Jacob – “If I Am Bereaved, I am Bereaved”
Introduction
The Greatest Generation lied to me. It wasn’t intentional or malicious, but I believed what they told me. My parents. My teachers. My coaches. My church leaders. They had just won the most horrific war in the history of the world. They had rallied from the disaster at Pearl Harbor to beat the Nazis and Fascists in Europe, and to achieve victory in the Pacific. They had developed the atomic bomb.
“You can do anything you put your mind to,” they told me.
“Where there’s a will there’s a way,” they said.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”
“You can accomplish anything you want, given time and resources and determination.”
And I believed them. I believed all of it. In my mind, these manifestos gave me an idealistic sense of tenacity that served me well through my teens and twenties.
But let me ask you: Is anyone really prepared to run into an immovable object? I was bewildered when I began encountering problems too large to solve; burdens too heavy to bear; goals too lofty to seize; injuries too deep to heal; puzzles too tangled to unravel; projects too daunting to finish; people too stubborn to change; habits too entrenched to break; and pain too great to endure.
What then? The awful perplexities of life drove me headlong into the Bible. There’s where I met a handful of people who ran smack into the same thing. In their own individual ways, they did the only thing one can do in impossible moments—they let go and let God. We have to release control over the circumstances that are beyond us and trust Him who is above us. That’s the splendor of surrender.
“Letting Go and Letting God” isn’t an invitation to Christian passivity. It doesn’t mean we stop striving for holiness, seeking to serve, or pressing toward the goal. It doesn’t mean we give up in defeat. Nor does it mean we don’t act when the Lord shows us what to do or gives us wisdom for the next step.
It simply means there are certain times when we realize we cannot do the impossible, so we turn over the reins of those circumstances, cast our burdens on the Lord, and trust His mysterious sovereignty to work out things in conformity to His will with a strong tilt towards our good. Simon Peter wrote, “…casting the whole of your care [all your anxieties, all your worries, and all your concerns, once and for all] on Him, for He cares about you [with deepest affection, and watches over you very carefully]” (1 Peter 5:7 AMP).
Edward D. Andrews wrote that letting go and letting God is not a form of spiritual abandonment, where one does nothing and merely waits for divine intervention. He said, “Surrendering to God means entrusting our worries, plans, and desires to Him actively seeking His will through prayer and Bible study, and obediently acting according to His guidance.”
There may be times when we can do nothing but wait for God to work—and we may be waiting a very long time—but that’s all right. Letting go and letting God means that we’re trusting Him to envelop our problems in the mysterious clouds of His omnipotence. We can take Him at His word that, in the course of His surgical timing, He will turn curses into blessings. Whenever we transfer control of any situation [all our anxieties, all our worries, and all our concerns, once and for all] over to Him, He begins injecting the invisible influence of His grace into our circumstances, and we’re free to pray fervently and faithfully, but not frantically.
Our job is to exchange our hyperventilating hearts with God’s all surpassing hyper-grace.
We aren’t the first people to learn about casting our cares on Him. When we run into intractable problems in life, we can trust the imperishable promises and unwavering providence of a God who has been a very present help for generations untold.
In one Puritan-like sentence, the 17th-century English Presbyterian, John Flavel, practically summed up everything I want to say in this episode: “Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.”
Jacob’s Problems and Yours
Dan Alexander wrote The Wounded Heart to help victims of childhood sexual abuse. As he rightly claims, many hurting people often ask, “Why am I still struggling with this? Why can’t I just give it to God and get on with life?”
Those are questions I’ve often asked. Though I’ve never experienced sexual abuse, I have had harrowing seasons of stress and moments of deep fear, disappointment, and betrayal. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to “let go and let God.” I remember saying to my wife, Katrina, more than once, “Why am I still struggling with this? Why can’t I just give it to God and get on with life?”
Healing takes time, and so does spiritual maturity. In fact, it’s a lifelong project. One of the Bible’s best examples is the patriarch Jacob, who, at the lowest moment of life, sent his beloved son, Benjamin, on a dangerous mission, letting go of all control, and saying, “If I am bereaved, I am bereaved.”
Jacob had family issues that tie up a huge block of the book of Genesis. He and his twin brother, Esau, were born when their father was a ripe sixty years old. From the first, Jacob was ambitious. He came out of the womb grasping the heel of his older brother, Esau. Thus his name, Jacob, had connotations of following, grasping at the heel of someone, pursuing (Genesis 27:36).
When Jacob was older, he conned Esau out of both his birthright and his blessing, causing such venom in the family that Jacob fled to his mother’s homeland, a town called Paddan Aram (in modern day southern Turkey). There he fell in love with a beautiful woman named Rachel and married her. But on his wedding night, in the pitch darkness of his tent and probably befuddled with wine, he slept with his bride’s sister (Genesis 29:14-30). The trickster had been tricked by his father-in-law, who wanted Jacob to marry Leah.
So Jacob had two wives, plus he slept with his wives’ servants. Children came, one after another. But his most loved wife, Rachel, was unable to bear children. Finally the day came when Jacob wanted to return home with his family, his servants, and his expansive herds of livestock. But he was petrified of facing Esau and Esau’s fighting men.
Nearing home, Jacob divided his party into two groups and sent them across the ford of the Jabbok. He was alone with his regrets and his fears when a powerful man leaped out the darkness onto him and wrestled him to the ground.
Who was this stranger wrestler? I believe He was the pre-incarnate Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the One later called the Lord Jesus Christ (see Hosea 12:3-5). Jacob was as tough as leather, and the two men struggled through the night. Near dawn, the strange combatant struck Isaac’s hip and wrenched it from its socket. The pain of Jacob’s dislocated hip defeated him. He had overcome everyone and everything in his life, but He could not overcome the Lord. Jacob surrendered, and God blessed Jacob then and there. He also gave Him a new name—Israel, which means, in its implications, “You have struggled with God, and God has won.”
Victor Hamilton wrote, “[Jacob] has a new name and a new limp. The new name will forever remind Jacob of his new destiny. The new limp will forever remind him that in Elohim Jacob met for the first time one who can overpower him.”
Jacob returned home, made peace with Esau, and fathered two more children. Dear Rachel gave birth to Joseph and then she died giving birth to Benjamin. Amid his grief, these two boys became Jacob’s greatest source of joy. His whole life was wrapped up in them. But Jacob’s family dysfunctions destroyed everything. The older brothers kidnapped Joseph out of jealousy, sold him into slavery, and told Jacob he had been slain by a wild animal.
While Joseph languished in slavery and prison in Egypt, Jacob grieved for him wretchedly and endlessly. His sons got into more and more trouble, and Jacob finally cried, “Everything is against me!” (Genesis 42:36).
Meanwhile God had blessed Joseph in Egypt, promoting him to Prime Minister of the greatest civilization on earth. During a famine, his brothers came to Egypt to purchase grain. They didn’t recognize Joseph, but he recognized them and created an ingenious scheme to reunite with his father and heal the rifts in his family. As part of the scheme, he imprisoned one of the brothers and demanded the others head home to fetch none other than Benjamin.
When Jacob heard this, he was apoplectic, crying, “My son will not go down there with you; his brother is dead and he is the only one left. If harm comes to him on the journey you are taking, you will bring my gray head down to the grave in sorrow…. Why did you bring this trouble on me?” (Genesis 42:38; 43:6). But there was nothing to do. The family was starving, one brother was chained in prison, and the full weight of the Egyptian government was bearing down on them all. Jacob had to let go of Benjamin and let God do whatever God was going to do.
“If it must be,” he said, “then do this: Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift…. Take your brother [Benjamin] also and go back to the man at once. And may God Almighty grant you mercy before the man so that he will let your other brothers and Benjamin come back with you. As for me, if I am bereaved, I am bereaved” (Genesis 43:11-14).
That’s when Jacob simply accepted the facts he could not change. In a raw cry of painful acceptance, Jacob said, in effect: “I can do nothing now to change things or to protect my sons. I am at the end of my resources. I’m letting go of control. If the worst happens, it happens. It’s no longer in my hands, but in God’s hands.”
Sometimes we have to simply give up like that. We come to the moment of resignation. It’s not that we give up on God or His mysterious methods. We give up our own efforts, struggles, toils, schemes, and devices. We have to say, “Lord, You take over, and if I’m bereaved, then I’m bereaved. But I am going to trust You against all human hope. I give it all to You.”
Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916) worded his prayer like this: “Father, I abandon myself into Your hands; do with me what You will. Whatever You may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only Your will be done in me, and in all Your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord.”
It’s no accident that Jacob’s moment of resignation became God’s moment of intervention. When the brothers arrived with Benjamin in Egypt, Joseph revealed himself to them, forgave them, and promised to care for them. He told them, “And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you” (Genesis 45:5). That’s sound psychological advice. At some point, we have to stop beating ourselves up and recognize the freedom of being forgiven.
In the end, Jacob was reunited with Joseph and Benjamin, and all twelve brothers lived in love and harmony. They also produced families who became the twelve tribes of Israel. And—this boggles my mind—when we get to New Jerusalem, we’ll find the names of these twelve erstwhile worthless, ruthless sons inscribed on the gates as we enter the city (Revelation 21:12).
Oh, the endless mercy and grace of our King! When we’re apt to say like Jacob, “All these things are against me” (Genesis 42:36 NKJV), He teaches us to declare, “All things work together for good to those who love God” (Romans 8:28 NKJV).
Jacob’s Helper and Yours
Notice these three elements in Jacob’s story, and apply it to yourself.
First, you have a burden you cannot endure. There’s a painful zone in your life that casts a shadow over all your other attitudes and activities. How true that was for Jacob! Some of his problems were of his own making, others came from his family, and some of his troubles simply came because they came. Same for you, right? And for me!
Second, you have a God you cannot ignore. He may even tackle you and wrestle you to the ground, but only because He wants to overpower you to bless you. That blessing begins the moment you let Him take over and have His way. Giving your burden to the Lord means giving yourself to Him with all your heart.
That leads to a result you cannot imagine. I cannot explain how God can and will extend His mercy and grace into areas that seem lost to you. “There’s a wideness to God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” But it is impossible not to underestimate our God. He is so infinite, so unfathomable, that we can simply say, “There is no one like the God of [Israel], who rides across the heavens to help you and on the clouds in His majesty. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deuteronomy 33:26-27).
The Bible says, “Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.” You have the God of Jacob, and He is there to help.
Captain Stanford E. Linzey was a member of the Greatest Generation who came to the end of his inner resources aboard the USS Yorktown at Midway. The approaching battle represented the greatest massing of sea power in the history of warfare. Linzey felt a spirit of fear gripping the sailors. “We had felt the heavy lurch of a bomb strike, buried our friends at sea, and seen the horror in the sinking of the Lexington. We knew what was ahead, and some of us would likely die. It was an eerie sensation…. There was a sense of foreboding throughout the ship. And I was afraid. A terrific paralyzing fear gripped me—animal fear, wide-eyed fear. It held me in a its grip like a vice.”
“In my desperation and mental anxiety, I cried aloud to God in my pillow. ‘Lord, I am saved and I know it. If I must die, then I must. It’s okay with me. I’m ready. Only one thing I ask of You, that you take this numbing fear out of my heart and mind so I can do my duty. Amen.’”
“At that moment,” he said, “lying face down on my bunk… something wonderful happened. I had an emotional experience I shall never forget. I sensed…the weight and pressure of the moment physically and literally life off my shoulders. At that instant, the burden and the fear were dispelled. I could feel it. I was free.”
During the battle, the USS Yorktown was sunk. Running to the slanting deck, Linzey saw nearly two thousand heads bobbing in the sea. Like the others, he stripped to his skivvies and leaped into black, oily waters of the South Pacific. The destroyer Balch let down its netting, and Linzey climbed to safety. With other survivors, Linzey said, “barefooted and clad only in our skivvies, we knelt on the steel deck and had an open-air praise meeting in full view of six or seven hundred sailors. With our oil-covered weary hands raised in praise, we worshipped God openly….”
Conclusion
In the face of terrific, paralyzing, animal-like fear, we have to throw ourselves on the mercy of God. We have to let go of all we are, of all we want, of all we need, and we have to trust God for His will to prevail on our behalf, whether we live or whether we die. When you have a burden you cannot endure, run to the God you cannot ignore and ask Him to give you a result you cannot imagine.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.