"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.” (Genesis 28:12)
Jacob’s ladder is a popular subject for children’s lessons and songs. It ranks up there with Jonah inside the great fish or David’s felling Goliath with a sling. There is more to the ladder, however, than an attention-grabbing story or a catchy song. Jacob’s ladder appeared in a dream. It’s important that we see that. God’s written Word is complete, so we must now rely on it instead of dreams. Dreams can mislead us, but in Jacob’s day, God sometimes still used them to communicate truth. The ladder may have been a kind of huge mound or embankment, more like the one mentioned in 2 Samuel 20:15 for scaling a high wall than like the modern one in your garage. After all, it had to accommodate “the angels of God ascending and descending on it” simultaneously. Narrow rungs wouldn’t have worked.
Jacob’s ladder got Jacob’s attention. He had lived up to his name (heel-grabber, trickster) and had not seemed a likely choice to carry out the promised family line of Abraham and Isaac. In Jacob’s dream, God announced that the promised land and the promised seed would continue through Jacob, the former referring to Israel and the latter–ultimately–to the Lord Jesus Christ.
How important is Jacob’s ladder? It was a gigantic object lesson God used to point to Jesus. Jacob’s ladder pictures a link between heaven and earth. That illustrates that God sought Jacob and not the other way around. It encourages us to see a ladder of grace. We, like Jacob, are linked to heaven because of God’s work on our behalf, not because of our own work. Jacob’s ladder, which we can now identify more accurately as God’s ladder, caused Jacob to marvel at God: “Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not (28:16)” and “he was afraid, and said, ‘How dreadful is this place!’” (28:17).
Jacob’s ladder is Christ Himself. The dialog involving Christ, Philip, and Nathanael in John 1:43-51, ends on an astounding note. When Nathanael was impressed that the Lord Jesus knew him though they had never met, Christ assured him that he would see “greater things” than that (1:50). “Hereafter”, said Jesus, “ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” (1:51). What Jacob had seen so long before pointed ahead to the true Ladder, on which angels moved to and from heaven. No one will get to heaven without Christ, portrayed so powerfully as Jacob’s Ladder and the only Hope of humankind.
