God both _records_ His name and _glorifies_ it. He records it or reveals it at first, and faith accepts Him. In due time He verifies that record or testimony, making it all good, and thus glorifies His name. And wherever He records His name there is His house. Ornan’s threshing-floor got the same dignity long afterwards, which Luz now gets, and on the same title. "This is the house of the Lord God, and this is the altar of burnt-offering for Israel," says David of that spot of the Jebusite. 1 Chron. xxii. 1. For it was the place, like this Bethel of our patriarch, where mercy had rejoiced against judgment, where God was revealing Himself in the aboundings of His grace, and there faith descries the house of God. Jacob and David, each in his day, were saints under discipline; but the Lord met them in the rich provisions of His love, thus revealing Himself or recording His name; and this was His house to them. But it is easier thus to consecrate the house, than to learn the lesson that is taught there. Jacob rightly uttered his heart under force of the impressions which the vision could not but awaken; but there is something of old Jacob in his spirit still. The faulty way of his heart is at work still, and he seems to calculate, and to make bargains, and to enter into conditions, though the Lord had spoken to him there in the language of the promise, in free, sovereign, abounding goodness. For nature still stirs itself after many a rebuke and defeat, and outlives what for a moment may have appeared a death-blow. Jacob no more now leaves it behind him at Bethel, than before he had left it behind him in his mother’s tent. But he goes on. Grace sets the chastened saint on his journey, and with some alacrity too, till "he came to the land of the people of the east," till he reached Padan-aram, where his mother’s counsel had appointed him, and, doubtless, where the hand of God had now conducted him. His introduction to Rachel was at the well, and in the midst of the flock, like that of Eliezer to Rebecca; and Eliezer was but Isaac’s representative. But Jacob was the poor man, Isaac the wealthy. Isaac could enrich Rebecca with earrings and bracelets of gold, pledges of the goodly estate he had for her. Jacob has but his toil and sweat of face. The one was as the son and heir, the other a man who had beggared himself, and must find his own way through the wear and tear of life as best he may, with God’s help. Israel served for a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep. Hosea xii. 12. And a hard service he was about to find it. But he enters on it at once, and continues at it for twenty long years. Chap. xxix.-xxxi. The scene is laid in the house of Laban his mother’s brother, and a scene of various moral action it quickly becomes, and so continues. We have not only Jacob himself and Laban, but the two wives Leah and Rachel, and their two handmaids Zilpah and Bilhah.