As a church struggles—and every true church must struggle—heaven’s stairway joins her to heaven and all heaven’s mercy and safety. The stairway is not built by our faithfulness, but God’s promise. The stairway is not our obedience and steadfastness, but the person of Christ come down to rescue us from our sin and rebellion.

Weeks after winning my license, I crashed my car. It was a wet night and my friends and I decided it would be fun to drift around corners with wheels spinning. I lost control, the front of the car hammered into a high curb, and the steering was wrecked.
I limped the car home, too ashamed and embarrassed to tell my parents. I drove it first thing in the morning to the repairers in town. The mechanic hoisted it up and showed me how I’d bent the wheels and steering arms. Repair would be very costly.
I remember pacing the wet streets car-less, wondering where on earth I would find the repair money and still too ashamed to tell my family. For just a few hours I felt unusually helpless, almost nauseous with worry and loneliness. Looking back, I see how unnecessary my suffering was. All the help in the world was all around me, and I was blind to it.
So it is with Jacob in the book of Genesis.
Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran (Gen. 28:10).
What tragedy we read in these few words. Jacob was born into a rich and loving family. But he tricked his twin brother out of his birthright (Gen. 25) and then pulled a seriously devious and nasty deception on his blind father, tricking Isaac into giving him Esau’s covenant blessing (Gen. 27). So now Jacob is fleeing Beersheba, his home in the south of the Promised Land, to Haran in the strange and distant north: beyond Galilee, beyond Syria and Damascus, right up near Assyria and the Euphrates River.
Jacob means “Grasper.” Grasper had betrayed his family. And by lying and cheating and dishonoring his father, he had also dishonored God. What had he accomplished? A family in humiliation and disarray. He himself running, alone, and far, far from home.
Remember, this is the father of Israel. According to the principle of corporate identity as explained in Hebrews 7:1-10, the entire nation was physically latent within him at that moment. Jacob is Israel. Grasper personifies the church. What is true of him is true of the church.
What is true of Jacob is true of the church.
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 (Gen. 28:11).
After fleeing all day, night falls with no motel or friendly house nearby. In verse 20 Jacob prays for “food to eat and clothes to wear.” So we see a lonely, guilty, destitute man. He lies in the open air with a rock for a pillow. He is exhausted physically, morally, spiritually, and relationally. This by nature is you. This by nature is your church.
Sleeping on rocks gives anyone strange dreams. God gives Jacob a vision. It is a kind of apocalypse; God pulls aside the curtain to show Jacob what is going on behind his desolate circumstances.
God showed Jacob a staircase joining heaven and earth.
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! And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac” (Gen. 28:12-13a).
God cast our rebellious parents, and thus us, out of Eden. Cherubim wielding blazing swords barred the way back (Gen. 3:24). Humanity, and not least Jacob at this point, live within the desolation of that separation. But God showed Jacob a staircase joining heaven and earth.
The people of Babel attempted something like this, to build a tower to reconnect heaven and earth, to manufacture greatness and security (Gen. 11:1-9). But it was human-made and prideful, and God razed it. If God separated humanity from heaven, what can we do to bridge the gulf?
We cannot reach up to God, but he can reach down to us. That is the staircase.
Why are angels dashing up and down it? “Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?” (Heb. 1:14). They rush down with God’s word and salvation (Heb. 2:2), and rush back up with our prayers (Rev. 8:4). The staircase establishes communication between Jacob and heaven. It is a conduit of help—of salvation.
The One who speaks to Jacob is “the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac.” He made that unbreakable promise to Abraham:

“Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Gen 12:1-2) 

At that point Jacob must have doubted those promises. “Land? Great nation? Great name? Blessing? I’m an exile from the land. My ‘great name’ is Grasper. I’m cursed, not blessed!” Jacob had betrayed family and God and had lost everything. Yet God was working right then even in Jacob’s betrayal and desolation to fulfill his promise. God was there, heaven and earth were joined. God’s ministering servants rushed up and down for Jacob.
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When we know God is our portion, when we rest in His sovereign control over all things, when we understand nothing comes into our lives except by the hand of a loving God, then we can avoid the temptation and the trap of rooting beauty in the stuff of life. For we know, if beauty is found in changing things, our experience of contentment will ever change. When life is good, joyful, happy, and successful our contentment will be intact. But when the shipwreck comes, when the avalanche lands on top of you, when life opens up and swallows you whole, you will be devastated. But, if beauty is found in our unchanging God, then nothing on earth and no power of hell can ever move us, shake us, or break us. 

A rather strange concept among the children of men is that beauty can and must be found in pain as well as pleasure. This behavior seems almost inconcevable to the worldly man, who ascribes beauty in the most lopsided ways. For instance, a carnal person will generously admit how a picturesque sunrise, a looming snow-capped mountain, an attractive woman, or a well-written play are all filled with a kind of beauty. But, it is my experience, that only a Christian is equipped to call the cancers of this life beautiful, or the poverty altogether lovely. It is the Christian who can endure the loathsome trial with all joy and the frowning providence of God as a true delight.
And while this may seem a bit mental, the Psalms will help us understand how.
Whole Life Beauty
In the 16th Psalm, David says the following in verses 5 & 6:

The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and my cup; You support my lot. The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; Indeed, my heritage is beautiful to me.

In this short passage, we learn 4 important truths that contribute to the Christian’s understanding of beauty and contentment.
Truth 1: The Lord is Our Portion
David begins this verse by reminding believers that the Lord is our portion. No matter what circumstances befall us, or what meals and drink we put to our lips, or what lands or houses we accumulate in our portfolios, the Lord is the true inheritance of every believer. This stands in clear distinction to the unbeliever, who gathers property and possessions like ants gather dirt, but still experiences multiplied sorrows from bartering the one true God for idols made with hands (Psalm 16:4). The psalmist is graciously pulling back the veil of reality for us to see the point of human living.
Think about it, if our inheritance is money or property value, our mood will fluctuate commensurate with the ebb and flow of the markets. Won’t such a fickle proposition end up producing a multiplication of sorrows? Or what if our portion comes from physical strength or sex appeal, wont our experience in life sag pitifully down into despair whenever wrinkles, white hairs, and calories collect in the gut? Of course, it will.
The simple and unavoidable point is that the human experience of temperament is directly tied to whatever we find beautiful. If the affections are affixed upon temporal things that dull and die, human experience in life will look more like an electrocardiogram than what David is setting forward here. But, if the believer will take note of what David is saying, and understand that God Himself is our portion, what could ever sour our disposition?
If the markets are up, our joy still comes from the Lord. If a great depression should overtake the land, the sound of Christian hymn-singing shall still overpower the shrieking cries of broken-hearted heathens, because our experience is rooted in the beauty of God and not on a fallen world. Indeed, physical attractiveness, relationships, health, wealth, the sovereignty of nations, and worldly inheritances will fail. Moth and rust will claim them all. But the Christian who understands this passage will never wail, because they have become enamored with their beautiful radiant God.
Truth 2: The Lord Reigns Over Randomness
A second truth we must consider, along with God being our most precious portion, is that no event is random in the hand of God. While the world casts the lot, supposing chance and superstition can override providence, the Christian understands that everything – both the good and the ill – comes from the wise hand of the Almighty (Proverbs 19:21; Isaiah 45:7).
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While the world is wholly and willfully foolish regarding the end of the world, the Lord our God “would not have us ignorant.” The series of articles and devotionals that follow bring us to the Word of God concerning the return of Jesus Christ through the parable of the ten virgins from the first thirteen verses of Matthew 25. By God’s Grace we will consider the topic of Christ’s return and the Parable of the 10 Virgins under four general parts, each of which will have several lessons attached.

And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him.
Matthew 25:6
Its 2022 and thoughts of the end of the world are common and well documented both in the academy as well as in pop culture. It’s been a trend of the last several decades in countless books, Hollywood movies, and all types of shows, podcasts, and youtube channels to depict and orate on the end of the world as we imagine it. We have been left with shows depicting apocalyptic scenarios, zombie creatures, population destroying diseases, and other imaginations. As these ideas were hitting a fever pitch an actual pandemic came that killed many around the world, leading many of the survivors to embrace greater excess, anger, violence, drugs, science so called, in an effort to enjoy or extend their lives a little longer before the end.
For many cults the end of the world plays a prominent part in their history. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been predicting dates for Christ’s return since their beginning in the late 1800s and as recently as 1975. Similarly, the World Mission Society Church of God grew in South Korea and around the world with promises of a heavenly jerusalem descending in Korea and ushering in the end of the world. This did not happen in 1988 or in 2010 as predicted but people keep following. In evangelical circles strange ideas of the end of the world are prevalent on the internet, social media, in best selling book series’s, and on the conference circuit. The 24 hour news cycle provides ample material for 24 hour newspaper exegesis wrecking havoc on many poor souls. In academia and business alike, scientists are regularly hypothesizing about when the sun will burn out and freeze the earth; when the ozone layer will disappear destroying our air, killing all life; or when an asteroid or comet will make a direct hit and wipe out humanity as we know it. All around us, the end of the world is considered, hypothesized, and modeled but few are searching for the truth where it is always found, in Scripture alone.
The end of the world, the day of judgment, and the return of Christ are all prominent themes in Scripture. Some of the longest chapters in the gospels are dedicated to Christ’s teaching concerning the end of the world. God spoke to us through the prophets in times past giving us lessons and pictures of the end of Jerusalem and the end of the world as a whole.
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