Genesis the 28th chapter, please.
Verse ten and on was one of the
most beautiful stories in the Old Testament.
And Jacob went out from Beersheba and went
toward Haran, and he lighted upon a certain
place and carried there all night, because the
sun was setting.
And he took the stones of that place
and put them for his pillow, and lay
down in that place to sleep.
And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set
up on the earth, and the top of
it reached to heaven.
And behold, the angels of God ascending and
descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it and
said, I am the Lord God of Abraham
thy father and the God of Isaac.
In the land whereon thou liest, through thee
will I give it, and through thy seed.
Thy seed shall be as the dust of
the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to
the west, to the east, to the north,
and to the south.
And in thee and in thy seed shall
all the families of the earth be blessed.
Behold, I am with thee, and will keep
thee in all places whither thou goest, and
will bring thee again into this land.
For I will not leave thee until I
have done that which I have spoken to
thee of.
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and
he said, Surely the Lord is in this
place, and I knew it not.
And he was afraid.
He said, How dreadful is this place!
This is none other than the house of
God.
This is the gate of heaven.
Jacob rose up early in the morning and
took the stone that he had put for
his pillow, and set it for a pillow,
and poured oil upon the top of it,
and he called the name of that place
Bethel.
The name of that place was called Luz
at the first.
And Jacob avowed a vow, saying, If God
be with me, and will keep me in
this way, that I go and will give
me bread to eat and raiment to put
on, so that I come again to my
father's house in peace, and then shall the
Lord be my God.
And this stone which I have set for
a pillow shall be God's house, and of
all that thou shalt give me, I will
surely give the tenth unto thee.
Now I want to talk about Jacob, the
son of Isaac and Rebekah, and the twin
brother of Esau.
There is so much to be said about
this colorful man, that I suppose that it
would take ten sermons, but I shall try
to do it in two.
What I want to do is not to
present a biography of Jacob, but to search
out the one central factor of his life
that is important to us now, and that
factor was this, that Jacob had an encounter
with Almighty God, the God of his father
Abraham and Isaac.
Now let's look at this man, Jacob, and
notice that at the beginning, he was anything
but a worthy character.
First place, his home life was unfortunate.
Now this will shock some people.
The woman back in Chicago does never think,
forgive me because I said that the life
of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob, Isaac and Rebekah,
Jacob's parents, was not a perfect one.
She said, how could it be possible because
Rebekah was a type of the bride of
Christ, therefore she must be perfect.
Well, that's assuming something, and then refusing to
see any other side but the one you've
assumed.
The truth is the home life of Jacob
and Esau was unfortunate.
They were born into a divided home.
Isaac and Rebekah never separated till they died.
They took literally until death shall separate us.
But one thing that they overlooked, and that
is that it's possible to be separated from
your wife and live in the same house
with her.
And this man, Isaac, was separated from Rebekah,
even though they never divorced and lived together
and raised their two boys together and the
neighbors never knew anything much was wrong.
But the fact is they were divided in
their hearts.
Rebekah had a habit of eavesdropping on the
old man, her husband, when he was talking
to one of the boys and then running
to the other boy with it.
Now that's no way for a husband and
wife to do, and yet they did it.
You will find if you read the story
of Isaac and Rebekah that they were not
getting on too well.
They didn't fight, they just didn't see eye
to eye, and she was a little sneaky
about it.
And so to be reared in a home
like that means, of course, that the disadvantage
is so great that it's almost impossible to
overcome.
Therefore the umpire called strike one on Jacob.
Strike one.
Then a second thing is that the parents
showed favoritism.
It's almost funny, it would be funny if
it wasn't so tragic, that Isaac loved Esau
because he ate of his savory meat.
Isaac loved the man Esau, his son, because
Esau was a hunter and used to go
out and get venison for it.
Now that's a poor cause of love and
a poor reason for loving anybody, but Isaac
did.
Isaac loved Esau because he did eat of
his savory venison.
But Rebekah loved Jacob because Jacob was a
plain man and dwelt in tents.
He stayed with his mama, and she loved
him because he thawed pottage.
Now thawing pottage is an old-fashioned way
of saying cooking stew.
And Jacob stayed around and thawed pottage, something
that man shouldn't have been doing.
He should have been out hunting with his
brother, but he was home helping mama thaw
pottage.
Well now, alike the umpire called strike two
on the man Jacob, and he's just about
out.
Then there was a third thing about the
man, and that is that his character showed
weaknesses, moral flaws that were beyond the normal.
He had an effeminate streak in him, as
I've already pointed out.
And the dear God in heaven, save us
from an effeminate man or a masculine woman.
And this man was effeminate.
Nowadays they would say that he had an
Oedipus complex or a mother fixation.
He was attached to his mother's apron string,
was the old-fashioned way my grandmother had.
She hadn't read Freud, so she didn't know
about Oedipus complexes.
So she said, he's no good, he's attached
to his mother's apron string.
And this fellow Jacob never got the umbilical
cord cut.
He still stayed with mama, even until he
was way along up in middle life.
And to be born a man by the
accident of nature and then have a character,
have a disposition that's feminine, is pretty bad.
It's pretty bad.
I don't know how he kept from turning
out to be a beatnik, because he had
all the makings of it.
And then Jacob had another thing wrong with
him, and that was duplicity.
I'm talking about the weaknesses of his character.
Duplicity was bordering on the perilous.
That is, do you notice how he cheated
his father and he cheated his father-in
-law later on?
He just cheated everybody that he could cheat
the man Jacob.
He was a crook.
You know, his name was Jacob, which means
crooked.
And they certainly named that boy.
He was that kind of fellow, a supplanter.
And then Jacob had a streak of avarice
in him, a streak of larceny, if you
ask me, was in this man.
Now, he's in the Bible all right, but
you've got to be realistic, and when the
Bible tells us about a man, we're not
to close our eyes like the three monkeys
on the shelf and see no evil and
hear no evil and think no evil.
We're going to have to face up to
it.
Jacob was avaricious.
You remember that when he was sobbing potage
in there, he came in smelling of the
field.
He hadn't caught anything that day, and he
was hungry.
He thought he was just literally starving to
death, a very big, rough, hairy fellow.
He wasn't going to die, but he was
hungry.
And he said to his brother, Give me
a bowl of your stew.
And Jacob held it behind him and said,
I'll do nothing of the kind.
What'll you give me?
Well, he said, About anything.
I'm ready to die.
Well, he said, Would you give me your
birthright?
And he cheated his brother out of that
birthright.
Then later on, you'll remember that the man
put garments, he put goat skin on his
arms and sneaked around to his old blind
father.
His father felt his hands and said, I
think the whole thing was kind of dumb.
I never did have much respect for Isaac.
Now, to tell the truth, Isaac was the
father of a great son.
He became great later on, and he was
the son of a great father.
But I never could see much in the
fellow Isaac.
The way he got way-corded, you know.
Send somebody else out to look him up
a wife.
I can't get interested in a fellow that
couldn't even have the manhood to go out
and get his own wife.
And now he comes, the boy comes in,
and he's got a sheepskin on his hands
so that he'll seem hairy like his brother.
Well, I don't excuse Jacob.
It was a sneaking, deceitful, dirty trick to
pull on his blind father.
But his father was so dumb that I'd
rather forgive the boy on the grounds that
anybody that dumb ought to have got cheated.
I wouldn't want to do it.
The idea that he didn't know his own
sons, he'd live with those boys and didn't
know their voices.
He didn't know their voices.
He said, well, it does sound like Jacob's
voice.
But he said, I'll admit, those are the
hairy arms of Esau.
So he stretched out his old, skinny arms
and started to bless the wrong fellow.
And he blessed him all the way through
and never stopped to ask God to help
him to get blessed.
Well, that's the kind of home the fellow
Jacob came out of.
And Jacob had a calculating, bargaining spirit, you
know.
Even when he had this great vision, he
wasn't rid of it altogether.
He started bargaining with God and said, God,
if you'll bless me, I'll tithe.
It sounded like modern tracts.
It pays to tithe, therefore I tithe.
Well, he had a calculating spirit.
And then I noticed that he lacked common
honor.
Now, he didn't have common honor.
He ran along with that mother of his,
who was something of a chief.
He ran along with her and he pulled
skullduggery, as I've said, on his father and
on his twin, his own twin brother.
He showed a spirit of disloyalty and faithlessness
here.
And the umpire said, Strike three.
And Jacob was out.
The only thing Jacob could do morally, as
far as any hope of God was concerned,
was to go back and sit down because
his home life was bad, his character was
bad, and his parents showed favoritism and partiality
and thus divided the home.
Rebecca loved Jacob and he saw, or Isaac
loved Esau, and so they weren't together on
it.
Now, he came out of that kind of
a home and, of course, he would have
been voted the man least likely to get
right with God because there was nothing in
the fellow.
Anybody that watched that slithery, sinuous, serpentine conduct
of the man, he just said, There's no
use.
The fellow's hopeless.
But do you know God saw otherwise?
And there's a deep mystery here and I
don't claim to be able to understand it.
I only know that we say so-and
-so would make a good Christian, but we
don't know how far we are off the
track.
So-and-so may have all the characteristics
of a gentleman and yet be a million
miles from God and be perfectly satisfied with
himself.
He may stand for hours in front of
the mirror and comb his, whatever you call
it.
I used to have one, but it's been
so long that I forgot even what they
call him anymore.
You have one, what do you call him?
I don't know either.
Anyhow, these things up in front here, we
don't look at it right.
We say he'd make a good Christian, but
we would never have given our vote to
Jacob if anybody had come along and said,
you know this fellow Jacob, do you think
he's all right?
No, he's a tramp.
Do you think he'll get right with God
not while he lives?
Never.
That man, he's hopeless.
But you know God is a God who
specializes in hopeless cases.
And there's a deep mystery here, I say,
that I don't understand.
Esau was far better as a prospect than
Jacob was.
There's nothing that Esau did that was very
bad.
You'll notice he was a hunter and he
smelled of the field and he was kind
to his parents and he put up with
Jacob, the chief.
He did want to kill him, but he
didn't go through with it.
Later on, 20 years later, he went out
with fire in his nostrils, but when he
saw Jacob, he cooled off and put his
arms around him and cried like a child.
So Esau was a pretty good fellow.
He was a little rough, you know, but
he was a good fellow.
Jacob was a crooked fellow and between the
two, if I'd had to live with one
of them, I'd have chosen Esau.
If I'd have been living in the same
house with Esau, I could have gone to
bed and hung my pants on a nail
and not worried about having somebody come in
and steal my money in the night.
But with Jacob, you weren't certain, you know.
Jacob would pray and say, it's the dear
Lord that sent me, and then go out
and rob your pocket.
He was that kind of fellow, Esau was.
But you know what?
The fellow Jacob had something that Esau didn't
have.
And Esau had something that Jacob didn't have.
And that which Jacob had finally led him
to God and that which Esau had finally
damned him.
Esau was morally better than Jacob and necessarily
Jacob was morally worse than Esau.
It figures.
But my brother Jacob had one thing Esau
didn't have.
He had a longing after God, a grave
dissatisfaction.
He belonged to the noble army of the
discontented.
If you show me a discontented man, not
discontented with the year of his car or
the size of it, but discontented with himself
inside.
I have been greatly encouraged here over the
last days for I have had people approach
me after service and tell me of their
deep spiritual yearning, their longing after God, their
discontent.
Once more I tell you, you ought to
thank God with all your heart that you're
a spiritually discontented man.
Most of the good people of the world
are not discontented.
They're compassionate and quite well satisfied with themselves.
They are not bad.
They have no conscience to bother them, but
they also have no longing after God.
God had been trying to get a signal
through to these boys, and Esau was so
contented with himself that he didn't hear it.
But Jacob the crook, Jacob the avaricious rascal,
Jacob the father-cheater, Jacob hated himself for
that thing.
He hated himself.
He sinned and hated himself for sinning.
And the result was that his eyes were
looking at heavenward, and when the voice of
God sounded over him, he heard it.
When the ladder was set up, he saw
it.
Jacob was deep in sin, but not so
deep as what he felt the tug and
the lift of another world.
Esau wasn't so deep in sin, but Esau
was satisfied with what he had, and that's
the terrible thing about it.
It's the worst thing that can be said
about Esau.
He was spiritually self-satisfied, but that thing
damned him.
And all that I've said against Jacob passed
away and became nothing when it was set
over against the fact that this sinful man
with a bad disposition yet hated himself and
longed after God.
I don't care how far down a man
is nor how low he is.
If I know that there's a spark in
him that's leaping up toward God, if deep
is calling unto deep, and the little deep
of the man is calling back to the
deep which is God, I'm quite pleased and
I believe in that person.
That's why I'm not worried about how far
a man has got, but I am greatly
concerned about what direction he's headed.
I'm concerned whether he's aimed in the right
way or not.
I'm concerned about whether he is longing after
God.
Oh, that we must long after God, my
brethren.
If we don't long after him, we'll remain
right where we are.
We'll settle down.
Browning, the English poet, talked about a man
like that.
He said, a finished and finite clod uncoupled
by a spark.
I think that's a terrible, damning epitaph.
A finished and finite clod.
He's finite, that is, he's limited all around,
and he's finished, he's done, they've marked him
finished, there's nobody going to work on him
anymore.
And he's uncoupled by a spark.
You know, the spark of God in a
man couples him.
I don't mean that spark saves him, but
that spark leads him to salvation.
That spark of God in a man.
Why is it that some good people never
have it?
They're nice people, nice to live around, but
they never have that spark.
Why, some of the crookedest people and some
of the most sinful people with bad dispositions
and evil temperaments nevertheless are deeply coupled with
a longing, a spark leaping up there after
God.
Finished and finite clod was Esau, and so
he found no way to change his mind,
though he sought it earnestly with tears.
Later on, when it was too late, but
Jacob, God was after Jacob, it was God
trying to get through to the man Jacob.
So Jacob sets out here in the story
that I have read, Jacob sets out for
Haran.
Now I suppose that the man, more heart
sick, never began his journey.
He had just seated his father, poor old
blind father.
And he was on his way to his
relatives in another country and never expected to
see his father again.
And indeed, I think he never did, if
I recall, see his father again.
And then Mama, to whom he had been
so inordinately attached, Mama found that she had
to get rid of the boy to keep
the big boy from killing him.
The big hairy fellow with the red face
had been cheated out of his birthright, and
cheated well.
She said, I'm going to kill my brother.
And it was a normal thing to want
to do.
Jacob deserved a good killing.
And Esau was the man who should have
done it because he had been the fellow
who had been cheated.
And when Mama saw that, Mama said, if
I keep my baby with me, he'll be
killed.
So she made up a lie and took
the twint to her husband.
And she threw herself across the bed and
stomped.
And she said, Isaac, Isaac.
He said, what's the matter, Mama?
And she said, oh, I feel so bad
about my boy.
She said, if he marries one of these
women of the, what did she call it,
I've forgotten for the moment, said, if he
marries one of them, I just never can
stand it.
And of course, when a woman starts to
howl, you'll give her anything, you know.
You'll go out and get her a new
anything.
And so he said, all right.
And he called in Jacob, called Jacob in.
And he never even rebuked the scoundrel, never
rebuked him.
You just cheated him by putting this stuff
over his hands and going through all that
monkey business.
And still Jacob never, never rebuked him.
He said, you better go out of this
country.
He said, your mother feels bad about the
possibility of your marrying one of these women
socially below you.
So you had better go back to where
you came from, back to the land of
Beersh, or Haran, and get a wife there.
Now it was a sneaky way of getting
Jacob out where he thought couldn't kill him.
And Mama had that to do, you know.
When you start something, brother, you start it.
The camel puts his nose in the tent.
And pretty soon, he's in the tent humping
all.
And he gets the narrow edge of the
wedge in, and then the whole wedge is
in.
So when Jacob and his mother started going
on this crooked piece of machinery, they were
carried away with it.
And he got up and left.
He wasn't going after a wife.
He was going away to save his crooked
hide.
That's what he was leaving for.
So Jacob set out.
And I say there never was a more
miserable man.
He was self-stricken because he had cheated
his father.
He was sick because he had to leave
his mother.
And then he was going away from his
home, and he was afraid, and he was
uncertain.
And Jacob was in a state of complete
loneliness.
Now, I've said this before, and I want
to keep saying it here, that there's a
lot you will never learn at a party.
And there's an awful lot of spirituality you
will never learn with somebody else.
You've got to have God all by yourself.
You and God alone have to figure things
out.
So if you've never learned or never experienced
the depths of loneliness before God, chances are
you're not in a position to have God
do very much for you.
We want to do things en masse, you
know, in the block, by the company.
It doesn't work that way.
All the great saints had to go to
God alone.
And God had to let this all work
out to get Jacob by himself in a
state of complete loneliness where all the spiritually
great have had to be.
And then God appears unto Jacob.
Now, Jacob wasn't seeking God, but God was
seeking Jacob.
I wrote a book 12 years ago, and
by the grace of God it's still selling
as well now as it did when I
first wrote it.
It's called The Pursuit of God.
A fellow discouraged me, said, don't call it
The Pursuit of God.
Nobody will read it.
There's no name for it.
But those very words caught on.
The idea that we must seek God, that
we must rule him and pursue him and
follow hard after him as the poet, the
Old Testament said, caught on to a lot
of human hearts.
But you know, if I had the time,
I could write another one and call it
The God Pursuit of Man because before any
man will pursue God, God must pursue the
man.
Before any man will start to woo God,
God must begin to woo the man.
Always God must be previous.
God must be there first.
And so God appeared to Jacob.
And that was the reason for his discontent.
That was the reason for the unrest in
his heart and the aimless activity he was
going through.
The eternal mystery had been overshadowing the man
Jacob.
He hadn't been bothering the man Esau.
Some of you are satisfied because you are
not uneasy, you are not disturbed.
A sermon or a song moves only the
surface of your emotions.
You can go home and look at a
TV picture on up to midnight and then
go to sleep, get up and eat a
hearty breakfast and go to work untroubled by
a spark.
You're satisfied with yourself.
John Bunyan, the great dreamer, said this about
a man in one of his sermons.
He said, Some sinners believe that because they
die in peace, therefore everything is all right
with them.
He said, No, that a sinner can live
his lifetime in sin and then die with
an untroubled conscience proves not how good he
is but how hopelessly lost he is because
if he were not hopelessly lost his conscience
would bother him sometimes before the end.
Well, Jacob went to sleep and he took
some stones and I've never been able to
figure out what a man wants to take
stones and make pillars out of them for.
I could think of half a dozen things
softer than that.
But he took some stones and piled them
up and leaned back against them and he'd
never been away from his mother before.
He'd never been anywhere, you know.
But now he was out there way off
and he heard howling.
He called it the way howling wilderness.
What was howling out there in the wilderness?
The wind?
No.
No wind howling there.
What was howling was wolves and bears.
And the man Jacob was scared.
And he leaned back finally and went off
to fitful sleep.
And while he slept, a ladder stood on
the earth and angels ascended and descended.
They didn't descend and then ascend.
They'd been down there all the time.
They ascended first and then came back down
to see if Jacob was all right.
Their first motion was upward because they'd been
down with the man Jacob.
Now here is one of the most wonderful
and most mysterious and most beautiful things that
I know.
That one of the most or least likely
fellows, one of the crookedest fellows, a man
that you couldn't say anything good about, is
out in the wilderness, wasting the howling and
sleeping against the stone under the wrath of
his brother and the displeasure of his father
on his way somewhere to keep from being
killed.
And suddenly a ladder appears and stands up
on the earth and its top reaches to
heaven.
The great unfolding mystery was there.
God was there all the time and had
been there all the time.
And when Jacob was back there sinning, God
was patiently with him then.
And when he cheated his father and lied
to his old blind dad and he even
used the name of God in his lie,
Isaac said, How did you get it so
soon?
And he said, The Lord brought it to
me, the sound rope.
And yet God was with him patiently then.
Oh friend, if all that keeps you away
from God is how bad you are, don't
stay away because God's looking for people like
you.
He's looking for the people that look as
if they weren't worth saving.
And so Jacob awaked out of his sleep.
Jacob had a sudden awakening of the inner
light.
In olden times they used to call revivals
awakening.
And when the man was suddenly converted they
said he had a spiritual awakening.
They couldn't have said it any better way
for this was an awakening here.
This man Jacob suddenly came awake.
Now he was the son of Isaac and
Isaac was the son of Abraham and Abraham
was the father of the faithful, the one
to whom the covenant was made so that
Jacob had some kind of religious teaching in
his life.
But as some of us, he went through
that religious teaching and it never got a
hold of him.
This was Jacob's world, he said.
This is my world.
And I want it and I want Esau's
part of it too.
And I want Dad's part of it.
This is my world, he said and thought
as he went away.
But now suddenly he sees that this is
God's world after all and that's one thing
that we must awaken to.
This is God's world, brother.
And not all the concrete on the pavement
and not all the machines and machinery and
technology and technocracy and all the rest can
change it.
God made this world.
Man has unmade it.
But God made this world and this is
God's world.
He's here and you've got God to deal
with and you will have God to deal
with.
You'll have him to deal with sooner or
later and you'd better make it sooner for
your own soul's sake.
This world was created by God.
It's supported by the word of his power.
All things hold together in Christ and this
is God's world.
And God is in his world and we
don't know it.
Jacob didn't say God came here.
He said God is here.
God is here.
This is the gate of heaven.
God had been there all the time and
Jacob didn't know it.
He was unconscious of it.
And I say again that one of the
most delicious and marvelous aspects of the spiritual
experience we call conversion is the sudden awakening
to the fact that we belong to God
and God belongs to us and that we're
his and he's ours and that this world
is God's world.
It doesn't belong to Uncle Sam or Great
Britain or Russia.
It's God's world and it belongs to him
and he allows Uncle Sam and Britain and
Russia to have a part of it while
he's patiently waiting that he might save some.
But it's God's world.
He sings in every bird and he whistles
in every wind and he falls in every
rain and he breathes in every sigh.
God is here in his world and you've
got God to deal with, my brother.
That's wonderful to me.
That's just wonderful.
I don't know how you feel.
But it's wonderful that I've got God to
deal with and that God has been following
me all this time.
Following me.
But somebody said, No, no, it can't be,
it can't be.
You don't know me, Mr. Toter.
I've lied to God a hundred times.
I suppose Jacob lied a hundred and one
at least.
Jacob was crooked and deceiving and avaricious and
calculating and he lacked honor and he was
disloyal and effeminate.
He had everything wrong and yet God had
been following Jacob around.
The patient, loving God.
He's called the God of Jacob.
You ever think of it?
God actually called himself by the name of
that man.
That man, Jacob, he called himself by his
name and he wasn't ashamed to say, I
am Jacob's God.
Oh, he's the God of grace and he's
the God of aggression and he's the God
of patience.
Well, how can it be that God comes
and follows us and that he introduces this
desire to be right?
How is it God is doing this?
I don't know.
I only know there's something in us akin
to God.
There must be.
Now, that doesn't mean we're saved because except
you repent and are born again you shall
all likewise perish.
Forget that.
But there's something.
You see, two unlike things, totally unlike, could
never get together.
It would be impossible.
There must be something in the light a
little bit like your eye or something in
your eye a little bit like the light
or you could never see.
There must be something in your ear geared
to the sounds of nature or you could
never hear.
So there must be something in you capable
of knowing God.
I'd rather die and be carried from this
platform than to lose the capability of knowing
God.
God put within us a capability and said
if you will turn unto me and seek
me with all your heart you shall find
me because he'd been seeking us with all
his heart before that.
So the man Jacob now wakes, I say.
He wakes to shining knowledge.
He wakes to the fact that God is
there.
But where do you and I find God?
Well, I would tell you that Christ is
a meeting place.
His name shall be called Immanuel which is
God with us.
Now, we know who the God is but
who is the us?
Us are the humans.
Immanuel, God with us.
And now Christ is the manward side of
God.
I want you to hear me say this
because I don't think anybody else has ever
said it.
But I want you to hear me say
that Christ is the manward side of God.
You know they tell us that up here
in space about, I've forgotten, 250,000 miles
away there's a little thing we call the
moon.
It's a dead cinder.
It hasn't any light in it nor any
light in it and they tell me that
it's knee deep in dust and the first
Russian that gets over there is going to
have to sneeze and get rid of the
dust somehow.
That's the moon.
And the moon is so geared on its
axis with the sun and the earth that
the earth never sees but one side of
the moon.
One side of the moon.
Because when the moon gets turned around then
the earth is turned around.
I don't know how they do it but
they've got to work somehow.
So you never see but one side of
the moon.
You know, to use that for an illustration
I might say that God in his great
heaven has a side and it's the manward
side.
It's the only side we see.
It's the side that's turned toward us.
And there's only one side of the moon
turned toward the earth and there never can
be any other way as long as the
heavens and the earth continue to exist in
their present relation and there is a manward
side.
God has one side turned to us and
his name shall be called Jesus for he
shall save his people from their sins.
And the God who followed Jacob in the
way-piling wilderness and the God who's following
you and me has a manward side.
What there is in the other vast infinitude
of the other side of God, I don't
know.
I don't know what lies out there for
us to explore in the days to come
and in the millenniums to come.
But I know that if you look up
just as we look up and see the
same friendly face of the moon that our
fathers saw, that Adam saw, that Abel saw,
and Cain saw the night he killed Abel.
Just as we look up and see the
same smiling, friendly face of the moon that
Abraham saw when he came out of Ur
of the Chaldees, that Jacob saw when he
looked up in the way-piling wilderness.
So when we look up we see the
same face of God turned toward us.
It is Jesus Christ our Lord.
And you know they know it back there.
Abraham said, Jesus saw my day and was
glad.
And Moses prophesied concerning Jesus.
And David spake as man of the tongue
of a ready writer.
And Isaiah saw Jesus and Simeon knew who
Jesus was.
They knew that it was God turned manward.
Now all the experiences by which men met
God, they all figure around Jesus Christ our
Lord.
Abraham, I preached about, had that sacrifice.
Well, that was Jesus Christ.
Jacob had that ladder and that was Jesus
Christ.
Moses had the burning bush and that was
Jesus Christ.
Go through your Old Testament and you'll find
it there.
The overarching mystery, the present, God is here.
And he's trying to get a signal through.
And the satisfied ones hear nothing but the
discontented and the uneasy.
And the people with bothered consciences, no matter
how deep in sin they might have been,
they see something and they hear something.
And they are the ones that will meet
God after all.
So Christ is the point where we experience
God.
He that has seen me has seen the
Father, said Jesus.
He that has seen me has seen the
Father.
And the God that Moses could not see,
lest he die, we can now see in
the face of Jesus Christ.
But it's the same God and the same
Lord Jesus and the same overarching mystery and
the same wondrous presence that fills the universe,
following bad boys around, following women around that
are full of pride and every kind of
envy, following us around, the dear God is
following us around so that we might well
write a book and call it God's Pursuit
of Man, for God's been looking for you
all this time, looking for you.
He wants you to break through into a
state of awareness.
You notice Jacob came out into a, it
says, Jacob awoke out of his sleep.
It was more than waking out of physical
humbleness.
It was a sudden awakening to the shining
wonder of the knowledge of God in the
face of Christ, even before his incarnation in
the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Now, you never can comprehend this that I'm
talking to you about.
I've said before, I repeat, our problem now
is we can understand modern Christianity.
There isn't anything you can't explain.
We got a God made in our own
image.
And because we've made him in our own
image, we can explain him.
And we can explain everything he's supposed to
do.
But the men who met God had spiritual
experiences nobody could explain, much less themselves.
All they could do was adore.
All they could do was rejoice.
All they could do was to enjoy and
thank God and obey God and come back
for more and rejoice some more and go
obey God some more.
Ah, this man Jacob, crooked old Jacob, mama's
boy Jacob, avaricious crooked bargaining Jacob with his
lack of honor and decency.
But he had one saving thing, I repeat.
He had a holy discontent.
In the depths of his heart, he wanted
to know God, and God knew it.
And God knew that nothing could keep him
out if he wanted to know God bad
enough.
And Jacob did.
You may wonder why I choose Jacob when
I'm talking about the great saints who met
God.
Ah, my friend, we find Jacob here at
his worst, but we find him on his
way to meet God and become best.
Jacob the worst became Jacob the best, and
Jacob the crooked supplanter became a prince with
God and had his name changed to Israel.
So I want to encourage you tonight.
Let not conscience make thee linger, because all
the fitness God requires is to feel your
need of him.
Now, if you're not discontented, if you're satisfied
as you are, then I don't know anything
I can do.
I don't know anything anybody can do.
There was nothing anybody could do for Esau.
Nothing.
Jacob Esau was satisfied.
He had no spiritual longing.
He wanted to get his money back, and
so he said, couldn't you bless me some
more and give me something?
But he found no way to change his
mind, though he sought it earnestly with care.
But nowhere in the whole life of Esau
was there any evidence of moral discontent or
spiritual longing.
It's the most precious treasure you have, my
brother, is the spiritual longing that's in your
heart.
Even if you hold it in your heart
along with every kind of duplicity and evil,
it's still the most precious treasure that you've
got.
Is there something in your heart that makes
you long after God?
Well, Jesus Christ calls you to himself.
He calls you to start now, toward him.
A journey for your heart, not a journey
for your feet.
Start now.
And the God of Jacob will be your
refuge.
The God of grace, the God of patience,
the God of