The teaching behind The Breaking of the Day. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (KJV).
Genesis 32:22–32
22 And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok.
23 And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had.
24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
29 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
31 And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
32 Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank.
Alone at the Jabbok
To feel the weight of this night, you have to know who Jacob was and what was coming for him in the morning.
Jacob was the grandson of Abraham, the son of Isaac, and the younger of twin brothers. He came into the world fighting. When the twins were born, Esau came out first, "and after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob" (Genesis 25:26). His name was tied to that moment. It sounds like the Hebrew word for "heel," and it came to mean the one who grabs the heel.
He lived up to it. One day Esau came in from the field starving, and Jacob would not feed him until Esau sold him his birthright, the double share and leadership that belonged to the firstborn (25:29–34). Years later, when their father Isaac was old and blind, Jacob dressed up as his brother to steal the blessing Isaac meant for Esau. His father asked him, "Who art thou, my son?" And Jacob said, "I am Esau thy firstborn" (27:18–19). He lied about his own name to get a blessing.
When Esau found out, he cried, "Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and, behold, now he hath taken away my blessing" (27:36). Then Esau made up his mind: "then will I slay my brother Jacob" (27:41). So Jacob ran for his life.
On the road, alone, God met him. In a dream at Bethel, God gave Jacob the same promise He had given Abraham and Isaac, and added this: "behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of" (28:15).
Jacob spent the next twenty years working for his uncle Laban (31:41), and in those years the deceiver was deceived again and again. Then the LORD told him, "Return unto the land of thy fathers, and to thy kindred; and I will be with thee" (31:3). So Jacob started home, with his wives, his children, and his flocks.
Going home meant facing Esau. Jacob sent messengers ahead, and they came back with news: Esau "cometh to meet thee, and four hundred men with him" (32:6). "Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed" (32:7). He split his people into two camps, so that if Esau attacked one, the other might escape. Then he prayed, and it may be the first honest prayer we hear from him: "I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant... Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him" (32:10–11). And he held God to His word: "thou saidst, I will surely do thee good" (32:12).
Then he went back to doing what Jacob always did. He sent drove after drove of animals ahead as presents, because, he said, "I will appease him with the present that goeth before me" (32:20). That night he sent his wives and children across the ford of the Jabbok, a stream on the way home. And then come the words that open our passage: "And Jacob was left alone."
1. God comes to meet us when we are alone
"And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day" (32:24).
Notice who started it. Jacob didn't go looking for a fight that night. He was alone in the dark, afraid of his brother, and someone took hold of him. All his life Jacob had wrestled with people to get ahead: with Esau for the birthright, with his father for the blessing, with Laban for his wages. Now, with everyone else on the far side of the river, someone wrestled with Jacob.
Who was it? Genesis calls him "a man." But by morning Jacob knew who he had been holding: "I have seen God face to face" (32:30). Centuries later the prophet Hosea looked back on this night and said Jacob "had power with God: Yea, he had power over the angel, and prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him" (Hosea 12:3–4). "Supplication" means pleading prayer. So this was not only a fight. All night long Jacob was weeping and begging for a blessing while he held on.
Then the man "touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint" (32:25). One touch, and Jacob's hip was wrenched out of its socket. That tells you who was really in charge of that night. The One who wrestled Jacob could have ended it at any moment. He kept it going until the day broke, because He had come to do something in Jacob.
Charles Wesley, the hymn writer, wrote a long poem on this passage in 1742 called "Wrestling Jacob." He put Jacob's night into words any believer could pray:
Come, O thou Traveller unknown,
Whom still I hold, but cannot see;
My company before is gone,
And I am left alone with thee;
With thee all night I mean to stay,
And wrestle till the break of day.
Wesley saw what the passage shows. Being left alone was not the end of Jacob's story. It was the place where God met him.
Maybe you're there right now. The people who usually stand between you and your troubles have gone on ahead, and you're left alone with what you're afraid of. That is not a place God has forgotten. It is often the very place He comes to meet us, when we have nothing left to manage and no one left to hide behind. Twenty years earlier, after God met him at Bethel, Jacob woke up and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not" (28:16). He's in this place too.
2. God gives a new name to those who confess the old one
As the sky began to lighten, the man said, "Let me go, for the day breaketh." And Jacob, his hip out of joint, said, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me" (32:26).
Think about what that looked like. Jacob couldn't throw anyone anymore. He couldn't stand on his own. All he could do was hang on. The strong, clever man who had always won by his own wits was now winning the only way left to him: by clinging to God and refusing to let go without a blessing.
Then the man asked a strange question: "What is thy name?" (32:27). He wasn't asking for information. He knew. He was asking Jacob to say it.
The last time someone asked Jacob who he was, it was his blind father, and Jacob lied: "I am Esau thy firstborn." He took another man's name to get another man's blessing. Now he's asking for a blessing again, and this time he has to give his own name. He said, "Jacob."
Here the Hebrew helps us hear what that cost him. Jacob's name, Ya'aqob, comes from 'aqeb, the word for "heel." When Esau cried, "he hath supplanted me these two times" (27:36), the word for "supplanted" is 'aqab, the verb made from that same word "heel." It means to take by the heel, to trip someone up, to get around them and overreach them. Esau was saying, "He's a heel-grabber, just like his name." So when Jacob said his name that morning, he was saying, "I'm the one who trips people up. That's who I am." It was a confession.
And God answered the confession with a new name. "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed" (32:28). The man who had spent his life grabbing from men had held on to God, and God gave him a new name to mark it. God would confirm that name again later, at Bethel: "thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name" (35:10). From then on it would be the name of a whole nation, the children of Israel.
Jacob asked the man's name in return, and he didn't get it: "Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there" (32:29). Jacob didn't get everything he asked for. He got the thing he needed most. He got the blessing.
That's the way to God's blessing still. You don't get it by pretending to be someone else, the way Jacob tried with his father. You get it by telling God the truth about who you are. "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). And God doesn't leave you with your old name. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17). Tell Him your name. He has a better one ready.
3. God blesses us through our weakness
When it was over, Jacob named the place: "Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved" (32:30). He was amazed to be alive. He had been face to face with God and had not been destroyed. That was mercy.
Then comes one of the most beautiful verses in Genesis: "And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh" (32:31). "Halted" means he limped. The night was over, the sun was coming up on him, and Jacob walked into the morning limping. The limp was so much a part of the story that Israel remembered it at their tables. To this day, verse 32 says, they did not eat "the sinew which shrank," the tendon in the hip, because God had touched Jacob there.
Do you see what God did? Jacob went into that night strong and came out of it lame. He went in as Jacob and came out as Israel. He went in trying to manage his brother with presents and came out blessed by God. God made him weaker so that He could make him new. From then on, every step Jacob took reminded him that he hadn't won by his own strength. He had won by holding on to God.
The apostle Paul learned the same lesson. He begged God three times to take away a painful weakness, and God answered, "My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness." So Paul said, "Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me... for when I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). And it's the pattern of the gospel itself. Paul says of Jesus, "though he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth by the power of God" (2 Corinthians 13:4).
Now look at what happened that same morning. Jacob limped ahead of his family toward the brother he was terrified of. Esau came, and with him four hundred men. Jacob "bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother. And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept" (33:3–4). The God who had wrestled with Jacob in the night had already gone ahead of him. The prayer of 32:11 was answered. Jacob even said to Esau, "I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God" (33:10).
Maybe God has touched you somewhere that still hurts. Maybe you've come through a hard night and you're walking with a limp. The limp is not a sign that God has left you. For Jacob it was the mark of the night God met him, named him, and blessed him.
So hold on to what this passage shows you. God comes to meet His people when they are left alone. He asks for the truth about your old name, and He gives you a new one. And He does His best work through your weakness, not around it. That's why the Bible is glad to call Him "the God of Jacob": "The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge" (Psalm 46:7). He is the God of the heel-grabber, the God who would not let Jacob go until He had done everything He had promised (28:15).
So don't let go of Him. Hold on through the night and ask Him to bless you. And when the morning comes, you'll walk into it the way Jacob did, maybe limping, but blessed, with the sun rising on you.
Keep reading
- Genesis 25:19–34, 27:1–45, 28:10–22, 32:1–21, 33:1–11, and 35:9–15
- Hosea 12:2–6
- 2 Corinthians 12:7–10
- Psalm 46
- Charles Wesley, "Wrestling Jacob" ("Come, O thou Traveller unknown"), Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742), at the Wesley Center Online