Originally published January 26, 2012.

“Jacob went on his way, and God’s angels met him. When he saw them, Jacob said, ‘This is God’s camp.’ So he called that place Mahanaim” (Genesis 32:1-2, CSB).

While Jacob was on a journey returning to the Promised Land, he met angels at a place where he stopped to camp. Jacob called the place where he met the angels, Mahanaim, which means in Hebrew, Two Camps. This was also the place where he would have the famed wrestling match with God.

Jacob may have designated the place as Two Camps because he was acknowledging the convergence of two realities at that place—the unseen world of God as represented by the angels and his own physical and material world consisting of his family, servants, and livestock.

Jacob consecrated and memorialized the place as Two Camps because he recognized God’s providence in his return to the Promised Land.

And the appearance of the angels authenticated that Two Camps was the place where the Divine Will crossed the path of human history.

Two Camps was a a place and a point in time where God’s plans for the future intersected with the everyday affairs of Jacob’s life. It was the place in Jacob’s life where heaven and earth meet.

Once Jacob encountered God, it was like he now lived in in parallel universes.

A new perspective had been superimposed on the old!

Like Jacob, when you encounter the unseen world of God’s reality, which is personified by Jesus, your perspective becomes drastically transformed.

Suddenly, your expectations for the future begin to impact how you live in the present!

When you encounter Jesus, you begin to live at at the crossroads of time and eternity:
 …. the place where your will intersects God’s Will, and
 …. the point in time where your eternal life begins!

When you encounter Jesus, you begin to live in this present reality–on this earth–according to the the way things will be in heaven.

Now you live in Two Camps! Now you live for the future in the present!

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God (the heavenly Jerusalem), to
myriads of angels, a festive gathering, to the assembly of the firstborn whose names have been written in heaven, to a Judge, who is God of all, to the spirits of righteous people made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which says better things than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24, CSB)