I Am the God of Bethel

Jacob did not meet the messenger for the first time on his deathbed. When he called Him “the messenger who has redeemed me,” he was naming someone he had heard speak, years before, in words that left no doubt about who He was.

To hear those words, we go back to the middle of Jacob’s life. Years before, he had fled from his brother Esau toward Haran, to the house of his uncle Laban. On the way, at a place he named Bethel, he dreamed of a ladder reaching to the heavens, and “The LORD stood over him” and spoke to him (Genesis 28:13). When he woke, he set up the stone he had slept on as a pillar, poured oil on its top, and made a vow.

Genesis 28:20-22 And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and a garment to put on, and I return in peace to my father's house, then the LORD shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be the house of God; and of all that you give me I will surely give a tenth to you."

Then came the long years in Haran. “These twenty years I have been in your house,” Jacob would later tell Laban (Genesis 31:41). At the end of them, the LORD told him to go home: “Return to the land of your fathers and to your kindred, and I will be with you” (Genesis 31:3). Jacob called Rachel and Leah out to the field and told them why he was leaving, and part of what he told them was a dream.

The Messenger Speaks in the First Person

Genesis 31:11-13 And the messenger of God said to me in the dream, 'Jacob,' and I said, 'Here I am.' And he said, 'Lift up now your eyes and see: all the he-goats going up upon the flock are streaked, speckled, and grizzled; for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you. I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar, where you vowed a vow to me. Now arise, go out from this land, and return to the land of your birth.'

The speaker in verse 11 is “the messenger of God,” and in verse 13 the same speaker says, “I am the God of Bethel.”

The word for “I” carries weight. The messenger begins the sentence with the pronoun anokhi אָנֹכִי aw-no-kee', “I,” and names Himself with it: anokhi ha-El Beit-El, “I am the God of Bethel.” He does not say that the God of Bethel has sent Him. He says that He is the God of Bethel.

So does the vow. At Bethel Jacob had vowed to God that “The LORD shall be my God.” Now the messenger says that Jacob vowed that vow “to me.” He does not speak of a vow made to someone else whom He serves. He claims it as made to Himself.

An ordinary messenger speaks differently. In the next chapter of Genesis, Jacob sends messengers ahead to Esau, and he tells them exactly what to say.

Genesis 32:5 And he commanded (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw') them, saying, "Thus shall you say to my lord, to Esau: Thus says your servant Jacob, I have sojourned with Laban, and have stayed until now.

That is the form of a message carried on someone else’s behalf. The messenger speaks, but the “I” in the message belongs to the one who sent him. The messenger of God in Genesis 31 does not speak in that form. He speaks in His own person and says that He is the God to whom the vow was made. His command, “return to the land of your birth,” is the same command the LORD had given in Genesis 31:3.

God did not withdraw behind a deputy when He met Jacob. The One who came as a messenger spoke as God. And Jacob heard this before he ever came to the river Jabbok, and long before his deathbed.

The Same Messenger Elsewhere in Genesis

This way of speaking is not found only in Jacob’s dream. Genesis has used it twice before.

The first is Hagar. Fleeing from Sarai into the wilderness, she is found by a spring of water, and “the messenger of the LORD” speaks to her four times (Genesis 16:7–11). One of the things He says is a promise spoken in His own person.

Genesis 16:10 And the messenger of the LORD said to her, "Multiplying I will multiply your seed, and it shall not be counted for multitude."

Then the text tells us what Hagar made of it.

Genesis 16:13 And she called the name of the LORD who spoke to her, "You are God who sees me (El Roi)"; for she said, "Have I even here seen after him who sees me?"

The one who spoke to her was the messenger of the LORD. Hagar called the name of “The LORD who spoke to her.” Genesis records it without correction.

The second is Abraham on the mountain, with the knife already in his hand over his son.

Genesis 22:11-12 And the messenger of the LORD called to him out of the heavens, and said, "Abraham, Abraham." And he said, "Here am I." And he said, "Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do not do anything to him; for now I know that you are a fearer of God, since you have not withheld your son, your only one, from me."

Abraham had been offering his son to God, yet the messenger of the LORD says the son was not withheld “from me.” The offering, He says, was made to Him. When He calls a second time, He swears by Himself (Genesis 22:15–16).

Hagar, Abraham, Jacob: three people, three meetings, and in each one the messenger of God or of the LORD speaks and is received as God Himself.

A Fair Word About the Word Malakh

The other side should be heard in full. The Hebrew word malakh appears 213 times in the Old Testament, and the great majority of those times it means a created messenger or a human envoy. It is an ordinary word. It is the word used of the men Jacob sent to Esau: Genesis 32:4 calls them malakhim, messengers. (The YLV uses the Hebrew verse numbers, which in Genesis 32 run one higher than in most English Bibles; this is verse 3 there, and the wrestling of verse 25 is verse 24.)

So the word malakh, by itself, proves nothing about who this messenger is. Nor, as Chapter 2 granted, does the singular verb of Genesis 48:16 settle it by itself.

Yet Genesis itself sets this messenger apart. In Genesis 16:13, in Genesis 22:11–16, and in Genesis 31:11–13, the messenger who speaks is spoken of as God, or speaks of Himself as God, or receives what was given to God. Within Genesis this is not one strange exception. It is a consistent group of passages, and the messenger of Jacob’s dream belongs to it.

That is the ground on which Genesis 48:16 should be read. When Jacob, at the end of his life, set “the messenger who has redeemed me” beside the God of his fathers and asked that “he” bless the boys, he was not mixing a created servant with God. He was naming the One who had said to him, years before, “I am the God of Bethel.”

But Jacob did not only hear this messenger. Not long after that dream, on his way home, he met Him in a way no one else in Genesis did. Jacob was alone on the bank of the Jabbok at night, with his family sent ahead across the river and his brother Esau coming toward him with four hundred men.