Genesis 32:22-32 | “God Blesses the Broken”

Sunday morning sermon audio from Preston Highlands Baptist Church.

The Hatchet Man is Cut Down

In 1973, Chuck Colson’s life was changed while he sat in his car outside a friend’s house.  Colson, you may know, was one of President Richard Nixon’s top advisors.  He was known as Nixon’s “hatchet man.”  He was a profane and vulgar enforcer of Nixon’s policies in the White House.  Like many around Nixon in the early 1970’s, Colson was caught up in the Watergate scandal.  As the turmoil of Watergate unfolded, Colson went to visit a friend of his, Tom Phillips, who was the president of Raytheon.  He had found out that Phillips and his wife had recently attended a Billy Graham Crusade and put their faith in Jesus.  Colson noticed that their lives were radically changed as a result, so he wanted to hear more about what happened to them.  As they talked that evening, Phillips read to Colson a passage from C. S. Lewis about pride.  Lewis writes, “A proud man is always looking down on things and on people.  And of course as long as you’re looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

Phillips told Colson that pride was keeping him from looking up and seeing something far greater than himself, namely the God who made him and sent his Son to die for his sins.  Phillips asked him if he’d be willing to submit his life to God by trusting in Jesus.  Colson declined.  When he left he got in his car and began to drive away, but he was too overwhelmed to go further, so he pulled off the road just down the street from the Phillips house and cried out to God, saying, “Take me, take me, take me.”  Colson was alone in the dark with the devastation of his life all around him.  Colson – this great and powerful man, wept uncontrollably because for the first time in his life he put down his machismo and pretenses and fears of being weak and surrendered his life to God.[1]

Colson would never be the same man again.  He went from being a proud man to a humbled and servant-hearted man, giving his life to serving his new Master, Jesus Christ.  The “hatchet man” found himself cut down by God’s grace and power.

Jacob Finds God’s Blessing through Pain

In our text this morning, we’re going to meet Jacob who, like Colson, was alone and afraid in the darkness of the night.  Jacob didn’t have an army of lawyers or a prison sentence awaiting him.  But he was preparing to meet his brother Esau and his army of 400 men the next day.

Jacob has spent his whole life grasping for a blessing.  He sought it from his father, his wife, and his wealth.  His whole life was a wrestling match looking for an elusive blessing.  But nothing has worked.  He finds himself alone and afraid, in the darkness of the night, when God comes to subdue him so that he might bless him.

What happens to Jacob that night is highly instructive for us as we think about how someone comes to meet God and how God often works to change our lives.  The main point of this text and this sermon is that God’s blessing often comes to his people through pain.  We’ll see that God sometimes breaks us in order to bless us (vv. 22-26) and that God’s blessing comes to the self-aware (vv. 27-32).  This passage teaches us that God blesses the broken.

God Sometimes Breaks Us to Bless Us

In verses 22-26, we see that God sometimes breaks us to bless us.  Picture Jacob there on the banks of the Jabbok.  Night has come and his family is gone.  Verse 24, “And Jacob was left alone.”  This has to be the darkest night of his life.  He will face his brother the next day who, the last time he saw him, wanted to kill him (27:41).  He wonders if time really heals all wounds.

God Comes to Us though Silence and Solitude

Jacob’s wives and children and flocks aren’t there to comfort him.  All the things that’ve defined his life have been stripped away.  We don’t know exactly why he isolates himself like this.  Perhaps he wanted a few moments to gather his thoughts and pray.  But what we do know is that God decided that this was a perfect time to meet with Jacob in his solitude.

Do you enjoy solitude?  Many don’t like quiet spaces.  We’re conditioned by our culture to be comfortable with noise and crowds, not with silence and solitude.  Donald Whitney, in his book Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, says that our aversion to quiet “is confirmed by the inability of many to ever be at home or in a car by themselves without turning on some ‘background noise.’  Unlike previous generations, technology now makes it possible for us to enjoy the benefits of news, music, educational content, and more whenever we want and wherever we are.  But the downside is that the appeal and accessibility of these things means the elimination of almost all quiet spaces in our lives.  More than any generation in history we must discipline ourselves to enjoy the blessings of silence and solitude.”[2]

Jesus often withdrew from his disciples so that he could be alone.  The prophets tell the people of God to “be silent before the Lord God” (Hab. 2:20, Zeph. 1:7, Zech. 2:13).  Elsewhere the Bible says, “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord…Let him sit alone in silence” (Lam. 3:25-28).  Whitney again says, “Closing our mouths can sometimes help us open our minds to see things God’s way,” and that silence and solitude “have a way of airing out the mind and ironing out the wrinkles of the soul.”[3]

I have a picture in my office that says, “The quieter you become the more you can hear.”  Perhaps we would feel the presence of God in our lives with more regularity if we created intentional times and spaces where we turned off our phones and got away from people and just sat alone in silence.  For those with roommates or small children, this may require getting up earlier than you’d prefer, but the principle of Genesis 32:24 holds true: God often comes to us when we’re alone.

One of the ways we try to build these disciplines into our lives is with moments of silence before we begin worship and after the sermon.  This allows us to slow down, think what we’re thinking, feel what we’re feeling, and create space for God to work in our hearts.

An All-Night Wrestling Match

It’s only when Jacob is alone, in the darkness of night, stripped of all his earthly comforts that God comes to him.  On his way out of Canaan, God came to him in a dream with a staircase and lots of promises and reassurances (28:12-15).  But here God comes to fight Jacob (v. 24b).

The text says a “man” wrestled with Jacob because at this point Jacob doesn’t know who it was.  Maybe he thinks Esau snuck up on him.  I think it was an angel who represented God (cf. Hos. 12:3-4).  The language of seeing God’s face in verse 30 shouldn’t be taken too literally.  Moses said that man can’t see God’s face and live (Ex. 33:20), meaning that we can’t see the fullness of his glory and live, not his literal face.

This wrestling match lasted all night, “until the breaking of the day” (v. 24b).  This is at least 8-10 hours.  Jacob’s not a young man anymore, but he’s able to wrestle this man all night.  Jacob was never one to go down without a fight!

Verse 25 says that “the man” decided to hit the fast-forward button and end the match when he realized that Jacob wasn’t going to quit.  He’s obviously been holding back on Jacob.  All he has to do is “touch” his hip socket to dislocate the largest joint in his body.

The whole night, this “man” has let Jacob think that it was a fair fight.  This is how I wrestle with my kids.  I let them think they’re winning and hold back most of my strength because if I didn’t we’d be in the hospital and I’d be in prison!

Verse 26 sounds like the man is a vampire who’ll die when the sun hits him, but what he’s doing is protecting Jacob because he knows that if the fight goes on Jacob will end up in bad shape.  He wants to tap-out early for Jacob’s sake, not his own.

Sometimes God Comes with Terror, Not Comfort

When Jacob is preparing to re-enter the Promised Land, God comes to him with a headlock, not promises like in chapter 28.  This is how God often works.  Sometimes when God approaches his people, he comes with words of comfort and assurance.  But sometimes he comes with terror and pain.

When God was seeking Adam and Eve in the Garden, they hid from him (Gen. 3:8).  When God spoke to Israel from Mount Sinai, they asked him to stop so that they wouldn’t die (Ex. 20:19).  When Isaiah sees God’s majesty, he says, “Woe is me!  For I am lost” (Is. 6:5).  After God speaks to Job, Job says, “I despise myself” (42:6).  After Peter sees the power of Jesus, he fell down at Jesus’ feet and said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord” (Lk. 5:8).

The point is that the presence of God is sometimes traumatic, even for the people of God.  Encountering the presence of God is not like reading a Hallmark card.  Sometimes God comes with comfort, but sometimes he comes to break us because we’re like wild horses that need to be broken.

Pain is a Good Teacher

When Suzy and I got married, my first job was mowing yards.  I’ll never forget that desert because it was so pivotal for me.  I had a master’s degree and experience working at well-known churches and was all of a sudden raking leaves in the heat with people nothing like me.  I wasn’t happy about it.  It brought me to tears many times, even while I worked.

What was happening in those moments?  God was breaking me.  My prideful, boastful, haughty, arrogant, know-it-all, comparing and competing heart needed exposing and humbling.  I thought I deserved better.  I thought I was better than the amigos I worked with.  Turns out they were some of the kindest, most generous people I’ve ever been around.  God taught me through them.

Why did God wrestle Jacob that night?  Why does God take us through pain?  Because he wants to break us so that he might bless us.  Because we usually learn through processes, not propositions.  There are some things that we’ll only learn through pain.

For example, I can tell you that God is your highest good, but you can’t truly learn that through a sermon.  In love, God will put us in places of pain that will leave us limping.  But through the pain he blesses us by making us feel the truth that he’s truly our highest good.

Why Do We Ignore or Minimize Our Pain?

It’s curious, then, why we work so hard to suppress and ignore our pain.  If pain is one of the ways God blesses his people, why do we work so hard to escape it?  I’m not suggesting we become masochists who purposely walk into pain just to make ourselves feel better.  I am suggesting that many of us purposely avoid dealing with the hard things in our lives.

We don’t like digging into our pain because it’s hard and disruptive and feels unspiritual.  But what if the One who wrote down all the days of your life before one of them came to be wants to meet you in those places that you’re ignoring and suppressing and minimizing?  What if you love the incessant noise in your life because you don’t like what happens when you’re alone and quiet?  What if your frenetic pace is because you know if you slow down you’ll feel things you don’t like?  But again, what if the Lord wants to bless you in your brokenness?

Scripture is full of promises like Psalm 34:18, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted.”  And Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”  And Matthew 5:3, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  And 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My power is made perfect in weakness.”

What pain are you leaving unaddressed in your life?  Where have you been put out of joint by God?  What dreams or plans were dashed or what innocence stolen?  What’s out of joint in your heart or body that may be God’s way of trying to get your attention?

Jacob’s Desperation

God’s blessing often comes to us most dramatically and acutely through pain and suffering.  Why is this so?  Because pain and suffering make us desperate for God.

This is what happened with Jacob (v. 26).  The fight is over but Jacob will not let go of God.  He’s in unbelievable pain so he cries out in desperation for God’s blessing.

This is a crescendo or climax in Jacob’s life.  He’s been striving for this his whole life.  He’s looked to his father for approval, to his wife Rachel for love, to his wealth for value, but none of these things gave him what he was searching for.  So God brings him to a place of pain and desperation so that Jacob will finally understand that God is his blessing.

Are you clinging to God like that?  We meander through life looking to God for his gifts, seeing him as how we access the blessings we want without seeing him as the blessing.

Friends, your greatest need is God.  God is saying to Jacob and to you, “Stop playing around with me, let’s get serious!  I’m what you need.  I’m your blessing.  Stop looking for your satisfaction in your identity as a father, husband, business owner, homemaker, elder, deacon, grad student, or anything else.  I’m what you need.  I’m your God.”

God injures Jacob so that Jacob will see his need for God.  In agonizing pain we can’t even imagine, Jacob is desperate for the blessing of God.  His pain increases his desperation for God.  As it should for us as well.  Often, unfortunately, we miss the lesson God is trying to teach us and merely cry out for relief.  Relief is good and God often grants it.  But God is the goal, not relief.

May God make us a church desperate for God, a church that longs to gather on Sundays to sing and pray and fellowship and hear the word preached because we long for more of God, because we know we can’t live without him, that, as the hymn says, he’s our inheritance now and always.

God’s Blessing Comes to the Self-Aware

God often breaks us in order to bless us.  And, secondly, God’s blessing comes to the self-aware (vv. 27-32).  Why does God ask Jacob what his name is?  Was he making sure he was fighting the right guy?

God wants Jacob to own his identity.  “Jacob” literally means “he takes by the heel,” or “he cheats,” or simply put, “deceiver.”  God is testing Jacob’s self-awareness.  He want’s Jacob to own his sinful nature.  His name revealed his nature.  Even Esau understood this (27:36).

The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

God tests Jacob’s self-awareness before he blesses him.  God’s blessing is for those who understand their need for God.  Remember the Pharisee and the tax collector from Luke 18?  Jesus says they’re both praying to God, but the Pharisee isn’t really praying because actually comparing himself to all the people he thinks are beneath him and boasting about all his religious activities.  He says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get” (vv. 11-12).  But then the scene pans over to a man standing in the corner, visibly broken and distraught and barely even able to pray.  He simply says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (v. 13)

Jesus says that only one of these men is saved, and it isn’t the man who thinks he’s better than everyone else.  His religious and moral pedigree don’t mean anything before a holy God.  But honesty and humility does.  Jesus says the tax collector is the only one who left church that day on his way to heaven, and that “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted” (v. 14).

In Genesis 32, God is sifting Jacob to see if he understands who he is.  Not because he doesn’t know who Jacob is but because he wants to see if Jacob knows who Jacob is.

Do you know who you are?  Are you the Pharisee or the tax collector?

A New Identity

We have to name the old man before we can receive the new man.  Jacob’s honesty paves the way for God to give him a new identity (v. 28a).  Out of his struggle with God, Jacob emerges a new man with a new name, “Israel.”  Interestingly, after this sometimes he’s still called Jacob, and sometimes Israel.  It’s like the Bible is telling us that part of the old man was still wrapped up in the new man.  And don’t we see that in our lives too?

In verse 29, Jacob asks for the man’s name, but God doesn’t give it to him.  It’s like he’s saying, “You know who I am.  I don’t have to tell you.”

And then those words at the end of verse 29 that are so pregnant with meaning, “And there he blessed him.”  We don’t know exactly what that looked like in that moment because the text doesn’t say.  Jacob’s prayer in verses 9-12 indicates that he understands that the covenant blessing has passed from his father to him.  So what kind of blessing is God giving him? Throughout Scripture, “blessings” are usually verbal in nature.  In other words, a blessing was often a specific word of affirmation to a specific person.

I don’t know all that God may’ve told Israel in that moment.  But we do know what God said to the true and final Israel, Jesus Christ after he was baptized: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased” (Mt. 3:17).  The Father tells the Son, “You’re my son, I love you, and I’m pleased with you.”  One wonders if God’s conversation with Jacob went something like that: “You’re my son, I love you, and I’m pleased with you.”

Notice that God doesn’t even bring up Esau.  He doesn’t promise Jacob that everything will go well with him when he meets his brother.  It’s almost like that doesn’t even matter anymore.  Jacob’s life is no longer defined by his circumstances because wherever he goes, he goes with the blessing of God.  One writer says, “Jacob received the restoration of a relationship, not the resolution of a problem.”  Those who have the blessing of God go with God into their problems.

Limping is the Way

In verse 31, we also learn that the blessing of God doesn’t remove Jacob’s pain.  Picture Jacob getting up off the ground, sweaty, bloody, dirty, exhausted, grimacing in pain, but with a slight smile on his face and a new confidence in his heart as he limps forward to meet Esau.

His limp will be a perpetual reminder of God’s blessing in his life.  He’ll be forever crippled and forever blessed.  It begs the question for us, would we rather limp through life with God’s blessing or skip through life without it?

In his excellent book on leadership Leading with a Limp, Dan Allender writes, “The process of leading others with a limp is not what we would have predicted.  Do we really have to be that desperate and that deeply exposed to be freed from our narcissism, our fear, our dogmatism, and our tendency to hide?  The story of Jacob exalts not the struggle but the goodness of God as he blesses a conniving, undeserving man.  No matter how far off the mark we might be, we see in this account the promise that if we open ourselves to meet God, we will not come out of the encounter the same.  We will walk a new path – with an unpredictable gait.”[4]

The apostle Paul was content to walk through life with a limp from God, a thorn in his flesh, because God told him that his “power was made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9).  Paul embraced his pain because it revealed God’s power.

When we realize that we’re cripples like Jacob and rely on God’s strength, we become stronger than we ever have been.  But when we’re proud and self-sufficient and self-righteous, the smallest breeze of affliction blows us over and provokes our anger.  James 4:6, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Weakness is the Way

We live in a city, state, and nation that exalts strength.  It’s the theme of our songs, the goal of our politics, and the ambition of our lives.  Even in the church, we’re prone to promote the fighters, the warriors, the crusaders, the leaders, the rich, the famous, the influencers, the strong.

But in the Bible it’s the nobodies, the peasants, the shepherds, the fishermen, the carpenters from Nazareth, the small and the weak who’re blessed by God.  In the Bible, we learn that glory comes after crucifixion, that weakness is the way to strength.

God’s People Limping Forward Together

Jacob limped into the Promised Land and Jesus limped down the road to Calvary.  Why would we think that displaying strength is the way to display God’s kingdom?  God’s kingdom is seen in churches committed to honesty about themselves and who feel their desperate need for God.

In these kinds of churches, God’s power is displayed through tangible acts of love between members, through humble confession of sins and honest acknowledgement of pain and anguish, through a teachable rather than defensive spirit, by exalting Jesus above any person or pastor or building or program.  In these kinds of churches, God’s people limp through life together with an unusual and inexplicable joy and love that the world won’t understand.  Why?  Because the church has the blessing of God.  And that’s all they need.

Jesus Came to Give Us the Blessing of God

Why would God bless people like Jacob?  The answer is elusive until we get to the New Testament and God shows up again out of nowhere as a man.  In the darkness with Jacob, God pretended to be weak so that he might bless him.  In the darkness of Calvary, God actually becomes weak that he might bless us.  As Tim Keller says, “Jacob held on at the risk of his own life to get the blessing for himself, but Jesus held on at the cost of his own life to give the blessing to us.”

Maybe you’re like Chuck Colson and Jacob and find yourself alone and afraid in the darkness of night, with a fearful and uncertain future in front of you.  Maybe you’ve spent your whole life searching and grasping for a blessing only to be left confused and empty and with an aching heart.  Maybe you’re doing all you can to minimize your pain when it’s the very place God wants you to enter so that you can meet him.  Maybe you think that God blesses the strong, not the weak.  This text is a rebuttal to that way of thinking, as it shows us plainly that God often breaks us in order to bless us and that his blessing is for the honest and self-aware, that he blesses the broken.

Friends, if you’re not yet following Jesus, do you think that you have God’s blessing in your life?  If so, how do you define it?  Is it merely physical and material provision, or is it a growing closeness and affection for God?  One day we’ll all come to Peniel on bended knee and see God face to face.  On that day, the blessing of God for his people will be complete.  We will cling to him and he will cling to us, and there will be no more lonely and dark nights.

[1]Charles W. Colson, Born Again (Lincoln, VA: Chosen Books, 1976), ch. 8.

[2]Donald S. Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2014), 226.

[3]Ibid., 233, 244.

[4]Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp: Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness (New York: Waterbrook Press, 2006), 48.