jacob's ladder
Do you remember when you were a child and were encouraged to peer at the clouds and say what they looked like to you? Most of the time they simply looked like clouds to me. But one recent spring day I went out to take a walk after lunch. I glanced skyward and nearly gasped. Looking up my first thought was, “Jacob’s ladder”.
In Genesis 28 the patriarch Jacob was fleeing from his older brother Esau. Jacob had just gained the blessing that is usually reserved for the eldest, and he had done it by trickery. When Esau found out, he was bitter at the way Jacob had stolen is blessing, and the scripture says that he held a grudge against Jacob. To avoid Esau’s revenge, Jacob fled to his uncle Laban’s home.
On the way, he stopped for the night, laid his head on a stone for a pillow and had a dream. In his dream he saw a stairway leading into heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. At the top, stood the Lord God who promised him that his descendants would be as numerous at the dust of the earth, and that the Lord would bring him home again.
About 2,000 years later, as Jesus walked toward Galilee, he ran into a skeptic named Nathanael. Nathanael had heard about this Nazarene “prophet”, and had just said to his friends, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” His friend Philip exhorted him to meet Jesus for himself, and as he approached, Jesus identified Nathanael as a guileless man. Nathanael basically said, “Do I know you?”, to which Jesus replied that he had seen him in his mind sitting under a fig tree before Philip had called him. Nathanael was astounded and exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Song of God, the king of Israel.”
Jesus told Nathanael that if he thought that was impressive, he would see even greater things than that. “Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Quite a claim! Jesus certainly had Jacob’s dream in mind when he said this. He identified himself as the ladder in Jacob’s dream. He essentially said to Nathanael, “I am the stairway to home that you need.”
We’ve always needed a stairway. Because of how pure God is and how impure we are, we need a bridge, a ladder to God, to our eternal home. Here we have Jesus’ portrait of Himself as that wonderful spiritual ladder. Are we content to see the glory of God’s face from the bottom rung? Are we putting our trust in other ladders? Or have we risked all and set our feet on that stairway, set our lives on Jesus alone? There is no one else who will do.
Love, Liz
