Jamin Bradley

In Biblical mythology, some of the angels of heaven crossed the boundaries between heaven and earth and procreated with human women. These women gave birth to children who would grow into the giants found throughout the Old Testament in the clans of the Nephilim, the Anakim, the Emim, the Rephaim, and the Zamzummim. Their quasi-divine race would live on until the time of David, when he went to war against the remaining giants in the land, starting with Goliath.

These giants were known as “the men of renown”—or in Hebrew “the men of šēm.” It seems possible that some of the giant’s ideologies lived on after the flood into the time of the Tower of Babel, for the Bible tells us that humans built this tower—this stairway to Heaven—in order to make a šēm for themselves. Perhaps they were trying to construct a way to get to Heaven, or perhaps they were trying to make a way for powerful angels to leave Heaven and come down to them. Whatever the case, God found their šēm project deeply offensive.

At one of his lower points, Jacob stumbled across the real stairway to Heaven, where he saw angels “ascending and descending” and God himself by it. This was the stairway of the one true God, who would one day descend those stairs and come to us, not as a giant created through broken boundaries, but as Jesus: a human crafted by the Holy Spirit, given to us via the miracle of a virgin birth. His own quasi-divinity would be repressed so that he might take on the full form of a human servant.

Jesus associated Jacob’s stairway to Heaven with himself when he preached, “You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” There are many interpretations we might take away from this statement: (1) Jesus is now the place where Heaven and Earth intersect; (2) the Abrahamic blessing that was passed onto Jacob when he saw the stairway, is now found in Jesus; or (3) Jesus is the God of gods whom Jacob witnessed by that stairway. All of these statements are true, regardless of whether Jesus meant to imply them here.

What stairway has your focus these days? What spiritual beings have your attention? The stairways of men and giants and fallen angels? Or the stairway of Christ? If you were to take a moment and close your eyes and imagine a stairway to the highest, most important thing in your life, what might you find at the top?