Came across Genesis 32 once again – about Jacob wrestling with God. It’s always puzzled me. Why did Jacob need to wrestle God for a promised blessing? Why would it say he prevailed, as if God couldn’t have won the first second? It reminded me of my confusion about God giving the Promised Land to his people and then telling them to fight for it! My question to God was are you giving or am I fighting. It took me a long time to understand His answer was yes!

This story of Jacob is really great good news for us.

I am seeing that we can resist God and fight Him, be against Him when we don’t trust Him and we don’t like His plans or His ways. Or, we can wrestle with Him. We can decide to go through, to persist, and persevere through whatever it takes to be shaped and transformed by God.

Jacob didn’t want to stop short of everything God had for Him. It was his faith in the character and promises of God that kept him persevering.

We don’t want to miss everything God has for us either. But it’s difficult for us to see desperation and relinquishment for the gifts they are.

And amazingly, God wrestles with us. He perseveres with us, not destroying us or abandoning us, but using the struggle to humble us, helping us to recognize our dependence, sometimes leaving us with a limp to accomplish that. But it’s the place of blessing – the place we’ve resisted in the past but that now we want with all our heart because we see our desperate need for it.

God has every intention of blessing us. He has promised all kinds of blessings to us. And because of His great love and faithfulness, He wrestles with us until we are in the place to receive them.

A. W. Tozer said, “The Lord cannot fully bless a man until He has conquered him.”

Jacob didn’t quit even when it was tiring, even when it was painful. And Jacob did come to the place of submission – the place of blessing.

That is truly amazing grace!!!