He Slept On It and Did Not Know

He is running, and he has nothing.

That is the whole setup of Genesis 28 and the text does not spend a word softening it. Jacob has just deceived his blind father, stolen a blessing meant for his brother, and been told by his mother to leave before Esau kills him. So he goes out from Beersheba toward Haran, and verse eleven says he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set.

Read that phrase again. A certain place. The Hebrew is as flat as the English. Not a shrine, not a landmark, not anywhere. It is the sort of spot a person stops at because the light went and they cannot walk any further, and the writer refuses to give it a name, because at this point in the story it does not have one.

And then: he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows.

A stone. He is a man with a rich father and a stolen inheritance, and he is lying on the ground in open country with a rock under his head, because there is nobody within a day's walk who owes him anything.

That is the lowest point of his life so far, and he did not choose the location. It chose him. The sun went down and this is where he was.

The place was never empty

And there, in the nowhere, with his head on a stone, he dreams a ladder set up on the earth with its top reaching heaven, and the angels of God going up and down on it, and the Lord standing above it saying I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.

Then he wakes up.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16, King James Version

And I knew it not. Those four words are the whole message and I want to hand them to you carefully.

He is not saying God arrived while he was asleep. He is saying God was there and he had not known. He had walked into that field at dusk thinking it was empty ground on a bad day at the end of a worse week, and he had lain down and slept on a stone in the middle of the house of God without any idea where he was.

Then he says the second thing, and it is even better: how dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

The gate of heaven has no building on it. It is a patch of dirt in open country that nobody had named. He calls it Bethel, house of God, and the name goes on the map for the rest of Scripture, and the only reason it has a name at all is that a man on the run was too exhausted to keep walking.

Now hear it plainly, because I think the same mistake he made has been running for a while.

You have been believing God is somewhere other than here, not in theory but in practice. Genesis 28:16 has a man waking up inside the house of God and saying I knew it not, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that confession usable rather than embarrassing. You believe He is in the season after this one, in the house you have not moved into yet, in the job you have not got, in the version of your life where the thing is resolved. And so you have been treating the place you are actually in as a corridor. Somewhere to get through. A certain place with no name, where nothing spiritual happens because nothing good is happening.

You are in the place God is in, and it is the apartment and the ward and the rented room and the month nobody would have chosen. Genesis 28:17 says the gate of heaven had nothing built on it and no sign over it, and the Holy Spirit is standing in the exact room that has been getting called a waiting area.

And notice how he found out. He did not find out by praying harder or by getting somewhere better. He found out lying down. He was asleep, at the end of himself, with no plan and no strength and a rock under his head, and God came to the place he had collapsed in rather than the place he was trying to reach.

You have nothing to arrive at first, and there was never anything to qualify for. Genesis 28:11 has him stopping because the sun went down rather than because he had got anywhere, and His Spirit does not check the address before He comes in.

One more, and it is the part that makes it durable. The ladder had traffic on it in both directions, ascending and descending, which means it was not a one off event laid on for a bad night. It was standing there before he lay down and it was standing there after he left. He simply saw it once.

You have traffic over your house that has not stopped. Genesis 28:12 has them ascending and descending, which is a two way movement rather than a single visit, and the same Spirit who kept both directions in the sentence is the reason a thing seen once in one week years ago did not leave when the feeling did.