Speaker 1: Hear these words tonight from Genesis chapter 28, beginning in verse 10. Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed.
And behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east, and to the north, and to the south.
And in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 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 promised you. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and 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? This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' So early in the morning, Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil on the top of it.
And he called the name of that place Bethel. But the name of the city was Luz at the first.
Speaker 2: The new testament reading comes from John 135 to 51. Come and listen. The next day again, John was standing with 2 of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, behold, the lamb of God. The 2 disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, what are you seeking?
And they said to him, rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? And he said to them, come and you will see. So they came and saw where he was staying. And they stayed with him that day, for it was about 10th hour. 1 of the 2 who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.
He first found his own brother, Simon, and said to him, we have found the Messiah, which means Christ. He brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, you are Simon, the son of John. You shall be called Cephas, which means Peter. The next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee.
He found Philip and said to him, follow me. Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Nathaniel said to him, 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Philip said to him, 'Come and see.' Jesus saw Nathaniel coming toward him and said to him, behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit. Nathaniel said to him, how do you know me?
Jesus answered, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Nathaniel answered him, Rabbi, you are the Son of God. You are the king of Israel. And Jesus answered him, because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree. Do you believe?
You will see greater things than these. And he said to him, truly, truly I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man. The word of the Lord.
Speaker 1: Thanks be to God.
Joel Brooks: If you would, pray with me. Father, we thank you for your word, and we pray that through your spirit, it would land home in our hearts. Lord, we recognize that left on our own, we are resistant to your word. Our minds are dull, our ears are stopped up, our hearts are hard. And so we ask that you would break down our defenses and allow us to see you and to savor you in this moment at this time.
Spirit, do your work. I pray that my words would fall to the grounds and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus, amen. Although we are studying the gospel of John, we're going to spend the majority of our time this afternoon looking at the story of Jacob, the life of Jacob found in the book of Genesis.
And the reason that we are going to do this is because the story of Jesus and Nathaniel can only be understood in light of the story of Jacob. If you don't understand Jacob, you're gonna completely miss the point of the story of John, and so we're gonna spend a lot of our time in the Old Testament. Plus, I really enjoy just preaching from the Old Testament. For those of you who aren't familiar with the story of Jacob or maybe you need a refresher since your last VBS, let me bring you up to speed on Genesis 28, how we get to Genesis 28. Jacob is the grandson of Abraham.
Jacob's father is Isaac. His mom is Rebecca. He has a twin brother, Esau, who was technically born first, but right after Esau was born, Jacob came out behind and he grabbed Esau's heel, and that's actually where he gets the name Jacob. His name means heel grabber or cheater or deceiver or one who doesn't play by the rules. He is the heel grabber Jacob.
And as Esau and Jacob grew up, their their dad, Isaac, he showered affection on Esau, but he he largely ignored, Jacob. Esau was a man's man. He was strong. He he hunted. He liked to make venison stew.
He liked weapons. He was always outdoors. He would have been, you would think of him as kind of the captain of the football team, the homecoming king, the man who everybody looked up to and admired. Then he had Jacob, who was the polar opposite of Esau. Jacob loved the indoors.
He didn't like being out in the sunshine. The comparison with him was, well, he was a mama's boy, and he liked staying in his room and playing Xbox. And his dad just didn't like him very much, and so he showered all of his affection on Esau. Now when Isaac was about a 100 years old, he decided to give Esau his blessing. And this went completely against God's word, because God had told him to do the opposite, to bless Jacob, but he wanted to bless his favorite.
He didn't just go against God's word, he went against the social norms of the day because usually a father would bless all of his children. Although he would give a special blessing to the first born, all of his children would receive some blessing. But Isaac, even though he only had 2 kids, he was only going to bless 1 and leave Isaac, I mean, leave Jacob completely out of it. Jacob was neglected. Jacob was unloved.
And this this hole in his heart, if you follow the life of Jacob, it drives him his whole life he is in search for a blessing. That's what he wants. He wants to receive a blessing by someone. Well, we know the story. When it comes time for the blessing, Jacob dresses up like Esau, And he goes to his father who is almost completely blind and he pretends to be Esau, and in this moment he gets what he thought he always wanted, his dad holding his head, looking at his face, blessing him.
But the blessing felt pretty empty because you can't just steal the blessing from another. And Jacob's life gets a whole lot worse after this moment. When it's all said and done, Jacob still feels that emptiness and his life begins to fall apart at the seams. Not only does he still not have his father's love, but now his brother Esau wants to kill him. And so Jacob has to flee, leaving behind his mom who was the only person who ever loved him.
So he's on his own. So the story in Genesis 28 takes place at this point, at the lowest point in Jacob's life. He is tired, he is lonely, he is depressed, he feels like his life has no meaning whatsoever, and then we come here. Verse 11 says that Jacob came to a certain place. This word place is mentioned 6 times in this text, yet the place is not named.
The author just kind of wants to put it out there that Jacob is in the absolute middle of nowhere, this no named place. He's utterly alone and he's neither here nor there. Now it's customary when you would travel and you would travel through a place, people would invite you into their homes and let you let you eat there and spend the night there. But nobody did this for Jacob, which means he was either nowhere near any other dwellings or perhaps nobody wanted Jacob to come into their home. Either way, he is utterly alone.
And since the sun is setting, Jacob has to make camp where he is at, and the problem is he has absolutely nothing, and so he just lays down and he uses a stone for a pillow. The great Hebrew scholar, Robert Alter, he writes a lot about Hebrew narrative, and he says, this is a very artistic way of expressing the simple truth that Jacob had nothing. Not even an extra shirt, not a blanket, nothing he could bundle up and put his head on. All he could do is put his head on a rock. But Jacob is so exhausted, physically, spiritually, emotionally exhausted, he he just kind of collapses and he goes to sleep.
And it's here in his sleep, he has this really bizarre dream. And he dreams of this. It's a giant staircase or a giant ramp going up into heaven. Now some of your translations might say ladder or some of the older translations might say that. It's a hard word to translate, but most contemporary scholars, they think this word means step or ramp, and the picture is this, picture, you know, one of those ziggurats, those old ziggurats and towers in which you kind of have a spiraling ramp or spiraling staircase that that reaches up into the heavens.
That's what Jacob is envisioning in his dream. It's one of those pyramids. And this thing is huge and it reaches all the way up to the sky and there are angels ascending and descending on it, possibly 1,000 and thousands of angels ascending and descending. And so that's the dream, and it's a bizarre dream. But what is God trying to communicate in giving this dream to Jacob here at this time?
Well, you need to understand at this point in Jacob's life, God has never appeared to him, never spoken to him. Jacob had spent his entire life unloved by his earthly father and his whole life feeling neglected and unloved by his heavenly father. He completely distanced from this supposed God. Now can you imagine how incredibly frustrating it would be to grow up with Abraham as your granddad? I mean, come on, father Abraham is your granddad and he's always talking about the visions he had, how the Lord told him this, the Lord told him this.
The Lord went outside with him and said, Look at the stars, try to count them. So will your descendants be. Oh, and I'm gonna give you all this land. And granddad has this amazing relationship with God. And your father Isaac, he has incredible faith with God and God has communicated with Isaac.
And here you are, your entire life, you have never heard so much as a peep from this God. He has been completely invisible and absent to you. And now here you are and you're supposedly this blessed one, the one whom in the world is gonna be blessed through and yet your life is a wreck. You're unloved, you're lonely, you're penniless, friendless, and you've never heard so much as a peep from God. And so you're thinking, God, where have you been?
What have you done? How have you ever looked out for me? You know, if I needed a birthright, I had to buy it. If I needed a blessing, I had to steal it. I've had to look out for my own all this time.
God, you have not been at work in my life, and certainly You would not be working now at this point in my life when I'm in this condition and I have so much sin. Jacob has never been in a worse position than here in this text. And yet, this is when God shows up. This is when God meets him. And he not only shows up, but he says, I'm not just real, but I'm active and I'm working and I'm in control of everything.
When Jacob sees these angels, we like to picture, I don't know, little angels in white playing harps floating on clouds, or the the really kind of creepy baby ones, with with the wings. But picture an angel is is God's royal messenger. It's it's how Akim, you know, he would send his commands and he would get them back and and he takes takes control of the world using these angels as his messengers. That's the picture here. God is working behind the scenes, giving orders, making declarations, receiving information, doing all of the things that a ruling king does.
And so legions of angels are coming and going at his command. And when when Jacob sees this, his entire worldview is shattered because he suddenly realizes there is a God, there really is a God, and he is in control. It's significant for us to understand this when when we don't see God at work in our lives or not at work in our world. I mean, all to do is just look at the news recently. You can read the news and everything that's going on in Nepal, or the violence in the Middle East, or all the uprisings happening in Baltimore, and you read these things and you're not gonna read one word about God.
So you have these huge major world events happening everywhere and God's not even in a footnotes. So you're thinking, is he really even involved at all? I'm certainly not reading about him. I'm certainly not seeing him. So he certainly seems distant or invisible to us, but this dream here tells us that that you might see that, but if you were to God were to pull back the curtain, you would see he is really at work.
Actively working in our midst, even though we see nothing. Jacob also realizes at this moment that God comes to him when his life is in transition. He's neither here or there. He's just in the middle of nowhere. And yet God comes to him and God even comes to him when he is asleep so he can completely do nothing.
He's passive in this as God reaches out to him. Let's look at verse 13 And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. Now once again, your Bibles probably have a little footnote by the words above it. And the reason that there's that footnote there is because most contemporary scholars, they translate this not as above it, but by Him. By Him.
And behold, the Lord stood beside Him. So Jacob, he looks up and he sees the heavens opened up and then he sees the Lord Himself, and the Lord has descended down this ramp or these steps to come by him. And you see this picture all throughout scripture that that man never goes up to God. God always comes to us, always comes to us. Jacob was not even seeking God at this point.
He did not ask to see God. He didn't ask to hear God. There are no prayers like when we were going through Moses, the Lord, teach me your ways, show me your glory, there is none of that in the life of Jacob. He is completely lost at this point in his life. And there isn't the slightest bit of desire to know God.
Instead, if you were to look at his life up to this point, all you see is deceitfulness, wickedness, emptiness, anger, hurt, and a total lack of faith. Kind of surprising that this is the point that God decides to appear to him and bless him. Just a quick takeaway from this is that there should not be a person in this room that ever thinks they are too far removed from God to reach out to them. It's what God does. In verse 17, we see how Jacob calls this stairway the gate of heaven, the gate of heaven.
And when he says this, he's making a connection with an earlier story in Genesis, Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel. Do you remember that story where all the peoples of the earth that gathered together and they wanted to make this giant ziggurat, this giant tower that would reach up to the heavens, and they called it Babel, which means gate of heaven, the gate of God. And that's just what they wanted to do. They thought if we put enough effort, if we put enough work into us, perhaps we can reach God. And God says, no, you can't.
I gotta put an end to this. I am too high. I am too holy. All of your efforts combined, you will never be able to reach me. And so this is the term that Jacob uses here, this gate to heaven.
But this is a different gate to heaven that Jacob is seeing because this gate is open and it's not meant for man to climb up to God. It is meant for God to come down to man, for God to descend to us. And when God does descend to Jacob, he tells him several things. He tells him, hey, I'm gonna give you some offspring, I'm gonna give you some land, but then the really big thing his promise to him in verse 15 when he says that he will be with him. God says, I will be with you.
Now this is the first time in scripture that God ever says this to anybody, that he will be with them. And this is the reason that he says behold here. This is something new, it's something unexpected. God never said this to Noah, he never said it to Abraham, never said it to Isaac. He says this only to Jacob here that he will be with him.
So Jacob realizes here he is not alone. No matter what he is feeling, he is not alone. God's real, God's active in this world, and God will never leave him. Here is when God reveals himself in what we will call the name Emmanuel, God with us. God with us.
So Jacob, he names this place Bethel, which means house of God. We find out towards the end of the story that this place that he kept referring to, this place, this place, this place, it actually did have a name, but he wanted to save it to the very end to tell because he wanted to contrast with the house of God. The name was Luz. Luz means separation. Luz was symbolic of Jacob's condition where he was separated from God.
His sin, the wickedness in his life had brought separation, but now this place, he's no longer in a place of separation. He is in a place where he can meet with God, the house of God. So Jacob, he wakes up and he has an unusual reaction. Verse 17 describes his condition as one that's fear. He's afraid.
He says, how awesome is this place? He's terribly scared. And he's scared because God has finally appeared to him. But even though God never mentioned anything about his sins, anything about his past, anything about all of his wickedness, only gave blessings, the experience still terrified him. And the reason is Jacob at this point in his life still doesn't understand grace.
He's not there yet, and so he's still scared of God. Believe it or not, if you were to read through the rest of Jacob's life, this event here has very little impact on him. He doesn't really change at all after this, which at first you think is it's kind of hard to understand. How can we have something like this? I think if I were to have something like this, it would change me.
But we live in light of the New Testament. We live in light of Jesus to whom this story points. Jesus gives us a much clearer picture of God and what is going on here. You know, when Jacob calls this place the house of God, we think of the New Testament where Jesus refers to Himself as the temple or the house of God. It's what Jesus calls himself.
When we look and we see here God is with us, well, Jesus is Emmanuel. That's his name, God with us. But Jesus is even more than just these things revealed in this text. And that is what takes us to John chapter 1 in the story of Jesus and Nathaniel. There is so much going on here in John 1 in this story.
We're just gonna skim the surface of there's just so much here. I get really excited when I look at this text. Let's let's read. Let's read starting at verse 43. We'll just read 3 or 4 verses.
The next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee and he found Philip and said to him, follow me. Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses and the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. Nathaniel said to him, can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to Him, come and see.
So the story begins with Philip going to get his friend Nathaniel to tell him that he has found the Messiah, has found Jesus. And Nathaniel answered, no way. Can anything good come from Nazareth? Nazareth is a nowhere place. Nazareth is neither here nor there.
It's in the middle of nowhere. God doesn't God doesn't use prophets or anything, call any greatness from a place like that. And Nazareth at this time probably had less than 300 people. It was a Podunk town. But Philip urges him to come and to see.
Then we get to verse 47. Says, Jesus saw Nathaniel coming towards him and said of him, behold, an Israelite indeed in whom there is no deceit. There's a lot right here. When Jesus meets Nathaniel, he says, here's an Israelite who will shoot straight with you. Here's an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.
But you gotta realize what Jesus is subtly saying here. An Israelite was a descendant of Jacob. If you go back into the Old Testament, you remember God changed Jacob's name to Israel. And so an Israelite is a son of Jacob, a descendant of Jacob. And you have to remember no deceit, deceit is Jacob's name.
Jacob's name means deceit. It means liar. So Jesus, he's he's looking at Nathaniel and going, oh, here's a son of Jacob in whom there is no Jacob. You get that? Here's a son of Jacob in whom there is no Jacob.
Here's a son of Jacob who doesn't lie. Here's a son of Jacob who keeps the rules. Here's the son of Jacob who doesn't cheat. Nathaniel goes, that's right. How do you how do you know me?
How do you know me? In verse 48, Jesus replies, before Philip called you, when you were under the tree, I saw you. And this knocks Nathaniel to the floor, which is really astounding because, I mean, later you're gonna have Jesus healing all these people, feeding 5,000, raising people from the dead, and he is never gonna get a reaction like this. I saw you under the tree. You are the son of God.
I mean, that's just he just blasts that out. What a confession. Now what we don't know at this moment is what Nathaniel was doing. We don't know if he was with somebody. We don't know what he was thinking when he was under this tree, but he obviously thought that nobody else could see him or know what he was doing.
It was an absolute secret that only God would know. And it could have been something good. He could have been doing something good, but I believe it was likely something he was ashamed of, and he falls into Jesus' subtle trap. So here's the son of Jacob who follows the rules in which there is no deceit. Yeah, that's that's right.
How do you know me? Nathaniel, I saw you. I saw you when he thought you were all alone under the tree, and he just collapses. He says, You're the Messiah. You are the Son of God.
He completely melts before Him. Then in verse 51, Jesus recounts the vision that Jacob had. It's no coincidence that he goes to the life of Jacob here. He recounts this vision that we just read from Genesis 28, but he makes one change, one really important change to this vision. I want you to look closely at what the angels are doing in verse 51.
Jesus said to Nathaniel, truly, truly, I gotta stop right there. This is for free, this little bit. It's amen, amen is what he is saying there. Amen, amen. Now we normally don't do amens at the front of a sentence.
Amen comes at the end of a sentence. It just means it is true. Jesus is the one who introduces saying amen before he speaks. Truly, I say to you. But here he is like, amen, amen, before he even says anything.
Truly, truly, you cannot get more true than what I'm about to say to you. What I'm about to say to you, you could build your entire life on. It is rock solid. Truly, truly, I say this to you. That was free.
You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the son of man. Now, there are not angels going up and down to Jesus. There are angels going up and down on Jesus. Jesus is where heaven and earth meet. He says, the angels aren't going up and down a staircase, they're going up and down on me.
Heaven and earth, they collide in this person of Jesus. He is the steps. He is the way to heaven. Heaven is now open to us through Jesus. Later in John 14, he's gonna say the same thing when he says, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the father, but through me. I'm the door to God. I am the gate to heaven. So far in John, we've heard from John the Baptist or we've heard from John the Evangelist say who Jesus is. Jesus is the logos.
Jesus is the word. Then we've heard from John the Baptist. He tells us who Jesus is. Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Now we hear from Jesus who Jesus is.
And Jesus says, I am the stairway to heaven. I'm how you get access to heaven and this makes Jesus utterly unique from every other religious founder you can find out there. Go study them all, and what they're going to do is they will point to what they think is the way or a way to get to heaven or nirvana or whatever it is. And they're they're pointing to something. Jesus doesn't point anywhere.
He stands before people and he says, I am the way to heaven. It's me. You wanna get to God? You come through me. Heaven is open, and Jesus is the way.
And it doesn't matter how much you've sinned, doesn't matter how much you have screwed up your life or how little you have sought after God. God comes to us in the person of Jesus and provides a way to himself. Will you trust him for this? Throughout this story, there is a invitation that keeps popping up, this invitation to follow Jesus. Jesus tells people, come follow me.
His disciples are saying, come and see, come and see. And this is both an invitation to those without faith and an invitation for those who have faith as to how they are to share that faith with others. You know, when Philip told Nathaniel, you know, you need to, I found the Messiah, you gotta come and see this guy. Nathaniel, you know, he gives his, there's no way. He's from Nazareth.
I mean, there's no way the Messiah could come from the middle of nowhere there. Philip doesn't get in a debate with him. He doesn't start pulling out texts showing him how you're all wrong about all this. You know what he says? I'll go with you.
Come and see. He just wants to bring them to Jesus and let Jesus do the convincing. Jesus is the great convincer of who he is. And so he just pleads pleads with Nathaniel to come and see. And for those of us who are Christians, this is how we share our faith.
We bring people to Jesus and let him do the convincing of their hearts and their minds. The best way to do that, the best way to bring people to Jesus is to bring him to his word. We say, Come and see. Can you come and see? I'll go through the book of John with you.
We don't just hand people a book and say, that's a really good question. Why don't you read this? We say, come and see. Come with me to church. Hear the word of God proclaimed.
But we invite them to come and to hear the words of Jesus, and then let Jesus through his spirit do his work. For those of you who are not Christians, I want you to know that Jesus is calling. He is now calling you. Through the words that you've heard, he is saying, follow me. Follow me.
It doesn't matter how far you have gone. I am here and I am the way to heaven. Won't you call out to him? Pray with me. Our Father, we are so grateful for your son, Jesus.
Without Jesus, we have no hope. Lord, if all of us in this room were to put forth every good work we can muster and try to build our own little tower of Babel up to you, it would just be rubbish. We cannot reach you on our own. We thank you that you have come to us through Jesus and now we have access. And I pray that we would cling to Jesus with all of our heart, soul, and strength.
For those of us who have faith in here, God, I pray you would strengthen it. For those of us in here who need to be sharing our faith, give us the boldness to do so. Invite others to come and see. Lord, and for those here who need faith, now through your spirit would you give it to them and may they call out to you. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus, amen.