“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”

— Dallas Willard, The Great Omission

​There’s a pattern in Jacob’s story, the grandson of Abraham. It’s one that chased me to the edge of the world.

Jacob the Grasper

Jacob was the second-born twin; his minutes-older brother was Esau. And they did not resemble each other at all.

In a time when the firstborn held the blessing and legacy of the family, these twins would not be equals, at least initially.

So, the story goes, Jacob first takes advantage of Esau’s hunger to make him trade his birthright in exchange for a meal. Then, at his mother’s prompting, Jacob also stole Esau’s blessing by faking his identity to his older and blind father.

​Jacob’s name meant heel-grabber, or trickster. Either way, it was fitting, because Jacob was always grasping for more.

After angering his brother, Jacob feared for his life, and his mother prompted him to flee.

​While running, he had his first recorded encounter with God, the famous stairway reaching from earth to heaven, with God’s messengers ascending and descending on it at Bethel. He was surprised to find God even on the run, in that place.

​Despite this, he kept running and set up a new life with distant relatives. Jacob met this match in his uncle, Laban. After having his bride-to-be switched on him without permission and being swindled for another seven years of work, he was upset.

Jacob’s Wages

A Hebrew word keeps appearing, and it’s important: “wages” (śākār – “wages, payment, reward”). Part of Jacob’s deeper problem is that he wants what he’s owed. Jacob isn’t against blessing. He’s opposed to uncertainty.

The language of wages keeps following Jacob. He works for his wives. He works for his flocks. He negotiates his compensation. Laban changes the terms. Jacob changes his strategy. Everybody is keeping score. Relationships have become transactional.

​He set up his escape and ran home. As he approached home for the first time in 20 years (Genesis 31:41), he stopped before the final approach. He first sent his family and belongings in waves ahead of him, with messages to his brother Esau of blessing and praise.

​And stays behind overnight, clearly still afraid of his brother. And it’s during that night that a strange figure appears to Jacob, and they wrestle with each other.

​Jacob refuses to let go as the dawn breaks without a blessing. The figure asks him what his name is. The last time he was asked that, he lied to his father to steal his brother’s blessing—the very thing that started this whole journey, which he must now face.

The mysterious figure dislocates Jacob’s hip and then blesses him. His identity remains strangely ambiguous. Jacob’s own conclusion is enough for the story: he has encountered God face-to-face.

​Jacob names the place Peniel because he saw the face of God and lived.

​The next day, instead of a battle with Esau, Esau runs to him, embraces him, and kisses him—an encounter that echoes Jesus’ later story of the Prodigal Son. In response, Jacob says, “To see your face is like seeing the face of God.” (Genesis 33:10). The brother Jacob expected to meet as an enemy becomes part of his encounter with God.

Jacob spends much of his life trying to secure by strategy what God had already promised to give by grace. His transformation begins when he can no longer manipulate the outcome.

While he made the journey home, the wages of his life would follow him. The consequences of his grasping would follow him home. Rachel would die on the journey. Joseph would disappear. The family he had spent his life trying to secure would repeatedly be beyond his control.

It was only after the redemption of his family through Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 45:26–28) that he seemed to finally understand, referring to his days as “few and evil” (47:9), and deliberately gives the greater blessing to Ephraim, the younger of Joseph’s two sons.

While Joseph didn’t understand, Jacob finally did: “I know, son, I know” (Genesis 48:19). What he didn’t understand as a boy, he did now. The man who spent his life grasping becomes, at the end of it, a man who gives blessings away.

​”God has to defeat us… The ego must be dismantled. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how God uses the Jacobs and the Esaus.”

— Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

Everyone Is Gentile

In the book of Romans, Paul makes the distinction painfully explicit between “wages” and “blessing.” “To the one who works,” he writes, “wages are not counted as a gift but as his due” (Romans 4:4). The Greek word Paul uses for “wages” is misthos (μισθός), the same word the Septuagint uses to translate śākār, the Hebrew word for “wages” or “reward.”

That’s the difference between earning and grace. If something is owed to me, it isn’t grace. If I have successfully negotiated the terms, it isn’t a gift; it’s a paycheck.

Then, two chapters later, Paul turns the metaphor darker: “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life” (Romans 6:23). The immediate metaphor is slavery and service—but the canonical resonance is hard to miss. There is an economy of wages, and there is an economy of grace. Another well-studied Jew in Rome could have picked up on the redeemed Pharisee’s remez.

This pattern of earning and transaction—which haunted Jacob—is exactly what Paul addresses in his theology of grace, where the ‘wages’ we earn are death, but the gift we receive is life. Jacob wanted the blessing, but he wanted it on his terms, through his control, by his own ability to perform.

Paul’s argument in Romans 11 wasn’t just a theological abstraction. Gentile believers are pictured as wild olive shoots grafted into an ancient cultivated tree. They don’t create the tree. They don’t own the root. They don’t get to boast about their place in it. Paul tells them plainly: “You do not support the root; the root supports you” (Romans 11:18).

It was a brutal paradigm shift for first-century Greco-Romans and Jews trying to walk the Way together. The scandalous claim wasn’t about the established family; it was that wild Gentiles were now being grafted directly into the ancient root of Abraham. Gentiles were among the nations who are included in the promise to Abraham to become a “blessing to all nations” (Galatians 3:8), but they were a small part of something much older and bigger.

The Abrahamic story also complicates our instinct to turn lineage into ownership. Ishmael and Esau belong to Abraham’s family story even though the biblical covenant develops through Isaac and Jacob. And Abraham’s blessing was never meant to terminate with Abraham’s descendants: “all the families of the earth” were supposed to be blessed through him.

Genesis’ story begins with a blessing that is supposed to move outward: the promise is centrifugal. Our religious instincts are often centripetal.

We have debated, argued, and we tried way too hard to earn an exclusive spot, but it is only by the grace of God and trusting in that root that we have life.

The outsider is a universal human category, a universal term found in every language and religion of their time (and ours). The only difference is semantics. Both Jesus and Paul point toward “the end of Gentiles” as a category (Romans 11:25; Luke 21:24)—not the disappearance of nations, cultures, or peoples, but the collapse of the boundary that makes some people fundamentally outsiders to God’s people (Ephesians 2:14–19; Galatians 3:28).

While Jews called outsiders Gentiles, Romans called them barbarians, and Chinese called them Hua-Yi. Different civilizations have repeatedly developed some version of an “us” and a “them.” The terminology changes, but the human impulse is remarkably familiar.

“God’s covenant with Abraham was always designed to be the means of rescuing the world. The problem was that Abraham’s physical descendants had come to regard it as a badge of privilege rather than a mandate for mission.”

— N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision

The End of the Outsider

Jesus came to break down dividing walls so all may be one (Ephesians 2:14ff). The only things that divide humanity are ego and fear.

Today, almost every family and tradition has language and concepts for this truth, and they are trying their best with what they have.

We debate and argue and try too hard on too many things: it is but by the grace of God and by trusting in that we have life. We’re all in the same boat, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…those damned egos of ours.

The path through the flood is not so different for any of us, even though it carries a whole world of diverse expressions and possibilities.

We all have to work to do and things to drop. If you want to get right with your concept of God, start wrestling with it.

In time, the ego loosens its grip, God wins, and something like holiness begins to emerge.

“We are saved by grace, we live by grace, and we earn absolutely nothing.”

— Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy