Clough Genesis Lesson 89

Joseph promoted; prepares for the 7 year famine – Genesis 41:37-57

 

Last week we saw Joseph ascend out of prison; after 13 years of sanctification, of pressure of trial, adversity, Joseph finally gets promoted.  And the reason that God took 13 years to promote Joseph was because Joseph needed 13 years of training.  It takes a long time to change the deep, deep ways we are.  And we have studied those times of training, those times of pressure.  Now we’ve seen Joseph is ready.  In Genesis 41:16, when Pharaoh comes forth with his dream “Joseph answered Pharaoh and said, It is not in me; God shall give Pharaoh an answer.”  Joseph, 13 years before, could not possibly have given this answer.  Joseph 13 years ago was a brat, and Joseph therefore could not take prosperity without getting fatheaded about it.  And so I took a little while to train this boy to be able to handle the pressures of this sort of thing.  And the most powerful monarch that ever walked the face of the earth in the ancient world was Pharaoh.  And for this powerful monarch to come to a 30 year old boy and ask him to help him, because no one else in all the world could help him; for a boy to respond in a godly way to that sort of situation required a lot of sanctification; 13 years to be exact. 

 

In verse 25, 28 and 32 of this passage we see how God’s sovereignty is asserted.  It took a lot of courage for Joseph to say what he did in those three verses because he’s not just repeating the dream; he’s not jut giving the interpretation of the dream, because in verse 25 he says, “God has shown Pharaoh what He is about to do.”  In verse 28, “What God is about to do he has shown Pharaoh.”  In verse 32 it is established by God and God will bring it to pass.”  Now for us, reading this in the comfort of 20th century America that sounds just normal nice religious language.  Except that wasn’t the way it came across that day in the court because here was a 30 year old foreigner, a Jewish shepherd boy, walking into the presence of this awesome monarch and saying to him, Pharaoh, though you may be what you claim to be and you may be what most Egyptians think you are, and I’ll show you what they thought he was in a few moments, though you may be that, I say to you that there’s a law over you and God, Elohim is the name, Elohim, the God of the Hebrews, He’s the One who is your Lord; He’s the one who is over even Pharaoh and He is the One that will bring this dream to pass. 

 

Joseph at this point has been prepared by God to witness, to present the gospel and the gospel, however we present it, will always have these four elements in it.  You may do this in your own way, in your own language, in words and a vocabulary familiar to you, but it will always, if it is to be a complete gospel presentation, it will always have to have at least these four parts.  Before anyone can become a Christian and trust in Jesus Christ they must know what God it is we worship.  That’s hard; my experience is that you will spend and consume 95% of your energy, your concentration, your thought and your prayer, over just the first point because modern man simply does not understand the God of the Scriptures.  The God of the Scriptures is foreign to today’s person.  What man wants today is a companion God and the God of the Scriptures is not a companion.  The God of the Scriptures is the Lord over all, and he doesn’t share His lordship with anybody.  We don’t have cozy relationships with God; we have proper Creator/creature relationships with God.

 

To make sure to test yourself, to see if you have the biblical view of God, from time to time we always review His attributes.  The God of the Bible is sovereign, meaning that God is over everything.  There is no natural process that is out beyond the umbrella of God’s control.  That God is righteous and God is just, meaning that these moral standards are not produced by man, they’re not produced by 51%, they are God’s revelation of His own character. God is love and no one has ever loved any object more than God has loved the human race when God died, in Christ, that whosoever would believe would have eternal life.  God is omniscient, which means that God never has learned anything, never will learn anything because he knows everything forever.  He not only has a knowledge of what exists but He also has a knowledge, the tempting knowledge that we all would like, well what if this happened in history or what if that happened.  Omniscience means God knows that.  God is omnipotent, meaning that God never gets tired; He can go on and on and on and on like a perpetual motion machine and never require outside energy.  God is omnipresent; He is fully present everywhere, not partly present here and partly present there but wholly present at every point.  God is immutable, meaning that God never changes, He is the backbone of the universe, He is why physical law and history flow without chaos. God is eternal, He preexisted the creation. 

 

And so that’s the God of the Bible and that’s the God who has to be communi­cated, no matter how much it takes.  And it’s useless to go on and talk about Christ dying for your sins; it’s useless to go on and talk about trusting in Christ if we don’t have clearly in mind the God of the Scripture.  Do you know how I know this?  Because I’ve studied very carefully of how the gospel is presented in the Bible.  When I see Paul on Mars Hill I seem him stop his gospel presentation.  Paul never finished on Mars Hill; he walked up on Mars Hill that day, he presented to the elite of Athens, the men who represented the core of Greek philosophy of the day, Paul got to the first point and he stopped because frankly, it was too much for them.  They could not tolerate an interfering God who was alive in history and resurrecting people. It was just too much for their philosophical system.  And so they just tuned him out and Paul said I’m sorry, I can’t go any further, I can’t tell you any more of the gospel until I have explained this point, you don’t want this, sorry. 

 

And we find Joseph here witnessing to Pharaoh in this dream.  He’s trying to say to Pharaoh, Pharaoh, you’re not God; Pharaoh, it’s not like you Egyptians think; Elohim is over everything.  But Pharaoh doesn’t buy it, he politely sees a way out, he thinks, for his country in this dream and the answer to it and he goes on from there and he never thinks, so the gospel presentation of Joseph stops.

 

Now we said last week when we looked upon what the dream was about, in verse 34, 35 and 36, as the dream is interpreted Joseph says, “Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up twenty percent of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous years.  [35] And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up grain under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities.  [36] And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; and the land shall perish not through the famine.” 

 

So we have Joseph’s strange answer.  We said last week this is a strange answer, this is a very hard one, for anybody who is trained in the Scripture, anyone who knows the political philosophy of the Bible knows that from one part of the Bible to the other it cries against centralized power, not that all power is wrong because the state is a divine institution authorized by God.  This has been understood down through the years of the Church.  But, what has not always been understood, but which is equally biblical, is that there’s a limit to how much power you can concentrate in a human institution. In our day the entire weight of the culture is against the biblical position.  You might as well start, if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you’re automatically in the 1 or 2 % minority.  We are a smaller minority than any so-called racial minority or cultural minority.  And in this small minority of people who think biblically there is an axiom that says because man is sinful he can’t be trusted with concentrated power. 

The founders of our country, though not all Christian and we’re not claiming the Constitution to be the Christian document, it certainly of all the historical documents in the world represents most clearly biblical thinking, and that is that power was distributed in three branches of government.  That came out of Samuel Rutherford’s writing.  It came out of other Christian influences.  All the men couldn’t articulate where the idea came from in the days that they wrote the Constitution but it was put on the grapevine of the community’s thinking by Christians and their doctrine of the depravity of man.

 

Well how, with all this rich heritage against centralized power we come to a passage like this, it says that Pharaoh eventually is going to take over all the land of Egypt and that as a result of a believer, Joseph, under his tutelage, under his counsel this occurs.  Well now we’ve got a problem and as I said last week we’ve got to think our way through this one real carefully, because if we don’t we’re going to be put in the embarrassing position of having the Bible testify to a philosophy that’s just like the communists. 

 

Here’s how we work with the problem.  Up until this chapter, from Genesis 12 through say Genesis 40, we’ve talked about the doctrine of election; the election of a chosen son; that was the issue in each story.  You have a family, say Abraham’s family, you had two sons in the family, one born of the handmaid, one born of Sarah; Ishmael on the one hand, Isaac on the other, both under Abraham as father.  Both share entirely their father’s genes.  The whole debate in all these stories, if you want to hook them together, is God is choosing one boy and He’s putting the other boy down.  One boy is elect, the other boy is reprobate; there is one boy that responds to the promises of God and God’s grace and the other boy turns his back and laughs and despises him.  And so therefore which commands the most attention in the Scripture?  Isaac, not Ishmael; Ishmael is mentioned, he’s tracked so that you can follow him today down to become the father of the Arab nations, and then Isaac is the father of the Jewish nation.

 

Then we come to another generation; we come into Isaac’s home; we find the same thing, except this time instead of one boy born of a handmaid and one boy born of the real mother, we have both boys born of the mother, twins.  We have Jacob and Esau and Esau is a reprobate and Jacob is the elect.  Jacob is the boy that constantly responds to the Word of God; Esau is the boy that constantly rebels against the Word of God and finally he’s cast aside.  So we’ve had those kinds of stories that concentrated within one family two children.  And that’s been our occupation.  Now you must see that the scene shifts. 

 

Beginning in Genesis 41 on through Genesis 50, we now have election but now it’s election of a nation over against another nation.  Now the word play and the drama is no longer centered on individuals that do this or don’t do this, do this and don’t do this, they’re individuals but now they’re part of a bigger thing and that is the nation of the Jews versus the nation of the Egyptians and now there is a growing tension between the two.  One is going to be elect, one is going to respond to the Scripture; one is going to be reprobate, hears the Word and departs from it.  And that’s the big picture of this scene.

 

To see the principles in a capsule verse, turn to Deuteronomy 4:19; here in one verse you have the political philosophy summarized.  This is a revelation of the mind of God as He works over those many centuries to separate the Jews as a national entity.  Verse 19 is spoken by God through Moses, and it’s spoken to the Jewish people as to why He’s given them all of the Law, and it says I have given you these “lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when you see the sun, and the moon and the stars, and all the host of heaven, and you should be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God has divided unto all nations under the whole heaven.  [20] But the LORD God has taken you,” look at the end of verse 19 and the beginning of verse 20; notice the two actions; one it says, “The LORD thy God has divided all nations,” the word divide means to allot by way of an inheritance.  Now isn’t that strange?  Do you know what that’s really saying in verse 19?  It’s saying these nations all want to apostacize; because they’re made of fallen men what do fallen men want to do? Fallen men want to worship the creature more than the Creator. 

 

So what does fallen man do most likely?  They go like people in Lubbock do, they open their daily newspaper and the fist thing they read is the horoscope, believing the same way the ancient Egyptians did, that there are impersonal forces that operate in the environment and I must line my life with the planets before I am blessed.  Well, God says that is typical of paganism, it is typical of apostasy and so therefore God says in verse 19 if you guys want to do this, be my guest; but the Jews I take out from among them. See the “But” at the beginning of verse 20, “But the LORD takes you” in other words, He won’t let you do what you want to do as a sinner, He’s correcting you.  Now there’s the picture of national election, the idea that one nation is taken out from among the other nations and the other nations are left to do what they want to do. You’ve often heard me say God greases their slide; if they want to go down, fine, be my guest, I’ll help you go down. 

 

And this is the story of Joseph in Genesis 41.  The story must be looked upon from the standpoint of the Egyptians and the standpoint of the Jew.  From the standpoint of the Egyptians they’re going to go down; they’re going to lose their freedom; from the standpoint of the Jews they’re going to come up, they’re going to gain their resources and become a very productive people.  And the main actor in both curves, the down curve and the up curve, the main actor is Joseph.

 

Genesis 41:37, “And the thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of all his servants.”  Now you’ll notice this and it’s typical of the way God works and it’s almost terrifying in a way; pray that you never be on the receiving end of this kind of a thing because what is so terrible about this is that it’s like going to hell on a stretcher, we enjoy it.  And what God is doing here, He’s giving the Egyptians a plan they themselves really like, and they themselves really go for, which condemns them forever. 

 

To show you how much the servants of Pharaoh like this, and we would include every inhabitant in the land of Egypt, turn to Genesis 47:13.  Here the plan and all of its stark character shows up.  Genesis 41 and Genesis 47 are parallel chapters in describing the famine situation.  “And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.  [14] And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the grain which they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.  [15] And when the money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread; for why should we divine institution in thy presence?  For the money fails.  [16] And Joseph said, Give your cattle, and I will give you for your cattle,” I’ll give you grain is understood, “for your cattle if the money fails. [17] And they brought their cattle to Joseph; and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for horses, and for the flocks, and for the cattle of the herds, and for the asses; and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year.  [18] And when that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how our money is spent.  My lord also has our herds of cattle; there is not anything left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands.  [19] Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh; and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land will not be desolate.  [20] And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them; s the land became Pharaoh’s.  [21] And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the border of Egypt to the other end thereof.  [22] Only the land of the priests bought he not; for the priests had a portion assigned to them by Pharaoh….”  Verse 23, “Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh; lo, here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land.” 

 

See what it ended in?  See the horrible tragedy of this process.  This is centralized power with a vengeance.  Now I said last week that what you’ve got here is confiscation.  I changed that because in looking more carefully at the text it’s even more subtle than that.  Joseph didn’t confiscate a dime of Egyptian property, not a dime.  He simply let the free market work.  Let’s review some principles that the Bible shows us about economy, money and government.  The reason that Joseph could do what he did was because he had a tap on omniscience; he knew exactly what the future was.  He had a 14 year business condition forecast that was perfect.   Now any businessman with a 14 year forecast of what’s going to happen to the market ought to be able to do something very well, particularly if no other businessman has such a forecast. 

 

So Pharaoh had Joseph’s financial letter and Pharaoh decided that he would centralize his power and we say right here is a biblical principle; mark this one well, for in our day many people want this but they don’t understand what they’re saying.  Many people in desperation say we need more and bigger and better government.  We need more government control here, we need more government control there, and so on; we need to centralize more, it’s more efficient that way.  It is if one thing is true; if you’ve got a Joseph that perfectly forecasts the future for you, but when you don’t and when you put all your eggs in one basket on the basis of one forecast, what do you do when the forecast busts?  What happens when it doesn’t turn out your 14 year economic forecast the way you thought it would?  You lose like you couldn’t possibly have lost if you had diversified.  And that’s the same thing with business; it’s the same thing with government.  This is why the argument for decentralization is the argument for the free market.  If I have a businessman here and a businessman here, and a businessman here, this guy bets on a drought, this guy bets on a plenty, this guy bets on a normal market.  One of the guys has got to win. So always you’ll have somebody producing in this case food.  But suppose all those guys miss the forecast; now what happens to your food?  You starve, that’s what happens because you didn’t decentralize, you didn’t allow many guesses about the future.

 

So this is why the Bible says unless you have omniscience forget one type solution.  We trace this to the energy crisis; we traced it to other crisis last time.  It’s simply this: if somebody walks up to you and tells you look, what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to have the government declare just wage, just price, just that… dot, dot, dot on down the line, we’ve got to have total centralization, there is one question you want to ask that person, just one.  Ask the person, where is your Joseph, I want his name, address and phone number.  Where is the boy that’s supplying you with the perfect forecast of the future; produce him and I will gladly go along with centralized schemes of government.  I’ll be a Marxist, a fascist or a socialist, whatever, all the little schemes that men have made, but if you can’t tell me who your Joseph is and you can’t produce one, don’t expect me to agree to give up my freedom for a bunch of faceless bureaucrats who will determine my future.  Of, if I’m a businessman don’t you ask me to put all my investments in one little investment; oh no, I’m not going to cluster my investments because I am not Joseph, I don’t have a perfect forecast for the future and by diversifying my investments I confess that I am a creature and I face history that is open.  And if I’m a Bible-believing Christian you say it doesn’t affect the way you invest your money, baloney.  I just gave you an example.  That is a biblical influence on investment procedures. 

So now Joseph is going to propose that they buy up property and the argument is going to be this: very simple, Joseph doesn’t rip anyone off.  If you were to chart the grain prices it would look like this.  The first year grain prices started to drop and the reason they dropped because all of a sudden the land started producing like crazy; remember in Egypt the crop is in proportion to what the Nile brings down in the spring so those springs during those seven plenteous years, what was the Nile River doing?  It was just cascading fertilizer, rich soil, spreading it out all over the banks of the Nile.  And these farmers would plant their seeds like they always planted their seeds and they’d turn around, look at this crop, we can’t believe it, you can see it grow, fantastic crop.  And so, as farmers always find the prosperity kills them because it drops the price of their product.  And so the price dropped and it dropped, and it dropped, and it dropped, for seven years the price went down as the supply went up.  And this is the way those curves looked. 

 

Now along comes Joseph, apparently he did not share this plan, at least initially, with the producers of the grain. But he takes Pharaoh’s treasury and he watches the price, and he sees that price curve drop down and lower and lower, and then he says okay, Pharaoh, we’re going out and we’re buying 20% of the crop.  So he comes along and starts storing it, and this is what’s going on; it’s not a confiscatory program, it’s a buying up the surplus program.  And they’re buying up the surplus at very small prices.  Now you can say wasn’t that a dirty trick to pull on the Egyptians?  He was greasing their slide, that’s all.  The Egyptians worshiped centralized power, they wanted it, it’s just that they didn’t have it yet in history so God said you like this kind of thing folks, that’s exactly what you’re going to get.  You’ve heard the axiom, people get the government they really want.

 

Now let me prove to you the nature of the Egyptian mind.  I’ve picked three archeological finds from prior to all possible dates for Joseph; there’s a debate on the date but I’ve made sure I’ve tried to produce all this data from before Joseph’s time.  I want you to look at this, this is an enlargement of an Egyptian woman’s comb, it’s a section of the handle of the comb, you can see the teeth here, and on her comb she has these symbols.  I’ll explain them; one symbol on the left, one symbol on the right, these up and down lines that you see are scepters and they are a symbol in Egyptian art for welfare.  Off to the left or the right scepters you see this kind of a phrase, you’ll see it today on jewelry, it’s sometimes called a Greek word; it’s not, it’s the Egyptian sign of eternal life.  And there you see it on a comb dating before Abraham’s time.  Then you see wings; actually there’s a falcon that appears in this drawing, there’s a falcon and he appears here, you can just barely see his outline and he’s sitting on a boat.  Then you see the falcon figure again with his wings spread out and then you see the falcon for the third time perched on this box with a snake in it and the man’s name, an ivory comb with the name of King Djet of dynasty one. 

 

Now those three falcons, this is what is meant; sometimes people have a hard time with Egyptian art; it’s not that hard.  The idea is that the artist who enscripturated that comb carved the comb is saying that the force that you see in the falcon… now what would you see in the falcon?  You’d see hunting, the pursuit, aggressive pursuit, for a falcon was used in hunting, would be aggressive pursuit, power, strength and mobility.  And these forces would be manifest in the falcon and so then the falcon became the symbol of that nature force.  So when you see the falcon perched on a boat and he’s going trough the sky, what does that stand for?  It’s the sun.  The falcon replaces the sun because he’s saying the sun has the same force in it that the falcon has.  All right, you see the falcon’s wings, there’s the sky and it’s saying that the sky, when the weather and so on is filled with this force of mobility and power that we see in the falcon, then the falcon is perched on top of a box with Pharaoh’s name on it; what does that mean?  Here’s the clinker; that means that Pharaoh himself is of the same power as the sun and the skies.  You see how they blended man with the creation?  This is pantheism. 

 

We have another picture of this and to explain this picture, two years ago somebody found this in Newsweek Magazine, in Egyptian art you find the human body and you’ll see an animal head on it. And this kind of silly, I used to think the Egyptians were really queer people, they thought there were such creatures walking around on the face of the earth but that’s not really true.  It was their art form.  Here is an advertisement in Newsweek, April 11, 1977 and it’s talking about businessmen trying to get them to listen to the radio early in the morning, and it says: Early birds of the world, and there you see the same art form, the human body with the bird face.  Now obviously the artist of this isn’t saying that there are such things in America; now there are birds in our country but we usually speak metaphorically.  The artist is saying something here, he’s trying to combine the nature of the bird somehow with a man and so he does it artistically. 

 

That’s the same style art that the Egyptian artist would do and they’d do something else as in this painting, this tells a big long story of Pharaoh and his vaunted conquest, but there Pharaoh is in the middle and he’s surrounded by two gods on the right and on the left who have this falcon head.  What this is saying very clearly, because if you notice the height of the Pharaoh figure, the height of Pharaoh in that drawing is the same height as the god.  If you look very carefully you’ll see that the artist is drawing Pharaoh’s head just a little bit taller than the god, and so that’s a clear declaration, before Abraham, of their national religious view that the Pharaoh is god; he is a divine being, not in the sense of Jesus Christ and Christian theology but he participates and he becomes the sort of mediator with nature; he is not just a person. 

 

Finally, one further drawing to show you this, this is taken from a mortuary temple and on the mortuary temple pillar there’s a hieroglyphic vertical, a set of symbols.  The set of these symbols depict King Sahure and on the left of this it looks like I’m sure to most of you, there’s a simple line drawn there and a line drawn down the side but if you look closely you’d see the line isn’t that, the line looks like this, it’s that same symbol we saw on the lady’s comb, it’s a symbol of welfare and in between those two symbols of welfare in hieroglyphics is the Pharaoh’s name.  On the top of the column there’s a symbol that looks like this, which is a symbol for heaven and down at the bottom there’s a symbol of this and that’s the symbol of earth.  Now put those together and what have you got?  You’ve got a message, don’t you?  Read the puzzle; two welfare symbols stretched between earth and heaven and the name of Pharaoh written between.  What is that proclaiming?  He is the divine mediator between heaven and earth that brings welfare to the state; the cosmos and the nation coalesce in the person of Pharaoh.

 

Now that’s the national religion that existed prior to Joseph’s day.  Joseph walks into that culture and God has a role for Joseph to perform.  And the role for Joseph to perform is let the Egyptians be purer Egyptians and let the Jews become purer Jews; it is as it were that Esau be more and more reprobate and let Jacob be more and more elect.  Well, here we’re saying, instead of two boys, we’re saying two nations; let the Jews become more and more and evermore consistent with the Scriptures, and let the Egyptians become evermore consistent with their apostate starting point, their apostate faith.

 

Frankfort, who was a man who for many years along with his wife did a lot of pioneer work at the University of Chicago in Egyptology, wrote this in summary of this attitude that I just showed you which is so crucial to understand Joseph.  Dr. Frankfort writes:  “Pharaoh was the fountainhead of all authority, all power, and all wealth.  The famous saying of Louis XIV, ‘L'état, c'est moi – I am the state’ was levity and presumption when it was uttered, but it could have been authored by Pharaoh as a statement of fact in which his subjects concurred absolutely.  It would have summed up totally Egyptian political thought.”  You see what’s going on here is like what went on in the French Revolution, sort of, you know, Queen Antoinette said: “If the people want bread, let them eat cake.”  Well, God’s saying to the Egyptians, you people, you want your centralized god, I’ll tell you what, I’ll help you set up a bureaucracy that will really make him god, and so we have Joseph helping him out.

 

Now in Genesis 41:39, Pharaoh knows the source of this blessing; Pharaoh knows that God is involved but Pharaoh doesn’t change the philosophy at all, there’s no indication in the text, just a polite pragmatic application. He said, “[And Pharaoh said unto Joseph,] Forasmuch as God hath showed thee all this, [there is none so discreet and wise as thou art,] you are the wise one, and [40] “You will be over my house, and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the throne will I be greater than you.  [41] And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt.”  Now can you imagine that boy back when he was 17; remember how arrogant he was when he dreamed his dream, he walked up to his dad and said hey dad, you and mom are going to worship me.  We’re gonna what?  Remember Jacob’s response to his son; remember how cocky and arrogant he was.  See, it’s all gone now; 13 years in the dungeon, 13 years under pressure, 13 years under trial, learning, transformation of the heart and mental attitude.  See how painful that kind of learning is. The trouble with it is, you can’t go to school and learn it like you can other subjects.  It takes a variable length of time and it’s hard; much harder than school.  And if you’re a Christian because you’re elect you know you’ve never flunked the course permanently, which means guess what, you take it over and over until you pass it.  This is how the doctrine of election works in sanctification. 

 

Well Joseph is ready; now the grand finale to his sanctification in Genesis 41:42, “And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand,” which was the thing that he would use as a signet, the thing that he would use to sign, “He takes off his ring and put it upon Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck;” remember this boy, Joseph, twice before he’s had vestments put on him.  Remember his dad, when he was a boy bought him that linen robe that the Bible says “a coat of many colors” which really isn’t many colors but the coat of royalty.  Remember what happened to it; it was ripped off and he was cast into that dirty cistern, that hole. Remember the second time he was arrayed in vesture again in Potiphar’s home as the manager of the estate, and Potiphar’s wife, when she was trying to seduce him she grabbed it off of him and he was thrown in jail.  Now for the third time in his life he gets vestments, and now what vestments, don’t they beat everything else that he ever had in his life before.  Wasn’t it worth waiting 13 years for?  You bet it was.  Now he becomes next to Pharaoh, the second most powerful person on the face of the earth in his generation was Joseph.

 

Genesis 41:43, “And he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him, Bow the knee: and he made him ruler over all the land of Egypt. [44] And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt. [45] And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name” and this is an Egyptian name actually, it’s pronounced, “Zaphnath-paaneah;” and it doesn’t have any real meaning in Hebrew, it’s just apparently a phonetization of the Egyptian word, and he gave him a priest’s daughter to wife, “[and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Poti-pherah priest of On.] And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.]”  So he’s totally acclimated to the culture. 

Genesis 41:46, “And Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh, king of Egypt. And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and went throughout all the land of Egypt. [47] And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by handfuls. [48] And he gathered up” he collected, “all the food of the seven years, which were in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same. [49] And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, [very much, until he left numbering; for it was without number],” until he stopped accounting.  I suggest to you verse 49 means not only quantity of grain but I suggest to you that it became so cheap that he no longer had as treasurer and finance man, he no longer gave account to it.  So it shows a rocket drop in the price of grain. 

 

Genesis 41:46, “And unto Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, [which Asenath the daughter of Poti-pherah priest of On bare unto him.]”  And they were born and named these two names, verses 51-52, “And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father’s house.”  Now you look carefully at that verse because for those of you who are going on in the Christian life I want to show you a little trade secret about it, one of those times it’s really an exciting surprise at how this can happen in your life.  He goes through this curve of depression and you go through all the trial and maybe for a man it’s just work, work, work, work, and you never get promoted, you never get any acclamation for what you’re doing, you feel like you’re stalled and stymied, not going anywhere, but keep faithfully plugging away, you keep faithfully doing your job as unto the Lord, and some day somebody recognizes it and bam, you get promoted. 

 

That curve, when you reach at this point, Joseph is right there now and he’s going up, verse 51 shows you a mental attitude transformation that occurs; it can’t be produced by your own efforts, it’s something God does, and it looks like this.  He thinks back, now he doesn’t forget his father, obviously, because his father shows up in the very next chapter so it can’t mean that he literally forgets his father.  What it means is he forgets the resentment that he had toward his father and toward his brothers.  They gave him a hard time, remember, hostility; he could say boy, I had a real clod for a father.  And boy, you should have been in the home I was, I was a little boy and I was always picked on by my brothers; hatred, resentment.  What happens here?  He says he forgets it. 

 

I suggest to you something like this happens to him.  When the thought comes next to him to be tempted to resent his father, to resent the treatment he got from his brothers or sisters, he says to himself, well, you know, they mistreated me, I know that, but you know something, I no longer resent it.  Why is it?  Because I’m naïve?  No!  I no longer resent it because I’ve got a bigger picture here and that enables me to absorb injustice without getting bitter.  I see that under God’s sovereignty my brothers when they were cruel to me actually helped me; I see that when my father wasn’t perhaps the smartest dad that ever walked the face of the earth, even in his mistakes it was used by God to help me.  Now if you can look back and take the disappointments and heartaches of your life, the things that really stick in your craw, the things that cause you to be bitter and resentful of your past, maybe things that occurred in your home, in your family, and you can get to the point in your life that Joseph is right here, where you can look back and say hey, I see the hand of God, God took that, God took that, God took that, and He tied these things together and through those things He molded me spiritually and I’m thankful for that.  Now that’s not meaning that you forgot it; and it’s not being naïve; it’s seeing a bigger dimension to the whole thing and that gives you pleasure, that gives you peace and that’s what he’s talking about, the peace that he has, so he names his son Manasseh, he says He made me forget all that irritation, all that resentment, I’m not carrying that around any more, I feel 50 pounds lighter. 

Genesis 41:52, “And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction. [53] And the seven years of plenteousness, that was in the land of Egypt, were ended. [54] And the seven years of dearth began to come, according as Joseph had said: and the dearth was in all lands; but in all the land of Egypt there was bread. [55] And when all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to Pharaoh for bread: and Pharaoh said unto all the Egyptians, Go unto Joseph; what he saith to you, do.  [56] And the famine was over all the face of the earth: and Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians; and the famine waxed sore in the land of Egypt. [57] And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph for to buy grain; [because that the famine was so sore in all lands.]”

 

You see what he did here?  He bought grain when the price was low and then he sold it out and the people lost their money and they could no longer sell back to him and so they got down to make this horrible choice.  Now here’s another little axiom of wisdom; tuck this one away along with the other axioms of wisdom that we get from Genesis: there comes a time in a national entity when these two are opposed; pray that it never comes in our country, but I’ll tell you which way it always goes.  When people have to choose between physical survival and comfort and their freedom, which way do they usually choose?  You know the answer; it was epitomized in the days of World War II when Mussolini’s acceptance among the Italian people was justified by saying well, Mussolini made the trains on time. Sure he did; is that a reason to permit this kind of thing to take place.  Well, if you want to get to work on time and don’t want to be discomforted, freedom doesn’t mean that much to you, sure, let Mussolini reign. 

 

In the history of our country, however, there was a Christian publisher of evangelistic literature in Colonial America; he used to take tracts by the preachers of his day, he wrote those tracts, he abbreviated them, he went out and he published them and he distributed them all over western Virginia.  That was the man God used to forever challenge that axiom in the history of our country; the man’s name was Patrick Henry, “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Henry saw the worst case scenario and as a Christian man he said no, if I ever have to face that I will take death; I will never give up my liberty.  And liberty was not the freedom that we think of autonomously, notice it was liberty, not freedom.  The Colonials know exactly what liberty meant; it meant freedom within the law, that was defined as liberty; give me that liberty or give me death, said Henry.  Today what would you find?  Give me security or give me death. 

 

And so we have the population selling itself out to ever increasing government power, the same equation works, and the only way you can keep free is the way that Joseph kept his family free of this; Joseph was a future oriented person.  Future oriented people save in the present so they can cope and never have to choose between those two horrible alternatives.  When you have to get in your life, and God help us that we never have to do this as a nation, when we come down to the last gun and we have to choose, something’s already gone wrong.  If we were future oriented people we ought never to have to face this kind of thing.  And the Egyptians should never have faced this sort of thing, but they were allowed to face it by God because apostate though they were, as impermeable to the future because they rejected the Word of God, God said you people want to live in the present, then have your present divine Pharaoh, I’ll help you with it.  And so God literally greased the slide and those people sold away their bodies, their land and their freedom and from this point forward in Egyptian history never once… never once was there freedom again.  Who was the man that presided over the funeral? A Jewish shepherd boy by the name of Joseph. 

 

But who was this Joseph?  If we were to go back in history and this famine really occurred and I’m not just telling you a Sunday School story, surely there ought to be evidence from history that such a famine really did occur.  Fortunately there is.  Archeologists that were working in the Nile River 20-30 years ago came across the Sehelan Inscription; it was carved in a rock in the middle of the Nile and it reads this way; some Egyptian inscribed it here in hieroglyphics.  “I was in distress on the royal throne, and those who are in the palace were in harsh affliction from a very great evil, since the Nile had not come in my time for a space of seven years.  Grain was scant,” notice the upheaval in the nation, “Grain was scant, fruits were dried up, everything which they eat was short, and every man robbed his companion.”  Total anarchy!  What a horrible situation because a nation didn’t think through. 

 

Now he’s describing the result of that famine and there were other men who wrote.  One man wrote in the 12th dynasty under Sesostris I, a lesser prince.  “No child of the poor did I afflict, no widow did I oppress, no landowner did I displace, no herdsman did I drive away; from no farmer did I take away his men for my own work, no one was unhappy in my days, not even in the years of famine, for I had pilled all the fields of the word nome,” the word “nome” in Egyptian writings is the word we would say state or province, “the nome of Mah up to its southern and northern frontiers.  I prolonged the life of its inhabitants because I saved the food which it had produced.”  Sounds again like Joseph’s program.  “No hungry man was in my province; I distributed equally to the widow as to the married woman; I did not prefer the great to the humble in all I gave away.”  That’s certainly a braggadocio in these inscriptions but at least they show you something serious happened.

 

In the 13th dynasty, which by some chronological adjustments may be simultaneous with the 12th dynasty, there’s the inscription of [sounds like: Bhed die], it says: “I collected grain as a friend of the harvest god; I was watchful at the time of sowing, and when the famine finally arose, lasting many years, I distributed grain to the city each year of the famine.”  So we have evidence that such a famine did occur; there’s a debate among scholars as to whether there’s one or two famines.  We take Courville’s revision of history, which I present in the third framework pamphlet, and you’ll see there the chart of why I do this. 

 

One further question this morning, do we know who the real Joseph was?  Does he have another name by which he was known in secular history?  We know one of his names, it’s in verse 45, that hard to pronounce name.  Joseph had at least two names and in keeping with the ancient world he had others. We can’t be dogmatic but Joseph looks like the vizier, the vizier was the number two man, under Pharaoh Sesostris I.  He was known in history as Mentuhotep, and the peculiar thing about Mentuhotep is that he had a list of unusual titles.  Now let’s look at some of his titles and compare them to the titles of Joseph in the Bible story.  Mentuhotep was called the overseer of the double granary; Joseph we know was the manager of the grain storage program of Egypt, Genesis 41 and 47.  Mentuhotep was the chief treasurer under Sesostris I; Joseph was the accounter and he was the one that bought and sold the grain.  He was the one who wore the royal seal, and where was the royal seal, it was on the ring.  Joseph wore the Pharaoh’s ring, Genesis 41:42.  Mentuhotep was chief of all there was to the king; Joseph was over all the land, verse 41.   Mentuhotep was giver of goods sustaining alive the people, that’s just a hieroglyphic literal translation; Joseph’s name in verse 45 in Coptic, which is the Ethiopian language in southern Egypt, in Coptic it means supporter of life. Mentuhotep was a favorite of the king; he was the greater over all except Pharaoh, verse 40.  So there’s a strange coalescence of titles.

 

We can’t be sure but we just simply say if you’re looking for evidence that the story is real, look in the reign of Sesostris I of the Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 12, and look up the life of Mentuhotep, and see if you don’t see a remarkable correlation in title, a remarkable correlation in events.

 

There are some other miscellaneous evidence that we could confirm this.  During Sesostris I reign a gigantic irrigation project was begun.  It wasn’t finished for many centuries but it was a ditch that was dug parallel to the Nile.  Today that ditch, and it has been known by Arab Bedouins that have lived next to it for many, many centuries, as the canal of Joseph.  Is this just a story or is this a Bedouin tradition that comes down from pre-Christian times. We’ve also know that Joseph could have lived and administered some 80 years in the administration because Joseph lived 110 years.  And if he was 30 when he started we at least have 80 years of his reign; maybe he retired early but nevertheless, he has a possibility.  If he lived that long at least he could have lived through the reign of many Pharaohs; Sesostris I, Sesostris II, and Sesostris III is known in Egyptian history forever changing the entire administration of the land; from that point forward in Egyptian history the minor princes had very little power; Pharaoh had all.

 

So we’ve concluded the story of the rise of Joseph, and as Sundays go on we’re going to look further at Joseph and his family. We’ve looked at how Joseph helped the Egyptians become more Egyptian; we’ve watched him, so to speak, grease the slide and let Egypt decline, but now we’ll watch how he edifies his own father, how he acts as a nourisher of his brothers.  Joseph was a real character, a real creature of God, a real sinner, a real believer.  You want to hold Joseph up in your mind’s eye and remember that what he presided over in Egypt is something we never want to preside over with our own country.

 

We’re going to sing…..