Tonight’s family service looked at the theme of ‘First Love.‘ Usually, when we use that term, we are thinking of romantic love, the rush of emotion we feel when we first fall in love. However, we have to acknowlege that love is the theme which runs throughout the whole of the Bible. God’s love is seen in Genesis 1:28 when we see Him creating mankind and blessing people; it’s also found in the last book, Revelation, when the church in Ephesus is told that they have forsaken their first love. (Rev 2:4)

God’s love for us is the theme of the whole Bible. His love prompted Him to give His Son to save us (Jn 3:16-17) and we love because He first loved us. (1 Jn 4:19) However, we need to move beyond the idea of love as a feeling only and acknowlege that our love for God needs to be seen in action and in truth. Whilst our thoughts of first love may reflect the idea that ‘the first stab of love is like a sunset, a blaze of colours’ (Anna Godbersen) and we may have many memories of our first love, what counts is that we move beyond nostalgia and remain faithful and true to God whose love for us is unending, indescribable and constant. Only when we see the power of His love can we hope to love Him faithfully and steadfastly as He loves us.

Jacob is changed irrevocably from his night of wrestling with God and bears permanent scars from this encounter, limping forever as a result (see Gen 32:31). Most of us want the blessings that God can bring, but are not so keen on the brokenness that is sometimes a part of receiving those blessings. There are no victories in the Christian life unless we learn what it is to be defeated by God. We have to learn the meaning of ‘magnificent defeat’ (Wes King), that unless we lose our lives, we will never find them. Jesus made this very plain: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.’ (Mark 8:34-35) One commentator says, ‘In Western culture and even in our churches, we celebrate wealth and power, strength, confidence, prestige, and victory. We despise and fear weakness, failure, and doubt. Though we know that a measure of vulnerability, fear, discouragement and depression come with normal lives, we tend to view these as signs of failure or even a lack of faith.’  Jacob is a vivid reminder to us that blessing and brokenness can very often not be separated in the Christian life.

Life breaks us. Things happen to us beyond our control which break us and we are never the same again after these things. We may heal physically; we may even know emotional healing, but we bear scars from these things. We limp.

God breaks us. Just as a horse trainer knows that a horse has to be broken before it can be ridden safely, God knows that if our self remains undefeated, we will not find the blessing He has for us. Jacob is never the same again after this encounter. He is not perfect: far from it. But he has learnt that in surrender and apparent defeat, there can be victory and blessing. Frederick Buechner says of this encounter that it represents the ‘magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.’

In our society, we often feel that brokenness means failure; we very quickly throw out broken things and replace them with pristine new ones. God is not like that, however. Brokenness is actually a prerequisite of being used by God. He’s not interested in perfect people, in flawless individuals. (They don’t exist, anyway, so there is no wonder He’s not interested in them!) He specialises in using people who are flawed, sinful and disobedient – people like Jacob. He specialises in turning the deceiver into one who has seen God face to face and lived. He knows all about brokenness. After all, Jesus Himself is known by the scars; He’s worshipped in heaven as the Lamb who was slain (Rev 5:6):

‘The marks of death that God chose never to erase,
The wounds of love’s eternal war.
When the kingdom comes with its perfected sons,
He will be known by the scars.’ (‘Known By The Scars’, Michael Card)

This morning’s sermon continued the ‘Battles & Blessings’ series, looking at when Jacob wrestled with God. (Gen 32:22-32) This incident profoundly changed Jacob’s life, giving him a new identity and transformed character. Prior to this, he had been known as a grasper, a deceiver (see Gen 25:21-34) who had connived to get his older brother’s birthright and who plotted with his mother to get his father’s blessing. (Gen 27:1-45) He had had to flee from Esau’s wrath and lived away from his family for years, discovering something of God’s presence through a divine encounter at Bethel (Gen 28:12-17), but also learning what it was like to be on the wrong side of deception with Laban! (Gen 29). Now he is about to return home and is fearful of Esau’s reaction (Gen 32:1-5). Immediately before that encounter, however, he has to face a mysterious man who wrestles with him until daybreak…

The wrestling match is not initiated by Jacob, but by God, and we need to remember that whatever we may think, God is the One who goes searching for the lost coin and the lost sheep. We see Jacob’s tenacity in this encounter, however, and understand that if we are to know blessings from battles, we must learn to persevere in prayer. Persistence and perseverance are not the same as pester power, but must form part of our prayer life if we are to be victorious in prayer. (see Luke 18:1-5, Matt 15:22-38, James 5:16-18) God tests us to determine our desire for Him and we must learn to keep on praying and not give up. Prayer becomes the force that moves us forward. Self-help is no good, but as we engage with God in prayer, we are in a position to receive the blessings God pours out.

Jacob’s encounter with God leads to a new name (‘Israel’, the name by which the whole nation will be known) and a new identity as one who has struggled with God and humans and overcome. We too have been given a new identity in God and those who overcome will one day receive a new name from Christ. (Rev 2:17) We are now new creations in Christ Jesus. (2 Cor 5:17) We have been given a new nature and the Spirit of God lives within our mortal bodies. (Rom 8:1-9, 2 Cor 6:19-20) We have been born again, adopted into the family of God so that we are now children of God. (Jn 1:12, Rom 8:14-17) We are no longer slaves to sin, forced to do whatever the enemy demands of us; we are free to do as God says, to live as He commands, to enter into all the countless blessings He has freely poured out. Eph 1:3 says ‘Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.’ Those spiritual blessings are there for every single Christian to receive. Paul says that ‘no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ.’ (2 Cor 1:20) Our part, though, is to speak the ‘Amen’ of faith, to claim those promises, to come before the throne of grace with confidence and boldness, just as Jacob speaks boldly and receives a new name, a new identity.

‘Footprints in the Sand’ is a much loved poem which talks of life as a journey, walking on sand, often with two sets of footprints visible (representing ours and God’s) and in the places where only one set of footprints is visible, this is not a sign of God abandoning us but of Him carrying us through the trials and difficulties of life:

Someone has written a more modern twist on the poem which goes on to say that ‘at the lowest and saddest times in my life, there was one set of footprints along with gouges and irregular lines in the sand’, the explanation for which is this is when God carried and dragged the person ‘kicking and screaming like a spoiled brat’, which made me smile ruefully because that is often how I do react, alas…

But what about the times when there are no footprints at all? Ps 77, a psalm which begins in complaining self-pity and ends in meditation on God’s wonderful works, says ‘Your path led through the sea, Your way through the mighty waters, though Your footprints were not seen.’ (Ps 77:19) On our journey through life there are times when we don’t see footprints at all; the mighty waters, after all, erase all trace of footprints and there can be no ‘evidence’ at all of God’s presence. We are called to walk by faith and not by sight. (2 Cor 5:7) These musings inspired the poem that follows.

The one set of footprints we see

Is, they say, where the Lord carried us,

But what about the days

When footprints can’t be seen at all?

What do we do, then,

When there is no trace evidence,

No footprints to follow?

Where is this guidance You promised us?

Where is the clearly illuminated path?

We trudge on in obedience,

Following the only path we see,

Wondering where it will lead.

Our scouting skills

Search assiduously for signs of Your presence,

For strategically-placed twigs and branches,

For carvings in the tree trunks,

For arrows pointing ahead,

As we frown over compressed leaves,

Trying to trace the imprint of a shoe,

The pressure of a foot’s presence.

But then we’re at the sandy shore,

Water lapping around our feet,

Vastness before us as we gaze at crashing waves.

You want us to walk through that?

Unseen footprints

Leading through impossible terrain,

Calling us to walk by faith and not by sight.

One step of faith –

The waters recede.

Our muddy footprints soon erased

As the waters gush back,

Eradicating the evidence of this tumultuous journey.

But we remember.

We’re on the other side.

There may be no footprints,

No evidence, no proof,

But our very presence here

On the other side

Shows us Your presence with us.

So walk on by faith,

When there are no footprints to be seen,

Listening alertly for the voice that says,

‘This is the way; walk in it.’

The Psalms have to be read as poetry, but that begs the question ‘What is poetry?’ Poetry uses language in a condensed form to convey layers of meaning and is often meant to be read aloud, with the sound, rhythm and form important to its effectiveness. It’s very different to the prose style we are used to in newspapers, magazine articles and novels, and tends to convey emotion and feeling as well as fact, causing us to ponder and ‘enter in’ to its meaning.

English poetry uses metre and rhyme for effect, but Hebrew poetry tends to rely on parallelism (which links two ideas and either compares or contrasts these ideas, with the repetition helping the listener to remember the points being made) for effect. This explains why there seems to be a lot of repetition at times in the Psalms (see Ps 70:1, Ps 120:2, Ps 3:1 and Ps 93.) Sometimes ideas are contrasted in pithy couplets (see Ps 1:6, Ps 34:15-15, also Proverbs 10:1-9). Sometimes the psalmists use anaphora (repetition for dramatic effect, as in the refrain ‘His love endures for ever’ in Ps 136) and inclusio (where an idea is stated at the start and repeated at the end, see Ps 118:1 & 29).

Alphabet acrostics are also great favourites in the Psalms (see Ps 9, 10, 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119 and 145). Each line or stanza begins with a different letter of the alphabet; in Ps 119, for example, there are 22 stanzas of 8 lines each, with each line in a particular stanza beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This signifies completion, but is also a great aid to memory!

Metaphor and simile, whereby two things are compared, are also a feature of poetry. Similes compare two things using ‘like’ or ‘as’ (see Ps 42:1, Ps 92:12), whereas metaphors compare two things by saying something is something else (see Ps 23:1, Ps 18:1-2). ‘Metaphor uses the language of sense experience to lead us into the world of the unseen.’ (Eugene Peterson, ‘Answering God’, P 73) By submerging us in the familiar world of things we see around us, the psalmist is able to help us to see the invisible God and understand more of His nature.

We can read the Psalms without any knowledge of poetic form and God can still speak to us and bless us. But so often, having some idea of these things can enhance our understanding of the Psalms. Instead of dismissing them as over-the-top or boring because they repeat ideas, we can see that this is deliberate and that the psalmists use language to teach us many things. We can also see how language is used to convey emotion, to express feelings, to convey a sense of awe and wonder and we are drawn into God’s wonderful world. After all, God spoke creation into being and Jesus is the Word (Jn 1:1), so words clearly have enormous value and worth!

We also had a birthday to celebrate last Sunday: