‘Middle of nowhere’ is an interesting idiom used in America. Either there are a lot of people in the middle of nowhere in this country or, there are a lot people in other parts of the world who don't know that they are in the middle of nowhere. It is an idiom is a group of words established by usage having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words. (Another example: 'raining cats and dogs'). 'Nowhere' cannot have a middle or a center. Then again, is 'middle' a word that can be used before nowhere? In any case, for Jacob, it was a night in the 'middle of nowhere'.
Jacob was a man of great schemes and plans who would do anything to get his heart's desire. He thought he was a self-made man. Someone said, “all of us are self-made people, only the successful will admit it.” He cheated his blind father Isaac, by impersonating as his older brother Esau and stole the blessing intended for Easu. Things were going great - all of Jacob's efforts to make sure that he got all that he wanted. He would do everything within his own power to get what God had promised that his mother taught him. Except, in doing so, he ran into a real problem. His brother Esau became his enemy - and as the death of Isaac approached, so did Esau's plot to finish off Jacob once and for all. When Esau found out, he got angry and was out to kill him. Jacob is on the run for his life now. Through deceit, trickery, plotting,lying, and conniving, he has stolen his brother's birthright, and he had been found out. When we scheme and devise and strategize at the expense of others, we are digging our own graves.
So Jacob fled away from Esau to Paddan Aram to his uncle, Laban. He had a few problems, but he could still handle them - he was on his way to adventure - even though he did feel probably a little alone, without a friend in the world. The first day running from Esau was one of distress and anxiety for Jacob. "He reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep." (Genesis 28). He did not have a tent or a roof over his head. The sky was his roof and the earth was his bed. He placed a rock as his pillow. The security of the home has been replaced by the dangers of the night. The comfort of his parents’ home has been replaced by the wide open desert. Behind him lays Beersheba, where Esau waits to kill him. Confused and tired, Jacob found a place to lie down and sleep. The setting of the sun, with the loss of its light and warmth, signifies the loss of energy of faith from life as he lingered in self-centered ideas and plans. Often our own self-centered nature casts its dark shadow over our lives and we fall into a deep spiritual sleep. But in that depression, comes a heavenly dream. Then looking at the sky and the beauty of God with the stars and the moon shining without fail, he slipped into a beautiful dream. He saw in his dream of a ladder going up to heaven. He saw angels climbing up and down the ladder between earth and heaven.
God brings heaven down to earth when He sees his children sleeping in the middle of nowhere. Just as the Lord did not leave Jacob on his day of distress, God will not leave us alone. God Himself came down into the world to bring the light of truth to shine in the darkness as 'Emmanuel', God with us. Jesus came as the light of the world so that you and I can shine in a dark world. God prepared a ladder, on the cross of Calvary with Jesus hanging between heaven and earth. There is an infinite and eternal communication that started where the earthly being meets with the Eternal One. There God promised Jacob, "I 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 spoken to you" (Genesis 28:15). God's promise is alive even today, in history and in our lives that He will not leave us abandoned, but will bless us because of the cross. God loves to intervene to meet with us when we are empty, lonely, and running away from Him. Heaven comes down to earth when we are the most in need of God.
Dreaming is good, but we need to wake up. Jacob awoke from his sleep with the sudden recognition "Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it" (Genesis 28: 16). These words have become one of the greatest statements of faith resounded generation after generation. He had the new realization that his God was not distant or unconcerned but present in the very stony ground the stone he had placed under his neck for support. He took the stones on which he rested and set them up for a pillar. He called that place, "Bethel," which means "the house of God" in Hebrews. There is an old hymn, 'Nearer My God to Thee'. One of the lines says, “Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise.” Our stony and hard times of grief and loneliness will become the place of visits from heaven. Paul asks us to wake up: "You know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed." (Romans 13:11).
Dreaming is good, but also it is for us to pursue it. It shows that the Lord has prepared a way for us to progress from where we are to where we should be. He will help us find new motives and new meaning for our lives. Jacob rose up and pursued the vision. The meaning of the dream is encouraging. It shows that the Lord has prepared a way for us to progress from where we are to where we should be. Jacob rose up and pursued the vision. He made a covenant: "If God will be with me, and keep me in this way that I am going, and give me bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I come back to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. And this stone which I have set as a pillar shall be God's house, and of all that You give me I will surely give a tenth to You." (Genesis 28:20-22).
C.S. Lewis said that God whispers to us in our pleasure and shouts to us in our pain. Pain and suffering, he said, is God’s megaphone to rouse a sleeping world to wake it up. Once the vision is seen and the way is shown, we must wake up and get up and we must follow in it to reach our spiritual destination. The transformation of our life is not abrupt. We pass through many states, both prosperous and discouraging. Yet, the stone pillar at Bethel stands where Jacob set it up and anointed it with oil, a constant reminder that the Lord is with us, in every state of our lives.
John Newton who wrote the famous hymn, 'Amazing Grace', was living in disgrace for a long time. He rejected the God of his mother, renounced any need of religion and he lived an irresponsible and sinful life. Eventually he became a slave trader, crossing the ocean several times as a cruel and torturous captain of a slave ship. He survived a deadly fever in Africa, which almost killed him. One time while he was steering his ship on the open sea his ship was caught up in the terrible storm. He thought for sure that his ship was going down and that he was going to die. In desperation, he prayed to this God he had been mocking all his life. His ship stayed afloat and barely survived the storm. That moment jolted him into learning more about who Jesus Christ was – this person he had been mocking all his life. He began reading the writings of Thomas A Kempis, that led him to surrendering his life to God. He felt a call to enter the ministry. He was eventually ordained in 1781 and accepted a pastorate and served for 43 years at the Church of England at Olney in England. But Newton’s disgraceful past never left his memory and he was completely dumbfounded over the privilege of living joyously free under the divine grace of God. In an intense moment of inspiration, when he was thinking of the wonder of the grace of God, which had saved even a wretch like him, he wrote the hymn, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound." He was one of the influencers in England who played a key part in abolishing slavery. Right before he died, he said, “My memory is nearly gone, but I remember two things, that I am a great sinner, and that Christ is a great savior”
“Amazing grace how sweet the sound, that save a wretch like me, I once was lost and now I'm found, was blind but now I see.”
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