This week at Pipe, we will discuss the story of Jacob. Hopefully, we can get a better understanding of how we can win by losing. Wait, what? Is this just some ridiculous wordplay to make me feel better about rooting for the Detroit Lions all these years?
Nah.
It’s a strange concept, I’ll grant you that. But let’s think about it in the context of Jacob’s wrestling match with God in Genesis.
Here’s the story from The Message:
But during the night he got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants, and his eleven children and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He got them safely across the brook along with all his possessions.
But Jacob stayed behind by himself, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he couldn’t get the best of Jacob as they wrestled, he deliberately threw Jacob’s hip out of joint.
The man said, “Let me go; it’s daybreak.”
Jacob said, “I’m not letting you go ’til you bless me.”
The man said, “What’s your name?”
He answered, “Jacob.”
The man said, “But no longer. Your name is no longer Jacob. From now on it’s Israel (God-Wrestler); you’ve wrestled with God and you’ve come through.”
Jacob asked, “And what’s your name?”
The man said, “Why do you want to know my name?” And then, right then and there, he blessed him.
Jacob named the place Peniel (God’s Face) because, he said, “I saw God face-to-face and lived to tell the story!”
The sun came up as he left Peniel, limping because of his hip. (This is why Israelites to this day don’t eat the hip muscle; because Jacob’s hip was thrown out of joint.)
Genesis 32: 22-32
So what on earth do we make of that? Well, because it is such a strange and confusing story, Christian scholars have a lot of different opinions of what to make of it.
Sunday night, we will talk about the story in the context of our own internal wrestling matches between who we are and who we want to be. As we discussed last week, we all have a desire to be good people, and to be recognized as such. Further, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God.
If it were a pay per view fight, the marquee would read: Who we are at our worst vs. who we desire to be at our best.
I’ve find that when I listen to the “still small voice” of God, I will, more often than not, find myself where I need to be, doing what I need to do. When I purposefully ignore it, or simply overwhelm it with the busyness of life, I’ve essentially defeated my conscience. I’ve lost by winning.
Harold Kushner, in the book I referenced last week, put it this way:
It hurts to be defeated by conscience, to feel compelled to take the more demanding high road, to resist temptation, to, apologize. But I suspect it hurts more to keep winning our over conscience. Too often, we compromise our integrity, we do something we really don’t believe in doing, to reach some important goal, only to find one of two frustrating things happening: Either we gain the prize and realize it wasn’t worth gaining, or we end up with neither the prize nor our integrity.
Jacob, who we will learn was a clever and conniving, took advantage of his brother to gain a birthright and deceived his own father (Isaac) in order to receive his blessing. Ultimately, Jacob (the person he was) had to come to blows with the person he wanted to be (a man of good conscience). This is one interpretation of the story that I think we can all understand.
Like Jacob, sooner or later we all come to blows with our conscience. Like Jacob’s limp, we will have scars from these encounters that will remind us of how we win when we allow ourselves to be defeated by our conscience.
See you Sunday night!
The Pipe 