Have You Been to Bethel Lately?
And God said to Jacob, “Go up to Bethel and settled there, and build an altar there to God, who appeared to you when you were fleeing from your brother Esau.”
Genesis 35:1
Believers in Christ are pilgrims. We are on a journey that is both individual and corporate. Our journey is not ours alone — we share much of it with other believers — but each of us also has a private Christian life. There are secrets of each heart — not only sinful secrets, the matters that we have confessed and are too ashamed of to mention to others, the things that we have gained inner confidence through God’s Word and by His Spirit that we are forgiven. We also have holy secrets — moments and experiences with God that are deep and personal, and of such a nature that we find ourselves unable to fully express them to others.
God reveals Himself to each person who trusts in Christ, and these revelations are real and happen at different times and in different places in our lives. God often leads us back to these places to remind us of what He has done. Jacob was commanded to build an altar there, and an altar was a place where animals were sacrificed, a place that pointed ultimately to the cross. For us, all of the ways that God has touched us in the past, each place and each situation, were His ways of leading us to Christ and to the cross of Calvary. Nothing God ever did in history or in our individual lives compares with the cross.
A Spiritual Journal for a Spiritual Journey: It is good for us to track our spiritual journey, to sit down in relative peaceful repose and let the Spirit guide us in our memories through the great moments of our walk with God. What were those Bethels in our lives where God spoke to us, where we found encouragement, growth, peace, joy, and the true life of the Spirit? Do you recall them? You should. Stop and write down those events, the times and places, the key people involved, and thank God for work in your life. But do not enshrine those moments as more important than the cross. Do not let a single person seem greater than Christ. Rather see all of these — people, events, experiences — as ways that God was leading you toward Christ, toward the cross, and toward life.
An Upward Call to Life: As Paul wrote in Philippians 3:14, the heavenward call of God in Christ is our goal. The events in the past, the moments when God touched us, simply prepare us for greater moments in the future. From studying Jacob’s life we learn something about ourselves as well, that our experiences, like his, are comprised of a mixture of our actions, the actions of others, the circumstances of our lives, and among these are both good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. But over all of them we should, as Jacob learned, see the hand of God, guiding, redeeming, forgiving, calling, urging us onward and upward.
For us Bethel is Calvary. Bethel is the place where Christ is recognized, where sin is atoned for, where grace is dispensed, where His presence is reaffirmed, where purpose is rediscovered, where hope is reborn, and where life is re-bestowed. When we cannot return to those places God has spoken to us in the past, we can still recall them and thank God for His work in our life. But our vision should always be upward and positive, not backward and depressing. For all that God has done in our past, He promises more for us in the future. For each child of God the best is always yet to come.
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A word about America: I happen to be writing this on the Fourth of July, 2014, the celebration of American independence. This is a day when we often look back on our past as Americans, and there is much to celebrate, much to learn, and much to think about. But let us not only look backwards. Too much of our current thought has only this backward view, and does not take into consideration our present realities or our future challenges. We need to let the past be celebrated but we need also to let it propel us into the future. As God has guided our nation in the past, so let us pray that we may listen to His voice today, that our leaders will be given wisdom and guidance, and that God might send great revivals among us.
