“I Won’t Let Go Unless You Bless Me”
Observations from Jordan Peterson’s “We Who Wrestle With God” Tour
What does it mean to wrestle with God? This is the question that Jordan Peterson asked as he walked across the stage of an old ornate theater in Louisville last week.
To wrestle with God is the unique marker and privilege of His chosen people, Israel. “God’s people” are chosen to…spar with Him. Let that sink in. This is one of the consequences of God’s respect for our free will–something that Peterson mentioned early in the talk while contrasting Christianity with materialism. Pagan gods of the old myths rape and conquer. The impersonal god of the Deists and the Enlightenment doesn’t care enough to engage humans. But the God of the Bible is personal and formidable. He is reality itself, and all humans, at some point, must reckon with reality. He allows us to tussle with Him, like a father play-wrestling with his son so that he learns his own strength.
Peterson himself is an icon of what it means to wrestle with God. It’s one of the reasons I respect him so much, despite my disagreements with him. Over the past several years he’s inched closer and closer to Christ and he’s been vulnerable enough to let the world watch.
I was fascinated by his body language during the talk. Peterson walked slowly back and forth across the stage and rarely looked up to directly address the audience. He seemed to be pacing through the corridors of his mind working out a problem. He’s not an orator in the typical sense, although his presence on stage transfixed the crowded theater for over an hour. It’s like he thinks with his whole body–his hands moving to mold his ideas as the thoughts incarnate into words. A few times his feet broke the slow pacing to move in rock-step as he danced with an idea. We were watching him wrestle with God right in front of us.
To wrestle with God requires vulnerability and honesty–with God and with others. It’s not a boxing match where fighters keep both feet on the ground and circle each other. It’s close contact, gritty, rolling in the mud. As he’s known to do, Jordan Peterson was at one point moved to tears with raw emotion.
What are we holding back from God? If you hold anything back, as Cain learned, you’ll lose. Why are we wrestling? Sometimes it’s because of a specific question or decision. Othertimes it’s because we’re seeking the truth in a fundamental way–why is existence good? What is my place in the world? What does God want me to do? What is truth? Is truth even knowable?
The answers to these questions cannot be neatly packaged and delivered–they must be worked out “with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12). To really ask those questions requires vulnerability because it’s an admission that we don’t know the answers. It also requires courage–because we might learn that either there is no answer (nihilism) or that the answer will demand more of us than we’re willing to give (conversion). It takes courage to confront the stakes for, as Peterson emphasized, there is no “neutrality” — it’s either God or Hell.
Wrestling with God also requires us to have some faith in ourselves. Jordan Peterson pointed to Job who–knowing he wasn’t guilty–refused to dishonestly abase himself before God.
Peterson expounded on Jacob’s wrestling with God, but didn’t touch on what I’ve always found to be the most perplexing part of the story–Jacob refused to let go until the angel blessed him (Genesis 32:26). Jacob–a fallible human–made a conditional demand on the Creator of the Universe–who could’ve killed him in an instant and who would later spend three books of the Old Testament describing exactly how He was to be worshiped (down to the details of priestly garments). Yet God did as Jacob asked (Genesis 32:29).
What kind of demands can we make of God? Maybe it’s simply the honesty of telling Him what we want (Matthew 7:7). Maybe it’s about refusing to move on from a trial until we see the good in it. I remember doing some reflecting after a particularly hard year. I was determined that I wouldn’t “move on” and ring in the new year until I found the blessing in my past. God promises us peace and joy and, like Jacob, we can remind Him of that as we wrestle (Genesis 32:12).
To wrestle with God means to embrace pain. God respects our will, but the fight isn’t exactly fair to begin with. Like Jacob, we may be left with a permanent battle scar (Genesis 32:31). To wrestle with God in the right way is to suffer without resentment, which Peterson illustrated with Christ’s suffering. I thought this was the most moving part of the talk. Ultimate strength is to acknowledge how much pain and suffering there is in life and to accept it without becoming bitter and jaded.
As Peterson began to conclude, he emphasized that the Cross stands at the center of community. The Cross is the radical embrace of self-sacrifice–letting go of our narrowness and opening our arms to the world to help heal it. The purpose isn’t just clean rooms and telling the truth (or not lying). The result of wrestling with God, I think, is for God to break us open so that we can be a gift to the world.
Based on his talk, I can’t tell if Jordan Peterson has realized that our ultimate end isn’t to wrestle, but to delight in the contemplation of God. There is an end to all our exploring and it’s to gaze upon God face to face (I Corinthians 13:12). There are answers to our questions but they can’t be understood by wandering through academic propositions. The Truth isn’t a code to crack–it’s a Person (John 14:6). It’s more than an archetypal personality–it’s the flesh-and-blood historical person of Christ. Watching him tussle with ideas across the stage, I kept thinking that Jordan Peterson is searching for a rest that still eludes him.
That evening he shared the stage with his wife Tammy and friend Jonathan Pageau. Both are baptized Christians who exude internal peace. To his credit, Peterson surrounds himself with those who have found what he’s searching for. He gave a lengthy explanation of the symbolic and biological reasons a mom’s kiss heals a skinned knee (something mothers and children know instinctively). But his wife, with a more childlike faith, knows that even a simple trial like tripping up the stairs and the window catching her fall can be an opportunity for gratitude to God. Some are given faith like children, but some of us have to find faith in what Dostoevsky called “the crucible of doubt.”
Jordan Peterson is brilliant, courageous, and vulnerable, but seems existentially tortured. In many ways, he manifests an undercurrent of our age–questioning, confrontational, searching. He’s wrestling with the greatest questions of life and, like Jacob, is unafraid to confront God and live to tell the tale. I hope that he finds peace and that he doesn’t let go before God blesses him.
