Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 315 · November 11
The Place He Slept
“And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”
"Nearer, my God, to Thee." Sarah Flower Adams published that hymn in 1841, and the verse people remember takes its picture from Jacob's night: "Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down, darkness be over me, my rest a stone." Sung slowly, it can sound as if Jacob chose that stone on purpose, as an act of devotion.
He chose nothing. "And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran." He was leaving in a hurry, because his brother Esau had said in his heart, "then will I slay my brother Jacob." When night came, "he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set." The stone under his head was simply what was lying around.
Then came the dream of the ladder, with "the angels of God ascending and descending on it," and above it the LORD said, "I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land." Jacob woke up and said the words of today's verse. Then he said something else that hardly anyone prints on a card: "And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place!" The moment he understood, he was frightened. In the morning he set the stone up as a pillar and made a vow that hangs on an "if": "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on." That is four conditions, and a fifth follows in the next line: "So that I come again to my father's house in peace." Only after all that does he say, "then shall the LORD be my God." Yet most of what he asked for had already been promised to him in the dark. He had not asked for any of it. He had been asleep on a stone.
"Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not." Lord, I could say that about many of my years. You were in the room I walked out of, and in the week I have written off. I have been asking You to come to places where You were already standing, and I called them ordinary because there was nothing to see. Keep me the way You kept Jacob, before he asked and while he was running. When I wake up to Your presence, let a holy fear come with it, because I have grown used to speaking to You as though this were a small thing. And let me rest on what You told him: "I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of." Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 315 is Boldly to the Throne (Hebrews 4:16).