Face Upon Face

Jesus lets me be desperate. He wrecks my self-guarding defense so I learn to hold Him like I know He’s real. More real than all the tangible things my heart and hands reach for first.

He wants to wrestle when a type of silence has stolen me. When journal words I wrote about Him are no longer a comfort to me...and I'm angry. He wants me to grab on to Him with every fragment He knit in my body and spirit and trust Him with all of it.

Jacob knew something of this in Genesis 32. The chapter reads that a “man”, either an angel or Jesus Himself, came to Jacob in the night and started a physical altercation with him. Jacob is a day away from facing his past and he's terrified. The text doesn't say, but it seems all through the night they wrestle without words. Daylight comes and God decides it's time for Jacob to get to the point, so He touches his hip and wrenches it, telling Jacob to let Him go. It’s here that Jacob finally verbalizes why he’s desperate. He wants God to bless him.

I wonder if it wasn’t until this moment that Jacob understood what he wanted from God, what he needed. 

Surely the Lord had already planned to bless him and rename him “Israel”- the beginning of a chosen people who wrestle with God.

I think a part of the wrestling, the back and forth until day break was for Jacob to realize how much he wanted this life, this great calling, and that it was impossible without Israel’s King beside him. It was the discovery of a great dependency. 

Jesus desires us to realize how much we want to be alive, how much we need Him so we can be. He invites us into an intimacy that is holy. To hold onto Him with both our hands and wrestle with Him. Wrestle Him with all the blood, water and spirit that it means to be human - refusing to ever be released from Him, knowing He will never release Himself from us.

"I will bind you to Me forever ... and you will really know Me then

as you never have before." Hosea 2:19-20 (TLB)

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"This is the one who came by water and blood- Jesus Messiah.

He did not come by water only, but by water and blood.

And it is the Spirit who testifies, because

the Spirit is truth. For there are three that testify:

the Spirit, the water and the blood;

and the three are in agreement."

1 John 5:6-8 (NIV)