Daily Lesson for January 21, 2020

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Genesis chapter 29 verses 10 through 17:

10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the 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. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the Lord stood beside him 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 and 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 all the families of the earth shall be blessed[d] in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that 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 woke 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.”

I love this story.

Jacob is on the run from his angry brother and in search of a woman to call his wife and comes to “a certain place” where he takes a pillow for the night from a heap of stone ruins, having no idea that this heap of rocks is from the altar which his grandfather Abraham once built to God in his own journey many years before. He falls asleep with absolutely no sense of the holiness of the place.

But then mysteriously he dreams, and a ladder from heaven is pulled down on which angles ascend and descend. Then the voice of the God speaks to him in his sleep: “I and 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 your offspring . . . And all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you.”

Jacob then awakens from his sleep and exclaims, “Surely the LORD is in this place — and I did not know it . . . How awesome is this place! This is none other than the House of the LORD!

And so it is, one generation builds an altar, or a Temple, or a church, and as the years go by it is almost left to utter ruin, but then two generations down, stumbles another from the family into this “certain place” which seems like “any old place” but turns out to be, mysteriously, that awesome place where heaven comes down and earth goes up, the very House of the LORD.

May it be so, dear God; may it be so again in all your holy places . . .


NOTE: We’re reading the whole Bible this year. Tomorrow’s Lesson will be taken from Genesis chapters 30 and 31.