Wrestling with God
Have you ever been so pressed against the wall, you felt like you could wrestle with God Himself? Life seems to be a tapestry of ups and downs. No matter who you are and how wonderfully normal your life may appear to others on social media, or how rich, famous, and glamorous your life might seem to be to onlookers, life is daily.
Occasionally, though, we run into something overwhelmingly big. It’s an obstacle so fearful we don’t want to think about it, let alone really look at it. Yet it is right there in front of us, and we can’t escape it. It’s at these times we are driven to God. Although we may be questioning His judgment, love, or protection, He is all we have.
A man named Jacob also experienced this in Genesis 32:22-29, when he stood to lose his life, his family, and all he had: “The same night he took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the day has broken.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ And he said to him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then he said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and you have prevailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him.”
Although I might wish it to be otherwise, I am finding that these kinds of times can be the richest in our spiritual growth and in our relationship with God. Although our wrestling may not be physical, I can wrestle with God anyway. Although God is in complete control, He is good for, and can handle, my anxious wrestling. And out of the wrestling comes a blessing. Some run from God during bad times; some get angry and isolate from Him. I prefer to wrestle with Him.
Although I increasingly understand that God’s ways are not my ways, and He will not be controlled by me, He engages me where I am, lets me exert, then uses the experience to help increase, a little at a time, maturity and blessing.
In a different world, I wish these huge, fearsome times never came; but come they will. Will we run, get angry and hide, or engage God until His work in us through the situation yields His blessing? May we dare to cling to God in all things and at all times, no matter how overwhelming, refusing to let go. He will prove Himself capable and faithful every single time.
Chris Heinss