The Scripture reading for Sunday is Genesis 28:10-22 – Jacob’s dream at Bethel.

I’ve always had a hard time with Jacob. He rubs me the wrong way. In many ways, especially up to this point in Genesis, Jacob is everything that I hope I am not. He is a cheat, a liar, an opportunist, a crook. He doesn’t seem to care about others insofar as he is willing to take everything from his brother in order to get ahead. Yet, if we turn back a page or two in our Bible’s from Genesis 28 to the time just before Jacob and his older twin brother Esau were born, we read that Jacob is God’s chosen son.

In Genesis 25:19-26, we read about Isaac and his wife Rebekah. Rebekah is pregnant with twins. Starting at verse 22, we read, “The babies jostled each other within her, and [Rebekah] said, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ So she went to inquire of the Lord. The Lord said to her, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be separated; one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.’”

But by the time we get to Genesis 28, Jacob has already weaseled Esau out of both his birthright and blessing. Esau’s birthright included the inheritance rights of the firstborn, which was double the portion that would have been allotted to Jacob. Esau’s blessing, something even more valuable than the birthright secured God’s blessing on Jacob as God’s chosen instrument of blessing.

After stunts like that, it’s hard to think well of Jacob. It’s even harder to think that God could think well of him. Surely God’s promise, and Isaac’s blessing, cannot be true about this crook.

After stealing Esau’s blessing, Jacob flees to his Uncle Laban to get a wife (and to get away from Esau). He’s on the run, and if things didn’t work out for him I doubt many would shed a tear. This punishment of being sent from home, as small as it may be in comparison to his crimes, at least gives us the sense that some justice is being served.

Then we get to our text for Sunday. Jacob is in the midst of his journey somewhere between Beersheba and Haran and he must stop for the night. Instead of Jacob receiving the justice due to him, he receives a revelation from God; one that reveals to Jacob that it was not through his conniving and manipulating and cheating that he came into blessing, but it was by God’s appointment and care. God, Jacob finds out, had always been watching over him.

In the middle of the wilderness, God tracked down Jacob. In his dream, Jacob saw God’s angels carrying out his work on earth, ascending and descending on the staircase to heaven. But most amazingly, in his dream, God spoke to Jacob and personally bridged the gap between the realms of heaven and earth.

It’s there, then, that the tables turn a little bit. Instead of rooting against Jacob, we rejoice that God chose him because there are not a few Gospel implications for us in the way God loves Jacob in spite of how undeserving he is.

Paul writes, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8)

As we realize that in big and small ways that we might be a lot more like Jacob than we care to admit, this passage points so clearly to the heart of the Gospel that even though we deserve God’s love as much as Jacob did, God loves us more than we can ever imagine.