Save Me, I Pray: Genesis 32:11
“Save me, I pray, from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid he will come and attack me, and also the mothers with their children. But you have said, ‘I will surely make you prosper and will make your descendants like the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted.’”
Jacob had spent his whole life, even from the womb, grasping, scheming and striving. After having finally escaped from Laban, after twenty years of toil (Gen 31:38, 41) and mutual trickery, he prepares himself for re-entering the promised land.
He had been afraid of Laban taking away his wives (31:31), but the prospect of meeting his brother Esau again was more deeply unsettling. And so he sent messengers on ahead to placate his brother (32:3-5), but they returned with the concerning report (concerning at least for a man with a troubled conscience) that he was on his way with four hundred men (32:6).
That report broke Jacob. Being “greatly afraid and distressed” (32:7), desperate, at an end of himself, he beseeches God in prayer. I think it is somewhere in his book on prayer that Tim Keller speaks of a time in his life and ministry when he turned to his wife and told her that he didn’t believe they would get through the coming months unless they sought God earnestly in prayer. He sensed that he needed God’s power and provision in a new, yet greater way.
But for Jacob this moment of reckoning is a yet more significant turning point in his life. For him, the realisation of his absolute dependence on the Lord was a new one. Only now is he brought to an end of himself. Only now does he see clearly that everything he has gained, whether by graft or guile, is only his by God’s extraordinary kindness (32:10). And only now does he realise that his only hope as he faces the greatest danger of his life is that God would fulfil his promises (32:12). God must save him. God must protect him. His only hope for today and tomorrow is that God would fulfil his promises.
We cannot live by faith in the promises of God, unless we stop living by the power of the flesh. They are two entirely different ways of living. Jacob learned this lesson in great conflict as he wrestled with the Angel of the Lord (32:22-32). In a mysterious nocturnal encounter with a powerful man, Jacob wrestles with the Lord himself. The Lord strikes a blow to Jacob’s hip and gives him a new name. He is no longer Jacob, the trickster, but Israel, “God fights.”
As Keil and Delitzsch put it, “Jacob overcame God; not with the power of the flesh, with which he had hitherto wrestled for God against man (God convinced him of that by touching his hip, so that it was put out of joint), but by the power of faith and prayer, reaching by firm hold of God even to the point of being blessed, by which he proved himself to be a true wrestler of God, who fought with God and with men, i.e., who by his wrestling with God overcame men as well.”
And so he goes on his way limping. So it must also be with us. We cannot enter the promised land strutting or scheming, seeking by our own wisdom and strength to overcome. We are secure in God’s promises. It is better to limp under the protection of the Lord, than to make great strides in our own strength.
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