Genesis 28

Hey, thanks for being with us, friends.
Welcome back.
After a week off,
it’s good to be back with
you on this Monday afternoon as we continue through the book of Genesis.
Kind of a very
quick pass at the beginning of chapter 28 here.
You’ll remember that where we left the story,
Jacob, at kind of the urging of his mother and the anger of his brother,
has decided that it would
be good to get out of town.
Esau has essentially let it be known that as soon as Isaac is no longer with them,
he plans to end at Jacob.
And so Jacob thinks,
and his mother agrees,
“This is a good time
to go visit Uncle Laban.” So his mother,
Rachel,
Rebecca,
sorry, my names
are mixed up,
Rebecca talks to Isaac, says, “I want to send Jacob.
I don’t want him to marry one of these locals.
I want him to go get one of our people.” So she sends him to Laban’s house.
In the early part of chapter 28,
Jacob blesses him and gives him that mission,
“Go find a wife from Laban’s people.” And then shortly thereafter,
we have a little blurb,
Esau heard that conversation or heard of that conversation.
He also takes a wife who is not a Canaanite.
And the
implication here is that Esau
is continuing to try and please his father, to please Isaac.
That’s really the only place the story goes.
Interestingly,
he takes that wife of Ishmael’s daughter,
and the Ishmael-Abraham
connection comes back into the story.
And so it seems as though
Esau continues to try and honor
and please his father,
even though he has been in the context of the story left behind a little bit.
Just one comment there, Clint.
So you can interpret that to be,
as you say, that Ishmael sort of comes back into the story.
Once again,
just another point for us to recognize that the
key characters of the story,
though they are the main characters,
are not the chief character.
The it’s not a traditional sort of Genesis story outside of the biblical sort of context where
you sort of build up the characters to be heroes and everything they do is right.
Here, it’s far more messy than that.
It’s that God makes it right even through the brokenness.
So just a different way of conceiving of a Genesis story.
Yeah, and then in the interest of time,
and I think also in the interest of trying to hit
the mountaintops of Genesis,
we get back to Jacob’s story.
And the first story that we get from Jacob after this
sending is along the way.
And it’s interesting,
it’s given a name,
but later in the story,
we’re just told he came to a certain place.
So let me read a few verses here,
then we’ll discuss them.
Jacob left, Beersheba went toward Haran.
He came to this certain place
and stayed for a night because the sun had set.
Taking one of the stones of that place,
he put it under his head, lay down in that place.
And he dreamed there was a ladder set up on the earth,
the top reaching heaven and the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
And the Lord stood beside him and said,
I’m the Lord, the God of Abraham,
your father and the God of Isaac,
the land on which you lie,
I will give you in your offspring.
Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth.
You shall spread abroad to the west and the east and north,
the south, and all the families of the earth will be blessed in you and your offspring.
Know that I’m with you.
I will keep you wherever you go and bring you back to this land,
for I will not leave you until I’ve done
what I’ve promised you.
Yeah, let’s stop there, Michael.
So Jacob finds himself in literally a hard place.
He lays down with a rock for a pillow.
And while there he has this dream.
And the word ladder is not quite,
probably not quite the full expression of the word.
It’s almost like a temple
or a staircase kind of idea.
Ziggurat is probably the best translation,
but a word that’s not real
familiar to us.
And he sees angels ascending and descending.
So he sees God on the throne
and he sees the angels coming and going to do their work.
And he hears the words of God,
again, restating the covenant promise,
which has now come to him as the third generation in the line.
And know that I am with you and I will keep you.
So again, a very dramatic restatement of the
promise we’ve seen several times in Genesis.
Which I think it’s worth noting here is important for two reasons.
So the first reason here is it is unique to Jacob,
this idea of having a dream.
You know, we’ve seen this previously where God has sent messengers who have spoken to some of
Jacob’s forebears.
Here we have a dream,
which is a very common sort of mystical experience,
especially in ancient religion.
Here we have this happening to Jacob.
So it’s important for the
means and the mechanism.
There’s a uniqueness to this encounter with God and to God’s assurance of the promise.
But the second is that assurance of the promise itself.
We’ve already seen all of
the complications of this family relationship.
We’ve already naturally, as the reader, begun to ask some questions.
Well,
you’ve got Jacob usurping Esau.
You have all of this
firstborn,
second born kind of rivalry happening.
What’s going to happen to the promise?
That is now firmly
put to bed and no pun intended.
But that is now firmly resolved.
That not only has the human
father given the promise,
but the heavenly father has said in this dream,
has verified, yes indeed,
the promise will live in you.
And so this is in many ways the catalyst to the story ahead.
All of the messy questions that we’ve spun up
now are going to be pushed forward from this point because
we know God has literally spoken through this dream.
So this serves an important function.
It has long lived in the memory of the faith.
I mean, this is an important story,
but it’s an important story not just to the larger faith and to the
hierarchical chronology that will follow
it.
It’s actually important to Genesis itself.
This sets off the entire next act of what’s going
to happen in this book.
Yeah, and I think it’s helpful to remember that if you call to mind,
we have not seen or heard a lot of God so far in the Jacob stories.
All of the stuff with Jacob
and Esau, the blessing,
Isaac, Rebecca,
God was a sort of background character in that.
And now we have in this
passage, we have the word of God essentially transferring the promise.
We had the blessing that has been transferred from Isaac,
but here we have a statement from God is sort of
confirming that Jacob is now the bearer of this promise and that he will be the conduit through
which the families of the earth and the peoples of the nations will be blessed.
And when he wakes,
this is a very interesting part of the story.
Verse 16, “Then Jacob woke from his sleep,
and he said,
‘Surely the Lord is in this place,
and I did not know it.’ And he was afraid and said,
‘How awesome is this place,
none other than the house of God,
and this is the gate of heaven.'”
So these are really interesting words from a preaching kind of Bible study perspective.
These are fun words.
“God was in this place,
and I didn’t know it.” And that’s often said of our difficult places.
That’s often said of the places where we lay down with a hard pillow on a hard
bed, metaphorically speaking, where we’re in difficult situation and God restates a promise
to us.
God tells us again that we are blessed and that we are beloved.
And we join Jacob in saying,
“God is in this place.
I didn’t know it.
I didn’t know God was here,
and here he is.” And the word
fear is troubling in verse 17,
and he was afraid.
Probably a better English translation.
He was in it.
It is not terror.
It is respect.
It is awe.
I think awe is probably the best word.
And then he says,
“This is none other than the house of God,
and this is the gate of heaven.” Yeah, Clint,
isn’t it interesting that Jacob finds the place of God on the road
of Exodus, really on his way out of his family relationship.
He’s going to a place for his own safety,
and it’s on that hard road away from what he knew to what he doesn’t know that he
now encounters this promise again.
I think you’ve already intuited as a preacher.
That is, I think, one of the things that makes this text so compelling is because as a narrative,
it’s eminently relatable, and I think it is almost infinitely preachable.
There’s a sense in which
we can easily find ourselves in the midst of lives that also wander,
often moving from one
thing to another.
It is in those places where we find God.
What is striking about Jacob’s encounter
here is that it was most certainly shrouded in a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety,
and maybe even frustration and discomfort.
The idea that he’s sleeping in the most uncomfortable,
most exposed sort of environment is also paired with the reality that this is where he
re-encounters or is reminded of the promise that God has made.
These things combined make this story beautiful,
that it’s all of it at once.
It’s both beautiful,
it’s both comforting,
and also it’s exposing
being at rock bottom.
It’s exposing the difficulty of life and how it’s in those
moments we often discover the holy place,
the place where God touches earth,
that thin moment of life, and here we have it in narrative form.
It opens the gateway to the rest of Jacob’s story.
I mean, this is in many ways
the pivot point where it turns from his old family to what God
does with a new family.
Yeah, and correct me if I’m wrong here,
Michael, but I believe this is
the first interaction we’ve seen between God and Jacob.
We’ve not encountered a story
where those two characters have conversed with one another,
and here it is,
and it is on the
way somewhere.
It’s not at home,
it’s not in the temple,
it’s not in the new place,
it’s along the path, and
God calls him to this promise.
Now,
what’s interesting about this as we read the next part is that Jacob
remains Jacob.
So again, let me read a few verses,
and we’ll talk about it.
“Jacob rose early in the morning.
He took the stone that he put under his head.
He set it up
for a pillar.
He poured oil on top of it.
He called the place Bet El.
The name of the city before was Luz.
Then Jacob made a vow and said,
‘If God will be with me,
and will keep me in this way
that I go, and will give me bread to eat and 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 set up for a pillar,
shall be God’s house.
And all that you give me,
I will give you surely a tenth.'” So this is a fascinating story.
I think it is tempting to read a lot into this,
and I will admit to you that I
do this.
I struggle with Jacob as a character,
and so he has this dream.
He has this profound moment.
He awakes in awe of God and says,
“God is in this place,
and I did not know it.” He has received
from God a promise that once belonged to Abraham and passed through his father,
that he will be a
great nation, that his descendants will be too numerous to count,
and that the families of the
earth will be blessed.
And Jacob’s response is “if.” Now,
he does honor God.
He sets up the pillar.
He calls the place Bet El,
which means the home of God or the house of God.
But listen to the vow.
Verse 20,
“If God will be with me,
if he will give me bread and clothing,
so that I come again to my
father’s house in peace,
then the Lord shall be my God.” If-then statements are very rare
for characters.
God makes several.
The prophets make some,
but it is very unusual for a character
in the Old Testament to offer an if-then statement to God.
If these things happen,
then you will be
my God.
And I think the author here wants us to remember that we are dealing with a man whose
development is still in process.
I think this is a subtle reminder that Jacob is still primarily
looking out for Jacob.
Yeah, I mean,
one could make a case that Jacob never escapes that orbit,
in fact.
And I think that maybe this is what makes us uncomfortable,
is because all of us would like
the idea of the heroes of the faith to be unblemished.
I mean, we would like for them to be
perfect exemplars of what faith in God should look like.
But it’s striking,
the account of, say,
Abram,
when he’s called to go,
is that he packs up and goes.
I mean, it’s actually,
to put them in contrast,
Abram’s narrative is really stark and simple.
Jacob’s narrative is actually quite flushed out with a lot of motivations and choices that get made,
and it’s actually very striking here when we get a zoomed-in version of what’s happening here.
He meets God.
The promise is made,
which to almost all of those who have come before,
the promise is big enough.
But to Jacob, you have this idea,
well, hey,
if God’s going to be with
me and keep me,
you know, if God’s going to keep this good thing going,
well, then I’ll set up a
temple here, and this will be God’s place.
You know, I think
there’s a sense in which Jacob’s
character in some ways points out it’s not about human fulfillment.
It’s not even about human
ability or faithfulness, because there’s a sense in which we know,
as the readers of the Old
Testament, one doesn’t get sneaky with God.
One doesn’t out barter God.
It’s God’s will ultimately,
but yet here we see a man who is counted in the lineage,
and he does show up with a kind of
sneakiness with God.
And, you know, I think that brings a natural discomfort to the text,
and I would say an intentional one.
Yeah, I would say that beyond this narrative,
that’s kind of the brush with which Jacob has painted.
I mean, that he has a very strong sense of what’s in this for me.
And we’ve seen selfish
characters, and we’ll see more of them,
and they’re in the Old Testament scattered throughout.
But I can’t think of another character off the top of my head in the whole of Scripture
that is met with the promise and presence of God,
and who says, “Yeah, that sounds good, but let’s make sure these boxes get ticked first.” There’s no one who jumps to mind
that has that.
Jacob seems to me a unique character.
And I think that’s a fair assessment,
because in the stories that follow,
we’re going to see more of that.
Yeah, I think that’s a good place to land here today.
You know, ultimately, there’s some text which we shouldn’t resolve.
I think on one hand,
this is a pivotal God encounter.
And on the other hand,
it doesn’t seem to result in the kind of conversion or
a hundred percent transformation experience that seems like it would make sense.
And yet,
God is written all over it.
So all of that’s on the table,
and I don’t think we’re going to try
to set it all in the right order.
I think it’s all there.
And by the glory and grace of God,
it’s part of the story of faith.
I think more than Abraham,
certainly more than Isaac,
and maybe more than any character I can
think of in Genesis and most of the Old Testament,
Jacob as a character shows us development.
Because this is God’s story,
we often don’t get nuances of how the character grows.
And I think as we go through Jacob’s story,
it seems clear that the author has in mind to show
us some examples of what the journey,
what the experience of God does to and through Jacob.
And I think that stands out.
Well, I’ll make that case as we go along and you see whether
you agree or not,
but we’ll continue in his story tomorrow.
It’s a good summary.
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.