“And this stone, said Jacob, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house.” At first view what a crude and poverty-stricken thought this appears. Certainly David's idea of what was Suitable for the house of God was a great advance upon it; the contribution towards its construction which, he “prepared in his trouble,” amounted to 5,000 tone of gold and 50,000 tons of silver, besides brass, iron, timber, stone, etc. “without weight.” And as Jacob's single stone is, compared with the splendor, magnificence and solemn grandeur of the Temple of God, so also is that Temple itself, or the highest of human conceptions, to what is ultimately disclosed as the true and eternal house of God.
Yet for all this Jacob's thought is correct; for was not this stone—which had been his pillow of rest was now his pillar of witness—Christ Himself? and whether the possessor's thought of Him be meager or otherwise, yet possessing Him, he has “all the fullness that filleth all in all.” And every disciple has this, Whether he know it or not; but “dove's eyes” —that is, eyes anointed by the Spirit—are required to perceive it. Agassiz looking upon a fragment of fossil bone can build up with accuracy the uncouth and gigantic form, of some monstrous lizard that wandered in the ancient world; Galvani can see in the twitching leg of a frog the revelation of a vast and mysterious power; Le Verrier could see in the perturbations of the planets the approach of a fresh globe; and Galileo looking upon a swinging chandelier, or Newton upon a falling apple, can read the mighty and unbounded laws that govern the solar systems. So a geologist looking 'on Jacob's Stone' may read in it much of a world that is past, and a disciple may read there, in embryo, the history of the world that is future.
Stone is the oldest and most enduring thing on the earth: for the granite was formed, we are told, as the globe cooled from its condition of liquid heat, and it is the foundation of everything else. In Daniel where Christ is spoken of as a stone cut out without hands, He is called the Ancient of Days; and there is no doubt that those are the chief features—Age and Stability. There is also passive strength and weight, the ironstones and ores; with value, the quartz, or diamond. But the type is presented in various ways; not only is he proclaimed as the Rock of Ages for a security for those in the tempests which Isaiah predicts, but also the Rock on which the church shall be built; a rock of habitation (Marg.); the rock of my heart (Marg.); “the rock that followed them,” and other such names of dignity, but also in the humblest aspects of a stone rejected by men, yet chosen of God and made by Him a foundation stone (everything beginning in and resting on Christ), and the head stone of the corner (everything ending and culminating in Him), and also a living stone, a tried stone (tried by death), and an elect stone (elect in resurrection)—a precious stone.
He is also a stone of stumbling on which whosoever shall fall shall be broken and snared (for salvation), and a rock of offense which shall, on whomsoever it shall fall, grind him to powder. It is this that Daniel speaks of in the falling of the stone cut out without hands on the feet of the Image, destroying and supplanting it. The “man of the earth” beginning with the golden head, the Babylonish rule, and deteriorating downwards through the silver chest and two armed Medo-Persian dynasty, thence through the brass stage of the Greek rule, reaches the iron or Roman age, which, dividing into two legs, finally arrives at its present condition, subdivided into ten toes (kingdoms). The stone falls on the feet (that is, the Ancient of Days descends in judgment at this final stage) and “fills the whole earth.”
The Caaba, or sacred stone of the Mahometans, is black; for the legend says, that though it came from heaven, clear as crystal, the lips of sinners have so often pressed against it that it has thus become changed. How different is that conception of a stone from what the Holy Word discloses—a nature as of One who could touch the leper without defilement. The Caaba touching a sinner contracts his pollution, but the Living Stone, touching a sinner, conveys to him His own holiness.
And not only this, but so conveys His own nature and characteristics that the Holy Ghost can pronounce that “As He is, so are we in this world.” Therefore we are called Living Stones, and dispensationally all that is true of Christ is true of us. Hence, when the ark passed through Jordan, twelve stones, representing the people of God, are placed in the bed of the river, and twelve taken out of Jordan and placed in the Promised Land; so that we are thus seen (extraordinary statement) “raised up together and made sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” The term “living stone” is a very peculiar one, for nothing is so “dead as a stone": it gives us the idea of the immutability of the stone combined with the vitality and energy of the higher natures, an unchanging and yet a developing nature— “growing unto an holy temple.” Elijah carried forward the idea when he built an altar of twelve stones on Carmel, and the special interest there is that, though the tribes were divided and that there were no longer twelve, yet he still represents them—as God sees them and as faith apprehends them— “complete in Him.”