06/06/2014 - THE ENCOUNTER WITH GOD

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.” (Genesis 28:16)

Jacob’s journey has a lot to do with that of the Christians’. He was not the firstborn, the one who would naturally inherit the blessing. But when he was born, he grasped his twin brother’s heel. For that reason he is called “deceiver” by many, which is a mistake. Jacob was nobler than his brother and won the highly privileged place of patriarch of the chosen people and ancestor of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Examining the Scriptures with the help of the Holy Spirit, we find that the events in the life of that man have to do with God’s will. The elder would have to serve the younger.

The achievement of blessing – He who is carnal will always lose, because the carnal mind is death. Esau did not care what God wanted. The Bible says that he was a man of the field – a cunning hunter but crude. Jacob, very much unlike his brother, who lived in tents in a quiet, contemplative yet simple way, interested in spiritual things. He was a person who waited on God. Those who wait on the Lord always win.

Esau took two Hittite women as wives and they became a grief of mind to his parents. Jacob decided to wait on God. One day Esau came in from the field and he was hungry. He saw that Jacob had cooked a stew of lentils. He then asked his brother to let him eat of that stew. Jacob negotiated and got Esau to sell him his birthright in exchange for that delicacy. Later on, Rebekah, their mother, forced Jacob to take possession of what he had lawfully obtained, making him dress up with Esau’s clothes to receive the blessing from his father Isaac. I’ve heard famous people say he stole the blessing from his brother or deceived him. I disagree because Isaac himself said to Esau: “Your brother came with deceit and has taken away your blessing” (Gen. 27:35).

The importance of obedience – One day, Isaac told Jacob to go to the land of his mother’s family, where he should get a wife (Genesis 28:2) and he promptly obeyed. Obedience is one of the basic requirements for anyone who wants to please God; there is a great reward in it. The guidance of the Lord should be obeyed and never neglected, or even questioned. As he walked toward Padan Aram, where he had been sent by his father, Jacob had an encounter with the Lord God that changed his life. The Lord promised He would accompany him and turn him into a blessed person, as He did to his father Isaac, and Abraham, his grandfather.

The right decision – During his journey, Jacob arrived at a certain place. It was dusk. He stopped, picked a stone to use it as a pillow and there he laid his head. When he fell asleep, he dreamed of a ladder uniting heaven and earth, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending (Genesis 28:12).

As I said, Jacob’s journey typifies our own. While it is daytime, we must walk; i.e. while the Word is being revealed to us it is necessary to move on, to make decisions. But when night falls (the revelations cease), you must stop and not take one more step; i.e. we should not make decisions until the sun (Word) shines again (reveals itself). The natural life is very similar to the spiritual life.

He chose a stone that most pleased him and used it as a pillow. This teaches us that we must choose one of the promises He has made to us and put our faith on it. While Jacob slept, the Lord God gave him a revelation and the promises He had made to his parents. When he woke up, he took that stone and poured oil on it and set it up as a pillar of God’s house. This fact shows us a beautiful lesson: we must take possession of the Lord God’s promises to us, pour our anointing over it and set it up as our platform of life and pillar of our ministry.

In 1984, after suffering from a cold or allergic rhinitis for two years, the Lord allowed me to get to know, through the reading of the book The Name of Jesus, by Kenneth Hagin, the doctrine of real faith, which I call ordaining. That revelation lit up my heart and opened my understanding to two passages that I knew by heart, but I had never quite understood them. The first is in John 14:13, which reads: “And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son”. In the blink of an eye, I saw where I was going wrong. Hagin wrote that the word “ask” had been mistranslated. This verb, in Greek, means to demand, to determine. From then on I knew I would no longer need to ask for my healing, but rather determine it, or demand it.

The second passage is found in Mark 11:22-23: So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. All I had to do was to follow the guidelines. That’s what I did.

It would be insane of me if I despised the stone (revelation) and prayed for the Lord to give me a new revelation. That stone, which the Lord had given me, was like opening the gates of heaven. By doing what I had learned, my cold completely ceased. All I did was to pour my anointing (my understanding) on the stone. Since then, this “small door”, which is the revelation, has helped me enter into His gate (Psalm 100), which is the Lord Jesus, and take possession of everything that belongs to me in Christ. Our encounter with God occurs in the revelation of the Word that He allows us to have. It is in the revelation of His Word that the Lord is.