"I will not let you go unless you bless me!"

Genesis 32:26-29
And He (God) said, “Let Me go, for the day breaks.” But he (Jacob) said, “I will not let You go unless You bless me!” So He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.” And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.” ... And He blessed him there.

Recently someone told me about a quote they read on Facebook. I didn't read the quote so I'm paraphrasing but it went something like this: "It doesn't matter what you do, how good you try to be or how much you serve in the church, God will bless whoever he wants to bless, whenever he wants to bless them." The person who shared this with me said it with such a sense of heartache and despair that I could see that the wind had been pulled from his sails. My friend has been trying hard to love and serve The Lord and has been praying for blessing but has not received that for which he has been praying. This statement by a fellow Christian who IS being blessed was far from comforting to him. 

Aside from the fact that Facebook quotes can be a bit shallow and more akin to "sound bite wisdom" than an actual word from God. And acknowledging the truth that we should not make "getting something from God" into a kind of transactional motivation for our good deeds there seems to me to be a very obvious flaw in that statement. It simply is not true. 

To say that no action we take can gain us a blessing overlooks the very word of God which gives us clear examples of men and women who take very definite actions with the express purpose of being blessed by God. What's more, by denying this we neglect the very essential truth that we are never NOT being blessed by God even when we seem to be taking no action at all.

When Jacob camped at Mahanaim he had come to the end of himself. He was caught between his past and his future. He could not go go back for he had broken with his father-in-law. He feared to go forward for he had betrayed his brother and deceived his father. So there he was in the midst of the wilderness with all that he owned. All his wealth, two wives, two concubines, a daughter, and eleven sons. So terrified was he of his brother's wrath and of the four hundred man army that he had heard was on its way, that he had divided his people into two camps so that should the worst happen, perhaps some should escape alive. 

He had done all that he could, but it was not enough. He had even seen angels along the way but it was not enough. Even though God had told him in a dream to go home, it was not enough. He could not sleep. He was restless, consumed with anxiety, worried for the lives of his family. Overcome in the night he wanders outside the camp and there meets God himself. 

Incredibly, he does not fall down on his knees before his creator. He does not worship. He does not beg for aid. He does not recount his good deeds nor promise some petty human compensation in exchange for divine deliverance. But rather he audaciously takes hold of Him who is ultimately his ONLY hope and seeks to force a blessing from Him by sheer brute strength. He has had enough of prophetic dreams, of angels standing like signposts in the desert, he has had enough even of his own schemes and machinations. He will have the one thing or he will have nothing. 

And it is this passion of soul, spirit and body all utterly abandoned to attaining the priceless blessing of God that leads him to victory. For anyone who clings to God with such violent passion, with such desperate desire is not repelled but rather drawn deeper into God. God, so graciously mitigates His own sovereignty and omnipotence so as to put forth resistance only so much as a mortal can withstand, and thereby tests Jacob's mettle. "Let Me go!" He says, but it is a dare really. "Let Me go for you love to hold onto your fear and I will drive out fear with love! Let Me go for you are too concerned with the things of the world and not with the Maker of the world. Let Me go for you do not trust Me and I am the Author of faith! No man can hold onto Me if he clings to such things. Let Me go or else I will change you entirely into My own likeness. Let Me go or I will bless you with all that I am."

Jacob is cunning. It is his gift. He knows the value of a thing when he has laid his hands upon it. And he says, "I will not let You go unless You bless me." Jacob had discovered something. That wisdom that we all forget until we meet God in the wilderness and wrestle with Him and in many ways with ourselves. You must lay hold of the Blessing Giver and not let Him go until He blesses you. For once He does, He becomes a part of you. After that Jacob was known as Isra-EL, the very name of God becoming one with his own. Living proof that God had joined Himself to Jacob in eternal promise. 

Our mistake is not in striving to gain a blessing from God. Our mistake is in taking hold of the wrong actions by our striving.  Thinking that by laying hold of them we can buy a blessing from The Lord. We do not serve God to earn a blessing. We serve to take hold of God. We do not go to church or read our Bibles to get a blessing. We do those things to take hold of God. We do not pray or quote scripture or witness to Christ to get a blessing, we do not sing praises or even love one another as Christ commands to get a blessing. We do not obey Him to prove ourselves worthy of a blessing. We do it all to lay hold of Him, to cling to Him, to say to Him, "I will not let You go unless You bless me. And when you have blessed me I will be at peace knowing that You will not let me go." Then we will do all those things and more because He has taken hold of us. We will be His people, called by His name. Made fierce and mighty not by the size of the fight in the man, but by the size of the God in the fight.

Deuteronomy 28:1-2, 10
“Now it shall come to pass, if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments which I command you today, ...all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, because you obey the voice of The Lord....Then all peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you.

But we must also remember that even now in the wilderness, in the night, as we wander away from the safety of the camp, as we struggle in the midst of this fight with our God and even before we came to this point, when we were relying on our own cunning, even then He was blessing us. Sharpening our wits, teaching us earthly wisdom, giving us skills and talents, granting us favor, speaking to us in dreams, sending divine messengers along our journey, protecting us from our own mistakes, providing for all our needs and restoring the bridges we burned. But perhaps the greatest blessing is that He comes to meet us in our darkest night of the soul, not to sooth us with platitudes or placate us with vague promises. But to offer Himself up for a fight. To wound us in a way that changes how we walk in life. To break us free of that which we cling to by offering us something we can have if we pursue it with all that we are. To change us, to bless us, to give us a new name and to never let us go.

And this battle is necessary. It is crucial. For God wills to bless us. It is His nature to bless. But a blessing, a great blessing, of the sort He delights most to give, is a wild thing. It is powerful and untamed like a wild stallion. The man who rides it must be the one who hangs on tight. The one who, once thrown, will get up straight away and get back on the horse. The one who will not let go until the blessing breaks. 

Jacob was such a man. It is not that God did not know this. Jacob did not need to prove anything to God. That fierce passion was in him that night in the darkness where the only fire was his burning desire for God's blessing. But I think perhaps Jacob did not know it. What good is it to be such a man if you do not know you are? It needed to be brought out of him. It needed to be beaten out of him by Someone who knew exactly where to hit him to break him free. 

I think my friend is in such a fight. He feels like he is being beaten down. But it think God is challenging him to a fight. A full on knock down drag out. I think God wants to wound him enough to change how he walks into the future with all the mighty blessings that await him. I think God is waiting for my friend to lay hold of Him and be fully determined to not let Him go no matter what until that blessing breaks. He must, above all things, not waver.

James 1:6-8
But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double- minded man, unstable in all his ways.

Double-mindedness will not do. This is no boxing match. No one gets to go back to his corner to rest, or worse to simply throw in the towel and hope to fight another day. This a battle that goes until someone wins. Winner takes all. And God will win when my friend discovers his own God-given relentlessness. That is the point of the fight. How can we ever hope to attain the abundant blessing of an infinite God without relentless pursuit? The appetite must equal the banquet or the food will be wasted. 

The fight is not over for my friend. In some ways I hope it lasts a little longer. For the most valuable prize will always require a bigger fight. So I pray that my friend does not grow weary, but rather stirs himself for a magnificent fight and sets his face like flint to battle it out to the end. So that when he has become as relentless for God, as God is for him he will meet the dawn with victory. And the blessing will be glorious indeed.