Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #10 of Genesis, chapter 28, and we are going to read Genesis 28:10-15:

And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, 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, JEHOVAH stood above it, and said, I am JEHOVAH God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, 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.

I will stop reading there.  Jacob has left Beersheba and he is on his way to Haran, in obedience to the command of his mother and father to go to Laban to find a wife.  Also, at the same time, his mother had rescued him and delivered him from the harm that his brother Esau intended to do to him.  He had gone some miles from Beersheba, and he was tired.  It had been a long day of travel, and he came to a place at night after the sun was set.  He took some stones for a pillow, and he laid down in that place.

Again, it was after a long journey, and when you are traveling like that you would be extremely tired.  He fell asleep and he dreamed of a ladder set up upon the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven.  He saw angels of God ascending and descending on it, and JEHOVAH stood above it.  So Jacob was on the earth on this little spot of land, and a ladder went from the earth where he was at, all the way to heaven.

Now the Bible speaks of three heavens.  There is the heaven that is the sky above.  There is the heaven we would call “deep space,” and there is the heaven or spiritual realm where God dwells.  JEHOVAH stood above this ladder, and we do not see the Lord in the blue sky or in outer space, but He is in heaven, so the ladder was going from the earth, a physical place and a physical creation, up into the heaven where God is, and that is a spiritual place.  It is a spiritual realm of existence, so this ladder was going from the physical to the spiritual, and JEHOVAH God was at the top of the ladder, and He began to speak to him.  So we can see that this was a place of communication.  God was communicating and Jacob was receiving that communication.  It was a place of access from earth to heaven.  Notice the order of the angels, and that their ascending is listed first, and their descending is afterwards, so that means they were going from earth to heaven, and then back down.  So this is a very interesting dream that Jacob was dreaming. 

We are going to try to look at this as best we can.  The first thing we want to look at is the fact that he was dreaming, as it says in verse 12 that he dreamed, and then God tells us what the dream is, and we also know that the Lord moved Moses to write this information as God gave him divine revelation.  Moses was inspired as God revealed an incident that happened in the life of Jacob.

And not only in the life of Jacob, but when we think of these people and their lives, we think of what we read  the previous couple of chapters where Jacob received the blessing, and it a very visible thing that happened.  And then his brother intended to harm him, and Jacob met with his parents and Isaac told him to leave the land of Canaan and go to Haran.  All these things were happening in time and happening outwardly, and people were aware of it and witnessed it.  But, here, God is going to tell us about a man’s dream.  Can you imagine the depths of knowledge that God possesses?   He knows everything that happens outwardly in the world (the things people say and do), and that is an enormous amount of information because people are saying and doing a lot of things, and there are a lot of people.  But, more than that, God knows the thoughts of men and He knows their dreams.  In this case, God arranged this, and he moved Jacob in a certain way.  You know, as we lie down at night and we drift off to sleep, our dreams happen as our minds try to work through things that have happened to us, or things we heard, or things we did, or other kinds of stimulus that came to us as we listened to music, and so forth.   That is why it is good to read the Bible before we go to bed, and that way maybe our dreams will be helped, and it would be good to think about the things of God. 

But, anyway, our subconscious minds are working out details, and all kinds of images come to us, and we can be thrown into various situations, and they seem very real, but in this case, the dream was designed by God and God brought it to pass.  And it is teaching spiritual truth.  It is divine revelation, and everything in his dream had purpose and meaning related to the kingdom of God, to God Himself, and to truth and the Word of God.  That is one thing we see. 

But, also, we see it is a parable, and the ladder set up to heaven represents something, and God is teaching a great truth through this dream.  That is not surprising because dreams, in the Bible, often identify with divine revelation.  They identify with spiritual truth.   Probably the most well-known dreamer was Joseph.  If we go to Genesis 37 (which we will get to eventually, Lord willing), we read of a young Joseph who is 17 years old.  He is the son of Jacob, and he had brothers, and he dreamed a dream concerning them.  It says in Genesis 37:5-11:

And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more. And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed: For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf. And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words. And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth? And his brethren envied him; but his father observed the saying.

Joseph dreamed dreams, and it got him into a lot of trouble.  His brethren hated him all the more when he would have a dream and tell them the dream.  But, you see, these dreams were also inspired by God.  They were coming from God.  They were messages from God.  And we know they were messages from God because they came to pass.  These were not just ordinary, typical dreams that people have.  We can dream something, and we wake up and it has dissipated and gone from us, or maybe we remember it, but it does not mean anything.  But these dreams would be fulfilled in due time according to God’s plan.  So God gave these dreams to Joseph, and later the brothers will bow down to him when he would rise to second in command in Egypt. 

And, by the way, how did Joseph rise to become second in command under Pharaoh?  It was because when he was in prison, he interpreted the butler’s and the baker’s dreams.  Then later, the butler remembered Joseph when Pharaoh had a dream, and Joseph came and interpreted Pharaoh’s dream, which had to do with seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, and so forth.

More than having a historical fulfillment that we will see in the book of Genesis regarding the physical fulfillment of the dreams, there is a deeper spiritual meaning to the dreams.  For example, when Pharaoh had these dreams of a famine, Acts 7 describes that famine as “great tribulation,” so we know that God was not only moving in Joseph when he had his dreams that were later fulfilled, but also it was true of the dreams of Pharaoh and the dreams of the butler and the baker, which Joseph interpreted.

So in the Bible, dreams are one way that God delivered His revelation.  Sometimes He would come to people and speak audibly, or He would move a prophet and give him a vision.  And the difference between a vision and a dream is that in a dream the person is asleep, and in a vision the person is awake, and they begin to see what God wants them to see, even being transported into the heavens.  We have record of that in the Bible.  So the Lord used things like dreams and visions and, for a short while, even tongues.  God used that mainly as a testing program, but He also brought divine revelation through speaking in tongues for a little while.  But once the Bible was completed, God stopped communicating in all these other ways with men.  Never again would He give someone a dream that was “inspired,” or that came from Him and, therefore, should be added to the Word of God, as all divine revelation should be added.  And we know that once the Bible was completed, the Lord ended all supernatural revelation – no more dreams; no more tongues; no more speaking to men outside of the written Word of God, the Bible.  The completed Bible is God’s communication to mankind, and the Bible was compiled through the Lord giving dreams, visions, tongues, and so forth.  For example, let us go to Isaiah 1:1:

The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

We also read in Nahum 1:1:

The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

So, we see that Isaiah received a vision.  That is how he was moved to write down the things we read in that book.  Likewise, the same was true of Nahum.

It says in Habakkuk 1:1:

The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see.

It is not called a “vision,” but that is the idea, as he would “see” whatever God was showing him, like it says in Ezekiel 1:1:

Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

Then he saw that glorious image that was practically impossible to describe, but, ultimately, it says in the last verse, as he tries to sum it up in Ezekiel 1:28:

As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of JEHOVAH. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.

And then God was going to speak, and we have an example in the New Testament of Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, and he was stopped by the Lord Jesus Christ, and he was struck blind, and he heard the voice of the Lord Jesus Christ from heaven.  This is divine revelation as God delivered it to men. 

And, in the case of Jacob, he went to sleep and while he was sleeping, he dreamed a dream of the ladder that was set up.  Now sometimes in the Bible, it is true prophets, like Joseph, that dream dreams.  Or, we could go to Judges 7 regarding the account of Gideon before he went to battle with the Midianites.  And, of course, he was afraid because there were so many of his enemies, but he only had 300 men.   So God wanted to encourage him and strengthen him, and He told him to go down to the enemy camp.  We read in Judges 7:13-14:

And when Gideon was come, behold, there was a man that told a dream unto his fellow, and said, Behold, I dreamed a dream, and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent, and smote it that it fell, and overturned it, that the tent lay along. And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else save the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel: for into his hand hath God delivered Midian, and all the host.

Notice that the dream is not direct (to Gideon).  We might wonder, “Why did God not just have the man dream the interpretation and not have the fellow answer?”  That is, God could have caused the man to say, “I dreamed a dream that Gideon and his sword would defeat the Midianite army.”  But, no, the man dreamed, “…a cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent, and smote it that it fell, and overturned it, that the tent lay along.”  In the dream, there are parables because Christ spoke in parables, and without a parable He did not speak.  God was giving revelation, just as He did in the Gospel accounts with the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the revelation was a parable, and on occasion Jesus would explain the parable.  And, here, the Lord moved another fellow to interpret what the barley cake tumbling into the camp of Midian meant.  It is just further evidence that the Bible is a parable, and we must look for the interpretation.  Even with the gift of tongues in the New Testament, when someone would speak in a tongue, there had to be someone that interpreted.  And we see this with dreams, and it is the same principle, is it not?

Joseph dreamed dreams, and then later he learned the interpretation.  He did not know the interpretation of the dream of his brethren bowing down to him.  But when Pharaoh dreamed dreams or when the butler and the baker dreamed, there was interpretation provided.  Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams.  You see, this was the nature of God’s people as God spoke through dreams, visions, tongues and voices through heaven, and it was all a parable.  That is, it was all a mystery or hidden truth that the people of God must interpret.  And the Holy Spirit is our guide unto all truth as He directs us to the Bible when we want to know something, and we are to compare spiritual with spiritual.  We will follow that methodology later on when we look at the word “ladder,” which is not easy because that particular Hebrew word is only found in that verse in Genesis 28.  But elsewhere in the Bible, as we allow the Bible to define its own terms, we will come up with a wonderful spiritual definition for the world “ladder.”  Then we will see why it is set up from the earth to heaven.  And we will understand, by God’s grace, who the angels are that are ascending and descending upon it.

But before we do that, we are going to discuss “dreams” a little bit more.  Yes – God would give true prophets dreams and interpretations of dreams, and He would bring revelation through it.  But there were also deceitful men in those days – men in whom there was guile – and we read about one instance in Jeremiah 23:25-28:

I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that prophesy lies? yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own heart; Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers have forgotten my name for Baal. The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith JEHOVAH.

Here, God is connecting those that dream dreams and tell their dreams to “prophesying.”  And there are false prophets.  And the link that is being made is that someone that speaks a false dream is a false prophet.  And we will see that relationship or tie-in in a couple of other places, but we will have to discuss that more when we get together in our next Bible study.