A wrestle with God is nothing like a wrestle with sin. To engage in conflict with sin involves a struggle over a divided Self: that part of Self that wants to sin and the other part that knows how unwise and destructive it would be. It is a conflict in which there is an endless argument within the soul that either tenses you up or tears you down, an argument that leads to an obsessive flip-flopping on the issues: “I could do this. It’s pretty harmless. It would be nice. And perhaps I need it…Yes, but it would ruin me and my family. What would people think? How could I survive the guilt and shame?” The end result is a state of tension relieved ironically by the very sin you’ve been trying all this time to resist. And you land with an exhaustion that makes you wonder how much longer you can go on like this before you throw in the towel and walk out on God to join the mindless pack.
A wrestle with God, on the other hand, is life-giving. Our Father in Heaven means to build us up and restore us, not leave us broken down. That great wrestler with God, Jacob, walks off towards the sunrise assured of the Promise, remember. A wrestle with God does not involve an argumentative carving up of the Self, but a gradual lining up of the forces of life with the Life of God, Who is Love, Joy and Peace (Gal. 5:22; Isa. 9:6; 1 John 4:8). The reason such a struggle with God is so creative, then, the reason our wrestle with Him brings peace instead of stress, confidence instead of fear, harmony with ourselves, instead of feeling we’ve been through a celestial meat grinder, is this: that God is for us, not against us. “Judgment was passed in favor of the saints” (Dan. 7:22 NASB). Christ is therefore our Defender against Satan. He doesn’t have to be our Defender against God as well, because God doesn’t have to be persuaded to love us.
Who, then, is fighting what? If God is for us, why are we fighting Him? Ah, but, you see, the question reveals a failure to understand our human nature. It assumes that we see through a perfect lens, and that what we see we perceive correctly.
We think that to wrestle with God implies there must be something wrong with Him which we must persuade Him of. We must appeal to Him to bless us, to love us and help us, and to speed things up. But if our faith accepts the truth of God’s Word, then we know that the problem is ours, not God’s. So what about this possibility: that in the wrestle with God to secure His blessing, we are actually wrestling against our own doubts that He really is the Blesser? The probability of this is highly likely. Consider this fact: when Jacob was in prayer asking for God’s protection against his brother, “a man wrestled with him”, not he, at first, with the man (Gen. 32:24). If God initiates the wrestle, and the problem is not with Him but with us, then He is wrestling with us not because He is against us, but because He is for us. He appears to be against us because we are against ourselves. The awful truth is, unbelief has made us our own worst enemy.
The very idea that human beings, who have, when pressed, violent instincts for survival, are actually fighting against themselves and occupied in Death, is a shocking concept. But it is clearly Biblical.
“It is your own wickedness that will punish you…see for yourselves how bitter a thing and how evil it is, to forsake the Lord your God and revere Me no longer” (Jer. 2:19). “Your own ways and your own deeds have brought all this upon you; this is your punishment and all this comes of your rebellion” (Jer. 4:18); “Your wrongdoing has upset nature’s order” (Jer. 5:25 NEB); “Do not run after other gods to your own ruin” (Jer. 7:6); “Drink offerings are poured out to other gods than Me—all to provoke and hurt Me. But is it I, says the Lord, Whom they hurt? No, it is themselves” (Jer. 7:18, 19); “Why has the land become a dead land, scorched like the desert and untrodden? The Lord said, It is because they forsook my law” (Jer. 9:12, 13); “The Lord of Hosts…has threatened you with disaster, because of the harm Israel and Judah brought upon themselves” (Jer. 11:17). “All who hate Me are in love with death” (Prov. 8:36).
But unless we understand how man came to do this thing, to work against his very existence, we shall never get a taste for wrestling with God.
The process may be described as The Inversion Of Good And Evil. Paul, the Apostle, describes man as in a condition of universal suppression of God (Rom. 1:18). Why would human beings suppress the One and Only Source of their life, well-being and happiness (Ps. 36:9)? What is this stunning, incomprehensible madness?
The collapse of Man’s spirituality at the dawn of Time was the greatest human catastrophe ever to cast its shadow over the World. In the account of that event in the book of Genesis we discover the process by which Man came to be at war with himself, a process that also laid the foundations for the faith-wrestle of all future generations who find their peace with God.
The Father and Creator of Life laid out His plan to spread His love throughout the world. He made Man, a male and female mirror-image of Himself, and provided them with a world-home, lush with the warmth of beauty. He created light and earth, the varieties of water and land; and the space for them, he covered with green and vegetation and fruits, and with living creatures that animated the world’s still grandeur. To man and woman He said, “Behold I have given you every” thing. “Fill the earth” with the fruit of yourself, and “rule over” it all (cf. Gen. 1, 2).
And to produce in man and woman the sheer joy of carrying out God’s plan freely, as partners with God, and to develop their sense of what it is to be human in the image of God, the Lord set up a domain, The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, by which Adam and Eve would realize the pleasurable creativity of their sovereignty through making good decisions in their world-home, just as God does throughout the whole universe. Therefore God told them, “From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17).
The angelic enemy of God, Lucifer, had been allowed to enter the paradise. He posed a question that seized upon Eve’s obvious curiosity: “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” (Gen. 3:1).
The misquote was no mistake. There was nothing intrinsically evil about the tree. Nor was there anything evil about God’s intent on placing it there. He was taking the kindest and simplest route to the development of Man’s new, untried powers. But Satan, by his misquote was attempting to place the prohibition against eating from the tree in a dark context. Why does God have a boundary here? What is He withholding? What is He up to? Thus Satan was acting on the first principle of the inversion of good and evil: to take something good and infuse it with implications of evil and to charge God with the responsibility of it.
Eve knew that this was not what God had said and she corrected the slur mediated through the serpent (Gen. 3:2, 3). But from what we know later on in the story, she must have begun ruminating over the idea implied in Satan’s question with thoughts that have ever since haunted all thinking minds: What can possibly be beyond God? What can be beyond Life? What must be hidden from me? Why can I not know it? Is there some other reality outside of God?
And from those small steps of doubt followed one giant leap into insinuations implied in Satan’s questions that have dogged Mankind thereafter: Surely God is mean (has He said you can’t have any of this?). He is depriving you of real pleasure (why would He hold things from you?). Why all this joy in your heart—when God is not the Generous One you think He is?
With these ideas evidently stored away in her heart, at least as a possibility, Satan is now ready to question reality itself.
Eve had said to the serpent that she and Adam would die if they ate the fruit from The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil (Gen. 3:3). Aware that Eve had already entered the realm of doubt towards God, Satan knows it is now possible to contradict the meaning of life itself without risk. “You surely shall not die!” (Gen. 3:4). Going against God will not result in disaster. There is no such cause and effect. God is depriving you of something wonderful. There will be no death from this thing.
Satan has now almost completed the process of turning reality on its head in Eve’s mind. God is possibly not, after all, good and generous. Reality possibly does not, after all, have an internal structure of cause and effect. There is one more step to the mental process of the inversion of good and evil.
Eve takes another look at the tree and its fruit. She is now sufficiently spiritually and mentally distorted to begin to entertain another interpretation of the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil. The tree “was good for food”; “it was a delight to the eyes”; “it was desirable to make one wise” (Gen. 3:6). It may have been good food. It most certainly was beautiful. These facts were merely the rationales by which the conscience is by-passed at an acceptable level of discomfort. But to make one wise?
Eve is on the verge of entering the realm of the inversion of good and evil. To believe that the tree is good to make one wise is also to believe that God (in His meanness) is withholding that wisdom, since He had forbidden Man to touch it. If the tree, which brings an experience of evil when it is misused, is actually believed to bring good when it is misused, then God Who brings the experience of good by our trust, will actually be thought to bring evil by that same trust.
And so, Eve “took from the fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate” (Gen. 3:6).
And from that moment, everything was back to front. Evil was good and good was evil. Eyes that were darkened were thought to be opened (Gen. 3:7). The innocence of nakedness was now seen as shameful and guilt-ridden (Gen. 3:7, 10). The Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, originally meant to train man towards the ways of goodness, has ever after been perceived as the vehicle of sin’s entrance into the world.
And, worst of all, “the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Gen. 3:8). Aside from references to the death of Christ, the Savior, here is the most tragic verse in the Bible. God, Who had said, “In the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17) was now perceived to say, “In the day that you eat from it, I will surely kill you”. To hear “the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8) was now thought to be a sound of danger. The Giver of Life was now perceived of as the Killer, and in terror, they hid themselves. Lucifer’s diabolical qualities had been projected upon God. And in the mind’s eye, Adam and Eve had perceived God as evil and Satan as good.
This inversion of good and evil has plagued mankind to the very present. It is the core of our sinful nature. We doubt the care and love of God. We are blind to the cause and effect of our sins. And we regularly delude ourselves about the presumed benefits of walking out on God.
This, then, is the reason for our wrestle with God. God doesn’t need convincing. We need convincing. The idea that mankind is in pursuit of God is a fool’s myth.
World religions are no evidence of Man’s pursuit of God, but rather his fearful flight from Him into madness. Substituting religiousness for The True God, they express their doubt of His love and care. It is God, rather, Who is in pursuit of fleeing man, forcing him to a wrestle of faith. For only as God does this with us, will we face our doubts and fears of Him, and in the wrestle that insists that He not let us go until He blesses us, will we be insisting that our doubts of Him not prevail over us, and our self-destruction cease. Then, that God loves us, God is merciful to us, and God helps us will be our PROMISE secured.