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.
