Lucha Con Dios

I was at a BBQ this weekend and at this event I happened to have the opportunity to speak with a "Lapsed" Catholic, at least that's what he called himself. Jim and I had quite the debate. It centred mostly around his assertion that the Church should be ordaining women to the priesthood (which I will write more about in an upcoming post) , but the argument came down to this; he said "wasn't the whole point of Jesus life, death and resurrection to demonstrate that humans who live moral existences can rise from the dead also?"
Wow.
I replied that he'd missed the whole point and starting from the Jewish practice of substitutional sacrifice and citing the book of Hebrews (which if you ever wanted a good bridge between Old and New Covenants this is it) explained how Jesus death and resurrection is the only way to reunite humanity with God. No sacrifice, no fellowship with God.
Jim replied that he liked this God even less after this realization than he did before. Before this explanation he figured that God's plan and thus God is flawed or there is no God, his reason being the presence of suffering in the world. If God allows suffering, then he is flawed.... whatever.
He left me in a ponderous state, obviously wrestling with this concept. Thinking back on it the story of Jacob came to mind. At Peniel Jacob wrestled with God. The scriptures don't say how it started, but it says that he wrestled with God until daybreak. I imagine that God approached Jacob and Jacob's response was to wrestle. In this case, God wrestled with Jacob to strengthen him and encourage him because his older brother Esau was after him with a few hundred men. Jacob was petrified of Esau from whom he had fleeced a blessing. God gave him hope that if he was given the strength to prevail against God, surely he would prevail against Esau, but so that he could not boast, God popped his hip out of joint and gave him a limp. Jacob's name was changed to Israel at this point which means to wrestle with God and his hip was never the same.
We are never the same after wrestling with God. Many times though God is not wrestling with us to build us up but to take us down a peg. In the case of Jim, he was wrestling with God's ways. He doesn't understand them and believes his own are better. He was just cruising for a bruising.
I have wrestled with God and I lost, no surprise there. I don't recommend it.

The next time you wrestle with God, think of Israel. He got a blessing out of his fight, maybe God has one in store for you. An attitude adjustment is a blessing too when you think about it.