Dream the Dream of God

About a month ago, I was pressed with a need to dream. Humanly I may not have gone through a lot but since young, I have tasted the vanities of the world. Consequently, I became a dreamless person with no ambition to pursue earthly achievements.

Yet here I am, presented with another dream. God has a dream. The dream that He granted to Jacob in the book of Genesis chapter 28 is called the Dream of Bethel. Bethel means the house of God so God's dream is to have His house, where the heavenly ladder is located to connect the earth to the heavens.

I do not know how to expound on the dimensions of God's dream. It's profound, high, and all-encompassing.

God desires not a physical building but a household, a living entity that would express Himself. Therefore the gospel needs to be preached, sinners must become sons of God, the children of God must grow in a normal way, and there must be a harmonious, functioning Body of Christ that would only express one Person- Christ.

I don't have any dream in the world and God's dream has not fully become my dream. I felt a bit stuck. Remember? Jacob's dream was not his desire per se, it was God's desire revealed to him. I thought to myself, Jacob's situation was just like mine.

In the most practical sense, how my heart reacts toward God's people and toward all those whom our God desires to save to the uttermost says it all. Let's say if a sister in the Lord is in need, but it is so inconvenient to go out of my way to render her help; what would I end up doing? Or, how desperate am I to speak the gospel to others so that they may be saved? So I began to consider Jacob's life recorded in the book of Genesis.

Jacob was born as a "heel holder," a true supplanter. Yet he was granted to dream God's dream. The problem was God's dream had not become his real dream. Thus Jacob's life was full of sufferings with the purpose of burning the paint to be one with the pottery. He just had to go through many tribulations so that God's dream became fully wrought into him. Yet when you look at Jacob in his last days, the blessings that came out from his mouth became truly an exhibition of God's dream concerning His people.

In the Bible, Jacob's life and Joseph's, his son, intertwined. In a sense, the records became one in presenting a full biography of a person who was chosen by God, dealt, broken (in his own strength) by God to eventually be changed to live by another life (i.e., God's life) as shown by Jacob's biography. Then this person continued to reign in maturity of life (as shown by Joseph's reigning in Egypt and caring for his family) and finally overflow with such life by blessing others (as shown by Jacob's final days).

And there I was, worrying about lacking dreams and my own shortness in living God's dream until the perspective changed. Jacob's dream in Bethel set the precedence over all the other dreams in the Bible. Yet there existed two more dreams in Genesis. You may say these were the stepping stones toward the Dream of Bethel. They were Joseph's dreams of the sheaves of wheat and the stars of light.

I shall continue this post soon. Stay tuned!