In a dream Jacob has a vision in which God promises to bless Jacob with the blessing of his forefather’s Abraham and Isaac. When Jacob awakes he responds by saying that if God truly does take care of him and his offspring then Jacob and his descendents will worship God. Jacob then takes the stone his head had been resting on and sets it up as a memorial pillar for worshipping God.
Is our worship of God dependent upon God taking care of us? For Jacob it seems that this was the case; it was necessary for God’s care of Jacob to precede Jacob’s worship of God. I would argue that this is not a normative relationship between man and God. We are not to ensure that God cares for us before we worship God, rather we are to worship trusting that God does care for us.
Perhaps it is unfair to compare our present situation with the situation of Jacob. We live in a time when God has already cared for us in the life and death of Jesus Christ. Jacob was living in a time when God was only promising a future blessing; we live in a time when God has fulfilled that blessing. We can live each and every day knowing that Christ has come, died, and risen again so that our sins against God might be forgiven. Jacob had no such assurance, so his reaction to God’s promise was different from what our reaction should be.
One thing that it might be beneficial for us to copy from Jacob is setting up a memorial of God’s blessing. Jacob took the rock he had used as a pillow and made it a monument to God’s promise. In this way there was a lasting and tangible reminder of God’s intervention in Jacob’s life. Whenever God intervenes in our lives it would be beneficial if we took the time to establish a lasting, tangible reminder of this event to remind us of God’s presence when we feel far from God.
Practically speaking it might be odd to setup a stone alter whenever God speaks to one of us, but what about planting a tree or a bush, or building a piece of furniture, or sewing a table cloth; so that whenever we saw the tree or the chair, of the cloth in our everyday life we would be reminded of the presence of God.
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