Themes From Genesis with R. C. Sproul, “Jacob’s Ladder,” 10

Jacob’s Dream as a Turning Point in Genesis

In this segment of our study of the book of Genesis, we're going to consider an episode that takes place in the life of Jacob. It's one of those moments in a man's personal history that is pivotal for not only his future, but for the whole future of the nation of Israel and for the Christian world.

One of the things I find when I look back at the portraits of the heroes of the Old Testament is that they tend to be for us bigger than life, epic heroes, beyond our comprehension. When I think for a minute of David, for example, of his strength, of his brilliance as an organizer and administrator and as a military strategist, we think of a man who takes a third-rate nation and extends the boundaries from Dan to Beersheba and turns that tiny little nation in the Fertile Crescent into a major world power in the ancient world.

Couple that with his artistic gifts, and we say, how could I ever be like David? Or even Abraham, whom we've already studied in this series in Genesis, a man who was called a friend of God, the father of all the faithful.

What God asked him to do in his old age, to leave everything that was precious to him, all his security in his homeland, to venture out into a place where he knew not where he was going, just on the basis of a promise of a strange God.

That kind of faith is in its sense almost unreal to me. I can't really identify it. But when we look at Jacob, here's a figure that I think we can all identify with. He is real. He's flesh and blood. He's the kind of man like we are.

I remember the words of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, who when everybody else was complaining about the corruption that had grasped nineteenth-century European culture and were bemoaning the loss of excellence in the arts and in religion and in science that had set in a kind of cultural malaise in Europe, Kierkegaard made the statement, he said, my complaint is not that this age is wicked or decadent.

My complaint is that our age is paltry. It lacks passion. And then he said, that's what drives me to go back to the Old Testament to read about real people, people of flesh and blood. He said, look at the characters in the Old Testament.

They lie, they cheat, they steal, they commit adultery. They're real. They're not plastic saints I can identify. Well, if there's any character in the Old Testament that would embody all of those vices, it would be this man Jacob.

He was a man whose very name, Jacob, means supplanter because his life was basically a life of dishonesty, a life of fraud. Here was a man who was destined to participate in one of the most rich inheritances in all of human history, and he wasn't satisfied with it.

He had to connive and in a fraudulent way virtually steal his brother's portion of the birthright and of the inheritance, and his life is a life of sheer corruption from beginning to end. Well, we pick up the story of Jacob in the 28th chapter of Genesis in, as I said, this moment of crisis that takes place in his life.

His father had called him to himself, and he said, son, I want you to carry on the faith of my father Abraham and to keep it pure, and of course at this point Jacob had no interest whatsoever in the covenant promises that were given to Abraham, but he said, I don't want you intermarrying with the pagans here in this Canaanite culture.

I'm going to send you back to our homeland, and I want you to go there and find a wife. And so Jacob departs to go back to Mesopotamia to find himself a wife, and we read here in the 28th chapter beginning at verse 10,.

Then Jacob departed from Beersheba, and he went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set. Now this little editorial description of how it is that Jacob came to stop at this particular place I think has some significance.

The point the author is making is that there was no prearranged spot for Jacob to stop in the midst of his journey. It appears, at least on the surface, to be strictly fortuitous, strictly by accident that he happened to come to this particular place, the name of which isn't even mentioned in antiquity.

It just was marked by the fact that in his travels he reached the place as far as he could move until the sun had gone down, and once the sun had gone down it was time for Jacob to stop his journey, so he pitches his tent, or he doesn't even have a tent.

He stops his livestock, and he goes over and he finds a stone, and there in the middle of nowhere he lies down and he goes to sleep. Well what happens in a very real sense changes the course of human history.

He took one of the stones, put it under his head, and lay down in that place, and he had a dream, and behold a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and behold the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

Jacob’s Ladder and the Bridge Between Heaven and Earth

And when I was a little child, we would go to vacation Bible school in the church, and they would teach us songs in this environment, and one of the songs that we used to sing had come from the Annals of Negro Spirituals, and you remember the song.

What was the name of the song, Jim? Jacob's Ladder, and we would sing that over and over again. We are climbing Jacob's Ladder. You know, every round goes higher, higher, soldiers of the cross, and I never really understood what the theme of that song was.

I just liked the melody, and I liked the words. They were simple, and we used to enjoy singing it, but here is the historical context out of which the Negro Spiritualist was writing. This event in Jacob's life where he goes to sleep, and in the night vision he has a dream, and he sees a ladder, or in the Hebrew a staircase that goes from the earth to heaven.

Now that ladder is indicating a point of contact, a way of passing over from this world to the world of transcendence, to the level where God exists. I want to just say something here parenthetically that in our modern culture, in terms of what has happened in the history of theoretical thought in the last two hundred years, we are living in the age of the greatest degree of skepticism about man's ability to ever learn or know anything beyond the confines of this terrestrial world.

That we have been told by secular philosophers and by the skeptics that our reason or our scientific inquiry or any legitimate means of knowledge is locked in to this time and to this place. In fact, that's the very meaning of secularism.

What the term secularism comes from is the Latin word saeculum, which means this time, this age, and behind it is the fundamental philosophy that man must live out his days in the here and now. There is an unbridgeable chasm between time and eternity, between this world and the world of God.

If there is a God, He is utterly unknowable. There's no way that we can bridge the gap from earth to heaven. In fact, secular man is divided between skepticism and agnosticism. The skeptic says, there is nothing up here.

There is no level of transcendence. There is no eternal dimension. There's only the here and the now. You hear it even in your commercials on television. You only go through life once, so you might as well do it with gusto.

When you're dead, you're dead. Here and down here are the absolute limits of finite human existence. I said the skeptics deny this altogether. The other group are agnostics who said, maybe there is something out there, but there's no way we can ever get in touch with it.

There's no way to bridge the gap between this world and the world out there. Now, we see the polls, we read the reports, and they tell us that still 95 of the masses of people in this nation believe in some kind of God, a nameless God usually, a faceless God, sort of a supreme being or a higher power or something greater than yourself.

But life is lived on this planet as if there were no God. And we've mentioned that earlier in this series that we experience a sense still of a kind of theoretical atheism, or excuse me, theoretical theism, but a practical atheism.

And that's tied into a very important reality that is part of daily life in our culture. Modern man lives in an environment where he senses a profound absence of God. We are not in tune to the everyday awareness of the presence of a living God.

Even people who believe in God tend to view God as remote, distantly removed from where we are right now. And sometimes we're frustrated when we read the Bible because as we read the Bible, particularly as we read in quick succession the books of the Old Testament following a Bible study path outline or something like that, where we often forget that literally hundreds and hundreds of years of history are compressed in those books.

They are telescoped together, and we forget that centuries are taking place between Abraham and David and between David and Amos and between Amos and Jesus. It all seems like it all sort of happened at the same time, and we sometimes get an impression that in Old Testament biblical history God was popping up in burning bushes every other Wednesday, and so that ancient man had this keen sense of the immediate presence and awareness of God.

But that's not the case. Certainly Jacob had sat around the campfires and heard the stories that his father had grandfather had told him about their extraordinary moments of encounter with God. But Jacob's life was like a twentieth-century man's life.

He had never seen God. There was no burning bush for Jacob. There was no pillar of cloud for Jacob, no voices coming out of the sky. He had a profound sense of the absence of God. He heard stories about God.

He was instructed in theology and in biblical history, but a personal encounter with a transcendent God was utterly foreign to him, just as it is for the vast majority of people who are living in our nation today.

That's why this night, this experience was so devastating to the man. Again, it was just a dream, but in that dream he saw the bridge from the transcendent realm to this world between heaven and earth, and he saw that ladder there.

And what did he see on the ladder? He saw the angels of God moving up and down, having access, transporting themselves between the heavenly dimension and the earthly dimension. He saw in his dream what was invisible to him in his earthly life.

Now you read about this ladder, and then throughout the rest of the Old Testament there's not a mention of it. In fact, I talked to a New Testament scholar, an Armenian scholar, just this past week, and I asked him about Jacob's Ladder, and the first thing he said was, Oh, yes, that's a hoppox.

I said, a hoppox? I said, it's not quite a hoppox. What's a hoppox? Well, it's a technical term in theology or in biblical studies that's the full phrase is hoppox legomena, which means a word or a phrase or a concept that occurs only once in the Bible.

And as soon as I mentioned Jacob's Ladder to this scholar, he said, Oh, yes, it's a hoppox. I said, No, it isn't a hoppox because it occurs a second time. And he said, Oh, yes, it is, didn't it? But not until centuries passed, and we get into the New Testament, into the very beginning moments of the gospel according to St. John.

Christ as the Incarnation of Jacob’s Ladder

You recall how the disciples had met Jesus, and they were thrilled because they were convinced that they had found the Messiah, and they go out, and Peter, you know, calls other friends and Andrew and James and John, the first group of disciples gather together.

And then Philip, who is one of the first of the disciples, goes and searches for his friend whose name was Nathanael, and everybody's all excited because they think they found the Messiah. And so Philip runs and tells Nathanael.

He said, Nathanael, we found the Messiah, but Nathanael wouldn't buy it. He was from Missouri. He said, You found the Messiah? Where did you find the Messiah? Where is He from? And they said, He's from Nazareth.

Remember what Nathanael said? Nazareth? Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Don't tell me you found a Messiah in Nazareth. That's like finding a Messiah in Jackson, Mississippi or something like that.

So Philip said, Okay. He said, Come and see. See for yourself. Don't take my word for it, Nathanael. You come and see. And as Nathanael approaches and Jesus sees him walking in the distance, do you remember what Jesus did?

He had never met Nathanael before, and He looks across the crowd and He says, Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile. Now you think it's strange for a Messiah to come out of Nazareth. How about a guileless person to come out of Israel?

He says, Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile, no deceitfulness. Here is a man of total integrity. And Nathanael is completely wiped out. He said, How do you know me? And Jesus said, While you were under the sycamore tree, I saw you or I knew you.

I mean Jesus wasn't anywhere near there, but He saw him supernaturally. And Nathanael is overwhelmed by this power of Jesus to penetrate his own personality. Well, Jesus wasn't an entertainer like Al Jolson, but it's almost as if He borrows a line from Al Jolson when He says, Nathanael, you're impressed because I said, Behold an Israelite in whom there is no guile.

You ain't seen nothing yet. I tell you that the day will come when you will see the heavens open and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. What was Jesus saying? He's saying, You are going to see in person the incarnation of Jacob's ladder.

In me, Nathanael, you see the link, the bridge between heaven and earth. Heaven has come down. The bridge has been, or the gap has been bridged not because man raised himself up to heaven, but because heaven came down to earth, and here He is.

Here I am, the link, the bridge, the path, the ladder. You want to go to heaven, you climb me, Nathanael. That's my mission. You see, that's what modern man lacks is an understanding of Christ as God in the flesh, God incarnate, heaven come down into our very midst.

How is He introduced in the New Testament but what? Emmanuel, God with us. Now, you would think that an experience like that that Jacob has when God breaks into his life in the middle of the night would convert him on the spot.

I mean, if you had a dream like that, with that kind of intensity and that kind of vivacity that gripped your soul, how could you ever be the same person? But we really don't know the moment in Jacob's life when he was converted.

But most historians and Old Testament scholars agree that his conversion does not take place here in chapter 28. It doesn't take place until later in chapter 32, which is only four chapters later, but it's several years later, where again God meets Jacob in the night in the form of an angel, and there is a wrestling match, a titanic struggle that goes all night, a battle for the soul of this man until finally when the dawn breaks, the angel of God prevails upon Jacob and leaves Jacob crippled, and Jacob finally surrenders.

It's at that moment that the man is changed. It's at that moment that God changes his name and said, You are or have been Jacob, which as I said means supplanter. Now your name is what? Israel, which means one who wrestles or strives with God.

And then the promise of Abraham is renewed to Jacob that he would be the father of a great nation, and out of that nation comes the incarnation of Jacob's ladder. But consider it, that God encounters Jacob years before he's actually converted.

And in that meeting, as I move ahead in the text for a moment, in verse 14 God, or let me pick it up at verse 13, and behold the Lord God stood above this ladder and said, I am Yahweh, the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac, the land on which you lie, Jacob.

I will give it to you and to your descendants, and your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south. And in you and in your descendants shall all of the families of the earth be blessed.

And behold, I am with you, and I will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised to do. That's the kind of God that is revealed in this book, a God who commits Himself to us before we even surrender, a sovereign God, not who's playing hide and seek that we search high and low throughout the universe to find, but the God who is the hound of heaven, who pursues us, His covenant people, and chases us down and tracks us down.

He'll come in the night. He'll come in the day. He'll come in the city. He'll come in the country. That's the kind of God we're talking about. But what's Jacob's reaction? What happens to Jacob? Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, surely God is in this place, and I did not know it.

That's the experience of modern man. God is here. Christ is here. He has promised categorically that He would be here, that His presence would always be here. And we confess in our creeds that He is never absent from us, yet we live as if He were never present with us.

We like Jacob live as if God were remote and removed from our lives. But God Himself has promised to be in this place, and we don't know it. And Jacob exclaimed, how awesome is this place. This is Beatel.

This is Bethel. This is the house of God, and here is the gateway to heaven. And that place where that rock was put became in Jewish history one of the most important early central sanctuaries that was exceeded in importance in Jewish history only by one other city, Jerusalem.

Because in that place and in that time, that gap was bridged in the middle of the night, and one man, one man became aware of the reality of the presence of God. It was like Elisha. You remember when he was sleeping with his servant, and the enemy king sent out chariots by the hundreds to come to this little town of Dothan and to arrest Elisha and take him away.

And when the servant woke up in the morning, he looked out the window on the west side, and he saw and behold the whole area was surrounded by the chariots of the enemy. And he rushed to the other window, and he looked out there, and again nothing but enemy chariots into the north and to the south.

The whole city, the Assyrian army had come in force to capture one man. And so the servant runs up to Elisha, and he wakes up, and he said, Elisha, Elisha, the whole Assyrian army is down here to take us.

What are we going to do? And Elisha rubbed his eyes, and like Jesus getting up in the back of the boat on the Sea of Galilee, and he said, Relax, for those that are with us are more than those who are against us.

And so the servant says, Elisha, you haven't heard me. You haven't woken up yet. He said, you're daydreaming. He said, look, out there, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, you know, there's 10 ,000 chariots.

He says, there's only two of us, and Elisha prays, Lord, open his eyes that he may see. And behold, God opened the eyes of the servant of Elisha, took the scales away, removed the veil that hides the presence of the supernatural.

And what did he see? Behold, chariots of fire round about. For that one second, the servant was given the privilege to view the transcendence and the presence of God. That's what we need to cultivate.

The kind of spiritual discernment, not that we see physically, but that we understand that we live in a world where God is not absent, that God would give us the eyes to see His presence so that whether we're here or whether we're there or over there, we say in the morning, how awesome is this place?

God is here, and I knew it all the time.