Featured speaker at last May’s local Banner of Truth Conference was Douglas MacMillan, who teaches Church History at the Free Church of Scotland College in Edinburgh, Scotland. Although this was his first visit to the U.S., be had become “one of Britain’s best-known preachers,” having rather recently also visited churches in Australia. His early life as a shepherd on the rugged west coast of Scotland and highlander accent, ready wit, rich pastoral experience and warm spirituality were evident in an extraordinary series of lectures on (1) our Prayers, (2) Expectations and (3) Defenses.
Our Prayers
The first of them focused attention on Jacob wrestling with God (Gen. 32). The Christian life does not involve only one “conversion experience,” but a life of fellowship with God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Although this incident at Penuel is hard to identify as Jacob’s conversion in view of Genesis 28:16, it marked a change and deepening of his spiritual life. (There is a “second blessing” as well as a third, fourth and fifth!) Jacob knew God’s blessing especially through prayer. The name he gave the place, “Penuel,” meant “the face of God.” It recalls Psalm 27:8, “When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek.” What kind of place was this? Although details of our experience change, God does not change. He says, “I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed” (Mal. 3:6). This solitary place of blessing was a place of prayer where Jacob faced a pre-incarnation appearance of Christ (the Son of God “trying out human nature!” Calvin suggested). Such audiences with God have been the secret of God’s saints. “They looked unto Him, and were lightened” (Ps. 34:5). Such places seem hard to find today.
In this prayer Jacob “wrestled” with “the angel of the covenant.” The speaker used to wrestle. That means a close encounter—you can’t do it from six feet away—and it takes energy. It is not easy to keep our minds from wandering. This is a place of penitence. God’s finger touched Jacob’s thigh. Twice we read in Psalms, “Thy gentleness hath made me great” (Ps. 18:35; 2 Sam. 22:36). MacMillan recalled a contest of throwing a 16-lb. hammer. When a little girl escaped on to the green, a burly bystander snatched her out of the path of the hurtling hammer and gave her back to her mother in a demonstration of tender power. Why should the tender finger of God touch Jacob’s thigh? Especially the thigh is involved in wrestling. Jacob, who had relied on his own subtlety and craft, is now disabled and can only cling to the Opponent.
God asks, “What is your name?” “Who are you?” Twenty years earlier when his blind father had asked that question, he had answered “Esau,” and tried to get the blessing by a lie. Now he is Jacob, “the twister,” needing God’s grace to straighten him out. But he is no more to be called “Jacob,” but “Israel,” having “power with God and with men” (v. 28). We must learn to quit our pretensions and say with the prodigal, “I have sinned . . . and am no more worthy to be called thy son.” Christ came to seek and to save the lost. We can’t deal with people as though we were sinless.
As Jacob “passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him.” The speaker was reminded of the sunrise on the mountains of Scotland’s wild west coast, first striking the peaks and then even the valleys. Jacob faced the promise of a new day, a new man in a new day, for God said, “I will heal their backsliding.”
And Jacob “halted upon his thigh,” crippled by the rough medicine of God’s loving discipline. Jacob had been proud-like all of us-and he would limp until the end of his days, having learned more humility in one night than in twenty years. When children would ask, “Why does old Grandfather limp?” they would learn of the work of God in his life. In a somewhat similar way, Paul was given a “thorn in the flesh” to teach how God’s “strength is made perfect in weakness . . . . that the power of Christ may rest” upon him (2 Cor. 12:9). Grandpa’s limp would remind new generations of the source of Israel’s strength.
To be continued in the next issue. Tapes of these addresses are available from Reformed Baptist Tapes, 3181 Bradford N.E., Grand Rapids, MI 49506 at $2.00 each.