Jacob hadn't got off to a very good start when it came to knowing God. He grew up with a father, Isaac, who saw God as someone to be feared. And he grew up with a mother who knew how to hear God's voice, but who used manipulation and deception to give God a "helping hand" in fulfilling his promises.
Jacob had been self-seeking for much of his youth. Not necessarily selfish, but certainly very self-focused. He bought his twin brother's birthright and then, with his mother's help, he used deception and subterfuge to steal his brother's blessing. All of this led to his having to flee from his native land and seek refuge with relatives in a far off country. Probably at that point, he thought that he had permanently messed things up and had completely forfeited the inheritance that had been promised to his family line.
We don't know much at all about how Jacob saw God in his growing up years, but it was at the point of leaving everything and losing everything that he had his first truly personal encounter with God. (It's the same for many people today; often it's only when we come to the end of ourselves and our own self sufficiency that we're in a place to really hear from God.)
You probably remember the story; we read about it in Genesis chapter 28. Fearing for his life and fleeing far from his family, Jacob has a dream of angels going up and down a ladder or a stairway. God speaks to him in the dream, reassuring him that he will still inherit the ground he is lying on, and that his descendants will be as numerous as the sand. God promises him that He will one day bring him back to that land and that, in the meantime, God will be with him and will protect him wherever he goes. Jacob's response was to put up a memorial stone and to call the place Bethel (Hebrew for "house of God") because he realised that, "God is in this place and I wasn't even aware of it."
Twenty years have passed since then; Jacob has had a taste of his own medicine and has learned a lot of hard lessons. Now, finally, he is heading back to where he originally came from, and he is feeling fearful about meeting up again with the twin brother that he wronged so many years before. It's interesting to read his prayer in Genesis 32: 9 - 12. We can see that Jacob is not the same man who left this land two decades earlier. He expresses it in material terms: "I left with only a walking stick and I'm returning with great wealth." But there's a deeper change, too: a new humility. Jacob tells God, "I am not worthy of all the unfailing love and faithfulness you have shown to me." And perhaps there's also a new depth of faith, as he prays out the promises God had given him: "You told me to return here and you promised to treat me kindly."
It's at this point in the story, back in the promised land, that Jacob has his second personal encounter with God. You probably remember this story, too. In the middle of the night, Jacob "wrestles" with a man (we realise later that it was God) and refuses to let go until he is given a blessing. It's described as physical wrestling, but we can probably identify with the night-time wrestling experience: wrestling with something God has asked us to do and making the hard choice to obey, or wrestling with a difficult situation and crying out for God to bring change. What makes all the difference, though, is who or what we are wrestling with.
Sometimes we wrestle with worry, and we allow worry to win. Or we wrestle with self-centredness and allow that self interest to have the upper hand. What was different in this encounter was that Jacob wasn't simply battling his guilt or fear or worry. He was holding on to God and wrestling in prayer for a blessing.
He got his blessing... and it marked him for life. He got a new name: instead of being called Jacob (the deceiver), he became known as Israel (the one who wrestled with God.) And he left that place with a limp, a permanent reminder of his own weakness and God's graciousness. All true encounters with God will leave us changed, marked for life... sort of like the spiritual equivalent of a limp.
That's probably why many people are satisfied with a Bethel kind of blessing: they go to church, they enjoy God's presence (in a generalised kind of way, as in Gen 28: 16, without even being aware of it) but they never put in the effort, the spiritual "wrestling" needed to go to a deeper level and experience God face to face in a Peniel kind of encounter. Perhaps, as with Jacob, that can only happen when we come to the end of ourselves; when we acknowledge that we're not doing a very good job of knowing God on our own terms and that we need to humbly cry out for Him to reveal Himself to us.
After this encounter with God, Jacob meets and reconciles with his estranged brother. And once he settles again in the land, he builds an altar (Genesis 33: 20) and calls it El-Elohe-Israel - which means God, the God of Israel. Now, remember that Israel as a nation didn't exist yet. At this point, Israel was Jacob; it was the new name he had been given when wrestling with God. At last, after his Peniel encounter and the proof of God's graciousness in repairing the rift with Esau, Jacob was finally saying, this God is my God, the God of Israel.
