Genesis 32:30: A place named for a face, on the mound across the water from the last one
Read it →Commentary on Genesis 32:30
Jacob has just come through a night of wrestling with a stranger. Now he names the place. The name says who he believes he was fighting. The reason he gives says he is amazed to be alive.
The Name of the Place
Jacob had once called the house of God a dreadful place. One writer reads the new name as his own summary of the night, and of how it ended:
By naming the place Peniel — "The face of God" — Jacob showed how deeply he felt that God had brought him face to face with Himself. The outcome was that he was preserved, not destroyed. Here was good reason for him to change his earlier thought that the house of God and the gate of heaven was a "dreadful" place.
Whom Jacob Saw
Jacob says he saw God. Commentators place this among the Old Testament appearances where God showed Himself under a covering:
In earlier days the Son of God showed Himself, sometimes in veiled glory, sometimes in unveiled glory. To Abraham at the tent door, to Jacob at Peniel, to Joshua at the walls of Jericho, to Gideon and to Manoah, He came veiled. Faith, with more or less strength, through the Spirit, took the covering away and reached the glory underneath.
A Life Preserved
Jacob's shock is not that he met God, but that meeting God did not finish him. The writers quote the older wording, "my life is preserved"; the ESV reads "my life has been delivered." One writer turns that on every reader:
Jacob — the sinner — had seen God face to face, the One who cannot look on sin, and yet his life was preserved. Jacob is not the only person who must meet God. Every single one of you must meet God one day, sooner or later.
How Little He Said
Two writers hear Jacob's words as thin rather than triumphant. Set beside what God told Abraham, his report is bare:
Even after God wrestled with him and enabled him to wrestle with God for His blessing, it was still far short of God's mind. How poor that he could say no more than "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved!" God "talked with" His friend Abraham. He revealed His Name as the Almighty. He promised by covenant to make him the father of many nations, with things still to come from Him. He told him what He was going to do to the guilty cities of the plain, and so drew out his pleading for righteous Lot.
The proof, another writer says, is the fear that still gripped Jacob when he met his brother:
How often we misread the meaning of something that has been (as Peniel was to Jacob) of the greatest real importance to our souls! If he had truly seen God "face to face," how could he have added, as the wonderful thing, "and my life is preserved"? Everyone who has seen God's face has found in it deliverance from self-occupation and from fear — the fear that controlled Jacob when he met his brother.
The Price of the Sight
The night left Jacob with a hip out of joint. One writer calls that a bargain:
Jacob wrestled with the angel, and the socket of his hip was put out of joint. This was sad. But God turned it to good, for there he saw God's face, and there the Lord blessed him. Who would not be willing to have a bone put out of joint, if it meant seeing God?
Another writer finds a Peniel wherever a believer comes to judge himself truly before God:
Nothing gives the failing, weak believer such confidence in the faithfulness and grace of God as coming to a true judgment of self in God's presence. Here the soul reaches its Peniel and can say, "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." After that, no failure can completely discourage the one who has been through it.
Our Peniel
Jacob's word was "preserved" — he survived. One writer sets Christian ground higher:
These were precious combinations in Jacob's experience. They mean still more to us who remember the deeper truth of death at the cross. There we count "the old man crucified," and we know in reality that we are "alive to God through Jesus Christ" (not that life is preserved). And we see God face to face in our risen and ascended Lord: "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." This is our Penuel.
Summary
- Face — Peniel means "the face of God"; Jacob named a place after the One who had just crippled and blessed him.
- Veiled — God met him under a covering. Faith had to see through it, as at other Old Testament appearances.
- Preserved — the wonder is the survival. A sinner met the God who cannot look on sin, and lived.
- Poor — writers judge his words thin. He won a blessing, far less than God gave Abraham, and he still met his brother in fear.
- Ours — a hip out of joint was a small price for a sight of God. What Jacob glimpsed in the dark now shines in the face of Jesus Christ.
