The Struggle for Blessing

We're looking at the life of Jacob, kind of doing a character study of him. And you might argue that Jacob is one of the easiest characters to relate to in the scriptures because, well, quite frankly, he's got so many issues, so many problems. He has so many doubts. He fails so often, and he's got many struggles. And this morning, we come to the second major incident in the story, as Genesis records it, of his life.

And the subject of the passage really isn't Jacob so much as it is heaven. And there are three parts to the passage. There's Jacob's understanding of heaven before the dream, his condition. There's the dream itself, the content of it, and then there's Jacob's response to it. And of course, our response this morning as well.

In each one of those sections, the sky or the heavens is referred to. So heaven is the dominant theme, and we will see what the text tells us about heaven for Jacob and for us. And then we have to ask, how could heaven possibly be open to someone like Jacob? And for that matter, for you and me this morning as well. The first couple of verses paint a picture.

Let's see if we can get the image right in our head. First of all, Jacob reached a place. Why is it called a place? I'm glad you asked. Later, of course, the place had a name, but at this time, it was just called a place.

And it didn't have a name because, well, it wasn't important. It wasn't like there was a river there, or a well, or a creek, or a pass, or the intersection of two particular roads. It would have had a name if it was anything significant. But the Bible refers to it just as a place, a nowhere place. Jacob was on his way to his mother's family.

We know, of course, he was on the run, really. His own brother had vowed to kill him. We can estimate that he had to travel a distance of some 900 kilometres from Beersheba to Haran. And it's a way of getting across the idea that he was in the middle of nowhere when this dream happened. Second detail that we should know in the story is that he used a stone as a pillow.

Now, why would you ever use a stone for a pillow? Only if you had absolutely nothing else suitable, something with you that is soft, maybe a blanket or some socks, something to roll up under your head. If you had anything at all, it would be far better than using a stone. But clearly, Jacob had nothing else. He resorted to using a stone.

And to say that he has a stone for a pillow is to say that he's destitute, broke. He literally has nothing. So both the place and the pillow start to paint a picture for us. There's detail in this story designed to tell us something, something we ought not to be dismissive of this morning. It tells us how completely Jacob's life had fallen apart.

The context of course is the aftermath of blessing, and we talked about that before. And far from reaching any benefits of the blessing, the opposite is true. Jacob finds himself on the run. He's a fugitive, really. Jacob is without his father's love, and without any contact with his own mother. Jacob is on the run for his life.

The promise of blessing that he was to be the head of the clan, that he would get an inheritance, that God would work with him and for him, that God would bless him, is not there. His life is all but falling apart. The last detail we should notice is this: the place where the story says the sun had set. The writer wants us to notice that this external darkness is symbolic of a darkness that lurks within Jacob's own character. It was kind of like the sun setting in his life.

Heaven, and more particularly, the blessings of heaven had shut down on him. Heaven was literally a closed door for him. Jacob, we can say is not in a good place, and maybe you can identify with him this morning. Times in your own life when God seems distant, remote, nothing like the God that he had grown up with, not the God that he'd learned about from his parents while living in Isaac's tents, while under the watchful eye of his mother, Rebecca. Now, as was the case with all the other patriarchs, with Abraham and Isaac, there were very real ways that God engaged with them.

In another generation, Abraham, his great grandfather, he had actually met with God. So Abraham didn't just believe in God, but he had met with Him, talked with Him. Even his wife, Sarah, had met the Lord. You might remember the story of the three visitors who came to their tent. God appeared and had spoken to them.

Jacob's own father, Isaac, in chapter 28 had actually met with God in verses 2 and 23. The Lord appeared to him and spoke to him is what we can read. Both Isaac and Rebecca knew their sons were children of the promise of God, and they were a sure sign of God's faithfulness to His covenant promises. Clearly, Esau and Jacob came under the influence of their own parents. But it seems that at least in this time of their lives, neither son knew the Lord, neither had ever heard from the Lord, or met with Him, encountered Him in a personal, in a relational way.

And so now, in the aftermath of his trickery, his stealing, his cheating, and everything else he'd done wrong, common sense would tell you that if Jacob had never encountered God before, it was certainly not going to happen now. You see, heaven was closed to Jacob. And besides, you don't see Jacob on his knees crying out to God, praying to God. You don't see Jacob asking for mercy. You don't see him saying, "Lord, please help me.

Where are you? I'm in a dark place." Nothing like that. But then, Jacob has a dream, and the dream changes everything. Starting in verse 12, he had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

He saw three things and he heard three things. The first thing he saw was a stairway, and that's a good translation of this Hebrew word. Some of you may know of an older translation. Traditionally, this has been called Jacob's ladder. But the original Hebrew word is literally the word for stairs.

For us, a ladder is a narrow thing that only one person can go up one at a time. But this Hebrew word indicates a grand staircase that could accommodate lots of people. And what Jacob saw then was something huge. This staircase stretched from earth to heaven. It touched both.

The bottom actually touched the earth, and the top actually reached into heaven. And as he looked at that staircase, he saw angels ascending and descending. It was a huge thing. And therefore, he might have seen dozens or hundreds or thousands of angels. It would have been a stunning sight.

First, he saw the stairway, then he saw the angels. Now, what are angels? Well, if you'd please for a second, don't think about Hollywood's version of angels. Don't even think about nineteenth to twentieth century artistic portrayals of angels, like the poor angel in the graphic that we're using to promote the series on Jacob, that is a human-like individual with wings and all. And don't think about television shows depicting angels, kind and gentle and generous human beings.

Whenever a real angel shows up in the Bible, the angel has to say, "Fear not." And obviously, there's something frightening about angels, something completely overwhelming about angels. But when the angels in the television shows show up, they're likely to say, "Oh yes, I'm an angel. Can't you see the halo behind me or the halo on my head?" The word angel coming to us from the scriptures is a word that means herald.

That is to say they are individuals created by God to make announcements, to bring messages, royal messages from the majesty of God. One commentator says, angels are royal heralds and attendants that flow into the world carrying out and executing the declarations and decrees of the king. Angels ascending and descending means God's royal power is on the move. There are messengers and messages going up from heaven down to earth, and going up from earth to heaven. Messengers coming and going, going out into all parts of the world.

And on that stairway, Jacob sees this royal power of God at work. The holy majesty of God, and angels coming out of the very throne room of God and going all over the world. It's a bit like the human heart pumping out angels, and then bringing them back in again. Only this is telling us something about the heart of God. And the third thing he sees is this, verse 13.

There above it stood the Lord. And now, you have another translation, it can read there, beside him stood the Lord. And the translators of the ESV, the version we use in this church, and the NIV have added a footnote at the bottom of the page in order to help us understand what's going on. There is a question, you see, whether the text is saying the Lord stood over the stairway, meaning the staircase, which would mean that He would be at the top, or whether it's better to translate it as the Lord stood beside him, as Jacob lay there on the ground asleep. And again, I go with the commentator who said that what this means is that Jacob has God literally with him on the ground, with His two feet on the ground.

What he saw was the Lord descending on the stairway, and then coming to stand right over him. It's the posture of intimacy, of warmth. And the Lord said exactly what he needed to hear. Graciously, the Lord restates the covenant promises once given to Abraham, Isaac, and now to Jacob. The blessings are clearly listed there.

The land, the descendants, the fact that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him, and He'll give you and your clan the promises of the messianic seed, even the Messiah Himself. Jacob hears it. He hears it not from his own father, but from the Lord Himself. But remember this, if you will, Jacob is alone here without any friends. You know, the only person who befriended him was his mother, Rebecca.

Was he ever going to see her again? But the Lord says two times in these verses, I am. I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go. And this is long before God had revealed Himself as the great I am when He spoke to Moses in the burning bush, further on in Exodus 3.

Here, the Lord says, I am. I am. I will not leave you nor forsake you until I've done all that I have promised you. So God is assuring Jacob that He will go with him, that He'll take care of him, prosper him, and one day bring him back to his homeland. And it's exactly what Jacob needed to hear at this time in his life. Just when it looks like the promised blessings could never ever happen, Jacob hears it.

Now, what does this mean? This dream tells Jacob that his ideas about heaven were wrong, that heaven is open, that God is there, that He's always there, and that He's involved in all the events of Jacob's life. Jacob, a man just like you and me, we can often feel that God is distant, that He's far off, and that everything and anything that's happening to us down here is just tragic, just plain wrong, and random, and it's awful, and God doesn't care, and God's not involved. Is that right?

The dream of Jacob says all that is not true. God's royal power is on the move. He's out there. He's present. He's working.

He's everywhere, and His kingship is flowing out into the world, and He's working all things out for His good purposes. Just as He says He would, He'll bring about justice and peace, even if we have to wait till the end of history. And He's doing it, and we just can't see it. You see, just for a second or so, Jacob has the veil removed. It's like scales fall from his eyes, and he sees what is really going on.

The Lord God is everywhere, all over the place, roaming throughout all the earth. God says, my kingdom and my power are everywhere. I'm not distant, I'm not unconcerned, and I'm not uninvolved. What this is saying is, think of those who suffer from COVID-19, think of those who mourn the deaths of loved ones without even having said goodbye to them, dying in nursing homes, families torn apart because of the disease. Why?

Why all these restrictions even for us in worship? God, are you there? How do we make sense of it? And the answer is, I am. I am the great I am.

I am with you. But thinking that way can happen to any one of us, can't it? It's the struggle, it's the battle that we have in life. But it doesn't mean for a moment that God is not working. What Jacob sees is heaven opened, and this is amazing.

And when Jacob wakes up, what does he say? "Wow. That was great. That was very cool." No.

He says, "I'm afraid. Very afraid." He says the translators have rendered it this way, "How awesome is this place." But this is not awesome as in, "Wow, this is wonderful. I think I'll have another one of those."

No. The old King James translates it this way, "How dreadful is this place? How scary is this place? I am trembling." And you know why?

Whenever angels appear in scripture, they always refer to the holy royal majesty of God. Remember Isaiah in his commissioning, Isaiah chapter 6. Isaiah goes into the temple and sees God high and lifted up, and he sees angels all around, and he feels like his life is falling apart. He can only cry out, "Woe is me. I am ruined.

I'm a man of unclean lips." And yet here, Jacob has not asked for God. He hasn't called out to God. He hasn't repented, but God has come right to him. God is standing there right over him.

God has revealed Himself to Jacob as the great I am, and He gives words of love and assurance. And look, all the promises that He gives to Jacob are the same ones He gave to his father Isaac, and his father before him Abraham, and these promises are absolutely unconditional. I will do it, says the Lord God. Isn't that amazing when you think about it? Because Jacob has hit rock bottom.

He's in a nowhere place with nothing and no one to comfort him. He's done the worst things possible, and his life is falling apart, and yet, from heaven at least, there's not even a word of condemnation. How could this be the same holy God that Isaiah meets in Isaiah chapter 6? Well, Jacob wakes up and he quite literally asks the question, "How come I'm still alive?" Essentially, is what he says, and it's a good question.

Heaven is open, and Jacob must wonder, and we must wonder. And Jacob says, "This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven." What is he talking about here? What is this house of God?

And what is this gate of heaven? Well, the place, the pillow have all become sacred because as far as Jacob could understand, this is where God lives. This is where God dwells, and he'd seen it even in his mind's eye. But since he is in a literal nowhere place, and if God can come here, well then He must come everywhere. This is the house of God and the whole earth is literally the dwelling place of God.

And Jacob says he's seen the gate, the stairs providing access to God. He saw the Lord even who stands over him, even heaven itself. Now, we should be thinking context here in terms of what's actually going on and what's already happened in history earlier on in the book of Genesis, but also even prior to that. Here, I'm thinking of Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. It says there, way back in Genesis 11, "Come, let's build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens.

The top they thought would literally reach into heaven." Very similar, very similar description to the stairway that Jacob now sees. The Tower of Babel, you see, wasn't just a tower. It was known as a ziggurat, and I trust you all know what a ziggurat is. Well, to be honest, I didn't know until I googled it.

In 2011, Regina and I went on long service leave, and we saw pyramids like this in Egypt. We were blessed. We had a period of long service leave, and I don't doubt that if you haven't had the good fortune to have gone there yourself, you'll have seen and heard about pyramids in books and in magazines. The Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for over three thousand years. These pyramids predate Abraham. And you know that Abraham went to Egypt before he settled in Canaan.

There's no doubt that Abraham was influenced by what he had seen in Egypt. Today, all that visibly remains are the underlying steps, the pyramid core, the structures that we see today. These pyramids tell the story of an Egyptian culture, a culture that was preoccupied with the afterlife. And the one thing you notice is their influence extends far and wide. In Jordan today, there are tombs like these that were marked with steps.

And if you look closely at the photograph, you can identify steps on top of the tomb. These are sacred places. You count six steps, and the seventh step was the step that was to be taken by those who had died to literally go into heaven itself. A ziggurat was a temple in the form of a pyramid, and up the side of the pyramid was a stone stairway into heaven. You see then, they were not just building a tower in the Tower of Babel, they were building a stairway to heaven.

And this was a place where everyone came to ascend to the gods. This is where you brought your sacrifices, where you did your rites of purification, where you said your prayers, where you ascended to the gods, you literally went up to meet with them. And you did that so that in a curious way, you could compel the gods, or strain the gods to cause them to bless you, and make you attractive to them, so that you would get answers to your prayers. These came to be very important places. And now, you begin to see why Jacob was so astounded, why it was so awesome to him.

He must have been thinking, this is the true gateway into heaven, one that really works, because every other temple was just a stairway from earth to heaven. It was built by human beings, a place where they could ascend to the gods. But here is a stairway from heaven itself, a stairway chosen by God, a stairway that is the way of grace, no less. It is not a way to ascend up to God and get blessing. It's a stairway from God chosen by God according to His free grace, where God comes down to the nowhere places on earth, and into the lives of nowhere men and women, young people, boys and girls, to messed-up people, and He'll do it by grace.

He takes the initiative to come down to you and to me. We don't go to Him. And He stands right over you and gives you unconditional love. Now, this is absolutely different to any other religion that was ever conceived and still is even today. But it still doesn't answer our question, does it?

We've got this problem. What's the problem? And simply this: how could a holy God do this? That is to say, meet with Jacob and bless this guy Jacob. We've been saying, Jacob is the guy who stole his brother's birthright.

He deceived his father, tricked his brother. I mentioned earlier, the driver in the shopping centre car park who never left a note, or the guy who tried to rip us off on Gumtree. That is Jacob, or the twenty-first century equivalent. Jacob could be described as a shallow, hollow person. So how could a holy God reach out to such a man?

And the answer is, many centuries later, in John chapter 1, a little passage I think you will never understand unless you link it up here with Genesis 28. Verses 43 to 51 from John 1, the passage that brother John read to us earlier this morning. There's this guy named Nathaniel, and Nathaniel has a friend named Philip. And one day, Philip came to him and says, "Nathaniel, we found the Messiah. We found the Messiah, the liberator, Jesus of Nazareth."

And Nathaniel says, "Nazareth?" And he's thinking, "God doesn't come down to the nowhere places on earth, places like Nazareth. You gotta be kidding." And Philip says, "Come and see." And so, they're walking towards Jesus.

And Jesus says to Nathaniel coming and says, "Hail, hello, or behold, I see an honest man." And Nathaniel replies, "Yeah, all my friends say that. What you see is what you get, that is me. But how do you know me?" And Jesus says, "Know you?

I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip even called you." With that comment, Nathaniel is absolutely blown away. And he says, "Rabbi, you are the son of God. You are the king of Israel." Now here, what is so interesting about this is we have no idea what Nathaniel was doing under that fig tree.

We don't know what Jesus actually saw. We don't know what Nathaniel was thinking or doing under that fig tree. But whatever it was, it was so significant that Jesus mentions it and He said, "I saw you." And that blew Nathaniel away. He had no more doubts about who the man was in front of him.

He looked at Jesus and said, "You are the one. You are the promised Messiah." And here's what Jesus says in reply, and it gives me goosebumps to read this. "You believe because I told you and I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that.

And then He added, I tell you the truth. You shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man." What Jesus is saying is, "Nathaniel, listen up. I am the stairway that Jacob saw. I am the link between heaven and earth.

I am the gate of heaven." And that answers our question this morning. How could Jacob see the holy God and live? How could a holy God come down? Why wasn't Jacob as good as dead? Jesus, son of God, son of man became for us the stairway to heaven, the gate to heaven.

Jesus does not say, "You will see angels ascending and descending to the son of man." It's not like Jesus is standing on top of the stairway. What are the steps? The steps are requirements, steps to God. Every religion has them.

You know, the five pillars of Islam. Each one of them, a step to God. Or even the ten commandments of Judaism, steps to God. Or the eightfold path of Buddhism, the path to enlightenment. They are basically all steps to God.

There are steps. Now, go for it. Make heaven your goal. Is Jesus saying that? No.

I don't think so. Jesus is saying, "You see angels ascending and descending on the son of man." What does that mean? It means that He is the steps. Every other religion has steps and it's something for us to do.

But we have the real steps. The same steps that Jacob saw. The real steps that Jesus identifies to Nathaniel. He is the real gate of heaven, and it is a person. A person who fulfilled all the requirements between earth and heaven.

He is the steps. He lived the life that you and I should have lived. He died the death and took the penalty that we should have taken, and He did it. And today, I can declare that if you know Jesus, if you've encountered Him, you will see heaven open. Jesus says, "I didn't come to start another religion.

I didn't come to create steps. I came to be the steps. I didn't come to show you the stairway. I came to be the stairway." And you will see angels ascending and descending on the son of man.

I am the link between heaven and earth. Heaven and earth intersect over my dead and resurrected body. Jesus is saying, the royal power of God, the angels moving up and down in the world and in heaven happen over Him because of Him. He makes it possible. What that means is that only Christianity can tell us about the God who came down and suffered.

He suffered injustice and tragedy, lonely, apparently senseless things. He suffered them all. He suffered on the cross. And that means that when you and I are caught up in the brokenness of this world, when we too suffer injustice, and our own lives seem so completely miserable, God is working. He's busy through the troubles that we encounter.

Like Jacob, we can easily become so wasted, destitute. But with Jesus, we have this indestructible permanent link with God, with heaven itself. We know where our destiny truly is and we are never alone. It's the way of blessing. And clearly, Jacob needed to hear that.

And God gave it to him. And that's the reason God can speak blessing into Jacob's life. Jacob, who was asleep when it happened. He wasn't even looking for this. He wasn't there praying or crying out to God.

He wasn't even on the first rung of the first step leading up into heaven. No. No. It was all of grace. It was all the wonder of God's mercy, and God wants you and me to be there too, to give you what He gave to Jacob, grace and mercy.

The sure knowledge of knowing that we have Jesus as our stairway into heaven now and always. Amen. Let's respond by praying together. Shall we pray? Father in heaven, we ask now that You help us to know You as You truly are.

Come looking for us, Lord, we pray, in the dark places of our lives and show us Jesus. Show us that He is the way to You through the cross of Calvary, the cross that is all of Your grace and mercy to us. Help us each one to freely admit how much You love us, how much You want us to grasp more and more of the gospel of grace in our lives. And as we've been singing, we pray that that will change us. Change our hearts, our attitudes, and behaviours as well.

Help us to know the relief and the sheer confidence that floods into our lives when we confess all our needs and our sins and our shortcomings before You. Help us to live in the strength of it and so praise You now and always. And this we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.