Sermon on Genesis 28:10-22, When God is Unexpectedly There

¹⁰ Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran. ¹¹ And he came to a certain place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. ¹² And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! ¹³ And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. ¹⁴ Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 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.” ¹⁶ Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” ¹⁷ 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.”

¹⁸ So early in the morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. ¹⁹ He called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. ²⁰ Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, ²¹ so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, ²² and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you.” (Genesis 28:10-22, ESV)

 

Is there some Jacob in you and me?  Jacob, of course, is the famous patriarch of Israel, the one from whom Israel’s name is derived, the son of Isaac and Rebekah, grandson of Abraham and Sarah, and twin brother of Esau.  We are picking up his story today right after he has tricked his nearly blind father, Isaac, with his mother’s help I might add, into believing that he is Isaac’s favorite son Esau, in order to get the blessing of the firstborn from Isaac.  This is the coveted blessing that brings with it a double portion of the inheritance money and the authority from papa to lead the family when he dies.  Esau is a might upset when he learns of this and because Isaac and Rebekah are afraid he might kill his conniving, technically younger, twin brother, they send him away to momma’s relatives in another country to find a wife and to get out of Esau’s reach.

So here is Jacob traveling north, apparently alone, and he stops for the night near a town called Luz.  He gets a rock for a pillow and goes to sleep only to have a very startling dream.  Yahweh, the God of Abraham and Isaac, speaks to him out of heaven with angels all over the place, and tells Jacob that He will give him the same benefits and promises He gave Abraham and Isaac.  He promises to be with Jacob and watch over him.

How do you think you would react to a dream like that? If you were in Jacob’s circumstances, on the run, feeling guilty perhaps, fearful, wouldn’t this seem like just what you needed?  Jacob was convinced that God had spoken to him through this dream and that the very place he had slept was sacred.  It jolted him big time and scared him, we’re told, because he felt he had stumbled upon God’s earthly house or temple.  Certainly, no physical structure was standing there but, in the dream, Jacob had seen the staircase going into heaven to God’s temple and being near God’s temple meant he was perilously close to being in danger of dying.  So, he built an altar there and made a vow.

Now what I want to focus on with you today are the words given to Jacob’s thoughts about this dream.  He said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it” (verse 16).

What does it mean when God is unexpectedly there?  In what kinds of situations is He unexpectedly there?  Why are we not always aware of it beforehand?

For those of us who are believers this may be more of an issue than for those who don’t believe.  Although I am sure that if an unbeliever knew that God was unexpectedly there it would matter a great deal.  Was Jacob a believer?  I don’t think so.  You know why?  Because he tells us so.  Look at his words in verses 20-22.

Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.”

Yahweh was Abraham’s God and Isaac’s God, but Jacob had yet to make Yahweh his God and acknowledge Him with tithes.  And from his perspective this would not happen unless God proved Himself to Jacob by fulfilling what He had told Jacob He would do.

Can you imagine your child coming to you and saying, “If you will take care of me and fulfill your promises to me, then I will make you my parent and treat you with the respect you deserve.”  Just warms your heart, doesn’t it?  You want to take that kid and nestle him in your arms and just love on him, don’t you?

But despite this horrible attitude on Jacob’s part, God did fulfill His promise to Jacob.

But Jacob gives us the first possible perspective on the reasons we don’t always expect that God is there.

I. Sometimes we think God is limited to certain holy spaces.

Jacob said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”  He thought he had inadvertently stumbled on a secret temple of God, a place where God’s holy presence intersected with earth.  In his mind, there were certain places God “inhabited.”  This is not unlike the pagan who believes God inhabits a mountain, or a shrine, or a special tree or rock.  This is why we often find pagan temples on high hills or mountains (acropolis’s they call them in Greece).  These places seem sacred and suited to a divine being.  And so we think of God being in these places and not in others.

But I’m afraid this is a rather limiting view of God that gets us in trouble.

• First, it wrong to think that there are some places where God is not. David disavows us of this notion in Psalm 139 when he makes clear that no matter where he tried to flee from God’s presence, God would be there.

Yahweh says through the prophet Amos speaking rather colorfully of His enemies, “Though they dig into hell, from there my hand shall take them; though they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down; and though they hide themselves on top of Carmel, from there I will search and take them; though they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, from there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them” (Amos 9:2,3).  There is no place where God is not.  If we realize that it should affect the way we live.  We can’t hide our behavior from Him.  Men love darkness, John says, because their deeds are evil.  But darkness does not effectively hide our evil deeds from God.

• Second, having this view, that God is limited to certain holy spaces, could make us think that there are some issues too profane and ungodly for the holy God to deal with.

I recently had an individual dealing with some sexual sin and he didn’t want God to help him explore the issue because it felt too unholy to talk about with God. In essence this person was believing that some topics are sacred and some are not. But the psalms and the entire Bible itself make it clear that there is no topic off limits to God and no issue that is not sacred.

Our problem is that we take the sacred, which is everything God has made, and spoil it with our sinfulness.  Does God know if you are dealing with sinful thoughts?  Of course He does!  Does He want you to talk about it with Him?  Absolutely!  But many times in prayer when we are trying to impress God with how holy we are and unclean thoughts keep intruding, we try to shut them out.  Understanding that there are no places that are not sacred should help us choose instead to address our unclean thoughts with God.  He knows about them anyway!

Jacob thought God was limited to sacred places, not realizing that every place is sacred to God.  If Jacob had stopped somewhere other than Luz God would have been there, too.  Jacob should not have been surprised that God was there.  And you and I should not be surprised that God is everywhere we are.

Don’t be guilty of dividing your life into the holy and the profane.  Don’t think that it doesn’t matter what you do with the profane part of your life, that all you have to do is give God some sacred part of your life.  He’s greedy like a father who wants everything for his children.  God wants it all for you.  God wants all of you.  God wants you and everything your life is attached to, because He wants to give all of Himself to you.  He won’t recognize our artificial boundaries of holy and common.  Every part of our life matters to Him and has sacred potential.

Does it matter to Him how you work at your job?  It absolutely does!  Does it matter how you spend your “free” time?  It absolutely does!  Is your vacation yours to decide upon?  Yes, but does it matter to Him how you take it?  Absolutely!  If you give your tithe to church, are you then free to spend the remaining 90% as you wish?  Absolutely not!  It all belongs to Him, and it matters how you spend all of it.

Could you get inordinately obsessive about this?  Yes, and He would not want to see you do that.  It would give Him great pain for you to become legalistic and full of doubt about making sure that you do everything correctly, perfectly, because that would mean that you are really thinking that it is up to you to do everything right in order to have a relationship with Him.  And that is a contradiction of Jesus’ death on the cross and his offer of rest for your souls.  But you can bring everything to Him because He cares about it and He wants to direct you in every part of your life.

So do not limit God to certain holy spaces and be surprised then to find that He is in a place you were not aware of.

 

There is another reason we might not expect God to be there.

II. Sometimes we think God’s love would make it impossible for Him to be there.

I was talking with someone this week who wants to get married.  He even believes that God has promised him a wife.  But when relationship after relationship fails to lead to marriage, he is tempted to believe that God is playing with him and doesn’t love him.  Why else would God withhold something from him that he so desperately wants?

Haven’t you been tempted to think this way?  I remember the first time I consciously thought this way.  I had just graduated from seminary and couldn’t find a job.  I had three kids and very little income and couldn’t understand why God was not coming through for me.  Instead of thinking, “Hmm, God loves me so this must be a way He is testing me and showing me that He will come through for me.”  Instead, I thought, “Hmm, He must be upset with me for not having adequate daily devotionals.”  In other words, He couldn’t be in this place in my life unless it was to punish me.

And apparently Jacob did not really believe that God could be there in his life in love, even though that is what God declared to Jacob in his dream.  Jacob makes God’s unconditional statement that He would be with Jacob a conditional thing in his mind that he must prove, hence, his vow that if God would fulfill His part, Jacob would fulfill his. But that is so wrong.  What has God told us?

If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:31,32)

But all too often we let circumstances dictate our theology and our feelings about God’s presence.  The Lord is in the place of our suffering but too often we are not aware of it.

I recently went to Ethiopia, to the capital city Addis Ababa to be exact, the second time I had been there.  I was there to teach with a local Memphis discipleship ministry called Downline, and I was also there to minister at an Ethiopian ministry to street children that I am involved with.  I was most eager to see Naomi (that’s not her real name, but I want to protect her privacy), now a 15 year old girl whom I had first met four years earlier.  One of my goals was to tell her the story of our first meeting.  Now you might think that she should know that story because she was there, but there were facets she did not know and that with a translator I was now hoping to communicate.

You see, Naomi had lost her parents and was, years before I met her, being raised by her grandmother.  But her grandmother ran out of resources to care for Naomi, so she did the only thing she knew to do.  In their culture they call it giving her to God.  She took her granddaughter out on the streets and when she wasn’t looking, she ducked out of sight and left Naomi on her own.  The hope was that God would now take care of Naomi. As you might imagine, life became a living hell for Naomi.  I don’t know how long she had lived on the street when I met her four years ago, but by that time Naomi had found her way to our ministry there.

Naomi had suffered a great deal before I met her.  How in the world could it be said that God was in the place of her suffering?  But I wanted to fill Naomi in on some aspects of the story that she did not know about.  Right before I flew the first time four years ago with my wife and one other member of our church to Ethiopia, a friend of mine called me and said that he had been praying for me and my trip and that something strange had happened.  He had a vision, as best as he could describe it, of me leading a little African girl to Christ.  Of course, I knew nothing of who I was going to see when I reached Addis Ababa.  But this certainly piqued my anticipation.

When we were picked up at the airport by our missionary and he was driving us to the place we were going to stay, he began describing one new little girl they had at their center who was giving them such fits that he didn’t know what he was going to do with her.  He believed she had been abused and was having a hard time trusting adults, but her behavior was affecting others.  Needless to say, I knew in that moment that this was the girl my friend had seen a vision of and that I was going to play some role in her life.

That week our team did a vacation Bible school for the kids at the center, and I met this girl, Naomi.  On the third and last day of our time there I made a presentation of the gospel to the kids and invited any who had a desire to know God to speak to one of the staff and let me know.  Immediately after that here came Naomi with our translator and he indicated to me that she wanted to receive the Lord.  I prayed and rejoiced with her and now, here I was four years later coming to see her and follow up with the details of the story I just told you.  Because she had known nothing of the vision my friend was given or of the conversation I had with our missionary on the way in from the airport, I felt a need to fill her in.

So, when I had the opportunity, I got a translator and sat with Naomi and began to tell her about what God had done.  I told her, “I know that the life you had to live before you found the center was one of the most painful things you have ever experienced and that it must have seemed as if God was not anywhere to be found.”  She began weeping and so did I.  “But,” I said, “God was planning all along to bring you to Himself.  If you hadn’t gone on this path, we wouldn’t have met, and you wouldn’t have come to the Lord when you did.”

As we talked, she was telling me now that her aspirations are to be a scientist and she is doing quite well in school, and I can actually see that happening.  Here is this young girl who had no aspirations before, and no hope of doing anything of significance, who now is full of hope and promise.  And I fully believe that God is going to use her to help rescue others like herself and speak a message of hope to her city.

God was in that place in Naomi’s life, and she didn’t know it.  What place in your life is God in and you don’t know it?  Where are you tempted to think that God is not because it is a place of suffering and seeming hopelessness?  Or have you already found that God is unexpectedly there?  I’ll never forget one of the men at our church saying he thanked God he got cancer.  It had brought him closer to his family and had given him an unbelievable platform for sharing the gospel.

Now God doesn’t always show us the reasons for our suffering in this life.  It is possible that there are some reasons that cannot be explained, that are beyond our ability to understand.  When you took your infant children to get their inoculations, and they knew once they saw that doctor or nurse with a needle that they were in for some suffering, they may have looked to you to rescue them.  They may have wondered why you didn’t remove them from this painful situation.  How, though, could you explain that the suffering you were allowing them to go through now was necessary to prevent greater suffering in the future? They had no capacity to understand that.  Perhaps at this time they chose to believe that you didn’t love them.  Or perhaps, most likely, they learned that though you were there in love, your love did not prevent all pain. It can’t and shouldn’t.

Sometimes loving someone means letting them experience pain.  Jacob’s pain was necessary to bring him to humility and a recognition of his own neediness.  He had thought that he could scheme his way through life, manipulating people and situations to get his needs met.  But it had all blown up.  Now God was preparing him to learn to lead his family in keeping the directives of God and experiencing His promises.  If you want to say that God was breaking him, that is perhaps an adequate explanation.  Love goes to any lengths needed to see that the beloved’s truest needs are met.  And those truest needs are always consistent with God’s greatest purposes for us.

I suspect we are all fond of that great passage in Romans 8:28,29,

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.  For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

God’s greatest possible gift that He could dream of for us is conformity to the image of His Son.  He didn’t go to Jared’s, He went to Jesus.  Making us like Christ is the very best thing He could do for us.  Don’t you long to love like Jesus loved, to walk in wisdom like Jesus did, to have the confidence Jesus had, to know beyond any doubt that we are in the Father’s love and that even death on a cross cannot contradict that.

To make us in that image means that God must chip away many rough edges in our lives.  We are so used to taking care of ourselves, so bent on making sure we get what we need at the expense of others, so intent on not suffering any pain, and so unwilling to yield to God in this process, that He must often take us through difficult circumstances to teach us to depend on Him.

It is just like you might do with your child.  He wants to do something himself that you know he can’t do.  But until he realizes it, he won’t be open to letting you help him and teach him.  God is in all those places we don’t expect Him to be.  Like Jacob we find out unexpectedly that God is there in our pain, in our seemingly normal and unsacred moments.  Will God have to give us a dream to make us aware that He is there?  He will, if need be.   He wants us to know that He is in every place of our lives.  He doesn’t want us to be ignorant like Jacob and have to say, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”

Would you look for God in every place?  Would you look for Him in your daily routine?  Would you look for Him in those places that seem profane and ungodly?  Would you look for him in your work?  Would you look for Him in the interruptions of life? Would you look for Him in your pain?

 

I read recently of a sketch artist in Los Angeles who wanted to serve God and wanted to pursue his art.  He got a revelation one day that he did not need to separate those two.  He decided to go to the places where homeless people resided.  He would sit down with them and listen to their stories and ask them if they would allow him to sketch them.  He always sketched them on some discarded piece of wood or cardboard or metal.  He created an exhibit in a warehouse, in a large cube constructed of throw away materials and made some of the homeless people the guides for the exhibit.  He provided slips of paper for viewers to write notes to the people who were sketched.  He had found that God was there unexpectedly, and he had not been aware of it.  He saw redemptive transformations in some of his subjects.  One man reported that this was the impetus for him to go to a drug rehab program and to learn job skills.  And everyone he sketched felt honored to have been drawn and seen and understood.

Where does God want you to look for Him?  Would you look?  Would you open the eyes of your heart to see Him there in love, looking for you?