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The story says that Rebekah, Isaac's
wife, conceived. The twins in her womb "struggled together within her; and she
said, If it be so why am I thus? …And the Lord said unto her, Two nations
are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels;
and the one people shall be stronger than the other people, and the elder shall
serve the younger. …the first came out red, …and they called his name
Esau. And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on Esau's
heel; and his name was called Jacob" (Gen 25:22).
Although the promise was that "the elder
shall serve the younger," Jacob thought he needed to resort to deception in
order get the birthright and the blessing from his father, Isaac. Esau was
furious with his brother for having deceived him and he vowed vengeance on
Jacob, so Jacob was naturally afraid. They parted company and lived in
different parts of the land. But sooner or later we are all made to come to
terms with these things in ourselves and so it says that at Peniel (Gen
32:24-30) Jacob was alone struggling with a man until the breaking of the day.
He was not struggling with a man really; he was having to come to grips with
his own duplicity and his own false sense of selfhood. It would not let him go
until the day broke and light dawned. During the course of the struggle, just
as with you and me, Jacob found that he was first struggling against his wrong
sense of himself and then was coming to identify with his divine self. That
divine self was so overwhelmingly true that it won the day. The angel-adversary
said to him, "Thy name shall be called no more Jacob," which means supplanter,
"but Israel," which means prince with God. Well, which would you rather be? At
the end of his struggle, when he had been renamed and the old Jacob-self had
gone out and the new Israel-self had taken over, he said "I have seen God face
to face, and my life is preserved." Immediately thereafter, in the very next
chapter in Genesis, he goes forth and meets his brother Esau, of whom he has
had every reason to be afraid. He sends gifts to Esau and when they meet, they
embrace and he says to Esau, "I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the
face of God, and thou wast pleased with me" (Gen 33:10). There was then total
reconciliation and no longer conflict or distrust between them. When this
Israel character had come into the picture it transformed both of these twin
brothers.
What a marvellous promise, what a working
model that is for human society! Whether we are thinking of our own problems or
of the strife we see all over the world, if we can touch this Israel-self which
is God's view of this man and that man and the other man, all seen from the
heavenly viewpoint — then we have a reconciled human relationship. This
apparent twinning of opposites is resolved. This does not amalgamate our
individuality but it just enables us all to find our proper worth and our
proper place in the divine plan, and coincidentally the proper worth and proper
place of our brother man. Our real self in God, our spiritual identity, is
changeless, complete, satisfied, tranquil, intact, untouched by the world. The
outer cannot give us anything that is not already incorporated in the gift of
the grace of God, and therefore the outer cannot rob us of anything, because
our selfhood, like the Israel-self, is something permanent and holy.
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