Struggling With God

Dear Ehud,

Let’s start with the naming of Israel as Israel, because I think it has a great deal to do with what you are going through right now. I will personalize it for you at the end.

The name Israel was given to Jacob at Peniel (Gen. 32) when he was on his way to reunite with his brother Esau—doing so while not knowing if that reunion was going to be bloody or not. God had told him to return, and had promised that such a return would be blessed. But this was a promise that Jacob had to hang on to by sheer faith, especially after he got word that Esau was headed his way, and with four hundred armed men with him.

This was because the last time Jacob had been living together with Esau, he had deceived their father Isaac into giving him the blessing, and Esau had been furious about it, vowing to kill Jacob (Gen. 27:42). So Jacob had fled and wound up at the house of Laban, where God greatly enriched him. Years passed, and Jacob is eventually directed by God to return to his ancestral homeland (Gen. 31:3).

So when it got down to the point, Jacob sent servants with flocks ahead of them all, presenting the flocks as peace offerings to Esau. And then, preparing for the worst, Jacob divided his people and the animals with him into two bands—if one band was attacked, the other could perhaps get away. He then sent them all across the ford Jabbok, and he himself remained behind until the break of day.

While alone during the course of that night, a man wrestled with him, and they struggled to a stalemate. The Lord—for it was the Lord—then touched Jacob’s hip and put it out of joint, and told Jacob to let him go. Jacob refused to let go unless he got a blessing. The angel of the Lord asked him for his name, and when he was told Jacob, he renamed him as Israel. This is a name that you still carry, and it is the reason you have that limp.

The name Israel means “he wrestles with God.” Centuries later the prophet Hosea says that Jacob “by his strength” had “power with God” (Hos. 12:3). Jacob consequently names the place where this occurred Peniel, because it was there that he saw God face to face, and lived.

The episode is all about faces and names. Jacob was profoundly concerned about what would happen when he saw Esau’s face (v. 20). He struggled with the Lord through the night, and afterward declared that he had seen God (Elohim) face to face, and yet lived (v. 30). We are safe in concluding that the struggle with God was all wrapped up with the fraught issue of meeting Esau again—he had been really anxious about it beforehand, and a few verses down in the next chapter, when he meets Esau, what does he say? “And Jacob said . . . therefore I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast pleased with me” (Gen. 33:10). Seeing Esau’s face was like seeing the face of God (Elohim). He saw the face of God twice, once with the angel and a second time with Esau.

Naming and renaming is important as well. Israel names the place Peniel because of what had happened there. And God renames Jacob as Israel, as the one who “struggles with God.” In the case of Jacob, that struggle was admirable and was rewarded. The Lord tells him that he had “power with God” and that he had prevailed. But we should also note that the Lord said that Israel would prevail with men also. The struggle was both vertical and horizontal.

And this is the same name that the sons of Israel bear to this day. They are still Israel. As Israel, they still struggle with God. As Israel, they still struggle with men. There is a stubborn streak in there that appears to be ineradicable. This willingness to struggle, even with God, can be praiseworthy, as it was here, or when Moses struggled with God over the possibility that God might wipe the disobedient Israelites out (Ex. 32:10-11). That was also admirable. The psalmist frequently struggles with God, and we are supposed to learn from all such struggles by singing the resultant psalms to the end of the world. The topics can include the apparent disjunct between God’s promises and our current suffering, or through a sense of abandonment, or on account of the divine silence—for more on this, just read through and meditate on Psalm 13, or 22, or 88. But there is a way of struggling with God that is nevertheless fundamentally at peace with Him.

There is also a struggling can also be deeply rebellious and sinful. There were other times when Israel struggled against the Lord and their behavior was nothing but high insolence. There was the incident with the golden calf (Ex. 32:4ff). There were the eras when they were causing their children to pass through the fire (2 Kings 17:17). There was the time when they concluded that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem because they had not worshiped the Queen of Heaven enough (Jer. 44:18). And of course, there was the culmination of it all, which we will cover in my next letter, when the corrupt leadership in Jerusalem railroaded the Messiah in an illegal night trial—and the ferocious judgment of God flattened that place within one generation (Matt. 23:35).

Not one stone was left on another, and the rubble from that catastrophe is still there. You have been there, and have prayed in that rubble, and the answer to your prayer was speaking to you from the rubble.

I said I would personalize this for you, and so here we are. You, Ehud, are a restless Jew, and from our conversations I can tell that struggle has been a centerpiece of your experience. This is not, as it appears, because you don’t fit into some idealized Israel, but rather because you do fit into the actual historical struggling Israel. You are not the odd man out in this experience. You struggle with God and you struggle with man. The irony is this: you could find yourself walking up and down freely in all the corridors of power, and still feel like an exile.

You have not done all of these different things in the same exact moment, obviously, but from our conversation I seem to recall that you have experienced most of these. You have struggled against your mother’s expectations for you . . . you didn’t want to be a lawyer. You have struggled against your orthodox upbringing, with all of its rules and expectations. You have struggled against the God of the Jews. There was even that stint with that Holocaust denial group. You have struggled against the strictures of Western civilization, while at the same time working for personal advancement in that civilization. In turns you have wanted to burn it all down, or to be the king of it—either way would be good, and either would feel just as pointless. That is, it would be good until you obtained the goal, whichever it was, and then the struggle would soon be resumed.

You have struggled against your own identity, which is where I would locate that sense of self-loathing you described. You have struggled against the God of the Christians, the one you didn’t believe in. You have struggled against your own intelligence, hating the fact that you see things so clearly. From that fatal year in high school, when the sheer fact of your restlessness pressed in on you, it has been one damn thing after another.

And this leads to a particular caution, one that I think is quite reasonable, given your history. The Christian faith could be approached as just another way station in this restless wandering of yours. There have been some who came to faith, as they thought, but who sampled it like it was some tidbit in a paper cup at CostCo. Such people can tell others later on that “they tried that.” But that is not the kind of thing we are talking about. If Christ is pursuing you, as I believe He is, the reason is that He intends to have all of you.

We experience His pursuit of us as us coming to Him. The earth is turning but it looks to use as though the sun is rising. Of course we would never come to Him, none of us would, unless He had first beckoned us. But in the beckoning, you should know that if you come, the central thing you will experience, which you have never known before, is epistemic rest.

I know that you will naturally feel the emotional force of such an appeal. Note it, don’t fight it, and in a submissive spirit, bookmark it. We still have some other intellectual and theological territory to cover.

Cordially in Christ,

Douglas Wilson