Genesis 28...

Jacob may have tricked Esau and Isaac so that he could steal the birthright

—or rather so that he might grasp

by human effort what would have been his by divine right.

But as a result of his trickery, his life was in danger.

He had to flee from his home. His sin had come home to roost.

It is sadly typical of family relationships in that household that his mother,

Rebekah, didn’t even give the real reason for Jacob’s leaving to Isaac.

Instead, she pointed to Esau’s mixed marriages with Hittite women and said to Isaac,

"So Rebekah said to Isaac, “I’m sick of my life because of these Hethite girls. If Jacob marries someone from around here, like these Hethite girls, what good is my life?”” ()

It seems that this was a family in which the plain, unvarnished truth was consistently in short supply!

This is a classic case of the sins of the parents being visited one hundred times upon the children.

Abraham first set the pattern of deceit in small ways, pretending that Sarah was his sister, not his wife (; ).

Not only was that pattern of behavior directly imitated by Isaac and Rebekah (),

but also deceit apparently

had become a commonplace of life for them.

Jacob was brought up in a world of scheming and conniving parents,

with Isaac looking out for Esau and

Rebekah looking out for him {Jacob} so lies will always bring division.

So it is little wonder that he grew up understanding how to lie and cheat and deceive.

He learned those childhood lessons well.

Unlearning them would prove to be far more difficult.

It would take long years in the wilderness before Jacob was ready for his place in God’s program, and

even then the scars of his past would never disappear.

That fact makes me wonder, therefore, what sins we are passing on to our children day by day.

We are typically so blind to our shortcomings as parents, until they are reproduced in magnified form in the lives of our children.

What are our cherished sins and wrong ways of relating that we will transmit to our offspring?

Will they learn from us merely how to abound in sin while successfully concealing it from the sight of others,

or will they learn from our constant example how to repent of sin and turn from it?

Are you setting an example for your children of godliness and holiness and of rapid and

heartfelt repentance when your sin becomes plain, or

are you merely modeling for them how to live as an effective sinner?

Are there those around you who can freely confront you over areas of your life

where you are going astray, or

are you defensive and slow to receive criticism?

But let’s drop down to 28:11 where Jacob has just been commanded by Isaac to Paddan-aram to get a wife there.

He’s just been blessed by his father and so he sets out.

In v11 the sun is setting and Jacob finds a place to stop for the night.

“the sun had set” it says. The Holy Spirit pens these vivid words to depict Jacob’s situation:

Night had caught up with him.

The sun isn’t going to rise for Jacob until .

It’s in between these two time periods, that Jacob’s going to endure the long, dark night of exile from the land that we’re going to look at.

Here and in chapter 32 are two encounters with the living God, that bracket his time away from the Promised Land.

This time period graciously demonstrate God’s enduring presence with him in the long night in between.

The place where he was sleeping would turn out to be none other than beth-el, the “house of God.” There at Bethel, as we would call it, God revealed himself to Jacob in a dream. It was not a vision of a ladder, as it is traditionally described, but rather of a stone staircase going up from earth to heaven filled with angelic traffic between God and man.

"Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.” ()

Now think back to the Tower of Babel account. That tower was a stepped pyramid temple.

It’s essentially a similar kind of stone stairway to the heavens. (Read 11:4)

"And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”” ()

The builders of Babel had a dual purpose for their building program.

By building the tower, they sought to find for themselves

security (“so that we … may not be scattered”) and

significance (“that we may make a name for ourselves”).

Neither of these goals was achieved.

They were scattered by the decisive judgment of God, and the name they made for themselves was as a proverbial failure.

The original meaning of Babel is: The Gate of God but what they made was a representative house of confusion.

Jacob’s encounter with God, in stark contrast to that of the builders of Babel,

was unsought for, unexpected, and undeserved.

He had done nothing in his life to earn God’s favor; quite the reverse,

he was a liar and a cheat.

All he was looking for was a place to lay his head and rest on his journey.

Yet he found something far greater.

What the builders of Babel sought in vain was graciously given to undeserving Jacob: the

promise of security () and

significance ().

God appeared to him and said: 13 "And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants. 14 "Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth; you shall spread abroad to the west and the east, to the north and the south; and in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed. 15 "Behold, I am with you and 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 spoken to you.”” ()

What God promised Jacob was nothing short of the covenant made with Abraham.

Just as his father had sought in his blessing, so the Lord confirmed the Abrahamic blessing to Jacob.

Ironically this happened at the moment at which it must have seemed to Jacob that all was lost, when it was evident that all his scheming had misfired.

He was on the run with no prospect of inheriting the promise, humanly speaking.

But this irony is necessary.

God came to Jacob at his lowest point in order that it may be seen clearly that all is of grace, unmerited, undeserved favor.

Indeed, it is a double misnomer to call the stairway to heaven Jacob’s ladder, for Jacob had no part in building it or crossing it.

Rather, it was God’s stairway, whereby He reaffirmed the enduring nature of His loving care for His chosen but rebellious child.

JACOB’S RESPONSE

What was Jacob’s response to the God who revealed himself to him?

In the first place, he was surprised. You might say, “Of course he was surprised! God had just appeared to him in a dream,”

yet elsewhere in Genesis

the rest of the patriarchs seem to take such revelations in stride.

Jacob alone was astonished by God’s self-revelation, perhaps because he realized how little he deserved it.

After he recovered from his surprise and initial fear, however, he went on to respond with total self-commitment.

His vow in echoed exactly God’s promise to him in .

20 "Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on,” ()

If God would undertake to be his God, just as he was the God of his forefathers, Abraham and Isaac,

then he in return would give himself completely to God.

If the Lord would

be with him and

provide for him bread and clothes, the basic necessities of life,

then he in turn would worship this God,

a vow sealed by his commitment of a tithe (one-tenth) of all that the Lord would bless him with.

So also you and I must respond to the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus.

It is not enough to be surprised and impressed by what the Bible says about God.

It is not enough to find the company of Christians appealing and attractive.

God demands of those who would be His people nothing less than total self-commitment.

For Jacob, tangible expression of that self-commitment took the form of a voluntary vow to tithe.

Living as he did before the giving of the law through Moses at Sinai, he was not bound by the obligation to give an annual tithe of the fruits of the soil in the way his descendants were.

But the effect of the grace he had received was to create a heart that wanted to give something back to God.

This was not natural for Jacob.

By nature, he was a go-getter, someone who thought that it is more blessed to get than to give.

His ambition was to be a self-made man, beholden to no one.

But now he was being transformed by grace from a go-getter into a go-giver.

Has grace had that impact upon your life also?

We, like the patriarchs, are not bound by the requirement in the law of Moses to give an annual tithe.

That was part of Israel’s civil law, which bound them as long as they lived in the land

As a matter of fact, because the tithe required under the Mosaic order was specifically a tithe of agricultural produce (see ; ), it wouldn’t be hard for someone like me to tithe.

I’d bring along an orange and a couple of grapefruit to church once a year, and I’d be home free.

to give one-tenth of their agricultural produce to the Lord,

as a mark of the Lord’s ownership of the land.

But shall I give less because I am under grace than I would have been obligated to give under law? By no means!

If my heart has been touched by grace, then no one should have to pester me to tithe.

My giving should not be driven by a sense of guilt but by an overwhelming and awed sense of gratitude for the gospel.

I should be eager to be “a cheerful giver” (), someone who because of the grace I have received delights to excel in what Paul calls “the grace of giving” ().

Also as a token of his commitment to the Lord, Jacob raised up a standing stone.

18 "Then Jacob rose early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put at his head, set it up as a pillar, and poured oil on top of it. 19 "And he called the name of that place Bethel; but the name of that city had been Luz previously.” ()

Jacob’s response to God’s gracious self-revelation was thus not simply to commit himself to give; he also committed himself to worship.

This is as it should be. If the entries in your checkbook are one key indicator of the vitality of your spiritual life, your hunger for worship is another.

Like our giving, our regular attendance at church should not be a guilt-driven obligation

but rather an expression of awed gratitude for God’s love revealed to us in Jesus Christ.

A Christian without a deep desire to worship is a contradiction in terms.

What sports fan is there who never wishes to attend a single game of his favorite team

or a music expert who never wants to go to a concert.

or a music expert who never wants to go to a concert.

If Jacob was moved to worship by his experience of God, how much more should we be moved to worship as Christians,

for we come to God through the gate of heaven to which Bethel pointed forward, Jesus.

Jacob was drawn to worship by the privilege of standing at the bottom of the staircase that led to God;

that was evidence to him of God’s amazing grace. In Christ, however,

we do not merely stand at the bottom of the stairway, gazing up.

In Christ, we are able to ascend the heavenly Mount Zion, to approach and enter the throne room of God,

there to bow down before Him and to worship Him acceptably with reverence and awe ().

In view of that privilege, how can our hearts be so slow to worship?