It is Time to Move On

Jacob was a man who was used to making his own way; a man who had picked himself up by his own bootstraps so-to-speak. He worked hard all his life to make a way for himself and he succeeded.

His mother helped him get a birthright and a blessing that nobody else, except Rebekah and Jacob and God thought he deserved. Ooh, but that made his brother, Esau, mad! He wanted to kill his brother Jacob and he probably would have, but Jacob ran. He ran all the way to Laban, to whom he hired himself out. He really liked Laban’s daughter Rachel so he made an agreement to work for Laban in order to win her hand. But Laban tricked everyone and gave Jacob his older daughter, Leah. Jacob worked seven more years to win Rachel and he stayed on with Laban afterward as well.

Jacob grew wealth as God blessed him, but Laban and his sons felt that Jacob’s wealth was at their expense. Sensing the building tension, Jacob packed up and moved back to his homeland. As he traveled he contemplated what it might be like to meet his brother again. He divided his family and his possessions into two groups and sent them separately so that if something happened to one group, perhaps the other would escape. He stayed by himself that night – he must have been filled with anxiety about what would come the next day: would Esau take his vengeance or would time have tempered the anger?

That night Jacob wrestled with a man (was it a prophet? God himself? An angel?) and won. He held the wrestler until he coerced a blessing out of him. The blessing was a summary of Jacob’s life and a new name, Israel, which means “struggles with God.” Up to this time, it appears that Jacob believed he had accomplished pretty much everything on his own. He had taken the birthright and the blessing, he had manipulated the kinds of livestock to be born in order to increase his wages, he had saved himself from Esau, he had known when to move from Laban’s area, he had wrestled with God and man and he had won. But this was not entirely true – God fore-ordained that Jacob would get the blessing and the birthright; God blessed Jacob with the right livestock births; God protected Jacob because he had a plan for him; God let Jacob win the wrestling match and he gave him a bum hip just to remind him that when you wrestle with God there are permanent markers on your life afterward.

Jacob means “usurper”, and that is the summary of his life up to that point. In renaming him Israel, God recasts Jacob’s struggle to take for himself at others’ expense as a struggle with God. It was after this that Jacob tells Esau, “God has been gracious to me and I have all I need.”

We struggle with God when we struggle with our place in the world, since he put us in our times and places. We struggle with God when we struggle with the bills, since we receive our bounty from him. We struggle with God when we help others or refuse to, since they also are his children. We struggle with God when we think in our minds that we are self-sufficient, or that we should be, since we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before and we all receive our very selves from God. We struggle with God when we refuse to take responsibility for our own lives, or allow others to do so, since we owe more than we can ever pay.

Let us all be Israel and in our struggles let us learn to trust and give thanks.

God bless.