New Church Sermons: Jacob’s Vision of the Ladder (Gen. 28)

Bethel: site of Jacob's Vision

Jacob’s vision of the ladder has inspired many through the centuries. Maybe you’ve heard the song “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” (new tab: audio). It’s a famous African American spiritual that understands Jacob’s ladder as a symbol of the believer’s spiritual ascent into heaven. The ascent is slow and agonizing, but the result is glory.

The slaves who sang this song weren’t the first to find spiritual meaning in Jacob’s vision. The early Church understood it in a similar way. Origen in the 3rd cent. AD understood the ladder to be a picture of the soul’s ascent to God after death. He also saw it as a picture of increasing virtue in the life of the believer. This understanding was closely linked to the monastic ideal of asceticism: the idea of denying the world and denying worldliness in order to follow Jesus.

One of the most famous expressions of this idea was the book, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (new tab: pdf) (7th cent. AD). Here again, the ladder is understood to be one that we must travel on to reach God in heaven. But the original vision of Jacob was quite different. Instead, God used the ladder to come down to meet with Jacob on earth. He came to prepare him for the dangers of his trip to the distant city of Haran. And in the process, he also prepared us for the coming of the divine messenger of God, a messenger who is himself God: God’s Son who would appear in human form as Jesus.

Jacob’s journey started at Beersheba in Israel’s southern Negev Desert. This is where Isaac, his father, was camped, and where Jacob had convinced his brother, Esau, to trade his inheritance for a bowl of lentils (Gen. 25:29-34). Here, too, Jacob had stolen his father’s blessing, pretending to be Esau, complete with a goat skin on his arms to fool the touch of his aging father (Gen. 27:16). As a result, his brother became so angry with him, he threatened to kill him (Gen. 27:41-42). So Rebekah, their mother, thought it would be best for Jacob to go away for a while. She sent him back to the area where she herself had been brought up, the city of Haran, from which Abraham had come to Canaan after his father died so many years earlier (Gen. 12:4).

For Jacob to journey to Haran was quite an adventure. He was a country boy, a shepherd. But Haran was a big city, far to the north, where many more people were living. It lay near the huge Tigris and Euphrates rivers that flowed past the great centers of ancient civilization, including Babylon and Ur—the same Ur from which Abraham had started his journeys (Gen. 11:31). Though these cities were small by modern standards—only a few tens of thousands of people lived in them, they were the largest on earth at the time.

Each had its pagan temples and a huge ziggurat, a stepped pyramid, towering above the city. This is what the Tower of Babel had also been: an artificial mountain with a large stairway up the front (Gen. 11:1-9). It served, according to the popular belief, as a “stairway to heaven” for the pagan gods. Bab-el, the Hebrew name of the city of Babylon, means literally the “gate of god.” They thought of their ziggurats as gateways to heaven: a stairway on which their gods could climb up to heaven or come down to earth. (For more on these ziggurats, see our message on the Tower of Babel.)

Some of Abraham’s family still lived in Haran and shared these beliefs. As it says in Joshua 24:2: “Since long ago, your fathers lived beyond the river [the Euphrates]—Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nahor—and they worshiped other gods.” Terah, in fact, is a name that comes from the word for “moon.” This implies that either he or perhaps his father had been a worshipper of the moon god Sin (also known as Nannar), who was popular both in Ur and in Haran. Laban, the brother of Rebekah, was also a worshipper of idols. Later in Genesis, his daughter Rachel stole his household idols, and he chased Jacob hundreds of miles to try and get them back (Gen. 31:30,34).

Jacob was about to be plunged into this completely different and pagan world, a world filled with spiritual dangers for a young man. But God didn’t want him to be completely unprepared. So he arranged a meeting with Jacob while he was still on his way to Haran. This meeting took place at Bethel in the hill country of Canaan.

To get there, Jacob had to leave Beersheba in the south and climb up into the hill country. This was the first stage in a much longer journey, a journey that couldn’t have been easy for him. He had never been an outdoor adventurer like his brother, Esau. Instead, he preferred to stay by the tents of his father Isaac (Gen. 25:27). But now, all alone, he was making the long and dangerous journey to a place he had never been before.

In those days, it was quite normal for someone to walk 30 miles (48 km) a day when they were traveling. This would put Jacob in the area of Hebron after his first day of travel. The second day would take him past Bethlehem and Jerusalem, both small villages at the time. The end of the day would have brought him near Bethel, a little village known at the time as Luz.

Here he slept under the open sky, using one of the stones lying everywhere on the ground for a pillow (Gen. 28:11). This may not have been as comfortable as being at home, but it was good enough. Israel is a dry country, so there is little chance of rain through much of the year and little vegetation up in the hill country. So it can actually be quite pleasant to sleep out in the fresh air after the heat of the day has passed.

But he had not come to just any place. In Hebrew it’s called “the place” (ha-maqom), an expression that can have a religious connotation. It may, in fact, have been the very spot where his grandfather Abraham had worshiped God, between Bethel and Ai, soon after he arrived in the land of Canaan (Gen. 12:8). These desert herdsmen did, after all, have incredibly accurate memories of the lay of the land. And Jacob surely knew the story of his grandfather’s wanderings. But even if he wasn’t in the exact spot, it was somewhere nearby, and he would certainly have thought of his grandfather as he approached the place.

During the night, Jacob had a dream in which he saw a ladder reaching up to heaven: “And he dreamed and look, a ladder was set down toward the earth and its top was reaching toward the heavens. And look, messengers of Elohim [God] were ascending and descending on it” (Gen. 28:12). But that’s not all he saw. Standing on the ladder, together with the angels, was someone who called himself LORD (YHWH), and who identified himself as the God of his fathers: “And look, the LORD was standing on it and he said, ‘I am the LORD, Elohim [God] of Abraham your father and Elohim [God] of Isaac” (Gen. 28:13a).* This one called LORD then repeated to Jacob the same promise that had been given to his father and his grandfather: the promise of the land of Israel. “The land that you are lying on, I give it to you and to your seed” (Gen. 28:13b).

* Though sometimes translated “the Lord was standing beside him,” the pronoun clearly refers back to the ladder itself, not Jacob.

But who is this that he sees standing on the ladder? The Hebrew preposition “al” used here can be translated either “on” the ladder or “above” the ladder. But the point is that this one who identifies himself as the God of Abraham is “standing,” which implies that he’s standing on legs. So who could this be? The Bible teaches that no man has ever seen God (John 1:18, Exo. 33:20). Yet Jacob clearly saw someone that identified himself as God, and who spoke as God (“I give it to you...”). Who is this?

Later, in Haran, this same being appears again to Jacob and reminds him of his previous appearance at Bethel. When he does, Jacob calls him “the messenger [or angel] of God” (Gen. 31:11,13). Who is this messenger who is also God? This is the one we know today as the Son or Word of God, and after his birth at Bethlehem, as Jesus.

Some dismiss any connection with Jesus by claiming that this and other appearances of the “angel of the Lord” are simply ordinary angels speaking for God. The later rabbis invented the angel Metatron, to whom they gave divine names, to explain passages like this one. But in recording Jacob’s visit to this same spot many years later, the Bible eliminates these other explanations with its carefully selected words (literally in Hebrew): “...and he called the place El-Bethel [God of Bethel], for there Elohim [God] revealed themselves [niglu] to him when he was fleeing from the presence of his brother” (Gen. 35:6-7). What does this strange expression mean, “Elohim [God] revealed themselves”?

Elohim is one of the most frequently used names of God in the Bible. Strangely, it’s not a singular but a plural noun: the -im at the end is a plural ending. When speaking of the pagan gods, the same word (elohim) is translated “gods.” This plural name of God is one of the proofs that Christians have used through the years to show that God is a multi-personality—that he is a three-in-one, a Trinity.

Usually, when Elohim refers to the true God, it’s matched with a singular verb. This alerts us to the fact that God is the subject of the sentence, and not the gods. But in this particular verse, not only is “God” in the plural, but so is the verb, “revealed themselves” (Gen. 35:7).* Here there is no question that the true God is being referred to because of the context (El in El-Bethel, for example, is singular). But the writer was not satisfied with an ordinary singular. He wanted to emphasize that God had revealed himself to Jacob as a plurality. And so he chose a plural verb together with a plural name of God. In other words, he wanted to make it perfectly clear that the messenger of God he had seen was not an ordinary angel, but was part of the plurality of Elohim himself. As Jesus said in John 14:9: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” The clear implication of this remarkable choice of words led the early Jewish Christians to use this verse to prove that Jesus is God in debates with the rabbis (Sanh. 38b).

* This is all one word in the original Hebrew, niglu [plural] instead of niglah [singular].

Jesus himself alluded to Jacob’s vision in John 1:51 when he met Nathanael for the first time: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will see heaven open and the messengers [angels] of God ascending and descending for the Son of Man” (John 1:51). What does this mean? Jesus is telling them, in effect, that they will also see what Jacob saw! They, too, will see heaven open, and the angels ascending and descending to do the will of the Son of Man. Here Jesus interprets Jacob’s vision for us, associating the divine angel of God on the ladder with the Son of Man, that is, with himself.

But when would this be that they would see this? Nothing like this took place in the lifetime of the apostles. So when will they see it? At Jesus’ second coming—the coming of the Son of Man—of which he says in Matthew, “he will send out his messengers by means of a loud trumpet, and they will gather his chosen ones...from one end of the heavens to the other” (Matt. 24:31). The angels of God will be ascending and descending to bring all the believers to Jesus in the clouds (1 Thess. 4:17). This explains how those listening to Jesus will see the angels “ascending and descending for the Son of Man”: because they’ll be there to experience this amazing event!

Is there any additional evidence to confirm this interpretation? Yes, the promise given to Jacob, the promise of the land of Israel (Gen. 28:13). Did Jacob ever receive the land in his lifetime? No. He wandered the land as a stranger all his life. The only land that his family owned in Canaan was the small field and cave near Hebron where Abraham and Sarah were buried (Gen. 23; 25:9,10; 35:27-29; Gen. 50:13). There was also a small piece of land that Jacob bought near Shechem (Gen. 33:19). But this was far from owning the entire land of Canaan!

So how will this promise to Jacob be fulfilled? In the resurrection at Jesus’ return! This was the teaching of the early Church: that the promises given to the Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will be fulfilled in the earthly reign of Messiah, a reign that begins when Jesus returns. As the early church father Irenaus (2nd cent. AD) put it: “The predicted blessing [of Jacob], therefore, belongs unquestionably to the times of the kingdom [of Messiah], when the righteous will reign upon their rising from the dead.” Here again, we see that the promises to Jacob point to the resurrection and the coming of the Son of Man.

* Irenaus, Against Heresies 5.33.3; see Matt. 8:11, 22:32.

The implications of Jacob’s dream are also confirmed in Gen. 28:14, where the one appearing on the ladder promised him, “...and all the families of the earth will be blessed by you and by your seed [singular].” This, too, is a repetition of the promises God gave to his father and to his grandfather. The singular “seed” by which all the families of the earth will be blessed is a prophecy of Jesus, the Messiah (Gal. 3:16)!

The next verse in Genesis reveals why Jacob was given this vision at this time: because he was going to a distant land which was not the Promised Land—and God wanted him back again! “And look, I am with you and I will protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you” (Gen. 28:15). Even though Jacob was leaving the Promised Land for a while, God wanted him to know that he would not abandon him, but would be with him for his entire journey. This, too, is a promise with incredible implications: If God would not leave him until he fulfilled his promises to him, then God has not left Jacob from that day until today. Why not? Because the promises have not yet been completely fulfilled! This is the kind of verse that Jesus and the rabbis used to prove the resurrection. And it’s the same promise that we have as believers in Messiah Jesus: that he will never leave us or forsake us, not in this life or the next (Heb. 13:5).

What was Jacob’s reaction to this awesome vision? He experienced the fear of God: “And Jacob awoke from his sleep and he said, ‘Surely the LORD is in this place, and I didn’t know it.’ And he was afraid and he said, ‘How fearful is this place! Is it not surely a house of Elohim, and this a gateway to the heavens?’” (Gen. 28:16,17). Jacob had understood exactly the point of God’s visitation: that the gate or door of heaven was right there in the land of promise, and not in the ziggurats of Mesopotamia where he was going!

Standing Stones in the Desert

The next morning, Jacob took the stone he had used as a pillow and stood it upright, pouring oil on top of it (Gen. 28:18). This was the ancient desert custom of using standing stones (masseboth in Hebrew, sometimes translated “pillars”) for worship. These standing stones have been found at dozens of ancient open-air worship sites throughout the deserts of Israel and neighboring countries. Moses himself set up twelve masseboth at Mt. Sinai (Ex. 24:4), though God later forbid their use (Lev. 26:1, Deut. 16:22).*

* Ancient standing stones have also been found in the pagan cities of Gezer, Hazor, and Petra among others, as well as at Israelite high places, including Arad in the time of the later kings of Judah.

So why did Jacob set up a standing stone? This is the first time they’re mentioned in the Bible. When Abraham and Isaac had an encounter with God, they set up an altar to worship him with whole burnt offerings. But it seems that Jacob was not yet ready for that.

Instead, he imitated the religious customs of those living around him. He marked the site of his remarkable experience with a stone—with a memorial. But memorials are for things that are dead and gone, not for things that are alive (Matt. 23:29-31)! Jacob did not yet have a living relationship with God.

But he was willing to make a deal: “If Elohim will be with me and will protect me on this journey that I am taking, and he gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I return to the house of my father in peace, then the LORD will be my Elohim. And this stone that I have set up as a standing stone will be a house of Elohim” (Gen. 28:20-22). The stone will be God’s house? This, too, reflects the religious practices of the surrounding nations. Jacob had had a genuine experience with God, but he still didn’t understand God very well.

But over the years, God was faithful. He was with Jacob through all his adventures and brought him back safely. So when Jacob finally returned to the Promised Land, he built an altar to God near Shechem, the same place where Abraham had first arrived in the Land (Gen. 33:20). But though he did this act of worship, nothing happened. God didn’t show up. What a disappointment! Have you ever prepared something spiritual for God, but heaven remained silent?

After some difficult experiences at Shechem,* God appeared to him again: “Get up! Go up to Bethel and stay there, and make there an altar to God who appeared to you when you fled from the presence of Esau your brother” (Gen. 35:1). God hadn’t forgotten him. Nor had he forgotten the promise that Jacob had made. He just needed to give one more thing to God.

* This is when Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, was raped, and his sons killed everyone in town to take vengeance. Things were not going the way Jacob had hoped!

“And Jacob said to his house and to all that were with him, ‘Put aside the foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes’” (Gen. 35:2). Now we see what the problem had been. Jacob had not yet made a clean break with other gods. The true God is a jealous God. He doesn’t want to be one of our gods; he wants to be our only God. Jacob had not yet fully committed himself to the God of his fathers. But now he was finally willing to take that step. “And they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that they had and the rings that were in their ears, and Jacob hid them under the oak that was near Shechem” (Gen. 35:4). The earrings probably had a connection with the false gods, too, as they were often looked at as good luck charms, popular both with men and women.

Then Jacob went to Bethel and built an altar (Gen. 35:7). And when he did, God appeared to him and repeated the same promises he had made to his grandfather Abraham. He would be the father of nations and would be given the land of Canaan (35:9-12).

How did Jacob respond? He set up a standing stone again (Gen. 35:14)! Jacob is now a believer. But he’s still trying to express his belief in pagan ways: he has not yet fully understood the ways of God.

This problem is not unique to Jacob. We all come to God with strange ideas in our minds; ideas that must be purified, refined, and tested to bring them in line with God’s word and his will. I still remember some of my strange early attempts to reconcile my previous worldview with what the Bible said. It didn’t work, of course. But it took me a while to understand that.

This happens not only to individuals but to Christian societies as a whole. In Europe, many pagan ideas and practices remained among Christians for many years—some until today. It’s often easier to continue old traditions than to think about whether or not they are pleasing to God. The problem is that these things risk blocking out the true spiritual presence of God in our lives.

The place where Jacob set up his stone, at Bethel, later became a center of traditional worship. Here Jeroboam set up one of his golden calves that led many into sin (2 Kings 10:29). Why did they do this? They, like Jacob, were worshiping the right God, but doing it the wrong way. They were using pagan forms of worship that God had forbidden. This can be quite dangerous. In the northern kingdom of Israel, it eventually led to death and destruction, as did similar times of false belief and action among Christians in Europe. Many in the northern tribes of Israel permanently fell away, and were taken into exile where they became completely paganized, far removed from the worship of the one true God.

Fortunately, Jacob himself did finally get the point. In his old age, before going down to Egypt to be with his son Joseph, he stopped at Beersheba, the place where his whole adventure had begun. Here, he offered sacrifices in worship to the God of his father Isaac (Gen. 46:1). Again, God spoke to him. He told him not to be worried about going to Egypt, that God would be with him and bring him back again (Gen. 46:2-4).* But this time, Jacob didn’t set up a standing stone. There was no need to. Now he understood that God was with him every day and every hour. There was no need for a memorial: his relationship with God was alive.

* The delicate wording here hints that though he would himself die in Egypt, his family would one day return with him. This was later fulfilled when his sons brought back his body for burial in Hebron (Gen. 50:13), and when Israel returned to Canaan under the leadership of Moses.

What about you? Have you set up memorials in your life for past religious experiences? Or are you in a living relationship with God every day? May God help us to have an informed understanding of his will, so we can remove the traces of dead tradition and every unclean thing out of our lives. But even more importantly, may he fill our hearts with the desire to worship him daily in Spirit and in truth.

(For more on this topic, see the index category Jacob.)

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