Open Hands · Week 1 · Sunday · STRESS
I have read Genesis for probably over 20 years and mostly skipped the strangest sentence in it. Jacob sends everything he owns across the river — two wives, two maidservants, eleven sons, every animal he has — and then stays behind on the empty side by himself.
So Jacob was left all alone, and there a man wrestled with him until daybreak.Genesis 32:24 (BSB)
Alone was never this man’s way of operating. Alone is exactly what he had spent his whole life avoiding. From the very first thing Scripture records about him, he is reaching for leverage.
After this, his brother came out grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob. And Isaac was sixty years old when the twins were born.Genesis 25:26 (BSB)
He grew into it. His brother said it plainer than I could.
So Esau declared, “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me twice. He took my birthright, and now he has taken my blessing.” Then he asked, “Haven’t you saved a blessing for me?”Genesis 27:36 (BSB)
So the man at the river is not a beginner. He is a career operator with a long record of getting his. And he wrestles all night and does not lose. Then comes the sentence I used to read straight past.
When the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob, he struck the socket of Jacob’s hip and dislocated it as they wrestled.Genesis 32:25 (BSB)
The Turn Is Not the Win
Read that slowly. The man could not overpower Jacob, and so He injured him. The turning point of the whole night is not Jacob prevailing. It is God taking something out of Jacob that Jacob was never going to hand over.
And only then does Jacob say the sentence he is remembered for.
Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”Genesis 32:26 (BSB)
For most of my life I heard that line as determination. Hang on. Don’t quit. Want it badly enough. But look at where he is standing when he says it. His hip is out. He cannot walk away and he cannot win. For the first time in sixty years there is no angle left to work, and what comes out of him is not a strategy. It is a request.
He got the blessing. He did not get to keep the hip.
And he gets a new name for it.
Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men, and you have prevailed.”Genesis 32:28 (BSB)
Here is what I keep coming back to. The heel-grabber does not get fixed by trying harder at being a better heel-grabber. He gets stopped. The thing that made him effective is the thing God takes, and what he walks away with is a blessing he could not manufacture and an injury he did not choose.
What This Week Is About
I run two businesses. I have a wife and four sons. There is no shortage of things in my life that only move if I push them, and I am good at pushing. That is the problem. When you are good at making things happen, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between working hard inside what God gave you and reaching for something He did not.
The reaching has a cost, and we mostly pay it in a currency we call stress.
This week we are going to look at five ordinary people in five ordinary situations, each of them holding something a little too tightly. Tomorrow it is a sixteen-year-old with a calendar that will not close.
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