A theology of grip.
A spiritual antipasto.
Have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. — Jesus.
The God of that Jacob.
A theology of grip.
There is a version of God we wish we could invent. A respectable God. A safe God. A God who blesses the people who are improving. A God who keeps His distance from the complicated ones, in much the same way that we do. A God who stands for the cleaned-up, the stable, the socially presentable, the spiritually functional.
Well, we don’t quite say any of that out loud. We don’t think we think such things. But then we read Old Testament stories, and we say, “I don’t get it!” The people God chose? The things those people did? What? Really?
But that’s the God Jesus names—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Jesus never said, “God is the God of the strong.” Or the “generally better than most.” Or the “not surprisingly horrible.” Or “those somewhat like me.” He said, “God is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” And when He said that, He wasn’t merely offering three historical facts. He was dismantling a worldview.
If God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, then God is the kind of God who binds Himself to people who are not impressive, not tidy, not consistent, and not safe.
And Jacob?
Jacob is no role model. He’s deceiving, selfish, relationship-destroying, dysfunctional, and ambitious. He schemes. He grasps. He manipulates the blessing as if it must be secured through his own tactics. He fractures his family. He destabilizes everything around him. He’s the Jacob who leaves a trail of collateral damage behind him.
And Scripture does nothing to sanitize him. Doesn’t even try. For two good reasons: Jacob is a mirror. And God is the God of Jacob.
Jacob’s story is a pastoral mercy because it tells the truth. It tells the truth about God, and it tells the truth about us. God’s covenant love story runs straight through generational dysfunction and human self-will. And that sure is a good thing! Because that’s right where we sit. There is a patient, relentless cleansing work that God does over time. He did it with Jacob. And He does it with us. Jacob kept breaking himself, and yet by grace, he became a blessing to the nations.
So, when Jesus says God is the God of Jacob, He’s making a mind-blowing claim about what kind of God God is. He is defined by His relentless grip on the unworthy. He is the God who binds Himself to broken people and will not let go.
The God of the living.
Death cannot terminate His faithfulness.
He is the God of the living, not the dead.
That’s severe, and it’s also really comforting. It means God’s faithfulness is unrelenting, so much so that even death itself cannot terminate it. It means death does not get the last word over God’s promises. It means God is not “done with them yet.” Not with Abraham. Not with Isaac. Not with Jacob. Not with anyone you’ve buried. Not with you.
If God is the God of the living, not the dead, then we do not slip out of His grasp when our hearts stop. And we do not slip out of His grasp in all the little deaths before that either: the collapses, the betrayals, the relapses, the shame spirals, the seasons where you can’t pray without feeling like a fraud. Even in death—or in anything that leads us toward it—we never cease to be the object of God’s love.
Grace is not a “thing.”
It is the invariable grip.
Grace is not a mood that God has on occasion. Grace is not a feeling He experiences toward us (and we’re kind of glad it’s most of the time). It’s not an attribute sitting inside God like a tool on a shelf that He will grab from time to time. It is not a leniency toward our mistakes. It is not a spiritual commodity that He happens to have in abundance. It is not a medicine He prescribes from a safe distance.
No.
Instead, grace goes deeper: it is personal action—deeply personal action. Grace is God giving Himself to us unreservedly. Grace is not a “what.” Grace is a “who.” And the name of that “who” is Jesus Christ.
That sounds like a wild, abstract theological idea. But it’s as simple as it is true. It is the basic architecture of Christian reality. If grace were something God handed out, then grace could be detached from God’s own being, and we could imagine it rationed, withdrawn, negotiated, earned, triggered, or revoked.
But grace is God giving God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is rooted in God’s eternal, triune being.
Thank goodness grace is not rooted in us. Because our grip fluctuates. Sometimes we cling. Sometimes we loosen. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we drift. Sometimes we actively shove Him away in rebellion. Our grip is not “invariable.” It is unstable.
But—God’s grip is the One Invariable Grip.
And that’s why He is the God of Jacob. That’s why salvation is not grounded in the strength of our faith, or our character, or our life. Our salvation does not depend on the unyielding strength of our hold on God, but on the unyielding strength of God’s hold on us.
Because of this, His grace is fierce.
Yet we’d prefer His grace not to be so fierce. We’d like it to be more like a gentle permission for who knows what we’re allowing into our lives. God’s grace is gentle, yes, but it is not permission for self-destruction.
Grace is God’s fierce, unconditional, unyielding movement into the deepest, darkest pits of our rebellion, into the most shameful and broken parts of our being, into the parts nobody will ever know about—so that our story will never read like Jacob’s—so that He can bind Himself to us there, in those very parts and places, and heal us in those places, and do so forever. FOREVER!
Which means grace is not God tolerating our ruin. It is God refusing to leave us to it. What we call “wrath” is often just the consuming fire of divine love refusing to make peace with the things that are slow-walking us away from communion with Him—which means away from Life itself—and, therefore, into nonexistence.
That is what it looks like when God loves for real. And because God does love us for real, He doesn’t do the “safe distance” thing. Grace is not God watching us self-destruct from a safe distance.
We are not living lives where we’ve merely made a few mistakes. And needing just a little bit of grace to keep going. A little bit of turning the other way. There is no one in that position. No one.
We have lost our minds.
And God has stepped inside the psych ward of our delusion.
We have lost our minds in sin. Completely lost our minds. The only reason we don’t see how broken we are is that we’re surrounded by it, swimming in it, breathing it, comparing ourselves to some other bloke we’re able to spot a little further into the mire than we are.
We have fallen into delusion. We call darkness light. We call poison medicine. We call control wisdom. We call our pride “strength.” We call avoidance “peace.” We call self-salvation “responsibility.” We call our doubt “intellectual humility.” We call our assessments “spiritual discernment.” We call our spiritual track records “maturity.” We call our spiritual productivity “fruit.” We call our speculations about God “theology.” We call our emotional vibes “the Spirit.” We call self-improvement “sanctification.” We call our feelings and our self-expression “authenticity.” We call our scientific reasoning neutral. We call identity “self-definition” when identity is being named in Christ.
Grace is not God standing outside our locked ward shouting instructions to us through the glass.
He enters. He enters the psych ward of our human delusion. He does not wait for us to become sane before He moves toward us. He does not keep a respectable distance. He does not write a prescription for grace and hope that we’re better in the morning. He does not lob spiritual advice down the hallway in our general direction, hoping that we’d respond somehow.
Rather, He steps inside our delusion. He steps inside our darkness. He meets us exactly where it is we are. And there He binds Himself to us and heals us.
This—this is called Incarnation. THIS is grace!
This is the heart of Incarnation. This is grace made tangible. God in Christ does not descend into the “nice parts” of human life. He descends into the actual human condition: our disease, our alienation, our twisted wills. And heals us from the inside out. His covenant—His love—doesn’t remain an external arrangement; it becomes a living reality in the flesh of Jesus Christ.
And here is one of the most scandalous parts: God not only gives us this gift; He also provides the means by which we receive it. Why does he do that? Because we are far too compromised to understand it and far too compromised to respond to God with a pure heart to receive it. Our brokenness is so thorough that we don’t even have the capacity in ourselves to understand or receive what He’s offered.
So God provided a covenanted way for us to both understand and to respond. In the Old Testament, it was through the tabernacle, the priesthood, the sacrifices. It was a God-made means of approach for frail people. But it was only ever an outline, a shadow, an adumbration of the real thing that was coming. It was how we would come to understand the real thing that was coming.
The real thing was Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, God fulfilled the Old Testament covenant from both sides. From the Godward side: God gave Himself to us in Jesus Christ. From the human side: Jesus offered the faithful human response of trust, obedience, worship, and love back to the Father, all on our behalf (because we never really had the capacity to do it on our own).
So, our response was taken into His response. This means our worship, our prayers, our stumbling faith, our fractured attention—all of it—is never us manufacturing something impressive for God. We can’t. We never could. Instead, it is participation. We participate in what Christ is already doing for us. Our faltering “yes” is gathered into Christ’s perfect “Yes.” Our faltering prayers are gathered into Christ’s perfect prayer. Our faltering obedience is gathered into Christ’s perfect obedience. Our faltering worship is gathered into Christ’s perfect worship.
Blessing is communion.
Wrestled, blessed, renamed.
Now, let’s bring Jacob back into view. Notice: God does not draw Jacob into holiness by a magic touch while Jacob sleeps. We love that fantasy—to pray ourselves to sleep and wake up whole, wake up different, wake up “fixed.”
Instead, God accommodates Himself to our frailty. He enters our mess, whatever that mess might be. And when He does, the transformation is a painful, disruptive wrestling match. It’s an agonizing struggle that God engages in with us. Not because He is cruel. Because He is faithful. Because He refuses to let your autonomy be the final form of your humanity. He comes into our mess and wrestles with our autonomy.
Jacob wrestles all night with a “man,” and yet somehow realizes he has been with God face to face. God came close enough to grapple with. Close enough to be resisted. And close enough to bless us.
If we don’t get this, it is because we don’t get what “blessing” is. Blessing is not a commodity God tosses our way from a distance. It is not a payout. Blessing is always God giving Himself. Giving His presence. Giving His promise. Giving His future. There is no greater blessing possible than communion with God. The very thing for which we were made. Life itself. God’s blessing is always in the direction of communion with Him. It is never anything else. Never.
It is not good health, a better financial position, a more dependable automobile, a parking spot up front, and most of the things we ask Him to bless us with. If God’s goal were merely “give Jacob benefits,” He could have done that remotely. But covenant blessing—God’s only kind of blessing—is God binding Jacob to Himself in the places where he was most broken so that there could then be real, true communion. Blessing is communion. And communion requires presence, not distance. And the presence of God exposes what distance lets us keep intact.
God comes close enough to struggle with us because of what it is He is healing; God is healing our will, not merely correcting our behavior. Jacob’s deepest problem isn’t a few bad choices he made, for which a little commodity called “grace” would be sufficient.
Jacob’s deepest problem (like our own) is autonomy: “I will secure my own life. I will manufacture my blessing.” “I will make sure I do not lose. I will manage the outcome.” “I will become who I want to be. I will name myself. I will curate who I am.” “I will protect myself from disappointment. I will make sure the story ends the way I need it to.” “I will not be weak.” “I will hold on to the life I have built. I will not let go.”
Autonomy is the fundamental human sin that started in the garden. It is the claim that we can live independent of communion with God, the source of all life. All steps in the direction of autonomy, then, by definition, are steps back toward the nonthingness out of which we were created. To heal that, God doesn’t hand Jacob a lesson. God meets Jacob’s will as it actually is—striving, grasping, resisting—and wrestles with it until it is re-formed. Until Jacob is wrestled out of autonomy and back in the direction of communion.
God could crush Jacob instantly. But God desires communion, not coercion. Coercion is not blessing. If God simply overwhelms him, Jacob doesn’t come to recognition, surrender, truth, or trust. And that wouldn’t bring Jacon an inch closer to communion. He’d just be flattened. So the very struggle itself—the real physical struggle Jacob enters with God Himself—is itself mercy. It is mercy because in it God is close enough to be resisted without annihilating the resister. God is not relating to Jacob as an enemy to be eliminated, but as a covenant partner to be transformed. And that’s the difference between domination and transformation.
God truly draws near to Jacob, not as some abstract declaration of who He is, not as advice, but as personal presence. He draws near in accommodated form. He does not cease to be God, but He relates to Jacob in a way Jacob can actually endure. He lets Jacob’s resistance come out into the open. He lets Jacob strive, cling, expose himself, and finally be renamed. In other words, God’s nearness does not flatten Jacob into nothingness; it creates the space in which Jacob can be unmasked and changed.
When something is hidden, it can’t be healed. So Jacob’s resistance is brought into the light. In wrestling, Jacob’s truest posture—the one demonstrated across his whole life up till that moment—comes out: striving, bargaining, clinging. The turning point is not that Jacob “wins,” but that his grasp is transformed. He stops scheming for blessing and starts pleading for it. “I will not let you go unless you bless me” is, finally, Jacob meeting God as God, not as a system he can manipulate. It is the acknowledgment that blessing comes from God alone, and that it is communion with Him.
Jacob is blessed with a new name that can only come after the unmasking. The narrative hinges on identity: “What is your name?” “Jacob (the supplanter).” The struggle leads to truth-telling, then naming, then re-naming. That sequence isn’t arbitrary. We can’t be renamed while still hiding behind the old self. We cannot autonomously self-identify our way into greater communion. Every step to self-identify leads in the opposite direction.
So, God comes close enough to bless, and because Jacob is Jacob, that closeness is struggle. It’s a real wrestling match. The struggle isn’t a technique God enjoys; it’s what God’s grace feels like when it meets our autonomy and refuses to let our autonomy lead us into nonexistence. God stays in the struggle to the end so that Jacob can learn who he is dealing with and what kind of man he really is.
God does what grace always does. He wrestles us. He blesses us. He transforms us. He renames us. Not eradication, transformation. Not annihilation, communion.
The only honest response.
Here I am!
So what does any of this mean on an ordinary Sunday with ordinary people gathered to worship? It means that our most honest response is not some spiritual performance. It’s simply this: Here I am. Not “Here I am, cleaned up.” Not “Here I am, finally stable.” Not “Here I am, worthy.” Just: Here I am.
And with that “Here I am,” a person can finally ask for what grace actually intends: Meet me in the truth of who I am. Wrestle down what is false in me. Heal what is wounded. Free me from my need to control everything.
Our relentless desire to control everything is just another form of unbelief dressed up as competence. Control is our autonomy fully on display. And Jacob proves how exhausting that can be: the lifelong scramble for blessing, for security, for identity. Until God interrupts it with Himself.
And this is why when we gather together on a Sunday, our worship is not a gathering of the spiritually strong. It is a gathering of the held. We gather not because we are strong, but because God is faithful. Not because we have held on, but because He has not let go. And that faithfulness is not some abstract assurance floating above us somewhere. It is the living Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—moving toward Jacob-people with relentless grace, holding through death, and turning our dysfunctional stories into communion and blessing.
This is God’s unrelenting grip.
And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,[a] for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.” — Genesis 32:24–30 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. — John 1:14 And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living.” — Matthew 22:31-32 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8:38-39 He always lives to make intercession for them. — Hebrews 7:25
This spiritual antipasto has an accompanying call to worship.
Fierce grace.
God is the God of “that Jacob,” and that’s the point. The God revealed in Scripture is not embarrassed by the patriarchs. God binds Himself to the deceiving, selfish, relationship-destroying Jacob, which means no reader gets to assume they are “too much” for Him.