Title: Jacob's Fear, July 17th
Genesis 28:10-22
Jacob's Fear
Jacob's dream
Even today, the same thing happened between the twin brothers Esau and Jacob, just as there are lawsuits between siblings or, in extreme cases, sword fighting over parental inheritance issues. Jacob and his mother Rebekah deceived their father Isaac and his brother Esau. Esau, who had been deprived of his birthright's right to receive, shouted out loud that he would kill his younger brother as soon as his father died. I think I was outraged that I was deceived by my younger brother, so I was outraged by this, but these words entered my mother Rebekah. Rebekah thought that there might be another sibling murder, just as Cain killed Abel, so she decided to send Jacob to Haran, where her brother lived. The excuse was not to marry a Canaanite woman, but to marry a woman in her family. Father Isaac was an naive person, so he immediately listened to this and allowed it.
Today's text begins with the words, "Jacob left Beersheba and went toward Haran, and came to a place where he stayed overnight" (verses 10, 11). Beersheba is located in the southernmost part of the Canaanite region. From there it would take at least two weeks to travel north through Canaan to reach Haran. It is estimated that the event in this text occurred about two or three days after departing from Beersheba. If you look at the map, Bethel is not too far from Beersheba, but it is near Jerusalem.
Readers of this folktale can fully predict what Jacob's mental state must have been today. It is not known exactly how old Jacob was at the time, but given that his twin brother Esau was already married, he must have been at least in his late teens. Unlike his older brother Esau, who liked hunting, Jacob was a child who was very interested in household chores, wrapped in his mother Rebekah's skirt. It is no wonder how much of a burden it must have been for Jacob, who grew up with his mother's favoritism in a family where his mother, Rebekah, took much more initiative than his father, Isaac. If you fall into a state of mental repression, you have a lot of dreams. Jacob, who spent the night in the wild wilderness, also had a dream.
Look at verse 12. “I had a dream. He was dreaming that there was a staircase from earth to heaven, and he was watching the angels of God ascend and descend on it. Can you imagine this? The ancients believed that humans communicated with God in this way. There were quite a few such altars in the ruins of the Inca civilization. A tall tower is built and stairs leading to it are designed. The priests ascended through these steps to the top of the tower to offer sacrifices to their god.
Jacob's dream continues. Yahweh appeared and said to Jacob, “I am the LORD, the God of your grandfather Abraham, and the God of your father Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will multiply like the dust of the earth and spread across the east, west, north and south. All the peoples of the earth will benefit from you and your descendants. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back here. I will not leave you until I have fulfilled all I have promised you” (verses 13-15).
The blessings Yahweh God gave to Jacob are the same as the blessings to Abraham and Isaac. The first blessing given to Abraham had the meaning of a 'promise' or 'covenant'. It was a promise and blessing that Abraham and his descendants would give the land and descendants abundantly as long as they live according to the word of the Lord God. The content of this blessing was not only for the Israelites, but for all ancient peoples. The ancient people had no choice but to establish their relationship with the gods in this way, because land and people were the minimum basis for a nation's survival.
sky gate
After waking up from the dream, Jacob said, "Truly, the Lord was here, but I did not know it." “What a scary place this is. This is the house of God, the gate of heaven” (verse 17). Jacob woke up early in the morning, raised the stone he had been cutting and sleeping, made a stone statue, anointed it with oil, and renamed the place, which was originally called Rouge, “Bethel.”
The word Bethel means ‘house of God’. In Amos 5:4,5 and Jeremiah 48:13 Bethel is described as a divine name. Bethel at the time when Genesis was written was developed as a holy place visited by so many pilgrims, like Gilgal and Shechem, so readers of Genesis must have deeply engraved in their minds that Bethel was connected with their ancestor Jacob. This is the same as saying that Mt. Manisan in Korea is connected with the legend of Dangun.
It is very natural that the ancient Israelites thought of Bethel as a holy place through the Jacob folktale. The Holy Land is imprinted as a place with a special energy and meaning. As mentioned earlier, the ancients thought that a special place to communicate with the sky was distinguished. When you go to such a holy place, you yourself will experience something of a holy energy. That is why Muslims also consider Tehran or Jerusalem, the capital of Iran, as holy places and make regular pilgrimages. Devotees of Tibetan Buddhism will make a lifelong dream of a pilgrimage to Lhasa, which may take months or even years, in a manner of occultism. To the ancient Israelites, Bethel was a place of very special religious significance.
What was Jacob's dream that led him to call Bethel the 'gate of heaven'? In Jacob's dream, there appeared a staircase from earth to heaven and angels going up and down the stairs. The biblical writer does not elaborate on this scene any further. No mention is made of the shape of the angels or the shape of the stairs. In fact, there is no stairway from the earth to the sky. You can draw a stairway to a very high place with just a picture, but you can't see that high place as the sky. The sky the Bible speaks of is different from the sky in the cosmological sense we think of today. Now we do not have the illusion that the Earth is the center of the universe. As long as you cross the Earth's atmosphere, there is no top, no bottom, no east, west, north, and south. There is only an infinitely wide space spread out. The sky that appeared in Jacob's dream now does not mean this, but rather the place where the God Yahweh is located.
Also, the report that Yahweh appeared next to Jacob and spoke can also not be considered as a realistic form. People at that time also considered earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to be God's presence. Moses experienced the ‘Fire of Elmo’ phenomenon in the presence of God on Mount Horeb. It is futile to try to express a person who cannot be embodied in any form.
Then you can ask, did Jacob say that Yahweh God had appeared without any basis? On what basis did Jacob think of it as the ‘gate of heaven’? Could it be that Jacob was talking about the stairs and the heavenly gates that reached heaven because he had some clear experience of Yahweh?
You should always keep in mind that this biblical text has been handed down orally for hundreds of years. The Jacob Folklore is a story that has been passed down to the Israelites through oral tradition for a long time. Therefore, interpretations of later generations are inevitably added to this process of oral tradition. Of course, it cannot be said that the fundamental has changed, but it is clear that there is always a new interpretation. The fact that the place of this story was in Bethel, the holy land of the Israelites, is evidence that the Jacob event is connected with the interpretation of later history.
After reading this text, we can summarize our position as follows. A long time ago, Jacob, the ancestor of Israel, had an accident in his hometown and had a decisive experience of God while he was fleeing to Haran. Although Jacob was not a good person to be loved by God, he experienced Yahweh God in a way that we do not know specifically under special circumstances. The experience was shocking to him, like discovering the heavenly gates. His experience served as an important opportunity for the people of Israel to turn toward God.
fear
Those who have experienced God are bound to be shocked. Because it is a qualitatively different life experience. So Jacob was overcome with fear and cried out: “What a dreadful place is this” (v. 17). Let's imagine, like Jacob's dream, that we actually found the gates of heaven. All the worldviews up to now are bound to shake.
The experience of God is precisely this fear, or, more precisely, the ‘holy fear’. Like a black hole that draws in even light, we are stunned and speechless in the presence of that being, the ultimate foundation of everything. Everything in this world is something we can define and categorize, but because God fundamentally transcends them all. For example, let's say an elementary school student travels through space in a spaceship faster than light. What would he say if he left the solar system, traversed the Milky Way, and traveled between nebulae? Our experience of God is a greater shock than this. Only in a world that fundamentally transcends existence and non-existence can we experience God.
Perhaps some of you will object to this. Such an experience is not a true God experience, but a theological and philosophical experience. We experience God through the fact that we are saved through faith in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's right. The 'kerygma' that we present as the basis of the Christian faith is a very important teaching. However, we cannot live a life of faith only in the level of the catechism. The early primitive community was forced to focus only on basic kerygma in the face of what happened to Jesus Christ, but the Christian faith does not end there. Only by delving into the depths of the salvation event that occurred in Jesus Christ can we actually experience God.
Think about it. Do you know about the ‘Kingdom of God’ that Jesus preached? Do you know what the “resurrection” that happened to Jesus was? We still don't know as much as little children about the nature of life. The depth of its life is so deep that the more you look into it, the more afraid it becomes, but there is not much that we can clearly grasp. You are right to say this. Faith is the fear experienced in the face of this absolute life. The experience of fear is the experience of God. It does not mean that fear itself is God, but that our encounter with God, which we cannot define with anything else, appears as a phenomenon called fear.
See why Jacob was gripped with fear. He woke up and said: “The truth is, the Lord was here, but I did not know it” (verse 16). Jacob must have thought that Yahweh God would protect them only in Beersheba, where he had a family. The ancients often associated their gods with certain places. Because they constantly struggled for survival with unfamiliar clans and tribes, it was considered good for God to not leave their homes as much as possible. If Jacob, who thought his life could be maintained only within the limited scope of his family, Beersheba, became convinced that his life was also maintained in a completely unfamiliar place, what a big change and what a shock it would be.
What are you experiencing in the course of your life? Have you ever experienced shock and fear that a world of life that goes beyond just your family and yourself is in motion? In your religious life centered on the church, have you ever experienced shock and fear at the fact that God is active in a much wider world? In general, people avoid these shocks and fears and just settle in the experiences they are familiar with. In this state, a true experience of God is impossible.