Clough Genesis Lesson 101
Joseph and his brothers reconcile; Joseph dies – Genesis 50:13-26
In the last part of Genesis the studies and principles have been concerning death and dying. Let’s review some of those principles and as we finish the last passage you’ll see these principles occur. Again we’ve said that every person who is dying has the right to know and the reason why, once again I see this principle being violated every week and the principle is people have a right to know so they can do something about it. Here’s the usual argument, we mustn’t tell the dying person that they’re dying because it might flip them out psychologically. It might cause all kinds of despair reaction. And in fact we might have, in addition to whatever physical afflictions this person is going through, now we’re going to add to that a psychological affliction. Well, now that’s an interesting consideration.
But the Scripture would counter argue that the person is spending their last moments at the driver’s seat of history; it’s the last time they have a chance to steer that steering wheel because once you die, you’ll be absent from the body, face to face with the Lord if you’re a Christian. And if that’s the situation you’re removed from history and don’t have a chance to interact with space/time history in that way any further; that’s your last moment. Now since you’re coming upon such a momentous point in your life, why is it that we’re suddenly worried about adding some minor psychological difficulty? The Word of God says that we must speak the truth in love. What usually happens is that we have sort of a grand conspiracy that develops around the death bed. Here’s the person who dies, they’re loved ones are concerned but nobody wants to level with the dying person. And so now in the last remaining moments of history for that person, instead of communicating with real people with real words with real concerns what are we doing? We’re building one massive integrated web of façade, so we cut them off, so there is no genuine communication in the last moments of their life. And God doesn’t want that; He wants a person in a position where if there are some final acts of submission to the authority of Scripture these acts can be taken, but they can’t as long as we’re playing games with some façade.
The second principle of death and dying is that the dying person has a right to remain lucid as long as possible. While we recognize the problem of pain and the need for some sort of anesthetic type thing, nevertheless we say it is more important to face the pain of un-submitted to or un-obeyed Scripture than the physical pain. And if those issues are there then the person has this right to remain lucid as much as possible. Now you may find yourself in this situation with your family. You may find the time comes in your life when a loved one is going to be dying and the doctor is going to come to you and give you a choice, and say hey, look, we can go this way or we can go this way; we can shoot this person full of morphine and total them out and take away the pain problem or we can treat it more conservatively, tolerate the pain situation so you can have some communication. And pretty much the decision… because the other person may be half awake and half asleep or something, this may fall on your shoulders. Well, here are some biblical principles you ought to store away and use in that situation.
A third principle is that a dying person has the right to rule posterity; that’s part of their dominion and it occurs, we said through two ways, inheritance and funeral arrangements, and we’ve seen that in Genesis 48, 49 and 50. And this ruling of the dying person is a concept that is just as hard to apply by faith for the Christian family today as the other two principles because every part of our society fights you on this point, with such a psychologically geared group of people that that’s the unpardonable sin to disturb someone psychologically, whether there’s anything real or not, it’s the psychological disturbance that becomes the unpardonable sin. So you have to fight everybody and his uncle to do those two principles; well then when you come down to here, ruling the posterity you not only have to fight the whole system but the law goes against you because “the dead hand no longer rules present property.” And so the courts have steadily undermined the right of rule here. So we find this in opposition.
And finally we come to the fourth principle and that is that we show respect to the dying person by the treatment accorded the body. The problem with applying this principle is that the funeral industry, by and large, has taken this one and gone with it too far; they begin to use this oftentimes to say well now you have to have a $8,000 funeral with a gold-covered coffin and if you don’t you don’t show respect to the person that’s passed away. Now that’s the problem of exaggerated application. The biblical way of showing respect is the way of approaching a direct burial, or a funeral and so on and then burial, embalming or something like that. The point is that a classic simple funeral is a biblical way, not some big extravaganza that bankrupts the family treasury for the next 55 years. This is an unbiblical extrapolation of that principle.
Last week we went into the cremation issue and we concluded that the Bible, while it does not ban cremation, it does say that it is hard using that technique to accord respect to the body, but it doesn’t absolutely ban it.
Today we’re going to look at this last
section and you’ll notice some of these principles operating. It’s significant that the book of Genesis
ends with this death of Jacob, because you see, everything is now in place for
what God wants to do in postdiluvial civilization. What He wants to do, He’s got creation, He’s
got the flood, He’s God Abraham called out, He’s got Abraham’s sons in their
places so you have the nascent tribes of
Genesis 50:15, “And when Joseph’s brethren saw that their father was dead, they said,” now you’ll notice that in the previous two verses, verses 13-14 the sons have carried out the commands of their father. So what we see is principle number 3, Jacob, the old man, rules his posterity, verses 13-14, the sons obey their dad’s wishes concerning funeral arrangements. And now in verse 15 they also follow their father but this time in a very interesting way. So we want to pay particular attention to verses 15, 16 and 17 because I don’t know of any family that doesn’t have this same kind of problem. So what you have here is a reconciliation technique that’s occurring inside the home. Let’s watch how it takes place.
“When Joseph’s brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, [Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him,]” Joseph is going to hate us and he’s going to, perhaps, require all the evil that we did unto him. And then they send a messenger and they say… and notice what they say. They say in verse [16, “And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying,] Thy father did command before he died, saying,” so here we find that third principle of death and dying still being applied. The old man had given instructions of how to glue the pieces of that family back together again.
Now let’s back up a moment to get perspective; you remember that all the way from Genesis 37 on down to Genesis 50 we’ve had one story after another story, incident after incident has occurred here. Now, beginning in Genesis 37 we have the fracturing of this family. The family has already started to decline theologically. How do we know this? Because we can observe the decline from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Now this is not any family that walks the face of the earth; this is God’s family, so we can label this as God’s chosen family. And this should encourage you because there’s not a person here that can’t say well, gee, we’ve got this problem in our home, we’ve got that problem in our home and here we are supposed to be Christians, and then you can look over her and see the non-Christian and they have much better homes and blah, blah, blah. And the same thing can be used, the same excuses, the same kind of depression could set in in this family because Jacob and his sons could say well gee, look at all those nice sweet Canaanite pagan families, they all get along together, how come we can’t, it’s not a very good testimony, and it isn’t. But then, in order to be encouraged you have to understand that as a Christian home you’re going to be under attack; do you seriously think that you’re living in a neutral environment, a sort of spiritual DMZ. No, you are living embedded in a hostile battlefield, spiritually speaking. There are principalities and powers; if you don’t believe it, that’s your privilege, but there are principalities and powers that operate daily upon us to deceive us, to pressure us, to trip us up, and so forth. That’s because we live in a fallen world and we’re going to take flack and we’re going to absorb this kind of fire from the opposition; it’s just part of living as Christians in Satan’s world.
That being so, every Christian home is going to have these discordant themes in it. Now look at this home. Here the guy is, the family is basically getting weaker and weaker, and in Jacob’s day we’ve got all the way down to actually attempted murder in the home. You can probably cite instances where you’ve wished to attempt to murder someone in your home and you’ve probably expressed that on occasion, but in this particular family it was actually carried out. There was actually a murder attempt made. So if you think you have troubles in your home, it’s no worse than what we’re facing here with Jacob and his family. That should encourage you, you’re not facing some new hairy situation and you don’t have to feel like you’re the only person involved in that particular club because everybody has these situations. Nobody wants to talk about it because they’re too embarrassed to talk about it but basically everybody has that kind of a problem, to varying degrees.
All right, so here we have attempted murder
and the rest of the story, from Genesis 37-50 is what? It’s how God glues Humpty-Dumpty back
together again is all the story’s about. What we’re finding is ways in which God
takes Joseph down to
But what triggers this new episode is the death of the old man. That’s why in verse 15, when they saw their father was dead, then they got fear again, and you will watch this happen, it happens to everybody, you think you’ve got the problem all nailed down; ah, I passed that spiritual test, whew! And then all of a sudden it turns around and there it is again. Well, this is the situation in this home. They thought they passed the exam and it was all in back of them. Then the old man dies and for some reason they get all destabilized again. Why? What it shows is that when Joseph forgave the brothers and they accepted it, they really fully didn’t accept it. What they were arguing to themselves was, and what they must have thought deep in their heart was, ah, well, it’s sort of nice, Joseph forgives us but secretly and inwardly what they were really telling themselves was Joseph accepts us because he knows dad’s alive and he and dad have this thing and it’s because Joseph accepts father and father has this great influence, and therefore everything is working out right. In other words, their acceptance of forgiveness wasn’t still fully by faith; there were still some snaggy, glitchy things in there that had to be erased. To when the old man dropped out of the picture, all of a sudden this stuff up-wells from deep within and they wonder, now the old man is dead and we put all our eggs in that basket, all of a sudden the basket dropped. So now what are we going to do. So they become very uptight.
Now apparently the father recognized this would take place, so in verse 16, under the third principle of death and dying, Jacob commanded certain things to take place in that family. He went and he talked to the brothers. And furthermore, you will notice in verse 16 he not only told them what to do he told them how to do it. Now this often, I’ve discovered only recently is a very key element in obeying Scripture, that in those situations in life that are the most embarrassing, that are the hardest on your pride, that are socially threatening, or you can add to the add to the list, you know what I mean, whenever you get a back pressure to obeying such a Scripture, when it comes right down to the nitty-gritty of submitting to the Scripture and tearing it out you kind of chicken out here. Now what can help focus your obedience is actually write the thing out that you’re supposed to say and that’s what it is; this is a quotation in verse 16-17. The father called the sons back to him and he said guys, now look, when I’m gone I know what’s going to happen, we’re going to start getting this rivalry started that we’ve been fighting in our family for the last 30 years so let me tell you how to handle it.
So verse 17 should have a quotation mark on it because it is a quote, “‘So shall ye say unto Joseph,” that means, he tells them word for word what they’re going to say. You say oh, that’s mechanical, all right, maybe it is mechanical but better to be mechanical and it works than not mechanical and don’t have anything. So he tells them, this is what I want you to day, “Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil:” if you have a King James you’ll see there’s a colon there, after the word “evil,” that’s the end of that quote, so the old man gave them word for word what they were supposed to do and appreciate that because there will come those times when you kind of flop all over yourself trying to get out what you want to say and it’s hard, and it’s a lot easier to just have someone else tell you, what am I supposed to say. Say this; oh, okay, whew. And they you just go ahead and say it; all right, that’s what’s happening here. This is a charged environment; it’s not easy for these guys to do this.
Then they add, “now,” and when you see the word “now,” “and now,” that’s their addition, “and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father.” Now that’s interesting. “Forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father.” Do you notice what noun dominates the sentence? It’s not God, it’s father, it’s “the God of the father,” they don’t say forgive me in the name of God but forgive me in the name of God of our father. Do you know why? If we were to diagram that family’s relationship it would look like this: here the brothers are on one side, Joseph is on the other and the strong relationship is between the father and Joseph and between the father and the brothers and there’s a very weak real between Joseph and his brothers. So gluing the family back together again consists of trying to better that horizontal link, but the horizontal link is very weak, so how do they take steps to rebuild the relationship?
Notice back in verse 16 one of the ways they do it. Not only do they get a message that so to speak is canned, a canned approach, but you’ll notice they send a messenger, they don’t do it in person. And you know why? Because you’ve all had the experience, at least if you are literate it’s a lot easier oftentimes to write a letter to a person than it is to tell them face to face, isn’t it. So this is what they are doing, they are simply sending a messenger over here to throw one little rope across the canyon and then when that rope gets accepted we’ll lock on, we’ll get a cable across and we’ll start building a relationship. And this is why it is awkward, it is gawky, they’re stumbling and so forth, but be encouraged if you ever have to go through this in your family, that here’s God’s chosen family and they’re going through it; sure it’s a sign of sin and trouble, so what. The non-Christian would like nothing better, because you see, he’s got an ax to grind to always ridicule our sin. Oh, you Christians, you do that, you do that and you do that and so forth, and then we get guilty for it. Well now just a minute, finally somewhere along the line we have to say yeah, we got crud and we’ve got about ten times more than you see, so what… so what! The issue is that we are trying to do something about it instead of sitting there playing games. So here they are trying to work through, so there ought to be no criticism against people who are trying to work with their problem, no matter how grungy it is. And that’s the grace attitude.
So here they are, they’re working the
messenger; they send a messenger, now you can argue with me at the end of verse
17, “And Joseph wept when they spoke unto him,” but understand that in the
Bible oftentimes when a messenger is sent the Hebrew will often reflect it as
the person doing the speaking. If you
want a good example of that, when a prophet, like Isaiah, comes to the nation
Now in Genesis 50:18, this is where they show up. “And his brethren also” see the word “also,” that’s the shift; after they sent the letter and they knew the letter was received, that is Joseph wept, he received the letter, he recognizes the problem, then they come down personally. So don’t feel like you’re the lone ranger when you have that icky feeling and you don’t want to really do it and you want to send a letter and you feel like an idiot for not wanting to and blah, blah, blah and you feel awkward and gawky about it; just relax, they felt the same way. Just join the human race. So, “his brothers also went and they fell down before his face; and they said, Behold, we be thy servants.” So here they cast themselves completely into Joseph’s hands. Now I tell you, that took an act of faith because what is their fear of verse 15? Compare verse 15 with the action described in verse 18; there’s a complete shift. In verse 15 there’s a morbid fear that they’re going to get faked out, stabbed in the back by brother Joe, but by the time they get down to verse 18 they’re willing to prostate themselves under the authority of their brother because he happens to be the Egyptian officer. What makes the difference? It is the acceptance of verse 17 that makes the difference. And so once we have the forgiveness and so on flowing in the veins, now we have the acts of verse 18.
But that’s not all; the most thrilling portion of this Scripture is verse 19-20 because whereas verse 18-15 deals with the change in the brothers, verse 19-20 is the change in Joseph and this change gives you a tremendously powerful tool to use in your life. Let me show you the principle, then I’ll describe the tool and how you can use it. “And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God? [20] But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Now let’s think for a moment.
Let’s think about Joseph, let’s go back to this little chart of that
family. Do you remember what kind of a
picture we got of Joseph back when this whole thing started back in chapter 37;
the guy’s a brat, an adolescent brat.
You wouldn’t want him in your home.
Talk about kids squabbling, with Joseph around you’d always be
guaranteed a high volume in every room.
You’d be guaranteed a fight every single day among the kids; all it
takes is a Joseph in your house. This is
the kind of brat this guy is in chapter 37, arrogant, brilliant, brat. But by the time we get down to chapter 50
he’s just as brilliant but his godliness has so transformed his character by
chapter 50 that he can come and accept verse 18 and remember if verse 18 had
occurred back in chapter 37 you can imagine what he would have done; I’m gonna
squash you guys like a roach in the floor.
That would have been his attitude because that would have naturally been
his out flowing feelings of the whole situation. But he doesn’t do that and in verse 19 he
takes his place under God and he says don’t fear… don’t fear. What were they afraid of? His sin nature; now how did Joseph deal with
his own sin nature. “Don’t fear, for am
I in the place of God?” One of the
central axioms of coping with your sin nature is that as long as you try to
place yourself in an autonomous mental attitude you can’t deal with your sin
nature. The only way you can deal with
your sin nature is to submit. You’re not
God so take your place first as creatures.
Then in verse 20 we have the tools; verse 20 is fantastic. “As for you, you thought evil against me,” now let’s visualize the situation so you can emotionally sympathize with what’s happening here. Here you are and here’s a case of persecution, this is real persecution, not because you’re a klutz. But here you are as a believer and you’re getting it dumped all over you. Maybe you’re a businessman in your organization and because of a Christian you’re not going to go with certain things, boy they’re going to get you. Or you get bypassed for the promotion but you get all the responsibility or something. Something happens like that. Or maybe you’re a woman operating in certain social circles and all of a sudden everybody treats you like you’ve got a bad case of B.O. What’s the problem? The problem is that you are being persecuted; you’re just picking up flack from being a Christian in Satan’s world.
All right, in that situation how do you cope with it? I’ll tell you one way not to cope with it and that is use one of these psychological gimmicks, well, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine and you try to put it out of your head and you don’t think about it. You can’t do that. You can’t stop thinking about it. When somebody is really giving you the shaft you are not going to stop thinking about it. You know, you can’t kid yourself, there are some fools that think so but basically you cannot stop thinking about that sort of thing. So notice in verse 20 the first step in the technique is you do not stop thinking about it, you say “you thought evil against me,” so the first step is that you honestly label evil as evil. When you do that, at least that starts getting integrity inside, so your conscience and your mind aren’t fighting one another, they’re in tandem, there’s teamwork functioning. So you identify evil as evil; that’s what Joseph’s saying.
See, verse 20, what it is, it is a capsule summary of how Joseph coped with the animosities and the temptations to resentment, bitterness, vindictiveness towards people in his own home. I emphasize, “own home” because it’s too easy to read verse 20 and say oh, that’s deep theology, that’s something for Dallas Seminary or something. No-no. Let’s look where it happened; it happened in a home just like yours; that’s where it happened. And what was the situation? People in a home that didn’t get along together just like yours. So, how do we apply the principle?
The first thing is you identify evil as evil but now look what happens. “God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive. [21] Now therefore, fear ye not.” Now see the “therefore?” The word “therefore” in verse 21 shows you how did Joseph get in the mental attitude of control and graciousness, rather than bitterness? Because it’s something that he used in verse 20. Let me show you what it was he used. He first honestly had labeled evil as evil, so he wasn’t playing self-hypnosis with himself. But what he did was something that I’ve taught you before about an apologetics; it’s hard to deploy this but here’s what I’m trying to get at.
Suppose in a discussion with a non-Christian, say you talk about answered prayer, so there’s an issue you’ve raised in the conversation, answered prayer. Then they come along and you know what they do if you’ve been around a good non-Christian recently, they envelop your claim with a counter claim which says, yeah, well, strange things happen, that’s just an interesting coincidence if you prayed that on Tuesday and got an answer on Saturday, but that’s just chance, it’s just coincidence. So what have they done to your claim? They’ve swallowed it up in their frame of reference. Now what to you have to do? You have to swallow them up in your frame of reference. And you have to go back to the fact that there is no such thing as chance in the universe but there’s God’s sovereignty and you can go into the various details there. Well then they’ll try to counter and envelop your frame in their frame. And they you envelop their frame in your frame. And that’s the contest that goes on, whether you deal with miracles, whether you deal with the deity of Christ, whether you deal with the issue of salvation, it’s basically whose frame is going to envelop the other guy’s.
Those of you in the family training, I gave you an instance where it’s going on right in front of your face, and that is with the word “prehistoric.” The moment you use the word “prehistoric” you’ve just denied Genesis 1-11 because by definition what does prehistoric mean? Life before written history. But if Genesis 1-11 is written history, then there isn’t any life before Genesis 1-11 because that goes all the way back to the beginning. So you see, when we condone the word “prehistory” and the concept prehistory we’ve already sold out. We’ve already let the other side envelope us in our claim inside their framework and that gives you the sense of frustration. You say, I’m trying to teach this, I master the material and it just feels like I get swallowed up, like the world is one big fat globby amoeba that slurps you up. That’s exactly what it does; it envelops you so that every one of your little pearls gets enveloped and then you just can’t articulate the thing. So on an apologetic level this enveloping frame thing worked.
Notice what Joseph has done in verse 20;
it’s the same thing. What he has done is
take honest labeling, evil is evil but then he envelops that problem in a
bigger truth. So here’s this I see my
brothers tried to really kill me, all right, but I’m going to encase that
little thing and put a cist around it so it won’t erode my soul. Now what is this cage or this cyst that he
grows around that point of evil? God’s
sovereign plan and that’s what he’s looking at in verse 20, “God meant it unto
the good,” my good, but not just my good because you can say well, that really
doesn’t work. Ah, but maybe it’s because
you don’t see what I mean by enveloping it under the sovereign plan of
God. It’s not just the sovereign plan of
God for you or for me personally; Joseph doesn’t say, “but as for you, you
thought evil against me but God meant it unto my good.” You don’t see the personal pronoun “my”
there, do you? If you look, in fact,
after the word “good” you will see that he defines what the good is that he’s
talking about. Notice, the good is “to
bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.” What is the good the? The good is God’s sovereign plan, the big
plan that He’s doing in history with
So, he enveloped it with God’s sovereign
plan for God’s good, or God’s glory. Now
notice something, there’s something that has shifted between step one and step
two in this technique and if you can catch what I’m saying here that spells the
difference between success and failure in the use of this thing. What often happens,
because what verse 20 is, it’s just the Old Testament version of Romans
8:28. So somebody remembers Romans 8:28,
they’re a new Christian, the first time they get into a situation to apply it
they say, let’s see, “all things work together for good to them that love God”
blah, blah, blah, well, here you are and someone totaled your car and all of a
sudden you discover it’s an uninsured driver, they’re always the ones that run
into you, and you didn’t have any protection and so now you’re without a car
and you buy a bike and you get a flat tire on the first day, it’s just one
sequence of events after another. And
you say hey, you know, I don’t buy this Romans 8:28, “all things working together
for good,” I don’t call an auto wreck and a flat tire and walking and going on
Look again at what Joseph is doing; he is not reading it as though God is going to bless him and make him feel good right away. Do you notice how the word g-o-o-d is qualified very carefully in verse 20? What the point is that Joseph was put in a place where he can satisfy God’s good, so what has happened here has not only has this cancerous evil been encysted and encapsulated in his soul with an enveloping frame, but the enveloping frame has moved him from self-centeredness to God-centeredness. His perspective now has shifted to the fact that well, all right, old Joseph took some lead here, but what is God doing about it. And when you transfer the center of concern over to God, and this is hard, I’m not making light of the fact, this requires tremendous spiritual insight, prayer, patience and meditation to apply Romans 8:28 or Genesis 50:20 correctly. But I guarantee if it’s applied correctly you don’t have that depression that sets in so often when people apply it carelessly.
And so when we have this insight now that Joseph is concerned, well God’s plan is going to be furthered by this thing and really what’s going to make me happy in the long run anyway, is God’s plan. So if my brothers tried to kill me and I received the brunt, I caught it, I’ll admit that, it was evil and I caught it, but I can see long term good coming out of this situation with God and His plan. So that relaxes his emotional pattern so he doesn’t tighten up, so he doesn’t go into bitterness, vindictiveness and hostility because basically he’s moved from being a self-centered perspective to a God-centered perspective or he’s become theocentric.
Now look at this again. If you skip down
to verse 24-25 when he’s giving instructions on his funeral, notice what he
says again, which shows you how he defines good. “God will surely visit you, and bring you out
of this land unto the land which he swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, [25] And
Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying God will surely visit,”
and so on. What’s he talking about? The Abrahamic Covenant, isn’t it? And we’ve seen the Abrahamic promise or that
covenant God gave Abraham, haven’t we seen that Sunday after Sunday after
Sunday after Sunday as we worked through Genesis? And what have we said that the Abrahamic
Covenant teaches about God? His elective
purpose. Aren’t we back to where we
started? Here we have a man who really
took it right on the chin, he took the whole brunt of the evil attack, he was
able to avoid the emotion of bitterness because he went down over to his
spiritual side and said I’m going to be concerned with what God’s long term
good is and so my emotions are going to respond to God’s glorification. So he controlled his emotions by an indirect
approach that’s shifting his interest.
Let’s go to Romans
What Joseph does, instead of getting small
and our tendency in our sinfulness is always get small; when we take it we stay
small, and Joseph’s attitude is no, I’m going to get big, I’m going to let this
whole little small episode in my life get thoroughly encompassed and surrounded
by bigger concerns. So he doesn’t drown
it out, he doesn’t hypnotize himself, he takes his problem and he says well now
let’s look at this thing that’s happened in my life. Let’s see how God’s purposes are going to be
furthered. And for the Christian who’s
born again he’s thankful when he sees God’s purposes furthered because if there’s
anything that will give you security as a Christian, what gives you security is
to see God’s purposes advanced. What if you saw God’s purposes not
advanced. What if you saw His problems
fall apart? What if you saw that, would
you feel secure? You’d have some real
bad emotional problems then, wouldn’t you?
So the real source of healthy emotions, as a Christian, is God’s
advance, not yours. And so it’s that
radical shift that’s going on in both Romans
Back to Genesis 50; Joseph has just got through telling his brothers how he was able to accept them. And in verse 19 what does he say, I am not in the place of God. How did he know he wasn’t in the place of God? Because verse 20 tells us God was in the place of God, and he was concerned that God stay in His place and that God’s plan in His place redound to God’s glory.
Now verse 21, “Now therefore,” … now
therefore he says, I haven’t gone through 85 weeks of psychotherapy, I haven’t
gone on drugs, I haven’t taken tranquilizers, “now therefore” I’ve got it
together and I can take this family situation; “fear ye not: I will nourish
you, and your little ones.” Now see that
positive action; not only is it not a negative thing, not only does he not kill
him, you know, he could have signed them work on a pyramid out in the heat some
place and hope they dropped dead on the south side under the sun. That would have been a convenient thing, he
could have done it through the bureaucracy of
And in verse 21, notice the emotional after effect, “And he comforted them, and spoke kindly unto them.” There was a relaxed atmosphere once again in the home. Now how did that relaxed atmosphere come? It came about because centrally the whole issue of him following God was made the issue. Now what happens so often in our day and all of us are vulnerable to this, particularly when you go to help somebody you can be vulnerable and sucked into this thing, we live in a psychological age, so here’s somebody in a family situation, here’s somebody else in a family situation and bang, sparks flying all over the place. So how do we analyze the problem? Inter-personal problems! Is it? Not according to verse 20 it’s not an inter-personal problem; according to verse 20 it’s a God-person problem.
According to verse 20 you’re an idiot if
you think you’re going to solve that problem on a non-Christian basis because
why was the problem allowed to creep into the system? The problem was allowed to creep into the
system to point back up to God. So here
we are and if we use some psychological device to say hey, stand on your head
three times in the morning, take four pills at
The last section, Genesis 50:22-26 shows a
repeat of the principles of death and dying.
Here Joseph is going to die and he gives instructions; notice in verse
25, “carry my bones from here” back to the land of the promise. So we once again have the third and fourth
principles of death and dying. The third principle is that the dying person has
a right to rule, make decisions, and in verse 26 you notice, only the second
time in the Bible there’s an embalming mentioned. The reason is the body is kept out of the
ground. Notice it was placed in the
coffin but it apparently was not buried.
It was kept sealed as in a mummy case and from what we can judge, both
Jacob and Joseph were Egyptian mummies.
Someone raised the question, they said does that mean that if archeologists
were to dig around
[22, “And Joseph dwelt in
Now this represents the last section of Genesis and because it is I want to take last five minutes and give you a quick summary with some hints on how to use the book of Genesis. One of the things that I’ve recently become aware of and you’ll hear more of this in the series that will replace Genesis which will be on the spiritual battle of the Christian life, the truth is how we learn truth. Genesis has taught us all kinds of things. Let’s contrast human viewpoint and divine viewpoint. Let’s think. I have repeatedly said from this pulpit that systematic theology is fine, except it’s not the way God teaches His truth. God teaches His truth in events; never abstractly. If he wanted to teach systematic theology of doctrine He would have written it up, mimeographed form, and dropped it. But God doesn’t teach that way, He teaches us in the middle of events and you ought to ask the question of yourself, why does He do that.
Reflect upon yourself right now. Whatever age you are, think back to some event that you can remember in your life, something vivid. Inevitably if you can in your mind’s eye right now, let it flash, some event that happened to you in the past that’s very vivid that stands out; why can you visualize it for one thing; why does that event come to your mind? Because it’s an emotionally charged event, isn’t it; it’s something that really caught your attention. It may be somebody here who has a fear of failure or something and it’s because you can remember as a child, maybe your parents kind of slipped in this area and they caught you failing something and they just yelled and screamed at you and carried on and raised a big scene and you to this day can still remember your parents yelling at you over that issue. Now what has that done, that taught you something; it’s taught you a code of life; it taught that to succeed in life you’d better perfectly succeed, you’d better be this. So here you are, you might have gone to a Bible church all your life, we’ll come back to this moment, you might have gone to a Bible church all your life and you have your soul, visualize your soul kind of like a seed, and you’ve learned that to be acceptable in life I’ve got to be justified before God. And so this truth has buried itself an inch and a half into your soul. But you find out that you have a very, very hard time in your Christian life believing that because when the chips are down you still sit there and evaluate yourself on the basis of all your failures and you think that really, I am unacceptable, I’m worth nothing, because I just can’t perform. I’m always a failure; in everything I do I’m a failure. And yet you hear Sunday after Sunday after Sunday and you read your Bible time after time after time but you’re acceptable with God. Yeah, but… and the “yeah, but” is a signal that another truth has got into your soul, not one and a half inches but six inches deep, all the down here. Do you know why? How come this piece of human viewpoint is deeper in your soul and has more effect than the Bible doctrine up here that you’ve also learned? Why? Because that was shot to you under a highly emotional situation. It was like the emotions opened up a big hole and whoooo, that hunk of human viewpoint went way down deep. And then the divine viewpoint just kind of bing, bing, bing, on the surface and that’s all, and it may bing 100 times on the surface but it doesn’t really get in because it’s not shot in under a highly charged situation.
Now, think a moment, in the book of Genesis how did God teach the human race divine viewpoint? The bing, bing, bing approach, or bloooooo in them? Let’s look: the act of creation; I dare say if you were there it would have blown a hole in you. Imagine now, in your mind’s eye, this is why reading the book of Genesis can do more for you to absorb Bible doctrine than just reading very nice academic statements of Bible doctrine. You read the book of Genesis, say you read Genesis 1 someday, you’re depressed, you know, God seems distant from you, everything’s gone wrong, you know, you just want to oh the hell with the whole thing kind or approach. Let’s be candid, that’s exactly what goes through your mind. So you’re in that kind of a mode and you whip out Genesis 1. Genesis 1 doesn’t state all the doctrine, no, but it gives you a vivid picture. Try in your mind’s eye to place yourself at the moment of creation and watch the things take place.
Okay, you’ve had a bad day and everything’s depressive; now you start reading Genesis, can you actually visualize yourself, you see all these space films and so on, visualize yourself kind of floating in space and you hear this big booming voice that said “And let there be light,” and as far as you can see energy comes into existence. And then you hear the voice and all of a sudden the thing springs into existence, instantly. Now if you visualize that in your imagination, and one of the troubles we’ve got right here is that in the TV generation we’ve lost our imagination. People who don’t read books have lost their imagination; children have great imaginations but by the time they reach 9th grade it’s killed. So there’s a problem here, but if you can get your imagination mobilized to see the event so you can almost feel yourself responding to that biblical event, now what’s happening? Now you’re having an emotional encounter with the Word of God, and the event, which is a “blow a hole in ‘em” type thing, is having an effect.
Let’s go to the fall. Sometime when you’re struggling with your sin problem and you’re very familiar because the emotions are very close, start thinking in terms of how would you like to be crouched under the bushes and God says and why are you there, and fill in your name. And you know that there’s nothing else, just you and God and here He is; hey, how come you’re there. And visualize how you’d respond. Now you can’t, in your mental imagination with your vivid thought picture go through these exercises of reading the Scripture and just relaxing, don’t be so tense about it, just read it and let it soak into your soul and play with it in your mind’s eye and your imagination. Draw a picture in your brain of this thing. And when you start doing that then you will find the doctrine starts going in deep because what you’re doing is you’re dealing with cosmic events.
The flood, take that one, that’s an easy one to visualize; imagine yourself on the ark on the 7th day and the waters are starting to slosh around the outside of the hull. And all of a sudden visualize some of your best friends that you know today who are non-Christian and visualize yourself looking out, say a slit somewhere in the ark, and you see hundreds of them down there getting scalded to death in hot water, banging on the side of the ark wanting entrance and you can’t do anything because God sealed you in, He’s drawn a wall of separation between you and them.
Visualize yourself stepping out of the ark onto a totally desolate planet with not one other person other than those in your own family. No books, no libraries, no cities, no tools except what you have in your own family work shed, and your job is to populate the planet from just that resource. Now start thing in these terms, let the pictures create the motions necessary to get the doctrine to penetrate deep. And this is why we say that event and doctrine is the way to go, not just learning doctrinal statements because doctrinal statements are anemic, they’re impotent, they don’t do a thing because you can rationally know them and it doesn’t grip you. It’s not the case of knowing an idea, it’s a case of being gripped by an idea. And that’s the difference in behavior pattern.
So what happens in human viewpoint? You have gone through background, say you’re 20 or 30, you’ve had several background experiences. You’ve lived in Satan’s world. Now don’t you think that Satan doesn’t take the human viewpoint that’s just in the air around you and create you in a little squeeze play where he can shoot the fiery darts in. How does he do it? Well, he just gets you in a position where either through no fault of your own or maybe through faults of your own you sit there and you can’t respond properly to that situation, you get the wrong emotions, you get a hole develop and then he just squirts in a hunk of the stuff, a big lie but it just gets embedded in your heart and you sit there and you act on the basis of that lie. And you forever find yourself trying to cope with this hunk of human viewpoint that I’ve got there, how do I get it out? Well Joseph, in Genesis 50:20 shows you how he got it out; he didn’t get it out really, what he did is he enveloped it with more powerful divine viewpoint truth and that’s the process you’ll have to do. You’ll have to identify what those chunks are that you’ve picked up, that you’re daily struggling with and start trying to envelop those with a divine viewpoint counter picture.
Do you know why I’m so sure of this approach? Because it dawned on me as I put this together today, isn’t that exactly what God does in the two ordinances that He’s ordained for the Church. Think of it a moment, baptism and communion. What are we doing? What’s communion all about; what do we have to do in communion? We have to identify ourselves with the cross of Christ and do it in some physical way of eating, which is a primary emotion of survival. It’s associated with food. So God knows this because He’s designed us as His creatures so He deliberately designed the second ordinance after the primary thing in our life that supplies us with existence in life, communion. And He has us act it out; what is He doing? You know if God approached the rational way, like rationalists, He’d just have a sign here, I died for you, memorize it five times every Sunday evening once a month. But He doesn’t; He acts it out so we get emotionally involved with it.
And that’s what we’re trying to do in the communion service; beware, we’re not saying emotions are the leaders. But we are saying that if there’s not an emotional response to truth taught, that truth that is taught does not get very deep. Think of baptism for a moment, I had one kid once tell me, he says, what do you do pastor if somebody drowns. Well, it’s a theoretical possibility but I haven’t drowned anybody yet and hopefully the church has good liability insurance, but the point is, that is a shocking experience. Some have even argued, and I’ve heard this argument, little children should never be around a baptism by immersion, it’s too scary for them. Well, maybe in some isolated cases the children because of various other fears that they had are terrified by thinking of what baptism is but you see, why did God invent baptism? He knows fears of little children and He knows fears of adults but why does He design a fearful kind of ordinance? Because He’s trying to communicate the significance; it is a death and a burial and if we don’t have those fears associated with death and burial the truth of baptism never comes over.
So I hope this will show you why, as we go
through the Bible and as you read the Bible, don’t think that well, all the
doctrine is in Paul’s epistles. Yes,
doctrine is in Paul’s epistles and we are thankful for it but Paul’s epistles
presume you’re emotionally responding to the truth right, and if you are a
typical member of our crudded up generation, you’re not responding to truth as
truth. And this is why the Bible is
filled with these stories. And you say
well what good are all these stories?
They are stories, hopefully maybe you have a propensity to like certain
portions of the stories, I like Genesis, you may like the stories in Judges or
something, or you may like Joshua going in and knocking the walls of
We’ll conclude by singing