September 3, 2025 • 50 mins
In this episode of the Legacy Bible Podcast, we explore Genesis 28:10–15 where Jacob encounters a dream of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. Pastor Chuck Rains unpacks the meaning of this vision, showing how it points forward to Jesus Christ as the true access between God and man. From Jacob’s entanglements in life to Nathaniel’s encounter with Jesus in John 1, this message reminds us that our hope, help, and salvation are found only in Him. No striving, no running, no collapsing—God’s answer is surrender to His Son, the ladder that connects heaven and earth.
📝 Show Notes:
- Scripture Focus: Genesis 28:10–15; John 1:43–51
- Jacob’s struggle: running instead of surrendering.
- The ladder vision: angels ascending and descending, representing access to God.
- Not our striving or good works, but Christ Himself is the true ladder.
- Nathaniel’s encounter with Jesus—“You are the Son of God, the King of Israel.”
- The Old Testament promises fulfilled in Christ, the Seed of Jacob.
- God’s call to stop fleeing life’s entanglements and run into Him.
- Practical encouragement: God is involved in every detail of our lives.
Key Takeaway: Only in Jesus Christ do we find access to heaven and the power to live free from life’s entanglements. He is the way, the truth, and the life.
Thanks for Listening
Thanks for listening and please subscribe. if you have any comments or questions please send them to legacybiblepodcast@gmail.com you can check out the website at www.legacybiblepodcast.com Fellowship Bible Church website is at wwwfbcjoliet.com please come back every week for another legacy lesson from the bible by the Re. Chuck Rains.Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Hello and welcome to the Legacy Bible podcast, a place where you were here, legacy lessons
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from Legacy Audio, from tapes that were once in the tape archive of the Fellowship Bible
Church in Joliet, Illinois.
My name is Marcus and we're bringing to you another one by our pastor, the Reverend Chuck
Rains.
This one is from, let's see, November 10th, 1991, and it's called Jacob's Ladder, God's
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Way of Access Through Christ.
All the way back from 1991.
All right, sounds good.
So last week was about Abraham and today about Jacob and I don't know, next week, maybe
another one about Jacob.
I'm not sure.
We'll find out.
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All right, so take it away, Pastor Reins.
I'm going to read from Genesis 28 verses 10 through 15.
At this last time I want to think on it in a new dimension today as we build the story
of Jacob that I'm going to read here, Genesis 28 verses 10 through 15.
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Now Jacob went out from Bersheva and went toward Heran, so he came to a certain place
and stayed there all night because the sun had set and he took one of the stones of that
place and put it at his head and he lay down in that place to sleep.
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Then he dreamed and behold, the ladder was set up on the earth and its top reached to
heaven and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father
and the God of Isaac.
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The land on which you lie I will give to you in your descendants.
Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth.
You shall spread abroad to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south.
And in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
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Behold I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land
where I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
Father, thank you for this blessed privilege of coming together on the Lord's Day.
What refreshment to the soul this time can be?
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Some meet today out of formal obligation and perhaps sensing that it is the right thing
to do, never quite understand why.
It seems to be no life, no encouragement in some places, Lord.
Seems to be no heart, knit with the other in love.
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Let thank you for that blessing in this place.
We pray that we might hear from heaven this morning now as you would speak through your
word in Jesus name.
Amen.
Intanglements in life really is where I want to start.
You go along in life and like the tentacles of a thousand leg doctorate, you know, the
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difficulties of life can grab on to you and you can get ensnared in them.
It seems that the older you get, the more energy you may put into it, the more you try,
the more entangled you can get.
You've ever seen a kitten play with a ball of yarn that has come undone at one end?
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It might have started out as a very orderly, neat little ball, but when the kitten gets
through with it, by no means, this is going to be a neat little ball.
The kitten might have that kind of wound around its paws and its neck and be laying
on its back, scratching away at it.
And sometimes, if you leave it down there long enough, you probably say the best thing
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to do with this ball of yarn now or this wad of yarn is just to throw it away.
No way am I going to get this untangled and make it useful again.
Life gets like that sometimes, especially for those that try to live life and make it work
in our own self effort because self effort, the scriptures give us the authority for saying
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this, self effort always lead to failures.
People use things like deceit, lies, manipulations, their own reasonings, their struggles, sometimes
even come to the place of fighting in those struggles.
They try to use physical force, they try to use force of argument.
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They deceive themselves sometimes even in that.
Then you have those emotional offers that people use to try to overcome arguments of
others or resistance from others.
They use intimidation, the force of mission.
And some, after all of that, go on.
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They don't come to an end of themselves.
They might go on with, I'm going to call it, resigned endurance.
I'm going to go on no matter how thick the mud gets, no matter how difficult it is, I'm
going to go on.
You might just call those folks stubborn.
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How about this one?
This is stubborn person also.
Dogget determination.
I don't care how much of life has let me down or how difficult things have gotten.
I'm going to go on and I'm going to make it work.
And they work.
Slevish, slavish work.
But life by that means is never going to mean that they arrive at a place of fulfillment
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and happiness.
It's not possible.
It just leads to more difficulty and more entanglements, more problems.
So what should we do?
Well there are three answers that God offers one of these.
In fact, let me take it through the first two.
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One is quit.
Just quit.
Collapse.
Give up.
Give up physically.
Just stop trying.
And give up mentally.
There are people that actually collapse mentally and just blank out of reality.
They're just through.
They don't want to fight anymore.
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They're done.
The other major answer or solution that men would say is not to quit but to run.
Just leave it all behind.
Get away from it.
Young people wish they could run away when they're very young and then gets to be shocking
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that even at about the age of 10, 11, 12, they start
running away.
America has a fantastic runaway rate from 12 years and up.
Hundreds of thousands of young people run away from home every year.
They hit the streets and get entangled in all the sin of the world out there trying
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to just find a way to live, to eat.
But when you run to get out of one situation, what you usually find is that you get into
another one that may be even worse.
No solutions in running and there's no solution in collapsing and giving up.
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God offers another way.
Men hate this way.
It's not really collapsing but I'm going to call it what the scripture would, breaking
or yielding before God.
Not collapsing on the whole idea of life but just learning to set your pride and your
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will aside and come before God and yield to Him.
Confessing your failures, your sin.
Crying out for mercy and the wonderful thing is that God is indeed a God of mercy.
Now you could go that far but if God wasn't a God of mercy, you would just be right back,
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I guess, where the person that just collapsed did come to the same place of having no answer.
But with God, if you come to that place, He has mercy.
He is rich in mercy.
He has provided an answer of forgiveness in His Son, the Lord Jesus.
Now with that background in your mind, let's go to Jacob.
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Jacob's answer was, I'm going to run.
See, he didn't collapse and just give up mentally and physically.
He ran.
That was his answer.
And here in Genesis 28, I read the section, we've already read it, verse 10 to 15, he
ran away from his homeland in Canaan with his father and mother and his brother and
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he ran back to the relatives of his mother back up on that fertile crescent, back up
near the top of that fertile crescent, back there at her ran.
He ran back for her ran.
Along the way, he was apparently going along the ridge route, we call it, in Israel, right
dead right through the heart of Israel going north.
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He ran and he came by the end of the day, the sun had set and he knew it was time to
lay down.
He came to a place along that ridge route and just took a stone, laid it down for his
head and went to sleep.
While he slept, God brought a dream to him.
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And the dream is in verse 12, chapter 28, then he dreamed and behold, a ladder was set
up on the earth and its top reached to heaven and there the angels of God were ascending
and descending on it and behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God
of Abraham, your father and the God of Jacob, the land on which you lie will give to you
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in your descendants.
He had a dream.
It was a God-given dream.
The vision was of a ladder that stretched from the earth to heaven and you are going
to get the picture in your mind, a ladder touching down on earth, reaching up to heaven.
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And then up there, especially as he looked up to heaven, he could see the angels of God
coming down the ladder and going up the ladder.
So apparently it was a wide enough, some have called it staircase, depending on how
you handle the word.
There was a wide enough channel there for angels to be coming down and going up.
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And there was the Lord right at the top of the ladder.
You over here the old song, We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder.
I want to tell you something.
I hate to do this to some of you, but it isn't scriptural.
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Now you look at the scripture and see who was climbing Jacob's Ladder, the saints, the
Israelites, the deceased saints that were with God in heaven.
How about the undoddly people trying to get there?
That wouldn't work.
You know who was climbing Jacob's ladder?
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Angels.
They were going down and going up, going down and going up.
Is that not a picture of access to heaven?
Yes, it is.
Shouldn't people have access to heaven?
Yes, they should in the mercy of God, in the grace of God.
But the scene here is not of people going up and down, but of angels going up and down
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on that route of access.
Why can angels go up and down?
Because angels, as we were not talking about those fallen angels, were not talking about
the ones that have been judged and cast down as Jesus says in Luke's gospel.
They don't have that kind of freedom in God's presence.
So indeed in the book of Job we find Satan as the accuser there is talking to God.
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But the access to God's presence to and from is for his angels, the holy angels, and the
word angel means messenger.
Now what would they be leaving heaven with and what would they be going back for?
They're messengers.
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Notice where their business has to take them.
The latter touches earth.
Those messengers of God, if you want a great chapter on this, the great chapter on angels
is Hebrews chapter 1.
Great chapter, probably the central chapter in the word of God on angels.
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No question about their existence.
No question of them being a special creation of God, special order of creation.
They are messengers.
Whether you use the Greek word or the Hebrew word, they are messengers of God.
They are servants of God sent out on behalf of others.
And guess who they come to serve.
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Guess who they bring their messages to.
Guess who they're sent out to have a part in whose lives they're to have a part.
Angel Hebrews 1 tells us, they minister on behalf of whom people.
Anybody know?
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The heirs of salvation.
Now who are they?
Angels?
Angels?
No.
Men.
People.
People who have received God's salvation.
The angels have special ministry on behalf of God's children.
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Coming down, going up, there's activity, there's business, they're going about their business
to minister the grace of God and work somehow.
I don't really know what they do for God's children.
We have a lot of indications from the Scripture of things that they get involved in.
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But when it comes right down to it, what do they do for you?
Are they the ones that caused you to find that little patch of solid road when you were
slipping on the ice last winter and the cars started to go into a skid and suddenly, oop,
there was just enough little road there that gets you straightened out?
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Did the angel put it there?
I don't know.
You'd have to blow his hot breath on the place to make room for that patch of road to come
through before you got there.
You're going to be in trouble.
I don't know.
I personally never thought of an angel doing anything like that, but I guess they could.
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I'm not going to limit what they could do, but they are ministers for our sake.
Do they resist Satan and the forces of Satan?
There is no question about that in the Word of God.
That is one of the things they do on our behalf.
There is spiritual warfare going on in heavenly places, and they minister on their behalf,
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bringing messages of answers of prayer.
No question about that either from Daniel's book.
There is so much that they're involved in, but they're not the source of it.
The one at the top of the ladder is the source.
Who is that, the Lord?
Now on what grounds by what logic do the angels have the access to our lives to bring us the
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provisions of God for our lives, the care and provision?
Hebrews again tells you the heirs of salvation.
Never in the Scriptures are we told that angels minister on behalf of those who don't know
Christ.
Never we told that the angels communicate with for the purposes of blessing those who don't
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know Christ, those who are not God's children.
We do see them in a threatening stance like the cherubim that were at the entrance to
the Garden of Eden.
They were set there to keep anybody else from coming in and eating of the tree of life.
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But the minister on behalf of to do service for in the name of God to come and minister
on behalf of God's children and only God's children.
That's their assignment.
They're coming up and down that ladder, up and down that ladder.
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Somehow, somehow God was going to legitimately make provisions so that there was grounds for
the angels to minister to children of this earth who had become children of God.
Jacob didn't see the whole scene.
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There is this follow through in the verses after that that there was going to be a acting
out for Jacob and for his descendants.
These promises that God had made to Abraham.
You can read that verse 14.
And then when he gets 13 and 14 and when you get to verse 15, there are some personal promises
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to Jacob that he's going to be brought back to that land, to that place, and God was going
to fulfill these promises.
And that's basically the outline of that.
He's going to come back to that place.
What do you learn from that?
Well, look at verse 15.
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Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land
for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
You see the you, you, you, you, there.
What you have is this.
God is going to do a work in this earth and Jacob is going to be the vessel among men through
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whom he's going to do it.
And he says, not only to him, but to his seed.
Verse 14, also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth and shall spread abroad
the West and so forth.
And in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
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So you have Jacob and his seed.
I want to point out to you that it is in this case singular, not plural seed.
Now we can say, but doesn't that apply to all the generations of Jacob?
You know, the Israelites that we're going to come forth from Jacob, the 12 tribes and
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so forth.
Yes, it does, but God was even being more specific than that.
He was saying in a sense, there is one who is going to be in your gene line Jacob.
There is one through whom I am going to bring the blessing to all the families of the earth.
You see, that's the verse 14.
And in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
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Down there through the years, you're going to have descendants Jacob, but one day one
will come and through that one, there will come a blessing available to all the families
of the earth.
And I read this literally, people, that God was saying, I am going to provide the perfect
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blessing and that the scriptures only know one and that is salvation for all the nations.
And I read it this way, all the families of the earth, all the families of the earth.
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Please read it that way, all the families of the earth, you and your descendants.
Now we know God is going to do something in that land.
He's going to do it through Jacob's descendants and in particular, he's going to do it through
one called his seed.
He's going to do a work that will blast the whole world.
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You've got the details here if you will receive them.
Jacob didn't see all of that.
He couldn't understand all of that.
But that one was going to be a human being, it was going to be a descendant of Jacob.
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The angels were just messengers.
They went up and down.
Notice they were not stationary on the earth, they were going up and down.
Their home is in heaven.
The source of their message and their service is in heaven.
The place of their service and the bringing of the message is earth.
So they have to go up and down, up and down, they are not stationary in the earth.
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Now there are some evil angels that are stationary in the earth.
You know why the demons are stationary in the earth?
Because they have been cast down.
They have been cast down.
They don't have the fellowship with God, the peace with God, the righteous standing
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in the presence of the Lord that the holy angels have.
But these angels were not stationary in the earth.
They were vessels for the work that God was going to do on the earth.
They were messengers.
And God had established Jacob and Jacob's descendants as the ones to be stationary
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on the earth through whom he was going to do the work.
Jacob was stationary in the earth.
Jacob could not climb that ladder, not in his own strength, and he didn't have that
excess yet.
I have to say yet.
He couldn't climb the ladder, but he was the vessel.
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He was stationary down here.
He was going to be the vessel to bring out a people.
And out of that people there was going to be one on the earth that God was going to
do a work through for the sake of all the nations.
Salvation.
Now, to get a further insight into this, I have to let the scriptures interpret the scriptures.
I've got to take you to John's first chapter, John chapter 1 at verse 43.
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Please turn over the gospel of John chapter 1.
And on chapter 1 verse 43.
Let me read.
The following day Jesus wanted to go to Galilee, and he found Philip and said to him,
follow me.
Now Philip was from the Theta, the city of Andrew and Peter.
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Philip found the Thaniel and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and
also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
So when we read this, it immediately takes us down to this thought.
Philip saying to Nathaniel, we have found him.
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We found the one that Moses wrote about and the prophets wrote about.
Now that means you wouldn't even have to be much of a Bible scholar to understand
this, that you should be able to go back to the writings of Moses, Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and find one in there that he was writing about that
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was going to come one day.
It would mean that you could go back and read the prophets.
Read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Hosea and Joel, name is no guy
a mike, and read them.
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Read what David wrote.
Read what Joel wrote.
Joel was a prophet.
You don't know what he wrote.
Think of him as one, but he was.
Read what they wrote.
They wrote about one that was going to come one day.
And a wonderful thing about this statement is there's this teaching of unification.
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In other words, by what Nathaniel's saying, he's saying, oh, there is one, not several,
but one that these various writers were writing about.
Now you find Moses writing about several people.
And indeed, those several people may from time to time get mentioned in the different
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writings of the prophets.
But there is one that the prophets and Moses all wrote about, one that is central and unites
all the writings.
He holds the office of prophet, of priest and king.
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And he's the only one in all the scriptures that holds all those three offices.
He is variously called the prophet, the one.
He seems never to be named, not with the kind of name that men have, like John or Andrew
or Philip or Bartholomew or Thaddeus.
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No, no, he doesn't have a name like that.
He just is called the one.
He's called the anointed one, which in Hebrew is Messiah.
The one anointed to reign.
He's never really given a name.
And yet we find out that he is, as he's just revealed it to Jacob, he is going to be from
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Jacob's line.
He's going to be a man, but we don't know his name.
What is his name?
Where is his town?
Well, Philip says, I know that now.
I've got it.
I've got it put together.
I've got the thing about the one and I've got his name now in his town.
It's Jesus of Nazareth.
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Never revealed in the Old Testament just that way.
Oh, we find out in Michael.
He used to be born where?
Bethlehem.
He used to be of Judah, city of David, Bethlehem.
But you see, what if he moved around?
What if he didn't stay in Bethlehem?
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What if he grew up in some other town?
He didn't make it hard to find him, right?
Guess what?
He grew up in Nazareth.
Nazareth that back would see hillbilly town of Northern Israel.
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In that poor growing area up on that outcropping of rock, you know, that's north of that wonderful
Jezreal plain.
Back in the hills there, just up on the top.
But why in the world did you build a city up there when all that nice land was down the
slope, you know?
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But these people clinging to life up here in these rocks, they were really hillbilly.
They were up in the rocks.
They were the poor folk.
They didn't have the rich land.
It was only a mile away.
Two miles, I should say, two miles away.
They were up on the rocks.
They were the poor folk.
They were the hill folk.
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They didn't have much.
They were eking out their lives up there.
You know where he was from?
Nazareth.
I felt so excited.
We found him.
We found him.
Jesus is his name, Old Testament that would be called Joshua.
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See?
Same name.
Greek is Jesus.
Hebrew would tell you it's Joshua.
In Jewish name Joshua.
He's from Nazareth.
Now, Nathaniel is a very practical man.
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He looks at things as they are in the real world.
He knows Nazareth.
It's like me standing up here this morning and telling you, oh, I met a man.
He's a great godly man.
I think one of the most godly men I met and most effective for the Lord Jesus.
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He lives on the south side of Chicago down a dead-end alley in the basement apartment filled
with rats.
You'd say, what?
Yeah, you could just smell the stench of the garbage where he lives.
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You know, out in the alley there.
Yet he lives in his own little place.
And you'd say, well, not very good proof of him being this great godly person, you say,
coming from a place like that.
Now, what are you going to do?
Judge him outwardly or inwardly?
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How are you going to judge him?
You know how Nathaniel judged him outwardly.
And Nathaniel says, pretty blunt about it, can anything good come out of Nazareth?
What did Nathaniel know about things from Nazareth?
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Did he know of anything good coming out of there?
Apparently not.
Probably poor, back woodsy.
Everything really good.
Where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world to spend your whole life?
Juliet.
No, Juliet is not the garden spot of America.
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You only have to be led here, you know, or born here or driven here or something.
But you know, you don't find people sitting down out in sunny California saying, oh,
if I could only get to Chile yet.
And listen, after they build their gambling casinos down here and get some more prostitutes
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on the street and then have a little more bankruptcy around and a little more sin on
the streets, I'm sure it's not going to increase the desirability of the place.
I speak to you folk that are here.
And to me, to my family, I'm not proud of what's going on.
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If we went out and told people, well, you ought to retire in the one wonderful place
I found and then you told them where it was.
You know, I read something in the newspaper a week ago, it said about the city council
that they're happy that now Juliet is going to have a standing among the communities of
the state that will make it much more attractive to people.
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President, and I thought I must have missed something somewhere, you know.
I wouldn't want to be on the chamber of commerce trying to sell this line to the world.
I really don't expect an influx from Florida.
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I see from the worst areas unless people come for specific job reasons or family reasons.
It's hard pressed to say they're here for the beauty of the weather.
Basically we share it with a bunch of other places that are nicer to live maybe, but they're
not here maybe for the beauty of the land.
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I don't know.
We're here for very special reasons.
And frankly, I think of it as a wonderful place to live because I'm at peace about being here
and I just have the most wonderful, blessed circumstances to live in.
I have you folks and I have my family.
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And I can just be as happy and content here as anywhere on this earth because my lord has
said, this is your place.
And he's given a wonderful, wonderful, blessed fellowship.
And if I was over in Hawaii right now and didn't have this, I'd be like a fish out
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of water.
And so would you.
Don't be an Nathaniel.
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?
Now I would ask you, could any good thing come out of Nazareth?
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The answer of the scriptures is that God's most wonderful gift to mankind came out of
Nazareth.
The most wonderful thing in all of eternity came out of Nazareth.
The most wonderful gift to the world, salvation came out of Nazareth.
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Now Nathaniel needs some convincing.
He certainly does.
Philip says, with some confidence I think, come and see.
That's all it's going to take, Nathaniel.
You just come and see.
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So he came.
Now while he was coming, Jesus saw him coming.
See, there it's coming to Daniel down the road, Jesus saw him.
And just about the time he gets within the earshot as he draws near to the Lord Jesus,
he says something about Nathaniel to the people around him.
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Isn't him talked in the Daniel yet?
He's not talking to Nathaniel right now.
He's talking to the people around him, the other disciples, maybe.
They're just gathering, by the way, they're just gathering together.
Nathaniel's going to be one of the twelve and Philip is and Peter and Andrew and James
and John, but they're not all brought together yet as disciples.
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So but there are some people around him and Jesus says, Behold an Israelite indeed,
in whom is no guile.
He looked and he saw Nathaniel and he knew Nathaniel's heart.
He knew what kind of man Nathaniel was, no guile.
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Somebody without guile is somebody that isn't trying to hurt others, isn't bitter, isn't
filled with anger.
But it really, the idea of not having guile is somebody that looks for truth, is willing
(37:52):
to see truth and when he sees it, is willing to accept truth.
In other words, somebody with a pure heart, a pure heart, not an evil heart, not somebody
trying to find fault, but somebody that lives a life of truth and is willing to recognize
(38:17):
it and accept it when he finds it in others.
As hard as that may be sometimes to start with a place like Nazareth and look for truth
and find it and accept it, he still was a man of truth.
If he could be shown it, he was ready to receive it.
And Jesus emphasized that about him as he was coming.
He was obviously coming to test, to test Jesus and Jesus.
(38:41):
The first thing he says about him, that's a man without guile.
In other words, he will give it the true test.
He will not be prejudiced.
His heart's not filled with evil.
As he comes and makes examination of me, Jesus is saying, he will test me and be truthful
to himself before God and yield to the truth that he finds.
(39:02):
Wow.
Can Nathaniel live up to that?
Nathaniel doesn't turn around.
He comes on to the Lord Jesus.
And Nathaniel said to him, how do you know me?
He doesn't say that's not true.
He just says, how do you know me?
How do you know these things about me?
(39:25):
Jesus must have described Nathaniel in a way that struck to the very heart of what Nathaniel
knew about himself.
He was a man of what we would call today a man of integrity.
He could not go against what he truly believed.
He was not a man seeking evil and an excuse to go his own way.
(39:52):
He was a man who was truly open to truth and to God.
How do you know me?
And the answer is so simple.
He says, the Lord Jesus said to him before Philip called you, when you were under the
(40:15):
fig tree, I saw you.
Very, very specific.
If you ever wonder, and there are some people that teach this kind of stuff, that God is
not involved with you on a detail by detail basis in your life.
(40:36):
If you want to know the will of God and you want to walk along with God, don't expect
God to be involved in everything that goes on in your life.
But I want to tell you something.
God does know everything there is to know about you, the very hairs of your head are numbered.
He is involved in every detail of your life and he is involved in what goes on every minute
(40:57):
of that life.
He wouldn't tell you pray without ceasing in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving, make your request known unto God if he wasn't interested in everything that
goes on in your life and wanting to be involved in everything specifically.
Specifically he was under a fig tree.
I don't know which one, but Nathaniel did.
(41:20):
It wasn't, you know, you have been under fig trees in your life.
It isn't that.
And you are under the fig tree.
Something went on.
And we get a clue of what went on.
(41:43):
First by Nathaniel's fantastic response.
His response just tells you he has found the truth.
He has found the one that is the truth.
He has found the one that Moses wrote about.
He has found the one the prophets wrote about.
He has found the Messiah.
It's an answer that tells you all of his doubts are removed.
(42:06):
He says, you are the son of God.
You are the king of Israel.
See king of Israel means the one anointed to reign.
That's Messiah.
And the son of God is related in the scriptures in the Old Testament to deliverance.
Like the one under the appearance as one having the appearance of the son of God that
(42:32):
was in the furnace with the three men.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
He was with them in the fire and brought them out.
He delivered them.
You are that one.
And Jesus said to him, most assuredly I say to you, here after you shall see the one
(42:55):
under the sea, now get this, you shall see heaven open.
And the angels of God descending and ascending upon the son of man.
And there you have the Old Testament revelation taken to the New Testament and given further
(43:16):
revelation.
Jacob saw the latter descending to the earth.
And indeed it touched the earth where Jacob was in the land.
And it was related to God bringing a blessing through Jacob's line and through Jacob's seed.
And now in John 1 we have the revelation of who that seed is by the Lord Jesus saying
(43:41):
that the latter touches down on the son of man.
How does the latter make touch with the earth?
How does it make contact with the earth?
On the son of man.
That's the contact that the bladder makes with the earth.
You want to get on Jacob's ladder?
Please listen, there is only one way, one truth and one life that you can possibly ever
(44:09):
have to gain entrance into heaven.
And there is one way to get on Jacob's ladder.
Through the son of man.
Because the latter rests on him.
You've got to come through the Lord Jesus to have access to heaven.
Now if you're going to climb Jacob's ladder, if you're going to gain access to heaven,
(44:33):
it's because you have received the Lord Jesus.
Not by your good works.
That song suggests you know by good works.
No.
Our climbing is our good works.
That's wrong.
That's unbiblical.
That's a lie.
You can climb that ladder by faith in the Lord Jesus.
(44:55):
You can come through the son of man.
That's taking the Old Testament and letting the New Testament give you the fuller revelation.
Jacob didn't see that.
He didn't understand that.
He isn't the man of faith.
But God was promising, I'm going to do it through you Jacob and through your seed.
(45:18):
What God wants is people that in the entanglements of life instead of fleeing like Jacob and
getting themselves more and more entangled will realize that they can have the ministry
of God on their lives.
The angels of God are there to help in the lives of those that are the heirs of salvation.
(45:40):
God is involved in our lives, whether we're under the fig tree or the apple tree.
He wants to minister grace in your life as his child.
You can only know that salvation through the Lord Jesus.
You need and struggle with this life and get more and more entangled, but learn the lesson
(46:05):
of surrender in everything day by day, item by item, event by event, hour by hour, moment
by moment because your Lord loves you with that kind of love.
He has an answer for you today and for your hour and for your minute.
(46:27):
And it's all through the Lord Jesus.
There is no other way, truth or life, but through Him.
In Him everything is summed up.
He is the sum of all things for us.
Don't flee as Jacob with any trouble.
(46:48):
If you don't know Christ, don't flee.
He's your only hope of salvation.
If you know Him, don't flee trying to deal with life because God's holding his arms wide
open like he did for Jacob and he's saying, if you're going to run, run into me.
My answer is in my son.
Well, let's pray.
(47:12):
Father, thank you for the wonders of how the Old and the New Testament tell us of the Lord
Jesus, Moses and all the prophets lead to Him.
How we can see, as Nathaniel did that day, that the grace of our God is available to
us through no other but you, Lord Jesus.
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As your children, we have problems.
We have some today that we need to talk to you about.
Thank you for wanting to be involved in every part of our lives, having an answer for every
problem and every need.
I pray that we might be a people that can encourage one another with testimonies of
how by letting you have your way in our lives you have given graciously, fully, wonderfully
(48:00):
your children.
Lord Jesus, bring us to an end of ourselves like Nathaniel and keep us at your feet rejoicing
and praising the one that is the Son of God, the King of Israel, in your precious name,
(48:29):
amen.
There we have it for this week.
Thank you, Pastor Raines, for another message from the Word of God.
Thank you, listeners, for listening in, especially those that are on our new platform, Rumble.
Rumble is kind of a, I don't know, kind of like YouTube, but I wanted to try it out for
(48:52):
a while.
I got starting.
I don't know if it was the last episode or the one before, but I'm going to start posting
there now, so we'll see how it does on Rumble.
So thank you, Rumble, listeners, for listening in, and please subscribe.
And no matter where you're listening, please subscribe.
And if you don't want to subscribe, you can please comment, right?
(49:15):
Yeah, comment's good.
I like that.
And if you want to go check out our website, I don't know if I really pushed the website
that often, but it's the www.legacybiblepodcast.com.
And there you can also comment or ask questions or you can listen to the back episodes there.
(49:41):
We have all the way back to episode number one.
So you can do that.
There's transcripts there that are slowly, but surely being put up there.
But you can check those out too.
Those are really well done transcripts.
Plus a few little lecture little things like news and stuff like that.
(50:05):
I'm trying to find out stuff to put on the website.
So you can check that out.
So thank you for listening and please come back again next week and make sure you read
your Bible every day.
That's always a good thing.
There's no downside to that.
So make sure you read your Bible every day.
(50:27):
And I'll see you next week and have a great day.
See you next time.
Hello and welcome to the Legacy Bible podcast, a place where you were here, legacy lessons
(00:15):
from Legacy Audio, from tapes that were once in the tape archive of the Fellowship Bible
Church in Joliet, Illinois.
My name is Marcus and we're bringing to you another one by our pastor, the Reverend Chuck
Rains.
This one is from, let's see, November 10th, 1991, and it's called Jacob's Ladder, God's
(00:41):
Way of Access Through Christ.
All the way back from 1991.
All right, sounds good.
So last week was about Abraham and today about Jacob and I don't know, next week, maybe
another one about Jacob.
I'm not sure.
We'll find out.
(01:02):
All right, so take it away, Pastor Reins.
I'm going to read from Genesis 28 verses 10 through 15.
At this last time I want to think on it in a new dimension today as we build the story
of Jacob that I'm going to read here, Genesis 28 verses 10 through 15.
(01:28):
Now Jacob went out from Bersheva and went toward Heran, so he came to a certain place
and stayed there all night because the sun had set and he took one of the stones of that
place and put it at his head and he lay down in that place to sleep.
(01:49):
Then he dreamed and behold, the ladder was set up on the earth and its top reached to
heaven and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father
and the God of Isaac.
(02:11):
The land on which you lie I will give to you in your descendants.
Also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth.
You shall spread abroad to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south.
And in you and in your seed all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
(02:33):
Behold I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land
where I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
Father, thank you for this blessed privilege of coming together on the Lord's Day.
What refreshment to the soul this time can be?
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Some meet today out of formal obligation and perhaps sensing that it is the right thing
to do, never quite understand why.
It seems to be no life, no encouragement in some places, Lord.
Seems to be no heart, knit with the other in love.
(03:16):
Let thank you for that blessing in this place.
We pray that we might hear from heaven this morning now as you would speak through your
word in Jesus name.
Amen.
Intanglements in life really is where I want to start.
You go along in life and like the tentacles of a thousand leg doctorate, you know, the
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difficulties of life can grab on to you and you can get ensnared in them.
It seems that the older you get, the more energy you may put into it, the more you try,
the more entangled you can get.
You've ever seen a kitten play with a ball of yarn that has come undone at one end?
(04:12):
It might have started out as a very orderly, neat little ball, but when the kitten gets
through with it, by no means, this is going to be a neat little ball.
The kitten might have that kind of wound around its paws and its neck and be laying
on its back, scratching away at it.
And sometimes, if you leave it down there long enough, you probably say the best thing
(04:33):
to do with this ball of yarn now or this wad of yarn is just to throw it away.
No way am I going to get this untangled and make it useful again.
Life gets like that sometimes, especially for those that try to live life and make it work
in our own self effort because self effort, the scriptures give us the authority for saying
(04:54):
this, self effort always lead to failures.
People use things like deceit, lies, manipulations, their own reasonings, their struggles, sometimes
even come to the place of fighting in those struggles.
They try to use physical force, they try to use force of argument.
(05:18):
They deceive themselves sometimes even in that.
Then you have those emotional offers that people use to try to overcome arguments of
others or resistance from others.
They use intimidation, the force of mission.
And some, after all of that, go on.
(05:39):
They don't come to an end of themselves.
They might go on with, I'm going to call it, resigned endurance.
I'm going to go on no matter how thick the mud gets, no matter how difficult it is, I'm
going to go on.
You might just call those folks stubborn.
(06:02):
How about this one?
This is stubborn person also.
Dogget determination.
I don't care how much of life has let me down or how difficult things have gotten.
I'm going to go on and I'm going to make it work.
And they work.
Slevish, slavish work.
But life by that means is never going to mean that they arrive at a place of fulfillment
(06:27):
and happiness.
It's not possible.
It just leads to more difficulty and more entanglements, more problems.
So what should we do?
Well there are three answers that God offers one of these.
In fact, let me take it through the first two.
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One is quit.
Just quit.
Collapse.
Give up.
Give up physically.
Just stop trying.
And give up mentally.
There are people that actually collapse mentally and just blank out of reality.
They're just through.
They don't want to fight anymore.
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They're done.
The other major answer or solution that men would say is not to quit but to run.
Just leave it all behind.
Get away from it.
Young people wish they could run away when they're very young and then gets to be shocking
(07:32):
that even at about the age of 10, 11, 12, they start
running away.
America has a fantastic runaway rate from 12 years and up.
Hundreds of thousands of young people run away from home every year.
They hit the streets and get entangled in all the sin of the world out there trying
(07:55):
to just find a way to live, to eat.
But when you run to get out of one situation, what you usually find is that you get into
another one that may be even worse.
No solutions in running and there's no solution in collapsing and giving up.
(08:17):
God offers another way.
Men hate this way.
It's not really collapsing but I'm going to call it what the scripture would, breaking
or yielding before God.
Not collapsing on the whole idea of life but just learning to set your pride and your
(08:38):
will aside and come before God and yield to Him.
Confessing your failures, your sin.
Crying out for mercy and the wonderful thing is that God is indeed a God of mercy.
Now you could go that far but if God wasn't a God of mercy, you would just be right back,
(09:01):
I guess, where the person that just collapsed did come to the same place of having no answer.
But with God, if you come to that place, He has mercy.
He is rich in mercy.
He has provided an answer of forgiveness in His Son, the Lord Jesus.
Now with that background in your mind, let's go to Jacob.
(09:26):
Jacob's answer was, I'm going to run.
See, he didn't collapse and just give up mentally and physically.
He ran.
That was his answer.
And here in Genesis 28, I read the section, we've already read it, verse 10 to 15, he
ran away from his homeland in Canaan with his father and mother and his brother and
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he ran back to the relatives of his mother back up on that fertile crescent, back up
near the top of that fertile crescent, back there at her ran.
He ran back for her ran.
Along the way, he was apparently going along the ridge route, we call it, in Israel, right
dead right through the heart of Israel going north.
(10:11):
He ran and he came by the end of the day, the sun had set and he knew it was time to
lay down.
He came to a place along that ridge route and just took a stone, laid it down for his
head and went to sleep.
While he slept, God brought a dream to him.
(10:35):
And the dream is in verse 12, chapter 28, then he dreamed and behold, a ladder was set
up on the earth and its top reached to heaven and there the angels of God were ascending
and descending on it and behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God
of Abraham, your father and the God of Jacob, the land on which you lie will give to you
(11:01):
in your descendants.
He had a dream.
It was a God-given dream.
The vision was of a ladder that stretched from the earth to heaven and you are going
to get the picture in your mind, a ladder touching down on earth, reaching up to heaven.
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And then up there, especially as he looked up to heaven, he could see the angels of God
coming down the ladder and going up the ladder.
So apparently it was a wide enough, some have called it staircase, depending on how
you handle the word.
There was a wide enough channel there for angels to be coming down and going up.
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And there was the Lord right at the top of the ladder.
You over here the old song, We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder.
I want to tell you something.
I hate to do this to some of you, but it isn't scriptural.
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Now you look at the scripture and see who was climbing Jacob's Ladder, the saints, the
Israelites, the deceased saints that were with God in heaven.
How about the undoddly people trying to get there?
That wouldn't work.
You know who was climbing Jacob's ladder?
(12:30):
Angels.
They were going down and going up, going down and going up.
Is that not a picture of access to heaven?
Yes, it is.
Shouldn't people have access to heaven?
Yes, they should in the mercy of God, in the grace of God.
But the scene here is not of people going up and down, but of angels going up and down
(12:54):
on that route of access.
Why can angels go up and down?
Because angels, as we were not talking about those fallen angels, were not talking about
the ones that have been judged and cast down as Jesus says in Luke's gospel.
They don't have that kind of freedom in God's presence.
So indeed in the book of Job we find Satan as the accuser there is talking to God.
(13:19):
But the access to God's presence to and from is for his angels, the holy angels, and the
word angel means messenger.
Now what would they be leaving heaven with and what would they be going back for?
They're messengers.
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Notice where their business has to take them.
The latter touches earth.
Those messengers of God, if you want a great chapter on this, the great chapter on angels
is Hebrews chapter 1.
Great chapter, probably the central chapter in the word of God on angels.
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No question about their existence.
No question of them being a special creation of God, special order of creation.
They are messengers.
Whether you use the Greek word or the Hebrew word, they are messengers of God.
They are servants of God sent out on behalf of others.
And guess who they come to serve.
(14:25):
Guess who they bring their messages to.
Guess who they're sent out to have a part in whose lives they're to have a part.
Angel Hebrews 1 tells us, they minister on behalf of whom people.
Anybody know?
(14:46):
The heirs of salvation.
Now who are they?
Angels?
Angels?
No.
Men.
People.
People who have received God's salvation.
The angels have special ministry on behalf of God's children.
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Coming down, going up, there's activity, there's business, they're going about their business
to minister the grace of God and work somehow.
I don't really know what they do for God's children.
We have a lot of indications from the Scripture of things that they get involved in.
(15:31):
But when it comes right down to it, what do they do for you?
Are they the ones that caused you to find that little patch of solid road when you were
slipping on the ice last winter and the cars started to go into a skid and suddenly, oop,
there was just enough little road there that gets you straightened out?
(15:54):
Did the angel put it there?
I don't know.
You'd have to blow his hot breath on the place to make room for that patch of road to come
through before you got there.
You're going to be in trouble.
I don't know.
I personally never thought of an angel doing anything like that, but I guess they could.
(16:19):
I'm not going to limit what they could do, but they are ministers for our sake.
Do they resist Satan and the forces of Satan?
There is no question about that in the Word of God.
That is one of the things they do on our behalf.
There is spiritual warfare going on in heavenly places, and they minister on their behalf,
(16:48):
bringing messages of answers of prayer.
No question about that either from Daniel's book.
There is so much that they're involved in, but they're not the source of it.
The one at the top of the ladder is the source.
Who is that, the Lord?
Now on what grounds by what logic do the angels have the access to our lives to bring us the
(17:15):
provisions of God for our lives, the care and provision?
Hebrews again tells you the heirs of salvation.
Never in the Scriptures are we told that angels minister on behalf of those who don't know
Christ.
Never we told that the angels communicate with for the purposes of blessing those who don't
(17:38):
know Christ, those who are not God's children.
We do see them in a threatening stance like the cherubim that were at the entrance to
the Garden of Eden.
They were set there to keep anybody else from coming in and eating of the tree of life.
(17:59):
But the minister on behalf of to do service for in the name of God to come and minister
on behalf of God's children and only God's children.
That's their assignment.
They're coming up and down that ladder, up and down that ladder.
(18:20):
Somehow, somehow God was going to legitimately make provisions so that there was grounds for
the angels to minister to children of this earth who had become children of God.
Jacob didn't see the whole scene.
(18:42):
There is this follow through in the verses after that that there was going to be a acting
out for Jacob and for his descendants.
These promises that God had made to Abraham.
You can read that verse 14.
And then when he gets 13 and 14 and when you get to verse 15, there are some personal promises
(19:06):
to Jacob that he's going to be brought back to that land, to that place, and God was going
to fulfill these promises.
And that's basically the outline of that.
He's going to come back to that place.
What do you learn from that?
Well, look at verse 15.
(19:28):
Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land
for I will not leave you until I have done what I have spoken to you.
You see the you, you, you, you, there.
What you have is this.
God is going to do a work in this earth and Jacob is going to be the vessel among men through
(19:49):
whom he's going to do it.
And he says, not only to him, but to his seed.
Verse 14, also your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth and shall spread abroad
the West and so forth.
And in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
(20:12):
So you have Jacob and his seed.
I want to point out to you that it is in this case singular, not plural seed.
Now we can say, but doesn't that apply to all the generations of Jacob?
You know, the Israelites that we're going to come forth from Jacob, the 12 tribes and
(20:35):
so forth.
Yes, it does, but God was even being more specific than that.
He was saying in a sense, there is one who is going to be in your gene line Jacob.
There is one through whom I am going to bring the blessing to all the families of the earth.
You see, that's the verse 14.
And in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
(20:58):
Down there through the years, you're going to have descendants Jacob, but one day one
will come and through that one, there will come a blessing available to all the families
of the earth.
And I read this literally, people, that God was saying, I am going to provide the perfect
(21:19):
blessing and that the scriptures only know one and that is salvation for all the nations.
And I read it this way, all the families of the earth, all the families of the earth.
(21:40):
Please read it that way, all the families of the earth, you and your descendants.
Now we know God is going to do something in that land.
He's going to do it through Jacob's descendants and in particular, he's going to do it through
one called his seed.
He's going to do a work that will blast the whole world.
(22:02):
You've got the details here if you will receive them.
Jacob didn't see all of that.
He couldn't understand all of that.
But that one was going to be a human being, it was going to be a descendant of Jacob.
(22:32):
The angels were just messengers.
They went up and down.
Notice they were not stationary on the earth, they were going up and down.
Their home is in heaven.
The source of their message and their service is in heaven.
The place of their service and the bringing of the message is earth.
So they have to go up and down, up and down, they are not stationary in the earth.
(22:58):
Now there are some evil angels that are stationary in the earth.
You know why the demons are stationary in the earth?
Because they have been cast down.
They have been cast down.
They don't have the fellowship with God, the peace with God, the righteous standing
(23:19):
in the presence of the Lord that the holy angels have.
But these angels were not stationary in the earth.
They were vessels for the work that God was going to do on the earth.
They were messengers.
And God had established Jacob and Jacob's descendants as the ones to be stationary
(23:41):
on the earth through whom he was going to do the work.
Jacob was stationary in the earth.
Jacob could not climb that ladder, not in his own strength, and he didn't have that
excess yet.
I have to say yet.
He couldn't climb the ladder, but he was the vessel.
(24:05):
He was stationary down here.
He was going to be the vessel to bring out a people.
And out of that people there was going to be one on the earth that God was going to
do a work through for the sake of all the nations.
Salvation.
Now, to get a further insight into this, I have to let the scriptures interpret the scriptures.
I've got to take you to John's first chapter, John chapter 1 at verse 43.
(24:33):
Please turn over the gospel of John chapter 1.
And on chapter 1 verse 43.
Let me read.
The following day Jesus wanted to go to Galilee, and he found Philip and said to him,
follow me.
Now Philip was from the Theta, the city of Andrew and Peter.
(24:59):
Philip found the Thaniel and said to him, we have found him of whom Moses in the law and
also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
So when we read this, it immediately takes us down to this thought.
Philip saying to Nathaniel, we have found him.
(25:23):
We found the one that Moses wrote about and the prophets wrote about.
Now that means you wouldn't even have to be much of a Bible scholar to understand
this, that you should be able to go back to the writings of Moses, Genesis, Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and find one in there that he was writing about that
(25:45):
was going to come one day.
It would mean that you could go back and read the prophets.
Read Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and Hosea and Joel, name is no guy
a mike, and read them.
(26:06):
Read what David wrote.
Read what Joel wrote.
Joel was a prophet.
You don't know what he wrote.
Think of him as one, but he was.
Read what they wrote.
They wrote about one that was going to come one day.
And a wonderful thing about this statement is there's this teaching of unification.
(26:30):
In other words, by what Nathaniel's saying, he's saying, oh, there is one, not several,
but one that these various writers were writing about.
Now you find Moses writing about several people.
And indeed, those several people may from time to time get mentioned in the different
(26:52):
writings of the prophets.
But there is one that the prophets and Moses all wrote about, one that is central and unites
all the writings.
He holds the office of prophet, of priest and king.
(27:13):
And he's the only one in all the scriptures that holds all those three offices.
He is variously called the prophet, the one.
He seems never to be named, not with the kind of name that men have, like John or Andrew
or Philip or Bartholomew or Thaddeus.
(27:34):
No, no, he doesn't have a name like that.
He just is called the one.
He's called the anointed one, which in Hebrew is Messiah.
The one anointed to reign.
He's never really given a name.
And yet we find out that he is, as he's just revealed it to Jacob, he is going to be from
(28:00):
Jacob's line.
He's going to be a man, but we don't know his name.
What is his name?
Where is his town?
Well, Philip says, I know that now.
I've got it.
I've got it put together.
I've got the thing about the one and I've got his name now in his town.
It's Jesus of Nazareth.
(28:23):
Never revealed in the Old Testament just that way.
Oh, we find out in Michael.
He used to be born where?
Bethlehem.
He used to be of Judah, city of David, Bethlehem.
But you see, what if he moved around?
What if he didn't stay in Bethlehem?
(28:45):
What if he grew up in some other town?
He didn't make it hard to find him, right?
Guess what?
He grew up in Nazareth.
Nazareth that back would see hillbilly town of Northern Israel.
(29:06):
In that poor growing area up on that outcropping of rock, you know, that's north of that wonderful
Jezreal plain.
Back in the hills there, just up on the top.
But why in the world did you build a city up there when all that nice land was down the
slope, you know?
(29:27):
But these people clinging to life up here in these rocks, they were really hillbilly.
They were up in the rocks.
They were the poor folk.
They didn't have the rich land.
It was only a mile away.
Two miles, I should say, two miles away.
They were up on the rocks.
They were the poor folk.
They were the hill folk.
(29:48):
They didn't have much.
They were eking out their lives up there.
You know where he was from?
Nazareth.
I felt so excited.
We found him.
We found him.
Jesus is his name, Old Testament that would be called Joshua.
(30:09):
See?
Same name.
Greek is Jesus.
Hebrew would tell you it's Joshua.
In Jewish name Joshua.
He's from Nazareth.
Now, Nathaniel is a very practical man.
(30:30):
He looks at things as they are in the real world.
He knows Nazareth.
It's like me standing up here this morning and telling you, oh, I met a man.
He's a great godly man.
I think one of the most godly men I met and most effective for the Lord Jesus.
(30:53):
He lives on the south side of Chicago down a dead-end alley in the basement apartment filled
with rats.
You'd say, what?
Yeah, you could just smell the stench of the garbage where he lives.
(31:14):
You know, out in the alley there.
Yet he lives in his own little place.
And you'd say, well, not very good proof of him being this great godly person, you say,
coming from a place like that.
Now, what are you going to do?
Judge him outwardly or inwardly?
(31:36):
How are you going to judge him?
You know how Nathaniel judged him outwardly.
And Nathaniel says, pretty blunt about it, can anything good come out of Nazareth?
What did Nathaniel know about things from Nazareth?
(31:58):
Did he know of anything good coming out of there?
Apparently not.
Probably poor, back woodsy.
Everything really good.
Where would you go if you could go anywhere in the world to spend your whole life?
Juliet.
No, Juliet is not the garden spot of America.
(32:23):
You only have to be led here, you know, or born here or driven here or something.
But you know, you don't find people sitting down out in sunny California saying, oh,
if I could only get to Chile yet.
And listen, after they build their gambling casinos down here and get some more prostitutes
(32:48):
on the street and then have a little more bankruptcy around and a little more sin on
the streets, I'm sure it's not going to increase the desirability of the place.
I speak to you folk that are here.
And to me, to my family, I'm not proud of what's going on.
(33:09):
If we went out and told people, well, you ought to retire in the one wonderful place
I found and then you told them where it was.
You know, I read something in the newspaper a week ago, it said about the city council
that they're happy that now Juliet is going to have a standing among the communities of
the state that will make it much more attractive to people.
(33:34):
President, and I thought I must have missed something somewhere, you know.
I wouldn't want to be on the chamber of commerce trying to sell this line to the world.
I really don't expect an influx from Florida.
(33:57):
I see from the worst areas unless people come for specific job reasons or family reasons.
It's hard pressed to say they're here for the beauty of the weather.
Basically we share it with a bunch of other places that are nicer to live maybe, but they're
not here maybe for the beauty of the land.
(34:24):
I don't know.
We're here for very special reasons.
And frankly, I think of it as a wonderful place to live because I'm at peace about being here
and I just have the most wonderful, blessed circumstances to live in.
I have you folks and I have my family.
(34:46):
And I can just be as happy and content here as anywhere on this earth because my lord has
said, this is your place.
And he's given a wonderful, wonderful, blessed fellowship.
And if I was over in Hawaii right now and didn't have this, I'd be like a fish out
(35:09):
of water.
And so would you.
Don't be an Nathaniel.
Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?
Now I would ask you, could any good thing come out of Nazareth?
(35:30):
The answer of the scriptures is that God's most wonderful gift to mankind came out of
Nazareth.
The most wonderful thing in all of eternity came out of Nazareth.
The most wonderful gift to the world, salvation came out of Nazareth.
(35:57):
Now Nathaniel needs some convincing.
He certainly does.
Philip says, with some confidence I think, come and see.
That's all it's going to take, Nathaniel.
You just come and see.
(36:19):
So he came.
Now while he was coming, Jesus saw him coming.
See, there it's coming to Daniel down the road, Jesus saw him.
And just about the time he gets within the earshot as he draws near to the Lord Jesus,
he says something about Nathaniel to the people around him.
(36:43):
Isn't him talked in the Daniel yet?
He's not talking to Nathaniel right now.
He's talking to the people around him, the other disciples, maybe.
They're just gathering, by the way, they're just gathering together.
Nathaniel's going to be one of the twelve and Philip is and Peter and Andrew and James
and John, but they're not all brought together yet as disciples.
(37:04):
So but there are some people around him and Jesus says, Behold an Israelite indeed,
in whom is no guile.
He looked and he saw Nathaniel and he knew Nathaniel's heart.
He knew what kind of man Nathaniel was, no guile.
(37:30):
Somebody without guile is somebody that isn't trying to hurt others, isn't bitter, isn't
filled with anger.
But it really, the idea of not having guile is somebody that looks for truth, is willing
(37:52):
to see truth and when he sees it, is willing to accept truth.
In other words, somebody with a pure heart, a pure heart, not an evil heart, not somebody
trying to find fault, but somebody that lives a life of truth and is willing to recognize
(38:17):
it and accept it when he finds it in others.
As hard as that may be sometimes to start with a place like Nazareth and look for truth
and find it and accept it, he still was a man of truth.
If he could be shown it, he was ready to receive it.
And Jesus emphasized that about him as he was coming.
He was obviously coming to test, to test Jesus and Jesus.
(38:41):
The first thing he says about him, that's a man without guile.
In other words, he will give it the true test.
He will not be prejudiced.
His heart's not filled with evil.
As he comes and makes examination of me, Jesus is saying, he will test me and be truthful
to himself before God and yield to the truth that he finds.
(39:02):
Wow.
Can Nathaniel live up to that?
Nathaniel doesn't turn around.
He comes on to the Lord Jesus.
And Nathaniel said to him, how do you know me?
He doesn't say that's not true.
He just says, how do you know me?
How do you know these things about me?
(39:25):
Jesus must have described Nathaniel in a way that struck to the very heart of what Nathaniel
knew about himself.
He was a man of what we would call today a man of integrity.
He could not go against what he truly believed.
He was not a man seeking evil and an excuse to go his own way.
(39:52):
He was a man who was truly open to truth and to God.
How do you know me?
And the answer is so simple.
He says, the Lord Jesus said to him before Philip called you, when you were under the
(40:15):
fig tree, I saw you.
Very, very specific.
If you ever wonder, and there are some people that teach this kind of stuff, that God is
not involved with you on a detail by detail basis in your life.
(40:36):
If you want to know the will of God and you want to walk along with God, don't expect
God to be involved in everything that goes on in your life.
But I want to tell you something.
God does know everything there is to know about you, the very hairs of your head are numbered.
He is involved in every detail of your life and he is involved in what goes on every minute
(40:57):
of that life.
He wouldn't tell you pray without ceasing in everything by prayer and supplication with
thanksgiving, make your request known unto God if he wasn't interested in everything that
goes on in your life and wanting to be involved in everything specifically.
Specifically he was under a fig tree.
I don't know which one, but Nathaniel did.
(41:20):
It wasn't, you know, you have been under fig trees in your life.
It isn't that.
And you are under the fig tree.
Something went on.
And we get a clue of what went on.
(41:43):
First by Nathaniel's fantastic response.
His response just tells you he has found the truth.
He has found the one that is the truth.
He has found the one that Moses wrote about.
He has found the one the prophets wrote about.
He has found the Messiah.
It's an answer that tells you all of his doubts are removed.
(42:06):
He says, you are the son of God.
You are the king of Israel.
See king of Israel means the one anointed to reign.
That's Messiah.
And the son of God is related in the scriptures in the Old Testament to deliverance.
Like the one under the appearance as one having the appearance of the son of God that
(42:32):
was in the furnace with the three men.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
He was with them in the fire and brought them out.
He delivered them.
You are that one.
And Jesus said to him, most assuredly I say to you, here after you shall see the one
(42:55):
under the sea, now get this, you shall see heaven open.
And the angels of God descending and ascending upon the son of man.
And there you have the Old Testament revelation taken to the New Testament and given further
(43:16):
revelation.
Jacob saw the latter descending to the earth.
And indeed it touched the earth where Jacob was in the land.
And it was related to God bringing a blessing through Jacob's line and through Jacob's seed.
And now in John 1 we have the revelation of who that seed is by the Lord Jesus saying
(43:41):
that the latter touches down on the son of man.
How does the latter make touch with the earth?
How does it make contact with the earth?
On the son of man.
That's the contact that the bladder makes with the earth.
You want to get on Jacob's ladder?
Please listen, there is only one way, one truth and one life that you can possibly ever
(44:09):
have to gain entrance into heaven.
And there is one way to get on Jacob's ladder.
Through the son of man.
Because the latter rests on him.
You've got to come through the Lord Jesus to have access to heaven.
Now if you're going to climb Jacob's ladder, if you're going to gain access to heaven,
(44:33):
it's because you have received the Lord Jesus.
Not by your good works.
That song suggests you know by good works.
No.
Our climbing is our good works.
That's wrong.
That's unbiblical.
That's a lie.
You can climb that ladder by faith in the Lord Jesus.
(44:55):
You can come through the son of man.
That's taking the Old Testament and letting the New Testament give you the fuller revelation.
Jacob didn't see that.
He didn't understand that.
He isn't the man of faith.
But God was promising, I'm going to do it through you Jacob and through your seed.
(45:18):
What God wants is people that in the entanglements of life instead of fleeing like Jacob and
getting themselves more and more entangled will realize that they can have the ministry
of God on their lives.
The angels of God are there to help in the lives of those that are the heirs of salvation.
(45:40):
God is involved in our lives, whether we're under the fig tree or the apple tree.
He wants to minister grace in your life as his child.
You can only know that salvation through the Lord Jesus.
You need and struggle with this life and get more and more entangled, but learn the lesson
(46:05):
of surrender in everything day by day, item by item, event by event, hour by hour, moment
by moment because your Lord loves you with that kind of love.
He has an answer for you today and for your hour and for your minute.
(46:27):
And it's all through the Lord Jesus.
There is no other way, truth or life, but through Him.
In Him everything is summed up.
He is the sum of all things for us.
Don't flee as Jacob with any trouble.
(46:48):
If you don't know Christ, don't flee.
He's your only hope of salvation.
If you know Him, don't flee trying to deal with life because God's holding his arms wide
open like he did for Jacob and he's saying, if you're going to run, run into me.
My answer is in my son.
Well, let's pray.
(47:12):
Father, thank you for the wonders of how the Old and the New Testament tell us of the Lord
Jesus, Moses and all the prophets lead to Him.
How we can see, as Nathaniel did that day, that the grace of our God is available to
us through no other but you, Lord Jesus.
(47:33):
As your children, we have problems.
We have some today that we need to talk to you about.
Thank you for wanting to be involved in every part of our lives, having an answer for every
problem and every need.
I pray that we might be a people that can encourage one another with testimonies of
how by letting you have your way in our lives you have given graciously, fully, wonderfully
(48:00):
your children.
Lord Jesus, bring us to an end of ourselves like Nathaniel and keep us at your feet rejoicing
and praising the one that is the Son of God, the King of Israel, in your precious name,
(48:29):
amen.
There we have it for this week.
Thank you, Pastor Raines, for another message from the Word of God.
Thank you, listeners, for listening in, especially those that are on our new platform, Rumble.
Rumble is kind of a, I don't know, kind of like YouTube, but I wanted to try it out for
(48:52):
a while.
I got starting.
I don't know if it was the last episode or the one before, but I'm going to start posting
there now, so we'll see how it does on Rumble.
So thank you, Rumble, listeners, for listening in, and please subscribe.
And no matter where you're listening, please subscribe.
And if you don't want to subscribe, you can please comment, right?
(49:15):
Yeah, comment's good.
I like that.
And if you want to go check out our website, I don't know if I really pushed the website
that often, but it's the www.legacybiblepodcast.com.
And there you can also comment or ask questions or you can listen to the back episodes there.
(49:41):
We have all the way back to episode number one.
So you can do that.
There's transcripts there that are slowly, but surely being put up there.
But you can check those out too.
Those are really well done transcripts.
Plus a few little lecture little things like news and stuff like that.
(50:05):
I'm trying to find out stuff to put on the website.
So you can check that out.
So thank you for listening and please come back again next week and make sure you read
your Bible every day.
That's always a good thing.
There's no downside to that.
So make sure you read your Bible every day.
(50:27):
And I'll see you next week and have a great day.
See you next time.
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