Hurting? Jesus is right there.
Weeks after winning my license, I crashed my car. It was a wet night and my friends and I decided it would be fun to drift around corners with wheels spinning. I lost control, the front of the car hammered into a high curb, the steering was wrecked.
I limped the car home, and, too ashamed and embarrassed to tell my parents, drove it first thing in the morning to the repairers in town. The mechanic hoisted it up and showed me how I’d bent the wheels and steering arms. Repair would be very costly.
I remember pacing the wet streets, car-less, wondering where on earth I would find the repair money, and still too ashamed to tell my family. For just a few hours I felt unusually helpless, almost nauseous with worry and loneliness.
Looking back I see how unnecessary my suffering was. All the help in the world was all around me, and I was blind to it.
So it was with Jacob. We pick up the story in Genesis 28:10 ...
Genesis 28:10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran.
What tragedy we read in these few words. Jacob was born into a rich and loving family. But he tricked his twin brother out of his birthright (Gen 25), and then pulled a seriously devious and nasty deception on his blind father, tricking Isaac into giving him Esau’s covenant blessing (Gen 27). So now Jacob is fleeing Beersheba, his home in the south of the Promised Land, to Harran in the strange and distant north: beyond Galilee, beyond Syria and Damascus, right up near Assyria and the Euphrates River.
Jacob means “Grasper.” Grasper had betrayed his family, and by lying and cheating and dishonouring his father he had betrayed God.
What had he accomplished? A family in humiliation and disarray. He himself running, alone, far, far from home.
Remember, this is the father of Israel. According to the principle of corporate identity, explained in Hebrews 7:1-10, the entire nation was physically latent within him at that moment. Jacob is Israel. Grasper personifies the church. What is true of him is true of the church.
Genesis 28:11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.
After fleeing all day, night falls with no motel or friendly house nearby. In verse 20 he prays for “food to eat and clothes to wear.” So we see a lonely, guilty, destitute man. He lies in the open air with a rock for a pillow. He is exhausted, physically, morally, spiritually, and relationally.
This by nature is you. This by nature is your church.
Sleeping on rocks gives anyone strange dreams. God gives Jacob a vision. It is a kind of apocalypse, God pulls aside the curtain to show Jacob what is going on behind his desolate circumstances.
Genesis 28:12-13a He had a dream in which he saw a staircase resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord, and he said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.”
God cast our rebellious parents, and thus us, out of Eden. Cherubim wielding blazing swords barred the way back (Gen 3:24). Humanity, and not least Jacob at this point, live within the desolation of that separation.
But God showed Jacob a staircase joining heaven and earth.
The people of Babel attempted something like this, to build a tower to reconnect heaven and earth, to manufacture greatness and security (Gen 11:1-9). But it was human-made and prideful and God razed it. If God separated humanity from heaven, what can we do to bridge the gulf?
We cannot reach up to him, but he can reach down to us. That is the staircase.
Why are angels dashing up and down it? “Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14) They rush down with God’s Word and salvation (Hebrews 2:2), and rush back up with our prayers (Revelation 8:4). The staircase establishes communication between Jacob and heaven. It is a conduit of help, of salvation.
The One who speaks to Jacob is “the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.” He made that unbreakable promise to Abraham: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will give you a land and make you into a great nation” (Gen 12:2).
At that point Jacob must have doubted those promises. “Land? Great nation? Great name? Blessing? I’m an exile from the land. My ‘great name’ is Grasper. I’m cursed, not blessed!”
Jacob had betrayed family and God and had lost everything. Yet God was working right then, even in his betrayal and desolation, to fulfil his promise. God was there, heaven and earth were joined. God’s ministering servants rushed up and down, for Jacob.
How gracious God is! How kind, patient, and longsuffering. How wise and mighty that through what we intend as evil, he intends for our good (Gen 50:20).
Genesis 28:13b-15 “I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.”
God reiterates that he will make a vast people for himself, from all corners of the globe, to be a blessing to the nations. God would go with them, watch over them, and relentlessly accomplish his promise, beginning with Jacob himself.
In all the hardships that Jacob’s exile would bring—his battle with Laban, home dramas, more poor decisions springing from his diehard manipulative habits—God says “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. I will fulfill my promise and bring you back to this land.”
Genesis 28:16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”
Jacob speaks geographically. Grandfather Abraham had been a Chaldean pagan (Joshua 24:14-15), a people who believed in localised deities. Likely Jacob thought, “The Lord is God of Beersheba. I didn’t think his jurisdiction extended this far. But it does!”
Note the double entendre. Grasper’s decisions had put him in a bad “place,” geographical, and spiritual. But the staircase showed him, “Surely the Lord is in this place,” again both geographical, and spiritual.
When God’s people are in a bad “place,” even a bad place of our own making, we must nevertheless say, “Surely the Lord is in this place.”
Jacob’s surprise turns to fear:
Genesis 28:17 He was afraid and said, “How fearsome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven!” early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz.
Jacob stopped near what was or would be the city of Luz. He himself named it Bethel, “House of God.” Jacob realised God was right there and that shook him. “I am evil, and I am in the presence of the holy God!”
Note this carefully: God didn’t build that staircase that night. It was there the whole time. What changed was Jacob getting a vision of it.
Because God promised to bless Jacob, he joined earth to heaven and had been right there with him the whole time, his angels coming and going, energetically ministering to him.
Genesis 28:20-22 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give a tenth.”
Jacob’s vow sounds like cupboard love, focussed on what God can give him: food, clothing and restoration. Instead of confession and repentance he attempts a deal with God, and you only make deals when you think you have something that the other person wants or needs. But Jacob had nothing that God wanted or needed. God has everything, Grasper had nothing but his sin.
So, God had much more work to do on him.
We have a huge advantage over Jacob. We look back to Genesis 28 through the 1,800 years of revelation that followed. Let’s now jump to 30 AD, and a scene both comical and sublime.
Jesus Christ has just called Philip to follow him. Philip brings the great news to his friend Nathanael,
“We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote – Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.” “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:45-46)
See the parallel with Jacob? A man hears about God’s Provision, but he can’t see the truth, and acts improperly: Jacob with deceit, Nathanael with parochial snobbery. God was there and he didn’t know it.
“‘Come and see,’ said Philip.”
This is not just “Come and meet him,” but, “Open your eyes, my friend!”
“When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, ‘Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is nothing false.’ ‘How do you know me?’ Nathanael asked. Jesus answered, ‘I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you’” (vs. 47-48).
Jesus is saying, “Nathanael, though you didn’t know it, I was there the whole time. I am with you.”
“Then Nathanael declared, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.’ Jesus said, ‘You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You will see greater things than that.’ Then he added, ‘Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man’” (vs. 49-51).
i.e. “Nathanael, you will have a revelation. You will see what Jacob saw. Although he saw a vision, you will see the reality. You will see the angels ascending and descending on me. You will see that I am the bridge between heaven and earth. You will see that all of God’s promised blessings will come through me.”
G.K Beale points out that the revelation of Christ that Nathanael was about to see was in his teaching and miracles, but “supremely in his crucifixion.”
This is the living reality for the Christian. Whatever place you are in, you are in Bethel, standing in the house of God. You are standing at the gate of heaven. Christ is there, right with you. All the angels of God are ascending and descending upon Christ, for your help and your blessing.
I recall that wet day, seemingly a lifetime ago, those few hours of shame, loneliness, and helplessness. But I was blind. I had a loving mother and father right there, more than willing and able to carry me through the trial.
And in your time of pain and trial right now, or as you struggle as a church, lift up your heads to see this heavenly vision.
Though in pain, you are standing in Bethel, the house of God. “But I have strayed from God! My pain is of my own making.” Yes, and that was true of Jacob. But God kept him, and always keeps us, within his house and under his fatherly care.
Though you are lonely, you are standing at the gate of heaven and it is open before you. “But my own poor decisions, and those of others, have put me here.” That was true of Jacob, yet he was the whole time in the presence of heaven. And so we are we: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6).
And as a church struggles—and every true church must struggle—heaven’s stairway joins her to heaven and all heaven's mercy and safety. “But aren’t our struggles are caused by our unfaithfulness and foolishness?” Probably, but that was true of Jacob too. Yet that stairway opened above him.
The reason is clear. The stairway is not built by our faithfulness, but God’s promise. The stairway is not our obedience and steadfastness, but the person of Christ come down to rescue us from our sin and rebellion.
God’s people, wherever you are and wherever you are at, look up now with eyes of faith to Jesus Christ, and “you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (John 1:51).
“Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it!”
Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash