After decades away in Padan Aram, Jacob now comes face-to-face with his moment of truth.
Genesis 32 underlines for us a most important principle: When we’ve been away from the Lord and want to come home, He will insist that we deal with our past failures and offenses. One thing about the Christian life—God doesn’t want us to pretend; He wants us to be real. And He doesn’t want us to live with shadows or regrets. As Paul would write, “Forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Php 3:13-14). If we don’t want to walk through life backwards, we need to come clean so we can look into the future undistracted by the past. We have just considered Jacob’s first recorded prayer in Genesis 32:9-12, and that is certainly a good step in the right direction. But now there are two major hurdles. He knows he is going to come face-to-face with Esau. In preparation, he selects a gift for his brother—almost 600 animals! They are arranged into droves, and with them he sends servants whom he coaches to say, “Behold, your servant Jacob is behind us. For he said, ‘I will appease him with the present that goes before me, and afterward I will see his face; perhaps he will accept me’” (v 20). So as night falls, this self-propelled gift of braying, mooing, and bleating creatures crosses over at the Fords of Jabbok, and then we read, “Jacob was left alone” (v 24)—because, before he sees Esau’s face, he must come face-to-face with God! The Wrestler at last is going to meet his match, and discover a principle that will revolutionize his life—true blessings do not come by trying to selfishly wrestle them away from others, but by learning to cling in our weakness to the generous-hearted Blesser God.