In Genesis 28 is the story of Jacob fleeing for his life whenever he stole the birthright away from Esau. He hightailed it out of there at the urging of his mother who conspired with him.
While he was there he had this dream of the ladder. The angels of God were ascending and descending on it. It really made an impact on Jacob's mind. Then, God spoke to him and He said in verse 15:
Jacob was the father of the Israelite people. Jacob had a life changing experience with God at Bethel. From that time on, Bethel became a place of special regard, an honor, an awe and respect to the people who were descended from Jacob because it was that way to Jacob. Jacob passed the knowledge of that on to his children, who in turn passed the knowledge of that on to their children.
So Bethel was almost like a holy place, because God Himself had actually been there. Of all the places in the nation of Israel, that was one place that they could say that God had actually been there. It was a place of special regard to them.
You can begin to see why Jeroboam, astute politician that he was, reached back into the past and said we're going to set up an altar (which there had never been) at Bethel. Our father Jacob was there. Sounds good. Sounds logical. Why didn't somebody think of that before? New knowledge; new doctrine; God is revealing things to us.
Does God change His mind about things like that? He said to go to Jerusalem not to Bethel. But the people bought it!
Jeroboam did the same thing with Dan. In Judges 17 - we won't go through the whole story because it's a rather long affair about a man named Micah who hires himself a Levite to be his own personal priest. In the course of this Levite's service to Micah, the Danites come through the area and they steal this Levite away. Micah wasn't going to fight against six hundred armed men, so they took his teacher (his father, as he called him, the Levite) and they took his idols and statues that were there, and they took this Levite to Dan - the city that they named after their father.
On the first occasion that Jacob went to Bethel he was fleeing for his life. He had just pulled that dirty deed on Esau, taking advantage of Esau's weakness. He got the birthright and the blessing and Esau was rip-roaring angry and wanted to kill his brother and so Jacob was fleeing for his life when he came across Bethel. I do not know whether Jacob knew it at the time, whether Isaac had ever told him about the strange circumstances of their birth, but God had made His choice of the twins - Jacob, from the very beginning.
Bethel is significant not merely because God appeared to be dwelling there, but because of what happened to Jacob there. Jacob came to Bethel as a man with a past, a bad past, a rotten past. He was a sneaking, deceitful, conniving, grasping person, a great sinner.
Bethel represents Jacob's calling. It was the turning point of his life. So significant was the impact of his calling there that this conniving, grasping man said he was going to tithe! This was the man who wanted to grab everything and pull it into himself, but already a change was beginning to take place within him. Undoubtedly, some of the instruction of his father and grandfather suddenly came into his mind and God was much more real to him now than He had ever been before and he left there convinced that God was going to be with him.
What is Bethel then noted for? It is noted for transformation, meeting with God, and a person changes because of meeting with God. So Bethel then became associated in the Israelites minds as a place of renewal, a place of reorientation, of transformation that comes from God working through a person.
Look what happened to Jacob. From a grasping, conniving man, he suddenly decides he is going to give God a tithe. His attitude toward the tithing law changed. His attitude toward money was changed. He was still very vigorous in the accumulation of it, but a lot of the grasping and conniving was leaving from him. So there was a change in attitude toward law.
God had already selected Jacob even before the twins were born. What we see here is Jacob in the process of fleeing from his brother's anger after he connived to get both the blessing and the birthright away from Esau. This would have come to Jacob anyway. God would have devised some other plan to do it, but Jacob, using his free moral agency, and probably having been told (but I do not know for sure), that he was the one who was going to be the recipient of them, used his human nature to secure them for himself. So here he has a very mysterious encounter with God.
In this dream Jacob clearly saw God at the top of this ladder with angels going up and down it.
