Human Pain and Struggles

Human Pain and Struggles
Genesis 32: 22 – 32.

I. Introduction.

I have been visiting church members in the hospital for several years now. In fact, I started visiting in the hospital when I was a College Minister in Waco. Every staff member of our church was required to go at least once a week to check on our folks.

Over the years, I have gotten a little more comfortable around doctors, in waiting rooms and walking through the hospital hallways. And I have learned a lot about hospitals and the health care professions.

There is something I have noticed in just the past couple of years. There is a new kind of doctor now that did not exist a few years ago…A Pain Specialist or a Pain Management Specialist.

Doctors and hospitals used to believe that pain was just a symptom of something else going on in our bodies…Illness, Disease, or some other type of Disorder. If you treat the illness or disorder, the pain will eventually go away. We also used to believe that pain was something that was just inevitable and folks need to learn how to cope with or at least how to survive pain.

But that is not the case anymore. Now, there are medical personnel whose entire practice is dedicated to relieving pain. These are the Pain Specialists. They often function as a team of doctors and therapists to treat the patient’s pain and to help the patient learn how to live with pain.

Pain Specialists work with people who are suffering from diseases that normally bring a lot of pain—I think of Cancer as a perfect example—Or from injuries such as a severe back injury or at least something that never seems to heal. Pain Specialists have also been very helpful for men and women who suffer from these types of Chronic Pain.

There are between 30 million and 50 million Americans who suffer from some form of Chronic Pain…That is defined as continuous pain that lasts longer than six months. More than likely, you can think of someone you know who suffers like this. Sometimes this Chronic Pain comes from identifiable disorders—like cancer or injuries—but often Chronic Pain is mysterious and not related to any identifiable disorder.

This is where Pain Specialists have been very helpful. Their treatments for pain range from medications physical therapy to psychotherapy to spinal cord stimulation to more New Age techniques such as transcendental meditation—Of course those techniques seem to be nothing more than just denying that one is suffering pain at all.

Of course you don’t have to suffer from Chronic Pain to recognize that pain is a natural part of human life. In fact, we might even say that to be human and to be alive is to know what it means to suffer.

I wish I had the answer to human suffering. I wish I could make your pain and suffering go away. Or, at least I wish I could answer the question “Why?”

The best I can do is to open the Bible and show you that you are not alone. The men and women of the Bible faced the same kinds of struggle and pain that we face today.


Read Genesis 32: 22 – 32.
22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maidservants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.
23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions.
24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak.
25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man.
26 Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak." But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
27 The man asked him, "What is your name?" "Jacob," he answered.
28 Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome."
29 Jacob said, "Please tell me your name." But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."
31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.
32 Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon.
(NIV)



Jacob really wasn’t proud of his past. There were a lot of things that he would just prefer to forget and not have to talk about again. Like the time when he tricked his brother Esau into selling his birthright for a bowl of red beans.

You see, Esau was the firstborn son—of course he was only a few seconds older than Jacob, because they were twins, and the Bible tells us that Jacob came out of his mother’s womb grasping onto the heel of his older brother. In fact, that is where Jacob’s name came from. Jacob means, “one who grasps at the heel” or the one who tries to trip or deceive another. And that is exactly what Jacob did—deceived other people.

He deceived his older brother into trading all the rights of a firstborn son for a bowl of red stew—probably nothing more than just a pile of beans. Can you imagine that? Trading half of the family fortune and all the rights to family leadership for a pile of beans. That is what Esau did, because Jacob deceived him.

Then there was that time that Jacob deceived his father out of the family blessing. Now this is something entirely different from the birthrights of a firstborn son. The birthright was a way of carrying on the past success. The blessing was a way of guaranteeing future success. Such a blessing was closely related to the ancient Hebrew belief in the power of the spoken word. Fathers were hopeful that the words they spoke over their firstborn sons would in fact come true. But only one of the sons could receive such a promise of a good future.

And Jacob—with his mother’s help—dressed up like his brother and put animal skins on his arms and wore sweaty, nasty clothes to make his father think he was blessing the older brother Esau. The deceiver had struck again. And Esau had lost again.

Immediately after Jacob left his ailing father’s bedside, Esau walked in expecting to receive his father’s blessing. But it was too late. Jacob had just left with the only blessing. And Esau vowed that day that he would kill his younger brother Jacob. But he would wait until their parents were dead.

That is when Jacob went into hiding. He spent twenty years in foreign lands trying to avoid any contact with his family. Jacob missed the funerals of both his mother and his father, because he was afraid of Esau.

During those twenty years on the road, something began to happen to Jacob. We don’t exactly know what was going on in his life, but we do know there were three places where Jacob came into the presence of God.

The first time Jacob encountered God was on the side of the road as he traveled from Beersheba to Haran. There wasn’t a Holiday Inn Express in the area, so Jacob had to sleep on the ground with his head on a stone for a pillow. During the night, God gave Jacob a vision of a beautiful staircase that spanned the distance between heaven and earth. There were angels of God walking up and down that staircase. And then it happened…God spoke! “I am the God of your father Abraham and Isaac, and I am your God Jacob. I will go with you wherever you go and protect you and bring you back to your own land and make a great nation out of you.”

Then Jacob woke up and realized that he had been resting in the presence of God. Therefore he set up a monument and gave that place a name. You see, in the Old Testament names were important. Names reveal character. And when there is a character change, there needs to be a name change. So Jacob gave that nameless place a name. He called it Bethel…The House of God.

The second time Jacob found himself in the presence of God was even more mysterious than the first. He had just deceived his father-in-law out of hundreds of sheep. Now he was on his way back to the land of Canaan—the Promised Land, the Land of his people. But again, the angels of the Lord came to Jacob and he began to realize how blessed he truly was. And once again, Jacob had such a profound experience of God that he gave the place a name. He called it Mahanaim…Two Camps. This may mean…God has blessed me so much that my family and possessions cannot fit into just one camp. Or it may mean…God is camping here with me.

The Scripture that I read earlier is actually the third time Jacob encountered God. This time there was no mistaking what happened…It was God. It wasn’t a dream…It wasn’t some bad pizza he had eaten earlier that day…It was truly and unmistakably a one-on-one encounter with God himself. In fact, Jacob stayed up all night wrestling and struggling with God.

On one hand, we can say that what happened to Jacob in this story is very similar to what happened in the other stories. Jacob had an experience with God that was so real to him that he gave the place a name…Bethel…Mahanaim…And this time, Peniel—the Face of God.

On the other hand, this encounter was different. On two other occasions, Jacob had an experience with God, changed the name of his location and walked away unchanged…This time Jacob was changed. Something happened in his life that made him different than he had ever been before.

Jacob wrestled all night with an unnamed assailant. As the dawn approached, Jacob seemed to be winning. He had the man pinned to the ground. Then something unexpected happened. The man simply touched Jacob’s hip and it was immediately dislocated. Jacob was in serious pain and began to realize that he could not beat this man. So, he asked for a blessing.

When Jacob asked for a blessing the man asked Jacob for his name. On one hand this seems logical…He needed to know who he was blessing. On the other hand it doesn’t seem to fit…Who wrestles all night with someone they don’t even know.

This makes me think there is something else at work here. There is something even more significant. Remember, a name in the Old Testament is very important. A person’s name reveals their character, and when a person’s character changed their name changed as well. Therefore, we might say the man asked “What is your character?”

Jacob had to confess his true character. “I am Jacob, the Deceiver.”

Here is the most important part of the story. The man replied, “You are no longer Jacob, the Deceiver. You are Israel, for you have struggled with God and with people and have survived.” This was more than just a change of name. It was a character change.

This is where we get our first clues that this man in the night was actually God. He said, “You have struggled with God.” Then, he changed Jacob’s character. Only God can change a person’s character.


II. Confession: I Am Jacob.

Too many people miss this part of the struggle…We tend to think that we are too good to suffer—as if suffering and pain were reserved for the bad people…

Pain and struggle is a normal and natural part of what it means to be human. As long as we live earthly lives, we will have pain and disappointment…Broken relationships, death, disease and loss. The wrong way to approach pain and struggle is to ask the question, “Why me? Why do bad things happen to me?”

At the heart of this question is the belief that I am too good to suffer or that bad things do not happen to good people. Both of these views are false. On one hand, we are not good people. We are sinners in need of God’s grace and forgiveness. On the other hand, Jesus is an example of how good people do indeed suffer. God has only one Son without sin, yet even God’s Son without sin felt the pain and the struggle of human life.


III. Let God Be God: Israel = God Reigns, or God Prevails.

The name Israel can have two different meanings. It can mean, “One who struggles with God.” It is built from two Hebrew words…One meaning “struggle” or “fight”…The other is the Hebrew word El which means God. It is normally the case that when a word ends in El, God is the subject of the action not the object. Therefore, we can say that Israel literally means “God fights.”

To think of God as the subject of Jacob’s new name, Israel, can help us in at least two ways. First, it helps us to make sense of his struggle. Jacob did not prevail against God in his struggle. Jacob survived in his struggle with God. Second, it helps us to understand what is taking place in our own struggles. If God were fighting against us, we would not survive. Therefore, we must acknowledge that God is fighting for us, and not against us.

When it seems that God is fighting against us, God is actually fighting on our side. How else could we survive unless God fight on our behalf?



IV. Allow the Struggle to Change Us: Changed Character & Walked Away with a Limp.

I am not saying that God causes us to struggle and suffer, or even that God inflicts pain…I am saying that when we place our struggles and suffering and pain in God’s hands we allow him to change us—inside and out—and to form us into the image of Christ who also struggled…


V. Conclusion.



Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”