Jacob looked back on his life and saw but three things God, love, grief. These were all he had to speak of. They were a trinity of the past; they dwarfed everything else.
I. "God appeared unto me at Luz." This one first and great appearance of God was memorable in all his life, because it was the first. It stamped itself upon his life; even in old age the memory of it was not obscured, effaced, or weakened, but was with him in the valley of the shadow of death.
II. Less august, but even more affecting, was the second of his three experiences love. Of all whom he had known, only two names remained to him in the twilight between this life and the other God, and Rachel. The simple mention of Rachel's name by the side of that of God is itself a monument to her.
III. The third of these experiences was that Rachel was buried. When Rachel died the whole world had but one man in it, and he was solitary, and his name was Jacob.
Application. (1) See how perfectly we are in unity with the life of this, one of the earliest men. How perfectly we understand him! How the simplest experiences touch us to the quick! (2) The filling up of life, however important in its day, is in retrospect very insignificant. (3) The significance of events is not to be judged by their outward productive force, but by their productiveness in the inward life. (4) In looking back through the events of life, though they are innumerable, yet those that remain at last are very few, not because all the others have perished, but because they group themselves and assume moral unity in the distance.
H. W. Beecher, Sermons(1870), p. 217.