The Angels Compared Jacob's Sleeping Face to the Face on the Throne

Jacob ran with nothing but a walking staff and the memory of his brother's face. Esau had sworn to kill him. Behind him lay the tent where he had taken a blessing meant for another. Ahead lay Laban and years of labor he could not yet imagine. Night caught him on the mountain, and he had no pillow but the ground.

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So he reached for stones. Not any stones. He gathered twelve of them from the altar on Moriah, the same rock where his father Isaac had once lain bound beneath a raised knife. He set them under his head like a vow he was making to himself in the dark, that twelve tribes would rise from a hunted man sleeping alone in the hills.

The Twelve Stones Became One

While he slept, the stones moved.

They had been twelve. By the time the night turned they were one. The rock pressed itself together beneath his skull, twelve stones closing into a single stone, and the meaning was written into the fusing itself. Twelve sons. One people. A nation that would stand alone on the earth and not dissolve into the nations pressing in around it. Jacob felt none of it. His breath stayed slow. His eyes did not open. The sign was being carved beneath his head while he lay unconscious between two men who wanted him gone.

The Ladder Fell Across the Sleeping Man

Then the sky opened a road.

A ladder stood on the earth where Jacob lay, and its top leaned into heaven. On its rungs the angels were moving, some climbing, some coming down, and every one of them turned toward the man asleep at its foot. They were not passing him by. They were coming for the sight of his face.

Something in that sleeping face stopped them. It was familiar. Not the way a stranger's face turns out to be familiar after a moment. Familiar the way a thing is familiar when it has stood before an angel every hour of that angel's existence. They had seen this face in the highest place there is, and they had never once seen it wear dust.

Michael Knew the Face on the Throne

Among them came Michael.

Michael knew the road between the earth and the Throne better than any of them, because he was the one who carried the chosen up it. He had lifted mortals from the ground, set them before the seat of glory, and spoken for them there. He knew what stood at the center of heaven. Beneath the Throne the living creatures that bear it lift their faces without rest, and one of those faces belongs to a man. That face is graven into the very seat of God, kept in the place nothing unclean can reach.

Now Michael looked at the fugitive on the stones, and then at the face he had served beneath since before the world held any people at all, and they were the same face. The exile bleeding hours on a cold mountain was the man engraved into the Throne of Glory.

One day Michael would come down this same ladder for a son not yet born. He would gather up a child of Jacob's line and carry him before the seat and say, "Sovereign of all the universe, this is Thy lot and the portion of Thy works." One day the right hand of God would stretch out over one of this sleeper's sons and set him to minister before the Throne the way the angels minister. All of it was folded into the tired face on the rock, and Michael had recognized the first of it.

The Hosts Came Down to Look

The angels raced.

They climbed to set the two faces side by side, the one below and the one above, and then they streamed back down to look again, up and down the rungs, checking the sleeper against the image they had always known. The man did not stir for all the traffic passing over his body. He never learned that heaven had crowded the ladder to see whether a hunted shepherd could truly be the face at the center of everything. Above him it was carved into the Throne. Below him it breathed in the dirt. The same face, exactly.

The Kingdoms Climbed and Edom Would Not Come Down

Then the ladder showed him more than angels.

On its rungs the guardian princes of the kingdoms began to climb, and Jacob watched each one rise and each one fall. The prince of Babylon went up seventy rungs and came down. The prince of Media climbed fifty-two and came down. The prince of Greece rose one hundred eighty and came down. Every ascent had its number, and every number had a floor waiting beneath it.

Then the prince of Edom began to climb, and he did not stop. Higher than Babylon. Higher than Greece. He kept rising, and from the rungs he cried out, "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High." He would not come down. He meant to hang there above every other power forever, in the place kept for one seat only.

Jacob answered him from the ground. "You will be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest parts of the pit." And a voice above the ladder answered as well, that though Edom set its nest as high as the eagle among the stars, it would be torn down from there.

Jacob woke on the mountain with one stone under his head where twelve had been. His brother still wanted him dead. The road still ran toward Laban. He gathered himself up poor and afraid and alone, and he carried out of that night the one thing the angels had come down to confirm. His face was already in heaven. It had been there the whole time.