Unlocking the Bible. David Pawson

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      JACOB’S LADDER

      And what about Jacob’s ladder? When Jacob ran away from home he slept outside at night with his head on a stone and dreamt of a ladder (actually more like an escalator). The Hebrew implies that the ladder was moving, and that there was one ladder moving up and one ladder moving down, with angels ascending and descending. Jacob knew that at the top of the ladders was heaven, where God lived.

      When he woke he promised to give a tenth of everything he made to God. The giving of tithes was not part of the law until the time of Moses. (Jacob’s offer of a tenth of his possessions was more in the nature of a bargain with God: you bring me back home safely and I will give you a tithe. It is not, however, possible to bargain with God – God makes a covenant with you, not the other way round – and Jacob had to learn that the hard way later.)

      Centuries later, when Jesus met a man called Nathaniel, he said to Nathaniel, ‘I saw you sitting under the fig tree. I noticed you and you are a Jew in whom there is no guile, no deceit.’ Nathaniel asked him how he knew this. Jesus replied, ‘You think that is wonderful, that I know the details of your life. What will you think if you see angels ascending and descending on the son of man?’ He is saying, ‘I am Jacob’s ladder, I am the link between earth and heaven. I am the new ladder.’

      ADAM AND EVE

      Further back, in Genesis 3, God made a promise in the middle of his punishment of Adam and Eve. He said to the serpent that the seed – or offspring – of the woman (seed is masculine in the Hebrew) would bruise the serpent’s head, even while the serpent bruised the offspring’s heel. Bruising a heel is not fatal, but bruising a head is and this is the very first promise that God would one day deal Satan a fatal blow. We now know who it was who bound the strong man and spoilt his goods.

      In Romans 5, Paul tells us that as one man’s disobedience brought death, so one man’s obedience brought life, implying that Jesus is a second Adam. It was in the Garden of Eden that Adam said ‘I won’t’ and it was in the Garden of Gethsemane that Jesus said ‘not my will but yours be done’. What a contrast! They each began a human race: Adam was the first man of the homo sapiens race; Jesus was the first of the homo novus.

      We are all born homo sapiens, and through God we can become homo novus. The New Testament talks about the new man, the new humanity. There are two human races on earth today: you are either in Adam or you are in Christ. There is a whole new human race and it is going to inhabit a totally new planet earth – indeed a whole new universe.

      CREATION

      One of the most remarkable things said about Jesus in the New Testament is that he was responsible for the creation of the universe. The early disciples came to see that Jesus was involved in the events of Genesis 1. As John said at the start of his Gospel, ‘without him nothing was made that has been made’.

      When we read Genesis 1, therefore, we find that Jesus was there. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’. Jesus was part of the plurality of the Godhead.

      We have known for several decades now that the earth’s surface is on flat plates of rock floating on molten rock, and that these plates are constantly moving, rubbing against each other to cause earthquakes. When it was discovered that these plates moved to form the land masses we have today, the scientists needed to coin a new word for the plates. They called them ‘tectonic plates’. In Greek the word tectone means ‘carpenter’. The whole planet earth on which we live is the work of a carpenter from Nazareth – and his name is the Lord Jesus Christ!

      So we finish our studies in Genesis where we began, with creation. God is indeed answering his problem of what to do when humans rebel. The solution is Jesus Christ, through whom the world came to be, for whom it was made, and by whom we discover the answer to all our questions.

       3.

      EXODUS

      Introduction

      Exodus is the story of the biggest escape in history. Over two million slaves escape from one of the most highly fortified nations in the entire world. It is humanly impossible, an extraordinary story, and it features a series of miracles, including some of the best known in the whole Bible. The leader of the Israelites at the time was a man named Moses. He saw more miracles than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob put together – in some places a number following one after another as God intervened on behalf of his people. Some of the miracles sound a bit like magic, for example when Moses’ stick turns into a snake, but most of them are clear manipulations of nature, as God proves his power over all that he has made for the good of his people.

      The original Hebrew title for Exodus was ‘These are the names’, these being the first words of the book to appear on the scroll when the priest came to read them. Our name ‘Exodus’ comes from the Greek ex-hodos – literally ex: ‘out’, hoddos: ‘way’ (similar to the Latin word exit), ‘the way out’.

      The whole event of the Exodus had a profound significance on two fronts.

      1. National

      First, it had national significance for the people of Israel. It marked the beginning of their national history. They received their political freedom and became a sovereign nation in their own right. Though they did not yet have a land they were a nation with a name of their own: ‘Israel’. So central was this event that ever since then its celebration has been written into their national calendar. Just as Americans celebrate their independence on 4 July, so every March/April the Jews celebrate the Exodus. They eat the Passover meal and recount the mighty acts of God.

      2. Spiritual

      Second, it had spiritual significance. The Israelites discovered that their God was the God who made the whole universe and could control what he had made for their sake. They came to believe that their God was more powerful than all the gods of Egypt put together. Later they would come to realize that their God was the only God who existed (see especially the prophecies of Isaiah).

      The truth that God was more powerful than every other god was made clear by the name which God gave to himself. His ‘formal’ title was El-Shaddai, God Almighty, but it is in the book of Exodus that the nation was given his personal name. Just as knowing a person’s name enables a human relationship to become more intimate, when they discovered God’s name Israel could enter into a more intimate relationship with him.

      In English we translate the name as ‘Yahweh’, though there are no vowels in the Hebrew – strictly speaking it should simply be Y H W H. The name is a participle of the verb ‘to be’. We saw in our study of Genesis that ‘always’ is an English word which communicates how the Jews would have understood it. God is the eternal one without beginning or end – ‘always’. This is his first name, but he has many second names too: ‘Always my provider’, ‘Always my helper’, ‘Always my protector’, ‘Always СКАЧАТЬ