Hello and welcome to the Scriptures A Real podcast. I'm your host, Carrie Mulesstein, and this is the podcast where we look at elements of the scriptures that have made them become very real to us because we believe there's a real power that comes into our lives when the scriptures seem real to us.

Today is a shortcast where I'm just going to be doing this by myself, and we're going to talk about the wrestle that Jacob has with an angel.

That's something that I've talked about with other hosts and so on, but I want to look at a

different element of this.

We've talked a few times in this podcast about the Abrahamic sacrifice and about how

that's a theme we're going to see keeps happening in the scriptures.

We've seen it with Sarah. We've seen it with Sarah.

We've seen it with Abraham and Isaac.

Now I think we're going to see it with Jacob.

And I think we can understand this experience that Jacob has best if we see it in those terms.

And we'll talk about how then since we all will have to make some kind of an Abrahamic

sacrifice ourselves how that might make it impact things for us and as I've said that that

will help it become very real for us. So to understand this, we're going to back up in the story

a little bit. The story of the wrestle with the angel is in chapter 32,

but to really understand that, we have to kind of see what's been happening even before that.

By this time, Abraham, or I, sorry, Jacob has left home. He's left because Issa was going to

kill him because he tricked Isaac to obtain the birthright

blessing. But as we talked about then, I think that's really, Jacob and Rachel trying to do God's will and make God's will happen. And so you can see that he has to leave home and he will never see his mother again or his father again. When he leaves, they think it's going to be for a little while, but they don't. He leaves everything behind really because he did God's will, because he was

willing to do what needed to happen in order for God's will to happen, even though that made

his brother Esau very, very mad at him. Then he comes and he marries Leah and Rachel and their two servants.

And he works and Laban keeps his brother-in-law slash, well, he's, I mean, sorry, his father-in-law,

also cousin, keeps changing his wages, but the Lord is with him and keeps helping him and he's blessed and so on.

...