Anyone who has attended church in the last forty years has probably at some point sung Lanny Wolfe’s enduring chorus, “Surely the Presence of the Lord is in this place.” We sang it at our church on a recent Sunday.
Later
in the week as I read in Genesis 28, I came again to the story of Jacob fleeing
from home to escape his brother Esau and to find a wife in a distant land. The
journey had to be difficult for many reasons, and as he found himself in a
desert, I’m sure it didn’t look like a place where God would dwell. As I read, I
was reminded of how he experienced a dream of angels ascending and descending a
ladder to heaven and how God promised to bless him and make his descendants so
numerous they would be as “the dust of the earth.” God declared he would be
with him and watch over him wherever he went. When Jacob awoke, he said “Surely
the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.”
Those words were so similar to the ones in the song, I
wondered if perhaps Lanny Wolfe was inspired by this story when he wrote the lyrics. After research, I found this verse was indeed the catalyst for him to pen the lines that have meant so much to many.
God
often works in my life by connecting dots. So, days later I saw an Instagram
post Priscilla Shirer made about the dream Jacob had. I took special note of
it, because this was the third time in a few days God highlighted that
scripture.
She
points out that while Joseph is in the desert on this journey, he takes a stone and
makes a pillow of it. It’s then as he’s resting on the rock that he has the
dream. After his earlier declaration he goes on to say, “How awesome is this
place. This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
To paraphrase, Priscilla points out how God can come to us in the hard
places, and despite their challenges, use these times to change our lives as He
did Jacob’s.
I was intrigued by all these connections and shared them with Jerry,
and when I mentioned Jacob resting on the rock, he immediately said, “The Rock
is Jesus.”
Yes. Jesus is the rock. In writing to the early church in 1
Corinthians 10, Paul says about the Jewish ancestors, “They all ate the same
spiritual food and drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and
that rock was Christ.”
It was and is and always will be in a desert or anywhere else, in a
hard place or an easy place. And so, if you find yourself in some sort of
desert, put your head down and rest on the rock of Jesus. And know that despite
how things may appear that if you belong to Him, surely the presence of the
Lord is there.
As I finished this post, we learned of the school tragedy in Nashville and the migrant fire in Mexico. Our hearts are burdened for all those involved and especially for the families of those who died. We pray for the consolation that only God can bring. We look to Him to do what only He can do in the unimaginably hard place in which these families find themselves. We continue to remember them in prayer.