10 Then Jacob departed from Beersheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head, and lay down in that place. 12 He had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants.
Jacob was running away from the mess he’d made of his life. He’d deceived his aged father Isaac into an irrevocable contract by which Jacob, and not his brother Esau, would receive all of the family fortune upon Isaac’s death. While his wicked plan and been successful, its consequences had shattered the family, and Jacob now was fleeing to relatives to avoid the death-threat made by his estranged brother, Esau. In the midst of such failure and crisis, the LORD appeared to Jacob one night in a dream, as Jacob slept out in a field. The LORD confirmed Jacob as the covenant bearer, as had been his father and his grandfather. In his attempt to gain this blessing of God on his own terms, and be his own ingenuity, Jacob had destroyed his family—his time away from home would stretch into decades, and he would never see his mother alive again. But at a time when he needed it the most, when it seemed the most certain that he’d certainly ruined any chance of real blessing in his life; God appeared to him and blessed him.
It’s often after the failure of our most cherished, carefully laid out plans that the LORD appears to us with blessing. God doesn’t watch this race of life waiting to see who the top dog is, and then shower our “winners” with acclaim, riches, and worship—those are the things we do to the winners in life. God, on the other hand, chooses out the riffraff, the down and out, the bottom of the barrel, the also-rans, and second-stringers—and appears to them with the news of a great blessing—the blessing of a way to get from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven. That blessing is His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus came to earth from heaven, died for our sins, and has returned to heaven with a crowd of blessed losers, deceivers, and schemers, following behind. The LORD doesn’t appear to anyone because they’re so bad, or because they’re so good—but because He is a God who has chosen to appear to those He’s chosen, and to extend a Ladder down into their lost lives that leads to a redeemed life. And the ladder is His Son, Jesus Christ. Let’s extend that Ladder to those around us who need rescue!
Father, we offer praise and worship to You for being a God who cares, who reaches out, who sees us in our failures and ruin, and yet extends the blessing of Your love and presence, and Your precious forgiveness to us—runaway children who have made a mess of things. Thank you, dear Abba!
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