Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1267
“I am the God of Bethel.” Genesis 31:13.
Jacob had been sent away to Padanaram and he might, perhaps, have stopped there if things had been quite as he wished. As it was, he stayed there quite long enough. He seemed almost to forget his father’s house in the cares that his wives and children and the anxious oversight of his constantly increasing flocks involved. But God did not mean him to remain at Padanaram. He was to lead a separated life in Canaan and, therefore, things grew very uncomfortable with Laban. He was not a nice man to live with at any time, but he began to show his crotchets and his heart-burnings, and a good deal of that scheming spirit of which there was a little in Jacob.
It came to him from his mother, who was Laban’s true sister, and had her share of the family failing. So there were endless bickering, bargaining, disputes—each trying to outdo the other—till at last, as God would have it, Jacob could bear it no longer. So he resolved to take leave of that land and return to the land of his kindred. An angel appeared to him, then, to comfort him in going back to his father’s house. The angel spoke in the name of the Lord and said, “I am the God of Bethel,” which must have at once suggested to Jacob that the Lord had not changed, more especially in regard to him.
The occurrence at Bethel was the first special occasion, probably, upon which he had known the Lord and though many years had passed, God comes to him as the same God as He was before. “I am the God of Bethel.” You remember, some of you, perhaps, the first time when pardoning love was revealed to you—when you were brought to see the love of God in the great atoning Sacrifice of Jesus Christ! Well, tonight, the Lord says to you, “I am the same God as you have ever found Me. I have not changed. I change not, therefore you sons of Jacob are not consumed, even as your father Jacob was not consumed, for I was, even to him, the same God.”
Brothers and Sisters, what a mercy it is that we have an Immutable God! Everything else changes. Yon moon, which but a little while ago was full, you see now young and new again and soon she will fill her horns. Everything beneath her beams changes like herself. We are never at one stage and our circumstances are perpetually varying. But You, O God, are the same and of Your years there is no end. Your creatures are a sea, but You are the terra firma and when our soul comes to rest on You, Rock of Ages, then we know what stability means and, for the first time, we enjoy true rest.
Trust in the Lord forever and rest in the Lord alone, for He changes not. “I AM THE GOD OF BETHEL. Does not that mean, first, that our God is the God of our early mercies? As we have already said, Bethel was to Jacob the place of early mercy. Let us look back upon our early mercies. Did they not come to us, as they did to him, unsought and unexpected and when, perhaps, we were unprepared for them? I do not know what were Jacob’s feelings when he lay down with a stone for his pillow, but I feel very sure that he never reckoned that the place would be the House of God to him!
His exclamation showed this when he said, “Surely, God is in this place, and I knew it not!” It was the last thing on his mind that, amidst those stones, the Lord would set up a ladder for him and would speak from the top of it, to his soul. So, dear Friends, with some of us, when God appeared to us, it was in a very unexpected manner. Perhaps we were not looking for Him, but in us was fulfilled that memorable word, “I am found of them that sought Me not.” We, like Jacob, were glad to meet Him, but we had not expected that He would come, or come in so Divine a manner, with such fullness of Covenant manifestation and such richness of Grace!
But He took our soul, before we were aware, and carried us right away from ourselves. We, perhaps, like Jacob, were sleeping. God was awake. This was the mercy! And He came to us while yet our heart slept and our mind had not felt awakened towards Himself. We seemed slumbering with regard to Divine things, but as a dream in the visions of the night, so God came to us. He found us sleeping, but nevertheless He manifested Himself to us as He does not unto the world. Do you remember all that? Then the God you have to look to is the God of that unexpected Grace! Do you need
Grace tonight? Why should you not have it? Are you unfit for it? Do you feel more and more how undeserving you are of it? Yet it came to you before, when you were in just such a state! Why shouldn’t it come again?
Sitting in this house of prayer, why should not we again be startled and be made to say, “Surely God is in this place, and I knew it not! I did not think, when I came within these walls that here He would, in such a special manner, reveal Himself to me! But now I shall always think of the seat in which I sat, and say, ‘How wonderful is this place! It is none other than the House of God and the gate of Heaven.’” The God of unexpected manifestations in your early days is still the same God!