Wrestling Versus Resting

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As much as I could wish it were true, life does not get easier with age, and Christianity is not a panacea either…as much as I would like for it to be. Wrestling with God over issues and circumstances seems a necessary part of walking the road of faith because events and people inevitably enter our lives and wreak havoc in places that we could never have foreseen. Sarai did not wrestle with God physically, as Jacob did, but she wrestled with Him spiritually in regard to the promised heir. Honestly, just reading about Sarai makes me feel tired because I see so much of myself in her. She knew God’s plan was for Abram to bear a son, and she knew that God had closed her womb, and yet she decided to take matters into her own hands in order to make something happen (Genesis 16). The resulting chaos has echoed through the ages, and all of Sarai’s manipulations did not help one bit; in fact, it made things far worse.
I can relate to Sarai in many ways. Like her, I am sometimes seemingly faithless even though I have the Word of God himself in my life. I sometimes wrestle with the circumstances in which I find myself, when God would rather I rested in His promises and trust Him to carry out His plans. I am often impatient when trouble heads my way because it is uncomfortable, and like Sarai, when I try to “fix” things, the results are less than stellar. The resulting problems are not so pleasant to dwell in either. Proverbs 21:19 warns that it’s better to live in a desert land than it is to live with “a contentious and vexing woman” (NASB). When I wrestle with God’s plans for my life, like Sarai, I am being contentious. I contend that a contentious woman is not a happy one, which makes her vexing to everyone around her as well. Unfortunately for Sarai, she had to learn the hard way to trust God and rest in Him. I like to think that the hard things Sarai encountered matured her and accomplished what God ultimately wanted in her—faith that rested in Him. Even though the test at Mt. Moriah was not hers, I can picture Sarah as a mature woman of faith waiting an entire week for her beloved teenaged son and her elderly husband to return from the land of Moriah and finally getting it right and trusting God with the unknown. Life may not get easier—in fact, the tests that cause us to grow may be increasingly harder—but at some point, I firmly believe that the faith that God has given us will combine with the tests of this life to mature us into Christians whose faith witnesses to the power of a sovereign God. It is the rest after the wrestling.

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