Text:  Genesis 28:10-22                                                                         X Reminiscere (2^nd Sunday in Lent)

Echoes of the Fall

In the name of him upon whom the angels of God ascend and descend, dear friends in Christ:  Last week in our worship together, we looked at the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son, Isaac.  It’s a very unusual episode.  The Lord tells Abraham to take his son, the son for whose birth he had waited according to the promise of God for his life of 100 years, the son who was conceived miraculously in his mother, Sarah, who was many decades passed the years of childbearing, the son through whom the Lord had told Abraham that all the temporal and Messianic promises he had made would be fulfilled, and the son who Abraham, in the ten years since his birth, had now come to love and to cherish more dearly than life itself—the Lord told him to take that boy, Isaac, and sacrifice him as a burnt offering.  Incredible.  We saw that on one level Abraham’s painful journey to the top of Mount Moriah to do this unthinkable thing was the ultimate test of faith.  He had to trust that “Because the Lord tells me to do this, then, though I can’t see how it’s possible, it’s certain that even if I do it, the Lord will still fulfill all his promises to me and to the boy.” We saw that Abraham passed the test. His quick response and his remarkable obedience in the face of this severe trial stand before us as a bold witness to the kind of faith that even now God wants to instill in us as we face the trials of life.  But what’s even more important for us to see is that, on another level, the story is a foreshadowing of the cross.  It’s a living picture of our heavenly Father’s own journey to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his Son for the life of the world.  Abraham, of course, didn’t have to go through with it.  When the Lord saw his faith, he told him to stop, and he provided him a substitute.  So Abraham didn’t have to kill his son; but to fulfill his promises to Abraham – and to us – our heavenly Father did.

            In today’s Old Testament lesson we focus in on a grandson of Abraham who is undergoing a test of a different kind.  The Lord told Abraham to make a journey because he had to face an appointment with death.  The man in today’s story, Jacob, is also taking a journey; but we find that he’s taking it precisely because he hopes to avoid an appointment with death.  He is fleeing for his life from his brother Esau.  And though we cannot condone Esau’s murderous intent, we can certainly understand it.  It was bad enough when Jacob cheated him out of his birthright by taking advantage of his weakened condition when he was half starved and faint with hunger. Then, foolishly, he let Jacob talk him into a bad trade that has ever since made him the butt of jokes, and subjected him to many years of mocking and ridicule.  But this time Jacob went too far.  Isaac sent Esau on a mission, and while he was gone, Jacob, conspiring with their mother, Rebekah, lied and deceived their blind, old father, Isaac. In so doing he stole the rich and prophetic blessing that Isaac wanted to give Esau, his eldest and best loved son. When Esau returned, having faithfully obeyed his father’s will, he stepped up to receive the blessing he had been promised only to discover it had already been taken.  Instead of a blessing Esau received a curse and was decreed to be Jacob’s servant.  It was more than Esau could bear, and in his anger he swore he would settle the score by taking his brother’s life.

            So it is that we find Jacob on the lam.  The strange irony is that though he has the birthright to inherit the lion’s share of his father’s enormous wealth, and also the prophetic blessing that he will inherit the entire Promised Land, because he used deceit and trickery to secure them he is, at this moment, penniless, homeless, alone, afraid, under a death contract, and now being driven out of the very land he tried to make his own when he stole the blessing.  He’s on his way to find his uncle Laban, who (though Jacob doesn’t yet know it) will virtually enslave him and cheat him out of more than twenty years of hard work.  We see that Esau is not the only one who made a bad deal for himself.

            In all of Jacob’s folly though, we can see an echo of the original fall of our first parents into sin.  In both cases we have someone who already had God’s blessing, living the easy life with loved family in a special place God prepared for him, taking it upon himself to break the established rules in order to reach for even greater blessings; which in Jacob’s case God had planned to give in time anyway.  And also in both cases we see that the result of the impatient and selfish grab for more is being cast out to face a life of hard work and misery with a death sentence hanging over head.

            It’s likely that such thoughts occurred to Jacob as he covered the sixty or so miles between home and where we find him in today’s text.  This is not at all what he had envisioned when he stole his brother’s blessing, though by now he’s surely (and regretfully) realized it’s exactly what he should have expected.  “What was I thinking?  How could I have been so stupid?  How else was Esau going to respond?”  Jacob’s been moving quickly to cover as much ground as possible, constantly looking back over his shoulder to see if Esau is in pursuit.  His brother’s celebrated hunting and tracking skills are now especially worrisome to Jacob.  But now, after three days of almost constant travel, Jacob is exhausted.  He has a long way to go yet:  at least another five hundred miles.  But he hasn’t seen any sign of being followed; even looking down across the plain from the heights he climbed just before sunset this day. Though he’s still filled with fear both about what’s chasing from behind and whatever unknown perils lie ahead, he can’t go any more.  He must rest. He finds a large rock to shelter behind and filled with many worries, he drifts off into an uneasy sleep.

            Enter our gracious God and Savior.  As he did when Adam fell and fled in fear from his presence, so he now does for Jacob, though perhaps a bit more gently in the medium of a dream. The Lord appears standing at the top of a set of stairs on which the angels ascend and descend to do his bidding. But he does not appear as the wrathful judge.  As with Adam, God comes in grace and love, bringing assurance of his forgiveness. Jacob has made a series of foolish, faithless, and self-centered mistakes.  He betrayed his father, his brother, and his God.  And now he is taking a hard and lonely journey that is a direct consequence of his sins.  Through his impatience and lack of trust he has chosen for himself a very hard path. What’s important is that we see that God doesn’t just abandon him to it.  Nor does God come to punish him.  Instead the Lord comes to equip him with exactly what he will need to make that journey.  God intends that this journey which began by Jacob’s sin be turned around to work for Jacob’s good – and since it was his failure to trust and be patient that caused him to lie, cheat, and steal in the first place, God equips him with what he needs to build his trust and teach him patience.

            Namely, God gives him five explicit Gospel promises.  On these Jacob, like his grandfather Abraham, will be able to hang his faith, because the promises of God cannot be broken.  And inasmuch as you and I are the spiritual descendants of Jacob, who often find ourselves filled with anxiety as we travel along through life on the difficult paths we’ve chosen for ourselves, it will be good for us to examine these promises because they apply to us as well.

            First God says, “I will give you the land on which you are lying.” Now, for Jacob, of course, the reference is to the land of Canaan through which he was passing and now had to leave; but more importantly, God is speaking of the Promised Land, which finds its final fulfillment for Jacob and for all of us in heaven above.  The operative words here are, “I will give”.  Jacob’s mistake, and all too often our own, is that he tried to take.  He thought the Promised Land could be gained by his own effort – his own sinful effort at that.  God says, “No.  You can’t take it.  You can only receive it as a gift.  You can only receive it because I give it to you, and I will.”  God’s grace alone, without any work of sinful humans, will deliver the goal we all seek.  The implied rebuke here is, “Stop trying to take it.  Stop thinking that you can earn it for yourself – that’s what got you in the mess you’re in.”

            Next God promises, “I am with you.”  It’s the only promise he gives Jacob that is in the present tense, though the sense of it is permanent and ongoing.  And we might think, “Well, God is everywhere, so naturally God is with Jacob”; but that is not what’s meant here.  When God says, “I am with you”, he is speaking of his merciful and gracious presence.  It is a relational concept.  It means, “I am with you in a personal and loving way.”  It means you are never alone, unloved, forsaken, or lost, no matter how bad are the circumstances in which you find yourself. It means that the Lord is with you helping you to bear your burdens.

            Then God promises, “I will watch over you wherever you go.” And this doesn’t mean passively “watch” like you watch a ball game on television.  This is a shepherding term.  He means, “I will watch over you in an active sense.”  It implies care, protection, defense from enemies, and guidance. God’s presence is not merely “being there” keeping you company:  it’s active. There was a popular song a few years back with the refrain, “God is watching you from a distance.”  That is not at all the way God wants us to understand his presence in our lives.  It’s not as though he’s far away watching and reaches in to intervene once in a while. No, his participation is continuous.

            The next promise is, “I will bring you back.”  This is the promise of redemption.  “Though you have through your sin been driven out of this place that I have promised to give you, I myself will see to it that you return.” The implication is that the sin problem must be taken care of.  For Jacob, it happened when God worked in the heart of Esau to forgive his brother. And for you and me it happened when our Lord Jesus Christ, through his suffering and death for us, changed the heart of God toward us.  That’s what Paul is speaking of in today’s Epistle lesson.  He writes, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly …. when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.”  And because through Jesus we are reconciled and redeemed, God can bring us back into the blessed land. 

            The final promise God gave to Jacob and to us is, “I will not leave you until I have done everything I have promised.”  This doesn’t mean he’s planning to leave as soon as the job is done, rather it’s a guarantee that he will not take away his gracious presence.  Throughout our sojourn in this land through which we are now passing, God will not leave us.  If you remember the story of Jacob, you know that his treacherous dealings with Esau and his father were not the last faithless mistakes he made.  Along the way he gave the Lord plenty more good reasons to abandon him.  But the Lord always used them as occasions to prove his faithfulness to his word and show Jacob love and forgiveness.  And the Lord remained with him throughout his time away from the Promised Land, and fulfilled his promise to bring him back; older, certainly, but more importantly wiser and more faithful for having seen himself many more proofs of the Lord’s unfailing love.  God’s promise not to leave is our assurance that no matter what sins and mistakes we make in the future, he will always be there standing ready to receive us again in his love.

            When Jacob awoke from his dream, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”  And this, my friends is the very heart of the problem of the human condition.  The Lord is in this place – he is with us wherever we go – and we are not aware of it.  Do you imagine for a moment that Jacob would have gotten himself in the position he was in if he had recognized all along that the Lord was with him? And if you think of the times in your own life when you’ve chosen a path other than the straight and narrow way the Lord has called you to walk in, could you have strayed off like you did if you had been fully aware of the Lord’s gracious presence with you?  You see, our biggest problem is always that we simply do not believe the promises of God, and like Jacob we have to keep learning and relearning the lesson that God’s Word cannot be broken.

            Jacob went on to say, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey, and if he will give me food to eat and clothes to wear so that I return safely to my father’s house, then the Lord will be my God …”  I suppose it strikes us as a rather mercenary kind of statement:  “if God does all this, then I guess he can be my God”; but I want you to see that it is a profoundly Christian thing to say.  The Lord is our God precisely because he keeps his promises – because if he didn’t, if even one of his promises ever failed, he couldn’t be the holy and perfect God to begin with.  But even if he could, if any one of the five promises he made to us in today’s lesson failed, we would be lost forever.  He would be God; but he wouldn’t be our God.  No, what sounds so mercenary is simply saying the Christian truth that everything depends on God and his grace.

            The Lord was with Jacob, and watched over him, and gave him food to eat and clothes to wear, and, some years later, returned him safely to his father’s house. Accordingly, and with deep gratitude, Jacob worshipped God as he had vowed.  The important thing to see is that today the Lord is with us, watching over us, and taking care of our temporal needs as we journey here below. But more important still, is that while he is here with us, he is watching over our eternal needs.  He is forgiving our sins and feeding our weak spirits and strengthening our faith with the Bread of Life which is his unbreakable Word.  He is with us feeding us with the body and blood of his Son who died to bring us back to our Father’s house.  And in the same way he is clothing us in his Son’s sinless perfection so that we can stand in his holy presence, and praise and worship him with grateful hearts for all that he has done.

            Dear friends, in Christ Jesus the Lord is with you wherever you go in your journey through life.  May God give us the grace to believe that, so that as we go, no matter where we are, we can always say with Jacob, “How awesome is this place.  This is none other than the House of God and the gate of Heaven.”  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!