has got to take place is for us to start obeying in the areas we know, trusting that He’ll make the necessary corrections on down the road.
So here Jacob is, he’s starting with verse 13 and 17, basic obedience. He starts down the road, he’s going not quite the road God wants Him to but he’s generally going the right direction. So what God then does, He deflects him and He deflects him through three confrontations. Let’s look at these confrontations. The first one occurs in Genesis 31:25, Laban overtakes Jacob. He overtakes Jacob and as he overtakes him we have the first confrontation with his father-in-law. So confrontation number one that he wants to avoid he can’t avoid because God sees to it that he can’t avoid it. Remember, he’s basically obedient, he’s in the will of God, and God’s not punishing him; this is not punishment. This is training.
The second confrontation is found in Genesis 32:6, one we’ll study today: And the messengers reported to Jacob, saying, we came to your brother, Esau, and now he’s coming out to meet you with four hundred men. So the second confrontation is not with his father-in-law, but with his own brother, the brother that he deceived years ago, 20 years ago. And this has to be taken care of and this has to be corrected. So the second confrontation.
The third confrontation is Genesis 32:24, wrestling with a man whom we will identify as the preincarnate Lord Jesus Christ. So we have a confrontation with three people and he does a very fascinating thing in this third confrontation. But all three of these very unpleasant situations are there by divine purpose. Why? To help sanctify Jacob, that’s why. Here is a man whom God has called to do something specific in life and he can’t do something specific in life down here on the road until he first gets rid of this problem up here, because if he doesn’t get rid of this problem, this –R learned behavior pattern, then he cannot do what God called him to do. So it’s just necessary that this gets sanctified out of his soul right here and now.
But something else about these things; in
each of these three trials God is not punishing him, God is being gracious and
protecting him. Let’s look back at the
first confrontation, Genesis 31:24, just prior to the first confrontation what
happened. It says, “And God came to
Laban, the Syrian, in a dream by night, and said unto him, Take heed that you
not speak to Jacob either good or bad.”
In other words, lay off! So what
does God do? He’s going to sanctify and
train Jacob but at the same time He is protecting Jacob. Jacob is a believer and Jacob is under the
umbrella of God’s protection. So God
will protect him in this confrontation.
So God brackets Jacob with help and the help is God’s restraint on Laban
so he won’t hurt Jacob. This is a
picture of 1 Corinthians
Let’s look at the second one; chapter 32,
his confrontation with Esau. Just before,
notice the timing, just before the confrontation takes place, what happens in
verse 1? Who does he meet? A whole army of angels. Next he’s going to meet Esau’s army of 400
men but before Esau’s army can get up to Jacob, what has he got around him? A
whole army of angels. So again he is not
being punished; he is being helped and God is very graciously protecting him
against any harm; even though the lesson will be hard it won’t be harmful. And finally in the third relationship it’s
with God Himself.
Let’s go to Genesis 32:1 and look at this
reference. “And Jacob went on his way,
and the angels of God met him. [2] And
when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God’s host: and he called the name of
that place Mahanaim,” which is a Hebrew dual noun, it’s a noun that means the
twin military camp. We’ll explain it in
a moment. Jacob sees these angels. Now whether everybody else sees them we don’t
know; sometimes when angels materialize everybody sees them; for example
Genesis 18, the two angels walk into
This sometimes happens in a very spectacular way. I remember a missionary story, during the Vietnam War the Montagnards, who were the tribesmen up in the hills of Vietnam, and there was this one village that, I think it was the Assembly of God missionaries had worked in very extensively, and the village was without any military protection whatsoever, and the VC surrounded it one night, and the chieftain of the village and some of the elders who were Christians couldn’t do anything else, they couldn’t escape, they couldn’t hide, didn’t have any holes, any trenches, and so what happened that they said well, the only thing that we can do is gather everybody together in the central meeting place in the village and we’ll pray. And so they prayed and they heard one mortar come off and then explode and that was all, and then the attack seemed to stop just at the time it started. And nothing was thought of it for a long time, nobody thought anything spectacular until in a later engagement the United States Army got hold of particular VC that had been involved in that operation, captured some of them, and upon interrogation, I forget the details but they somehow got one of the VC that had been involved in the raid and they brought him through the village to go somewhere else and it was discovered that he had been in this raid. So some of the Christians in the village said how come that night when you had us surrounded you didn’t carry on with the raid. Why did it get stopped as soon as it started? And he said oh, it was very simple, we had it all surrounded and then when we started opening fire we noticed, all of a sudden on the roof of every house in your village there was an army of white that far outnumbered us and it just spooked us. Well now nobody in the village who was at the prayer meeting saw any of that. It was selective perception. In other words, the angels were there protecting but they were only visible to the ones that it was necessary to make them visible to. So this is highly selective.
And I think this is probably what’s going on in verse 1. There’s an army of angels there and Jacob and probably Jacob alone recognized that they’re there. This happens at other places in the Scripture. If you turn to 1 Kings 6 you’ll see a very famous incident that happened in the days of Elisha. And it’s a good one to go to every once in a while to remember all the neat things that God has available to him, all of His resources that He can bring to bear to protect believers. 2 Kings 6:15, Elisha, much like the people in that Montagnards village, was surrounded by an enemy army. “And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, and behold, an army,” the word “host” is an army, “compassed the city, both with horses and chariots. And his servants said unto him, Alas, my master! What shall we do?” Total deceit as far as from the human point of view. Now Elisha’s answer, [16] “Fear not; for they who be with us are more than they who be with them. [17] And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man, and he saw; and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.”
In other words, there were two armies that day; the human army that they thought was the real situation and then Elisha says no, don’t let it worry you, we’ll claim the promises, Lord, open up to him, let him see all the other resources we have available here. And all of a sudden, you can imagine this bewildered look on this servant as he looks around, all of a sudden for every human horseman there, there’s two or three of them in back of him of God’s horsemen, the angels, just sitting there waiting for the order. And the order is given in verse 18, “And when they came down to him, Elisha prayed unto the LORD, and said, Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness.” And the order went out, and they blinded all the human army. So there is a remarkable illustration of one point in time, at a place, you can go visit the place today, it’s not in never-never land some place, it’s in this world, in this history that you and I live in, where the angels manifested themselves and did a work.
That’s not the only place in the Bible; turn to Zechariah. In Zechariah 1 the prophet is receiving new revelation and during this process he has a vision. Zechariah 1:8, “I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the bottom; and behind him there were red horses, speckled and white.” In other words, an entire angelic army. And then Zechariah turns around and he says, “O my lord, what are these? And the angel who talked with me said unto me, I will show you what these be. [10] And the man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and said, These are they whom the LORD has sent to patrol to and fro though the earth.” Isn’t that amazing, angelic patrols, it’s like, you know, police cars cruise your neighborhood, you don’t know, the angelic patrols wandering around all the time, just seeing what’s going on, checking in on you and me, what’s happening. Well, that’s what this patrol was doing. The only thing is 99% of the time these patrols are invisible but at this one point God said I want you to see this. And so Zechariah was let in on God’s system of patrols. In verse 11, “And they answered the angel of the LORD,” notice, “they answered the angel of the LORD,” it’s the whole army, “We have walked to and fro through the earth, and, behold, all the earth sits still, and is at rest.” So the only way to describe this is an active angelic patrol; again momentarily visible, normally invisible.
Zechariah 2:5, the protection of God upon
believers and particular the protection of God upon believers in the city of
Incidentally, in verse 8 and expressions like this I don’t know how the modern translations carry it but I’ve noticed working with one of them when it says “the LORD of hosts” I think it just says “Almighty,” “the Lord Almighty;” it totally misses it. And this is where the King James actually is better. “The LORD of hosts” means the Lord of armies and there’s a reason why the Hebrew says that and it’s lost when you think of the Lord Almighty. It’s usually capitalized to clue you the translator is trying to tell you, when you see those capital L-O-R-D that it’s the word Jehovah, it’s the covenant name of God, it’s not His title; that is not a name, that is a title. This is a proper noun; that is a common noun. When it says “the LORD of hosts” the word “host” equals “armies.” What armies? Angelic armies! And so the whole name, “the LORD of hosts,” that expression is to recall to your attention and mine Zechariah 1, 2 Kings 6, Genesis 32 and the imagery of the angelic hosts that protect. Incidentally too, always remember that everywhere the angels operate in history they do not operate to help you spiritually. That is the prerogative of the Holy Spirit. When we see angels helping believers they are always confined to helping them physically, not spiritually. Apparently angels have no authorization to interfere in our spiritual relationship with the Lord; they are only authorized to help the physical situation.
Now this word “hosts” this is a little excerpt on Martin Luther’s hymn, turn to hymn 166 and I’ll show you something about that lyric. Luther knew what he was composing here and it’s lost sometimes on people. The second stanza of A Mighty Fortress is Our God, the third grouping, “Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus it is He,” now Luther did a very interesting thing in the middle of this lyric, something which even the New Testament doesn’t do this fully but Luther was right, “Lord, Sabaoth,” now the word Sabaoth, that S is actually “tz,” it’s Tsaboth; now the “oth” is a plural ending in the Hebrew noun, it’s a feminine plural ending, and Sabaoth, this “b” is pronounced as a “v,” Sabaoth, Sava-oth, that “sava” means army, Savaoth means armies, so it’s not Sabath, the way often people sing it, it’s not Lord Sabath is His name, it’s the Lord Sabaoth is His name, the Lord of armies is His name; “From age to age the same,” and what is He doing, “and He must win the battle.” Luther captured it perfectly in that line, Sabaoth. Today, when you see an Israeli soldier, for example, that word is still used. We have our guys with USA on their coat pocket, in Israel it’s TZHI, and it means the armies of the defense of Israel, and they still use the word, Tzaba or Tzabaoth, [he says it in Hebrew] “the armies of the defense of Israel.” So that is a technical term and I’m sorry to see that the modern translations have just flushed the whole thing and in doing so we’ve paid a price. In trying to get clarity for the average popular reader they’ve sacrificed the depth meaning of the term.
Back to Genesis 32:1; so it’s the Sabaoth of God that are meant here in verse 1. We don’t know how many, God has legions and legions and legions of angels, without number, and verse 1 apparently was one company of them that was dispatched to handle this little situation. And Jacob recognized it and he names it and he names it, and he names it, this is the camp of the twin military, or this is the place of the twin military camp. Now it doesn’t mean they’re side by side; the picture is here’s Jacob’s camp and the angelic camp is right hovering over him. It’s just a glorious picture of the protection God gives believers.
Now we watch Jacob work; we said Jacob is a male model so let’s watch a male model, some of the things he does and see if we can mimic him in his wisdom. The first thing he does or step one, verse 4. We’ll go through this by a series of steps and watch how he copes with the situation.
Step one is given in Genesis 32:4, “And he
commanded them, saying, Thus shall ye speak unto my lord Esau; Thy servant
Jacob saith thus, [I have sojourned with Laban, and stayed there until
now.]” Now Jacob, in step one, initiates
reconciliation and he does so because he recognize the authority of the
family. Let me show you how this
works. Here’s a map; we have the
So they’ve come down here to just north of
the Jabbok and they’ve halted; the meaning and significance of this is that Esau
is down here, down south of the Zered; the
Where did this take place? The
So the first step we recognize is he initiates voluntarily this procedure, and in verse 4 he calls Esau lord? Because he’s his older brother, and so even though Jacob has the position spiritually superior to his brother, this does not get taken as an excuse to run roughshod over the family authority structure. In other words, he still recognizes that Esau, even though he’s a spiritual ignoramus, is his older brother, and that’s why he defers to him in verse 4. It’s a recognition of family authority.
Genesis 32:5, the second step of Jacob; he prepares carefully, “I have oxen, and asses, flocks, and menservants, and women servants: and I have sent to tell my lord, that I may find grace in thy sight.” Now why does he tell his servants to tell him all about the oxen, the asses, the flocks, the menservants and women servants and so on. Why is that? What were those things? Tokens of grace; did Jacob literally deserve that? No, he’s going to say later, quite frankly, I didn’t deserve that. What he’s saying is hey, Esau, God’s blessing me. Do you know why He’s blessing me? He’s graciously blessing me. I’m a stinker and I’ve learned in these 20 years of my life what a stinker I am and what a gracious God God is and that He’s blessed me and blessed me and blessed me. So what he’s really doing in verse 5, it isn’t that he’s just presenting a grocery list of his wealth; what he’s doing in verse 5 is giving him evidences of things he’s learned by watching God’s blessing in his life. He comes back to Esau saying Esau, in those twenty years that we’ve had this hostility and this animosity, I’ve learned about myself and one thing I’ve learned that’s basic to everything is that I’m a sinner and I’m in need of grace. That’s why he turns to Esau and he says now I ask grace in your sight. In other words, he’s able to turn and ask for forgiveness and grace in Esau’s sight because he’s first turned and seen grace in God’s sight.
So that’s the second step; now comes the 400 men of verse 6. [“And the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, We came to thy brother Esau, and also he comes to meet thee, and four hundred men with him.”] We don’t know why Esau sent these 400 men; I suspect it was not because he was planning something evil against Jacob at this point; Esau was kind of one of those characters that gets mad quickly and is subsides. Remember what Rebekah said? Now Jacob just get out of here a couple of weeks and Esau will simmer down; he probably was that kind of a person. I suspect the only reason he’s carrying 400 men is he’s got to go 100 miles through that mountain area and that area was hostile at the time, lots of gangs and so on in there so he needed a large contingent, plus the fact, later on, in chapter 33 he offers the 400 men to protect Jacob. Do I don’t think it was sinister on Esau’s part in verse 6, but when you come to verse 7 and you see Jacob’s response, all of a sudden now we’ve got a different story. Even though Esau did not intend evil, what do you see Jacob doing?
Genesis 32:7, “Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed: [and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks, and herds, and the camels, into two bands,]” now here’s an interesting principle about guilt and fear. Guilty people are usually fearful people. Illustration: If I know that I’m out of fellowship with God and God is angry with me, and I go out and I get myself in a situation where I need His protection, it could be a storm at sea, it could be a malfunctioning aircraft, it could be some very dramatic thing where I need at that point to call upon God to protect me physically, do I have confidence that I can claim the promises of God in that situation, when I’m able to hear that I’m basically guilty in His sight? No-no, you know that as well as I do. You don’t claim objectively the protection of God when basically deep down in your heart you know He’s hacked off at you. The two don’t go together.
And this is why here is a by-product of guilt and this is why the Bible way of handling fear is not by courage; you would think there are two antonyms of contrasting words; fear and courage. That’s the way we usually use it in the English language. However, when you come to the Bible the anonym of fear is not courage. In 1 John it says “perfect love casts out fear.” So the antonym of fear is not courage; the antonym of fear is love. Another illustration of this: Christians may be very fearful of say, a guy’s got a gift of teaching or a girl may have the gift of exhortation, she’s going to use it in song, in music, but she’s very fearful, she’s afraid of what people are going to say, she’s afraid of what people are going to think or he may be afraid of what people are going to think if he does this and that. How do you cope with that kind of fear? You know people are always going to say something so obviously you’ve got to have some solid base for handling the situation. It’s not vacuous fear, it’s real fear. The way to do it is if you know you’ve got a spiritual gift, and you know that that spiritual gift is given to you to serve, then the way to handle the fear is simply to say wait a minute, God, You’ve given me this spiritual gift, You’ve given me this gift not to elevate what I’m doing, You’ve given this gift ultimately so I can help those people. So if therefore you do it out of a motivation of helping, serving, edifying those people the fear goes away. Now how is that fear overridden? The fear is overridden by a love to do what God wants for those people and that overrides the fear.
Of course, the classical illustration is the woman who’s walking along the street, her little child gets out in the middle of heavy traffic and is about ready to get squashed by a two-ton truck and what does she do? For the love of the child she goes out and she grabs him, even though it may mean her life. Why? Because the mother is courageous? No, not basically; you don’t see mother’s courageously jumping in front of two-ton trucks all over the place. It’s rather that she loves her child and that love for her child overrides the fear.
All right, the fear, guilt and love are all tied together and in verse 7 Jacob is basically fearful because we know all is not right with him and Esau. But then step two. Step was in verse 4, he initiated it, recognizing the authority of the family; step two, he prepared carefully, choosing the time, place and method, looking at it with a gracious attitude. Step three, in verse 7, he now tries something that often people, Christians in particular, think of this as coping out spiritually.
Now let me address this problem, call it
contingency planning; what do we mean by contingency planning? Something is contingent if it’s not
certain. Is tomorrow certain? From God’s point of view, you bet! From your point of view, no. Now there’s one of three ways you can handle
tomorrow; you can sit and do nothing about it, that’s the worrywart; the
worrywart doesn’t do anything about tomorrow because ultimately they’re very
lazy people and don’t want to do anything about tomorrow so they’d rather sit
and worry about it than do something about it.
And so often worry is just nothing more than manifested laziness; it’s
the result of laziness. Well, that isn’t
pious and God doesn’t want us to just sit back and do nothing about
tomorrow. But then there’s the other
extreme, we’ve got plan every detail for tomorrow. That’s wrong by the book of James because
James said woe to you businessmen, you go here, you go there, you’ve got your
whole thing autonomously planned and it’s not an open-ended plan. Suppose God wants to veto what you’re going
to do at
So there are at least two extremes and the Bible commends neither. The Bible says there’s such a thing as godly planning and it’s contingency planning. Godly planning means that you are not God and don’t know exactly what tomorrow handles. Godly planning involves many factors; we’re not going to go into them this morning, just to mention the one here in verse 7, that is in contingency planning I confess my creature hood. I confess and admit I don’t have omniscience. And I confess, therefore, by the way I plan what I really believe. And so Jacob confesses, he doesn’t know what’s going to take place so he divides his capital assets into two piles. He doesn’t put all his eggs in one basket so they can both get ruined; he puts it over here so if one gets ruined the other is saved.
Now the principle of contingency planning is important and very deep; it has many applications in many areas of life. I just mentioned one here today; contingency planning, which is part of godly planning, is the theoretical basis for free market capitalism. There is where one of the basis for free market capitalism over against socialism, communism, fascism, and all the other isms. Why? Because in contingency planning you’ve got many people entering the market; if somebody builds a certain kind of baby carriage with four wheels; somebody builds it with three wheels. Nobody knows how the public is going to buy. So we’ve got two or three businessmen and one guy says I think the public will but this product; I think the public will buy that product; I think the public will buy this product, and they invest and they develop a product. What does that give you? It gives choice among the buyers and the consumers. The more diversity and contingency planning you’ve got, the more spread out and the more stable the society is. Suppose everybody all of a sudden gets a hang-up against three wheel baby carriages and they don’t sell; it’s one big flop and the company goes bankrupt. But the whole industry doesn’t go bankrupt because other points in the industry haven’t bet on that particular point.
See, you’ve got depth in a free market situation. But what happens with socialism? Oh, government knows best, and so government says… they send Ralph Nader around, and the big counsel, and they say we’re going to design three wheel baby carriages that are safer, only three wheels instead of four to run over your feet with; this is safe and we are going to protect the American consumer against his own stupidity and we are going to decide to offer only one line of baby carriages, the three wheel kind. And so the government invests thousands and thousands of dollars, nothing else, the industry doesn’t have any other flexibility, everybody is building three wheeled baby carriages but nobody wants three wheel baby carriages, they want four. Now what happens? It’s a bust and this time it’s a bad one because now there’s no other options on the market. That’s what socialized planning does.
Whenever you have a politician saying they are going to regulate your markets, they are going to tell you, the farmer, for example, that you are going to plant X acres of corn or you’re going to plant X acres of cotton or this, that or the other thing, that’s violating the contingency planning principle because what they’re saying is they know what the consumer and what the weather is going to be tomorrow, rather than let each person take their own risk. That is interference and there’s where you have people suffering because they’re violating wisdom principles. As Milton Friedman said one time, he said you know, isn’t it interesting, he was commenting on the problem that the government thinks everybody has to label everything in the breakfast cereal to protect the consumer and he says you know, isn’t it interesting in this country that we’re too stupid to choose our own breakfast cereals, but come November we’re apparently smart enough to choose our own President.
So Genesis 32 goes on and deals with another step of Jacob. After taking verses 6, 7 and 8 and working with this step of where he’s applying wisdom to the situation through contingency planning, faith-rest, faith-doing actually, now in Genesis 32:9-12 he prays. You’ll notice when he prays and when he does not pray? He faith-does what he can do before prays. There are some times when prayers are a waste of time: a classic counseling case, somebody comes in a basket and you look down at this bloody mess and you say what have you done about this problem that’s been bugging about you for the last ten months. Well, I’ve prayed about it. What else have you done? Nothing. Well great, J. Adams says do you know God says pray for your daily bread but you don’t walk out on your front lawn expecting it to come down in a parachute do you? The point is, there are means and the point of verse 7-8 is that you can do certain things; not autonomously, they are done submissively and obediently because they’ve conformed to the structures that God has built. Then in verse 9 we come to pray.
We have to be careful with prayer because in our day we tend to get wiped out with fatalism. It comes in all sorts of areas; sometimes it comes in by extreme Calvinism, other times it comes in in a lazy fundamentalism, whatever, it comes in and it has the same net result and that is, well you don’t have to ask God for anything because I thought you said God was omniscient and God knows our needs before we ask them so why do we bother and ask Him. Turn to Luke 18; God, in the Bible has many titles; one of His most famous titles and one so often neglected in our day is the title, the living God. What does that title mean, “the living God?” It means that He lives and He acts and He responds in history. You can always tell when you’ve been infiltrated by fatalism by your response to this statement; if I tell you and I walk up to you and I say hey, do you believe that as a result of your prayer today you can talk God into changing His mind? Now if you feel resistance to that statement you’ve already been infiltrated by fatalism. You’ve already been infiltrated, I don’t care what your orthodoxy is or whether you say you believe this creed or that creed, if you don’t believe that God can change His mind in response to prayer you’ve got a problem.
In Luke 18:1, none other than the authority of Jesus Christ Himself… look at this! “And He spoke a parable unto them [to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.] [2] Saying, There was in a city a judge, who feared not God, neither regarded man. [3] And there was a widow in that city,” the picture of total helplessness, “and she came to him, and she said, Avenge me of mine adversary. [4] And he would not for a while; but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man, [5] Yet because this widow keeps on troubling me, I will avenger, lest by her continual coming she weary me. [6] And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge said. [7] And shall not God avenge His own elect, who cry day and night unto Him, though He bear long with them?”
Now the logic of that parable breaks down unless God changes His mind. In other words, you come before God and you tell Him, and you tell Him, and you tell Him, and you tell Him, and you tell Him, and you tell Him. Now this somehow grabs Christians the wrong way; this is impious, to walk in there and carry on this strong petitioning, instead of just floating in, God you already know what I want to tell you and just kind of float on out. This isn’t that kind of thing; it’s must more vigorous than that.
Let’s watch the vigor, back to Genesis 32, this is the theme of this final encounter. Remember, this is the third encounter; Jacob has already learned to not be afraid; he goes after it, and now he’s going to encounter God. First he prays here in this passage. And there’s four elements in this prayer. The first element, Genesis 32:9, “And Jacob said, O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, the LORD which said unto me, Return unto thy country, and to thy kindred, and I will deal well with thee,” that verse, if you read it carefully you’ve read before. That verse is a recapitulation of two other verses, Genesis 31:13; Genesis 28:15. And all he’s done in the first element of his prayer is recite the promises of God that he’s obeying at that point. Why? In verse 9 what he is doing is saying God, as far as I know I’m in your will; now I may not be but as far as I know what I know of the Word of God I’ve done everything You’ve told me. “If My words abide in you … then you shall ask what you will and it shall be done unto you.” See, the first element, it’s grounded on obedience to the known will of God.
The second element, verse 10, “I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast showed unto thy servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan;” it means with only my staff, with not even a tent, with not even extra resources, with just his staff I left and crossed Jordan, “and now I am become two complete bands.” In other words, what verse 10 is, the second element of the prayer is orientation to grace. See how grace oriented the guy is; I didn’t deserve this, I’m not worthy of all the mercies. So another healthy, healthy attitude in prayer, it’s the old principle, God opposes the proud and he gives grace to the humble.
Genesis 32:11, here’s where you see his aggressiveness, “you have not because you ask not,” and if he didn’t ask verse 11 he wouldn’t have been protected. Oh, you mean God wouldn’t sovereignly protect him? Not automatically protect him; God would protect him because he had the gumption to ask for it. “Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the mother with the children.” God does not always give you blessing until you ask. You say well why, doesn’t He know? Sure He knows but God is the living God; he doesn’t want to be treated like a computer and that’s exactly what you’re going to Him when you say oh, well, you know, it’s on the tape, the lights are flashing, He knows. That’s not a personal relationship; that’s a machine relationship and God’s not a machine and He doesn’t like to be treated that way and He refuses to allow us to treat Him that way, and that’s why He makes us, so to speak, walk into His office and get before His desk and lay out the petition and do business with him personally. That’s a personal living God.
The fourth element observed in this prayer
is in verse 12, the very last statement.
“And You said, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand
of the sea, [which cannot be numbered for multitude].” That refers to the Abrahamic big plan, the
big covenant and it’s a principle of the glory of God because God’s plan is the
one that’s ultimately at issue.
Ultimately the issue is is God going to carry out His plan
And so Genesis 31:13-21 is a listing of all
the animals, 550 to be exact, and he takes 550 and if we figure, say an average
price of $250 per animal, maybe it’s a little higher but it comes out $137,500;
that’s his little gift to Esau. Now say
that’s less than 10% of his assets that he’s just given as a gift; that makes
him a millionaire. Don’t think of Jacob
as some poor little soul that kind of limped along over on the other side of
[13, “And he lodged there that same night; and took of that which came to
his hand a present for Esau his brother; [14] Two hundred she goats, and twenty he goats, two hundred
ewes, and twenty rams, [15]
Thirty milk camels with their colts, forty cows, and ten bulls, twenty she
asses, and ten foals. [16] And
he delivered them into the hand of his servants, every drove by themselves; and
said unto his servants, Pass over before me, and put a space betwixt drove and
drove. [17] And he commanded
the foremost, saying, When Esau my brother meets thee, and asks thee, saying,
Whose art thou? And whither go thou? and whose are these before thee? [18] Then thou shalt say, They be thy
servant Jacob’s; it is a present sent unto my lord Esau: and, behold, also he
is behind us. [19] And so
commanded he the second, and the third, and all that followed the droves,
saying, On this manner shall ye speak unto Esau, when ye find him. [20] And say ye moreover, Behold, thy
servant Jacob is behind us. For he said, I will appease him with the present
that goes before me, and afterward I will see his face; peradventure he will
accept of me.
[21] So went the present over
before him: and himself lodged that night in the company. [22] And he rose up that night, and
took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed
over the ford Jabbok. [23] And he took them, and sent them
over the brook, and sent over that he had.”]
In Genesis 32:24, now the last fascinating scene of this story, the wrestling match with the Lord Jesus Christ. This is one of the most fascinating statements of Scripture. And it’s fascinating for a number of reasons; it’s fascinating for the reason I just got through telling you in prayer. We often speak metaphorically of wrestling with God in prayer. Do you know where it comes from? Right here. This was wrestling with God in prayer. You say well I just see him wrestling. No, it’s wrestling in prayer. Turn to Hosea 12:4, this is a prophetic interpretation. I show you this so you don’t think that I’m just making it up. Don’t argue with Clough, argue with Hosea, that’s how he took the passage. This interpretation of the passage shows you that what we have in this wrestling match is a depiction of the character of the Jewish nation. Jacob is the last patriarch; from him on the tribes begin. And God is building into his character spiritual aggressiveness. He’s not passive, he’s active, and so Hosea uses the story to say hey people, that’s what you’re supposed to be.
Hosea 12:3, “He took his brother by the
heel in the womb, and by his strength he had power with God.” He’s not just sitting waiting for the
blessings to shower, he’s grabbing them.
That’s the attitude. [4] “Yea, he
had power over the angel, and prevailed; he wept, and he made supplication to
him.” So while the wrestling match is
going on it’s actually an unusual prayer meeting. It’s actually prayer that’s going on. “…he
found him in
Let’s go back to that wrestling match and see some neat things that happened. Genesis 32:24, “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” He’s only 95 and he’s wrestling for eight hours. Now when I was in high school I was on the wrestling team and man, I remember one or two minutes of wrestling; this went on for eight hours with a man of 95. And of all people, usually the sport of wrestling is… I don’t mean this idiot stuff out here in the coliseum, I mean collegiate type wrestling, one of the great things for that particular sport is that men can be matched on the basis of their weight; it’s a very fair kind of sport that way and it gives tremendous opportunity for smaller, lighter boys to participate. It’s going to be interesting, coed wrestling when the ERA gets in. But wrestling has that characteristic as a sport because it’s paired. So here Jacob is at 95 wrestling for eight hours and who does he get paired off with on the mat? The Creator of the universe! So he goes after him; and it’s a man, in verse 24, clearly human manifestation.
And Jacob goes on and they wrestle all the time, and Genesis 32:25 the subject of that first clause is not Jacob; it’s the angel of God. “And when the angel of God saw that He prevailed not against him, He touched the hollow of his thigh; [and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.]” Now what’s the touching of the hollow of the thigh? Here’s the thing; oftentimes in a family situation a father will wrestle with his children, I’ll get my four boys after supper and we’ll go chase the soccer ball around the house or something and we’ll all pile on. Now obviously if you’re going to be fair about the situation you’ve got to let the boys win once in a while, but then so that they don’t get the big head you’ve got to show them after a while that basically the old man isn’t that incapable. So this is what’s happening here in verse 25. The Lord Jesus Christ is going on with Jacob for eight hours and He could have pinned him in the first two seconds, but He didn’t; He wrestled on because all this time this is going on this prayer is going along with it; Jacob is holding on to Him because he wants a blessing if he has to put a fell nelson on God he’s going to get a blessing out of him. That’s his attitude. And so he goes on and on and on and wrestles and wrestles.
Well, the morning is coming and the Lord Jesus has something else to do and so He’s going to leave this place but He just wants to make sure, like a father would wrestling with his sons, that he knows who basically holds the score. So the Hebrew has a word, it doesn’t mean hit and it doesn’t mean punch, it just means touch. And so while they’re wrestling the Lord Jesus just reaches around with his finger and touches his thigh and totally dislocates it; and He says I just want you to remember Jacob who ultimately is in control. I want you to remember for a very, very vital reason, because in verse 31, as Jacob walks away he limps, and he limps for the rest of his life.
What has been cured here, in this man? God wants to develop an aggressive spirit in
Jacob because He wants to develop an aggressive spirit in the nation
And so lest Jacob walk away from that wrestling match saying oh boy, at 95 I whipped God, He’s going to give him a lesson and so He cripples him. And so Jacob has to limp off the mat and limp for the rest of his life, and every time they see him limping they understand, it wasn’t accomplished by his physical strength; his power with God was other than physical. His power with God was his grace attitude and his demanding the blessing. And so this is why in verse 29 he blessed him. He blessed him because of verse 26. Verse 26 is the attitude; verse 25 deals with the physical problem, He makes him a cripple there, and verse 26, apparently after He cripples, they’re locked in this combat and they’re rolling all over the place, and the Lord Jesus Christ sticks out his finger and he cripples him, and Jacob has lost the use of his leg not, he can’t get a scissors on him or anything else, and so that’s out, but he still grabs Him. “And he said…” this is why… it’s very picturesque in verse 26, Jesus said, in His preincarnate form as the Son of God, says “And he said, Let me go, for the day breaks.” Jacob, you’re still holding on, I’ve crippled one leg boy, and Jacob’s attitude was I am not going to let You go until You bless me. I don’t care, you can cripple the other leg, I don’t care, you can cripple my shoulders, I’m going to hold on to You until I get from You what is mine. [“… And he said, I will not let thee go, except You bless me.”]
Now you see the attitude of verse 26, that’s what God wants, and He puts the pressure on and He puts the pressure on and puts the pressure on until He makes Jacob do it the right way. And now in Genesis 33 he’s going to have no problem with Esau, no problem whatsoever because he’s learned that that aggressive spirit the God put in his soul is okay, it’s just that he’s got to be wise in how he uses the aggressiveness.
[Genesis
32: 27, “And He said unto him, What is thy name? And he
said, Jacob. [28] And He said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but
We’re going to conclude by singing