What was Jacob's ladder, really? In Genesis 28:10-22, the fleeing deceiver Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven. Dr. Toby Holt reveals what that ladder truly was. Running from Esau, Jacob sleeps with a stone for a pillow and sees a ladder joining heaven and earth, angels going up and down, and God above it renewing His promises. Every person senses a gap between earth and heaven, and our error is trying to build our own ladder by good works. But Jesus told Nathanael that He Himself is that ladder — the only way between earth and heaven.

Questions this study answers:

1. Why was Jacob alone with a stone for a pillow? He was fleeing his brother Esau after stealing the blessing. Even there, God met him with grace.

2. What did the ladder represent? A connection between heaven and earth. Jesus later revealed that He Himself is the ladder — the only way to God.

3. How do we reach heaven? Not by building our own ladder of good works, but through Christ. He came down to us, and we come to God through Him.

"...a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." — Genesis 28:12 (NKJV)

Dr. Toby Holt is President of New Geneva Theological Seminary, and his sermons have been downloaded more than 1.9 million times on SermonAudio. Find more verse-by-verse Bible teaching at newgeneva.org; support this ministry at newgeneva.org/give.

In Genesis 28, Jacob was on the run.

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He was alone, scared, and had been forced to use a rock for his pillow.

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But just then, in the darkness, Jacob had a dream.

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A dream of a ladder that bridged the gap between heaven and earth.

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So what was this dream all about?

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And what, or who, did this ladder signify?

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That will be the focus of today's study.

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As Christians, we believe in heaven, but that's not unique.

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All religions have some sense of a hereafter,

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have some sense of a here and a there,

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have some sense that we live out our lives on this mortal coil,

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then we go someplace, and the hope is that where we go will be good.

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Every religion has some type of heaven.

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For the Greeks, it was called Elysian Fields.

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For the Egyptians, we talked about this, I don't know, about six months ago.

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The Egyptians had this weird idea that you died,

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and that you did go somewhere, but before you got to the somewhere,

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you went to kind of this holding room in the afterlife,

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and your heart was placed on a scale.

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And if your heart measured well on the scale,

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you graduated to a better eternity, to a better hereafter.

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And if your heart failed that test, if it failed on the scale,

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then it was promptly eaten by a crocodile god named Ammit.

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Every religion has some idea that you live here for a season,

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then you die, then you go someplace else.

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And some religions are honest enough to realize that the distance and the difference between the

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here and the there is great. That there's a chasm, so to speak, between whatever we do here

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and whatever there is like. That there is a chasm. And the question is how to bridge it.

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Now in the New Testament book of Luke, I think it's Luke 16, Father Abraham speaks to one called

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the rich man. This is in a parable. And he identifies this chasm. He says this. He says,

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between us, between the heavenly realm, between us and you down on the earth, between us and you,

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there is a great chasm set in place. So those who want to go from here to you cannot, from here to

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you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there unto us. So this idea of a chasm, of a gap, of

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some distance between the here and the there, it's not just something the pagans believe. It's

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something that we as Christians believe. But again, the question becomes, all right, if there is a gap,

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if there is a chasm, if Abraham was right, if Luke was right, then how do we bridge it?

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If I die at a given point and I go somewhere and I want to go somewhere good, how do I get there?

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Well, virtually every religion under the sun has an answer to that question. And you know what the

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answer is overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly focused on? They're overwhelmingly focused on this idea

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that if I want to get someplace good in the afterlife, that I need to do enough good deeds

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here. In other words, most religions, 99.9% of religions under the sun, they do hope and pray

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and believe that there's some place that they'll go that's better in the hereafter. But the idea

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is that in order to ensure my presence there, I'll do enough good deeds here. And therefore,

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I will construct one rung at a time, a ladder that will enable me to go to heaven when I die.

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There are even brick buildings with crosses up front that believe that,

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that believe, yes, there is a heaven, yes, there is a God in heaven,

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and yet who mistakenly believe that my means of entering into that golden estate

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is the things that I do here to earn it, to merit it.

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Really, that's not fundamentally all that much different than the Egyptians

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who thought your heart gets weighed on a scale, and if it's good enough, you pass.

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If not, you get eaten by the crocodile god.

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Not much different. Why?

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It's not that different because it puts the onus, the onus entirely on man to earn his

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eternal place, his eternal security, to earn his spot.

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And because that heaven, such as it is, is not a grace God gives to anyone.

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It's something he owes you because you deserve it.

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That's the mentality.

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It's a workspace mentality that infects and informs the pagans.

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Even the secular world works that way.

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Even secular people, if they're honest with themselves, they understand that there's something

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out there somewhere, even if they're agnostic about it. But their thought, the premise by which

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that will be any good is how I do here. As long as I'm better than Bob and Joe and Fred and Stan

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and Frank, as long as I'm better than those people, I do enough things, we're graded on a curve, the

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scale will tip in my favor, and I will enter in. So we recognize there's a heaven. We recognize

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there's a chasm. We recognize there's a gap between here and there, but we think we will bridge it on

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our own. We will build a ladder rung by rung by rung, and God willing, in enough time, we'll be

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able to heave ourselves onto his golden shores. That's the mindset that affects and forms this

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globe, and it is dead wrong. And it is the exact mindset that is countered in Genesis 28, when the

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most unworthy guy on the planet at that time, it would seem, quite the scoundrel, could not earn

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anything from God, and yet God shows up. He doesn't wait for Jacob to earn his estate there

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by climbing a ladder to reach him. Rather, in Genesis 28, God comes down as a ladder to Jacob

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and makes this faithless man the most faithful of promises. He says, Jacob, the things I told

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Abraham, they're true. See the dust at your feet? More numerous will your ancestors be than all the

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dust, you can count all the stars in the sky. See this rock that you're using as a pillow? See this

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ground? See everything within your eyeline? All of it I'm giving to you and to your descendants

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in due time. All of this, all the good that we have here on this earth and all the good we hope

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to have on the other side is attained through grace. Grace alone, through faith alone, Christ

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alone, who is the ladder of which today's text speaks. All right, let's return to verses 10

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through 11, and then we'll kind of work our way through to see that Jesus Christ is the latter

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of this passage. All right, verses 10 through 11. Now, Jacob went out from Beersheba and went

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towards Haran. As we said before, he's on the run. His brother wants to kill him. His parents said,

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get out of town. Get out of Dodge. You've got to go somewhere. Go somewhere. In fact, go to our

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relatives. And while you're there, find a wife and settle down. So that's what his parents told him.

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So that's what he does. Verse 10, Jacob went out from Beersheba. He went towards Haran. Then he

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came to a certain place, and he stayed there all night because the sun had set. And he took one of

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the stones of that place, and he put it on his head, and he laid down in that place to sleep.

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All right, so Jacob the scoundrel, Jacob the swindler, he's on the run. He stole the birthright.

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He stole the blessing. He lied to his father. He pretended to be Esau so that his blind father

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would bless him. He did all manner of things wrong, very few things right. And you could say

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he's earned this comeuppance. He's had to run for his life, and now, although he sought all this

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material goods, you know, birthrights and blessings might give him, there's no material goods here at

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all. He's got a rock for a pillow. Life, you could say, has turned up very badly for Jacob. The things

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that he would have desired by being the owner, the proprietor of the birthright, the blessing,

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they haven't shown up. Materially, he's doing terrible. Now, let me ask you a question.

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Spiritually, how is he doing?

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Is he any better spiritually?

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Well, not at this point.

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At this point, if there's a deficit in his bank account, so to speak, materially,

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the same is true spiritually.

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Jacob's not a saved man in Genesis 28.

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I'm of the persuasion he's not even converted in this chapter at all,

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but that happens later in chapter 32, which I think we'll get to next week.

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But this chapter, this is just a guy on a run looking for love in a foreign land

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and sleeping on rocks.

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This is what we have here.

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But spiritually speaking, it's no different.

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Not only is this a man on the run sleeping on rocks,

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but spiritually speaking, he's bankrupt.

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He's as secular as the world around him.

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His parents had talked with God.

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His grandfather had talked with God.

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His grandfather was a friend of God.

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All these stories had been passed around.

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They didn't have Nintendo Switch.

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They didn't have the cell phones.

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They didn't have the distractions.

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What did they have?

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They had the stories.

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They sat around the Abrahamic campfire

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and heard all the things that God had said

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and done in years past.

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Jacob could recite that better than any of us could.

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He heard those things first and second hand from his grandfather, from his parents.

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He understood, he understood the personal work of God, of Yahweh,

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as conveyed to him by people who knew firsthand what this God was like

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and the promises that this God had made.

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And yet Jacob at this point is secular.

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He knows that there is a God. He's heard about this God plenty of times.

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But there's no sense of God's presence in his life,

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which is why he gets so shocked when God shows up.

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Most people in the secular world around us, there's a dim understanding that everyone has in the world around us that there is a God.

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Romans 1 tells us that we suppress it.

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We suppress what we know to be true.

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We kind of box it in.

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Even the atheists and the agnostic, air quotes, they take that knowledge that they have innately and they suppress it and pretend it's not there.

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But everyone knows that there is a God.

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The reality, though, is that most of our culture, in fact, even in a Christianized Bible belt, live as if he's not there.

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Live as if, yes, there is something up there, you know, the force or something.

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God's some old wise guy in the clouds.

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They live as if there's something out there somewhere.

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But if he were to show up in their life, in any material way, any substantive way,

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you know, shell-shy, because they're not used to walking with him.

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Well, that's what we have here.

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Verse 10 opens, Jacob is just another unsaved, secular, worldly man.

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But then God is going to show up.

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Let's see him show up in verses 12 through 15.

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Jacob dreamed and behold a ladder was set on the earth and its top reached to heaven and there the

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angels of God were ascending and descending upon it and behold the Lord stood above it and said I

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am the Lord God of Abraham your father the God of Isaac the land on which you lie I will give to you

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and to your descendants also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth you shall spread

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abroad to the west to the east to the north to the south and in you and your seed will all the

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families of the earth be blessed. Behold. Third time he said behold here. It's really important

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stuff. Behold, I am with you. I will keep you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to

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this very land, for I will not leave you until I have done all that I have spoken to you. All right.

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Here we come to Jacob's ladder. Jacob's ladder. Verse 12, Jacob sleeps. He falls asleep on this

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rock-like pillow or this pillow-like rock, and as he dreams, he sees the ladder. Now, let's step

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back for just a moment. Why a ladder? What's the purpose of a ladder? You don't have to shout it

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out, but think it through. What do you use a ladder to get to, or what utility does it serve in your

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house? Well, in my house, I suspect like yours, a ladder allows people at a lower plane with lower

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height to reach that which is above, to reach that which is higher. Pretty normal stuff. A ladder

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connects two places, or makes some other place accessible that otherwise wouldn't be without the

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ladder. So this is the job of the ladder. Well, that's the same in verses 12 through 15. Verses 12

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through 15, we see a ladder exists in his dream to connect two planes. You have the here, and you

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have the there. You have earth, you have heaven. And in Jacob's dream, he sees this ladder that

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exists to connect this fallen plane with that glorious one. It is the answer to the time-old

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question of how do we bridge the gap? How do we bridge the chasm? Well, here in Jacob's dream,

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he sees this ladder, but he not only sees the ladder, but God stands above it. And God doesn't

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just stand above it, but God speaks to him. And in verses 12 through 15, God reiterates the promises.

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He reiterates the covenant. Remember the covenantal nature of God? God makes promises. He makes

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promises and then he keeps them. He makes promises and he fulfills them. Now we've made promises to

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God too. We've made all manner of vows to one another, to each other, to the church, to God.

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The problem is that we are oftentimes faithless. We do not fulfill all that we have promised to do,

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but God fulfills every promise. He said, Abraham, your descendants are going to be more numerous

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than the stars in the heavens. Even though Abraham was a jillion years old, he couldn't be older when

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this promise was made to him and to Sarah, it was fulfilled. Even though Sarah was old, she had a

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child. Well, the same was true with Isaac. Rebecca, there was old, there was barren, and they too had

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a child. They had two children, Jacob and Esau. God had a history of making promises that seemed

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impossible to fulfill and then fulfilling each one of them. Well, here he shows up, says, Jacob,

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remember me? I'm the one your father told you about. I'm the one who made him a promise and

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his dad a promise, and I'm here to make you the same promise or to convey that same promise to

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you. Your life will not end by being slaughtered by your brother in the wilderness. Life will not

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end by starving to death on a pillow made of rocks. I am with you, and I'm going to stay with

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you, and I will be with you. And your future is better than you could possibly realize.

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Now, to Jacob, who had to be feeling some weight of his guilt while he was traveling,

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you know, going, oh, mercy me. I had to leave home. My brother hates me. You know, my parents,

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they're angry at me, too, or at least his dad certainly was. And I guess I got to go and,

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you know, go off 500 miles away. This is a guy who was probably thinking a little bit about his shame

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and his guilt based on what he was having to do to satisfy the bloodlust of his brother and his

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parents' direction. So he's probably feeling some shame. But it's to that guy that God shows up and

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says, no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter how you failed, I made a promise

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and I will keep it in you and through you. So that's what we're seeing in this text. God speaks

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to him and makes promises that are contingent not on his faithfulness, but on God's. All right,

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let's look at verses 16 through 22. Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and he said, surely, surely

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the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. That is the hallmark of every secular person in

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the world around us. Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. Verse 17, and he was

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afraid and he said, how awesome, how awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of

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God. This is the gate of heaven. Then Jacob rose up early in the morning. He took the stone that

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had been put on his head. He set it up as a pillar and he poured oil on top of it. And he called the

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name of that place Bethel. But the name of the city had been Luz previously. Then Jacob made a

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vow saying, if God will be with me and keep me in this way that I'm going and will give me bread to

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eat, clothing to put on so I come back to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be

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my God. And the stone which I've set as a pillar shall be God's house. And all of it that you give

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me i will surely give a tenth back to you all right so jacob has been sleeping and he has this

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incredible amazing dream and then he awakes and what's his reaction well he looks around at the

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place that previously meant nothing to him he looks at a place that was previously just a pit

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stop on the highway to nowhere and all of a sudden he sees it through new eyes he says this is the

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gate of heaven. This is the most special place on the globe. Pours oil on the rocks, consecrates it.

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See, the Israelites were big on what you would call the sacramentalization of space and time.

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And here's what I mean by that. What the Israelites would do is anytime anything significant happened

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anywhere, what would happen next? They would look for the rocks to build up and make a monument to

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them. You remember if they crossed the Jordan River, they took 12 rocks for the 12 tribes,

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set it up, go through the Old Testament. You see, all men are times where they would take a specific

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physical location, a specific physical space, and they'd sacramentalize it. They'd say, this is

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special. This is set apart. This is holy. This is the gate of heaven. They did that with space. They

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also did with time, because they did the same thing with all their feasts, right? They would

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celebrate and commemorate. God did such and such with our ancestors that many years back. We will

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honor that date every year forward in memory of who he is and what he did. So it would take space

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and time, dates and places, and sacramentalize them. Well, this is what happens. Jacob immediately

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wakes up and he says, oh, this place is very special, very holy. And so he commemorates this

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location. Now, the reality is that sure, it's special. Throughout the Old Testament, Bethel is

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second only to Jerusalem in the amount of times that it is named. So it is a significant place,

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or it became a significant place, largely on the back of this work. But at this time,

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Jacob's problem was that he had no great sense, even now, even as he's doing this,

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he had no great sense for what we call the eminence and the transcendence of God.

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When we say God's transcendent, what do we mean?

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We mean he's over everything, right?

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God transcends what he's made.

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The creator, newsflash, is above the created.

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So that's God being transcendent.

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The eminence of God says that God not only is over everything, but that he's in everything.

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There's no place you can go on this globe,

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from the saltiest ocean depths below to the highest mountain peaks above.

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No place you can go where there is not God.

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There's no place you can go where God's presence is not felt.

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But Jacob was not the most erudite theologian at this time.

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He didn't fully understand it, so he thought,

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this place is the gate of heaven itself, and I didn't realize it.

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God's been with me. I had no clue.

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I had no clue.

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So he's still shell-shocked here.

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Now, let me step back for a moment and say this.

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At this point, at this point, most theologians,

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Calvin comes to mind, Spurgeon, others,

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most theologians don't think Jacob was converted here.

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They think it occurs at the time that we'll look at next week

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when God wrestles with Jacob in Genesis 32.

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They think the conversion comes at a different point.

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At this point, this is still a confused, secular, lost God.

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But he knows this much.

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He had an encounter with God.

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He had an encounter with God.

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And as he left that place, as he went out to go find and marry his wives in the near future,

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as he went out to do that, you've got to think that the one thing,

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the one picture that kept on his brain for all those steps, for all the days, for all the months,

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and really for all the years yet to come, you've got to think the one thing he never forgot,

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the one image that was burned into his brain, tattooed on his soul, was the image of a ladder.

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The image of this ladder. You think he never forgot about that all his days.

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But you wonder, did he ever fully understand it?

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Do you think he ever fully understood it?

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Well, here's the thing, as we look to wrap up this morning.

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For 1,800 years, I don't think anyone understood it.

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This story got passed down through the Israelites

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for decades that went into centuries and centuries and centuries.

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This story, what happened to Jacob in Bethel,

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what happened to him with this ladder.

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Everyone could relate the story,

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but there was no great understanding of what the story meant

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until we flip the text into the New Testament

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when we come to the book of John.

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John chapter 1, which is what Gardner read for us earlier.

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Let me reread a section of that.

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In John chapter 1, you have Jesus,

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and his first disciples are coming to him.

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The first disciples, and they don't know what to make of him.

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They don't know exactly who this guy is.

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And in John chapter 1, verse 47, the text picks up this way.

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It says that Jesus saw a man,

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a man named Nathanael, coming towards him.

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And when Jesus saw Nathanael come towards him, he said this.

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He said, Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile, in whom there is no deceit.

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Now Nathanael, verse 48, when he came to him, he says, How do you know me?

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How do you know me?

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And Jesus answered and said to him, Before Philip called to you,

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you know, the guy who introduced him, the guy who brought him to him,

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before Philip even called you, before that, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.

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At that point, Nathaniel's mind is blown.

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You saw me?

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No one saw me under the fig tree.

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What was he doing under the fig tree?

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Maybe praying, maybe desirous of seeing the Messiah.

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We really don't know, but we know this.

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Jesus says, before Philip even brought you to me,

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when you were under that fig tree, I saw you.

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So then in verse 49, Nathaniel answered and said,

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Rabbi, you are the Son of God.

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You are the King of Israel.

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Whatever he was doing or thinking or praying,

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under that fig tree was so significant that when Jesus said, I saw you, I saw you under the fig

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tree, that somehow convicts Nathanael. The visor falls off his eyes. He looks at Jesus and says,

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one of the greatest confessions you could possibly make this early in the gospel narrative in John

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chapter 1 says, you are the Son of God. You are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel.

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But now listen to how Jesus responded to him. Verse 50, Jesus answered and said, oh yeah?

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Because I said to you, I saw you under the fig tree,

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you believe because of that?

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You will see greater things than these.

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And then, and this is the text that's germane

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to everything we've studied in Genesis.

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And then Jesus said to him,

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Most assuredly, I say to you,

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Hereafter, you will see heaven open

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and the angels of God ascending and descending

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upon the Son of Man.

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You see what Jesus said here.

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Nathanael acknowledges you are the Son of God.

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You've got to be. You must be.

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His heart was enabled and persuaded to see Jesus for who Jesus really was.

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And Jesus says, you haven't seen anything yet.

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In the time yet to come, you will see heaven open.

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You will see heaven open.

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And you remember the story of the ladder.

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You remember the story you've been passing down for generations.

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You remember the narrative of Jacob and Bethel.

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You remember the ladder he saw the angels ascended and descended upon to heaven.

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You remember that?

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In the time yet to come, heaven's going to open again,

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and you'll see angels ascending and descending upon me,

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the Son of Man.

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He was making a bold claim that not only was he the promised Messiah,

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but that he was the fulfillment of an 1,800-year-old vision

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given to one of the patriarchs.

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You know, it's in closing thought,

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one of the coolest things to me about the gospel is how consistent it is.

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One of the coolest things to me about this book

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this book, thousands of pages here across thousands of years of history

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is how consistent the narrative is. There are things

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we would call them Easter eggs in a fictional context. There are things

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that are dropped in, deposited early in the book of Genesis

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that don't find their fulfillment until centuries and centuries and centuries later. And when they're

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fulfilled, they're fulfilled to the exact specificity to the original prophecy or vision.

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Here, Jesus says, I am

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the fulfillment of the vision that was given to your forefathers. And most importantly, most

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importantly for our purposes this morning, remember we talked about those who desire a way to heaven?

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Remember how we talked about how all cultures, all nations, all religions have some sense of a here

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and there, and the problem is how to get from here to there? Well, in this text, Jesus is saying, yes,

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there is only one way. Yes, there is only one ladder. Yes, there is a singular means by which

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man can hope to get from here to there, and it is upon the Son of Man. For those who believe,

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and there may be some even in our presence here this morning, but for those who believe that you

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can get to heaven by being better than the person down the street, for those who believe that it's

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a meritocracy, that God's going to let you in because he has to, because you did enough things,

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that's not the narrative. The narrative is what Jesus said elsewhere when he says,

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I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. You want to

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get there, I am the way. I am the means. I am the door. I am the path. Full stop. The reason that's

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exciting for us this morning as we come to the Lord's table in a few moments, the reason it's

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exciting is because who wants a ladder of your own works? If you could get to heaven like all the

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fallen people in our culture seem to want to, if you could get to heaven on the basis of doing

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enough deeds, how would you ever know that you did enough? How could you ever be convicted and say,

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you know, today I finally got to the top rung. That was a journey. I got there. God has to let

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me in now, right? How could you ever be sure? Martin Luther, his great challenge was that he

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kept trying to do all the things to satisfy what he believed to be a God who was just endlessly

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angry at him. And he thought, I'm a monk, so I'll try to lift myself into that heavenly estate

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through monkery. That was his word. I'll try to do enough. He would later go on to say, if any man

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could have gotten to heaven through his works. It would have been me. But I couldn't. Because no man

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can. You and I will not get to heaven on the basis of doing good deeds, although we should do them.

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We will not get to heaven on the basis of doing good deeds and on the basis of laying one wrong

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after another and grabbing for it and grabbing for it and grabbing for it. Rather, we will get

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to heaven. If we get there at all, we will get to heaven on this basis, that God himself comes down

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as a ladder, and through faith in him, him alone, we may ascend. That was the promise extended to

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the thieves on the cross. That was the promise that the thief to Christ's right trusted in. Though he

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was a thief, though he had broken all laws, though he was a rebel, though he was a sinner at enmity

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with his creator, though he did all manner of things wrong and very few things right, in those

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last moments, God changed his heart and enabled and persuaded him to see that the man on his left

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was the ladder, was the means, and he trusted in him through faith. And so Jesus looked at him and

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said, truly this day you'll be with me in paradise. We're saved by grace alone,

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through faith alone, in Christ alone. Let's pray.