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THE DREAMER
The Gospel According to Jacob, Part 3
Genesis 28:10-22
September 24, 2006
Pastor Bob Sanders
Genesis 28:10-22 (The Message)
10-12 Jacob left Beersheba and went to Haran. He came to a certain place and camped for the night since the sun had set. He took one of the stones there, set it under his head and lay down to sleep. And he dreamed: A stairway was set on the ground and it reached all the way to the sky; angels of God were going up and going down on it.
13-15 Then God was right before him, saying, "I am God, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. I'm giving the ground on which you are sleeping to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will be as the dust of the Earth; they'll stretch from west to east and from north to south. All the families of the Earth will bless themselves in you and your descendants. Yes. I'll stay with you, I'll protect you wherever you go, and I'll bring you back to this very ground. I'll stick with you until I've done everything I promised you."
16-17 Jacob woke up from his sleep. He said, "God is in this place—truly. And I didn't even know it!" He was terrified. He whispered in awe, "Incredible. Wonderful. Holy. This is God's House. This is the Gate of Heaven."
18-19 Jacob was up first thing in the morning. He took the stone he had used for his pillow and stood it up as a memorial pillar and poured oil over it. He christened the place Bethel (God's House). The name of the town had been Luz until then.
20-22 Jacob vowed a vow: "If God stands by me and protects me on this journey on which I'm setting out, keeps me in food and clothing, and brings me back in one piece to my father's house, this God will be my God. This stone that I have set up as a memorial pillar will mark this as a place where God lives. And everything you give me, I'll return a tenth to you."[1]
A Nowhere Place
This is the third in our series of messages on Jacob. As we said last week, Jacob is the kind of guy many of us can relate to, someone with all kinds of struggles and doubts and failures, and many of us can see a lot of our own story in him. This morning we find him on the run, far from home and family. The first couple verses in our Scripture reading give us some clues to his condition. First, in verse 10, we read that Jacob comes to “a certain place.” It’s so out of the way, so desolate and so unimportant it doesn’t even have a name. Not yet, anyway. Later it will be known as Bethel (“house of God”). But right now it’s just “a certain place” – a nowhere place. And the writer of Genesis is telling us that’s where Jacob is at. No home to go to. No family to embrace him. No place to belong. Jacob is nowhere.
And then we read he has to use a stone for a pillow. Now, I’ve done a fair amount of traveling, and sometimes I’ve slept on beds where there’s no pillow. Other times there was a pillow, but it was so disgusting you wouldn’t want your head anywhere near it. Sometimes I’ve rolled up a coat for a pillow, or stuffed some socks into a T-shirt and slept on that. But a stone? The only reason he’d use a stone is because he has nothing else. No coat. Not even some extra socks. Jacob is utterly destitute. He has to use a stone for a pillow.
This is a guy whose whole life has fallen apart. How did it come to this? Well, if you were here last week, you’ll remember. If you weren’t, let me bring you up to speed.
Jacob is one of two sons born to Rebekah and Isaac. Esau his brother was the firstborn by a matter of seconds, and Jacob was born grabbing Esau’s heel, trying to get ahead of him. Hence, his name: Jacob means Heel, and it also means Striver or Grabber or even Cheater. Now before they were born, the Lord had told Rebekah that she would have these two sons, and promised that the older would serve the younger. Jacob, not Esau, would be the one God chose to work through, the one God would use to bring blessing into the world. But as the two boys grew up, father Isaac favored Esau, completely doted on him and completely ignored Jacob. As you might expect, Jacob grew up desperate for his father’s love, and last week we saw how it led him to do this desperate thing. He dressed up like Esau. He pretended to be this powerful, charismatic, macho guy (Jacob was none of those) and tricked his blind and aged father into giving him the blessing of the firstborn.
But it backfired. Esau was furious and wanted to kill him, so Jacob has to run for his life. With nothing more than the shirt on his back, he scurries off toward Haran, hundreds of miles away, to hide out at the home of Laban, his mother’s brother. So here’s Jacob, the one who’s supposed to be the head of the clan and the inheritor of the family wealth, the one with the blessing. But it’s all fallen apart. He’s in the middle of nowhere – homeless, friendless, helpless, and penniless. All he’s got is this stone for a pillow.
Jacob’s Dream
And that’s where God finds him. Have you noticed how seldom God has been mentioned thus far in Jacob’s story? If you read back in Genesis, you see that each of Jacob’s forbears had some kind of personal encounter with God. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac – they had all met God, all knew God. But not Jacob. There’s no record of any personal encounter between Jacob and God. And even now, in this nowhere experience, Jacob isn’t looking for God. He’s not crying out for help. He’s not praying for guidance. Jacob had learned to depend on his own wits, his own cunning, his own striving and pretending. God has never been a vital part of his experience.
But all that changes when he has this dream, a dream in which he sees three things and hears three things. What does he see? First, he sees a stairway connecting heaven and earth. A lot of translations call it a ladder, and if you’re into Bruce Springsteen you can join him on his new CD and sing “We are climbing Jacob’s ladder.” But that’s not a good translation. A ladder is something narrow and only one person at a time can climb it. What Jacob sees is a huge ramp, a stairway to heaven (Led Zeppelin got this one right). It’s huge enough to have angels on it. Not just one or two, but dozens, perhaps hundreds of angels, ascending and descending on this grand stairway.
Angels. That’s the second thing Jacob sees in his dream. Not the cute, cuddly little cherubs we see on Hallmark cards. Forget about those. In the Bible, whenever an angel appears, the first thing people do is hit the dirt. They’re terrified. And angels always have to begin by saying, “Fear not…” Why? Because an angel is this awesome, powerful messenger sent into the world to carry out the purposes of God. Jacob sees these angels, these divine messengers going up and down the stairway – a visible reminder that God’s power and purpose are flowing from the throne of grace and out into a world of need, and then bringing the world’s pain and brokenness back up to heaven before God’s throne.
And the third thing Jacob sees, the most amazing of all, is God himself coming down that stairway and standing right over him. Every parent in this room has done this – stood over your sleeping child at night, with a heart full of love and tenderness. God comes and stands over Jacob as he lies there sleeping. It’s a picture of something Jacob could never have expected: God’s care, God’s nearness, God’s intimacy.
That’s what Jacob sees in his dream. But it’s not over. He then hears God say three things – three things which Jacob desperately needs to know.
First, Jacob hears God say, “I’ll be with you.” And Jacob needs to know that, because he feels so alone. He has absolutely no one who cares about him. The only person who ever loved him is his mother Rebekah and he’s never going to see her again. But God says to him, “You’re not alone, Jacob. I will be with you wherever you go.”
Second, he hears God say, “I will protect you.” Jacob is running for his life, never knowing if Esau would jump out from behind the next rock and wring his scrawny neck. And God says, “I’ll protect you, Jacob. I’ll stick with you no matter what.”
And third, he hears God say, “I will bring you home, I will give you a future.” Jacob is headed far away from the only home he’s ever known, no family and no future. And God says, “I’ll bring you back to this ground on which you’re sleeping. I’ll give you a home, a family, and a future.”
Some dream! There in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to lay his head on except a stone, Jacob sees this grand stairway connecting earth and heaven, with angels going up and down. And he sees God himself coming all the way down and standing over him. And though he’s never spoken to God, he hears God speaking to him: “I will be with you. . . I will protect you. . . I will bring you home.”
As Frederick Buechner puts it in the quote on your bulletin cover, “It wasn’t Holy Hell that God gave Jacob” – much as he deserved it – “but Holy Heaven.”[2] And when Jacob woke up, he said, “God is in this place” – this nowhere place – “and I didn’t even know it. This is God’s house,” he whispers in awe, “the very Gate of Heaven.”
Heaven’s Gate
What does it mean, this dream? Let me suggest two possibilities.
First, I think it means God’s power is working even when we can’t see it, even when things are going very wrong, even when we’re stuck in some painful, nowhere place. When things are going wrong we often feel that God has abandoned us, that all that’s happening to us proves life is random and tragic and God doesn’t care.
But Jacob’s dream says it’s not true. Jacob’s dream says right here in the middle of this nowhere place is a stairway connecting earth to heaven, heaven to earth. And God’s power is moving up and down that stairway. God has not abandoned us. God isn’t sitting up in heaven, isolated from what’s going on down here on earth. God is at work to bring his peace and his justice to this world. To our world.
The problem is, we can’t see it. Not without some help.
I think of that story in 2 Kings chapter 6 where the prophet Elisha and his servant are in this city, and it’s besieged by enemy armies who are coming to kill Elisha. The poor servant is terrified, but Elisha is cool and calm. The servant panics, and Elisha asks the Lord to open his eyes so he can see what’s really going on. And the text says, “The Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.”[3]
The armies of God, the angelic host, the chariots of fire were there, more powerful than any human enemy. They were there all the time, but the servant couldn’t see it. And so often that’s the case with you and me. All we can see is the problem in front of us. All we can feel is the fear inside us. But that doesn’t mean God is absent. That doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. What we need – Jacob and Elisha’s servant and all of us – is to have our eyes opened. To see that, even in our nowhere places, earth and heaven are connected. To see that no matter how hopeless the situation, the mighty power of God is moving out into the world, into our world. To see that the toughest, the most painful places in our lives can turn out to be where God comes to find us.
Are you stuck in some nowhere place today? It doesn’t have a name, at least not a name you’d like to repeat. It may be called “cancer,” or it may be called “divorce,” or it may be called “job loss,” or it may be called “depression.” It’s a nowhere place – lonely and cold and hard. What you need is a fresh glimpse of God’s power at work, and to know that God is standing over you, and to hear him say “I’m with you. I’ll protect you. I’m going to bless you with a future.” You need what Jacob discovered – that this nowhere place is none other than the Gate of Heaven.
I Am the Stairway
That’s part of what this dream means. But there’s another part, and that’s found in the New Testament, in the first chapter of John’s Gospel. Maybe you remember the story. Jesus invites Philip to follow him, and Philip finds his friend Nathaniel and tells him, “We’ve found the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.” And Nathaniel says, “Can anything good come out of a nowhere place like Nazareth?” Philip says, “Come and see.” He brings him to Jesus, and Jesus looks at Nathaniel and says, “Here is a person in whom there is no deceit.” And Nathaniel says, “Why do you say that? How did you come to know me?” Jesus says, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Now, we have no idea what that means. We have no idea what Nathaniel was doing under the fig tree. Was he praying? Was he reading the Bible? Was he pondering the meaning of life? We don’t know. But Jesus did. And when Nathaniel hears Jesus say that, he’s sold. “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, the King of Israel.”
Jesus says, “Do you believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You’ll see greater things than that.” And here’s the punch line: Jesus says to him, “Truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” [4]
Please catch this. Jesus is saying, “I am the stairway that Jacob saw. I am the link between heaven and earth.” Jesus does not say to Nathaniel, “You’ll see the angels of God ascending and descending to the Son of Man.” Jesus isn’t standing at the top of the stairway and saying, “Here are the steps you have to take to get to God.” But that’s in fact what every human religion does. Every religion has its steps you have to climb to get to God. Think of those ancient temples in Central America, with their steep steps you had to climb, offering sacrifices along the way to pay for your sins, as you work your way to God. Or think of Islam with its five pillars: these steps you have to take to get to God. Or Judaism and its Ten Commandments – steps to God. Or the eight-fold path of Buddhism to enlightenment – more steps to God.
Every religion does it. Every religion says, “Here are the steps. Now, go climb them.”
Is that what Jesus says? No. Jesus does not say, “You will see angels ascending and descending to the Son of Man.” Jesus says, “You will see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Every other religion has a series of steps. But Jesus says, “I am the steps.” Jesus fulfilled the requirements. He did all the steps. He lived the life we should have lived. He died and took the penalty we should have received. And this same Jesus says, “Let me tell you what you’ll see if you understand who I am: you will see heaven opened and angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. I didn’t come to tell you what the steps are. I came to be the steps. I didn’t come to point you to the stairway. I came to be the stairway. I am the Gate of Heaven. I am the way to the Father, and I’ve come all the way down for you.”
So the final word in this story is Jesus, just as he is wherever we turn in the Scriptures. And the final question is this: Have you seen Jesus? Have you come to know the One who alone bridges the gap between a holy heaven and this broken and sinful earth? You may be stuck in a nowhere place. You may be lonely and lost like Jacob was. You may be alone and afraid like Jacob was. You may have kept God at arm’s length all your life, just like Jacob did. Whatever you are, wherever you are, I direct you to Jesus. He is the One who comes to us and the One who stands beside us. He is God.
Look! Heaven has opened, and there’s a stairway coming all the way down. It’s none other than the Lord Jesus. He comes this day to be your Savior. He comes to find you in your nowhere place and bring you home. Won’t you give as much of yourself as you can to him this day? If you do, then like Jacob you will be filled with awe and wonder. And you will find yourself saying, “God is in this place – truly. And I didn’t know it. This is the Gate of Heaven.”
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