Grappling with God...Continued from page 2

Then Jacob begins to look over his flock and decides to give some of them to his brother as a gift, and he tells his servants what they are to say to Esau when he enquires about them.

Now we find Jacob all alone, just him and his thoughts, or so he thinks. Then seemingly out of nowhere a man appears before him. For some reason, the Bible doesn’t tell us why they begin to wrestle. Now you have to understand something here.

At the very least Jacob is seventy years old now he isn’t a young man anymore. Some scholars have thought that Jacob could be ninety when he begins to wrestle.

I don’t if many of you know much about high school or collegiate wrestling, but if there is one thing that you have to be in to wrestle someone, and that is good shape. Wrestling someone isn’t really a sprint as much as it is at times a marathon.

I can remember when I was in wrestling how my high school coach would start off practice with the phrase, “Okay guys start running.” For the first hour of practice we would run up and down the hall of our high school. After that we would spend time conditioning, and then grappling with one another.

Three hours later you would feel absolutely dead tired, and you would think to yourself that you might be ready for that next weeks match because of how well conditioned you were.

I had a friend who was two years ahead of me leave for the marines. When he had time to come back, he came and visited us and told us that that best thing that helped get ready for basic training for the marines was wrestling practice.

But no matter how hard we would practices, when it came time for the match, it was just only a few seconds in and you felt like your lungs were going to explode inside your chest. The longest a match goes in high school was three two-minute rounds.

So imagine what it must have been like for Jacob. He isn’t going to wrestle this man for a measly six minutes ? and as we know this man is actually God. He is going to wrestle with God all night.

Jacob who is the one who is known as one grabbing at someone’s heel is now being grabbed by God and He is grabbing at him. It is just about to become dawn and the man needs to be on his way, so he does something that someone might consider cheating, he pulls Jacob’s hip out of socket.