If you have your Bibles, you might want to turn to Genesis chapter 28, and we'll be reading verses 10 to 22. Genesis 28 and verses 10 to 22. Now Jacob left Beersheba and went to Haran. And he came upon a place and stayed the night there, for the sun had gone down. He took one of the stones of the place and placed it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed, why a stairway situated on earth with its top reaching into the sky, and why angels of God going up and coming down on it. And why? Yahweh standing over him. And he said, I am Yahweh, God of Abraham your father and God of Isaac, the land on which you are lying, to you I will give it and to your seed. And your seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and you shall break forth to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south. And in you and in your seed all the families of the ground shall be blessed. And look, I am with you, and I shall keep you wherever you go, and I shall bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you.' Then Jacob woke up from his sleep and said, Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I did not know it. So he was afraid and said, How fearful is this place! This is nothing other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. So Jacob rose early in the morning and took the stone which he had set under his head and set it up as a pillar. and poured oil on the top of it. And he called the name of that place Beth-El, but Luz was the name of the city previously. Then Jacob vowed a vow, saying, if God will be with me, and shall keep me in this way I'm going, and shall give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I shall return safely to my father's house, and Yahweh shall be my God, then this stone, which I have set up as a pillar, will be the house of God. And as for all that you give me, I will give the tenth to you. in the sense of reading of God's written word this evening. You may be seated. President Theodore Roosevelt had a son. They had several sons, but Quentin was the one who was serving in World War I overseas. And Quentin was not married, but he had an attendant. Her name was Flora Whitney, and both of Quentin's parents were delighted with the girl. But Quentin rarely wrote to her. Here he is, over in Europe, and so on, and he hardly ever writes to his intended. Letters weren't everything, of course, but a lack of them could kind of cool a relationship. Teddy Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, former President Roosevelt, thought he had to intervene. So he wrote to Quentin, and he said this. If you want to lose her, continue to be an infrequent correspondent. If, however, you wish to keep her, write her letters, interesting letters and love letters, at least three times a week. Write no matter how tired you are. Write enough letters to allow for half being lost. Well, Roosevelt was an intervener. He thought he had to do something about this. And that's the sort of thing that you see in Rebecca. Leading up to our text a little bit before it, we mentioned her of course this morning and so on in that text in chapter 25, but as you go on into chapter 27 and that fiasco of where Rebecca overheard that Isaac was going to give the blessing to Esau, no matter what, she thought she had to intervene. And so she co-ops Jacob in her scheme with her, of course, and well, they intervene and there's a big mess there. And then at the end of chapter 27, When she realizes that Esau is so angry that eventually, when Isaac dies, he's going to kill Jacob, she intervenes again and tells Jacob he needs to get back to her home country until Esau cools off. Like Esau's going to cool off, sure. So she intervenes again. And then she goes to Isaac and she says, now Isaac, I'm going to die practically if Jacob would marry one of these Hittite women like Esau has. My life won't be worth living. You need to see that Jacob goes back to my home country to obtain a life there. So again, she intervenes, and Isaac does what Rebecca tells him to do, and sends Jacob off. So all this intervening here. And of course, in verse 10 of our text now, chapter 28, verse 10, there's a journey, and there aren't many details except this momentous one, this passage right here, that happens on that journey. Now, it's probably something like 55 miles from Beersheba, verse 10, in the southern part of Palestine, Canaan, probably about 55 miles to the site of what is later called Bethel. So this was probably about the third night out for Jacob, traveling on foot probably, when he came to this spot. I think here we could say that there is a kind of a theme operating. You may say I'm opposing it on the text, but I think the theme of grace is a controlling idea in our text. You might say it's the grace of God in Bethel, the house of God. Now, my father used to have a certain back pocket definition of grace. He said it was God's something for nothing when we don't deserve anything. Now that doesn't fill the content of grace in, but that grabs the principle of it. Something for nothing when we don't deserve anything. So let's look at God's grace here. First, what's the text imply about it? Well, first of all, it seems to say grace surprises. Verses 11 to the first part of verse 13, grace surprises. You notice that in verse 11, it refers to the place where he comes three times. And then it talks about him dreaming as he sleeps there. And in this dream, it's full of surprises. Now, most of our translations have, he dreamed, verse 12, and behold, and behold, and behold. There's this little Hebrew interjection that's in traditional translations is translated, behold, but that kind of doesn't grab us exactly the way it should. It always indicates a little bit of either greater or lesser surprise when that particle is used. The Hebrew form is Henei. It was the one that was used in Genesis 29 when Uncle Laban foists Leah on Jacob when he thought he was getting Rachel, and he wakes up in the morning and, Henei! It was Leah! Now you don't read that and behold, it was Leah. You know, it means, oh no, it was Leah. There's a surprise there. And oftentimes this little part of Wednesday is a surprise. So I've translated it, why, W-H-Y with an exclamation mark. You have these surprises. situated on earth with its top reaching into the sky? And why angels of God going up and coming down on it? And why Yahweh standing over him? Now, that last part in the first part of verse 13, it can be translated a couple of ways. It can mean Yahweh above it. that is, above this stairway he saw in his dream. Or it can also be translated, beside him, that the Lord was beside Jacob, or standing over him, either way. So it depends whether you... and it can go either way. I tend to think that it's preferable, without going into a lot of detail, that it means Yahweh was standing beside him or over him, down there, rather than up. above the so-called stairway in his dream. Now, all of this though is unexpected, great surprises. Jacob hardly came to that spot that night and was thinking, you know, I'll probably dream a dream tonight and Yahweh will appear in it and speak to me about it. No, he wasn't thinking like that. This was a surprise, sort of like Charles Spurgeon, the British Baptist preacher of the 19th century, one time he wrote an article, I think in one of the church papers or something, about the need, he referred to the need for a facility where some of London's neglected street orphans could be taken care of. And so on. And he got a letter, a note, from Mrs. Hilliard. She was the widow of a very wealthy Church of England clergyman. How do you get to be a Church of England clergyman and become wealthy? I don't know, but that was the case, alright? She was loaded. And she wrote a note and she promised 20,000 pounds. for this facility?" Well, Spurgeon was agog at this response, and so he took one of his men with him and went to meet with her and didn't want to claim too much, so he said they had come to thank her for the 200 pounds that she had pledged toward this work, and she said, 200? Did I write 200? I meant 20,000. What a surprise! Who would think? Who would guess? Well, that's the way it is here. Grace surprises. That's the mood of the text. Now, of course, we can go on about the stairway that Jacob saw in this dream, and we could speculate about whether it's related to the Mesopotamian ziggurats and so on. But the angels are there, and Yahweh is there. There's a certain ease about it all. It's as if Yahweh, I think, is saying to Jacob, it's not hard for me to get to you. The stairway is really not for Jacob to get access to Yahweh. It just indicates that Yahweh is able to get to Jacob, it seems to me. He can get to him anytime, anywhere. Now, none of us has slept and dreamed at Bethel, have we? But you can still remember, a number of you, I'm sure, of being surprised by grace. Grace surprised you. It broke into your apathy or your indifference, perhaps. And you weren't expecting it. Or maybe like Jacob, there was a mess you had made. Or perhaps a relationship you'd ruined. Or a habit that was destroying you. Or perhaps it was in tumultuous circumstances, the loss of a necessary job, or facing major surgery. You were not looking for heaven to take an interest in you, and God showed up. Grace surprises. It may be without the stairway, and it may be without the angels. But grace still surprises. See, that's one matter. Grace surprises. Now secondly, notice that grace offends. Grace offends. The last of verse 13 through verse 15. Now I'm not going to deal with this in detail right at this point. We'll look at it in a moment in more detail. But you look at what Yahweh is saying there. to Jacob in the middle of verse 13. He identifies himself, and then he says, the land on which you're lying, to you I will give it, and to your seed. Your seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and so on. In you and your seed, all the families of the ground shall be blessed. And look, I'm with you, I'll keep you wherever you go. And doesn't that make you angry? Well, if you've just come out of chapter 27, doesn't it bug you that Yahweh makes these kinds of promises to this scheming, lying, conniving mama's boy that is just told bald-faced lies to his dad in order to steal the blessing from him? Well, you have this assurance that from the middle, verse 13 through 15, you have this assurance given to Abraham in chapter 12, verses 1 to 3, and then to Isaac in chapter 26, verses 3 to 4, but now he gives it to Jacob! But look what Jacob has done! Doesn't that bother you? Grace offends! There's something about grace that makes us angry if we're self-righteous. But you can sense, can't you? how that might be, especially in the light of Chapter 27 preceding. During the Second World War, after the Second World War, the Nazi war criminals were going to be tried at Nuremberg in 1946. And the United States Army, or whoever were the head knockers in charge, asked one of the US chaplains, Henry Garricky, G-E-R-E-C-K-E, Henry Garricky, to serve as chaplain to these men who were either going to be sentenced to death or to long imprisonment to these Nazi war criminals. Well, he spoke fluent German, so they wanted him, asked him to take this task on. So he did. He dealt with them, and he would counsel them, and he would pray with them, and so on. And he was no softy. He had had a history of dealing with criminal types, so they didn't put anything past Henry Gehrig and so on. It was pretty hard to fake it with him. And so he was very strict with them, and several of the men, maybe about three or four, seemed to come to genuine repentance. Even eventually Hitler's old foreign minister, Ribbentrop, who was arrogant and obnoxious in the extreme, seemed to place himself completely in dependence upon Christ, and so on. So there were these And not all of them, but a remnant of them seemed to be genuinely converted, and to these few, Gericke admitted them to the Lord's table, and so on. Now that's part of what he was doing. He finished his duty there in July 1950, and he was a Missouri Synod Lutheran minister. He came back to the States and continued his ministry until 1961. But after Henry Garricky's death, his oldest son found a thick file of letters stashed in a secret compartment in his desk. They had been sent from all over the United States. They called Gericke a Jew-hater, a Nazi-lover, and they said that he should have been hanged at Nuremberg with the rest of them. All the letters were written in the most hateful language imaginable. Why such venom? Why so vicious? Well, that's what grace does. It offends. And that was manifested there. Those who have little knowledge of themselves implicitly sense that grace is something that should not be. And you can sense from one point of view, if you see Jacob as he is coming out of chapter 27, what business does God have making promises like these to him? But we have to realize we're all Jacobs in one sense. You can forget about worrying about actions, sins of commission or omission, actions, those are involved of course, but if you just have any sense and any aliveness to the sinfulness and twistedness and perversity of what's unseen, your motives and your thoughts and your imaginations and your desires. How can you not see that you have no hope and I have no hope apart from this offensive stuff called grace? It's in grace that God tramples on all our stuffy notions of propriety and deservedness. I sometimes find that it's helpful for me to read some of the prayers in the Puritan prayer manual called the Valley of Vision. There's one that stresses my undeservedness and perhaps yours as well. And it confesses, sin is my malady, my monster, my foe, my viper, born in my birth, alive in my life, strong in my character, dominating my faculties, following me as a shadow, intermingling with my every thought, Sinner that I am, why should the sun give me light? The air supply breath, the earth bear my tread, its fruits nourish me. If I see who I really am, how can I be offended at grace?" But grace offends. If grace galls you, you're probably still a stranger to it. So grace offends. But not only does grace surprise and grace offends, but thirdly, grace overflows. We're looking here again at the last of verse 13 through verse 15, and let's look in a little more detail. As I said, Yahweh makes his promise in its full-orbed provision to Jacob. Nothing's held back. It's as extensive as the promise he made to Abraham in Genesis 12 and Isaac in Genesis 26. All four legs of it. parts to the whole promise, and I call it the Quad Promise, Q-U-A-D, because there are these four parts to it. You see them here. Look at the last of verse 13. The first part is place. I'm Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac, the land on which you're lying, to you I will give it and to your seed." There's the place element. Then the people element, verse 14. Your seed shall be as the dust of the earth and shall break forth to the west and the east and to the north and the south. There's the people element. Then, the program. The last of 14. And in you and in your seed, all the families on the ground shall be blessed. Eventually, through the blessing of the Messiah that would come from Jacob's seed. And then, the fourth element is in verse 15, what we could call presence or protection. You have one emphasis or the other, but that's the idea. Here, it begins with presence, and look, I am with you, and I shall keep you wherever you go. So that fourfold, full-orbed promise, grace overflows. Now, there's a problem here, though, in this lavishness, because these promises seem to promise too much, don't they? It seems. Notice the unlikelihood of this promise. Well, verse 13, the land on which you're lying, to you I will give it. But he's leaving the land for crying out loud. How is he going to give him the land if he's leaving the land? That doesn't look like it has much of a chance of coming about. And then only that, but to your seed, or your seed shall be as the dust of the earth. He doesn't have any seed. He doesn't have any children. He doesn't even have a wife. That's why he's going to Mesopotamia, etc. But he doesn't have the beginnings of this. All of this doesn't look very likely. That's often the way God's promises seem. It overflows, yes, but is it relevant? Well, now that's another thing, isn't it? There's one provision. in this quad promise here that has immediate application for Jacob. On one occasion, Abraham Lincoln, when he was president, it was early in 1865, was speaking with two women there in the White House. Things were different then. People came and if they waited long enough, they got to talk directly to the president and they made appeals to him and that sort of thing, which you couldn't do now. Lincoln spent most of his life divided off a certain amount of time in order to do this, and it was exhausting. His friend Joshua Speed came to visit him there at the White House, and he had to wait until Lincoln was done with this last case of the day. There were two women. One was a young woman who was the wife of the man concerned. The other was his mother. And they were pleading for Lincoln to pardon this man. He had been arrested for resisting the draft. I don't know if he was going to be executed or if it was imprisonment, but they were begging Lincoln to show clemency and to pardon him. And Lincoln did. They were overwhelmed. They were ecstatic. It was marvelous for them. And then Lincoln went and plopped himself down beside Joshua Speed, obviously exhausted, and Speed admonished and criticized Lincoln for taking so much time and energy listening to everybody and having these interviews and so on that just sucked the energy out of him, and he needed to stop it. And Lincoln said, how much you are mistaken. I have made two people happy today. So for everything that you might criticize, look what I have done today. Right now, I've made two people happy. Well, that's sort of the thing here with this promise. A lot of it at this point seems unlikely. And it overflows, yes, but it seems unlikely. But there's one part of it, verse 15, that is of immediate application, isn't it? There's something here for today. Look, I am with you, and I shall keep you wherever you go, and I shall bring you back to this land." And so on. However far off a lot of the promise seems, the first part of verse 15 is for the now, for Jacob. What it must have meant to the ears of an exile without a home, without a family, without clarity for what was to come. But since Yahweh is with him, He has all he needs for today. He has his presence and his protection. I wonder if there isn't a carryover, situation-wise, for what we sometimes call New Testament Christians, whatever they are. I guess that's us. But don't we find the same? We're in the same kind of situation. We haven't yet seen what Paul calls in Ephesians 2.7, that is going to come to us in the coming ages, what he calls the immeasurable riches of His grace. No, we haven't seen it yet. Okay. How often we've been able to say, say with Paul near the end of his life as he faced a hearing before Caesar in 2 Timothy 4.17 and everyone apparently had deserted him, he had no one with him, he said, but the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength. He had the promise of God's presence in the present moment. We don't see, we don't yet have the immeasurable riches of His grace, but we have some of that grace, and part of it is the presence promise. Now can't we sometimes say with Paul, but the Lord stood at my side, and gave me strength. But the Lord stood at my side in my grief. But the Lord stood at my side in my cancer. The Lord stood at my side in my disappointment. But the Lord stood at my side when my spouse abandoned me." There's part of that promise. Grace overflows. And we haven't seen it all yet. But we have that promise of His presence and His keeping. Now, let's look at one other matter. Fourthly, let's notice that grace impresses. Grace impresses. Verses 16 to 22. Now clearly Jacob is impressed. You notice what he says in verse 16, Surely Yahweh is in this place, and I did not know it. And notice that grace leaves its mark. Verse 17, So he was afraid, and said, How fearful is this place! This is nothing other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. He was afraid. How fearful! Grace was impressive, and it left its mark in fear. He was afraid. In other words, when you find yourself in God's presence, you don't become casual and informal. There's nothing incompatible, is there, between grace and trembling. Fear can be evidence that grace has found its target. And you can tell that grace impressed them because It marked him with fear. Now there's another mark of Grace's impression in verses 18 to 22, and it leaves its mark in commitment as well as fear. That's in verses 18 to 22. Jacob anointed this stone or rock, a pillar, and named it and so on. But then in verses 20 to 22, you have Jacob vowing a vow. And I'm just going to make a comment on the translation of it. Most of our translations put the then. It goes in the Jacob's pattern is, if God will do this and this and this and this, and most translations have then in the middle of verse 21, Yahweh shall be my God. and so on. But without going into a lot of detail, the Hebrew text seems to indicate pretty clearly that the if clauses, if, if, if, if, includes all of verse 21. And if Yahweh shall be my God, then, so the then should come at the beginning of verse 22. But this is His vow, isn't it? If God will be with me and shall keep me in the way I'm going, notice how He recollects the promises, and shall give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I shall return safely to my Father's house, and Yahweh shall be my God, then the stone which I've set up as a pillar will be the house of God, And as for all that you give me, I will give the tenth to you." So what's his commitment? Well, there in verse 22, the commitment is, first of all, worship, first part of verse 22, and secondly, giving. People get upset with Jacob here, they say, ah, there he is, that's the old Jacob, driving a bargain with God. No, I don't think that's what's happening. The IF clauses in verses 20 and 21 are simply rehearsing primarily the promises God has made to him. in verses 13 to 15. So it's as if he's saying, now if all this is true, if you do this, and if you do that, if all of that... He's responding to the promises. And if you do that, then this is my response to your grace. Verse 22, I respond in making this place at Bethel in place for your worship, and I'll give a tenth to you." So he was impressed, and grace left its mark in his commitment. So grace impresses. Now I want to take this just a little further here. Push your patience a bit. Jacob, when he came back from getting a wife, or wives as the case may be, you can read about that, and he comes back, and he finally comes back to the land in chapters 33 and 34, he doesn't go to Bethel to fulfill his vow right away. And God kind of has to prod him to get back to Bethel. He messes around at a place called Sukkot on the east of the Jordan, and then at Shechem, and they get into trouble there, and then the Lord says, go up to Bethel, and you need to fulfill the vow you made in chapter 28. Was he impressed with God's grace in chapter 28? Yes, he was. But he needed to go fulfill that vow, and when he did, He showed that he was still very impressed with God's grace. He said to his company, his camp, his cohorts, his herdsmen and all those that were part of his party, he said, I'm going to go up to Bethel and make an altar Genesis 35 verse 3, "...to the God who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone." Isn't that a marvelous testimony? I've hardly seen much treatment of it among commentators. But what a... to think Jacob could look back The God who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone." It's as if he's saying, grace still impresses me, leaves its mark. And so on, especially here in worship. I want to just push a little bit more and go over to a passage in the New Testament where you still see this idea of grace impressing, especially as grace is manifested in the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you remember that scene at the end of John chapter 1, up in about verses 46 and following to the end? And you remember that Nathanael, I think it was Philip, told Nathanael about the Lord Jesus, and so on. And he comes to Jesus, and Jesus says, oh, there's an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile or deceit. And he says, how do you know me? And he says, oh, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you. Now this really impressed Nathanael. Apparently not. I haven't checked this out recently, so I need to be a little careful here. But it seems to me that probably the fig tree, and being under the fig tree, that was probably a rather secluded spot where perhaps Nathanael was praying and, you might say, having his devotions and that sort of thing. It wasn't something that was in public view. But the fact that Jesus could say, I saw you under the fig tree, really impressed him. And he said, Rabbi, You are the Son of God, you're the King of Israel. And Jesus says to him, do you believe because I said, I saw you in the victory? And then he says, You will see greater things than these. You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God, pulling Genesis 28, the angels of God ascending, notice the angels don't come down first, they're already there on earth, ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Now I'm not smart enough to know how to put all that together. It sounds like Jesus is sort of saying He's the equivalent of the stairway of the communication between heaven and earth. He Himself is. But what I want you to see there is this whole matter of how grace, and in this case, being embodied in the Lord Jesus, how it impresses or ought to impress. Was Nathanael impressed? Oh yeah. Think what Jesus said. You're the Son of God. You're the King of Israel. And John 1 verse 50, Jesus says, You will see greater things than these. Isn't it? Isn't that something that the Lord Jesus can say to any of us at just about any time? You may get impressed about this or that, about His way with you, but He can say to you, you will see greater things than these. Here's the principle. Jesus is always far more than you ever imagined Him to be. Grace impresses. And of course, the good news is that in all our Jacobness, We have a God whose grace is greater than all our bungling. Let us pray. Now, O Lord our God, we thank you that you have given to us a Savior who is full of grace and truth. and that we can join others in testifying. And we have all received, out of His fullness, grace on top of grace. And for this we thank you in His name. Amen. Brothers and sisters, let's respond to the Word and if you're able to stand with me and turn to 465, marvelous grace of our loving Lord. Let's stand together and sing. praise God grace grace Grace, grace, God's grace, Grace that will pardon and cleanse within. Grace, grace, God's grace, Grace that is greater than all our sin. But there is flowing a crimson tide wider than so you may be today. Praise, praise God, praise, praise God. Your blessing and benediction tonight is adapted from Psalm 61. Now may the God to whom you cry when your heart is faint continue to be the rock that is beneath you the tower that is around you, and the shelter that is above you, this day and all the days until Jesus comes. Amen.