set up on earth and reaching to heaven; and he saw the angels ascending and descending, and the Lord standing above it, and he heard the Divine voice charged with promise and with blessing: “I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.” This, taking it in all its parts, is a very surprising narrative; and the point in it on which I desire to fix your attention for a moment is this, that this vision startled him into a new consciousness—“Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.” It was the beginning of a new life.
That vision, we may be sure, never entirely faded. He was never afterwards the same man he had been before it. It had awakened the divine capacity in him; and it remained with him as a constant reminder of the presence of God in his life, to protect and to inspire him—“I am with thee, and I will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.” Such a voice as this in a man’s heart gives his life a new quality; it puts him in a new relation to all common things.
We may well believe that it was this more than anything else which drew Jacob apart from the common heathen life around him, from that day onwards. It was this which, in spite of all his weaknesses, defects, and failures in life and character, gradually raised him to a different level.
It was this which finally culminated in transforming him from Jacob the supplanter to Israel the prince of God.
So far as appears, he had gone out from his home, as so many go forth in all ages, a dull soul, though with latent capacities, his thoughts bent on securing his personal safety and his worldly success. But he woke in the desert after that vision, with the seeds of the new life rooted and growing in him.
It is this moment of awakening on which I desire to fix your thoughts—this moment of his transfiguration; when he saw and felt a heaven above him, and yet very close, with its ladder of angelic communication, which he had not so seen or felt before;
the moment when a new consciousness flashed through his soul, and illumined unsuspected chambers in it, stirring new thoughts and new aspirations. He woke up to be a new man henceforth, moving in a new presence, and having always in his ears the voice of a Divine call.
Do you ask why I dwell on this familiar history, or desire that you should contemplate and realise this change in the young man Jacob? It is because there is just the same soul, the same capacity of higher life in every one of us: in some it is awake already and transfiguring their life; in others still latent, sleeping, undiscovered.
I dwell on it because it makes and will make all the difference in the world to your life whether in your case this capacity is awakened or not. This, then, is what I have to postulate as giving a value beyond the power of words to describe to every soul amongst us.
It bids us recognise and keep always before us that in every common life, of child