Genesis 32: 26 Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

Jacob had come to a time of reckoning in his life.   He had left home many years earlier just before the death of his father Isaac. He had to run away essentially because he had misrepresented himself to his father as being Esau his older brother. Isaac’s sight had failed him and though he was a bit suspicious, the disguise that his wife Rachel had fabricated for Jacob fooled his father and he gave him the blessing which belonged to Esau. Now it was time for him to return home and face his brother.

Jacob had built a life in his adopted land. It was a life of toil but he had managed to become wealthy and so he readied his entire family and possessions and started off with fear and trembling to go home. He assembled an impressive herd of animals as a gift to pacify his brother Esau and sent them ahead of him with servants. In the middle of the night while he was alone, he encountered a man with whom he wrestled until daybreak. “When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled the man.” The man asked to be let go but Jacob refused saying: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”

What did Jacob want exactly? He knew full well the conditions under which he had left home. He knew the rage of his brother when he left. He did all he could think of doing to lay the ground work to pacify him for the moment they would face each other again. But there was still the chance his brother was waiting to take his life. So he wanted to be blessed in a dimension that I have identified in my own life as the ‘loving-kindness of God’ – favor, totally undeserved, but which my God grants anyhow. Don’t you dare quit, because God’s loving-kindness is new every day.

When the encounter was over, Jacob had a new name – Israel, because you have struggled with God and with men and have overcome” and he named the place Peniel saying “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life is spared.”  God gave him his life for a prize by melting Esau’s heart to welcome him home.