How Do We Get To Heaven?
When was the last time you genuinely encountered God?
Not when you last attended church, said your prayers, or read your Bible—but when you were truly, unexpectedly aware of God's presence in the middle of your everyday life? Perhaps while making a cup of tea, sitting in traffic, or scrolling through your phone on a Monday morning?
Many of us believe that God exists, but we're not really expecting Him to be present. We believe in creation, in Jesus' life and resurrection, in the Holy Spirit—and then we live Monday through Saturday as though God belongs exclusively in Sunday's sanctuary.
A Flawed Hero Who Couldn't See What Was Right There
The story of Jacob in Genesis 28 offers a refreshing perspective precisely because Jacob is so deeply flawed. Unlike the great spiritual giants of Scripture—Abraham wandering faithfully through the desert, Moses splitting the Red Sea, David conquering kingdoms—Jacob is a liar, a cheat, and a thief.
By the time we meet him in this passage, Jacob has deceived his father, stolen his brother's blessing, and is literally running for his life. This isn't some noble spiritual pilgrimage through the wilderness. He's flegging it, having lost his home, his security, and his family.
Jacob is completely alone in an ordinary place, with nothing but a stone for a pillow. There's no temple, no altar, no act of worship. Just a scared, broken man sleeping in the middle of nowhere.
And this is where God meets him.
Heaven Comes Down to Earth
In his dream, Jacob sees something extraordinary: heaven and earth connected, with angels ascending and descending. God speaks to him, repeating the same promise given to Abraham and Isaac, but adding something crucial: "I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go."
When Jacob wakes, he makes a stunning declaration: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."
Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't exclaim, "Look, God has arrived!" God was already there. The problem wasn't God's absence—it was Jacob's awareness.
God's presence didn't depend on Jacob noticing. God was there while Jacob slept, while he worried, while he ran away. The place didn't change. Jacob changed.
God Doesn't Wait for Us to Get Our Act Together
What's remarkable about this encounter is that God doesn't wait for Jacob to sort himself out. He doesn't demand an apology to Esau or insist Jacob become a better person first. God meets Jacob while he is still Jacob—flawed, frightened, and on the run.
This is profoundly good news.
We often imagine that God is playing hide-and-seek with us, that if we pray hard enough, become good enough, or understand enough theology, we'll finally find Him tucked away somewhere. But Scripture tells a different story. Again and again, God comes looking for us. He calls Abraham, speaks to Moses, meets Jacob in the night, and comes to us in Jesus.
God commits Himself to us before we fully surrender ourselves to Him.
Where Heaven Meets Earth
Centuries after Jacob's dream, when Philip tells Nathanael he's found the Messiah in Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael responds with skepticism: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
Do we still ask that question? Can anything good come from that neighborhood, that family, that circumstance? Can anything good come from places the wider world finds easy to overlook?
Jesus responds to Nathanael by echoing Jacob's dream: "You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."
But notice what's changed. There's no ladder or staircase now. It's Jesus Himself. In Jesus, heaven comes down to earth. In Christ, God-with-us becomes real, meeting us in the places the world overlooks.
The Wheat and the Weeds
This brings us to Jesus' parable in Matthew 13, where the kingdom of heaven is compared to a field where wheat and weeds grow together. When servants want to pull out the weeds immediately, the owner tells them to wait—pulling them too soon might destroy the wheat as well.
This isn't passive waiting. Farmers actively care for their crops, nourishing them, protecting them from pests, watering them daily. The instruction to let them grow together until harvest doesn't mean abandoning the field—it means tending it with patience and care.
Jesus tells us something uncomfortable here: God's presence doesn't mean everything becomes perfect. The wheat and the weeds will grow together. The kingdom is here, but the world is still broken.
If God were really present, we think, wouldn't everything be sorted? Wouldn't churches be less messy, families less complicated, the world less troubled?
But Jesus says: look again. The presence of weeds doesn't mean the wheat has stopped growing. The kingdom is here, but it's not quite finished yet.
Looking Again
Both Jacob's story and Jesus' parable invite us to the same practice: look again. Pay attention.
The world is exceptionally good at noticing the weeds—at spotting what's broken, failing, or disappointing. We're experts at identifying problems in our communities, our churches, ourselves.
But Jesus says: look again. The kingdom is growing.
It grows when we feed a neighbor, sit with someone lonely, give our time quietly, share our food, choose forgiveness. These things don't look impressive by worldly standards. That's precisely the point. The kingdom of God doesn't always arrive in ways the world recognizes. Sometimes it's as small as a seed, hidden like yeast in flour, present in places others have written off.
Living Between Two Truths
We live between two realities: the kingdom is here, and the kingdom is coming. We see both the weeds and the wheat. And we trust the farmer.
This doesn't mean ignoring what's wrong or pretending suffering doesn't matter. It means refusing to believe that what we see right now is the end of the story.
Jacob learned this trust. After God met him at Bethel and promised, "I am with you," Jacob's life didn't become easy. Years passed filled with deception, war, fear, and disappointment. He wrestled with God, was renamed Israel, and eventually faced the brother from whom he'd spent years running.
And where did God take him? Back to Bethel—back to the ordinary place where the promise began. Looking back over everything that happened, Jacob could finally see what he couldn't see while living through it: God had been there all along.
Opening Our Eyes
Perhaps one day we'll look back over our own lives and discover the same thing—that God was there in the moments we knew it and in the moments we didn't. In celebrations and grief, in answered prayers and in silence, in those ordinary days when nothing important seems to be happening.
When we wake and make coffee, rush to work, deal with overflowing inboxes, handle annoying phone calls, manage responsibilities we'd rather avoid—God is there.
The hope of Christianity isn't that we climb high enough or become spiritual enough to reach God. The hope of the gospel is that God has come to us. In Jesus, heaven has come to earth. Emmanuel—God with us.
As we move through our ordinary lives, with all their beauty and brokenness, we can truly say: "Surely the Lord is in this place."
Even when the place seems ordinary and overlooked. Even when it seems broken. Even when it's somewhere the world hasn't noticed.
God is here. How wonderful that we might learn to see it.