his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “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 have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you.” (Gen 28:18-22)
When the Biblical patriarchs are spoken of, it is firstly a reference to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and secondly a reference to Jacob’s twelve sons. These are the generations of men from whom the nation of Israel would emerge, and more importantly, from whom the Savior of the world would emerge. All of them existed before Moses, which means that they were called by God to be the media of his will, even before the Law was expressly given, a sacrificial system established, or a tabernacle ever constructed.
Jacob is the man who would wrestle with God, and would have his name changed to “Israel.” The word israel is an enormously packed and controversial word, but many scholars agree that its meaning seems to be related to the themes of “striving with God” and “God prevailing.” The whole nation is named for this man, and all that he represents—the promise of God, given to Eve, that made its way to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob—the promise that God would someday prevail, using a man to undo the brokenness of the world that was brought about by sin. Israel would be the medium of the Messiah.
But this passage, in Genesis 28, takes place before Jacob ever wrestles with the angel of God. We find him having recently deceived his father, and taken his brother Esau’s inheritance by trickery. After thieving the additional blessing from his dying father, Jacob takes his mother’s advice and finds distant relatives with whom to form an alliance. Esau, incidentally, does the same thing. He marries into the family of his father’s half-brother, Ishmael. All of this shows us the fractalizing effects of sin. The sin of one brother against another reverberates through ages of family history, and implores long-forgotten grievances to work their dark magic of division in a new generation.
On the first night of his journey, Jacob stops to rest as the sun goes down, and he uses a stone as his pillow. In his sleep, he dreams that there is a staircase pitched between heaven and Earth, and on it he sees angels ascending and descending. This staircase, or ladder as it’s sometimes called, represents an intersection of the spiritual and the Earthly. The theme of correlating the vertical and the horizontal will continue to be a crucial concept throughout Scripture, but in this event, Jacob believes that he has stumbled upon a portal into the heavenly dimension, rather than that he is looking at messianic typology. He appears more superstitious than theological. Jesus would later explain that this bridge between heaven and Earth is true only of himself. Jesus is Jacob’s Ladder.
Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 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.” (John 1:49–51)
God not only gives him this vision, but he reveals himself to Jacob. He declares himself as the God of Abraham, and he links Jacob directly to Abraham as his father. Genealogies often do this when there is something about the descendent that is to be directly equated with a specific ancestor. The Bible never uses the word grandfather. Isaac, Jacob’s biological father is mentioned, but Abraham is named as the progenitor. This seems to be relevant, because the nature of the call which God puts on Jacob’s life is the exact same calling as that which he put upon Abraham’s. It is the promise given by God to Abraham being reiterated to the next in line.
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. (Gen 28:13b–15)
Jacob seems to be more taken by the event than by God. This petty thief, running from the law, speaks in such a way as to suggest that he will give this God a try; if God comes through on his end of the deal, then Jacob will give God a cut of the yields. It will take Jacob a lifetime to increasingly understand that mission to which God was calling him, and who this God was who was doing the calling.
The fact that God says he will give Jacob the land which he is on tells us one true thing about God—he is claiming that land as is his own. Now, because God promises to give life to Jacob, and generations, and territory all over, we see that God is claiming to be the owner of a lot more than just the rock which Jacob used as a pillow; however, there is a complexity to this issue of houses and lands. Jacob has run from his house—from his father’s house—and hopes to make it back there someday. This is what Jacob is hoping God will procure for him in this agreement. Jacob symbolically calls the rock “Bethel,” or “the house of God.” It is as though he is saying, “This place is amazing. I must be in God’s house. If this is really God, I’ll do what he says, as long as he ends up bringing me safe and sound back to my father’s house someday.”
There are two hitches with this line of thinking. Even if God intended to bring Jacob back to his father’s house someday (which he does in fact do, but which is incidental to the real issue), he has already established the fact that Jacob’s relevant ancestor, of whom Jacob is a son, is Abraham. We could say that God is calling Jacob back to his father’s house, indeed; but Jacob has Isaac in his mind, and God has Abraham in his. The question that must be answered, if this is the case, is “What does Abraham consider to be his house?”
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (Heb 11:8–10)
So, Abraham, although given a land of promise, never lives in it as though it is not his. Of course, it is his, but he does not build a permanent home. Why? There are others who have lived like this. One thinks of the the Rechabites in Jeremiah 35. Their reason for not settling down and making themselves at home was that they were obedient to the teaching of their ancestor, Jonadab. For some reason, Jonadab saw a Faustian bargain not worth making in settling down and taking pleasure in drink. It is a safe conjecture to make that his motivation may have been the same as Abraham’s—because there was a greater home and a greater pleasure for which he did not want his heart to stop yearning.
We are told in the previously cited passage from Hebrews that Abraham forgoes the right to build himself a house in order that his heart might continually yearn for a place made out of rock that God himself had laid—God’s house. Now we can see the full-circle irony of Jacob calling the rock upon which he slept “God’s house” and imploring God to allow him to find his way to his father’s house. God has already said it: “Your father is Abraham.” In light of this declaration, the answer is a resounding yes, to Jacob’s question of whether he will ever make it home to his father’s house. The truth is, he was already there.
In literature, heroes will often strike out from home in search of some great discovery that will give both meaning and value to their existence. Often, the plot has the hero return empty-handed so that he might find his greatest treasure to be that which he had left. Only in the act of leaving it did he come to value it. This is not what is happening with Jacob in our passage. In this event, our hero leaves home, already eager for the return flight. God, the greater Hero, interrupts this seemingly traditional plot to teach Jacob a valuable
