Jacob No.3 At Heavens Door

Now let's turn in the Word of God, shall we, to the book of Genesis. If your life is a little confused and you're having a rough time, then you picked a good night to come along, because here is a man in the Old Testament whose life too was in somewhat difficult circumstances, and yet God in his grace dealt with him. He wasn't the nicest sort of man.

You wouldn't actually have chosen him to be your friend unless you had a rather strange selection of those that you wanted close to you. His name is Jacob, and we read something of him and the family circle who weren't really much better than he was in the 27th chapter of Genesis. Those of you who were around last time when we were preaching from this will recall how the mother helped to deceive the father and also how one brother deceived his other brother.

So they're a right set, this family. Well, we pick up the reading in the 28th chapter of Genesis where we come across Jacob who, having left the parental home, starts out for uncharted country, uncharted ground as far as he's concerned, and remarkable things happen. Genesis 28 verse 10.

Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep.

He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 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.

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. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back 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. When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, how awesome is this place.

This is none other than the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. Early the next morning, Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it.

He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, 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 so that I return safely to my father's house, then the Lord will be my God, 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. Give me now and evermore Give me now a crystal fountain Where study is free of glow Let the vibrant cloud be filled up May be all my journey through Strong deliverer, lead us in thy strength and cheer Lead us in thy strength and cheer Let all joy in thy anxiousness subside Death, O death, and hell's destruction Let me stay on heaven's side Songs of praises, songs of praises I will ever give to thee Father, once more we thank you for your goodness and for your grace.

To love the Lord Jesus and to worship him is, for the majority of us here, one of the greatest experiences in life. But some of us here so desperately require your guidance. We're making our way through this dark uncertain earthly life and we feel like rudderless ships.

We feel as though the driving wheel of our life, so to speak, needs a more mature hand than the hands which we possess. Lord, some of us feel that we ourselves are unlovely, unwanted, without any poise and without any purpose. Lord, we bless you that your word says that you trade in failures and turn them into spiritual successes.

You detect beauty and potential where others have said this is no good whatsoever. You did it yesteryear. You did it in apostolic times.

Do it now, in the name of the Saviour. Amen. Would you like to have your Bibles open at Genesis and 27? I too will concentrate mainly on the 28th chapter.

I've set up the context in the introduction to our scripture reading. Let me give you another little verse, however, to bear in mind. It's found in the last verse of the first chapter of John's Gospel, where our beloved Lord, talking to a man who's got theological problems, he says, I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.

Let me read that again. I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Verse 12 of Genesis 28, Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth with its top reaching to heaven and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

There was a TV program some years ago called The Fugitive. If memory serves me right, it had to do with a doctor who was wrongly imprisoned. He broke jail and engaged in a number of escapades which became the series of that particular lot of programs.

There's a man by the name of Francis Thompson who was very much like some of the folk who were helped by the night shelter and, praise God, will be increasingly helped by this new hostel on Queens Road. He was an outcast. He spent a lot of his time on the embankment by the Thames in the great city of London.

And a remarkable thing occurred one day. He was apprehended in an astonishing fashion by God and the whole of his life, which was in a mess, was redirected. And Francis Thompson, who had great poetical abilities, wrote one of the more famous Christian poems entitled The Hound of Heaven.

And in that poem, in which he is the central figure, he thinks of himself trying to run away from God, going down the labyrinth, the corridors of his own experience, ever trying to take himself away from the sight of the Lord. But he says there was the Hound of Heaven, the Holy Spirit, who stalked his steps and ultimately confronted him. And Francis Thompson was taken from that life of a vagrant and given the purpose and the poise to which I made reference in my prayer.

God is always after the fugitive, whether his name is Jonah, and he lived in Palestine, or his name is John or Sally, and she lives in Worthing or Goring. God has a strange way in choosing his friends. Be careful who you associate your name with.

I mean, the friends that you have, they're all respectable, aren't they? You're like the nice person, because you're a nice person. Well, here's an astonishing thought. When God associates his name with people in the Old Testament, you can spot the odd one out.

The God of Abraham. Now, I would have liked to have been a friend of Abraham. Seems a grand chap.

The God of Isaac. Well, early on, he got a lot to commend himself. But the Bible also refers to the God of Jacob.

And more often than not, in the Old Testament, when God associates his name with anyone, he selects Jacob. And he's certainly the odd one out of the three. For Jacob has got a cockscrew personality.

He's a man who does not balk, egged on by his mother, in an endeavor to deceive his father with the bad eyesight. He's a man who does not stop at exploiting the somewhat distressing condition of his brother and use that distress to his own advantage. An unpleasant man.

If you could select your next-door neighbor, I'd give you a bit of advice. Skip Jacob. You find this man in a rather strained condition at a place called Luz.

When you read of cities in the Bible, don't think of the great metropolis like London or Mexico City. Just think of a few houses. And Luz wasn't the most attractive place.

In effect, it was just a heap of stones. And here is Jacob, and he finds himself out in the open air. He's not really a man of the wide open spaces.

He's not like his brother Esau, someone who can easily adapt to the sounds of nature. Probably he was like I am in Africa when sometimes visiting the out-of-the-place mission station and there's a noise at night and I'm just paralyzed with fright wondering if the leopards are going to come in or if it's a hiss, is there a snake, and so forth. I mean, I was born in Sheffield.

We don't have snakes there, at least. We don't have snakes there. Nor leopards.

The reason why he's in this condition is, well, because of the double deceit of his father and also of Esau. Esau has murderous intentions towards Jacob. And when Isaac discovers what Jacob has been about, although he blesses his lad, there must have been a sense of regret that he deceived me with my blind eyes.

There comes a point sometimes when you're traveling when you just have to stop. I fell asleep once in one of the most dangerous places in the United States, Miami. I was absolutely spent of nervous energy.

I'd been in Latin America for some time and preached and preached and I had to stop off in Miami on my way back to the UK. So tired I just fell asleep for several hours. There comes a point of physical exhaustion and it hit Jacob.

To the extent that when he's in this unattractive place, this heap of stones, so to speak, for that's basically what it means, he upends one of the stones and it becomes his pillow. And he puts his head on the pillar and he goes off to sleep. It's amazing sometimes what God can do through a person's dreams.

Says an old preacher, I would take Jacob's pillar if I could have Jacob's dream. The interesting thing is that Jacob only saw spiritually when he was asleep. He needed to sleep in order to see.

Some of you have turned in here this evening and you need to see. You need to see where you're at. Jacob, you see, is afraid.

He's boxed in with fear. Fear at the back of him, Esau and the family. Fear at the side of him because, well, he's not the man of the wide open spaces, as I say.

And fear of what lies in front of him because he's never traveled much beyond Beersheba where he was born. And he needs help. You know, one of the interesting things about preaching in Wales is the number of chapels they've got.

There was a revival in 1904. It was an incredible move of the Spirit of God. And it seemed to me that they not only had a revival but they had a frantic building program and in every village, every coal mining community, there was the Bethel.

Oh, it was grand in the chapel. And the chapel was invariably called Bethel or Ebenezer or Galid. One of the Old Testament names.

If you have to live anywhere, I guess Goring's all right or High Salvington. But I didn't ever discover during the 20-odd years or so that I've been here that Goring actually communicates some meaning in its name. Perhaps it does.

Perhaps it does. I could just be confessing my own ignorance. But Bethel.

You see, the reason why those Christianized miners called their little chapel Bethel and some of them not so little was because Bethel meant the house of God. And they came up from the bowels of Mother Earth. Their white faces blackened by the coal dust.

And they go not to the pub but to the chapel. They go to Bethel because Bethel means the house of God and the presence of God. And they had come to realize that there was more in life than the drink and the gambling.

There was God. And he met them. Sometimes he met them down in the pits transforming their language to the extent that the donkeys could not understand the commands of the miners because they used to swear.

And now they spoke the queen's English or the king's English. Luz became a Bethel. Here is Jacob.

And he desperately needs to hear from God. And though he is spiritually sightless as he goes to sleep he is given a vision. And in that vision there is a stairway that rests on the earth but its top reaches heaven.

I spend a lot of time going up and down from Worthing to London. I think I must have bought a train if I add up all the journeys, the cost of all the journeys of these years. You know there is nothing more frustrating than getting to Victoria and then whipping across to Archway with only a few minutes to spare before your next meeting and discovering that the wretched escalator is not working the way that you want it to work.

And you've got the cumbersome job of trying to nip up on the left when some people are standing both left and right denying all the instructions given by the underground authorities. This escalator that confronts Jacob in his dream with its top in heaven and its bottom rung on earth is not only working one way there are angels ascending and descending. Do you ever think that planet earth is crazily off orbit? Everything is out of control.

We need Mr Spock to come on board and take over spaceship earth and show us just which way to go. Well, when you read of Somalia and the incredible happening of these last 24 hours with 20 Africans dead or more when you think of Bosnia and that awful conflict when you think of what's happening in Northern Ireland and the bombing of the Baltic exchange here in London and many more dastardly things you have every reason to believe that planet earth that our particular globe is really off course. But actually the Bible says that earth is in contact with heaven.

Or let's turn that round. Heaven is in contact with earth. Listen to what David has to say as you read one of the Psalms that he penned speaking of his own experience Psalm 46 God is our refuge and strength and ever present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea though its waters roar and form and the mountains quake with their surging whatever problems we may be going through in life caused or uncaused by us God is a present help God is a very present help in time of trouble and here is a man in trouble but I see not Jacob I see something of my own twisted nature my own corkscrew personality and if I were God I would not want a relationship with me Here is an evidence of grace matchless grace unsought and unstinted unsought because Jacob was not looking for God unstinted because when God appears to Jacob in his dream he does not engage in a period of recrimination he does not show Jacob to be what he really is you go through this revelation of God and God's purposes to Jacob at this point and there is no recrimination at all there are these fine statements I am the Lord, the God of your father I will give you, I will be with you all peoples on earth will be blessed through you and that magnificent text, I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go and I will bring you back to this land and Jacob could well have stood and sung amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me the Bible says of Jacob he is a worm now that's not exactly a title that you would use to impress someone and the hymn writer says of God he calls a worm his friend isn't that amazing the God of Abraham the God of Isaac the God of Tony Sargent and if I were he I would not associate my name with that one grace unmerited grace unstinting and this is the grace that God offers you do you hear me some of you whose lives are as full of deceit as the life of Jacob some of you who cannot look into a mirror without blushing when you think of what you have done and the revelation of the Bible says this that God seeks that sort of person the vigilance of God the patience of God both characteristics of the great God almighty are directed towards the inhabitants of spaceship earth let's come closer a moment to this stairway that stretches from heaven to the earth of what does it speak well I've already given you a hint of the answer it speaks of communication God forbid that this should ever happen but if you were in a situation on a ship and one of the things that a captain of a ship has only as a nightmare in his imagination takes place there is a fire what would you want more than anything else a ladder a rope that will allow you to get out of the ship and into the lifeboat and sail into safety there was nothing that Jacob wanted more than anything else even though perhaps at that moment he didn't realise it there was nothing that he needed more than anything else than a ladder a shaft of communication from God to himself and that's what happened God targeted that spot lust nobody in their right mind would live at lust and Jacob was not there by choice he was there by circumstances it seemed almost abandoned a desolate place but the Bible will tell you this that there is nowhere on planet earth that is desolate spiritually speaking the eyes of God they roam around the world he has you in his sights always for you were born in his image not as a worthless piece of human refuge to be thrown away you have within you a potentiality which can come to the forefront once you respond to the grace of God and this is what Jacob sees in this ladder which drops from heaven to earth it's interesting isn't it that when the experience is through and Jacob assesses it he says in the 17th verse how awesome is this place this is none other than the house of God this is the gate of heaven you know if you go back to the 11th chapter of Genesis you read of the tar of Babel what was Babel? well it was a ziggurat it was the foolish endeavour of people like ourselves to declare themselves so clever that they could outwit God let's build a staircase into heaven itself let man let woman of her own initiative stake his or her claim to be on a par with God it's the philosophy of humanism it's the attempt that men and women have always accepted as the temptation has been dangled in front of them by Satan himself to do it their way to work out their own salvation that attempt was comical God only had to speak from his high heaven and confusion was wrought as various languages were placed in the minds of men and they could not communicate one to another the attempt to make it yourself is always doomed to disaster but don't you see here this is God's answer to Babel this is God doing what he alone can do in his grace moving towards a lovely man dropping a ladder from the skies with angels ascending and descending and that ladder for those who've got any understanding at all is but a prophetic anticipation of the ministry of our beloved Lord Jesus for who was Jesus? well he's the son of God his natural abode the heavens but he comes on earth he incarnates himself in a body like your body my body heaven touches earth in the person of Jesus it has to be that way so when Jesus speaks to this somewhat confused Jew at the end of the first chapter of John's gospel he says I tell you the truth you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man what the ladder was to Jacob at Luz so Jesus Christ becomes to Jacob's in the 1st through to the 20th century the nervous system is a wonderful system isn't it I put my hand on this fluorescent tube this light that illuminates my lectern and if I was to keep my finger on for a long time in fact just for a fleeting second not for a long time I feel the pain of the nervous system it travels to my brain and my brain down the same nervous system can send the stimulus telling the finger to let go or else my skin will be burned ascending and descending response stimulus so this ladder that Jacob perceives this communication from heaven to earth upon it there are angels ascending and descending indicating that the circumstances of Jacob are known to God and God in his grace responds and our beloved Lord comes on earth to do exactly the same thing there's a lot that's been read some of it I think some of it I think fanciful in terms of demons and demonology in the evangelical church today not that the bible does not speak of demons but some of the theological systems that I've been reading of in recent times come more from the imagination of men than from the revelation of scripture but hear me of greater consequence to Christian people are not the malevolent forces of the devil but the goodly forces of God Jacob sees ascending and descending the angels of God our Lord has his emissaries our Lord has custodians who look after and keep vigilance on his church our beloved Lord says I do not claim to understand all these things but our Lord says that each child has his or her angel what are the angels? they are ministering spirits they are God's ambassadors who come to the aid of people like ourselves who are in need in the bible you even get the depiction of angels cooking food sometimes being with those who have been persecuted for righteousness sake for righteousness sake in dungeons and cells God has his own infrastructure God has a way of protecting his own here is Jacob and he feels that Luz is one of the most desolate places but now at the end of his dream as he opens his eyes he sees that there is an awful amount of activity this is none other than the house of God this is just like the city gate but not just the city gate of an earthly city it's the city gate of heaven and did you not know this? that the suburb of heaven is earth the people of God on the earth live in God's suburb heaven is not so removed we think in terms of galaxies heaven is far nearer than either you or I could ever imagine I will never leave you I will never forsake you Jacob never feel again that you're desolate never look at modern Jacob into any experience in life and feel that you're absolutely barren God is everywhere heaven above is softer blue earth below is sweeter green something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen birds with gladder song or flow flowers with greater beauty shine and I know, yes this I know I am his and he is mine Jacob, I'm with you and I have a purpose for your life and God communicates that through Jesus Christ to each one of us his great ambassador his spokesman what does Jacob do? well he responds he responds in the best way that he knows how to respond it may be that some of us with the maturity of the full revelation of the Bible think that there's a bargaining factor in the 20th verse when Jacob makes a vow and says well God if you will watch over me then indeed I will be true to you but basically all that Jacob is doing is capitalizing on what God has said I am with you and will watch over you that's a blank check Jacob alright says Jacob if that is so I am your man if Jesus Christ be God and died for me on Calvary's cross then I am his man is there any difference in that logic? Lord you prosper me all that I have will be given to me by you therefore Lord one tenth of all that I possess I will return at first that was voluntary then it was made compulsory and then in the New Testament for modern Jacob so to speak the principle applies of proportionate giving when God has blessed you and received you unto himself when he has cleansed you from your sins when you recognize that every good and every perfect gift comes from him then he leaves you to respond accordingly and out of the riches that God has given you so you are so to generously give back to him that is your privilege I read of one pastor who said it was always his desire to preach to the poor and he went on to say perhaps with tongue in cheek from the state of the offerings he realized that his objective was increasingly being fulfilled to what degree do you respond to the Lord with that same amount of generosity that he has responded to you you see Jacob does his best from the revelation that he had received you have an even greater revelation of God's grace more to praise him for than ever the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets had for you have lived to see the day when the ladder was fulfilled in its type when Jesus came on earth and you know the grace of the Lord Jesus how though he was rich yet for your sakes he became poor that through his poverty he might enrich others Jesus came to call you to a faith relationship with himself have you made that response have you recognized his offer of salvation do you do what Jacob in effect did do you take the pillar and upend it and take the oil and anoint it and say this to me is no longer Luz this is Bethel this is the house of God and I will take that as my compass point and from that now my life shall be steered for Jacob moves on further into the purposes of God as you and I can move on will you show will you show the generosity within your own heart not just by receiving the gift if that is no indication of your generosity it's every indication of God's but now by the way that you deal with what God has given to you he's given you time how much time do you give to him some of you are privileged to be a member of this church I say that unblushingly not because I'm a pastor but because I travel more than most and see more than most of the state of Christendom what do you give towards this local church in terms of time for prayer in terms of being where the action is how do you show your response are you listening how do you show your gratitude to this God who made a worm like you his friend God turned lust into a baffle and a corkscrew personality into a man who ultimately became a prince he can do the same for you and with you will you respond right now to the love of God let's pray let's stand and sing with me if you mean it I love you Lord and I lift my voice to worship you O my soul rejoice enjoy my being in what you hear let it be a sweet sweet sound in your ear I love you Lord and I lift my voice to worship you O my soul rejoice enjoy my being in what you hear let it be a sweet sweet sound in your ear so take your pillar whatever that stands for right now and take the oil and consecrate it to the Lord and make this act your baffle the place which in memory you will often return give him all for he deserves all and know his blessing upon your life I will never leave you I will never forsake you I love you not because of your attractiveness but because of what my son has done for you when he dropped the ladder of salvation down from heaven to earth and invited you to ascend into the heavenly presence as a result of the blood that he spilt father we thank you for your amazing grace love unsought love unstinted directed to Jacob's like ourselves straighten us out and enable our lives to be lived more consistently for the sake of the Christ Amen