Welcome the Wilderness Paraugs

Ebenezer of God’s Faithfulness 

The wilderness is never pointless. Even when we feel like it’s taking us nowhere and we can’t figure out what our next steps should be, if we are walking through the wilderness, well—we are still walking forward. We are still going somewhere. 

Sometimes, it’s in the wilderness that God does his best work. 

It’s in the wilderness that God meets Jacob and wrestles with him. In the wrestle, God does a few things on Jacob’s behalf: 

1. He gets Jacob’s attention in the fear and the wondering. 
2. He renames Jacob in the midst of the brawl, calling him Israel, because of the very fact that Jacob wrestled with God and prevailed. 
3. He touches Jacob powerfully in the thick of things.

Jacob walks away from the interaction with a broken hip. The passage says that from that day on, Jacob walked with a limp, not as a sign of weakness, but as a sign that God touched him. 

It’s in the wilderness that God changes us and gives us a new name.