Wrestling With God

       There is a problem I have which I’ve been dealing with time and time again. Now it is quite possible that many of you have gone through this only once or twice, while for others this problem could be ongoing. In my personal experience with some people that I’ve talked to, facing this kind of scenario has actually made them leave Christianity altogether because they felt they were doing something utterly wrong in their spiritual life. This particular problem that I’m talking about is having to wrestle with God.

       Now some of you may be asking, “what does it mean to wrestle with God?” There are two ways you can wrestle with something: literally and figuratively. To literally wrestle with God is what we find in chapter 32 of Genesis. Jacob decides to travel with his family from where they are living to reunite with his long-lost brother Esau who, earlier on in Genesis, was robbed by Jacob of his blessing from their father Isaac. Along the way they come to a ford (a shallow stream or river you can walk across on foot) called Jabbok. Upon reaching this ford, Jacob makes sure that his entire family crosses the ford safely to the other side before he does, leaving only himself to cross. Just as he’s about to cross over, however, an angel of the lord appears to Jacob and engages in a physical wrestling match with him until the break of dawn.

      When thinking of this biblical scene, it’s very tempting to think in WWE Wrestlemania imagery. How cool would that be? Jacob does an elbow dive off the tight ropes while the angel is grabbing a chair to hit Jacob on the back with. That isn’t what happens here though. The kind of wrestling we would be seeing Jacob involved in is the most ancient type of wrestling that still exists in the world today known as Olympic wrestling which arguably is significantly harder. For those of you that are more familiar with UFC, Olympic wrestling is similar only without the kicking and punching, just the grappling. In Olympic wrestling it’s just two guys facing off with each other, just your strength and stamina against your opponent’s. I must point out that there is one similarity to the WWE here in that the ideal goal you want in this match is to pin both of your opponent’s shoulders to the floor resulting in an automatic win. Easy enough right? Wrong. While you’re trying to pin your opponent to the ground, he’s trying to do the same thing. The best way to think of Olympic wrestling is this, basically you’re playing blitz chess against somebody using your whole body; needless to say, it’s exhausting. I remember when I started wrestling back in high school. After my first wrestling tournament I felt like a rubber band the rest of the day. As soon as I laid down in bed that was it, I wasn’t getting back up until tomorrow. Even when I woke up the next day, I was sore all over. That tournament was just a few hours, here we have Jacob wrestling for a whole day into tomorrow morning!

     In the present day we wrestle with God more in the figurative sense, yet equally so, it can be physically exhausting. You may have heard someone, or even you yourself, say something like, “I’m wrestling with this concept of…”. This is what we’re talking about here currently. Like I said, admittedly I find myself wrestling with God a lot especially when it comes to the topic of theodicy, the concept of evil in the world while there is a just and beneficent god. A small example of this is one day when I saw an ad for St. Jude on my Facebook newsfeed. On the ad there was a child with a brief description saying that he had retinoblastoma, or eye cancer. I found myself briefly pausing and drawing into myself asking God, “what is the purpose for a child having eye cancer?”, “what did he do to deserve this?”. Whenever I found myself asking God questions like this, grappling with him, it felt like maybe I was doing something wrong. If I ever found myself asking questions, then maybe I just did not have any faith at all.

    We really aren’t alone though when it comes to wrestling with God. In fact, there are a few famous biblical figures who found themselves grappling with God because of their doubts or concerns. To name just a couple, John the Baptist found himself at one point struggling with the question of whether Jesus really was the appointed messiah who had come to redeem mankind. He struggles with this so much in fact, that he sends a messenger to Jesus to confirm if this is true according to Luke 7:18-23. A more obvious example is Thomas, more famously known as doubting Thomas who was one of the twelve chosen apostles of Jesus. Thomas unfortunately missed out on Jesus’s first appearance to all of the apostles after his resurrection. When Thomas finally returned to where the other apostles were hiding, they all told him of what had happened. Thomas still didn’t believe though, saying, “unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:24).

    Now we may not be alone when it comes to facing these wrestling matches that we have with God, but they can still be very trying moments. It’s in these situations that a great feeling of hopelessness comes over us and with that comes doubt. Sure, people like John the Baptist and Thomas had their moments, but even with their doubts maybe I’m still more unworthy than they are. It’s like if I was to compare a mistake I made as a horrible amateur wrestler to a mistake that an Olympic wrestler makes that cost him a match. We can say that we all make mistakes, but at the end of the day I have a record of twenty losses for the whole season. The Olympic wrestler on the other hand has a record of only ten losses in his whole wrestling career! In the same way, how could I say that I am not alone with John the Baptist when comparing my thousands of wrestling matches I’ve had with God to just the one that he’s had? It’s when we’re thinking like this that we can’t give in. All this means is that we must practice harder. As I said moments earlier, wrestling is a sport and like all sports, it takes practice and perseverance to build up our endurance. Practice is never easy; it takes hours and hours of physical conditioning and preparedness to get better. When it comes to God, this not only means we have to train physically, but most importantly, mentally as well. Paul makes an excellent analogy between playing sports and following in the path of our Lord saying, “every athlete exercises discipline in every way”, he continues, “They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one” (1 Cor. 9:25). The key word in this passage is “discipline”. Physical discipline is very important in training ourselves to not wander from the path that God has laid out for us. What’s most important though, is your mindset. There is something I always remember hearing growing up, though it may be a bit cliché, which is that attitude is everything. If you feel that you’ve lost before even getting on the mat, the match is already over; your mindset is everything. We as believers need to remember that with every wrestling match we have with God we strengthen our faith. In other words, the true tragedy is not how many matches we find ourselves in wrestling with God, but when we give up and quit wrestling altogether.

  When something doesn’t make sense and temptation lurks around the corner of giving into doubt, we must remember that this is part of what it means to pick up our cross and follow Jesus. Wrestling isn’t easy for any of us, but grappling with God is part of suffering for our lord and with him. Even more, each time we wrestle with God we are practicing and strengthening our faith so that we may spread faith and hope to those around us who need it. Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, and character, hope” (Rms. 5:3-4).

  Through our sufferings, we not only strengthen our faith, but our hope as well and it becomes clear to those around us. It’s equivalent to when it’s your first day at your job and with your luck it’s the busiest day of the year. Everything is just all over the place and you have no idea what to do; you feel hopeless. Just when you feel like you’re going to have a nervous breakdown, a more experienced co-worker shows up confident, calm, and even a little humorous. Right away you feel at ease and even encouraged to do what he’s doing. In the same way we provide faith and hope to each other and those around us when we see them ready to give up on wrestling. We are able to do this because while that less experienced co-worker is looking at us, we are looking at Jesus asleep on the boat in the midst of the storm while his disciples are panicking. Again though, to put it back into sports terms, we can’t become that source of comfort of others to point them to Jesus unless we ourselves keep practicing.

  Believe it or not, we actually give glory to Jesus by wrestling with God. Each of us in the world has a relationship with God. How close you want that relationship is up to you though. In my experience I’ve seen two types of couples. There’s the couple that never argues, never talks about the nitty gritty things such as financial hardship. Every day for this couple is basically like they’re in the honeymoon stage because they’re practically strangers. Ultimately, this couple either just naturally drifts farther and farther apart because there’s no bonding substance to the relationship, or a time of hardship comes on them and they call it quits. On the other hand, there is the couple that argues almost every day and sometimes you’ll hear them say that their significant other drives them crazy. In between these fights though, you’ll also find them rejoicing together during some good moments even if it’s just for five minutes. This is a couple that has stuck together through the good and the bad. Even more beautiful is when you ask them how they feel about the other. They’ll say something like “it’s magic, I honestly don’t know how I can live without her”. In other words, if you find yourself wrestling with God, you’re not only thinking about him, but you’re actually in an extremely close relationship with him. You don’t want your relationship with God to be like the first couple where you barely talk, or you acknowledge him as long as the good times keep coming, and as soon as the bad times hit, you call it quits. In this sense, we glorify Jesus by wrestling with God because he wanted us to be reconciled to God again. He wanted us to have that close of a relationship. It’s okay to ask “God, why are you doing this?”, or “I don’t understand”. Just remember to keep your heart open to God, keep thinking of him, and that it’s okay to wrestle.