Face to face with God

James Cathcart August 02, 2026 4 1

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Genesis 32: 22-31 (NIV-UK)

22 That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23 After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. 24 So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. 26 Then the man said, ‘Let me go, for it is daybreak.’

But Jacob replied, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’

27 The man asked him, ‘What is your name?’

‘Jacob,’ he answered.

28 Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.’

29 Jacob said, ‘Please tell me your name.’

But he replied, ‘Why do you ask my name?’ Then he blessed him there.

30 So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, ‘It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.’

31 The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

Here we have a particularly bracing encounter of coming face to face with God. The wild and wayward Jacob is stopped in his tracks by God and made to confront who he is and who he is to become.

Someone who has come face to face with God and yet has lived.

Ready your canvass

Jacob is the crooked line

the charcoal smudge

hard to pin down

to know

to name.

He is smoke and suggestion

he has one of ‘those faces’

reminiscent of countless you’ve seen

but hard to place

familiar but unmemorable

a silver tongue in a hidden sheath.

And then there’s the stranger,

your pencil captures movement

and power

but no discernible features

However, in the midst of his movement 

Jacob comes into sharper focus

the storm caught up in a whirlwind 

a flesh and blood man limping at the gate of eternity.

Prayer:

Dear God,

Your Bible has only words

no pictures.

Every generation we have to draw the pictures anew

to fix them once again in our imagination

They are not timeless,

— like you —

they are incomplete

containing fragments.

But in fragments we catch reflections

of who you are,

of who we are.

Amen.