Clough Genesis Lesson 94

Jacob goes to Egypt; roster of who went to Egypt – Genesis 46-47:12

So far in the Genesis series we’ve looked at Joseph, we’ve looked at the family of Jacob; we’ve looked at Israel, we’ve looked at Isaac, we’ve looked at Jacob and Abraham, and in this series of three, the Abraham, Isaac and Jacob series we’ve watched God’s election of one family to be the basis for the Old Testament kingdom of God come true. When we start using words like election and God’s sovereign plan of history you always want to avoid falling into the trap of visualizing these powerful things as sheer abstraction; they are not abstraction, they’re accounts and descriptions of how God works. And when we look at this series we’re looking at a family that’s in trouble.

The third divine institution, this is where it takes place; God always works through family units. We can look to Adam and Adam starts the human race as a family. We can look to Noah after the flood; he starts the human race as a family. We look to Abraham and God starts as a family. Now we don’t need many more examples to kind of get the impression that the family is the most basic unit of all. And this is a very, very important point in the Genesis series. Our day is characterized when everyone wants to think in terms of a state organized society, hence the popularity of socialism and communism because we think the state ought to have prior claim; it does not, it never had; the family always has the prior claim upon the state and in our time we’ve got to watch how these authority structures work out.

Now when God put this family back together again, for indeed it had fallen apart, and it had done what any family does when left to itself, or when any individual who is a sinner, fallen, depraved individual is left to him or herself and that is we all crater. It doesn’t take anything to crater; just left to ourselves it happens. This can be seen on smaller scales; the rooms in your own house left to themselves get messy; isn’t it amazing, you don’t have to try to get your rooms dirty but you do have to try to get them clean. And it’s the same thing spiritually; you don’t have to try to get messy, it happens. All you have to do is try to get cleansed, and so we always have this degrading effect.

But what we want to gather out of all these stories are principles that we can use for living today and one of these principles has to do with how to get a messy family back on track again, and God shows us by the way he uses the spheres of authority in life. All of life can be divided into certain spheres. One would be, of course, responsibility; the other marriage; the third, family; and the fourth is the state. In our day, of course, the state is the one that everyone looks upon as the divine savior, the Christ replacement. And then we have the family. God starts working on the family by imposing His law. Now this is a fundamental axiom that will always be followed, regardless of who you are; as a non-Christian or a Christian, regardless of what the problem is, whether it’s a family problem, whether it’s a personal problem, whether it’s a group problem, the way of solving it always follows the same kind of scheme.

And the first step in solving these kinds of messy problems, God imposed His laws. Now in the third divine institution, in this case, He couldn’t impose the law effectively because the father in the family unit had forsaken his role. Jacob had cratered. When the father forsakes his role you can talk law all you want to but without a power to enforce the law there simply is no law. So we have no authority in that situation, so therefore to God, to get the ball rolling, comes over to the fourth divine institution, has Joseph elevated to number two spot in Egypt, and then he takes the law and imposes it back on the family. And in this way God speaks to these rebellious people.

Here’s what happens, usually, in kind of a mess that goes on. We have people fighting among themselves. We have that sort of situation, horizontal. This person over here says it’s all his fault, him; and his explanation is her. So now locked in a mortal conflict like this there’s no way to break out of the cycle, it just goes on and on and on and on. But God has a way of breaking into the cycle and that is what He did with Jacob and his family. His answer is you, because God imposes His law upon that family unit.

Let’s consider the men in this situation. He says it’s her, she’s the whole problem. Now very often you can watch this take place, either in marriage problems or it can take place in the parent and child relationship, it doesn’t make any difference, you can use either one. But whatever the specific is, you listen to the language used and it’s always her, or it’s always him, or it’s always that kid, or it’s always something else. Now that’s where the problem is located, granted that’s where the problem is located but that’s not the ultimate cause of the problem as far as this person goes. His problem before God is his response to her; he may feel like grabbing her and throwing her up against the wall like men often do, but that’s not quite the biblical response in the situation. So he has to got to clear his relationship vertically.

Now here’s a marvelous thing that happens; when you start realizing that your controversy is basically with God then, for the first time in this kind of a situation, you can do something about it. As long as you’re locked in this kind of a problem there’s nothing you can do about it because the other person is not going to change, so there you sit trapped, unable to respond because they don’t change, and if you’re going to condition your response on you’re their change, and they’re doing the same thing, you’re locked down, no progress. But as soon as you define it in terms of the fact that all right, Lord, I cannot be responsible for that woman, but I can be responsible for my responses to that woman.

Example: Jesus Christ was persecuted as no man who ever walked the face of this earth. Jesus Christ, following most of our ways of handling life’s problems, could die of an ulcer on the cross worrying about where his movement was going to go when He died, worrying about the idiots that he had selected as disciples, worrying whether the three women, Mary, Martha and the women that had gathered around Bethany there, worrying about whether they’d start a women’s lib movement. He could have lots of things to worry about, but as a matter of fact Jesus Christ did not die of an ulcer on the cross, He dealt with what He could deal with and He left the rest in the Lord’s hands; and this is how he went about it as a model problem solver.

Now let’s watch how the three sets of people in Jacob’s family have gone about solving their problems. First we have the old man, Jacob. What was his problem? His problem, he thought, was his kids, those kids will never obey me, those kids are unruly, I can’t handle those kids; those kids took my favorite son and they killed him. I have a problem and it’s them. But you see here is the fallacy of the finite creature analyzing his problem. In the first place, Jacob’s problem wasn’t a dead son, he didn’t have any dead son. He thought he had a dead son but he really did not have, and that’s very often the case when you and I try to work with our problems; what we think is a problem actually is a fantasy, it is not really there. Now we may be cut off from the data, simply because we’re limited creatures; we may not realize that in fact our “Joseph’s” are still alive. But nevertheless, let’s look at Jacob.

Jacob, analyzing his problem in his purely horizontal way, his problem is his son, his problem is a dead son, then Jacob says by way of solution, and it’s logical, given his premise, just as logical as night follows day that if that’s the case then I am going to hold on to Benjamin and I am not going to let go and I don’t care who tells me. And God says sorry, old man, Benjamin is going to be given to me, let go. No. Let go! No! Let go! And then God finally slaps his wrist and Jacob let’s go of Benjamin. And Jacob, in the process of letting go of Benjamin realizes yeah, he’s not really responsible for those kids at this point; he could have done things before but right now he can’t do anything so the best thing is to get straight with God first, then we’ll worry about the other problems.

Let’s watch how it worked with the brothers. They define their problems in terms of a little brat brother; why we were all right, we guys ruled the roost around here until that little brat, Joseph, came along, and if we didn’t have a little brat brother we’d be all right. Sweetness and light would prevail if it weren’t for Joseph. Well, they found out that that wasn’t the problem after all because when Joseph was in Egypt what happened? They were confronted with a situation where they realized their guilt; they realized they did not have to kill their bratty brother. Now they might have solved their problem some other way but that wasn’t the right way to solve it. So once again notice the way God works here. He imposed authority that can’t be bucked; that’s usually the first thing that happens, an authority that cannot be bucked, cannot be manipulated, cannot be taken away, cannot be avoided, and once that authority is in place then this process begins.

Then Joseph, he couldn’t get away, he was stuck in a cistern and a jail. And so he had nothing to do besides count cockroaches and think about what he was going to do with his mental attitude, and this is what went on for his life for 13 years. Again, sometimes God has to work this way in order for us to break out of the horizontal cycle that our problem ultimately is not the other person. There’s a problem there but that’s not our problem. Joseph has a problem with his brothers, true, but the brothers have the problem; any sin is their problem, not Joseph’s problem. All Joseph is responsible for is Joseph at this point. And so the first step is imposition of authority and then the second one is this repenting process that I’ve just described to you.

What is this repenting process? It’s shifting from the horizontal to up to the vertical and realizing that my problem, as far as the sin side of it is concerned, is my problem with God. That is the process of repentance, that’s what it means, to change the mind, change the mental attitude. And when this process takes place, then things can go on. Now being the good, delightful, skillful sinners we all are, we know this process is going to take place; intuitively we know it’s going to take place. So what do we all do? As great artists we construct perimeters of defense against imposed authority and so we have lots of little deals and here we are building an umbrella to avoid this, because secretly, deep down, we know that if we violate God’s laws, then He is going to impose them upon us and their penalty. So to avoid this we try to avoid the law, and we have great gimmicks for doing this.

It can be seen all over our society. The Constitution under sinful concept of law has been turned into a piece of paper where it means what nine old men think it means. And this becomes the new Christ that walks the face of the earth, the new Mount Sinai located across the Potomac, that decrees the latest of what law is and the law is not based upon the internal standards of describing documents and past decisions; it is based upon sociological standards that happen to be present today and that’s how laws are interpreted. They are not interpreted as abiding principles, they are interpreted arbitrarily. Why, because we’d have authority structure if we didn’t do that and we don’t want an authority structure other than ourselves, so the field of law has done very nice things to destroying authority. And then the clergy, and I speak of the clergy as a profession including liberals and conservatives, what have we done? We’ve turned the Bible into a piece of paper, that way we can get rid of God’s laws so once eliminated the constitution and the Bible that takes care of quite a wide range of facility. And now the Bible can mean anything that anybody wants it to mean and we have great conventions saying that they believe in the bible, errors and all, then we can go along and say that we aren’t under any authority. By endless re-interpretation we destroy the authority. Oh, the Bible can’t possibly mean that, I have another interpretation of that, and so forth. So these are gimmicks or devices by which people escape the pain of having an authority speak to them.

Now in Christian circles we’re also good at this. We’re good at this by avoiding the consequences of church membership. People who may hop from church to church and so on, that’s all right, there’s a process of being led by the Holy Spirit to a particular congregation but I’m talking about people who for years and years and years this goes on, it becomes a way of life; I’m not going to join there, I don’t like so and so, I don’t like somebody else, hypocrites there, don’t like the pastor. Fine, go somewhere else. But it’s always something; it’s always some reason why we don’t want to get in a relationship that means I am responsible to something.

All the couples that live together, why is this such a phenomenon in our time? Why is it that if they really loved one another don’t they want to go the final point of [can’t understand word] that love for one another. Well, you know what it is, it’s very simple, they don’t want the responsibility; I don’t want to get locked into that kind of a relationship, if I got locked into that kind of a relationship I’d have to solve some problems and it might mean some of my problems and I can’t stand to have some of my problems forcibly solved by living with someone who disapproves of me. And so we avoid the marriage situation.

So you name it, whether it’s family, marriage, church, law, Bible, what have you, it’s all over the place because intuitively, like eels we slip and slide around trying to avoid authorities and of course when we avoid authorities what are we also avoiding? God’s correction, spiritual growth, because spiritual growth only comes through authority. That’s why we have the idiots we do in extra-church groups that wander all over evangelicalism giving their pearls and they’re fools, and the literature they write is the literature of fools because they haven’t had to live day by day, week by week, month by month in a coherent cohesive authority structure, which is not pleasant. Many times it’s exasperating, frankly, but that’s the way God has designed it. What makes it exasperating is simply the flow of sin that’s sloshing back and forth. And that’s exactly why God has designed it that way.

Now in Jacob’s case, in Genesis 46 we have him going down to Egypt, and we want to look at how this takes place; this is the last part of the family that is out of the location of Egypt. They’re being brought back down there with a certain kind of guidance. It says in verse 1 that “Israel took his journey with all that he had, and came to Beer-sheba, and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father, Isaac.”

Notice the place and notice what he does there. If you’ve been following the Genesis series you know the terrain of Israel is located a certain way, we have a mountain range that runs north/south, and a trade area. Jacob has come south, he’s come across through his little well over there at Mount Ebal and Gerizim, he’s come south along this highway, past what will become Jerusalem, it wasn’t then, and has gone down to Hebron, and the patriarchs spent much time in Hebron. Now he’s been called out of the land to go down to Egypt and Beer-sheba is the last frontier town. It doesn’t look like it on that map but it does if you ever go there and travel there; Beer-sheba is simply the last town, there is no more town until you go hundreds and hundreds of miles west across the Sinai desert, then you encounter the big cities of Egypt. So it’s a frontier town, not exactly on the border but the last big town on the road. It would be more like in the 19^th century what St. Louis served for the American west, or later in Texas history the role of Fort Worth in the settlement of western Texas. It’s simply the last major city before you break out into the countryside. So it’s at Beer-sheba where he has his last chance to turn around.

Now consider this old man; consider his mentality to get a little sympathetic with him. Here he is, he has had a hundred years plus of living; every time he’s been out of the land he’s experienced suffering. He thinks back, when Isaac cautioned him and told him don’t get out of the land; when my father got my wife for me he sent his servant up there out of the land to pick her out and bring her back to me but he wouldn’t let me leave the land. So he learned it from his dad. And then he remembers his grandfather, Abraham. And grandfather Abraham surely could tell him, yeah, I went out of the land once, I went down to Egypt, and my wife wound up in the harem of Pharaoh, it wasn’t very nice. And so Beer-sheba has tremendous emotional connotations for him. This is why in verse 1 you see the old man pause there and stop and he begins to seek one last word from God: is this really right? Because remember up to now it’s all been open and closed doors kind of guidance. It’s been those kind of things, well, you know, it’s really nice to know my son’s alive and he’s down in Egypt and he asked my down there, all my sons go down there, I’ve got a famine at my back, going to ruin my business, and I’ve got to bring all my livestock down there to save them or I’ve lost my capital.

Now all of those are circumstances but still there lingers in the conscience of this old man the question: is this really, Jacob, the will of God, or are you being tricked again; are you being misled, are you being coaxed by the siren song of you know who to get out of God’s will and come beyond the boundaries? So when he gets to Beer-sheba he has to stop, he has to stop! And he has to once again go to God about this.

And now God answers and God answers in the eighth vision or the eight dream in his life, verse 3-4. “And he said, I am God, the God of thy father: fear not to go down into Egypt; for I will there make of thee a great nation. [4] I will go down with thee into Egypt; and I will also surely bring thee up again: and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.” Lots and lots of stuff taught in verses 3-4, we want to go through it very slowly and very carefully.

He’s at Beer-sheba and he wants divine guidance. Now in the situation, suddenly when God talks to him, in verse 2 it says, “[And God spoke unto Israel in the visions of the night, and said,] Jacob, Jacob.” And He calls to Jacob, and He apparently calls to Jacob in such a human voice that Jacob, like the other men of the Scriptures almost don’t recognize it’s God speaking; this is peculiar. I’m sure if you were to dramatize this as a script or you were to set up a movie camera and we were to do this in a dramatic way, you’d have some deep spooky voice speaking and it would be spooky enough so it would be intuitively obvious God’s doing the talking. Well that might be true and probably Cecil DeMille was right in portraying that on the top of Mount Sinai, but that is not always true in the way God speaks.

There was an incident that happened later in the history with a little boy by the name of Samuel; Samuel sat outside of the tabernacle night after night after night in his little sleeping bag and one day, one night God called to him. And all it was, and we know this by the way the text was written, it wasn’t a spooky voice at all, it was just “Samuel, Samuel,” the Hebrew word for Samuel, and that’s all it was, and Samuel so thought of it as a human voice that he went to Eli and woke him up, do you want me? No, kid, go back to sleep will you. And the voice happens again, and he wakes up Eli again, no, it’s not me, somebody else may be around her but it’s not me. Now did you ever stop and question, what did God’s voice sound like such that he would have confused it with a normal human voice? It wasn’t spooky; it was just a normal human voice. And therefore it was almost hard to recognize as God’s voice.

The significance of this is today; today you and I can’t expect what’s happening in verses 2-4; that’s direct revelation; that’s while the canon was yet open. But today there is something akin to this that I’ve become more and more aware of as a pastor. God can call to you and He can call to me in such a common way that we don’t recognize it’s His call. Recently there was someone in our congregation who had become increasingly, kind of antsy and edgy over things that were going on among certain relatives. And this manifested itself in maybe heightened irritability or depression and it just wasn’t a particular sin, it was nothing you could confess, it was nothing to really get your handle on, it was just this kind of agitation, what was going on here, I just feel upset. And finally it turned out that something needed to be done in this particular family situation and once that particular thing was done, immediately relief. Now why? What was that? I diagnose that on the basis of these Scriptural principles as a nudging; I don’t know how else to describe it, no fancy theological terms for it, but a nudging of the Holy Spirit. When He wants to get us to do something He doesn’t communicate verbally, oh He can through the Scriptures, but He doesn’t communicate verbally as at the end of verse 2 but He does communicate perhaps by a nudging that makes us uneasy about something and we just can’t seem to settle down about it. And until we finally get prodded into seeking in more detail God’s will about the matter, then we settle it. But it’s His way and because it so often comes to us as simple uneasiness we may attribute it to something we ate, all the way from that to we’re going crazy, or some other thing, and we just simply haven’t recognized it for the nudging that it is.

So Jacob recognizes it and he says, “Here am I.” Now God begins to expand revelation to him. Very significantly, in verse 1 you notice the word “God of his father,” then you notice in verse 3, “I am God, the God of thy father.” Why is that so important at this point for Jacob to know that it’s God of his father. There are three approaches to divine guidance that can help you and these are not techniques so much as they are just perspectives, things that you can use in daily living.

One is what I call the norm approach, that’s the easiest one, most Christians know that, obviously if you’re seeking God’s will try to find some principles in Scripture, and most of us have heard of the norms approach. But I wonder how many have heard of another perspective; maybe that one frustrates you; maybe you’ve got a problem and you find this norm and that norm and another norm and another norm but you’ve still got this big hairy zone where you don’t really have any discerning principles of Scripture to apply. What do you do then, when you find your life stuck in one of those undefined zones?

Then you go to the continuity principle. The continuity principle is found in 1 Corinthians 7 if you want the reference; the continuity principle says that God doesn’t lead you by zigzags, that God is so sovereign in your life that He may turn you to the right or to the left but they’re smooth curves, they’re not zipping things like God led me here, God led me here, God led me here, God led me somewhere else. Baloney! God didn’t do that because God doesn’t lead that way. Where in the Bible do you find God leading like this? He doesn’t. Now how can you apply the principle of continuity practically in your life? I suggest one of the most practical ways of doing this is keeping something like a spiritual diary. If not in a notebook, in your mind at least, where you can reflect back and say how has God basically been leading me up to this moment? Does this make sense, where I am being led now, does this make sense with what’s gone on in the past, does it really make sense. You ought to be able, in any kind of situation like this you ought to be able to relate where you are going now with what has happened to you in the past and not just anything that has happened to you in the past but with definite things God has done in your life in the past. There ought to be hook up into some sort of continuity.

That’s what he’s getting at here. He goes to the God of his father, Isaac, because right now the man is upset; he’s being asked to leave the Promised Land, he knows the promise is for the Promised Land but he knows, I don’t like this idea of leaving. So where does he drift, he doesn’t have a norm and a standard that he can apply so he starts applying the principle of continuity, God, what did you do in the life of my father? And so when God responds to him in verse 3 “He said, I am Elohim, I am the Elohim of your father.” God respects that continuity approach; God understands we’re made that way, we’re not made to go through life in a bunch of jerks and jags and crooked curves. We’re made to have much more smooth continuous transitions.

And of course the third way, the third thing that Jacob is also using here is the help/hinder perspective; that is, is this path that I am going on going to help me grow spiritually or is it going to hinder me from growing spiritually; I’ve got to evaluate it and think through. Well, Jacob is wondering, he thinks this is going to violate this principle; if I go down to Egypt, I know what happened to grandfather Abraham, I know what happened to my dad when these things went on, this is going to hinder us spiritually. So now watch God deal with it; he’s asked God a legitimate question. So first in verse 3 “I am God, the God of thy father,” there’s the continuity, I am doing to you Jacob, what I promised your granddad; I promised him a land, I promised him a seed, I promised he’d be a worldwide blessing, now Jacob, I haven’t stopped those promises, I’m going to carry out those promises; I promised you’d be a grandfather, I’m going to produce on my promises. So He rests Jacob at this point.

Then he says, “Fear not to go down into Egypt: for I will there make of thee a great nation.” There’s the answer to the hinder problem; it’s not going to hinder you Jacob, it’s going to help you. You see Jacob, you’re problem is that you as a family have become absorbed with the Canaanite culture, so I’m going to take you to the most powerful nation on earth and here are some things that I’m going to down in Egypt. Number one is the segregation of society, and that’s going to be good for you Jacob because they’re not going to quite accept you; for one thing you’re foreigners and another things you’re shepherds and one thing that the Egyptians farmers couldn’t stand was shepherds and the second thing they couldn’t stand was foreigners. So you’ve got two strikes against you and you’re going to be segregated and you’re going to be discriminated against, and it’s for your good because as a segregated minority you’re going to be forced to live by yourselves, meaning your boys will date your own girls, and your girls will date your own boys and we’re not going to have cultural pollution in the home, meaning that you will do your business with other Jews and build a community there. Other things you will get in Egypt are some of the arts and skills and crafts, some of the concepts of law and so on, these things, the experiences of building and organizing and administration, these are things that I will do for you now in Egypt. So as he goes through this he describes all these things. Now He says don’t fear, “go down to Egypt,” and I’m going to make you a great nation refers not to the spiritual seed of Jacob, like our anti-dispensational theologians insist; this refers to a literal physical nation that comes forth out of Egypt.

But then, in verse 4 we’re introduced to a whole new idea. Now this idea has been lingering in the text of Genesis for some chapters, but only in verse 4 does this idea burst forth to the surface and because this idea is such a major thing in the rest of the Bible I want to pause and go through this very carefully so you’ll all understand it. This is the key to understanding a lot of your New Testament. The New Testament, remember, was written to people who ought to have known the old. Today we don’t know the Old so we don’t understand the New. All right, what is the principle? See if you can guess, I’m going to read through verse 4 very slowly; there’s an abnormality that you ought to detect going on in verse 4. If you try to interpret verse 4 in a simple straightforward way there’s a contradiction there and I wonder if I read it very slowly how many people can pick out the contradiction. It says, “I will go down with thee,” hint, keep track of the singular pronoun, “I will go down with thee into Egypt; and I will also surely bring thee up again: and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.” Now it might help some of you detect the contradiction if I add the clause “put his hand upon your eyes,” is an idiom for death, to preside at a funeral, it means you reach over and you close the eyes of the dead victim; it was before they closed the casket and so on and they would close the eyes and the ceremony of closing the eyes would be done by the most responsible family member, in this case Joseph. So it’s a prediction of his death in Egypt. Now, having explained that, do you see the contradiction in verse 4?

“I will go down with thee, and I will bring thee up, but Joseph will close your eyes.” Well, quite obviously he’s not going to be brought up alive. Well now here we have, for the first time in the Bible, a major problem and it becomes so major that this chapter is one of the most attacked chapters in the last half of the book of Genesis. What we have is the problem of identity, individual or corporate. In our day you and I think of ourselves as individuals, don’t we? You say I’m trying to see who I am and so forth and your question of identity, who am I? We use the singular pronoun. You know, that’s not wholly true; you know that you’re not all you. From the biblical point of view you are not only you but all the progeny that shall come forth from you. This is a basic biblical point; this is where we differ from angels. You see, angels are discreet entities, individuals, so the angels can say I am Michael, Gabriel, I am; Gabriel doesn’t have little Gabriels, Michael doesn’t have little Michaels, they don’t have girl angels, that’s one of their problems. So the angels are discreet entities, they don’t have racial unity. In the human race that is not the case. Therefore, when you have Adam and Adam walks the face of the earth, Adam is not just Adam but Adam is every one of us.

I saw this idea put forward in a very interesting way when I was looking at an old book that was a publication of Hobbes Leviathan, and in the preface of this book, this philosophic work that he had done, there was a picture that looked like a man when you first looked at the preface picture and then what the artist had done, it was a pen and ink, and what the artist had very cleverly done was she drew a picture of a man but when you looked at it and got closer and closer to the pen and ink you discovered it wasn’t a man, it was lots of little people. And she had drawn all these people in a group such that it looked like one person. Now there is a good illustration… she meant it, of course, for the Leviathan, but Biblically she was close because in the Scriptures that’s Adam; do you want to see Adam; he’s not only the guy that died in the Garden, right here, this is Adam; this is Adam, Adam has been spread out, he’s like an acorn that’s turned into an oak tree. The seed form, we think, because here’s where our Greek human viewpoint gets us; we think so heavily in terms of individuals we don’t understand our progeny. This is why we have such sloppy views of marriage. This is why we have such sloppy views of the family; we don’t think of our identity as that which comes forth from us in the future; we think only of ourselves that we control. Oh no, wrong; watch how this unfolds.

In verse 4 “I will go down with you Jacob,” singular, “you,” physically, “and I will bring you up again” but the “you” that’s going to be brought up are going to be men and women who have come out of Jacob, so Jacob is the [sounds like: V], but it’s a new kind of idea and this is called the corporate identity idea of the Bible. And this is something that basically only in the last 200 years have exegetes really seriously worked with because finally we just can’t handle passages like this and follow literal interpretation unless we invent and say that basically the writers must have a corporate idea to their use of these pronouns.

Let’s watch what it does, some surprises coming up. Jacob goes down, verses 5, 6 and 7, and takes all his family gear down to Egypt. [5, “And Jacob rose up from Beer-sheba: and the sons of Israel carried Jacob their father, and their little ones, and their wives, in the wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him. [6] And they took their cattle, and their goods, which they had gotten in the land of Canaan, and came into Egypt, Jacob, and all his seed with him. [7] His sons, and his sons’ sons with him, his daughters, and his sons’ daughters, and all his seed brought he with him into Egypt.”]

Then there begins a massive list and those of you with modern translations, it’s usually set off in these translations, it begins in verse 8 and comes down to the vicinity of verses 24-25. Now here’s the list of Genesis 46. Now here we have a major battleground of the critics and the Bible. Say the critics, over the past 200 years they say aha, you people can’t claim inerrancy because this list is wrong. Do you want to see an error in the list?

[8, “And these are the names of the children of Israel, which came into Egypt, Jacob and his sons: Reuben, Jacob’s firstborn. [9] And the sons of Reuben; Hanoch, and Phallu, and Hezron, and Carmi.
10: And the sons of Simeon; Jemuel, and Jamin, and Ohad, and Jachin, and Zohar, and Shaul the son of a Canaanitish woman. [11] And the sons of Levi; Gershon, Kohath, and Merari. [12] And the sons of Judah; Er, and Onan, and Shelah, and Pharez, and Zerah: but Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan. And the sons of Pharez were Hezron and Hamul. [13] And the sons of Issachar; Tola, and Phuvah, and Job, and Shimron. [14] And the sons of Zebulun; Sered, and Elon, and Jahleel. [15] These be the sons of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob in Padan-aram, with his daughter Dinah: all the souls of his sons and his daughters were thirty and three. [16] And the sons of Gad; Ziphion, and Haggi, Shuni, and Ezbon, Eri, and Arodi, and Areli. [17] And the sons of Asher; Jimnah, and Ishuah, and Isui, and Beriah, and Serah their sister: and the sons of Beriah; Heber, and Malchiel. [18] These are the sons of Zilpah, whom Laban gave to Leah his daughter, and these she bare unto Jacob, even sixteen souls. [19] The sons of Rachel Jacob’s wife; Joseph, and Benjamin. [20] And unto Joseph in the land of Egypt were born Manasseh and Ephraim, which Asenath the daughter of Poti-pherah priest of On bare unto him.”]

Verse 21, “And the sons of Benjamin, and there’s a bunch of them listed there, [“were Belah, and Becher, and Ashbel, Gera, and Naaman, Ehi, and Rosh, Muppim, and Huppim, and Ard.”] And Benjamin, going down at 21, how can he have all those sons, that’s all he is, he’s the youngest kid in the family; how can he have all those kids? Not only that, say the critics, they say if you compare with Numbers 26 and other passages you discover that those aren’t all his sons; some of those are his grandsons. How come they’re listed as grandsons in one passage and in verse 21 they’re listed as sons? Oh-oh, now what do we do with something like this if we believe there are no errors in the Bible. What do with these concepts? What do we do with the fact that this list has name differences?

All right, let’s sort out the problems quickly. There are trivial problems with this list; they include name shifts, that doesn’t bother us as conservatives, name shifts, because men had three or four names in Bible times. That’s not an issue. But we do have serious problems and these serious problems consist of (a) men have too many children in this list for their age, and (b) the relationships are trivialized, it’s much more sophisticated from later biblical materials. So we seem at a crossroads here trying to understand what this list is all about, and the liberals have really made this a camping ground to prove there are contradictions in the Bible. You know how the liberal does, because he doesn’t believe in any inherent truth he argues that well, you can’t blame these religious writers, they’re just taking a few materials here and a few materials there and weaving them together in a nice religious story to teach truth. Well wait a minute, what the liberal clergy man never seems to understand, if I’m sitting there and I’m listening to the fact that he’s taking this little hunk and this little hunk and he’s arbitrarily woven it together, why should I accept his conclusion. How does that follow? You see? You don’t get truth out of dreams; you don’t get truth out of falsehood, so that just doesn’t cut it.

What does cut it? Corporate identity solves the problem of this list; this list and it turns out, if you take a concordance and check every name in the list with what that name does later in the Bible you discover an amazing thing. There are twelve tribes listed here and under those twelve tribes there are subdivisions called the mishphachah, or the families, and what you have listed are the heads of those family subgroups of the tribes, some of whom were born after they got to Egypt. Now the question is, why are they listed at this point when they’re going down to Egypt; for the same reason that you have verse 4. See, verse 4 is the tip, we’re not conservatives who are intellectually cheating here; we’re not cheating; we’ve got a list, we’ve looked in the context to subscribe to the author’s own intent. The author in verse 4 has introduced us to the theme of corporate identity. Now the list is just simply an expansion of the list of corporate identity.

Now some may be a little vague on this so hold the place in Genesis 46 and let me show you how that reappears in the New Testament in Heb 7:9, here’s an example of where a New Testament author not only uses the principle of corporate identity, but draws big doctrinal conclusions from it. It says, “I say that Levi, who received tithes, paid tithe in Abraham.” Well now wait a minute; if you know anything of the Bible you know you’ve got a problem with verse 9. Why do you have a problem? Well, Levi wasn’t living when Abraham… here’s the sequence; Abraham had Isaac, who had Jacob, who had Levi. You’ve got four generations removed, how is it said that Levi paid tithes “in” Abraham? Explanation: Verse 10, “For he was yet in the loins of his father,” there’s the concept of corporate identity and legally I remind you, this is behind imputation. The concept of imputation in biblical law is grounded on the principle of corporate identity. Levi, though he wasn’t even a sperm at this time, in Abraham, was in Abraham genetically. And therefore the Bible considers what Abraham does Levi does. Okay, here’s Abraham and here’s his pinnacle; Abraham and Levi’s down here, what Abraham does his whole progeny does.

Apply that, what Adam does you did. When Adam walked the face of this earth, he, under God, carried your genetic material in his body. And this is the significance, incidentally, of why Eve is not separately created in the Bible from Adam. You might just kiss that off as another (quote) “Bible story.” Huh-un, very interesting, Eve does not have independent genetic material; that’s why she’s made out of the side of Adam, so that when Adam and Eve, the first couple walked, the woman is basically not a separate creation; she too comes out of the genetic material of Adam, and thus every living human being walks the face of the earth with the genes of Adam. We are Adam; we are Noah.

All right, if that’s the situation, back to Genesis 46, our list is now explained. The author here is simply showing us that when Jacob walked down to Egypt he had in seed form, like an acorn has an oak tree, he has in seed form the entire nation. Now in verse 27 of Genesis 46, after the list there’s a summary statement. Notice the number in verse 27; you will notice that he lists seventy; why seventy? Again, this is not just a Bible story, it’s not just a random number game, there’s a reason for this. What he’s saying is that if you sociologically and spiritually divide the nation Israel under Jacob you’ll divide it up this way, so forth, until you get seventy sectors in that nation. The corporate entity has seventy sub parts. Why is that so important? We, in this Genesis series, covered another very famous chapter, called Genesis 10, and out from Noah there came all the human race with the sub groups. Remember I mentioned in Genesis 10 seventy; Noah, count all the names, and the present human race also has seventy sub parts, and that’s why there’s 70 names listed in Genesis 10.

Hold the place in Genesis 46 and turn to Deuteronomy 32:8 and you’ll see these two concepts come together beautifully. Here’s the neat design of God. “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance,” now when did the Most divide to the nations their inheritance? It was in Genesis 10, right? All the tribes spread out over all the face of the earth. How did He divide it? On a seventy number base. Now look what this verse says, “When the Most high divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.” What’s the number of the children of Israel? You just found it, Genesis 46, seventy. Now here is an interesting thing. Back in Genesis 10 God anticipated what He would do in Genesis 46 and He designed the human race rationally, linguistically, culturally, subdivided into seventy sub parts, and as it were, Israel is a microcosm of the human race.

Dispensationally this is extremely important because unlike those who were in the Reformation, who did marvelous things in soteriology and other areas of theology, they did not handle eschatology well because they weren’t trained that well in exegesis. And therefore they missed the point, and that’s why dispensationalism is so important. Dispensationalism insists that Israel plays an integral role in the evangelization of the world, not the Church. The Church does too but Israel has her own little thing that she’s doing and her own little thing that she’s doing has to do with this physical design. She is designed as a microcosm of the structure of the earth; therefore in the tribulation when the world is evangelized, she’s not evangelized by the Church; she’s evangelized by Jews who are in every area of the earth, the seventy/seventy mix.

This seventy comes up again and again in connection with Israel and the Bible. In Numbers 11 there are seventy elders; there are seventy years to her captivity in 2 Chronicles 36; there are seventy weeks or seventy sevens to her history in Daniel 9; and lastly, when the Lord Jesus sends out representatives into the house of Israel, what does He do? He sends out seventy.

Now I know what some of you have background in literature will tend to because I tended to do this. When I come across material like this in the Bible it’s the natural human viewpoint that I’ve picked up to say, oh, this must be an imposed scheme that the authors of the Bible take from the flow and flux of history and they impose a structure on that seventy, you know, maybe they have a thing about seventy. And so therefore they impose seventy on everything, and so you know what they do, they just take lists like this and they arrange them so it comes out that way. It’s not inherent structure; it’s just an imposed structure. Wrong! This is God’s own structure of the human race. To illustrate this, I’ll go back to a principle, one of our tapers in California is a biology teacher in the Los Angeles school district and he’s writing a course this summer on bionics to teach high school students about design and creation. Of course he can’t mention God because he might get sued but nevertheless, he at least can show that there is inherent design.

Now one of the neat discoveries is that he’s found out many biological systems in both plant and animal kingdom with the same number system, called the Fibonacci number series which goes like this: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Now those of you who are sharp mathematicians can see how this is generated; each number is generated by the sum of the previous two. 1 + 2 is 3; 2 +3 is 5; 3 + 5 is eight, 5 + 8 is 13. It’s called the Fibonacci number series because of an Italian 12^th century mathematician series together, it has some interesting properties, it has sort of a geometric flow to it but it’s generated by sheer addition and that’s kind of interesting to mathematicians. But Fibonacci, in discovering this number series, scoped out how it’s generated. Now here’s an interesting thing; if you go to the protrusions of a pinecone they are designed along the Fibonacci number system. If you go to the curls in certain seashells, they are designed according to the Fibonacci number systems. If you take the head of a sunflower and count the number of spirals in the design that go clockwise, and the number of spirals that go counterclockwise, both are Fibonacci numbers, always.

Now the question is: are the Fibonacci number system something the Italians imposed upon the creation? Or is it something that inherently is. I suggest that sunflowers preexisted Fibonacci by some centuries. And so therefore there is an inherent exact mathematical structure to the universe. Now if we believe about sunflowers and seashells, and we can see that they’re Fibonacci numbers, always Fibonacci numbers, then why do we profess such great intellectual difficulty accepting a passage in Genesis 46 that seems to be schemed after the number 70? And when we go when Jesus in Luke 10 we have another thing schemed after the number 70? Well, all we’re seeing is the beautiful design of God; maybe He didn’t take modern math, but nevertheless He knew something when He designed creation.

All right, the last part of verse 46 deals with the coming into the land of Jacob and his family; they are identified as shepherds, very obviously, very straightforward. [22, “These are the sons of Rachel, which were born to Jacob: all the souls were fourteen. [23] And the sons of Dan; Hushim. [24] And the sons of Naphtali; Jahzeel, and Guni, and Jezer, and Shillem. [25] These are the sons of Bilhah, which Laban gave unto Rachel his daughter, and she bare these unto Jacob: all the souls were seven. [26] All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, which came out of his loins, besides Jacob’s sons’ wives, all the souls were threescore and six; [27] And the sons of Joseph, which were born him in Egypt, were two souls: all the souls of the house of Jacob, which came into Egypt, were threescore and ten. [28] And he sent Judah before him unto Joseph, to direct his face unto Goshen; and they came into the land of Goshen. [29] And Joseph made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him; and he fell on his neck, and wept on his neck a good while. [30] And Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen thy face, because thou art yet alive. [31] And Joseph said unto his brethren, and unto his father’s house, I will go up, and show Pharaoh, and say unto him, My brethren, and my father’s house, which were in the land of Canaan, are come unto me; [32] And the men are shepherds, for their trade hath been to feed cattle; and they have brought their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have. [33] And it shall come to pass, when Pharaoh shall call you, and shall say, What is your occupation? [34] That ye shall say, Thy servants’ trade hath been about cattle from our youth even until now, both we, and also our fathers: that ye may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”]

And in the first 12 verses of Genesis 47 we have some strange things that occur. [1, “Then Joseph came and told Pharaoh, and said, My father and my brethren, and their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have, are come out of the land of Canaan; and, behold, they are in the land of Goshen. [2] And he took some of his brethren, even five men, and presented them unto Pharaoh. [3] And Pharaoh said unto his brethren, What is your occupation? And they said unto Pharaoh, Thy servants are shepherds, both we, and also our fathers. [4] They said moreover unto Pharaoh, For to sojourn in the land are we come; for thy servants have no pasture for their flocks; for the famine is sore in the land of Canaan: now therefore, we pray thee, let thy servants dwell in the land of Goshen. [5] And Pharaoh spoke unto Joseph, saying, Thy father and thy brethren are come unto thee: [6] The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land make thy father and brethren to dwell; in the land of Goshen let them dwell: and if thou know any men of activity among them, then make them rulers over my cattle.”]

We want to conclude this morning by pointing you to the first part of chapter 47 and what happens when Jacob meets Pharaoh. Joseph invites him down and his very much loved father is invited into the room of Pharaoh. Now if you have to close your eyes and just visualize the scene; use your mind’s eye and your imagination to think of this. You’ve got a man, probably maybe 50; he’s Pharaoh, he’s the most powerful man on earth at that point in history. No one has more political power and grandeur than Pharaoh himself, and he sits with his Egyptian headgear on this tremendous throne, with all his servants around him, Mr. Power, he is the state, and I’ve given you the theology that justifies this according to their thinking. Then in walks, maybe a little stooped man, withered face, white hair, white beard, old, old man, 130 year old man to be exact, and these two great figures meet for a moment and then there’s the following conversation.

Genesis 47:7, “And Joseph brought in Jacob his father, and set him before Pharaoh: and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. [8] And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old art thou? [9] And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage. [10] And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from before Pharaoh.” Now wait a minute, I said Pharaoh was the most powerful man on earth; in this meeting between this tremendous powerful ruler and this old, old man, who is the superior? According to the human picture the superior is clearly Pharaoh, but if he’s the superior, then the superior is supposed to bless the inferior. But at the end of verse and in verse 10, who blesses who? It is the old man that blesses Pharaoh.

Now this is also dispensationally important because it shows you the function of Israel; Israel is a man in Pharaoh’s presence, true, but Israel is also the nation Israel to the nations of the world and Israel is the blessing nation on the face of this earth. Israel has given the world the Bible you hold in your lap. That didn’t come from our Gentile forefathers that were trotting around Europe in their loin cloths when the Jews had a very high civilization. They gave us the Bible. They gave us the prophets; Jacob gave us the Lord Jesus Christ, He was a Jew contrary to a lot of right-wing anti-Semites. Jesus Christ was a Jew; the Jews have given us a Bible, the Jews have given us a Messiah, the Jews have given us an atonement for our sins, and yet to be given us is a worldwide blessing on a global scale of world peace and world law. That too will come from the Jew. That’s their function in history and it starts with a man, Jacob, because he carries it himself, the seed form like an acorn, he carries the seed form of his whole future progeny and he walks into THE most powerful man and he blesses Pharaoh; Pharaoh doesn’t bless him. Blessing all in thee, God said to Abraham, “in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” So notice that about this confrontation between the grand old man and this powerful young leader.

But then three’s something else to notice; did you notice in verse 9 his lament, Jacob’s lament? What is he sad about as he walks in to Pharaoh? That he hasn’t lived longer; well, at 130 years you can fake out any insurance company; but the point is he laments that he’s not living longer. Why? Because his father lived to 180 and his grandfather lived to 175, that’s why, he’s a runt, going to die 50 years early. What’s happening here? Here is one of those verses that shows you the rationally tight package you call the Bible because the Bible has said that after the flood…, before the flood man lived 930 years, after the flood you have this curve that comes to present life span, we are right there at the time of the Jacob story; that curve is decreasing. Here’s an innocent little note put in the text and you take a graph paper and you plot it and it fits that curve beautifully.

Now you can sit here and tell me that some critic of the Scriptures just invented these high numbers to kind of exalt…oh no, it’s darn funny they came out with an exponential curve, I can just see the rabbis in 500 BC sitting with their TI calculators working out logarithmic curves. The Scriptures have an inherent structure because they reflect God’s design in history.

Now something else about verse 9 that I wonder how many notice? Did you notice the appearance of a strange new word, the word “pilgrimage?” One of the first time it occurs in the Bible. Why does it occur here and what’s its importance. There was one author, author of a very famous New Testament book that took this word from this verse and used it to write one of the most famous chapters in all the New Testament. The man was the author of Hebrews; the chapter was 11, and the theme was by faith on a pilgrimage to a city that has no foundation. That is a meditation built out of this passage, the concept of the pilgrimage.

Now let’s tie these ideas together. This morning we’ve looked at three ideas and now look at the key that ties them all together. I started off by telling you that there was a problem of getting families together or marriages together, and it was always a question of putting under God’s authority. Then we talked about another idea, the idea of corporate identity. Then we talked about a third idea that has to do with pilgrimages. Now let’s wrap these up together.

This chapter teaches very important theology. In solving personal animosities like we started this morning with, him, here, it’s those kids, it’s my parents, what we have done is define our problems too myopically; we’ve looked at just temporal features, we’ve looked at our set of problems in terms of things that are going to be gone tomorrow, and every time we do that, every time we define our existence in terms of what somebody did to us we have trivialized ourselves, we’ve cut ourselves down, we’ve made our life contingent on a few temporal circumstances that are here today and gone tomorrow. Even a marriage that is considered to be enduring, in the face of eternity with millions and millions and millions of years existence in the face of God, a marriage is here today and gone tomorrow also.

See, all of life is a vapor and this is what has happened, as God has put that family under his authority and made the theocentric vertical relationship totally override all the horizontal little trivial flies and mosquitoes, When that preponderance has been so heavily vertical then he’s got the authority, he’s looked at the corporateness because now it’s not just Jacob but its his whole progeny that’s going forward in history, he’s got a long, long time in the future and he’s a pilgrim as an individual walking the face of the earth. It’s going to be gone, Jacob says yeah, I know, my father lived to 180, and I have 50 more years I could have lived but I’m not going to. So why waste your life getting bent out of shape by what somebody did to you yesterday; life is too short, you haven’t got time to take up and waste your resources, fiddling around with some incidentals that ought not to be handled when you consider the light of eternity. God in his grace straightens us out.

We’ll conclude by singing….