We
call him the God of Jacob. This means
that he is the God who wants us to rely solely upon his word. That is always how he has revealed himself –
through his word. He does not reveal
himself through our personal experiences.
In fact, our personal experiences deceive us. They distract us. They make us expect one thing when we should
expect another. Often we feel strong.
We feel close to God. But we need
to be brought low. We need to be made
weak. God is our strength. And we find his strength when we recognize
how weak we are and cling to his word alone.
There true joy is found. Often we feel forsaken. We feel like God is too displeased or fed-up
with us to continue to strive within us.
When this is how we feel, we need to repent, as David did, and as we
sing: “Cast me not away from thy presence, and take not thy Holy Spirit from
me.” We are weak, but he is
strong. His strength is found in his
mercy – where he is faithful to forgive us our sin and to increase our faith in
him.
The
God of Jacob doesn’t always bless us as we expect him to. But by doing what we do not expect, he drives
us to what is more certain than how we might feel. He drives us to what he promises in his word. And his word does not change.
Consider
Jacob for a moment so that we can see in history how God has remained faithful
to the promises he makes. Jacob was the
grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac.
God had called them out of idolatry, and promised that he would bless
them and make them a great nation, and that through this nation the Savior of
all humanity would come. Jacob received
this blessing too, but in an unexpected way.
This is how:
This is how:
God
blessed Isaac by giving his wife twin boys in her womb. Only one would receive the blessing to carry
on the messianic line. God told Rebekah
that two nations were in her womb and that the older would serve the
younger. This was not what Isaac would
have expected. And so when the boys were
grown, he was dead set on blessing Esau, since he was the older. It made sense. But Rebekah, trusting in what God had told
her, tricked her husband and got him to bless Jacob instead, who was the
younger of the two. It didn’t matter if
it made sense. It’s what God had
said. This made Esau very mad. He became his brother’s enemy, and so Jacob
went on the run.
Jacob
knew that he had received God’s blessing to be the father of a great nation; he
knew that God had promised this before he was born; he knew that his father had
blessed him and not Esau. But he sure
didn’t feel it. For fourteen years, he
worked as a slave without any real evidence of this blessing. He had many sons, but was a stranger in the
land. He lived as a fugitive afraid of
his older brother, Esau. After these
fourteen years, God told Jacob to return to the land where he was born, since
this was the land that God had promised him.
On the way, he learned that his older brother had come out to meet him
with a great number of armed men. He
began to feel not very blessed. He needed
confirmation that God truly intended to make him a greater nation than his
brother. He needed God himself to tell
him that he would become the nation through which Christ the Lord would be born. So that night in a dream, foreshadowing his
future incarnation, God visited Jacob in human form.
And
did God then gently appear with sweet words of encouragement? No.
Jacob might have expected God to lay his hand on him as his father once
did, but instead, God laid his hand on him and wrestled him to the ground. What a contradictory experience. But Jacob by now had learned not to trust in
what he experienced. He held God to his
word. He wrestled back. He would not let go. He pinned God to the ground and refused to
let go until God blessed him.
And
God did. He kept his word.
Jacob’s
name means ‘usurper.’ It means that he
takes what isn’t his. He was born
holding on to his twin brother Esau’s heal.
And as a young man he took the blessing from Esau even though he had no
other claim on it than God’s promise. He
usurped. He fulfilled his name. And this night, when he wrestled with God and
prevailed, God changed his name to Israel.
Israel means ‘struggles with God.’
This is how God names his children.
He
names us Christians when we are baptized.
He tells us to expect from God not what we have earned or deserve, not
what we can see. We are born in
sin. We are born with no inheritance but
punishment and death. But by God’s
promise, we take what we have not earned.
We take what Christ has earned for us, because that is what his word
tells us to do. He tells us to claim the
inheritance of Jesus. And when personal
experience contradicts this, when we feel our sin and know our guilt, when we
see a bad conscience rise up against us and tell us that we cannot possibly be truly
blessed by God – even if an army of witnesses were to testify that we do not
deserve what God promises, we wrestle with God in his word until the promise is
confirmed. We contend for the blessing
of Christ by clinging to the promise of our Baptism. And we win.
God blesses us. He changes our
name from unholy to holy, from sinner to righteous, from child of Adam to child
of God.
This
is what it means when we call God the God of Jacob. He is the God who tells us to take what we
have no earthly right to take. He is the
God who tells us to wrestle with him and not take no for an answer. He is the God who assures us that despite our
experiences and feelings, his word does not change. What he promised to you when you were
baptized remains his promise even if you have lived a sinful life. He comes to us and wrestles with us by
teaching us to listen to his word.
Sometimes
we do not understand what God is saying when we listen to his word. This is not the fault of God’s word. It’s the fault of the one listening, or
perhaps the fault of the one trying to explain it. But so that we can understand it, Christ has sent pastors to explain it – just as he sent Apostles and prophets in times
past. Just as it can be a struggle for a
pastor to teach something clearly, so it is often a struggle for Christian
listeners to learn it. But the struggle
always pays off when we are faithful to God’s word. We do not struggle or wrestle in vain. God helps us.
His Holy Spirit, the finger of God, works through the word we hear. He who inspired the text to be written and
the message to be preached also inspires our hearts to believe it and to grow
in wisdom.
When
studying the Bible, there are often historical difficulties that we are not so
quick to make sense of, and so we need some clarification as to what is going
on. There are many laws and ordinances
in the Old Testament that seem awfully strict and severe or else just plain odd. And so we need to be taught the broader
context to see why God commanded what he did.
People like to reference some of these things in order to mock how
outdated our religion is. But they are
ignorant. Everything in Scripture, if
one humbles himself and learns from it, is clearly intended to reveal God’s gracious
purpose and plan in sending Christ to save lost sinners from eternal death.
I
think the Psalms can sometimes be particularly difficult to understand. We speak or chant them every week, but many
portions seem to be obscure and so we skip over them to the parts we think we
like. But it’s useful to learn some
terms so that the meaning of the Psalms more readily jumps out at you. So, for instance, the psalmist is often
complaining about his enemies – those who seek his life – those who surround
him. We might get a picture of young
King David hiding from King Saul, or maybe Jacob fleeing from Esau. And that’s good. These were enemies of theirs. But all that is written about these Old Testament
saints was written for our learning.
Look at how God delivered them from their earthly foes. So also he delivers us from our spiritual
foes. And this is what the Psalms are
always singing about.
Our
true enemies are the devil who temps and accuses us, our flesh that lusts and
misleads us, and the world that is heading to hell and wants to drag us with
it. Our enemies are doubt, sinful
desires, and a bad conscience. And our
deliverer is God. He destroys the devil
by redeeming us with his own blood. He
overcomes our flesh by becoming Man and living a holy life in our place. He overcomes the world by dying for the
world’s sins and by preaching the gospel to all nations.
Is
a bad conscience your enemy? But Christ
has fulfilled the law that damns you.
Does the world want to suck you into its false promises of pleasure and
pride? But Christ forgives you and
promises eternal life and endless joy in heaven. Does the devil accuse you? But Christ, by dying and rising has put this enemy
to shame and shields you from his power through the forgiveness he speaks. But
is your flesh still weak? Then don’t
rely on your flesh. Don’t figure on what
you can do to overcome. Cling to what
the word of God teaches you. God is your
strength. He gives freely what we have
no power to earn — because Jesus Christ, the God of Jacob who came in the
flesh, has made all our enemies his own.
He has wrestled with everything that pins us down. And he has conquered. And he gives this victory to us by blessing
us with mercy.
We
are the true children of Israel – we who believe the promise once given to
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When the
Psalms speak of Israel, they are really speaking of the holy Christian
Church. When they speak of Jacob, they are
speaking of us who hear the word of God and believe it. When they speak of Zion, they are speaking of
the kingdom of heaven that comes to us in the word we hear and in the
sacraments that give us the forgiveness we need. When they speak of the temple or the
sanctuary of God, they are speaking of Jesus Christ himself. He is our holy refuge. The better we know the gospel, the better
equipped we are to understand what God’s word is actually teaching us.
And
that is why Jesus comes to teach us.
Just as God called Abraham from paganism to know the truth that in his
Seed all nations of the earth would be blessed, so also Jesus came to the
people of the region of Tyre and Sidon to teach Gentiles the words of eternal
life. They brought him a man who could
not hear. Jesus made him hear. They begged him to lay his hands on him. That’s what they expected. But Jesus doesn’t always do what we
expect.
He
brought him aside by himself to show him that no one could believe for him – no
one could wrestle in his place. He must
contend with God on his own. He put his
fingers in his ears to indicate that it is only by the finger of God, that is,
by the Holy Spirit, that we can be brought to faith, and that faith comes by
hearing. Only God can make us hear. Only he who came down from heaven can teach
us heavenly things. That is why Jesus
looked up to heaven and sighed. The man
could not speak – at least not correctly.
That is why Jesus spit and touched his tongue. The words he gave him to hear were the words
that he gave him to speak. And they were
the words of God. They were the words of
God made flesh who came down and spoke human words with a human mouth. That’s what the spit indicated.
And
the human words that we hear today – the words that Jesus commands us to preach
and listen to and confess with our mouths – these words that absolve us of our
sins and tell us to depart in peace – these are the words that open our ears
and open our hearts and loose our tongues.
They give us peace with God, because they are the words of him who made
peace with God. He took our weaknesses,
our diseases, our evil desires, and our death into himself. He suffered our guilt in order to give us his
innocence. He makes us his children with
an eternal inheritance. He opens our
ears to receive his mercy. He loosens
our tongues to speak rightly about what he has done. And he opens the gates of heaven to receive
us when we die. This is what we wrestle
with God to receive. And this is what we
praise him for since it is already ours.
“Sing
aloud to God our strength; make a joyful shout to the God of Jacob.”
In
Jesus’ name, Amen.
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