WildOx Blog

The Blog of John K. Baw - Gibraltar

House of God, Gate of Heaven

In Genesis 28 we have the story of Jacob falling asleep, as he escapes the hand of his brother Esau, and dreaming of a ladder reaching up to Heaven. In this dream the Lord stands beside him and reconfirms His covenant with Abraham, and in this reconfirmation we get an idea of how central to God's eschatological plans the Abrahamic covenant is. I am getting increasingly disappointed with an exposition of the Gospel of Jesus Christ being explained in terms of a simplistic "I am a sinner, I need a Saviour, I repent and ask Jesus to come into my life, I am now blessed for eternity because I know Him". That, I am increasingly seeing, is part of the Gospel, indeed a very essential part of it, but it is not the full gospel. In my view, the Gospel, in order to be the Gospel, needs to be eschatological through and through.
 
By eschatological I mean that it has to include as part of its narrative the message that the one and true creator God chose Abraham and his descendants as the mens through which all the nations of the Earth would be blessed, and all the world's wrongs would be put right.

In our story,when Jacob wakes from the dream he realizes that God is in that lace, hence the name Beth-el, and then we read his words:

Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ -Genesis 28:16b, 17


The Good News of God's Kingdom, in order for it to be good news to a hurting world, must involve these elements in it, not as peripheral elements, but as its core message.

1. God's Presence.

The message needs to be a message about the Presence of God – surely God's presence is in this place – it needs to produce a Godly fear, a reverence and a sense of awe towards God. We cannot be satisfied with a Christianity that speaks f the Lord but does not make people declare “surely God is in this place!”

2. House of God.

This Gospel needs to have us see that WE are the “house” of God – we are a living temple that the Holy Spirit is indwelling, a living and breathing house made up of living stones that are to reflect to all the wonders of God's love, peace, joy and presence IN a people.

3. Gate of Heaven

The heartbeat of Christianity is found in the Lord's prayer, specifically where it says , “ Your will be done, on Earth as in Heaven”. By this statement we read that God's will is to have Earth reflect the attributes of “Heaven” - not Heaven as in the-place-where-you-go-when-you-die, but Heaven as in the place where the seat of God's benign rule is, the seat of His throne, the place where He reigns in Love, Mercy, and Righteousness. God's Ekklesia, His community of called-out ones, need to recover the sense of being “gates” or gateways of Heaven. We are portals, places of access, through which expressions of Heaven are made a reality here on Earth.

Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in -Psalm 24:7