Jesus, the Stairway to Heaven
When I read this morning’s text in the NIV this past week and it translated the Hebrew word for “ladder”
in v. 12 as “stairway,” I knew it was unavoidable: I was going to have to make allusion to Led Zeppelin’s
famous song in this sermon! I do that against my better judgment, because I suspect some of you are
already listening to that in your heads instead of to me (can you really do both?!). OK, now snap out of
it!! Yes, from what I’ve read, Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven is the most recognized and requested rock
song of all time. In fact, Robert Plant, Zeppelin’s vocalist, apparently got so tired of the song he himself
wrote that he once paid $10,000 to a radio station never to play it again! I have been amazed as I’ve
read about it a bit this week, how people have gotten married to the silly song and all the rest! I don’t
know who performed those weddings, but that’s way over the top, as far as I’m concerned. Weddings in
church buildings are, as I tell prospective married couples, primarily services of worship, so whatever we
do in them must be in keeping with the worship of God. And that’s what’s really eerily missing about
Zeppelin’s anthem, if you will: it has nothing to do with God!
Apparently the guitarist Jimmy Page came up with the music by combining some ideas he’d been
thinking about, and then Plant came up with some lyrics to go with the music. A writer at American
Songwriter magazine a few years back said, “As the song itself notes, ‘Sometimes words have two
meanings.’ The meaning behind Stairway’s words seem, if nothing else, infinite. Lyrically, the tune has
dazed and confused many a mind-altered listener with its vague take on duality for the better part of a
half-century. But, more often than not, lyrics say more with how they feel than what they really mean,
and while ‘Stairway’ is seemingly a song about the inevitability of death that’s really a song about fear
but actually a song about greed… or something…” At least you can understand the lyrics, whatever they
mean! There seems to be little doubt that there are ideas of magic, paganism, what one would term
occultism and associations with Wicca in the song. I won’t listen to it anymore. Or talk of it!
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Rather than trying to figure out the esoteric pagan words of some rock band, let us seek to understand
the depth of revelation found in the Word of God and the real stairway to heaven!
Leading up to our text for today, Jacob has already deceived his father Isaac into giving him his blessing
and so confirming the birthright transfer of which we spoke last week. Gen. 27:41 tells us that Esau
hated Jacob and vowed to kill him as a result. Rebekah urges Jacob to flee to her brother Laban till Esau
calms down. Isaac further charges Jacob to go and take a wife from among Laban’s daughters. So Jacob
is on his way to Paddan-aram to take a wife. Along the way he stops for the night and takes a stone to
put under his head. I’ve camped and backpacked and have never even thought of using a stone for a
pillow, but somehow Jacob is able to fall asleep that way! He has a dream of a ladder, no, of a stairway,
reaching up to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending on it. What Jacob probably
was thinking of in his dream was what is known as a ziggurat, an elevated complex at the top of which
was a shrine found throughout the Ancient Near East. There is in your bulletins a drawing of the NeoSumerian Great Ziggurat of Ur, near Nasiriyah, Iraq, which has been largely reconstructed today. It
dates from around 2100 BCE. You can see the stairs that lead to the top. The Mesopotamians believed
that these pyramid temples connected heaven and earth. In fact, the ziggurat at Babylon was known as
Etemenankia or "House of the Platform between Heaven and Earth.” Thus, when Jacob dreams, he is
perhaps thinking of things he’d previously seen or heard of, together with the covenant God his fathers
had told him about, and he makes that connection. The covenant name of God, Yahweh, is indicated by
the word LORD in your text in all capital letters. God reveals himself to Jacob in a dream to confirm to
him the promise made to Abraham, of land and offspring and blessing. The Lord adds that he will be
with Jacob wherever he goes, accenting the transcendence of God, a very different concept from the
prevailing idea of the divine then and yet today in native or indigenous religion, where there are
multiple gods, each associated with a particular place and limited to that place. While Jacob feels a
special presence of God in the place that he was sleeping and where he experienced his dream, it was
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hardly the case that God was limited to that place. Indeed, God promises to be with him and to keep
him “wherever you go”—“I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you” (v. 15).
When Jacob awakens, he realizes he has had an experience of God. He doesn’t seem to have had much
of that before. Children and young people can grow up in a family where the faith is either not talked
about, is assumed, or neglected, with the result that they don’t really know much about that faith.
Jacob seems to have been somewhat unclear on who God is; when he awakens, he confesses he did not
know God was there. Did he think God was just a local deity like those found among the neighboring
peoples?
People often talk about God, but what do they mean by the words they use? One blogger, an “interfaith
minister,” at the Huffington Post a couple of years ago said, “large numbers of spiritually oriented
people are reluctant to use the term [God] at all, because they know how easy it is to be misunderstood.
They'll say ‘the universe’ or ‘nature’ or ‘spirit’ or ‘the divine,’ or some other neutral, non-sectarian word
that doesn't carry the same kind of baggage as ‘God.’ The fastest growing religious cohort in the country
-- the so-called Spiritual But Not Religious -- rarely use the word. Those who do use it are increasingly
likely to mean it in a non-anthropomorphic sense, as something more like the abstract ‘Force’ of Star
Wars or a field phenomenon in physics than the Jehovah of Bible-based religion.” I don’t see why one
would even bother with the idea of the divine if it is simply equivalent to “nature” or “the universe,” an
impersonal force, an energy field. If one’s idea of the divine is equivalent to the material realm, one is
essentially a pantheist, which means God is limited to the universe and is not transcendent; how could
he then exist before there was a universe or create it? Is he filled with evil, just like the world? Should
one bother to pray to or worship such an impersonal entity? Why can’t people see that this really
devolves back to the little amulets, rocks, fetishes, and idols of the indigenous religions of the world?
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Q. 4 of our Shorter Catechism tells us that God is Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being,
wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. He was before all things and transcends all things.
He is personal and has graciously entered into relationship with us through the covenant made with
Abraham and the promises made to him and those coming from him, culminating in Jesus Christ. Hence,
“those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed” (Gal. 3:9).
Jacob saw a stairway to heaven in his dream and realized God was with him and had made covenant
with him, as with Abraham and Isaac. The covenant is realized in Jesus Christ—he is the stairway to
heaven. In John 1:51, Jesus says to Nathanael, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and
the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Nathanael would have understood
the allusion well and we must not miss it. Jesus was saying that he is the way to God. If you want to get
to God and live with him in heaven, walk in his way. He is “the way,” as he later says in John 14:6.
Jesus is the one in whom God uniquely dwells. He is the Son of God, God incarnate. He is the one by
whom God bridges the divide between time and eternity, between the mundane and the transcendent,
between the secular and the sacred, between earth and heaven. It is not that we must leave the world
when we come to God in Christ. He has come to us and promises to be with us, to provide for us, and to
bless us. He gives us bread for the body and bread for the soul, for Jesus is the Bread that came down
from heaven. He gives us clothing for the body and clothing for the soul, for it is in the righteousness of
Christ that we must be clothed if we would be justified and accepted with God. We have no
righteousness of our own. He calls upon us to mark out life with him in mind and to give him our first
and best, the tithe.
Stairway to Heaven may be the preeminent rock anthem, but like so much of what one finds in rock and
pop culture, it is spiritually bankrupt. It is another of those bridges to nowhere that people spend a lot
of time and money on. Believe on Jesus and walk in the way of him who is the true stairway to heaven.
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