By 
This sermon was preached for Capital Pres Fairfax on Sunday, June 21, 2026, as a part of our Summer series on the life of Jacob. Jacob’s life is not a story about a man who finally got it together. It is a story about a sovereign God who chooses the undeserving, pursues the self-sufficient, and meets the wrestler in the dark—not to defeat him, but to bless him. In this series, we’ll learn from Jacob’s life about the extravagance and power of a grace that doesn’t wait for us to deserve it. This week we encountered the Lord at Jacob’s ladder in Genesis 27:41-28:5, 28:10-22. You can listen to a recording of the sermon on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
Gen 27:41–28:5.
41 Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him, and Esau said to himself, “The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob.” 42 But the words of Esau her older son were told to Rebekah. So she sent and called Jacob her younger son and said to him, “Behold, your brother Esau comforts himself about you by planning to kill you. 43 Now therefore, my son, obey my voice. Arise, flee to Laban my brother in Haran 44 and stay with him a while, until your brother’s fury turns away— 45 until your brother’s anger turns away from you, and he forgets what you have done to him. Then I will send and bring you from there. Why should I be bereft of you both in one day?”
46 Then Rebekah said to Isaac, “I loathe my life because of the Hittite women. If Jacob marries one of the Hittite women like these, one of the women of the land, what good will my life be to me?”
28:1 Then Isaac called Jacob and blessed him and directed him, “You must not take a wife from the Canaanite women. 2 Arise, go to Paddan-aram to the house of Bethuel your mother’s father, and take as your wife from there one of the daughters of Laban your mother’s brother. 3 God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples. 4 May he give the blessing of Abraham to you and to your offspring with you, that you may take possession of the land of your sojournings that God gave to Abraham!” 5 Thus Isaac sent Jacob away. And he went to Paddan-aram, to Laban, the son of Bethuel the Aramean, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob’s and Esau’s mother.
Gen 28:10–22.
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.”
We are three weeks into our sermon series on the life of Jacob, and yall, it’s not looking good for Jacob. Really it’s not looking good for anyone in the story. Our passage starts with everyone continuing their same old patterns of dysfunction (if you weren’t here for last week’s sermon, I highly recommend you give it a listen). Rash and impulsive Esau is now determined to murder his brother. Rebekah is still scheming, Isaac is still getting fooled. Jacob is more interested in skipping town with his blessing than in making things right with his family. These are broken, messed up people. Just like us.
Right? Aren’t we? Are you willing to admit that this morning? We might have a lot to say in criticizing this passage: the people in it, their choices, their marriages, their culture. There certainly is room for that, but that’s not our goal—to sit up high and look down on those ancient, immoral, foolish people. Here’s the far more interesting question: what does this passage have to say in critique of us?
As the word of God, it reveals the deficiencies of our own moral character, our own foolish thinking, our own backwards culture; and how God relates to people like you and me. We’ve said it every week that Jacob’s story is our story. Today we’re looking at how Jacob, in the middle of his striving, stumbles right into a face-to-face meeting with the living and holy God.
What happens when people like that—people like us—find ourselves in the middle of the Lord’s presence? We’ll consider that question in two steps. First, how are we confronted by the Lord’s presence? Second, how are we changed by the Lord’s presence?
Confronted by God’s Grace
If you’ve got a Bible on you, go ahead and open it up to Genesis 28. I want us to see a couple things about Jacob’s confrontation with God. First, notice the place where this happens. Look at verse 11 where it says “he came to a certain place.” The author is doing two things at the same time here. On the one hand, he’s emphasizing how random and unplanned and ordinary this spot is. The verb here could easily be translated as “he happened upon.”1 Jacob was walking all day, it got dark, and he decided to stop where he was and call it a night.
At the same time, though, the author is teasing out that this place isn’t random. It isn’t just a place, it’s a certain place. It is the place. Repeated three times. The author waits until the end of the passage to reveal what this place is when Jacob names it “Bethel” which becomes one of the most significant cities in Old Testament history. As it says in verse 17, Bethel means “the house of God”—this is where God lives, his presence is here with Jacob. Why is that significant?
In Jacob’s mind, this God was the God of his father Isaac, and Isaac was back in Beersheba. God had promised to give this land to his family, and Jacob was about to leave the land. Jacob is running from God as much as he is running from Esau; he thinks he’s crossing into a “God-free zone.”
We have those, too. Even us good Christians who know Psalm 139:7 “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” Even us theology nerds who understand omnipresence—we still have places we treat as “God-free zones” places outside his jurisdiction, free from his presence, free from his rules, free to do whatever we think is best. Where is that for you? What do you treat as a “God-free zone?” Is it your office at work? Is it your car? Is it your bedroom?
This passage is inviting us to realize with Jacob that there is no such thing as a “God-free zone.” He names the place “Beth el” not just to say “this ordinary place is actually the house of God” but as a broader confession that “God lives here—and everywhere! God’s not limited to Beersheba, he’s not limited to a church building, or Sunday morning—wherever I go, God lives here.” So when you are working late into the night, God lives there. When you’re driving home cursing at the BMW who cut you off, God lives there. When you get home and crawl into bed and pull out your phone, God lives there. That’s the ordinary place where we are confronted by God.
Come back to Genesis 28 with me, starting in verse 11. Jacob settles in for the night and starts having this wild dream about a ladder. It is massive, stretching from heaven to earth. Isn’t that such an interesting picture? Think about the way use ladders as a symbol. We talk about the corporate ladder, the social ladder, the ladder of success. Ladders are made to be climbed. And here in the DC area, we are good at climbing them.
Our guy Jacob would have resonated with all this. He’s been real good at climbing the ladder of success by any means necessary. Lying, cheating, and stealing himself a birthright and a blessing. Now on his way to secure himself a wife. Ever striving, ever climbing.
That’s what makes this particular ladder so confrontational. Jacob’s not climbing it; angels are, up and down, connecting heaven to earth. And who stands at the bottom beside Jacob? God himself. Look at verse 13, you might notice a footnote in your Bible that says “beside him” instead of “above.” That’s a better interpretation of the grammar here. This same language is used elsewhere in Scripture to describe someone standing next to someone who is sitting.2 Think about if my 18-month-old son were standing next to me, I’d be standing “over him” in a sense. All that to say, in Jacob’s dream, he’s not climbing up. God is climbing down to meet him.
This is the first recorded instance in Genesis of Jacob encountering God personally. Up until this point, he had heard a lot about God, he knew about his interactions with his dad and grandpa. Surely he would have heard that God commanded his people to be “holy and blameless.” He knew about the promises God had made. He knew his dad had passed on those promises to him—because he had stolen them. So what had this holy and blameless God come down from heaven to do? Curse Jacob? Rebuke him? He deserves it.
And yet! Look at verses 13-15. Overwhelming, abundant promises perfectly in line with what he had said to Abraham and Isaac, and completely contrary to what Jacob deserves. Friends, that challenges our assumptions of how we relate to God. We so often think that if God does exist, he’s only interested in the “good people”—and I’m not one of them. Sure, I’m a decently good person, but if we’re using the standard of a holy and blameless God, I’m nowhere near good enough for him. So I want nothing to do with him, and I hope he wants nothing to do with me, because if he does, that’s bad news.
And again, even for those of us who know our Bible and have been Christians for years, we can still slip into this kind of thinking. We operate out of the feeling that until we get our act together, we can’t go to God. What is your “until”? “Until I forgive my father for being a bad parent, I can’t come to God.” Or “Until I fix my marriage,” or “Until I stop looking at stuff online…I am out of reach of God, and if he wants anything to do with me right now, it’s to judge me.”
This passage shows us we’ve got it completely backward. God isn’t waiting for us to clean ourselves up before we climb the ladder to him. God climbs down the ladder to meet us as we are, and he intends on blessing us.
Look at the blessing he gives Jacob. It’s got the stuff he’s been striving for all this time—the land, the offspring—but even more than that. God says “in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” What Jacob is just now realizing is that he is right in the middle of God’s grace, and no amount of his own foolishness and selfishness can derail God’s plan. One commentator put it this way: “No human act — not even the most evil of acts — could thwart God’s gracious will to bless all peoples through the patriarchal line. He did not abandon his gracious promise but used even the misguided acts of Isaac and the members of his family to further his plan for the salvation of the world.”3
If you are a Christian, God’s grace is not contingent on you making the right decisions. God loves you. He intends to bless you, and to bless the world through you. He confronts you with his sovereign, persistent grace. And that changes everything.
Changed by God’s Grace
Let’s look at how this changes Jacob, come back to Genesis 28 with me. Look at verses 17-18, the first change is that Jacob is filled with awe. I was reminded of two quotes this past week while reading this passage. The first is from the Sci Fi author Arthur C. Clarke “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” Clarke was talking about aliens, but in our modern secular world, this can just as well be applied to God.
The second quote is from the English scholar C.S. Lewis as he reflected on his journey to faith, musing on this very tension.
It is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. ‘Look out!’ we cry, ‘it’s alive’. And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw back…and proceed no further with Christianity [I would have done so myself if I could]. An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”4
God had found Jacob, and this morning, God has found you. We are not alone. But when we realize that the One who is with us is the Lord, the faithful and loving covenant God, that terror turns to wonder. Dread turns to delight. Suddenly the universe isn’t impersonal and indifferent, just a vast infinity of nothing with no center. It is the handiwork of a master Creator. That changes the feel of reality—as one author puts it, the world with God becomes a “cosy little cosmos.”5
Suddenly life is not a random accident. It’s a gift. The things that make us human aren’t just mental constructs we invented to justify our own existence. No! Beauty is real. Joy is real. Because they are fundamental to the God who comes before and reigns over all creation. That God has drawn near to bless us. The first change: God’s grace fills us with awe.
Change #2, closely related: God’s grace gives us direction. Jacob went from thinking he was in the middle of nowhere to recognizing and proclaiming “This is the house of God.” A landmark on the map, a lighthouse on a dark coast, and not just geographically speaking. This moment orients his whole life. Now the world has meaning and life has a destination. He knows where he is headed—not just literally going to Haran, but the destination of his whole life—because God has told him his plan.
That gives him direction in the choices he makes: he knows he will have descendants, so he seeks a wife. He knows he will return to the promised land, and that guides him home eventually. But on a deeper level, it gives him peace that no matter what comes to pass, because God has revealed the end of the story. No matter all the twists and turns he faces, no matter what kind of awful mistakes he will make (and he will make a lot) God has promised Jacob that he will return to the promised land, he will be blessed, and God will be with him.
The same is true for us. We know how our story ends, too. We will go be with Jesus in paradise. No more tears. That should give us the same direction in our choices. We’re not aimlessly stumbling through life. We’re oriented to God’s house. The career we pick, the people we date, the words we choose—as Christians, we believe these choices should be directed toward God. And for us on that deeper level, we can share in the same peace in the midst of whatever comes to pass. No matter how off the rails our own choices go, we can rest in God’s promises to go with us and to bring us home. God’s grace gives us direction.
The last change we’ll talk about is that God’s grace leads us to commitment. When we see the extravagant promises God makes to us, that inclines our hearts to respond with our own promises to him. Think about your own story of faith. If you are a Christian, there was a moment when you came to believe in Jesus’ overwhelming love for you, and you made the conscious decision to commit your life to Jesus. This is that moment for Jacob.
Now we have to be honest. Jacob’s vow isn’t all that impressive, and even worse, he seems to completely forget it for twenty years. Lest I be too critical, I’m reminded of all the lame promises I’ve made to God and promptly forgotten. “God, if you help me pass this exam I didn’t study for, I swear I’ll be a better Christian.” Or “God, if you let me get away with my sin this one time, I promise I’ll never do it again.” Does that sound familiar to anyone else here?
Here’s where the grace of God is really amazing: even as we falter in keeping our promises to God, he never waivers. Turn with me in your Bibles to the Gospel of John chapter 1, starting in verse 43. This is right at the start of Jesus’ ministry where he calls the first disciples. Jesus meets a guy named Nathanael. Nathanael has heard of Jesus but isn’t overly impressed. As he puts it, “Has anything good ever come out of Nazareth?” (Jesus’ hometown). So Jesus seeks him out, not unlike the way God seeks Jacob out.
When Nathanael finally realizes who is standing in front of him, he is filled with awe and wonder and he says, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” To which Jesus replies that, one day, Nathanael and the other disciples will see something “even greater..” Verse 51: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
You see what Jesus is saying? He is saying, “I am the ladder. I am the gateway to heaven. I am the One who will be suspended between earth and heaven on a cross, to pay the debt you owe God, so that heaven can be opened for you, and for all who trust in me. I am the one promised to Jacob to bless all the families of the earth. I kept the promise.”
Friends, we get to see in broad daylight what Jacob saw in the shadow of a dream. Jesus is the “Yes” and “Amen” to all of God’s promises. And as we bask in the fullness of his grace revealed in Jesus, that changes everything for us. That enables us to come back to God—hopefully sooner than twenty years. Every Sunday, every morning, every moment, as often as we realize we’ve faltered in our commitment. As the Apostle Paul writes, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful” (2 Tim 2:13). The gospel empowers us to remember our commitment to God and fuels us with faith to follow Jesus.
Here are three closing questions for you to discuss over lunch or with your CG. How has the grace of God filled you with awe and wonder and delight? How has the grace of God given you direction in life? How has the grace of God inspired you to commit your life to him—and how has that grace given you space to recommit your life as often as you remember?
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1 Victor P. Hamilton. The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50 (Eerdmans, 1995), 238.
2 Hamilton, Genesis, 241.
3 Andrew Steinmann, and Tremper Longman III. Genesis : An Introduction and Commentary. [CA & US version]. Vol. 00001. (IVP Academic, 2019), ebook.
4 C.S. Lewis, Miracles (London, UK: Geoffrey Bles, 1947), 114. https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150616
5 G.K. Chesterton, “The Ethics of Elfland” Chapter IV in Orthodoxy (UK: The Bodley Head, 1908) https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html
