Surely God is with Us

There is a question worth sitting with for a moment: What does it feel like to walk into the house of God?

For some, the answer comes easily. The church is familiar, comfortable, a place of belonging. But for others, those doors represent something far more complicated. They carry with them a weight of shame, a record of failure, a sense that they do not belong among people who seem to have their lives together. Many people assume, whether anyone has said it directly or not, that God is primarily interested in people with good track records. People who are respectable. People who have cleaned themselves up.

If that is the assumption you carry, the story of Jacob has something urgent to say to you.

The Runaway
Jacob was not a man anyone would hold up as a model of virtue. His very name means heel grabber, a reference to the deceptive nature he displayed from birth. He manipulated his brother Esau out of his birthright, conspired with his mother to deceive his elderly, blind father, and stole the blessing that rightfully belonged to his brother. When Esau threatened to kill him, Jacob did what any guilty man would do. He ran.

He set out on a journey of roughly 550 miles, running from the consequences of his own choices, running from his family, running from everything he had broken. There was nothing noble about his departure. He was a sinner in flight.

And that is exactly where God met him.

A Dream in the Wilderness
Genesis 28 describes Jacob stopping for the night, exhausted, using a stone as a pillow. In that desolate, in-between place, God gave him a dream. He saw a stairway stretching from earth to heaven, with angels ascending and descending on it. And there, standing above it, was the Lord.

What God said next was not a rebuke. It was not a list of conditions Jacob needed to meet before receiving divine attention. It was a promise. God declared that he would give Jacob the land, that his descendants would spread in every direction, and that through his offspring all peoples on earth would be blessed. Then God made it deeply personal: I am with you. I will watch over you wherever you go. I will bring you back. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised.

Four commitments.

• Presence. 
• Protection.
• Preservation.
• Promise.

Jacob had done absolutely nothing to earn any of it. He was a fugitive from his own sin. And God said, I am with you.

That is what grace looks like.

Surely God Is in This Place
When Jacob woke up, he was overwhelmed. He said something that deserves to stop us in our tracks: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." He had not been searching for God. He had not set out on a spiritual pilgrimage. He was running away. And yet God had been pursuing him the entire time.

He called the place Bethel, which means house of God. He set up a stone as a memorial, poured oil on it, and made a vow to honor the Lord with his life. A man who had been defined by taking from others now pledged to give back to the God who had so freely given to him.

This is the pattern of grace. It does not wait for us to arrive at a better version of ourselves before showing up. It meets us in the middle of the mess.

The Stairway Has a Name
In the Gospel of John, Jesus makes a striking statement to a man named Nathanael. He tells him that he will see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending, not on a ladder, not on a stairway, but on the Son of Man. Jesus was pointing directly back to Jacob's dream and declaring himself to be its fulfillment.

Jesus is the stairway. He is the connection between heaven and earth, between a holy God and broken people. He lived the righteous life that none of us manage to live. He died the death that our failures deserve. And through his resurrection, he opened the way for sinners to be called saints. Not because they earned it. Not because they cleaned themselves up. But because he did what was necessary to bring us all the way home.

This is the only basis on which anyone walks into the house of God with any confidence. Not performance. Not a clean record. Not a respectable reputation. Only the righteousness of Jesus Christ, received by faith.

God Never Stopped Being Faithful
Jacob's story did not become simple after Bethel. The next twenty years of his life were filled with more deception, family conflict, jealousy, and struggle. He was tricked into a marriage he did not want. He entered into arrangements that created lasting strife. He remained, in many ways, a deeply flawed man.

But God never abandoned him. Through every season of failure and difficulty, God kept every promise he made on that night in the wilderness. He provided. He protected. He preserved. And eventually, he brought Jacob home.

The Bible is not primarily a collection of moral examples to follow. It is the story of a God who makes promises to prodigals, who turns sinners into saints, and who leads runaways all the way home. Jacob's faithfulness was inconsistent at best. God's faithfulness was never in question.

An Open Door
The same God who pursued Jacob through the wilderness is the God who pursues people today. If you have been running, if you feel the weight of your own failures, if you have assumed that the house of God is for people who have it together, hear this clearly: you do not have to clean yourself up before you come.

Come as you are. Come in repentance and faith. Come to the one who is himself the gate, the stairway, the house of God.

Surely God is with us. And he is not waiting for us to deserve it.