3. In spiritual matters experience varies. The personal experi- ence of each one of us differs in some respects from that of all others. There is no one rule that applies in every case. With some, the way of life is a way of peace and a path of pleasantness, leading the soul by green pastures and still waters. There are happy, sheltered lives that never know the burden of doubt, uncertainty, and inward distress — never are sifted like wheat with the fan of the Lord, or tried in the refiner's fire of trouble and sorrow — never feel the ache of shame and self-reproach, or the agony of a broken and contrite heart. But there are others for whom the way of life dips into what is dark and painful, and who have to fight their way through much tribulation towards the light of God, — men and women who, from nature and circumstances, from the weakness and defects of their own character, or the faults and mistakes of early days, or a combination of causes which are known only to God, have to win the crown of life, if it is to be won at all, with wrestling and struggling — with a stern, often-renewed, and persistent conflict
' A. B. DavidNoa.
GENESIS XXXII. 24 237
with themselves and the world and the flesh and the devil — a conflict that ends only with life.
As men from men Do, in the constitution of their souls, Differ, by mystery not to be explained; And as we fall by various ways, and sink One deeper than another, self-condemned, Through manifold degrees of guilt and shame; So manifold and various are the ways Of restoration, fashioned to the steps Of all infirmity, and tending all To the same point, attainable by all — Peace in ourselves, and union with our God.*
ii. The Opponent.
1. Why was Jacob thus mysteriously held back while his household was quietly moving forward in the darkness ? What is the meaning, purpose, and use of this opposition to his entrance ? The meaning is obvious from the state of mind Jacob was in. He was going forward to meet Esau under the impression that there was no other reason why he should not inherit the land but only his wrath, and pretty confident that by his superior talent, his mother- wit, he could make a tool of this stupid, generous brother of his. And the danger was that, if Jacob's device had succeeded, he would have been confirmed in these impressions, and have believed that he had won the land from Esau, with God's help certainly, but still by his own indomitable pertinacity of purpose and skill in dealing with men. Now, this was not the state of the case at all. Jacob had, by his own deceit, become an exile from the land, had been, in fact, banished for fraud ; and though God had confirmed to him the covenant, and promised to him the land, yet Jacob had apparently never come to any such thorough sense of his sin, and entire incompetency to win the birthright for him- self, as would have made it possible for him to receive simply as God's gift this land which was valuable only as God's gift. Jacob does not yet seem to have found out the difference between inheriting a thing as God's gift, and inheriting it as the meed of his own prowess. To such a man God cannot give the land; Jacob cannot receive it. He, in short, was about to enter the
1 Wordsworth, Tlu Excursion.
238 SPIRITUAL WRESTLING
land as Jacob, the supplanter, and that would never do ; he was going to win the land from Esau by guile, or as he might; and not to receive it from God. And, therefore, just as he is going to step into it, there lays hold of him, not an armed emissary of his brother, but a far more formidable antagonist.
2. From the first Jacob knows that it is a man that wrestles with him. It is a person — it is with a personal will that he is grappling. But after a time both adversaries stand out more clearly. The morning begins to break, and with the light the spell of the Unseen over the patriarch will break too. The conflict must cease, lest its advantages be lost. The heavenly wrestler seeks to depart. He said, "Let me go, for the day breaketh." And Jacob said, " I will not let thee go, except thou bless me." Ere now there had begun to break upon Jacob's mind some consciousness of the rank of his adversary; and perhaps to complete it He touched the nerve of his thigh and paralysed it. And then the conflict quite changed its nature, from using force, to mere supplication. And here the details supplied by Hosea come in : " He had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him" (xii. 4). God had put out His hand upon him at last, having allowed him to wrestle with Him for a night — a symbol of that obstinate struggle which, in his confident, unsubdued strength of nature, he had been waging against Him all his lifetime. His Spirit cannot always strive with him: some decisive stroke must be put forth upon him, to break him once for all, to touch him in the vital part, that, utterly disabled, he may know whom he has been opposing, and how vain such a conflict is.