Recall that when we last spoke about a dysfunctional biblical family—that of Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Esau—Genesis 27 ended with strife, turmoil, division and separation. Jacob had conspired with his mother to steal his brother’s birthright from their blind, soon-to-be-dead father. Resultantly, Jacob had to flee home because his older brother, Esau, was so enraged he planned on murdering his younger brother.
That brings us to Genesis 28, where, in short, Jacob flees home in order to go to Paddan-aram, where his uncle Laban lives. It is on this journey that Jacob has his famous dream of a ladder. The symbolism, meaning and theological significance of the ladder will be the main focus of this post.
As always, let us begin with the text. Genesis 28 says:
So Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and commanded him, saying to him, “You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Paddan-aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother’s father; and from there take to yourself a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother. May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, so that you may become a multitude of peoples. May He also give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your descendants with you, so that you may possess the land where you live as a stranger, which God gave to Abraham.” Then Isaac sent Jacob away, and he went to Paddan-aram to Laban, son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, the mother of Jacob and Esau.
Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan-aram to take to himself a wife from there, and that when he blessed him he commanded him, saying, “You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan,” and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and had gone to Paddan-aram. So Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father Isaac; and Esau went to Ishmael, and married, besides the wives that he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaioth.
Then Jacob departed from Beersheba and went toward Haran. And he happened upon a particular place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and made it a support for his head, and lay down in that place. And he had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Then behold, the Lord was standing 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 to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants 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, “The Lord is certainly 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 Jacob got up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had placed as a support for his head, and set it up as a memorial stone, and poured oil on its top. Then he named that place Bethel; but previously the name of the city had been Luz. Jacob also made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God. And this stone, which I have set up as a memorial stone, will be God’s house, and of everything that You give me I will assuredly give a tenth to You.”
The chapter opens with Isaac not only sending his younger son away but also telling him why he is to leave the Promised Land now. In Genesis 28:1-2 Isaac tells Jacob:
You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan. Arise, go to Paddan-aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother’s father; and from there take to yourself a wife from the daughters of Laban, your mother’s brother.
As I believe I have written many times before on this site, when we look at the whole canon of Scripture, it is evident that the command not to take a Canaanite wife had little to do with biology, geography or ethnicity. Rather, it had much to do with worship. You see, Canaanite wives brought Canaanite idolatry with them, and at this point in the drama of redemption, God was laying the foundation to carve out a special niche of people for Himself. This foundation was being laid through history and bloodlines in order to mold a people that were set apart; that is, set apart from the world and set apart to God.
In fact, when Isaac blesses Jacob, he tells him (28:3), “May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, so that you may become a multitude of peoples.” What Isaac does here is actually add onto the Abrahamic promise. Recall that back in Genesis 12:1-3, God promised to create a great name for Abraham and bless him with land and people. Now, Isaac is blessing Jacob with more than a great number of descendants; he also now speaks to the quality of those people. When Isaac blesses Jacob with a “multitude of peoples,” the Hebrew word for “multitude” is qahal. And why does that matter? Because the Greek translation of this Hebrew word is ekklesia, which translates as the English word “church.” Thus, what Isaac blesses Jacob with is the start of the Israel of God. And so, after receiving this blessing, Jacob heads for Paddan-aram in modern-day Turkey.
What is Esau’s response to Jacob’s blessing? Genesis 28:6-9 says:
Now Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob and sent him away to Paddan-aram to take to himself a wife from there, and that when he blessed him he commanded him, saying, “You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan,” and that Jacob had obeyed his father and his mother and had gone to Paddan-aram. So Esau saw that the daughters of Canaan displeased his father Isaac; and Esau went to Ishmael, and married, besides the wives that he had, Mahalath the daughter of Ishmael, Abraham’s son, the sister of Nebaioth.
Recall that Esau already had wives from the land (or Canaanites), which was against his parents’ wishes. So what does he do now? He compounds his earlier sin and marries an Ishmaelite girl⎯who technically wasn’t a Canaanite⎯in order to add to his Hittite wives. But there is a problem with this plan. Genesis 25:18 tells us that Ishmael settled out of the Promised Land in defiance of all his relatives. So, for Esau to marry an Ishmaelite women may have seemed like the right thing to do in his eyes because an Ishmaelite was not a Canaanite. Perhaps Esau was making an attempt to please his father, but his course of action lacked spiritual perception. Accordingly, Esau here gives us a succinct picture of the unregenerate heart: Even when they do what they think is right, the devolve further into sin because they reject God’s truth and chart their own course. They do not use God’s standard of right and wrong but instead follow their own conscience. Hence, for the unregenerate heart, morality leads to more depravity. This will be unpacked and made explicit in the New Testament in Romans 1.
Now, back to Jacob. Genesis 28:10 tells us that Jacob “departed from Beersheba and went toward Haran.” Of course, Jacob was fleeing Beersheba because he was in danger. And thus, like Moses, Jacob was now fleeing home to escape the consequences of his sin. Moses, of course, fled Egypt because he had murdered an Egyptian. Jacob was escaping to safety because he was threatened with being murdered.
Genesis 28:11 then says, “And [Jacob] happened upon a particular place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and made it a support for his head, and lay down in that place.” What’s about to happen is that Jacob is going to fall asleep and have a dream of the famous ladder. But I don’t want you to miss the fact that Jacob has his dream at night after the sun had set. This is important because Jacob’s experience in exile is bracketed by two encounters with God. The first is here, when Jacob is going into the darkness of exile. The second is two decades later as Jacob is returning home, when he wrestles with God. There in Genesis 32:24, the text says the two men wrestle until dawn as Jacob’s exile ends and he now moves out of darkness, into the light. Beloved, God does not waste words, and thus the Bible provides details for a reason. The great hope for all believers is that God will providentially allow dark times, but such seasons exist so that He may reveal His light. Oftentimes, God is more willing to demonstrate mercy than we anticipate, especially when He makes a promise to a deceitful, idolatrous, blasphemous trickster who is on the run from his entire family after he sinned against them all.
What happens next? Genesis 28:12-15 says:
And [Jacob] had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. Then behold, the Lord was standing 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 to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants 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.”
There are three “behold” statements in these verses, so the text is trying to focus our attention with repetition. First, Jacob sees stairsteps founded on the earth. It must be said here that the Hebrew word (סֻלָּם or sullam) that is translated by the NASB as “ladder” more properly refers to stairsteps on a ziggurat. I believe it is fair to infer that thousands of years ago in the Middle East, modern ladders were not commonplace. Instead, sullam implies an ascending structure that connects two levels; hence, a ziggurat has its base on the earth while its peak touches the heavens. More on that in a moment. Second, angels were moving up and down the ziggurat, meaning they were at work executing God’s orders. Third, it is God Himself who stands atop the ziggurat, for He is the One who crowns the structure as the legitimate stairway to heaven.
Now, I am firmly persuaded that to truly understand this divine revelation, we have to go back to Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. What were the people trying to construct? Genesis 11:4 says:
And they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let’s make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of all the earth.”
The people of Genesis 11 were trying to build their own stairway to heaven that likely took the form of a stepped pyramid or ziggurat. Babel was a stone structure the goal of which was to reach God. In fact, the Hebrew word Babel is derived from the Akkadian word babilu, which means “gate of God.”
Let’s explore some more contrasts between Babel and what God revealed to Jacob. The intent of Babel’s builders was to make a name for themselves and to secure a territorial home. Babel did not come from the command of God but was created based on human initiative and human desire. The end result of the failed tower was divine judgment, as everything ended up in chaos and division: The people were confused with language and were scattered over the face of the earth. Meaning, the very things the people were building the tower for⎯security and significance⎯they ended up getting the opposite. The story of Babel ended with judgment and separation. Genesis 11:5-9 says:
Now the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the men had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they have started to do, and now nothing which they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore it was named Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Contrast this to Genesis 28. Jacob was dreaming when he saw the vision of the ziggurat, meaning he wasn’t doing anything. He was a passive recipient of the vision, which was unsought for, unexpected and undeserved. Jacob wasn’t looking for God but received a gift regardless. And it must be said that I am sure there are some readers who had a Sunday school lesson when they were younger and heard the story of “Jacob’s ladder.” Yet it wasn’t Jacob’s, and it wasn’t a ladder. It was God’s ziggurat! The only thing Jacob did was fall asleep.
And how did Jacob’s dream end? Not with judgment, chaos and confusion but instead with grace, order and harmony in the form of land, descendants and a great name. Meaning, what God promised to Jacob at Bethel were the precise things the builders of Babel were looking for. In Genesis 28:13-15, God tells Jacob:
Then behold, the Lord was standing 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 to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants 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.”
In other words, God promised Jacob security in that He would guide, protect and preserve him; He also promised significance in that through Jacob, a blessed legacy of descendants would permeate the entire globe. This means that even before Jacob leaves the Promised Land, God already promises to bring him back home with a sacred inheritance.
You see, beloved, the fake stairway to heaven is something made by human hands based on human designs. But no one ever makes it to God based upon works. The real stairway to heaven is God’s work that doesn’t involve human effort and is revealed to us by grace. I think it is clear to see that God’s ziggurat is a picture of Christ, the only Mediator between God and man (I Timothy 2:5), between heaven and earth. As Jesus says of Himself in John 1:51, “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 God-Man is the One who emptied Himself and descended the stairway to take the form of a bond-servant, born in the likeness of men (see Philippians 2:7). After He lived on earth and then died, He ascended back up the ladder to sit at the right hand of God. Now, there is only One “gate of God,” only one way to get right with our Heavenly Father: Jesus Christ.
Furthermore, the emphasis of grace in Jacob receiving the vision is all the more remarkable when we consider what was happening in Jacob’s life at the time. Remember, Jacob’s sin is what made a mess of his family, and the consequences of his sin caused him to flee home. One would expect that when Jacob dreamt, he would have received harsh words of rebuke or wrath from the Lord. But He didn’t. Instead, Jacob received grace and the promise of security and significance. In other words, at a low point in his life, Jacob received an unmerited, undeserved gift from God.
Additionally, the final point I will make on the connection between Babel and Bethel is this: The fiasco of Babel in Genesis 11 was followed by the Abrahamic promise and the foundation of a covenant of grace in Genesis 12. The fiasco of family drama and Jacob stealing a birthright in Genesis 27 is followed by the promise at Bethel in Genesis 28. A pattern is emerging in the Bible’s first book: that people will invariably mess things up, yet, by grace, God intervenes and writes straight with crooked pencils.
If I were to stop there, I would give the reader the impression that perhaps the vision Jacob received at Bethel was Jacob-focused. Certainly, that is not the point. Let us look again at what God promises Jacob. After the Lord promises Jacob land and descendants, the Lord says in Genesis 28:15:
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.
Do you appreciate what God is doing for Jacob here? God is not promising to bless primarily Jacob with land, people or things on earth; God’s chief blessing is Himself. God promises Jacob that “I will be with you … I will bring you back … and I will not leave you until I have done what I promised.” This foreshadows what the apostle Paul will write in a dark time in his life⎯while imprisoned for living out God’s truth⎯when he still rejoiced knowing that the great hope for him and for all Christians is that God will providentially allow dark times in order to reveal His light. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work among you will complete it by the day of Christ Jesus.” In the end, God is more gracious than we expect!
Truly, God is a refuge and strength in times of trouble, but how could God demonstrate the strength and integrity of His refuge unless He allowed us to experience times of trouble? As it says in Psalm 46:1-3:
God is our refuge and strength, a very ready help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth shakes and the mountains slip into the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains quake at its swelling pride.
Now, what was Jacob’s response to dreaming, seeing God’s ziggurat and hearing the divine promise? Genesis 28:16-18 says:
Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “The Lord is certainly 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!”
When Jacob makes the observation that God was “in this place” yet he was unaware of it, this highlights an important point for our modern experience: that for Jacob, God was where Jacob was, and for us, God is where we are. You see, there may be times when, to us, God seems to be far away or even absent. But even if we do not know it, God already is where we are. No one ever has to pray for God to “be with” any of His children, because He has already promised to be with all of us always until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).
Next, when awake, Jacob demonstrates to the reader that his response to the divine promise is worship. That is because grace received creates a heart that wants to give back to God. In Genesis 28:18-22, it says:
So Jacob got up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had placed as a support for his head, and set it up as a memorial stone, and poured oil on its top. Then he named that place Bethel; but previously the name of the city had been Luz. Jacob also made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God. And this stone, which I have set up as a memorial stone, will be God’s house, and of everything that You give me I will assuredly give a tenth to You.
Truly, the point of worship is God. And while orthodox Christians do not believe in relics, it is fitting to both rename a location and build a memorial stone to remember what God has done and promised. Now, Christ is our living Bethel, and we look back and remember what He has done in His life, death and Resurrection. Two concrete rituals that memorialize Christ’s work are baptism and communion. I must mention that while we don’t believe in relics, there is always a temptation for tradition and formalism to replace genuine worship in spirit and in truth. That is because, hundreds of years later when the people had inhabited the Promised Land, Bethel became a place of false worship. As it says in Amos 5:4-5:
For this is what the Lord says to the house of Israel:
“Seek Me so that you may live. But do not resort to Bethel and do not come to Gilgal, nor cross over to Beersheba; for Gilgal will certainly go into captivity and Bethel will come to nothing.”
In other words, later on in the historical narrative, the people forgot what true worship was and began seeking Bethel without God. False worship will remain false worship even if it’s dressed up to look like true religion.
The final note I will make is on Jacob’s vow. After the entire experience, in Genesis 28:20-21 Jacob says:
If God will be with me and will keep me on this journey that I take, and give me food to eat and garments to wear, and I return to my father’s house in safety, then the Lord will be my God.
It is interesting to contrast the Lord’s promises to Jacob⎯which are all unconditional⎯to the conditional vow that Jacob makes to the Lord. Jacob in essence says, “If … then,” so as to suggest that he was still unsure about God. This is the grand irony of the Christian experience: that we are called to trust in our perpetually trustworthy God, yet the problem is never God’s faithfulness but our unbelief. That is not to suggest that at his point in the narrative Jacob did not have some faith in God, for there is a distinction between no faith, little faith and weak faith. What is evident, however, is that while Jacob received grace at Bethel, it did not immediately transform him by leaps and bounds. As we will see in future episodes, God willing, Jacob was about to embark on a decades-long journey of sanctification. The result is that toward the end of his life, Jacob did not regard the Lord as his only if He satisfied some conditions. Rather, Jacob regarded the Lord as his (Genesis 32:20) because God is God.
As Iain M. Duguid writes in his commentary Living in the Grip of Relentless Grace:
“If Abraham is the archetypal man of faith, Jacob is surely the archetypal picture of grace. The schemer whose wonderful schemes have backfired is now a fugitive on the run for his life, stranded in the dark in the wilderness. Yet this is the one to whom God chooses to reveal himself, and his grace will not be without effect in Jacob’s life. The promised blessings that Jacob sought to wangle for himself will ultimately be given to him. But they will not come through might or through power or even through his craftiness but through the Spirit of God.”
Beloved, this all points to Christ, the real Stairway to Heaven. Just as God’s grace found Jacob when he most certainly did not deserve it, through the Son, God’s grace finds us and opens the path to redemption. He is the One who bridges the gap between heaven and earth; between God and man. The real Stairway cannot be tricked out of a blessing, nor can anyone ever construct their own ziggurat to reach Paradise. The real Stairway is not Babel. Instead, the grace that is needed to be reconciled to God is freely given, independent of human effort. And, once we cling to Christ, in Him we also find the security and significance that the tower builders were working for. You see, the Stairway doesn’t lead to a place but to a Person: God Himself.
Dr. C. H. E. Sadaphal