Genesis 28:10-22
Jacob's Dream at Bethel, Makes Him Feel that God is Near
10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Harran. 11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the Lord, and he said: “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” 17 He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
18 Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz.
20 Then Jacob made a vow, saying, “If God will be with me and will watch over me on this journey I am taking and will give me food to eat and clothes to wear 21 so that I return safely to my father’s household, then the Lord will be my God 22 and this stone that I have set up as a pillar will be God’s house, and of all that you give me I will give you a tenth.”
Jeremiah 23:23-24
God is Near
23 Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off?
24 Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.
Psalm 145:18
God is Near
18 The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
Acts 17:26-27
God is Near
26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
When we encounter God we each probably act differently...Encountering God makes us aware of this current moment, and that we near Him and in the present moment...And I think it is possible that we learn something about ourselves when we encounter Him...And we may get this great sense of our LORD's greatness, and what it means when the authors say that God is Almighty...We may also recognize we miss things in our lives, such as Jacob, when he explains when he stops and sleeps at Bethel one night...Jacob the Patriarch said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it."...Jacob may have thought about God often, but by what he said he may have never thought God was always around him, and around all things...And when we have this encounter we feel the Spiritual, and maybe even be surprised by His Joy or startled by His Presence...And then we realize He is near, and has always been near us, as Jeremiah writes, and as the Psalmist tells us, and as Paul explained...
When Jacob was in Bethel and had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with the stairway top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it...He saw God...There above the stairway stood the Lord, and He said: “I AM the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac...I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying...Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south...All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring...I AM with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you....
I believe Jacob had probably heard this story from his Dad Isaac, and by his grandfather Abraham...And when Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”...He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place!...This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”...
Thomas Aquinas was a genius and prolific writer of theology...It is said that writing was like breathing to St. Thomas Aquinas, but something happened to him on December 6th, 1273...On that date and during the feast of St. Nicholas, he would no longer write...And he was one of the great writers of faith...But after that date he no longer wrote...Something had happened to him...He saw a vision or had a great thought about our LORD...And all the great things that he had written compared to what he had ever seen or encountered, seemed to him now to be of little worth to him...Thomas was finishing up his latest book, Summary of Theology...And the book would not be finished...The Saint's vision may have been a vision of heaven, we are not sure...But the Saint compared this vision or this thought, or this mystic feeling to which all he had done, no matter how good or great his writings, they now seemed of little or of much less value...We can only speculate on that point...Some say Thomas saw Jesus, and now everything was just straw...When Thomas was later asked by Brother Reginald, his friend and secretary, why don't you return to your writing, Aquinas said, "I can write no more...I have seen things that make my writings like straw."...
And others say that Thomas (and maybe at a different time) heard the voice of Jesus say to him, "You have written well of Me, Thomas"...And if this is the case, then we can see why St. Thomas Aquinas saw that other things now looked like straw...He had seen the Presence of Jesus...And Thomas would change...St. Thomas would die three months after the feast of St. Nicholas...His life forever changed...
C. S. Lewis defined joy as a faith encounter...Lewis explained (to a friend) that he did not mean “joy” as having everything going well in one's life...Lewis stated, “In fact I meant by ‘things going well’ just that security – or illusion of security – which you also regard as unhealthy...Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony,” he wrote...“It jumps under one’s ribs and tickles down one’s back and makes one forget meals and keeps one (delightedly) sleepless o’ nights...It shocks one awake when the other puts one to sleep...My private table is one second of joy is worth 12 hours of Pleasure...I think you really quite agree with me.”...In Lewis' book Surprised by Joy, he talks about his conversion and his first belief in God, after being an atheist all his life -he would meet God..."You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet...That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me...In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."...
These three men experienced God... It was this experience through which they saw not only themselves, but they saw the world differently, they saw the Word of God maybe differently, and they now saw Creator for the rest of their lives, also a little differently...He was near, just as the Psalmist, Jeremiah, and Paul had said...And in His nearness they felt this Joy...