Dreaming Away
Genesis 28 · Vern Peterman · Oct 5, 2008
Genesis, No. 38
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926113336563

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. We're going to be stepping into the passage that was introduced by what Courtney read for us here. Before we do, I'd just like to make you be aware, we've got, of course, electives going in the hour before this time, and we've been proceeding with the Gospel of John and biblical counseling, and those will continue. And if you're in those, we certainly encourage you to remain in them. The elective that's been Who You Are in Christ is now switched over as of this morning to How to Study the Bible. And if you've not been involved in the elective, you're certainly invited to join that as it's just begun. Okay, as we've been going through Genesis, one of the things we've said is we'd like you to memorize the book of Genesis, okay? And we'd like you to do that very simply by memorizing eight words, okay? And so let's go through them.

Creation, Fall, Flood, Nations. And the next set, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph. One of the things we're going to see here is that this is going to be about one of the last times we're going to see anything significant out of Isaac. It's going to step into a section here in which Jacob is now the prominent player, and we're going to see that transition taking place in this chapter here this morning. It'll finish off with Joseph being the prominent player as we get towards the end. One of the things we want to do is kind of look ahead a little bit. One of the things we'll do to look ahead is just to point out this fellow Jacob that we're now beginning to focus upon is one momentous man. This is a man whom we'll soon see learns his lessons the hard way. Anybody like to learn their lessons the hard way? Anyway, he will.

He will be named Israel, and that will become the name of the nation that's descended from him. He will have sons who will be the heads of the tribes of Israel. It will be his descendants, yes, his very descendants, who will be led by Moses out of Egypt. those descendants. The Lord will produce one grand and glorious miracle after another, gracious and merciful.

And it will be these descendants of Jacob who then will be led by Joshua into the Promised Land, the land that we've seen even chapters behind us now, and we'll see again here this morning, the land promised to Abraham and his descendants. And it'll be this man, Jacob, that will have a descendant named David, son of Jesse, whose royal lineage will be sustained up to the point of the birth of Christ our Savior, who will reign forever. And Jacob's descendant will be the one with whom we've been identified as believers. Isn't that amazing? This fellow Jacob, yeah, the one that learns things the hard way.

He will be the one, Jesus Christ, the descendant of Jacob, be the one that we will see that we've been made to be in Him, as 1 Corinthians 1.30 says. Be the one who indwells us who believe, as He is made to be in us. Jacob, yes, will learn the hard way. And we've seen Jacob be manipulative, We have seen him be deceptive. We've even seen him conspire with his mother to deceive his father Isaac. And in fact, in the worldly sense, he pulled it off. He did it.

In the next few chapters, we're going to see that God brings him face to face with every one of his character flaws. The Lord says, I'm going to take you through this, Jacob, but we're going to deal with these issues. Every one of them. The manipulation, the deception. Oh yeah, you're going to see that face-to-face. And so the Lord's going to take him through these things. Every one.

And he's going to have to learn them the hard way. And he's going to be face-to-face with Laban who is going to make him the subject of manipulation and deception. Now, one of the things that will become clear is something that is actually true for us. There are two main options for how the Lord brings us to walk in fellowship with Him. How about that? You get two. One, we believe what God has revealed. Okay? That's option one. We can see what God has revealed through His Word and we can believe Him. That's first choice.

Or the next choice, the Lord must discipline us so that we learn to believe. To go through circumstances that are tough so that we learn the lessons the hard way. Those are the two routes that the Lord has. We have kind of in the secular realm this term, the school of hard knocks. But the one thing that that doesn't say, this isn't just learning things the hard way and leaving it at that. But one of the things that we're going to see is when the Lord disciplines us, it's not just going through a tough time and learning a lesson. It is the Lord Himself personally disciplining us.

Because it's not just, okay, you're going to go through a tough time and learn your lessons, but it has to do with relationship with Him. That's what it is. It has to do with relationship with Him. It's not just, okay, now you're going to learn your lessons the hard way, and now have you learned your lesson? But through it all, it's, have you learned to depend upon Me? Have you learned to believe Me? Have you learned to rely upon me? Have you learned to walk in fellowship with me? That's at the core of all these lessons. Whether we learn it by simply believing Him or having to go the difficult route and coming there anyway.

In Hebrews 12, 9 through 11, which you also have on page one of your handout, It kind of breaks into a few sections there, but notice the first one. Furthermore, we had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much rather be subject to the Father of Spirits and live? Pursue life. Or in verse 10, for they disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them, but He disciplines us for our good so that we may share His holiness.

Living. Holiness. That's the outcome. Look at what's next. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Notice in each of those sections, what's the outcome? The outcome that the Lord intends in that discipline. Life. Holiness. the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

That's what the Lord intends. The Lord isn't there to punish us and say, boy, you're really going to get ground up in this, aren't you? But the Lord brings these things for these positive results. And while Jacob's going to go through a tough time, a couple decades of tough time, okay, learning these lessons, the Lord is not doing this just simply to punish him and give him a bad time. The Lord is doing it because He wants the outcome in Jacob's life.

The same is true of us. Here's the big picture as we look at chapter 28. Two main parts, okay? The first one is where Isaac blesses Jacob, also charges him, as we'll see, with certain do this, not this, and sends him off to find a wife among his family, as was done for him. but also Esau's attempt to say, oh, now I get it, when he really doesn't, and to come up with his own solution and his own fix. The second part of Genesis, the last half, Genesis 28, is about Jacob's dream and then Jacob's response to that dream.

He dreams of a, and I put quotes in there, ladder. The actual Hebrew word is not specific as to ladder, ramp, stairway, but the idea is some structure that helps you ascend and descend. This ladder to heaven and also in which God speaks to him. Jacob responds with a vow, setting up a pillar and naming the area that he is in there. We'll go into the details on that. Bless you. By the way, that was not set up. That's not what that's about.

Jacob and Rebekah conspired together to deceive Isaac so that Jacob could get the eldest son's blessings. But we see that Isaac blessed Jacob here, not out of deception, but out of a deliberate, I'm sending you off and blessing your journey and blessing your seeking here of a wife. And Isaac's blessing were in keeping with God's promises. What Isaac was particularly blessing here had to do with his offspring, and plus the other promises the Lord had given to his father Abraham. What's interesting as we look at this, as we made comment previously, Isaac, as we see what's a relatively brief summary of his life, doesn't seem to be terribly spiritual. These words that we see in the beginning of the chapter, beginning verses, that Courtney read for us, are some of the more spiritual things that Isaac said, so far as what we have recorded for us in Genesis anyway. As with Abraham, one of the things that Isaac told Jacob not to do is don't take a wife from the Canaanites. Don't.

From the daughters of back where we're from, that family, back from Laban, Jacob's uncle basically, the brother of his mother, Rebekah. Go back there. 550 miles you're going to travel to get back up to this area. So here his mother's brother, basically, is where he's sent.

Isaac then blessed Jacob and kind of pulled together the blessings that had already been set out, the promises made to Abraham. And those three things are the land, the seed, that is the offspring, and then the blessing from those offspring. Those three things and he summarizes those together. We've got references here to some earlier chapters where those similar blessings are already given. Now, so we've got the land, that's the very land that they have been in and in fact Jacob is going to be traveling and get further indication that he's still in that land. The seed that is the offspring, those descended from Abraham through Isaac and then through Jacob, the twelve sons and the rest of the Israelites on down to Christ himself. The one who would be the ultimate source of blessing, even blessing us. Now, we step from Jacob to Esau.

Now, in the next part here of this first half, here's Esau who marries two local girls. These local girls are Canaanites. It's clear that these two were a real pain to Isaac and Rebekah. And you have some references there on page one of your handout that gives those locations where it's very clear that Esau's first two Canaanite wives were a serious disaster. And so here's Esau.

Either he directly saw his brother Jacob being blessed or heard about it. And so he says, oh, now I know what the problem is. I've got to marry some kind of a relative. He still doesn't get it. So Esau, seeing the charge to Jacob, don't marry this Canaanite, he says, oh boy, well, I've blown that. He's married two of them. He came up with a partial remedy to the problem. I know. Two wives are a problem. I think I'll get three.

Okay, so he married a daughter of Ishmael and the idea was, oh that keeps it in the family. What's the problem with that? The problem is, Ishmael is the part of Abraham's line that had been cast off out of the inheritance. That wasn't a part of the family that he was to be connecting up with.

The other thing is, when you start looking at the genealogical chart, This daughter of Ishmael is now three quarters Egyptian. Remember, we talked about before how the Egyptians ought to walk like this, you know? And so anyway, she's got three quarters of that just deeply inbred. So she's really mostly Egyptian, but a quarter descended from Abraham, and even that is not a part of the inheritance, specifically rejected from the inheritance.

So Esau thought he was going to fix things by going and getting this wife from the family. So here's the way it looks. Basemath and Judith and Mahalath, now the descendant of Ishmael. So now he's got three. And I guess he's hoping one out of three ain't bad or something like that. It's not the fix that he would have hoped for. This is the Esau solution.

One of the things that I think we can draw from this, looking at this passage, certainly what he married into was a real mess. The thing is, as believers, the Lord has made abundantly clear what he has in mind for marriage. And he's given us a tremendous amount of revelation and resources to learn from. And so one of the things that I would encourage among us here in this church body is to take advantage of the wonderful things that the Lord has revealed for marriages and to not subject ourselves to just what this world has to offer or the best we can figure out. but instead to look carefully at what is the Lord revealed regarding marriages so that we don't end up with marriages that are underwater or in deep trouble as they go down the line. We have been given tremendous truths from Scripture that shows what God intends in the marriage relationship. As a matter of fact, we've been given tremendous truths in Scripture as to what God intends for singles too. And I would encourage each of us to take a look at that. OK.

At this point, the tensions between Jacob and Esau take a break for now, about a two-decade vacation, roughly. So it doesn't mean that they end. We just take a break from them because Jacob's got other lessons to learn, as we made reference to earlier. Now Jacob begins traveling north. He's been blessed by his father Isaac and he knows where he's headed.

He's taking this 550 mile journey and traveling along this ridge that goes between the Jordan River Valley and the Mediterranean there. About two or three days travel north. And so here he is going between Beersheba and Bethel. And just for orientation, here's the Dead Sea over here off to the right of the area where he's traveling, and then up a little farther here, the Sea of Galilee as we have come to know it.

Okay, here is, just so you get an idea, this is an old structure in the terrain around Bethel where Jacob traveled here and where he decided to spend the night. Now, as he slept there, he had a dream. And that's what the last half of the chapter begins to record for us. So Jacob has this amazing dream. And it goes like this. He dreamt of a ladder or a stairway, this kind of upsloping access that went between heaven and earth and the angels of God were ascending and descending on this ramp or stairway or ladder. A couple artist depictions here.

The one critique I would have of each of them is the angels are far too feminine. I don't know why Phil's compelled to do that. But anyway, that's as it's imagined. The one thing is unless we get more description from Jacob, and I think that's going to be a while before we get that, it's tough to know exactly what he went through.

Okay. We can take this, I believe, as the angel of the Lord, and since it's an appearance of the Lord to Jacob, and the angel of the Lord being the Lord Jesus Christ in his pre-incarnate state there. A handout we had from two weeks ago on the first page gives some of the background on that, so we won't go into that now. But the Lord told Jacob this.

The land on which he lay, so now he's been traveling for a couple days at least, but the land on which he lay would be given to him. So this is further confirmation of the covenant and the promises to Abraham. would be given to him and his descendants, they would be as the dust of the earth. Now that doesn't mean that they're really dusty people. It means they're great in number, countless. That's the idea. They would be as the dust of the earth.

And so this line from Abraham through Isaac, through Jacob, and then he doesn't have them yet, but his twelve sons, and then on into all the other descendants. the Israelites, those people would be as the dust of the earth, and that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him. Ultimately, that's through Christ, isn't it? Through the birth of Christ, the descendant of Jacob that we spoke of earlier. Then the Lord also told Jacob this, I am with you, It's one of the statements that he made to him.

I will keep you. Yeah, you're going to learn some hard lessons, but I'll keep you. I will bring you back to the land. You're not going to get hung up there or stuck there or lost there. I'll bring you back. I will not leave you until I've done what I promised. How about that? How about that? Having the Lord tell you directly those things.

For Jacob, that was a pretty phenomenal thing for him to hear. So he says, as we quoted there in verse 17, how awesome is this place. Now, I get the sense that you imagine having a dream like that. It's probably something like, woo, that was awesome! Kind of like that. Sorry if I woke up the kids in the nursery. Okay. He also said, okay, Jacob awakened early that day and it says he was awestruck and afraid. Certainly that response there.

He declared that place where he was, that place where he had this dream, to be the house of God and the gate of heaven. This is one awesome, extraordinary place. This is a wow kind of place. Now, in response to what Jacob had seen and what he'd heard the Lord tell him in his dream, he set up a pillow stone as a pillar. In other words, he'd taken a stone and he'd laid his head on it. Now, something we've got to explain here, okay? And that is, in the Middle East and even over into the Orient, for centuries, there's been a tradition of using porcelain and stone pillows, okay?

Now, that wouldn't appeal to me terrible much. And I could not imagine what a pillow fight would be like. That would be downright dangerous. But nonetheless, that was one of the things that they often did. I think probably some of the times they'd put some kind of padding over the stone so that it wasn't quite so hard. But nonetheless, that's what they did. So he set up this stone that he's put his head on then as a pillar. Anointed it. You don't need to put oil on your pillow, that's fine.

And named the place Bethel, which means house of God. And then he there made a vow, which was, and we'll see that in a minute, essentially a dedication. In this vow, he said, well, if the Lord's going to do that, then I'm going to do this. If the Lord's going to be with me and keep me and promise to take me there and get me back, and this is all going to turn out okay, then that's my God. That's basically what he said.

He added to that, and interestingly enough, we don't have some subsequent recording of how he did it, but he added to that, they would also give a tenth to him. Now, one of the things I need to point out, the Mosaic Law had not been given. Centuries later, that would happen.

The giving of a tenth was the standard figure given to any priest. In fact, that's the amount that the kings and empires taxed. A tenth was the standard number. And they went and did a tenth to everything. So that's the number that he drew up because that was the standard amount.

Now, what are some things to take to heart from this account here that we see? The Lord said to Jacob in his dream, I am with you. Well, notice, the Lord Jesus said that He is not only with us, but in us and we're in Him. Here are some passages. Matthew 28.20, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Or here's Romans 8.10, if Christ is in you, and by the way, that if has an assumption that it is true. So if Christ is in you, and He is, Though the body is dead because of sin, yet the Spirit is alive because of righteousness. The Lord is in you. In addition to that, 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30 begins with this, but by His doing, that is God's doing, you are in Christ Jesus.

I am with you. You are in Him. He is in you. We have those same assurances. So, Jacob, Heard the Lord say this, and he said, man, this is an awesome place. This is an awesome place that the Lord has us. He with us, us in Him, He in us. What an awesome place to be. He told Jacob, I will keep you. You're going to go through all kinds of things, but I'll keep you. Well, guess what? Jude 24. Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, He can keep you and make you stand. He can do it. You have these passages except for the first Corinthians 30 on your handout there, I believe. But there's one more truth here to draw to this.

God told Jacob he would bring him back to the land, but our Lord told us something different. See, we don't have the land promise for us in the church, but what do we have? Our Lord told us that He will come and take us to be with Him. John 14, 1-3, and one of the pieces of background I need to provide quickly is this kind of statement would have been made from a bridegroom to the bride. So when Jesus made this statement, it was that kind of a statement. The statement a bridegroom would give to his bride, and the church is the bride of Christ, right? He says, Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in Me.

In My Father's house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, I would have told you. For I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am you may be also. See, we have these statements from the Lord Himself that parallel these things said to Jacob, in this case, better still. Not just I'll bring you back to the land, but the Lord says, no, I'll come back and take you where I am and you'll be with me forever.

Furthermore, we have this promise we see from this passage. God's the one who makes the promises. We've seen it for all the chapters all the way along, starting with chapter 12 here. He's also the promise keeper. He assures Jacob here, I'm going to keep the promise. Don't worry. When you come back here, and you will, I'll have been faithful all the way through. I'm the promise keeper. He promised Jacob that he would never leave him.

Now, in our nation here, we've been going through some wild times of late. Maybe you've noticed. The ups and not quite so downs of the gas prices. The crazy things going on with the economy. I mean, this is some wild stuff. But at times like these, this very time we're going through right now, isn't that one of the best times to know that the Lord is always with us?

If we turn to Hebrews 13.5, It's a particularly appropriate passage for our times.

Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have. For he himself has said, I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you. Both those places, in other words, there's two places in that one statement that I've marked with a plus sign there. These are both written with a form in the Greek. that puts it this way, not even remotely, not the slightest chance. So let me put that in there. I will never even remotely, not even the slightest chance, will I desert you. Not even remotely, not the slightest chance will I ever forsake you. No way. That's what he says. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that great? In times like these when, you know, the markets may be just rolling and roiling and we may see wild times yet to come.

But we can count upon, he says, I will never, never leave you or forsake you. Not going to happen. We can count on it. None of the things that we just looked at, I'll be with you, will be impacted by anything that happens that they're going to tell you about on the news. This next election will not impact what the Lord is with you, and that's awful good.

These are promises we can count upon. In wild times, that's a wonderful thing to be able to do, to depend upon the Lord's faithfulness. And to see that very similar to the promises given to Jacob, we have those great assurances from the Lord himself that he'll be with us. Let's thank him for that now. Lord, as we look at this passage, we do indeed see your faithfulness. And Lord, we want to count upon that and depend upon that through the midst of what have already been a bit wild times. and may yet be wild times more, we're thankful for your faithfulness that you are unmoved and unchanged by the things that unsettle the masses. And we're just thankful for all that we can count upon, and who you are, and who you have promised to be for us, and in us, and with us, and us and you. Thank you for these wonderful blessings, tremendous promises. Thank you that you're the promise keeper. In Jesus' name, amen.