God Sent a Stairway

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In an evening service like that, like we're doing tonight, it probably would not do well for me to ask you to take out your Bibles because you won't be able to read them.
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So I'm gonna encourage you to listen as I read the text to you.
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And I'm going to simply say this, one of my favorite things to do is to preach Jesus from the Old Testament.
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And the reason why is because the Bible is a pretty large book.
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It's 66 different books all bound together.
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It was written over a 1,500 year period of time.
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It was written by over 40 different authors.
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It was written in three different languages.
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And yet it all tells one message.
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The message of the Bible is very simple.
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It goes from creation to fall, to redemption, and to consummation.
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Now we are at the third point of that particular outline, if you would outline the Bible that way.
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God created man, man fell into sin, and then God did the work of redemption.
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Redemption is not something that we do for ourselves, but redemption is a work that God does on our behalf.
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And we become the beneficiaries of his work of redemption.
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We don't cause it to happen.
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We don't will it to happen.
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And we certainly cannot purchase it.
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It is something that God does.
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And so we have creation, fall, redemption, and we look forward to consummation.
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That is the end of all things when the Bible says in the last moment, God will be all in all.
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So when I talk about Jesus tonight, I could go to the New Testament.
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We could talk about the virgin birth.
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We could talk about the baby in the manger in Bethlehem.
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We could go to Matthew's gospel.
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We could go to Luke's gospel.
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We could go to John's gospel.
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But I want to remind you that Jesus is all through the Bible, because this big book that we have of 66 books, 39 of those were written before Jesus was born, but every single one of them points to the coming of Jesus.
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Every single one of them looks forward to the coming of the Messiah.
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This is why when Jesus came into the world, people were so ready to receive him in one way because they knew the Messiah was coming.
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If you remember in John chapter four, when Jesus met the woman at the well, she says, we know that Messiah is coming.
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It was something that was well understood and people were primed and ready for him to come.
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And he did come in the fullness of time, as we sang earlier.
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But what we're gonna look at tonight is we're gonna look at somewhat of an obscure passage from the Old Testament.
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I've been preaching through Genesis now for a few years.
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We are now at chapter 29.
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And it just so happens that this is the place I want to preach tonight.
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Now, many of you are guests tonight.
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You haven't heard the other two years of preaching.
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So if you wanna go back, it's all recorded.
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You can go spend the rest of this week listening to it.
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You don't have to hear all the previous sermons to understand tonight.
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Just understand tonight will in a sense stand on its own.
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And we're going to be reading the story of Jacob's ladder or better, I think in the Hebrew, Jacob's staircase or Jacob's stairwell.
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And so I'm gonna read the text to you.
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And then I'm going to move to John chapter one.
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And I'm gonna read a portion from John one.
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Both of the notes are on the board if you do wanna take note of the passages that I'm reading.
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So it says in Genesis chapter 28, verse 10, Jacob left Beersheba and went towards Haran.
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And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set.
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Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and laid down in that place to sleep.
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And he dreamed.
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And behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth.
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And at the top of it, it reached to heaven.
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And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
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And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord.
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And this is actually the sacred name of God.
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In Hebrew, it would be pronounced, some would say it would be pronounced Yahweh.
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He would say, I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac.
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The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your offspring.
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Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall spread abroad to the east and to the west and to the north and to the south.
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And in you and your offspring shall all of the families of the earth be blessed.
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Behold, I'm with you.
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And I will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised.
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Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, surely the Lord is in this place.
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I did not know it.
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And he was afraid.
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And he said, how awesome is this place? There is none other.
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This is none other than the house of God.
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And this is the gate of heaven.
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So early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head.
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He set it up for a pillar and he poured oil on top of it.
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And he called the name of that place Bethel.
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The word Bethel means house of God.
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But the name of the city was Luz at the first.
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Then Jacob made a vow saying, if God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go and will give me the bread to eat and the clothing to wear so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God and this stone which I have set up as a pillar shall be God's house.
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And all that you give me, I will give you a full 10th.
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And now over to John chapter one.
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In John chapter one, verse 43.
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The next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee and he found Philip and said to him, follow me.
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Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.
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Philip found Nathanael and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses and the law and all the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
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Nathanael said to him, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him, come and see.
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Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said to him, behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no deceit.
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Nathanael said to him, how do you know me? Jesus answered him, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.
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Nathanael answered him, rabbi, you are the son of God.
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You are the king of Israel.
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Jesus answered him, because I told you, I saw you under the fig tree, do you believe? You will see greater things than these.
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And he said to him, truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man.
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Let us pray.
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Father, as I seek to give an understanding of this text, I pray that you would keep me from error.
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For oh God, I am a fallible man and capable of preaching error.
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And for the sake of your name and for the sake of my conscience and for the sake of those who would hear me, I pray that you would keep me from that.
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I pray also, Lord, that you would open up eyes and ears, but more importantly, Lord, that you would open up hearts.
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Lord, I know that anytime we have a group this size come in, that certainly there are those who have not bowed the knee to Jesus Christ.
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They have not seen him as the only savior of the world, the only bridge between God and man.
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And so tonight I pray that what I preach will be understandable, what I preach will be practical, but most importantly, Lord, what I preach would be convicting to the soul.
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But Lord, only your spirit can do that.
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So I pray this by the power of the spirit through the name of your son, amen.
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As I said, I like to preach Jesus from the Old Testament.
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And there are different ways to do that.
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One of the ways that we preach Jesus from the Old Testament is through what is called messianic prophecy.
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Those are specific prophecies about Jesus that point forward to Jesus.
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For instance, the Bible tells us in the Old Testament that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, and Jesus was born in Bethlehem.
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The Bible tells us in the Old Testament that Jesus would be born of a virgin, and Jesus was born of a virgin.
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And those are what we call messianic prophecies.
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They point forward to Jesus, specifically saying things about his life, death, burial, and resurrection, and all of those things are found within the Old Testament.
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And then we have actual appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Old Testament.
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In Isaiah chapter six, the Bible says, Isaiah saw the Lord seated upon his throne, high and lifted up.
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And if you go to John chapter 12, John tells us that that was Jesus, that Isaiah saw Jesus in his vision in Isaiah chapter six.
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So we know that not only do we have messianic prophecy that tells us about Jesus, we have actual appearances, pre-incarnate appearances of the Lord Jesus Christ which occur in the Old Testament.
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But one of my favorite ways to see Jesus in the Old Testament is through what are called types and shadows.
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Types and shadows are pictures given in the Old Testament which have a fulfillment in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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An example would be the sacrifices which were made in the temple.
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Every one of those sacrifices pointed forward to the greater sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Every time an animal was killed, in fact, when was the first animal killed in the Bible? In Genesis, early in Genesis, when Adam and Eve sinned, it says they were naked.
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And whenever they sinned, they realized they were naked and they were ashamed.
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And the Bible says God covered them in animal skins.
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Well, you don't get animal skins from nowhere.
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You get animal skins from dead animals.
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And so the first time we see the slaying of animals for the purpose of sacrifice is when God made skins to give Adam and Eve clothes.
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And that sacrifice pointed forward to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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And then we see other pictures in the Old Testament that point forward to Jesus.
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The priesthood points forward to Jesus Christ.
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The Bible says Jesus is our great high priest.
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So all of the priests of the Old Testament looked forward to the coming of Christ who was the fulfillment of the priesthood and the final great high priest.
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We don't need any other.
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By the way, you don't need a priest today.
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I'm not a priest.
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I don't intercede for you with the Father.
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Jesus Christ intercedes with you for the Father.
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The Bible says there's one God and one mediator or intercessor between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.
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So we see Jesus fulfills that priesthood.
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And on and on through the Old Testament.
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A few months ago, I preached about the time Abraham went to offer up his son on Mount Moriah.
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And you remember what happened when he took that knife and he was ready to slay his son and God called, stop.
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And he looked and he saw what? He saw a ram caught in the thicket and that ram pictured the Lord Jesus Christ because he would now substitute for Isaac as the sacrifice in the same way the Lord Jesus Christ substitutes on the cross for our sin as our sacrifice.
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The ram points to Jesus.
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And so all throughout the Old Testament, we see these pictures.
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We see these signs, these shadows that all have their substance in Jesus.
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Colossians actually tells us that.
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It tells us that these are shadows of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.
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Well, tonight, I wanna share with you that I believe that when we read Genesis chapter 28 and Jacob sees this stairway which leads to heaven.
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I always think about the great title for the sermon.
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Not gonna call it that.
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But we, Jesus, or Jacob sees this stairway that leads up into the heavens in his dream.
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And we have to wonder, what is that all about? Jacob, of course, is the grandson of Abraham.
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Abraham was given a promise by God.
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He was given a covenant.
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A covenant is like a contract, but more so than a contract, it is a covenant promise from God which cannot be broken.
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And God made the promise to Abraham that through his seed, all the world would be blessed.
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And God reaffirmed that promise with his son Isaac.
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And then God is about to reaffirm that same promise with Jacob.
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Jacob is fleeing his brother Esau.
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Esau wants to kill him because he has stolen Esau's birthright.
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His mother sends him away to her family so that he can find a wife.
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And so he's running away from death.
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He's running away from his family.
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He's trying to find a wife that his mother sends him to find.
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And on his way to his uncle's house, he makes camp at a little place called Luz.
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Some pronounce it Luz, it doesn't really matter, but it's a nowhere place.
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In fact, if you read Genesis 28 again sometime this week, maybe you'll read it again, you'll notice that it doesn't even give the name of the place until the very end of the chapter.
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It just calls it the place, the place, the place, the place.
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Finally, at the end, it says, oh, and it has a name.
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The name was Luz.
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But we have this place where Jacob lays down to sleep.
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He takes a stone, he puts it under his head, which I'm sure was very comfortable.
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He didn't know the MyPillow guy, apparently.
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So he just took a stone, made himself a head rest, and he went to sleep.
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And the Bible says when he fell asleep, God gave him a vision.
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And the vision was that of a stairwell.
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Now, the ESV, which is what I preach from, says it was a ladder.
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Some translations say a stairwell.
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And here's the thing that I want you to think about.
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Now, if you remember way back to Genesis 11, there was a group of people who tried to make a tower to heaven.
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Remember the name of that tower? The Tower of Babel or Babel, however you wanna pronounce it, right? And that tower had one intention, to reach the heavens so that man could make a name for himself.
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And what we find when we look historically and archeologically about that, is that that tower actually would have looked like one of those old ziggurats that they now unearth in many places around the world.
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And a ziggurat is sort of like a pyramid.
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And they have steps all around that go all the way up so that the people could go up high into the sky, as it were, and make their sacrifices.
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Men tried to make a tower to God and God laughed him to scorn and separated him and confused him so that he could not accomplish what he set out to do.
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That's Genesis 11.
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You see, we cannot reach God by our own effort.
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That's the meaning of the Tower of Babel.
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We can't do it.
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But Jacob laid his head down on a stone and God showed him a vision of a different tower, of a different stairwell, one made by God.
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And Jacob saw that this tower did provide intercourse between heaven and earth.
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It provided a place for angels to go up and come down.
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And by the way, that's why I don't think it's a ladder.
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Mike, you're a painter.
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You ever try to go up a ladder while somebody else came down? Kind of difficult, isn't it? So I don't think it was a ladder.
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I think it was a tower.
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I think it was a stair-filled tower where the angels of God were taking back and forth the intercourse of heaven and earth.
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And Jacob sees this picture and he says, God is up there and I am down here.
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It says the Lord was up there.
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Now there are some translations that say the Lord was beside him.
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And if time allowed me tonight, y'all know I would do this.
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I would go into all the different reasons why I disagree or agree or whatever.
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I'm just gonna say, I do think in one sense, the Lord is there and Jacob's here because there's a reason for the ladder.
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It's to bring the two together.
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You see, Jacob has to this point not declare God to be his God.
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Up until this point, the God that he knew was only the God of his father.
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Go back and look at what Jacob calls God in the previous chapters, the God of my father.
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But now he's going to become his God.
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Jacob sees this ladder, this statue, this stairwell between him and God.
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And he sees that that creates a path for the two to come together, where he has been separate from God.
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God has now given him this great and wonderful bridge.
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That is the tower or the ladder or the stairwell of Jacob.
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And the angels of God ascended and descended.
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Now, when we go to chapter one of John, Jesus meets a man named Nathanael.
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And Nathanael, according to Jesus' own words, is a man with whom there was no deceit.
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He was a man, I think the King James says, without guile.
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He was a noble Israelite.
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And Jesus says, I know you.
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I saw you under the fig tree earlier.
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And Nathanael has a little moment.
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He says, you must be the son of God.
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How would you know I was under the fig tree? How could you know that? Because Nathanael had apparently been by himself.
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It wasn't as if Jesus was walking down the road, saw Nathanael praying under a fig tree, and he says, oh, I saw you.
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No, Jesus had seen him through that divine understanding that he had.
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And he knew that Nathanael was actually contemplating the Lord.
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And you say, well, how do you know that? One of the things that is very common when we look into the old literature is that the Israelites would go under the fig trees as a place of meditation.
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So Nathanael was meditating.
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And I'd like to think that perhaps.
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Perhaps Nathanael was meditating.
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On this passage in Genesis.
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Because Jesus points to this passage.
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And he says, you believe in me because I tell you that you were under the fig tree.
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I tell you, you are gonna see greater things than this.
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You are going to see angels ascending and descending on the son of man.
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Now, who is the son of man? It's Jesus.
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Jesus identifies himself as the son of man.
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Why, by the way? You know why Jesus calls himself the son of man? Because that was the designation that the prophet Daniel gave to the Messiah.
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Daniel called the Messiah the son of man.
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And so Jesus identified himself as the son of man.
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And when he said to Nathanael, you will see angels ascending and descending upon the son of man.
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What I believe he was saying to Nathanael is I am Jacob's stairwell.
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I am the bridge between God and man.
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And you will see through the gospel people coming to God through me.
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You will see the bridge from heaven and earth.
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And he is standing right in front of you.
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On a trip overseas, there was a Lutheran pastor who recounted seeing a banner hung from the ceiling of a church.
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And the banner simply said this.
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It said the crib and the cross were both made of wood.
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Now that may seem like a simple banner, and it certainly isn't meant to be.
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Too hard or difficult to understand.
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But what it was meant to remind the people of that church is that God provided two trees for his son.
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One tree was made into a manger and received him into the world.
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The other tree was formed into a cross and received him up for redemption.
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And at Christmas.
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We often think about the first one, we think about the manger, we think about that.
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Jesus comes into the world.
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But the manger resides in the shadow of the cross.
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Jesus did not come just to live a perfect life.
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He came to die a substitutionary death so that he could make the way for us to be in relationship with God.
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You see, the Bible says we have been separated from God because of our sin.
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But Jesus Christ came into the world to receive in himself the punishment for our sin, that we could become the sons of God, sons and daughters of God through him.
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He is the bridge.
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He is the stairwell.
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If you walk out into our narthex and I encourage you to do this, if you walk out into our narthex as you leave.
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And by the way, that's the four year.
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Some people laugh at me because I use old terms, but that room out there, if you walk out into the narthex.
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Turn.
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And you will see a painting on that painting.
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And by the way, that painting used to hang in a mission downtown.
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It ended up coming off the wall, being put into storage, and it was in storage for a long time.
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And one of my friends called me one day.
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He says, I have this beautiful painting from used to hang at the mission.
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He said, I think you will like it.
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And he brought it to me and he showed it to me, and I loved it.
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And I showed it to the elders.
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I said, I want to hang this as prominent as we can.
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Because what it is, it's a picture of a multitude of people painted on this painting.
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And many of them are going into hell.
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But there are some.
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Who are going across a bridge.
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To a city on a hill.
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Which bears the light of God.
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And the bridge is in the shape of a cross.
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Jesus came into this world to save sinners.
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And he did it.
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By dying on the cross for our sins.
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If you're here tonight and you're a believer, when you celebrate Christmas.
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You don't just celebrate the birth of a baby.
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You celebrate the birthday of the king who came into the world to save you.
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And if you're not a believer, understand this.
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There's only one bridge.
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There's only one stairwell.
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There's only one way.
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Jesus Christ said this.
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He said, I am the way and the truth and the life.
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And no one comes to the father.
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Except through me.
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Let us pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for your truth.
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And I thank you for the great picture that we have in this text.
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The picture of the bridge between heaven and earth, who is our Lord Jesus.
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And I thank you, God, for him.
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Lord, as we draw to a close now, bless us as we sing.
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And Lord, if there are those here who don't know you, Lord, let it be that this be the moment that you might even through your spirit draw men and women to yourself.
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And Lord, if there are those with questions, I pray that they would not be afraid to ask.
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If there are those who who want to know more, Lord, that our elders are available to them and Lord, give us wise words and give us ears to hear.
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We pray this in Jesus name.
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Amen.