Jacob’s awareness of God in his own life came one night in a dream. In the dream he saw a stairway stretching up to heaven, at the top of which “stood the Lord,” who then spoke to him (Genesis 28:12-13).
So this was God’s doing, choosing a time when Jacob is scared, alone, and running for his life. His brother Esau is out for his blood and maybe catching up fast, so Jacob has likely stayed off the main roads and stuck to the rocky hill country to not be noticed. After a hot day’s slog up and down rock strewn hills he’s ready for sleep as soon as the sun sets.
For Jacob this was like a hell on earth; in his own words “the day of my distress,” Genesis 35:3 – “the day,” note, meaning no other day like it in his life so far. But that night, according to verse 7, “God revealed himself to him.” Or in Jacob’s own words in verse 3, he “answered me.”
But answered in a way that gave Jacob a glimpse of this other world in operation, in the form of a stairway connecting heaven and earth, with angels travelling up and down it, and God at the top fully aware of Jacob’s demise. And in the worst state Jacob’s ever been in, that’s when God passes on the promise he made to Abraham to Jacob (28:13-14).
It’s enough for Jacob to realize “the Lord is in this place” (16), so he calls that spot Bethel (19) meaning “house of God,” or when used of deity it meant “temple” – the place where heaven and earth come together, the place where God dwells, granting us humans access to him for all our needs, which is exactly what God promised Jacob, that “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go” (15).
So God did this for Jacob at the lowest point in Jacob’s life, when his abysmal behaviour with Esau had caught up with him, and Jacob was a dead man in waiting. But here in Genesis 35:3 Jacob’s back in Bethel to build an altar to the God “who has been with me wherever I have gone.” God was now that real to him.
Does God do the same for us, then? Yes, in Jesus. Jesus came down the stairway from heaven to earth to reveal God to us (John 17:6). He’s now the temple where heaven and earth come together (John 2:21), so it’s in him we have open access to God (Ephesians 3:12) and all the help we need in our “day of distress” too (Hebrews 4:16). So God’s still in the business of revealing himself to us humans, so in time he can become real to us too. Especially in “The reconciling spirit God gives us”….(next blog)
