Couplea days ago, work radio started playing “Jacob’s Ladder” by Huey Lewis and the News. The DJ really likes that band. Me… meh, they’re okay. Definitely better than Imagine Dragons. For fun, I like to imagine dragons breathing fire all over Imagine Dragons. The only band I wanna hear screaming, “Thunder!” is AC/DC. But I digress.
If you don’t know “Jacob’s Ladder,” it was written by Bruce Hornsby and his brother. At the time, he didn’t care for his version, so he shelved it for a few years, and let Huey Lewis record it; may as well get some residuals. It’s about how he twice encounters certain off-putting Christian evangelists, and rejects their offers of salvation because he’d rather do it himself—“step by step, one by one, higher and higher… we’re climbing Jacob’s ladder.”
As I recall, Jacob’s ladder (or as Led Zeppelin calls it, the stairway to heaven), was a vision Jacob had of a route from heaven to earth, on which angels ascended and descended. [Ge 28.10-17] Not humans. I suppose if God permitted us to climb it, we could; but if we could, it’d only be possible through God’s grace. Our own efforts wouldn’t get us anywhere.
But that’s what Hornsby (and Huey Lewis and the News, I guess) preferred to the gospel: His own efforts. Good karma.
Although a lot of it, I expect, is the messengers. Verse 1 is about a fat man bugging a fan dancer; verse 2 is about a televangelist begging for money, “and I don’t wanna be like you.” I get that. I regularly see lousy examples of evangelism, and churches full of really creepy people instead of healthy Christians. Still, it takes a lot of chutzpah to think you can save yourself.