Clough Genesis Lesson 71

The preparation, the dream, the response to the dream – Genesis 28:10-22

In the morning series we’ve been looking at the sequence of the patriarchs and these stories that we’ve looked at seem to be stretched out for quite a while. There is a detail here and a detail there about these early families. And the question we have to deal with is how these stories all apparently obsessed with little details, how do all these stories fit together into the big picture. We said that one of the important elementary things to remember when you read the Bible is to remember that it was written in sequence; it wasn’t dropped out of a cloud some place, all its one unit, and therefore there is a progress to the way God reveals Himself in history.

We have looked so far at creation, the fall, the flood, the covenant; we’re looking at this whole complex, the call of Abraham, the beginning of the Jewish culture. Next will come the Exodus and the kingdom of God. In order to put all of this together we want to remember that the kingdom of God is something political, something physical, something national. Don’t ever think of the kingdom of God as something mystical; that’s not the way the Bible presents it. The kingdom of God began at a point in time in the Old Testament, a shadow version or an adumbration of the yet to come eternal kingdom of God. This Old Testament shadow version, however, is not occurring at this point in Genesis. It’s going to occur with the rise of the Jewish nation at the Exodus; therefore all these stories that we’re looking at, the stories of Abraham, the stories of Isaac, the stories of Jacob and Esau, are all preparatory; they are preparatory to this coming kingdom, the coming kingdom in the Old Testament beginning at the Exodus. And as we look at this coming kingdom of the Exodus we want to think why or what is the Holy Spirit teaching? What is He stressing that has to be inside history all functioning before He starts His kingdom? There is a preparation for the kingdom and we’ve looked at the doctrines that are associated with this event in the Bible over and over again, the doctrine of election, the doctrine of justification, and the doctrine of faith.

If we draw the kingdom of God as some sort of a building and realize that it’s a nation in the Old Testament, that building has to rest on a foundation and the question now is, what is the foundation for the kingdom of God. The foundation of the kingdom of God is a family culture and it’s interesting that in the sequence of revelation which unit does God work with first? Family or overall society? Answer: family; family precedes the nation and therefore if you want to affect society you must affect the family, and if you don’t affect the family then you’re never going to affect the society. Culture is built through the family and we can make that sociological claim simply because this is the mechanism that God used in the sequence of revelation. Now what does it mean to say He built His foundation? Why did He spend three to four generations building that foundation before He brought the nation into existence? And we say, if we summarize all the teaching, it basically falls out as three major doctrines over and over and over: the doctrine of election, that God plans, the doctrine of justification, that God provides perfect righteousness, the doctrine of faith, that I accept it on His authority.

Now to see what the fight was or why this tremendous agonizing three to four generation separation, why all that was necessary, let’s show the difference between divine viewpoint and human viewpoint on these vital matters. You can’t have the kingdom unless you first have these kinds of things settled. The doctrine of election says that God is going to be the planner, that it’s God’s plan, not man’s plan that designs history. We also find out from human viewpoint that man wants to do the planning, so you have the Marxist, the socialist, the fascist and all the other schemers of history setting down that man is going to design his own blueprint; society is sort of plastic, it can be molded any way it wants to, there’s no inherent laws that have to be followed in molding a healthy society. That’s not really true. The Marxists hold that there are these ephemeral things, economic determinism and so on. But we’re saying that it’s even more profound than that; it goes back to eternity. There is a God-designed plan so that election has to be balanced against the natural tendency for man, the sinner, to form his own plan, to write his own constitution, to manufacture his own set of laws, to draw up his own constitution. God says I will draw up the constitutions and you will follow them.

So right away we’re faced with a crisis of authority and the authority has to be the authority of revealed Scripture. Then we find the doctrine of justification, that God provides divine good, that is, the good that is created by Himself, His own perfect good revealed through the life of Jesus Christ. But man always wants his human good; he wants to provide it independently of God and His gracious provision and so we have a war over that. Not only do we have a war, a war without treaty or compromise, either God or man will be the final arbiter of the design and now either or God or man will be the one who manufactures righteousness. Then when we come to the doctrine of faith it’s a third war of issues, and that is, is it going to be by faith, receiving what God has provided, or is it going to be by works, I will do it.

So these three doctrines are critical and they had to be taught and taught and taught and taught over and over and over again. That’s why we have all these stories that are going on in Genesis. It is to lay the foundation for this coming kingdom and the kingdom can’t be built unless those cultural pieces are all into place. Now we can, because we’re Americans, we like to have everything instant. We have instant food, we have instant this, we have instant that, we want to use now and pay later, the whole culture is permeated with this philosophy of instant-ism. Now this is where we, as Americans, have something fluky with our character that prevents us from appreciating the way God the Holy Spirit works. He doesn’t work the instant way, and that frankly is not one of the most admirable qualities of American culture. In history God works slowly, never in a hurried way, and especially is that true when it comes to building a culture. When a culture is put together over a long time span the tragedy is it can be very rapidly destroyed and once it’s rapidly destroyed it takes a heck of a long time to rebuild it.

Those of you who have been reading the newspapers the last two weeks have watched the tragedy of one nation, Iran, just come unglued at the seams. And the horrifying thing to think of is that those people are not uneducated people; thousands and thousands of them have American university education; they’re not some peasant class that basically is running the country. They are well-trained intelligent people and yet the fiber and the glue all came undone and came undone, now we can say from November to December to January. It just took 2-3 months to completely destroy a society. Those of you who know history know what happened in Russia in 1917; the same thing. The European side of Russia had many, many European educated people in it and it basically came unglued extremely rapidly. A sobering reminder, incidentally, that don’t you think the same thing can’t occur here. The fragile-ness of culture is something we don’t appreciate. It takes generations to put something together and it takes days to tear it apart and once it’s lost it’s lost. In Iran you’re having a destruction of some of the military leaders; you’re having a destruction of some of the managerial leaders. Now if that destructive process doesn’t stop the society simply can’t recover. Managers and leaders take generations to build and once they’re gone they’re gone and the nitwits that are riding down the street with machine guns in the back seat, these people can’t control themselves, leave alone build a society. Anybody can be a gorilla, anybody can be a terrorist, anybody can tear apart but very, very few people can lead and put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The same thing is true in our country; you can take the religious Protestant Christian faith that had been built up in the country all the way up to the end of the 19^th century and then about from 1920 to 1920 in the liberal fundamentalist controversies, where the liberals captured the machinery of every major denomination, they captured the schools of every major denomination, we had a complete destruction, an erosion of Christian culture, replaced with a sort of humanism sugar-coated with Christian words. The result of all this is seen today in churches like this one, where you can go through and perform an analysis statistically of the age levels and I’ve talked with pastors in conservative churches and various groups across the country and this is not unique to Lubbock Bible Church, it’s a pretty general trend.

When you take a poll of the people who regularly attend and plot their age versus the number of people in that age group, it always seems like you get a curve like this, and that is you have a high frequency of the over 55 people and then you have a frequency of the college group, say 18-25, but the section in between is gone and that’s usually the case where you get your leadership from. And this is what has so desperately hurt large independent works, the small independent works, is what happened to the missing generation. It doesn’t require a genius in arithmetic to realize that that missing generation is a generation that grew up precisely during the liberal-modernist controversies and therefore, you see, that generation as a generation, there are many fine exceptions to the contrary, but basically as a generation they’re dead; basically as a generation they’re gone and the Holy Spirit just seems like in evangelism doesn’t work this way. One thing that we’ve been thinking about recently is in our own church, it’s interesting that most of our families, those of you who are faithful, those of you who are turned on to the Word in that age bracket, you were basically attracted here through your children, not directly by yourself. And so it’s an interesting historical comment on just one very close at hand easy thing to observe. Notice what happened; it was not a general working of the Holy Spirit in that generation, it was working with the young people and then back through them the other way. This is unusual and it’s a deep wound in the way that just the general fundamental conservative culture is developed and this is why we are without a culture and why it’ll probably take us 40 years, if the Lord tarries, to rebuild once again an intellectually viable culture in every area, the music, the arts, philosophy and so on. It’s in the process but it’s a long, long way to go because something was ripped apart and torn apart in a couple of decades at the beginning of this century and we suffer the consequences all the way down to the present time.

Well, this gives you some appreciation for the passage we are about to start; Genesis 28:10. This is a section that is yet another story in the preparation of this family. You see, before you can build a culture you have to have basics and one of the basics is that you have some sort of family structure and family authority. Now by authority we’re not talking about dictators but by authority we mean what the commandment means, of the Ten Commandments, you shall honor your father and mother. Now if there’s not a honoring of the father and the mother, if there’s not an upholding of their basic authority, then we never learn authority.

This is why I’ve advocated over the ears and it increasingly falls on deaf ears, that the best thing for a college boy leaving Tech at 21 is to go into the military service. Well, I don’t want to interrupt my career. You’ll learn in 2-3 years lessons it will take you ten years to learn in industry and the reason is because many of you have come out of homes which must have been designed around Spock or something and your parents let you get away with hell, and it’s obvious the way you carry yourself, it is obvious the way you talk, it is obvious the way you handle girls, it is obvious the way you do a lot of things that you do not understand authority and have no appreciation for it. And this is why you need somebody, if it isn’t a D.I. or someone else to knock you up against the side of a wall and tell you just where you’re at. You need this, a lot of you young men need this and this is why I insist that military service is a good thing, where you can have responsibility, it’s under controlled conditions so that at least you won’t take a B-52 and drop it on 34^th street or something, there’ll be somebody there to cushion the blow but nevertheless, you’ll learn responsibility and you’ll learn it within a chain of authority and that lesson will do you wonders for the rest of your life. But since the draft stopped we have a generation that is even weaker in the normal basics of life and by basics I mean basics, I mean getting up in the morning at the same time.

When we find people that are all chaotically wrapped around the axle about some problem in life, you do a survey and you say, just tell me what you do each day, you know, the last four days what have you done. And so often you find no pattern, no rhyme, no reason, no order anywhere in their life, they don’t get up in the morning, don’t go to bed at the same time, I don’t mean legalistically but just routinely. And if they don’t feel like doing something they don’t do something. This same deal, just hedonistically living any way I want, and then they wonder why after, when they become a Christian, all of a sudden they get hit with all this problem of gee, I didn’t know being a Christian was like this and gee, before I was a Christian I’d go out and raise hell and do what I wanted to and now I’ve got all these problems. Well, the problem is that you just joined the family of God and God is your Father; that word “Father” is a metaphor in the Bible and it is meant to be something. God the Father does not run His family like apparently some of your fathers ran you, you got away with hell. But God the Father doesn’t let you get away with hell because He doesn’t want you in hell. And so to keep you out of hell He is going to whip your butt, to put it in a nice non-theological way.

Now that we’ve communicated let’s turn to Genesis 28:10. Here we find another episode in this training of a family. I like to divide this passage from Genesis 28:10-22 into three parts. The passage has as its theme, God is assuring Jacob that the kingdom is going to come. This is a passage at the end… remember we’ve had three generations of a family, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And we’re down to that last crucial generation because remember, Jacob is the father of Israel. It’s his sons that form the prototype tribes. So right here you see something major is going to happen in history so this is the last patriarch that’s living as an individual person. And therefore in this passage, this famous latter dream vision that many of you have learned about in Sunday School and so on, the angels going up and down the ladder, you know, this kind of dream is providing new information about the Abrahamic Covenant.

The first section is verses 10-11; this section deals with God preparing Jacob before that dream. By the way, before we’re finished this morning we’re going to see that it wasn’t a ladder after all. If you notice the newer translations, the NIV, you notice they translated it “stairway,” not “ladder.” That’s very close, a lot better than the old King James. Verse 10-11 is God providentially prepares him for the dream. Then verses 12-15 God is going to give him the dream. Then verses 16-22, his response to the dream. So it’s a very simple passage with those three parts; the preparation, the dream, the response to the dream. You’ll notice in the Bible, in this passage and others, that dreams do figure in very prominently into a method God used to speak to men, not that all dreams speak to you, at least in this sense. They are a method God used, one of many, to talk to people in ancient times.

Now Genesis 28:10-11, let’s see the setup for this. He’s on his way, fleeing from his brother. Remember the story, old mamma Rebekah did her thing, managed to break the home up and get the two sons murderously feuding with one another and so he has to take off; I believe the modern word is “split” from Beersheba, and he goes north and there are two major north/south highways in Palestine, in ancient times and today. One is the Via Maris, a very famous one along the Mediterranean coast, and one up along the highlands that goes up through Bethlehem, Jerusalem, that’s the one Joseph and Mary came down from Nazareth on and they found all the hotels full in Jerusalem so they drove on to the next town which is Bethlehem and that’s how Jesus was born in Bethlehem. But Jacob is fleeing along this north/south highway, he will eventually cut through over to Damascus, the famous Damascus Road, and on up north into what is close to the Turkish/Russian border, Haran. That’s some five to seven hundred miles away.

He has moved, so far, thirty or forty miles up to just the point north of Jerusalem. That location is important to appreciate what’s going on in this dream. Maybe I can make it clearer if I point out that the northern boundary of Israel at that time is close to what is now the Lebanese border and the southern boundary goes off to the south. This area, the place where this dream occurs, is therefore approximately in the geographic center of the Promised Land. That will explain a verse that is going to come up. You’ve got to see how it’s placed on a chart first.

Genesis 28:11, “And he came to a certain place,” and the Hebrew verb there is he chanced upon the place, he just met the place. Now for those of you who are ultimately and very reverently with protecting the sovereignty of God let me assure you, the Genesis text is not being heretical, it’s just using an expression that you often use. Oh, I happened to be over at the sub today, or I happened to be up in the biology building or something, or I happened to be downtown. It’s just a chance expression to show you the mild control of the sovereignty over everyday life. And the idea, because obviously we’re not denying sovereignty, the idea of this passage is God’s providential preparation. You see, the author of Genesis, one of his stylistic devices is that he emphasizes again and again providence. What do we mean by providence? Providence means God’s sovereignty in everyday events. God arranges everyday events.

So here we have “he chanced upon a certain place,” if you look at verse 11 carefully you’ll see “place” repeated three times. That’s another feature of this particular author’s style, that when he picks up a word, remember, he didn’t have underlining in the original language, when he picks up a word and repeats it, that’s the key in this kind of literature that he’s emphasizing the place. Notice, “he chanced upon a certain place, he stayed there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, , he put them down for a pillow, and lay down in that place to sleep.” And you see the “place” mentioned again and again throughout the rest of the story. So obviously, before we go any further, we have tips that the central thrust is this place where it occurred, the location, in the center of the land.

Now as he gets set there are some things that we want to watch, how God prepares him for his dream. Not only is the place prepared, which he, from his perspective chanced upon it, God designed it, but the second thing is that he has very little equipment. And so he comes to the… I don’t know what happened to his bedroll but something must have happened to it so he takes a rock out, presumably puts something on top of the rock and put his head up there to use as a pillow. You’ve heard of people with rocks in their head, this one had a rock under his head, and it was a picture of the fact he was traveling light. Why was he traveling light? Somebody was out to get him, that’s why. He was trying to stay ahead of Esau so the second preparation is not only the place but God arranges through his traveling light to have him do something just before he goes to sleep that will trigger a dream.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed it but I’m sure you have, is that so many times when you dream a dream it just seems like the scrambled eggs version of what’s been going on in the last two or three day; weird juxtapositions of this, that and this element and this element and kind of all shredded and mixed together and you dream about it, sometimes in a very bizarre way. Well, here’s an instance of how God almost sets up the dream. It’s not so much that God, after he goes to sleep, works down there and kind of goes drip, drip, drip, drip and causes a dream to happen. Rather, it’s He’s providential sovereign worker over all the secondary cause/effects and so he puts his head on this rock. You’re going to see, this is very crucial to the rest of the dream, this rock and him resting on that rock in the middle of the land.

So there’s the preparation; now Genesis 28:12-15, the dream itself. “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder was set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” When I started to study this I noticed something, which always creates horror in the mind of a Bible teacher; when you get to something like this, this is the word [?] and unfortunately it’s what we call in Bible interpretation a hapax legomenon, which means once it is read. In other words, what we’ve got here is a problem; we’ve got a word that only occurs once in the whole Bible. Well, if I used a word and I only use it once and you can’t judge from the context how I use it, what do you do, hopefully? Go to a dictionary and look it up, find out what’s the meaning of that. Only one problem; here we don’t have a dictionary so now what are we going to do. We’ve got a word, we don’t know exactly what it means, it only occurs once so I can’t go to another passage to check it out or to control it, what am I going to do. No dictionary!

Well, the next best thing to do when you get yourself in a jam like this in studying lexically is to go to roots and stems. So we’ll look at where those words that look like it in stem and how they are used; maybe we can pick up some nuances in how those words occur. This is why some of you, if you have an elective of two credits and you want to do something useful, take a course in Greek or Latin; it’ll do you wonders in your vocabulary. Study Latin for 2 or 3 years and you can guess 80% of the English words because the stems of English are related to Latin stems. We do much the same work in study of the original languages; we go to stems. And when we look at all the nouns and verbs that are similar in stem, here’s what we discover: that they refer to piled up stones, again and again and again and again.

For example, in one of the nouns that’s related to this one it’s used for siege work, against an ancient city they wanted to breach the walls so they’d pile rocks up against the wall, then they’d walk up the rocks and jump over the wall. Another noun that’s related to this one was for highways, you know that passage in Isaiah, “make straight the highway?” Well, they had drainage problems, just like we have, and so the bed of the highway, to raise it up off the ground, had to be piled up rocks. There are two things to notice about this in the light of what’s going to take place. Rocks in the Scripture that God uses are never carved rocks. In the Old Testament whenever you made an altar you never made it out of cut rock; no human hand could change the natural shape of the rock in Jewish architecture in Israel. Now that’s not true of some of the temple edifices but it is true of many of the altars; unhewn rock, just pick them up as they occur in the field. Why is this? It’s a theology; it’s to act out something. Act out what? Act out the fact that I must rely upon God’s provision as they come from his hand; I don’t generate it. So the little simple thing of just building a simple rock altar, you couldn’t pour your concrete blocks and get a nice neat square, you had to use the rocks of the field because of something important.

Another thing about all this context is that human beings pile up the rocks; they are artificial piles, they’re not piles that occur in nature. So here’s what we say about this word “ladder” in verse 12, to make a long story short and get down to the point. The word “ladder” here is best translated, as the NIV does, as “stairway,” and I would add a stone stairway. What Jacob sees is not a ladder and the angels playing firemen; he sees this kind of a thing, sort of a stairway made up of these kinds of rocks. He has rocks on his mind because he’s got one under his head. And so he starts dreaming it this way. But on top of this pile of rocks, instead of his head, he sees, according to verse 13, Jehovah. And the word “stand” is not the normal Hebrew to stand. The word “stand” means to take your stand prior to combat, take your stand prior to a dramatic announcement. It’s the picture of somebody coming up some place and just kind of anchoring themselves in position. And so it’s a picture of Jehovah in an anthropomorphic form coming out and taking His position on the top of this great place. And meanwhile he has this column of angels going up and down, up and down, up and down, it’s a Hebrew participle, they are constantly doing this. And he just watches this, and the angels are going up and down, maybe he was counting them, maybe here’s a case when instead of counting sheep he counted angels.

This went on for some time and then God began to speak. In Genesis 28:12, before we go any further, you want to notice that the tower goes from heaven to earth; that’s very critical to observe. When that’s in the text it isn’t just a sort of incidental observation; it’s central to defining what this tower is all about. When we have it reaching from heaven to earth that’s the same kind of language the tower of Babel is described in, and there’s a certain theology here, or what we call the theology of mediation. Here’s heaven, here’s earth, and whatever is going on, this action, here’s God up here in His glory; here’s man down here and the angels going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, there’s a mediation function between heaven and earth. In the New Testament “there is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.”

Well, the ancients knew a lot about this mediation theology and let me show you something from Egyptian history, which shows you how outside of Israel the mediation theology was very, very strong. So this is not just an innocent little dream. Here is a pillar from one of the temples in Egypt. On that pillar, from top to bottom, is a set of Egyptian hieroglyphics. The top symbol on that thing is a circle; that’s the symbol for the sun, with wings on it, which is heaven. Down at the bottom, I am told that that symbol is the symbol for earth. Between those two, that top most symbol and the bottom most symbol are what looks like two lines that connect them, but they don’t. If you were close enough you could see that this line, not the outer liner of the pillar but the inner line on that inscription stops here and it stops here, just before it touches the symbol for heaven and it stops here just before it touches the symbol for earth. Those symbols that go up are the symbols in Egyptian art and archeology for rule; in between those two vertical lines is in hieroglyphics the Pharaoh’s name spelled out. What does that tower tell us? It’s the theology of mediation. What that tower tells us is that this Pharaoh, whoever he was, claims to be the mediator between heaven and earth. That’s how seriously the Egyptians took their concept of state. That is why the Exodus occurred from Egypt, not from Syria, not from Assyria, not from Babylonia; it occurred from Egypt because God wanted to show the contrast between the total state, absolutely the total state, Pharaoh could, unlike Louis XIV, actually say I am the state. That kind of architecture, which you see again and again and again in Egyptian history says it thousands if we don’t have to have a historian tell us, thousands of times Pharaoh links heaven and earth together.

Now what does this mean? It means that Pharaoh is a god and Pharaoh is a man; said another way, what we have here is a sinful depraved distortion of Christ. Pharaoh, in a real way, is the antichrist, he is the head of the state, the total state, the totalitarian state in a way which even the communists haven’t thought of yet. And that is the state is the mediator between God and man. I bring this up because we’re going to have to explain what is going on here; if that’s the way the ancients were taking this, what was the meaning of this dream, this latter vision of Jacob.

So we see a pile of rocks, there are stairwells, angels are going up and down, conceivably carrying down the decrees of God to earth, they are going back up from earth to God and so on. Now God speaks. Genesis 28:13-15, and in these verses you notice that He reiterates the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant. Once again I say before the kingdom of God can occur in history it has to have a foundation. The foundation is built on faith, justification and election. It is built on what God is doing in that patriarchal family and the Abrahamic Covenant, given to the old man, is now repeated to Isaac, is repeated to Jacob with the same three terms. What are the three terms of the Abrahamic Covenant? Over and over and over again, that is the Jews have a right to a certain real estate on the face of this planet, a land promise. They have historical survival, in spite of the Hitler’s and everyone else, no one is going to eradicate the Jew. They are the seed of Abraham. And thirdly, through them the whole world will be blessed. So we have three basic promises iterated over and over and over and over. And here, verses 13-15 you can see them. Let’s look.

In verse 13, “[And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said,] I am Yahweh, the god of Abraham, thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon you lie, to thee will If give it,” there’s the land promise, “and to thy seed,” there’s the seed promise. Obviously the seed has to exist if they’re going to be given the land. [14] “Thy seed shall become as the dust of the earth, and thou shall spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south:” and there is an expansion of their seed and when I said earlier you want to notice the place; where did this occur? This place occurred in the center of the land and in the center of the land we have the place called Bethel, or [?], and it was from this center that to the east, to the west, to the north, to the south, Jacob, you and your seed will receive this land. So he’s taking him to a geographic reference point and hence the four directions given in verse 14.

Now notice the end of verse 14, there’s the third promise of the Abrahamic Covenant, “and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” “…all the families of the earth be blessed.” You see, it wasn’t God’s objective in the Old Testament, like so many people think, to just form a separate little culture and now we have God, He speaks one way to this culture and God speaks another way to this culture and God speaks another way to this culture. It wasn’t that at all; it was the fact that this one culture was selected as sort of a hothouse or an incubator to develop revelation over 1400 years, then to flower and spread across the earth. It had to start only in one culture because of man’s sin, as sort of a controlled experiment in history where God breeded His culture that He wanted to go across the face of the earth.

Now in Genesis 28:15 God says something else to him that’s exceedingly interesting, and that is here you are introduced to what many scholars believe to be heart of Old Testament theology. That is, it is so central to the Old Testament, it’s this idea that gives God His name, “I am with you.” Now “I am with you,” the Hebrew verb to be, copulative form of it looks like this; this is God’s name, the Hebrew verb to be looks like this. You can obviously see those are very, very close. This is the so-called Tetragrammaton; that is the four-lettered word which is always written this way and no Jew today, Orthodox Jew, will dare pronounce it. In fact, if you read Jewish writings today you will find it like this in the English, when it comes over in the English translation; they refuse to pronounce this name. The name is lost; no one knows how it was pronounced; we say Jehovah or Yahweh but that’s a guess; the oral tradition is simply erased from historical memory. Anyway, it’s that name that is related to “I am with you.

The picture of this “I am with you” is given, if you think ahead a little bit in history from Genesis, to that time when Moses went up on the mountain and he came to the burning bush. You wonder why the burning bush? It was a picture, the bush a picture of Israel in the fire of affliction of Egypt and the bush that Moses saw on the mountain was never consumed, it was just sitting there. And where did Moses hear the words of God? He heard it from within the bush. And what did God say in Exodus 3? “I am with you,” and Moses said but who do I say you are? When I go back to these people and they ask what is the name of your God? Tell them “I AM” sent you Now it’s not just saying I exist; the force is I exist and I am with you in the midst of adversity and pressure.

Now here’s a little surprise and a little spiritual benefit if you’ll just track with me. This is the central idea of the God of the Old Testament; I am with Israel wherever she may be. Notice in verse 15, “I am with thee,” and remember Jacob is the father of Israel, “I am with thee, and I will keep thee in every place where you go, and I will bring you again to this land; for I will never forsake you, until I have done that which I have spoken of.” That in a nutshell is the whole prophetic program in the Old Testament.

Now, keeping that in mind, what do you suppose Jesus meant when, just prior to His ascension He said this to His disciples: “Go, baptize all nations in My name, teaching them to observe everything that I have commanded you and lo, I am with you to the end of this era.” “I am with you!” Do you know what Jesus was claiming? He was identifying Himself with Jehovah God of the Old Testament. That is a God claim that He’s making there, subtle, but anybody who knows their Old Testament theology becomes aware that either He’s blaspheming when He does that or He means what He says. Jesus Christ identifies Himself with Jehovah, the God who was with Israel forever in every area.

So the dream is there; we find this rock vision, we find Jacob looking up and he sees God on top of this stone stairway, the glory of God with the angels going back and forth, and it’s sitting on land. Notice in verse 13 at the end, Jacob is in the dream, he’s lying down with his head on the rock, and what does God say to qualify the word “land” in verse 13? He says, “the land whereon you are laying…” we have a picture of Jacob and he rests on the rock which in turn rests on the land; here you have Jehovah on top of the pile of rocks that’s resting on the land. This is the first instance, and this is where the revelation is new, this is the first instance in the progress of revelation where God begins to lay down a few more cards in his hand, to use a very unreligious to fundamentalists illustration. He’s laying down cards because now He shows the kingdom of God; I will now show you that the rock pile itself means something. That rock pile on which Jehovah stands and over which the angels go back and forth is the kingdom of God. It’s developed later on in the progress of doctrine.

Turn to Daniel 2:34, this is a passage written by a man involved deeply in world politics during the time of the exile, writing, say, in the era of… say 550, 520 BC, writing over a thousand years later. But God is conservative in His use of symbols in the Scripture. Don’t buy this thing well, that’s just what so and so says it means. That’s really not true; the Bible is like all literature, all good literature. These people that go around saying you can interpret literature any way you want to obviously must be talking about the garbage that’s being written today. But classical literature always was intended to communicate something. After all, why does an author sit down to write? Not to give you an experience when you read his word, but he’s trying to communicate something, get inside your soul, and that’s the way he’s going to give you an experience. It’s the same with the Bible. God the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible and He uses symbols and these symbols are defined and again and again mean the same standard thing.

Here in Daniel 2 Daniel has examined the four kingdoms of history, they look like this: one kingdom goes up and then it comes down and has its residue in history, that was the Babylonian kingdom. Then the Medo-Persia kingdom would come after that and then there’d be the residue. And then you would have the Grecian kingdom, the kingdom of Greece under Alexander and have the residue. And then there would be the Roman kingdom and the Roman kingdom would go down and then would come back again in an aberrant form and so on, and they finally would be cut off. All four levels we see today in our society, which we won’t go into, I did in the Daniel series. But Daniel here at this point is looking at this end time when all four of these kingdoms will be cut off.

Now that’s Daniel 2:34, “You saw until a stone cut without hands,” see, natural, not hewn by man, a natural stone, “which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay, and He smashed them to pieces. [35] The was the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer [threshing floors;] and the wind carried them away, and no place was found for them; and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” He’s talking about the mountain here and now from Daniel 2 we can define the mountain. The stone becomes a mountain, the mountain lasts forever and it fills the whole world.

Question: What is the mountain? The mountain is the kingdom of God. Now to show you that this is so turn to the parallel chapter in Daniel, Daniel 7 where the same four kingdoms once again occur, this time in a different symbology but they’re there. Daniel 7:9, same instance, Daniel has reviewed the four kingdoms of history, he’s looked at the end of the fourth and now he’s waiting for the termination of history in one great climactic judgment. It’s Daniel 7, incidentally, where Jesus Christ picked up the title “Son of Man,” most believe. “I beheld till the thrones were cast down,” now the thrones that are cast down are the thrones of political power. They are cast down, “and the Ancient of days did sit,” God the Father, “whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of His head like pure wool; His throne was like the fiery flame, and He wheels as burning fire. [10] A fiery stream issued and came forth from before Him; a thousand thousands ministered unto Him,” those are angels, plus maybe other things but at least angels, “ten thousand times ten thousand stood before Him; and judgment was set, and the books were opened. [11] And I beheld then because of the voice of the great words… I beheld till the beast was slain,” that’s the last kingdom, “and his body destroyed, and given to the burning flame. [12] As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away, yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time.”

Now Daniel 7:13, “I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, came to the Ancient of days, and they brought Him before Him. [14] And there was given to Him” the ancient beasts, Son of man, “given to him dominion, and glory and a kingdom that all people shall serve Him; His dominion, which shall never pass, and His kingdom is that which shall never be destroyed. So Daniel 7 tells us that not only does the rock mean the kingdom, it is also the king. The symbols interchange between the kingdom and the founding king of each one of these kingdoms.

So with that added information, taking this original idea of this stone pile that Jacob sees, in connection with the Abrahamic Covenant, that this will be forever, this is God’s program, now let’s watch what Jesus does to Jacob’s dream, John 1. John 1 is addressed… Jesus was discussing with Nathanael and in verse 51 look what He says. What Jesus is doing with Nathanael and again, yes, it involves some study, it involves some concentration, he didn’t do it on television, so I’m sorry, it does take concentration. In John 1:51, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, Hereafter you will see heaven open,” who’s he talking to? Believers. “…you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending,” exactly the language taken from Jacob’s vision. You will see them, but this time not upon the rocks of stone, not upon that stone stairway that Jacob saw in his dream, this time “you will see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon” who? “the Son of man.” So the stone here is the king, but since Daniel interchanges the symbols for king and kingdom, the two mean the same thing.

You see, when Jesus walked around and identified Himself as the Son of man, He was identifying Himself as the second Adam; that is, He saw in Himself the whole future redeemed human race for all eternity. It literally could read “the Son of mankind,” the ideal man who subdued the earth, who completes the creation mandate. So now we find at the end of history, in verse 51, Christ combines Genesis 28; He combines Daniel 2 and He combines Daniel 7, wraps it all together and He tells him: and this is My kingdom, I am that rock. And the angels ascend and descend on Me. Said another way, they’re My servants, and therefore those who are identified with Christ the angels are their servants to, in the ultimate sense.

Let’s turn back to Genesis 28 and watch how Jacob responds to this dream. See, this dream was not just a simple repeat of the Abrahamic Covenant; this dream was added information; it had new revelation. God let Jacob in on what He was about to pull off. Jacob is the father of the twelve tribes and he’s got to know that the kingdom of God is imminently here.

Genesis 28:16, what does Jacob do; he hears the dream and he builds a model, that’s the explanation of what he does. Notice: “And Jacob awoke out of his sleep, and he said, Surely Jehovah is in this place; and I knew it not. [17] And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful [awesome] is this place! This is not other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. [18] And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and he poured oil upon the top of it.” Now the setting up of the stone, it’s like an obelisk, it’s a monument, and it’s patterned after his dream. That stone becomes a picture of the kingdom. When Jacob awakes in the morning he walks over to where he sacked out all night, he knows that’s in the geographical center of the land, and he says to the north, the east, the west and the south, this is my land and I’m going to erect a monument there because the kingdom of God will be centered here, in this land. Now that’s the power of what God did for him. Jacob awakes and he’s fearful.

Let’s take a look at some geographical information to get in mind perspectives, both God’s perspective and man’s perspective on this matter. Looking at the land area, a wide ranging view, here the Promised Land centers… the reason I show this global section is because this is the continent of Africa, looking at this center Palestine was picked as the geographical center of the earth; I didn’t say geometrical center, geographical center. You can prove this mathematically, that if you wanted to pick a location on the surface of the earth that was the average minimum distance from every other point on the surface of the sphere, the continents being what they are, you would have to pick an area right here. God picked Jacob to this land so that he could communicate with Asia to the north; Europe to the northwest, Africa to the south, and North America and South America either way. So it’s very important as far as the location.

Now coming closer and looking at the perspective of this land, here’s the land area, Jacob is located right here, just north of Jerusalem, Bethel. Here’s the road that still runs north/south, there’s Bethlehem, there’s Jerusalem, the road is still there and Bethel is off to the right of that road. It looks like this today, a little Arab village that’s located on that site. But that’s the place where the dream took place. Now in the dream we talk about this pillar of stone. I tried to find in my slides an example and here is one, made of unhewn natural rock, this is a particular monument to five Jewish boys who one day… there’s a popular song about going to Edom and they tried to cross over here, some teenagers about 18 or 19 and they were shot by Arab guards and so there’s a little story about these five teenagers and their attempted trip to Petra. Anyway, at a close up shot there’s an example of what a rock pile as a monument looks like. And it was probably a pile very, very similar to that that was used by the patriarchs. Now here is just one rock but presumably later on it was built up and we know other passages in the Scripture [can’t understand words]. Take a good look, there’s what the Bible is talking about, something like that.

So when Jacob finishes locating this he pours oil on it, he renames the place and he makes a vow. To show you the power of all this I want to show you that in verses 17-22 there are five separate prophesies; prophesies that I’m sure Jacob himself didn’t realize he was making, but because of his position he made them anyway. The first prophecy is in Genesis 28:17, he’s afraid of this place and he says, “This is the house of God and the gate of heaven.” Now the house of God is a synonym for temple in the Bible, and the gate is a place where the elders used to rule, it’s a city council meeting we would say today, and what he’s saying is that the temple of God ought to be in this land. Is the temple of God going to be in the land? You bet it, Solomon is going to build it there. And what about in the future kingdom; the Word of God shall go forth from Jerusalem to all the world; the temple of God is in the land. Verse 17 is prophecy number one.

Prophecy number two, verse 18, after he takes the pillar, which represents the king and the kingdom, he pours oil on it, and this is the anointing. And the anointing is the word meshach from which we get Messiah, or Christ. So the second interesting thing he does is he anoints it, furthermore showing that the Holy Spirit, symbolized by oil often in the Bible, is the One who makes this kingdom of God in history.

The third prophecy, verse 20-21, “And Jacob vowed 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 raiment to put on, [21] So that I come again [to my father’s house in peace]; then Yahweh will be my God.” The bread and the clothes, physical survival. What are verses 20-21 a prophecy of? The safe survival and return of the Jew and his submission to Jesus Christ nationally. Israel will one day in the future accept nationally Christ as the Messiah. “Jehovah will be my God,” the third prophecy.

The fourth prophecy verse 22, “And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall become God’s house,” the kingdom of God is centered on the Church; the Church, in Ephesians 2 is the temple of God. “This stone” will become the temple of God.

The fifth prophecy is found at the end of verse 22, when all this happens he says, “I will give a tenth to you, God.” He will tithe physically. What does this mean? This is a picture of the physical nature of the kingdom. It’s not going to be a shadow world with spirits speaking around; it’s going to be a real world with material elements. So the fifth prophecy is the physical nature of the future kingdom.

So what have we seen? We’ve seen God reaffirm that Jacob is to be the founder of the kingdom; a kingdom that shall have no end, a kingdom that will bring down all the kings of the world and make them submissive to it.

We’re going to conclude