My daughter asked me the other day why someone would want to wrestle with God. I was taken aback by the question, not only because she’s five and I didn’t expect her to ponder the significance of the metaphor unprompted, but also because I was in the middle of merging with lunch hour traffic onto 295, and multi-tasking is not my forté.
“Well,” I said, as I checked the rearview mirror before slipping out of the exit lane just in time. “You know how your brother likes to play fight with you, sometimes? I think that as human beings, maybe even especially boys, but all of us really, play fighting can be the best – sometimes the only way of interacting with someone. It allows us to touch the person, really see them, really get to know them, in a way that nothing else can.”
I was waiting my turn as car after car whipped by me on the left. “Before Jacob wrestled with God, he didn’t really know God. He just called him the God of my dad.”
My daughter laughed at that. What a funny thing to called God, apparently.
“But when he left home, he came across this guy, and he didn’t know who it was. It seems to have been Jesus, but in the form of an Angel. But Jacob didn’t realize that, so he decided to play fight with him.”
An opening between a truck and an SUV. This was my chance! I pulled into the next lane. “Well, maybe it wasn’t just a play fight. Maybe he was mad at God about the way things had turned out. Maybe he was confused and frustrated that he didn’t understand everything. We don’t really know. But when he wrestled with God, he touched him. He saw his face. And when he realized who it was he was wrestling with he said ‘Wow! I have seen the face of God and I’m still alive?!’ And you know, after that, he didn’t call Him ‘God of my dad’ anymore. He called him ‘My God.’”
Again she laughed.
We were smooth sailing now. No more stressful lane changes to make. I could just stay here till we got to our exit.
“So that’s how he got the name Israel. One who wrestles with God. And you know he passed that name on to his whole family. All his kids and grandkids and great-great-grandkids, and everyone who followed, thousands, millions of people. They were called Israel. And they kind of wrestled with God just like he did. They fought with Him and they got mad at him and He got mad at them. And it might have seemed pretty awful in the middle of it. But through all of that, they got to know Him. Through all of that, they got to see His face. And in the end, God used them and all of that wrestling to bring His own Son into the world so that they could really, really see the face of God. He used all that wrestling to bring redemption, to bring a good end, not only for them but for the whole world. That’s pretty incredible isn’t it?”
To this she gave a kind of noncommittal sound, “uh-huh.” I might have been starting to lose my audience.
When I later told my husband this story and how it had all started because were listening to the song “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” and how she had heard the line “Rescue captive Israel” and must have remembered the story behind the name of Israel, he proposed an alternative interpretation: “Maybe she just thought it was ‘wrestle captive Israel’”.
Hmm. That did seem the more likely explanation. So the whole conversation might have sprung from a mere misunderstanding.
But now that I think of it, I like that version of the song. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and wrestle captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear!” Maybe that should be my prayer, that He would come to wrestle.
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