Word of Salvation – Vol.38 No.30 – August 1993

 

Ladders Into Heaven

 

Sermon by Rev. J. Rogers on John 1:35-51

 

Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ,

When the heathen in the ancient world offered sacrifices to their gods, they believed that the smoke from their sacrifices formed a pillar from earth to heaven.  Much like Jacob’s ladder.  And they believed that their prayers used to go up the ladder of smoke to the gods.

That belief helps us understand a large part of the story of mankind – the search to find and speak with God.

Ever since the creation of the world men and women have been knocking at the gates of heaven.  Man has a built-in impulse to break down those doors of heaven and get in there, to see God.  Or at the very least, to communicate with Him; to speak with the God who is in heaven.

But that search has been rather useless, for, at the same time, man has been running away from God.  Remember Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  After they sinned, it was not they who searched for God.  Rather, it was God who looked for them.

They did not call out, ‘God where are you?’  No, it was God who called out, ‘Adam, where are you?’

Yes, man wants to find a god alright – someone who understands him and can fulfil all his needs.  Just so long as that God is not the God who placed Adam and Eve in the garden and talked with them every day before they fell into sin.

Fortunately for us, God still wanted to find His sinful creatures and have a relationship with them.  So God promised a Redeemer, a Saviour.

And Man has always had a sense of that promise lurking in his subconscious.  I suppose that is why man has always sought to find God and pray to Him.

And we read in other passages of the Old Testament that God confirmed that promise again and again.

But, people of God, we do not just have the promises of God.  We have the real thing.  We have the real ladder to heaven.  Even the Psalmist cried out one time, ‘The heavens seem as brass, God.  When I pray I can’t seem to get through.’

I suppose we’ve all had times like that.  Well, if we have, imagine how tightly shut those strong brass doors must be for people who don’t love God.

But now, people of God, those doors of heaven have truly been broken down so far as we are concerned.  God comes down to us.  We can, in a sense, go up to Him.

So then, there are three questions that we can ask our text this morning:
1.  How is heaven really opened?
2.  How is Christ our everlasting ladder?
3.  How do we get up that everlasting ladder?

1. How is Heaven Really Opened to Man?

We read earlier about that strange dream Jacob had when he was running away from his brother Esau.

And well he might run away too!  Jacob was a crafty fellow.  Earlier in his life he had bought from Esau, for the grand price of a bowl of soup, the right to have the special blessing of the first-born son; the right to be the head of the family tribe after the father died.

Only in this case it meant a lot more than in most families because God had given to Abraham and Isaac the very special blessing that through them salvation would come to the world.

In his dream Jacob saw heaven opened and a ladder reaching up into it with angels on it, going up and down.  And from the top of the ladder God Himself called down and passed on that great blessing to Jacob.

But what on earth did all this mean?

Jacob interprets the dream for us when he said, after he woke up, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place.  This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.’ So he called the place Bethel, which means ‘house of God.’

What he is saying is this: ‘This is where God lives.  This is the place where God reaches down out of heaven and speaks to man (that’s what the angels coming down the ladder represent).  This is the place where man may speak to God (that’s what the angels going up the ladder represent.)  This is the place where God and man may have fellowship together.’

And so we often read of Jacob coming back to this place – to speak to God again.  To bring his burdens to God again and hear God’s voice speaking to him again.

But then, in that last verse of John 1, Jesus tells Nathanael that he too is going to see heaven opened and angels going up and down on the Son of Man.

Jesus often referred to Himself as the Son of Man.  In other words, Jesus was saying to Nathanael, ‘Look Nathanael, many years ago your father Jacob was shown to the house of God in the land of Canaan.  That’s why he called the place Bethel.  But Nathanael, you are going to see the real house of God, the real gateway to heaven.  And that’s me, the Son of Man.  And why am I the real gateway to heaven?  Because, as you just said Nathanael, I am also the Son of God.  I live forever.’

As Jesus said later in John 14: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father, but by me.’

But why did God give this new gateway to heaven?  What was wrong with the old gateway at Bethel?

There are two reasons.  Firstly, God never wanted to be worshiped in Canaan only.  God wanted to be worshiped in all the world.  And secondly, God wanted His people to be able to have constant communion with Him.

John the Baptist and Jesus stand on the centre of history.  John is the greatest, but the last of the Old Testament prophets.  He came to reveal Christ to Israel – not just so that Israel could be saved, but so that Israel could take the Gospel into the world.

John was closing Book One of the world’s history in which salvation was offered, in the main, only to the Jews.  Jesus was opening Book Two of the world’s history in which salvation was to be offered not only to the Jews (and it must still be offered to them), but also to the Gentiles.  The Gospel was becoming universal.

And that is the great thing about this new gateway to heaven, people of God.  It is not fixed in one geographical location.  Jacob and the Israelites had to keep on coming back to a special place – Bethel, and then later to Shiloh, where the Tabernacle was and then to Jerusalem where the Temple was.

But now Christ is the new gateway to heaven.  We don’t have to go to a special place any more.  Because Jesus is the Son of God, He’s everywhere.  We can find the gateway to heaven and have fellowship with God anywhere.

The other great thing about the new gateway to heaven is this.  Because Jesus is the Son of God, He is eternal.  We are never going to have to look for another gateway to heaven.  Because He’s eternal, He takes away all that temporariness of the Old Testament worship.

How does He do that?

2. How is Christ our Everlasting Ladder to Heaven?

Christ can be our everlasting ladder to heaven because He is the true and final prophet, priest and king.

Under the old Covenant, in the Old Testament dispensation, God continually gave His people prophets, priests and kings.  He gave them prophets to bring them His Word.  He gave them priests to offer sacrifices for their sins.  And He gave them kings to rule over them and protect them from their enemies.  But He had to keep on giving them new ones all the time because they were all only men and so they died.

But it was also because they were only men that their work was not really good enough.

Because the prophets were only men, they could never bring a full and complete word from God.  But Jesus is the Word of God.  He perfectly shows us all our needs.  He perfectly shows God to us as the answer to our needs.  He does that by His Word and the Holy Spirit.

In this passage in John 1 we see Jesus as the true prophet with perfect knowledge.  He knows all about Nathanael even though He’s never ever met him before!

We also see Jesus as the perfect priest in this passage.  John points Him out to his disciples and says, ‘Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’  The Old Testament priests had been offering sacrifices for centuries but they didn’t really take away sin.  They were only ordinary men and their sacrifices were only animals.

We must not despise those sacrifices.  God had commanded them and when they were offered with truly repentant hearts, He accepted them.  But if the true priest, Christ, had not come and offered Himself as the true Lamb of God, they would all have been useless.

They were really just pointers to the true sacrifice for sin that was to come later.  The true priest had to come and fulfil those sacrifices.  It was not really those Old Testament sacrifices that were the ladders by which those Old Testament saints got to heaven, but the sacrifice which Christ offered.

But then we also see Jesus as the true king of God’s people.  How these Old Testament kings of Israel had sinned!  They had not ruled God’s people wisely, according to God’s law.  And because they had sinned like that, they had not been able to protect God’s people and lead them into peace and security and prosperity.

Of course Nathanael blurts it out, ‘You are the king of Israel!’  But we also see it when Jesus renames Simon to become Peter.  To name somebody in the Bible showed that you had authority over them.  So when Adam named all the animals he was showing that God had indeed made man king over the rest of creation.

When Jesus saw Simon, He said ‘Simon, under the old Covenant of shadows and promises your name was Simon.  But now I have come to bring in the new Covenant and under this new Covenant of the real thing your name is going to be Peter.’ Jesus was exercising His kingship.

What a beautiful bridge between heaven and earth Jesus is.

Could God have fulfilled Jacob’s dream in any better way?

Jesus is the ultimate ladder.  Jacob’s ladder ‘rested on the earth,’ we read in Genesis 28.  So does Jesus.  He is a man.  The top of Jacob’s ladder ‘reached up into heaven.’  So does Jesus.  He is both the man Jesus, and He is also the Christ, the Son of God.

In Christ, God comes down to man to help him – that’s what the angels going down the ladder in Jacob’s dream represent.  Also in Christ, man can reach up to God to take His needs to God and praise God – that’s what the angels going up the ladder represent.

And because John saw that the ultimate prophet, priest and king had come as a man to be the true ladder to heaven that He sent his disciples away from himself to follow Christ.

Christ is that ‘new and living way’ that Hebrews 10 speaks about.  And by that ‘new and living way’ we are able to ‘draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith’ that God will hear us.  But of course it’s all very well to say all this about ladders to heaven.  But it’s not much use to us unless we know how to get on the ladder!

3. How do we get up that everlasting ladder?

We’ve all got needs that we want God to know about.  And we all want God to reach down to us and help us.  We want to see God and put our case to Him and have Him speak to us.  We can only do that through the ladder He has provided.

How then do we get on the ladder?  Or, since Christ isn’t a literal ladder, how do we latch onto Him?  How can we make use of His services, as it were, as the true prophet, priest and king?

Well, why did Jesus promise Nathanael that he would see God?

The reason is that Nathanael was a true Israelite.  ‘Here is a true Israelite,’ said Jesus, ‘in whom is nothing false.’

But what is a true Israelite?

A true Israelite is a person who is completely honest, and especially in regard to sin.  Where do I get that idea from?

In Psalm 32 we read about the man who is completely honest about his sins.  In fact what Jesus says about Nathanael in John 1 seems to be a quote from Psalm 32.  But there was a time when this man in Psalm 32 wasn’t completely honest about his sins.  He kept silent about them; he tried to hide them.  And do you know what it says about him then?  It says this:

‘When I kept silent, my bones wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.’ (Ps.32:3f.)

Now that’s a man in trouble, isn’t it?  He needs deliverance.  He needs salvation.  He needs heaven opened.  But the longer he shuts up about his sin, the sicker he gets.

But then we read that he confesses his sins.  He owns up to them.  He becomes honest about them and admits them to God.

‘Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover my iniquity.
I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’ –
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.’ (Ps.32:5)

And then what happens to him?  He finds God acting towards him as a prophet, a priest and a king.

In verse 5 we read that God forgave him – that’s the work of a priest.
In verse 7 God acts toward him as His deliverer – that’s the work of a king.
And in verse 8 God says ‘I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go.’
That’s the work of a prophet.

Well, what about you this morning?  Do you see heaven opened?  Do you want to have fellowship and communion with God?  Do you want God to know about all your needs?  Do you want to see God and have all your needs supplied?

There is only one way.  Somehow you have got to get messages to heaven.  And somehow God has to reach down to you.  You need a ladder between you and God, don’t you?

God has provided that ladder – and not just a temporary one either, as He gave to Jacob.  God has thrown heaven wide open and sent down his eternal Son as a man to act as a ladder.
The priest to clear away all your sins so you are fit to get into heaven.
The prophet so He can teach you the way.
And the king to protect you from the devil
so that you really will get to heaven after all.

Do you want that?  Jacob did.  And when Jacob truly repented of his sin and learned to depend on God above, God called him Israel.  Nathanael also wanted all that.  You can have it too.

But you must become a true Israelite.  A true Israelite is one who is willing to be fair dinkum with God about his sin.  Like that man in Psalm 32.

Or as Hebrews put it, you must have a ‘sincere heart’.  Don’t bother to come to God if you’re not prepared to come clean and make a complete break with sin.  But if you are prepared to do that – confess all your sins to God, you can be completely sure that God will hear your prayer through Christ, and He will reach down to you and forgive you.

AMEN