The Fight

Martyn Payne

On your marks:

God sometimes feels so close while at other times God seems to be out of reach and out of sight. Sometimes God startles us by the immediacy of his presence but then God is gone again, drawing us on by his very absence. This has been the experience of God's people all down the ages, ever since we cut ourselves off from intimacy with God at the beginning. This is just as true an experience of God for the 'great names' of the Bible as it is for Christians today. God calls us to 'live by faith, not by what we see' (2 Corinthians 5:7) because 'faith makes us sure of what we hope for and gives us proof of what we cannot see' (Hebrews 11:1).

The following story is about God wrestling with Jacob at the River Jabbock. God is completing the long process of changing this man from a cheat into someone who is truly aware of God's presence and the calling to be a part of the people of God. It is part of a series of stories linked to the big Bible story of 'Hide and Seek'.

Get set:

You can find a retelling of this story in The Barnabas Children's Bible, story 27. You can read the story in the Bible in Genesis 32-33.

Go!

1. What a story the life of Jacob makes! It may be almost 4000 years old but it is a story of God dealing with an ordinary human being just like you and me. It's an amazing story of mistakes, cheating, running away, disappointment in love, bad choices, exploitation at work, family argument, and fear; as well as a story of spiritual high points, great prayer moments, but also faith forgotten; and all this against the backcloth of the story of God's faithful steadfast love. The climax of all this is an extraordinary wrestling match. Jacob wrestles with God in human form, or rather God wrestles with Jacob. A famous Christian writer, F.B. Meyer, sums it all up: 'This is life; a long wrestle against the love of God which longs to make us all his.' God never gives up on Jacob, however much he twists, turns and runs away!

Play a game in which the children sit in a circle but one child is outside the circle. This child needs to find a space and so taps someone on the shoulder. That person must get up quickly and give chase to the one who touched him, trying to outrun her back to his own space. One child reaches the vacant space first, and the other is left outside the circle to repeat the process. This game goes by a variety of names and will be well known to most children and leaders. Jacobs's story is a story of chase and catch up like this!

2. Again and again in the Bible, God is called 'the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob'; sometimes, as in Psalm 46:11, simply 'the God of Jacob'. How amazing! God of a man who was a cheat and a liar, forgetful and faithless; and a God who does not give up on such a man but spends a lifetime wrestling with him to shake him out of all that is bad so that he might cling to God alone. It is a very encouraging and hopeful title. God is prepared to wait a lifetime to bring us back to who we were created to be.

Play a game of 'Call My Bluff' or Balderdash as it is marketed nowadays. Have a panel who each must give a definition of an unusual word (dip into the dictionary for a word that the children (and you!) will not have met before). Only one child should give the true definition. Can the others work out who is lying and who is telling the truth? Jacob cheated and lied a lot in his life and this story is his encounter with God. The wrestling match is the moment when Jacob at last has to face the music!

As an alternative to this, play a game of 'word tennis'. Divide the group in half and line the two teams up opposite each other. Starting at one end, a child calls out a word (i.e. 'serves' the word in the 'tennis' match) and then the child opposite tries to 'return' a word. For this version, it should be a word that is completely unconnected. This continues down the line. Anybody on the team can challenge a word that has been chosen at any point and try to prove that the word is connected in some way. Successful challenges score points for the team. Use this to illustrate Jacob's way through life. It was full of unconnected twists and turns as he tried to dodge God's call upon him.

3. The wrestling match in the story is a picture of a lifetime in which God wrestles to wake up Jacob. Jacob was on his way home when this wrestling match took place at Peniel. When Jacob had run away 20 years before, he had gone via a place which came to be called Bethel. Bethel was the place of God - the house of God - and the place of the dream about the angel stairway to heaven. What a spiritual high that had been for Jacob and what an important first step on his journey of faith! But perhaps that was all it had been - a first step only, on which he had remained stuck. We certainly have no recorded prayer from that time until our story today (see Genesis 32:9-12). Through all the years with Laban and despite all the wheeling and dealing by Jacob and in equal measure by Laban - the wives, the wool and the wealth - had he been growing in his faith? Or was he still living on an experience from long ago?

Talk with the group about what happened to Jacob at Bethel (Genesis 28:10-22), where he had the amazing vision of the angels going up and down from heaven on a ladder. This was an amazing spiritual moment where Jacob was very deeply aware that God was with him. He even made an agreement to give God back one-tenth of everything that he had been given. However, when he arrived and worked for Laban for years in order to earn marriage to his two daughters, it seemed that he had forgotten that moment of seeing God so clearly. I wonder whether Jacob ever talked about what happened at Bethel. He had met with God very powerfully but then he seemed to have forgotten the impact of that moment, or maybe he deliberately shut his eyes to those moments when God tried to break through and seek him again.

Hot seat some of the group in the role of Jacob and question them as to why he possibly never told Laban or Leah or Rachel what had happened. Was he embarrassed? Had he forgotten? Did he think it was all a dream? Was it too mystical and mysterious to make sense any more? Why didn't he pray? Why didn't he seek God after God had so clearly sought him?

This is why God wrestles with Jacob - to wake him up to the God of here and now. God loves people too much to want to leave Jacob, or us, just living on a spiritual high from the past.

4. It is a life-changing journey in which God wrestles to shake up Jacob. Jacob was his name and Jacob was his character. 'Jacob' means cheat, one who grabs for himself, one who always puts himself in pole position. Jacob's life was marked by cheating, deceiving and scheming. Chapter 32 contains his longest and most beautiful prayer but it came because there was a crisis.

Look at the prayer with the children (vv. 9-12). Ask them which part of the prayer they like best. Do they think this is genuine prayer? Print out the prayer so that the children can copy and illustrate a version of their own, perhaps picking up on just one verse. They could include a picture of the stone pillow where the promise was made (v. 9 - see 28:10-15); a walking stick, people and animals (32:10); weapons of attack (v. 11); or the stars in the sky (v. 12).

Jacob says all the right words but even after such a prayer he doesn't seem quite ready yet to trust God completely. He schemes and plans so that, whatever happens, this encounter with his brother might at least leave him with something still of his own. He divides his property, sends gifts, splits the family, manoeuvres for some sort of safe outcome. And then, and only then, when he is left alone, the wrestling God meets him.

God comes to him to shake up any remaining self-reliance and to shake him out of his lack of trust in God - to bring him to a place where he clings to God alone and asks for God's blessing, legitimately as God-given and not as a Jacob-stolen. God wants to change Jacob for the better. This midnight wrestling match is God's determined battle to rescue Jacob - to wrestle the bad out of him and to bring him to a point of clinging on to God alone, so that he can be blessed and changed.

5. It is a life-and-death journey in which God wrestles with Jacob so he will take up God's ways.

Perhaps some members of the group have had the experience of learning the controlled moves of a martial art. Can they show some of the basic moves to the group? This could give a taste of the wrestling match to come. I wonder what Jacob's struggle with God looked like. The place is called Peniel, which means 'the face of God' because it is here that Jacob does come face to face with God.

Try a sit-down tug-of-war between two halves of the group. This could give a way into the idea of the struggle that is going on in the story. (It's safer than a stand-up tug-of-war, of course, but harder because there's no way you can anchor your feet easily against the opposing pull!)

If God hadn't wrestled with Jacob, he could never have changed as much as he did. In the same way, unless God is at work in us, even the best that we may do in life can be wasted. And, unless God wrestles us, how can we ever have the strength to wrestle with the enemy and with evil? As Paul reminds us: 'we are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world' (Ephesians 6:12, CEV). To let God wrestle with us like this leads to a new start and a new power, as it did for Jacob.

Use this part of the story to have a focused time of prayer for some difficult and challenging prayer issues. Have a set of cards on which are written some of the sound-words seen in cartoons when fights take place, e.g. Grrr, Pow, Wack, Thwack, Ugh, Ouch, Zap, Crunch, Wop, Kerplunk.On the back of each of these cards you should put a cross. Encourage the group to name some of the prayer challenges that are on their minds, e.g. prayers for peace where there is war or for healing where there is much suffering. As they mention each issue, ask them to put down one of the cards with the wrestling sounds, as a reminder that prayer is a battle against all that is bad and evil in our world. After the prayers are finished, turn the words over so that the crosses are visible as a picture that by the cross Jesus defeated all that was evil on our behalf.

As for Jacob, he never forgot his prayer because he went round with a limp following the wrestling match and he had a new name - Israel - which means 'wrestled with God'.

6. In the story, it was God's way that worked, not Jacob's scheming. Esau did arrive, not with an army to attack him but to welcome him and forgive him. This forgiveness was Jacobs's new start. Now he really began to live by faith. Jacob even said that he saw God's face in the face of his brother (Genesis 33:10). When enemies become friends like this, it is the work of God alone! Jacob found life, not death, because he met with the wrestling God.

Play the 'word tennis' game again (see above) but this time, after a word is 'served', the return must be a connected word, as a picture of 'reconciliation' rather than hostility. Each word must be connected to the one before in some way.

7. One way to sum up today's story is to look at some of the rhyming words for Jacob throughout this outline, namely:

Jacob and wake-up

Jacob and shake-up

Jacob and take-up.

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