Genesis 28
“Meeting God”

Stairways to heaven
In 1971, the year after I was born, Led Zeppelin released a song almost as long as American Pie, which came out in the same year, and even more incoherent. I won’t even begin to try and explain the lyrics, because I think the general consensus is that they’re not really capable of explanation - except to focus on the central image of the song, the image of the stairway up to heaven.

The basic idea of the song, as far as I can tell, is that there is a stairway, but it’s not the one that the lady in the song wants to buy with her money - it’s another stairway, one that lies on the whispering wind, and find it when you follow the music of the pied piper - the music that comes to you at last when all are one and one is all. And then there’s something about a bustle in the hedgerow and smoke-rings between the trees, and if you can explain those bits you were probably a bit older than I was back in 1971.

It’s a very late sixties, early seventies kind of song, isn’t it. The assumption is that there is some sort of heaven or nirvana or ultimate meaning, and that the path is not money and materialism but some sort of mysterious, mystical inner quest, some sort of progress of the soul in which we climb and grow and eventually arrive.

That’s the 1970s version of the image. A generation earlier there was the iconic song that Paul Robeson used to sing about Jacob’s ladder. Paul Robeson was a black American singer, one of the great bass baritones of his generation, as well as being a communist and a trade union organiser and a leader of the civil rights movement. He used to close his concerts with a song that he borrowed from the old Negro Spiritual tradition, and he’d ask the audience to join him as he sang: ‘We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, We are climbing Jacob’s ladder, We’re soldiers in this fight. Every rung goes higher and higher, Every rung goes higher and higher,’ and so on...

It’s an old, old image, and if we had time we could trace out a whole lot more versions of it from different sources over the centuries, all of them very different but all of them having in common that idea of the gradual progress of the soul, the gradual journey step by step through this life, up the ladder toward heaven. Sometimes it’s a mystical journey, a journey of enlightenment; sometimes it’s a moral journey - a journey of effort; sometimes it’s an aspirational journey - a journey of advancement and wealth and success. But always, in all the versions I’ve come across, it’s we who are climbing the ladder, it’s we who are ascending the stairway, and if we do the right things and we follow the right formula we can clim all the way and make it right up to the top.

Except for this version - except for this one, the original version back here in Genesis chapter 28. This is the original stairway to heaven, the original Jacob’s ladder, and in this version the point of the image is exactly the opposite of the way it’s used in all the other ones.

Meeting God at Bethel
Mixed Blessing (27:41 - 28:9)
The context is this story that we’ve been following over the last few weeks about Jacob and his brother Esau, and the quest and the struggle that Jacob goes through across the whole of his life to get hold of the promise, the blessing that God gave to his grandfather Abraham. God had said to Abraham when he first called him back in Genesis chapter 12, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. 2 I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Jacob is the younger of two twins, and in the normal course of events he would have expected to see the lion’s share of the blessing go to his older brother Esau. But in a pivotal moment, when they were both young, he manages to persuade his older brother Esau to sell him the birthright in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew. Esau despises his birthright - he says, “What good is it to me?” - and so Jacob grabs hold of it and says, “I’ll have it, thanks very much”. And then in chapter 27, in the passage we looked at last week, he clinches the deal by deceiving his father Isaac into passing on the whole of the blessing to Jacob and not to his favourite son Esau. So Isaac gets Jacob to stand next to him and he pronounces the blessing over him and he says: “May God give you of heaven’s dew and of earth’s richness — an abundance of grain and new wine. 29 May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed and those who bless you be blessed.”

At this point, Jacob must have been thinking that he had arrived, that it was all going to be plain sailing from here. Heaven’s dew, earth’s richness, an abundance of grain and new wine, his brother bowing down to him and serving him... It must have seemed as if it was just going to be onward and upward from here.

What follows in reality is disaster. His success in stealing the birthright from his brother turns out to be quite a mixed blessing. Verse 41: Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his father had given him. He said to himself, “The days of mourning for my father are near; then I will kill my brother Jacob.” So suddenly, Jacob is on the run, in fear of his life, with an elaborate plan by his mother to give him an excuse for leaving. If he thought that getting hold of the blessing and the birthright was going to make his life smooth or easily, then he must have been bitterly disappointed.

So he leaves, chapter 28 verse 1, with nothing except the blessing. Isaac calls him and pronounces the blessing over him again - verses 3 and 4 - and then he sends him on his way.

And in the mean time, Esau decides that things might improve for him if he takes a non-Canaanite wife, so he goes and marries a third wife, a daughter of Ishmael. I’m not sure if this is meant to be seen as a positive or a negative thing.

Sleeping rough (28:10-11)
So Jacob heads off into the unknown, and he travels north through the hill country on the west bank of the Jordan, and when sunset comes he stops in the middle of nowhere, and he decides that he’d better sleep the night. He’s far from home, and he wouldn’t be safe if he went back there anyway; he doesn’t know anyone in the land that he is travelling through; he has no tents and no animals and no servants and no family with him, so he just pulls up a rock and uses it for a pillow and goes to sleep.

Over the last week or two, our little boy Jacob has been having quite a few nightmares and night terrors in the early hours of the morning, so I’ve been spending a lot of nights sleeping on the floor next to his bed through the early hours of the morning to keep him company. There’s a roll of foam rubber and a couple of cushions and a sleeping bag, and even with all that I’d still have to say there are mornings where I wake up feeling little bit stiff and sore and sorry for myself. But sleeping under the open sky with a rock for a pillow, on the run for your life - you don’t really sleep much rougher than that. And this is Jacob, remember; homeboy Jacob, Jacob the smooth one; Jacob the quiet one who dwelt in tents.

Meeting God (28:12-17)
And it’s in that context, there under the stars with a rock for a pillow, that Jacob mets God.

Stairway (12)
The encounter takes place in three stages. To begin with, verse 12, there’s a vision of a stairway or a ladder, reaching up to heaven. But it’s not a ladder that Jacob is climbing - not literally and not metaphorically. His life is hardly on the up and up, marching on from one success to another; nor is he in the middle of some great process of moral progress, where he’s getting better and better every day - that’s not the point of the metaphor either. He hasn’t gone out into the wilderness to meditate and find himself - he’s just running away from home after ripping off his brother and getting scared that his brother will want to kill him.

The ladder is not a ladder that he is climbing; no - it’s a ladder or a stairway that angels are coming up and down on. It’s a ladder that God has put in place for meeting with Jacob and revealing himself to him and watching over him. It’s a ladder that’s an image of relationship with God, but it’s the kind of relationship where he reaches down to us in the middle of our lostness and our undeserving and he opens up the communication.

Promise (13-15)
And the words that God says from up at the top of the ladder are words of promise. Verse 13: There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

“I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” That’s what Jacob has to hold onto - a promise, and a promise that God will keep his promise, and stay with him until he has kept it. Nothing else at all, really, apart from a few basic provisions that he can carry on his own back. God has stripped him right back to bare essentials. It’s as if God is saying to him: “You said that the thing you really wanted was the promise that I gave to your grandfather Abraham; well here it is. For the time being you’ve got that and nothing else. Is that going to be enough for you?”

House (16-19)
And jacob wakes up from his dream, verse 16. and he says: “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” And he is overwhelmed with fear, verse 17, and he says “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

It’s a strange place to call the house of God, isn’t it. Back in Mesopotamia, where his family came from, a ‘house of God’ or the ‘gate of heaven’ was the language you used for a big, elaborate temple. The Babylonians said that the name of their city, Babylon, meant ‘Gate of God’. But Jacob hasn’t met God in a big temple somewhere, surrounded by all the pomp and glory of human religion. He’s met God in the middle of nowhere, in the words of God’s promise and a dream about this ladder coming down out of nowhere, this stairway from heaven.

And perhaps in a sort of strange parody of the great temples and archways of the ancient world, Jacob takes the rock that he was sleeping on, and he turns it on its end and makes it into a pillar and pours oil over it and he calls the place ‘Bethel’, which means, ‘house of God’.

Vow (28:20-22)
One last thing he does, verse 20; he makes a vow. He says: “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the LORD will be my God 22 and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.”

He’s realised that the heart of the blessing that he got from his father is not the corn and the new wine and his brother bowing down to him - though one day in the future those things will be true for his descendants. The heart of the blessing is the presence of God and relationship with God. The only thing he asks of God is that “God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear, so that I return safely to my father’s house.” And if God will do that for him, then he will continue to make the LORD his God, and he will give back to God a tenth of all that God gives him.

It’s clearly not an attempt to bargain with God - if it’s a bargain, then it’s a pretty lousy one for God: “You give me a hundred bucks and I’ll give you ten!”. It’s not an attempt to bargain with God; it’s a vow of gratitude and a statement of allegiance.

Meeting God in Jesus
Stairway (Jn 1:44-51)
Two thousand years later, a man called Nathanael gets invited by his friend to meet a young Galilean prophet from Nazareth named Jesus. He says, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”, but he goes and he meets him. He comes up to Jesus, and Jesus says to him: “Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile.” In other words, “This guy’s a pretty blunt instrument; there’s nothing tricky or subtle about him - he’s not like the original Israelite, like his ancestor Jacob the deceiver.” Nathanael says, “How do you know me?” Jesus answers, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael responds: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” And Jesus closes the conversation by saying: “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

It’s a strange conversation, but the punch line seems to be: the real ladder, the real stairway between earth and heaven is Jesus himself. He’s the one who comes down to us in all our lostness and our undeserving, and he bridges the gap between God and us. Life is a twisting, turning journey; it’s not a stairway that we climb; the only stairway is the stairway of grace that God travels down to us on, in Jesus.

Promise (Jn 1:14)
He’s the stairway; he’s also the promise. John 1:14, he’s the promise of God in human form; he’s the word become flesh. Jesus is the promise of God - the promise of God that if we put our trust in him he will always be with us, whatever might happen to us, wherever life may take us. He’s with us by his word, and he’s with us by his Spirit in our hearts, keeping the word of his promise alive within us.

House (Jn 2:21)
He’s the stairway; he’s the promise, and he himself is the house of God as well. In John chapter 2, Jesus says to the religious leaders: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days,” and John tells us that his disciples realised later that the temple he is speaking about is his own body. He himself is the place where earth and heaven meet, the place where God lives, the we come into the presence of God.

If we have met jesus, then we have met God just as much as Jacob did, and more so. And if we’ve met Jesus, and if we’ve learnt to pray the way that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, then in the end, the prayer we pray is not all that different from Jacob’s. We pray that he will be with us and will watch over us on this journey we are taking; that he will give us food to eat and clothes to wear, and that in the end he will bring us safely to our father’s house.

I’ve been thinking a lot during this series about my own little boy Jacob, and about what I pray for and what I want for him, which is a kind of reflection or an echo of what I want for myself most of the time. And here at the end of this first half of the series, this is what the bottom line ends up being. It’s not about grand aspirations for success and education and prosperity in this life. It’s not about some ladder that I want him to climb - that he will be good enough or spiritual enough or successful enough; it’s not about whether he will measure up to other people’s expectations or my own. In the end, if I’ve understood these chapters of Genesis - if I’ve taken them to heart in what I want for my boy (and what I want for myself as well), then it’s just this really - that God will be with him wherever he ends up going in his journey through life; that God will be his God and he will be God’s child; that God will simply give him what he needs - food to eat and clothes to wear; and that in the end God would bring him safely home to his Father’s house in heaven.