Jesus in GenesisSample

OPEN DOOR TO HEAVEN (Genesis 28)

Isaac was old and wanted to bless his firstborn son, Esau. So he told Esau to hunt, prepare a meal, and bring it to him and then receive his blessing. But Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, favored Esau’s twin, Jacob, and wanted him to get the blessing. So she came up with a plan for Jacob to deceive his vision-impaired father and steal the blessing of the firstborn heir.

The plan worked, Esau was furious, and Jacob fled out of fear for his safety. On the surface, he left to find a wife from the old “home country.” The deeper reality is that he was avoiding trouble and was surrounded by uncertainty, conflict, passion, and guilt. Such was Jacob’s emotional state when he stopped to camp. That night, he had a vivid dream of a stairway leading to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. He woke up convinced that God was in that place that had looked so ordinary the night before. He called it Bethel, “house of God.” In his turmoil, Jacob had a divine encounter.

Many centuries later, when Jesus met Nathanael and told him he would see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man, He was making an extraordinary claim. He was pointing to Himself as the “way to God,” the place where divine encounters occur, the open doorway between heaven and earth. Any Jew would have recognized the reference to Jacob’s dream. What Jacob perceived as an intersection between the heavenly and earthly realms became a sign of God’s willingness to meet humanity in the midst of our tumultuous, burdensome, complicated situations. And Jesus offered Himself as the fulfillment of that sign. He presented Himself as an encounter with God when we’re trying to flee from our problems.

Jesus’ words to Nathanael are more than an interesting reference to Hebrew Scripture. They are an invitation to anyone bound in this realm with the longing to connect to another. Heaven really can touch earth because it did in encounters like Jacob’s and then more powerfully in the presence of Jesus. Anyone united with Him can live at the intersection between human and divine—where angels ascend and descend and God’s works flow into our lives.