Ladder Between Heaven And Earth

A schemer lays his head on a stone and wakes to a vision of heaven open. From that ancient night in Genesis 28 to a conversation under a fig tree in John, we trace how Jacob’s ladder points straight to Jesus—the living bridge who reconciles earth and heaven and invites us into a faith that actually changes how we live. Along the way, Pastor Carl challenges us with a piercing question: do you believe God, or do you only say that you believe God?

We walk through God’s covenant to Jacob, the transformation from Jacob to Israel, and the holy shift from fear to reverent awe at Bethel. We talk about the power of remembrance—why altars, communion, and simple markers guard our hearts from drift. The symbol of the almond tree opens a window on hope, renewal, and provision, reminding us that while the world feels unsteady, Christ remains our blessed hope and our solid ground. That hope moves us to speak: neighbors, barbers, teachers, friends—will they hear the gospel while we’re here to share it?

We get practical about conditional vows, tithing as stewardship, and the difference an eternal perspective makes when bank accounts shrink or doors close for standing with Jesus. Suffering is not wasted; it often becomes a stage for God’s glory. You’ll hear a moving story of pastoral courage in the face of brain cancer and a reminder that sometimes God heals now, and sometimes he heals in a better country. Either way, the prayer is the same: Lord, be glorified.

If you’re longing to trade anxious scheming for surrendered trust, to carry hope into hard places, and to see every circumstance as a chance to witness, this conversation will steady your steps. Listen, share with a friend who needs courage today, and if it speaks to you, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: where has God met you lately?

Come On Up is the radio ministry of The Mountain Cross in Waynesville North Carolina. To learn more about us please visit: TheMountainCross.com.

Chapters

• 26:00 Marker 01

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:05

Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways and we shall walk in his paths.

SPEAKER_00: 0:13

Welcome to Come On Up, the radio ministry of the Mountain Cross in Waynesville, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_02: 0:20

In the power of his spirit, he gives us the provision to go and to proclaim and to be solved in light to a world that desperately needs to hear it. You know, if I die today, I know I'll be with the Lord. But there are many people around me who won't know the Lord. And if I'm gone, will they hear the gospel? I guess the bigger question is, if I'm here, will they hear the gospel?

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

The cool thing about the Christian faith is that it's not just a spectator sport. God invites you to be active in your faith and tell others about the good things he has done in your life. In fact, Pastor Carl teaches in today's message that you are a critical component of someone else's journey. Your neighbor, your barber, your child's teacher. Do they know your story? Do they know what all Jesus has saved you from and how he's transformed you? Do they know they can be transformed too? And now, here's Pastor Carl.

SPEAKER_02: 1:28

Is there anywhere else in the Bible that you hear about heaven opening and the angels of God ascending and descending upon maybe not the Son of Man but a ladder? That's right. Jacob. And what was Jacob known as? A schemer. He was a deceiver. Could it be that Nathaniel was meditating on the story of Jacob? When Jacob, you know, had cheated his his brother Esau out of the blessing with some direction from his mom. And Esau wasn't all that uh honest either, and he would take anything for just filling his his stomach. But Jacob was a schemer to get the blessing. And Jacob, part of it was running away from Esau so he wouldn't be killed. But the other part was his father Isaac told him to go back to the old country, back to Haran, to find himself a wife there from the family. So he was on the way to Haran to find a wife when something happened along the road. And let's go back and look at this story from Genesis chapter 28, beginning at verse 10. Now Jacob went out from Bersheba and went toward Haran. And he came to a certain place and stayed there all night because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones that of that place and put his head on that stone, and he lay down in that place to get sleep. I don't know, to me that doesn't sound very comfortable, but that's what he did. And as he sat on that hard stone, he slept on that hard stone, 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 upon this ladder. And just imagine if Nathan and Nathaniel was reading this portion of scripture, and Jesus comes and says, I saw you, and you know you're going to see greater things like heaven opening up and angels going up and down the ladder. Who happens to be me? I am the ladder. I am the stairway. I am that gap, that bridge that connects earth and heaven. I am the high priest that represents man to God and represents God to man. I am the one that has come to bring reconciliation to this world. And the ministering angels, the ministering spirits, they come through me to come and minister to you. Now, wouldn't that blow you away if you were Nathaniel and that was the case? Wow. Well, what happens with this? We need to hear more of this story. Verse 13 And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham, your father, and the God of Isaac. Um, anytime you have a father or a grandfather or a great-grandfather, they are considered your father in the Old Testament. So his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac, I am their God. And the land on which you lie, I will give to you and your descendants after you. The same promise that he gave to Abraham, the same promise that he gave to Isaac is now the promise that he's given to Jacob, the schemer. This isn't one of those things where God will bless you if you do the right thing. This is one of those things where God has chosen to bless Jacob because he chose to bless Jacob and to give him this. But as a result of it, he changes Jacob's heart, doesn't he? And later on, when you hear the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel of the Lord, I believe he's wrestling with Jesus himself, and he loses that that match and he finally surrenders to the Lord, basically. The Lord then calls him Israel. The Lord calls Jacob now Israel, a one that walks in faith, a true Israelite. One is not walking as Jacob, but now walking as Israel, who's trusting in the Lord for everything that is going on in his life. So here the Lord is is spelling it out to Jacob. 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 the south, and in you and in your seed, all the families of the earth shall be blessed, because through his seed would come the Messiah that has come not only to save Israel, but to save the whole world. The salvation of the Jews and the salvation of the Gentiles. Anyone who would trust in the name of the Lord would be saved. And this is coming through Jacob. Behold, I am with you, and 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. And the way that's written, it kind of sounds like as soon as I'm done doing what I said I would do, then I'm gonna leave you. But that's that's not what that means. In the Hebrew, it means I'm gonna be with you now, I'm gonna be with you until what has been promised, and I'm gonna be with you forever and ever. Do you believe? Do you trust? Will you follow after me? Will you stop scheming and doing things your own way? So that makes me think too, going back to Nathaniel, when when Jesus talks about him as being a true Israelite, you know, in which there is no deception inside. He might have been talking about Simon, but I think more so he was talking about Jacob, because he was reading about Jacob. And and everybody who's who's growing in the scriptures knows the story of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And how could God choose this schemer to be used by him? And comparatively, Nathaniel had gone past that, and it's already had some sort of faith and desire and surrender in his life. Lord, I want to follow you. I realize what's in me is no good. And I need you to come and work in and through me, to accomplish your purposes and to have your will be done through me. So behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you're going, and I will be with you until I'm done doing these things, and then and then on and on and on. And the work that he's going to accomplish through Jacob is going to live past the life of Jacob. These promises were fulfilled generations on. But Jacob had to take hold of it. Jacob had to have some sort of faith to accomplish these things, to allow the Lord to work in and through his life. So then Jacob awoke from his sleep and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it. Even if we're schemers, even if we're doing our own thing, if we have a knowledge of the Lord and we have a relationship with the Lord, we recognize when the Lord is at work. And hopefully at those points we recognize that we've gone astray and we need to realign ourselves with the Lord, say, Lord, please forgive me for the direction I've been taking my life. Help me to follow after you and walk in your ways, because I obviously am not able to do what you've called me to do. I'm doing something different. And he was afraid. And he said, How awesome is this place? The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, a lot of the Proverbs say. And the fool has said in his heart, There is no God. The fool is not afraid at all. And yeah, the fear of God is a real fear. When we as sinful, fallen human beings stand before a holy, righteous God and recognize that he has every right to just eliminate us completely. There is a healthy fear there. But this fear also recognizes the grace of God, that the one who's our judge is also our Savior. And that it's his desire to change us and make us right before him. And then we have this awesome reverence to the Lord. The fear of the Lord has turned into this reverence of God. And just this Lord, you're so good, you're so holy, you're so right, and and you're working in me, and you've accepted me in spite of all that, and you've made a way where there was no way. Thank you, Lord. And he says, How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God in the gates of heaven. This this is the place, because he saw it in a vision, of course. This is where God will meet with men. And Jacob rose early in the morning and took the stone which he had put on his head, and he set it as a pillar and poured oil upon it. He made an altar there, uh a pile of remembrance. Are there places in your life where you have some kind of marker of remembrance? This is what God did at this point in my life. And I need to go back and remember that to be encouraged because I'm going to go through these other things in my life where I might forget. That's why the Lord calls us to do communion. Because in remembrance of me, he says, right? With the implication, if we don't, we will soon forget. As Christians, it's it's it's important for us to come back to the cross, to remember what the Lord has done, because it's so easy to get distracted and to get off track. And so it looks like Jacob was doing really good things here. He recognized God was at work and he made a place uh to set apart and to sanctify it, and to remember that this is where the Lord met with him. And he called the name of the place Bethel, which means the the house of God. But the name of that city had been Luz previously. Now, this is somewhat interesting. I wanted to look up Luz, and it means almond tree. And in the strong concordance and stuff, it is an almond tree. And I'm like, well, there's got to be more to that. What does almond tree mean? So I went to Google and I did a search, and I found a new website that uh it looks pretty good. It's called Biblicalpathway.com. And at Biblical Pathway, they they answer all sorts of interesting questions in a real easy-going way, real simple way that people like me can understand. And this is what they said about the almond tree. The almond tree symbolizes resurrections, new beginnings, and God's provision and abundance. At this spot, Jacob was realizing that God was doing something new in his life. It serves as a powerful symbol of hope, renewal, and divine provision. When we look to the Lord, we find hope. When we look to the things of this world, I don't know about you, but it's real easy to get discouraged and depressed. The world is falling apart. People aren't living the way they ought to live. And our governments, they're just way off the charts. But when we look to Jesus, he's our blessed hope. He's coming back. It gives us what we need to continue going in the here and now. And not just to keep going, but in the power of his spirit, he gives us the provision to go and to proclaim and to be salt and light to a world that desperately needs to hear it. You know, if I die today, I know I'll be with the Lord. But there are many people around me who won't know the Lord. And if I'm gone, will they hear the gospel? I guess the bigger question is if I'm here, will they hear the gospel? The early blooming of the almond tree signifies new life and a triumph over death. When we come to the Lord, we meet with him, when we see his resurrection and realize that in our lives, we realize that we have victory over sin and death. And now whatever happens to us in this body of death, it doesn't matter because our soul is protected in him. And it gives us the boldness to go forward. Just think of all the brothers and sisters in Christ, the saints of the faith that have gone before us, that stand before people who say, Denounce the name of Christ, or we're gonna kill you. And they say, Go ahead and kill me, because Jesus is my everything. And before you kill me, he's died for you too. And you can repent and turn to him at this point, too. You think about the stories of the early disciples in in Acts and especially Paul, when uh I always get giddy when I read through those passages where he's basically tied up to a guard in the prison, and he kind of turns to the guard and basically says to him, You know what? I'm here tied up with you for your sake. God sent me here so I could share with you the gospel. May the Lord give us that vision, that outlook, that focus on what he's called us to, especially when we get into situations that seem rough, let's say. The almond tree is associated with God's promises, blessings, and faithfulness, reminding us of the fulfillment of his promises. So here he meets with the Lord in this place called Luz, which was encapsulates all these things. And and it's a new beginning, and so he has changed the name of the place to Bethel, the house of God. And then Jacob makes a vow. He was heading down that road of faith, and then he kind of falls back into some of his old nature. Just listen to this. If God will be with me and keep me in his way that I am going, and give me the bread to eat and clothing to put on, so that I come back to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God. And this stone which I have set as a pillar shall be God's house. And of all that you give me, I will surely give a tenth to you. Wow. There's so much in there that needs to be addressed, isn't it? But doesn't that reflect a lot of how we are in our flesh? God, if you do this for me, then I will follow after you, as opposed to the full, bored eyes of faith that say, God, you've revealed yourself to me. I am yours. Whatever I want is no longer significant. I want what you want. Your direction in my life. But the thing is, God does promise these things to us. God promises He will be with us and He will keep us in His way. He will protect us. I mean, we will go through tribulation. He promised in this life you will have tribulation, but fear not, I have overcome this world. When we change our perspectives from the here and now to eternal, if we realize our time here on earth is very short, it's like a vapor, but eternity is forever, then it changes our reactions to things that happen to us here. You know what will happen to us if all of a sudden, because we we declare the Lord that our bank accounts are shut down. And may I say we're not far from that? What happens if you actually stand up for Jesus in your workplace and you're fired because of it? We're pretty much there today. If we have this eternal perspective and a wild gutsiness like Paul, we'll say, bring it on. God is being glorified through me, even though I'm suffering and dying here in this world. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I have nothing to eat. But praise be to the Lord. That's got to be something that is from the Lord, not from my flesh. My flesh won't say that. My flesh says, I need to eat, I need some water. Oh, woe is me. But the Lord calls us to consider others more important than ourselves. The Lord calls us to see that we are here for a purpose. We are here to declare the gospel of Jesus Christ, no matter what situation that we're in. And may I say we may be great men and women of faith and not have the Cadillac, not have the gold watch, not have the 401k, because God has called us on a different path. We may not have perfect health. I just came back from a pastor's gathering. Senior pastors were about 30 of us up in Virginia with Calvary Chapel, and I sat next to a man at breakfast who has uh brain cancer, who has the worst kind of brain cancer, who just uh a month or two ago was put into a coma for a couple of weeks to try to stabilize some things, and he and he bounced back and was able to get back into the pulpit, but he's having a hard time reading and and remembering words and and so forth, and in his flesh. I'm sure he would raise his hands to God and say, What kind of God are you to give me this? But as I spoke with him, his spirit is a lot stronger than his flesh. And he says, I'm growing closer to the Lord through this. More than anything else. His wife has come alongside him and done whatever she needs to do, not in fear that she's going to lose him, but in helping him to do what needs to be done to glorify God in this season and the next. God is being glorified through this man. And the Lord has taken him home. We anointed him with oil. We prayed for him. But sometimes the Lord says, I'm going to heal him in another way. I think a lot of times we need to pray, Lord, be glorified in this situation rather than just for healing. Healing is good. We want healing. God is glorified through healing. We can have more life here on earth to live for him when there's healing. But sometimes God is glorified through the dying. But it all depends on what our perspective is. How are we looking at things that come to us in this world? Jacob started going along this path, but he started going back into the old ways. Lord, if you take care of me, if these things happen to me, then I then I'll be the your servant. You'll be my God. And by the way, I'll give you a tenth of everything that uh that I that I get. And that kind of misses the whole idea of the tithe, too. The the idea of the tithe is to recognize that God owns everything and we're just stewards. And he just asked for a portion back to help get our minds alive that this is not your money, this is God's money. And he has things intended for you to use that money for. So it's always easy for us to look at somebody else and how they lack faith. We can look at this prayer and say, Jacob, you should have said, God, I surrender all to you. You've revealed yourself to me. I own nothing. I trust you with everything. Just show me what to do. Fill me with your spirit. Guide me in your path. Help me to walk in your ways. But if we're honest, maybe his prayers sound a lot like our prayers. Because we get caught up in the here and now. I gotta pay the rent, gotta pay the electric bill. And we get our eyes off of the cross and into our situation. May the Lord help us to get our eyes back on him. Because he is our provider, he is our life, he is our hope, he is our savior. And you know what? He loves us. He loves us and he knows us better than we know ourselves. It's a good thing to trust him with that, isn't it? And that's a good place to wrap up chapter one of John. Do we trust God? Or do we just say that we trust God? I used to work for Larry Briquette. Some of you might be familiar with him. He talked about tithing, he talked about managing your money, recognizing that it's not your money, but it's his money. But the greatest thing that he said that really struck with me was that phrase. Do you believe God? Or do you just say that you believe God? And if you believe God, it affects the way you look at things, it affects the way you pray, it affects the way that you look at circum circumstances in your life in the here and now, and it gives you an eye on eternity. May the Lord give us that perspective today. Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 24:07

That's Pastor Carl of the Mountain Cross on Come On Up. We're currently going through the book of John. We're so glad you've been with us, and we know there's so much to get out of this gospel book. One of the most powerful moments is in a well-known passage in John chapter 3. Jesus is meeting with Nicodemus and explaining what it means to be born again, not physically, but spiritually. As you might have memorized, Jesus speaks this to Nicodemus, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. What a promise from God! It sounds so easy, right? But sometimes the pressures of life can push you further away from wanting a relationship with God. Let me tell you, the most important decision you'll ever make is being in right relationship with God. He wants you with him for eternity. So don't be waiting around for the right moment. The best time to choose Jesus is now. If you'd like to learn more about what all of this means, head over to themountencross.com and click on How to Know God. The Mountain Cross is a group of believers in Jesus who seek to grow in faith by simply teaching the Bible verse by verse, chapter by chapter. We meet on Sundays at 10 a.m. at the Smoky Mountain Cinema in Waynesville. We look forward to worshiping with you. Well, that's all for today, but come on up to the mountain with us again as we seek to learn more from the Lord through his word. Come on up is sponsored by the Mountain Cross, a Calvary Chapel fellowship.