Clough Genesis Lesson 95

Joseph used as God works with Egypt and Israel – Genesis 47:13-31

Genesis is a book of beginnings; we’ve noticed the beginning of the universe, we’ve noticed the beginning of evil, we’ve noticed the beginning of God’s plan of salvation. And in this section of Genesis we’ve looked at the beginning of the nation Israel. Now we look at all these beginnings, we want to tie it together because as you’ve seen from Genesis 47, we only have three more chapters left in the book and since the next three weeks we’ll be dealing with those chapters, we want to make sure that you haven’t lost the forest for the trees. So one of the principles that we’re looking at in Genesis 47 and that we’ll see operate from time to time as we finish the book is a certain view of history that the Bible has. It’s one that differs from the evolutionary view of history; it’s one that differs from most present thinker’s view of history, and that is from the Bible point of view history starts off with mankind undifferentiated; that is, there is neither believer nor unbeliever, there is neither elect nor reprobate. Only as time goes on do these trends separate, and then finally at the last chapter of history you find those who are the damned and those who are the saved.

It takes time to differentiate; it takes time to separate and this section of Genesis that we’re working on is a separation; it’s a separation of the Egyptians from the nation Israel, and it takes place ever so gradually, from verse to verse and from chapter to chapter. Now to catch the forces involved in this separation, probably the best way is to think of a field of soil. And think of that field of soil as covered with weeds from one side to the other. Now notice, if you are the owner of the field, you don’t have to do anything to have those weeds grow; the weeds simply produce by themselves. Weed seeds are airborne mostly and so they just simply germinate spontaneously. So you have this massive crop of weeds. No one has to water them, no one has to nourish them, no one has to cut them, no one has to care for them. It’s a natural product of the soil.

Now if you were the owner of this field, what would you have to do to make something worthwhile? You would have to invade the field, you would have to alter it, you would have to actively subdue it, come in, tear out the weeds, plant the crop that you wanted to plant, water it, nourish it and take care of it. These would be the things you’d have to do to get any wealth from that plot of land.

This illustration shows all the forces that God uses in history; it’s a very biblical illustration because it’s the illustration used in the book of Genesis, used in the book of Proverbs and used in the New Testament. The field is the world and the weeds are simply the results of sin. And the weeds would be the examples of fallen man, doing their own thing spontaneously with no outside interference, not help, no guidance, no subduing; men just do that, just like the weeds just form by themselves. And then to get any produce it requires an outside cultivator. In this case God comes into Egyptian society and begins to tear aside the weeds and begins to plant his seed, and He begins to water it and nourish it and out from it will grow the nation Israel. But it’s growing on the same ground that the Egyptians are growing; the Egyptians become ever so more consistent with their presuppositions, they begin in autonomy. Under Mizraim and his sons who first settled the Nile delta area, as far as we know from Genesis 10, the table of nations, he and those tribes forsook the revelation that they had available to them from father Noah. And as the Egyptian society grew and the clan grew into a tribe, there was a growing darkness, simply because they had abandoned revelation. And so culturally they spiraled down and culturally you begin to see the Egyptians develop this aberrant culture that’s based on autonomy.

God then interferes; He interferes with planting a family from outside Egypt in Egypt. He nudges them, he coaxes them, He interferes in a thousand ways into their lives and we’ve watched how this idea of God nudging is something that He still does, this nudging of God. God no longer speaks in a direct revelatory way because the canon of Scripture has been closed and to reopen it would automatically mean that the apostles would be walking the face of the earth once again. We don’t have that but God is not dead and He’s still active so how does He guide us? By nudges, and these nudges could include changes in your family structure, changes in health, changes in finances, birth of children, added parental responsibilities and so on. These are the various things He may be using in your life this morning to get your attention, to wake up to see what He wants done as He begins to work with you as He worked with His chosen family of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

God is going to make Israel more and more consistent with His plan and He is going to make Egypt more and more consistent in the kingdom of man and human viewpoint. The passage can be divided into two parts. In Genesis 47:13 we have the first part; that part deals with what God is doing with Egypt. It lasts down to the end of verse 26, and then verses 27-31 we have God’s program with Israel. God presents both of his plans and Joseph figures instrumentally in both. As we said earlier, we warned you about this, we do have a problem in the Scriptures in Genesis 47 as well as Genesis 41 and that is when God goes to tell us what’s happening to the Egyptians or the weeds that are spontaneously growing in the field, Joseph, as it were, comes along and almost fertilizes the weeds; he makes the weeds grow to be more weeds. And you say how can Joseph, who’s a believer, sit there and start to cultivate an apostate kingdom, and build, in fact, the greatest totalitarian system the world has ever seen until the communists walked the face of the earth. How did this happen, because as we said last time, there’s one way of solving the problem, I think, and that is to say that Joseph is acting as the judge of Egypt while he is acting as the savior of Israel.

Let’s watch what happens. In Genesis 47:13 the pressure device, the thing that is applied to differentiate Israel from Egypt. It starts with a famine, and before the book of Exodus is finished it will terminate in a smashing death and massacre in the Red Sea, but always the pressure, always the adversity, always the heat. Why? Because under the flow of history it takes that to separate men from men. It takes that to make believers more consistent believers and unbelievers more consistent rebels. The Bible also uses, in addition to the metaphor of the field, the Bible uses the metaphor of metal and smelting, taking ore, applying heat and getting rid of the dross and separating it from the precious metal. How again? By the mechanism of pressure brought to bear, to force us to go more consistently with out faith.

And so the famine in verse 13 is described in words that make it comprehensive. “And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, [so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.]” All those words emphasize the power, everywhere they go that’s all they saw was disaster, pressure, adversity. In verses 14-16 we have one of the later manifestations, this is not the second year of the famine as it seems to say in the text; it’s the second year of this chapter, it could have been the fourth or fifth year of the actual famine. Remember, the famine lasted seven years. But in the year, whatever it is, that’s described in verses 14-16, you have a very significant thing occur to that nation; the failure of its money supply. “And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the corn which they bought: and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house. [15] And when 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 die in thy presence?] For the money fails.”

Now failure of currency or actually the whole state of money in any national entity is taken by many students to be a good indicator of that nation; numismatists, coin collectors, have known for years that one way to judge the quality of a civilization is simply to look at its coinage. You can go back through history, for example, in Israel toward the Roman times and you can look at the coins and you can tell when they were blessed and when they weren’t, because during the times when things were tough the coinage was very sloppy put together; the art form on it was very sloppy, hastily struck, the metal was impure. And then in those times when there was prosperity the coinage reflects the prosperity; it is done artistically, it has fine design to it, it is made of good metal. Coinage becomes a key to the quality of a culture, thus when you pull out your Susan B. Anthony dollar coin that is worth three cents that is a good commentary on where the United States is today.

But we want to look at something more serious than that; we’re going to use verses 14-16 to enlarge this problem of the failure of a nation’s money supply because God used this and to catch the force of how He used we’ve got to think a little bit about what failure of money means. In order to understand the concept of the failure of a money supply we have to go back to another idea called legal tender. If you look on your dollar bill you’ll see a little sign on it that says this currency is declared to be legal tender of the United States government. Now as the Susan B. Anthony coins have come out you see pictures in the papers of shop keepers who don’t like the coin because it’s so close to the quarter that they put these signs, “we do not accept the Anthony dollar coins.” Well, unfortunately for those shop keepers they have no choice about it; the Susan B. Anthony coin is issued by the United States Treasury and is legal tender and therefore has to be accepted, whether people like it or not. It’s tragic, but that’s the case. Legal tender means that you are forced to accept whatever is declared as legal tender for payment of just debts. This means if I owe you some money and I want to be a stinker and I go out and I get a thousand of these Susan B. Anthony tokens and I come and I try to pay off my debt and you don’t like this, I say sorry, you don’t want it? No, I don’t want it. Okay, and I take my bag of a thousand Susan B. Anthony coins and I go back. Do you know that you cannot collect your debt again from me? I have offered you legal tender, you refused it, so my debt is clear. Now this is the power of declaring any object in society as legal tender. It’s an awesome power because it means that you can compel people to obey your will by offering them whatever happens to be the legal tender of the country.

Now earlier in our country, when the Bible was taken as a norm and a standard for areas other than just one personal devotional life, we had men like John Witherspoon, who were the great men who lived at the founding of our country. John Witherspoon was President of Princeton University, he was also one of the great Presbyterian clergyman; he was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence; he was an outspoken Christian minister under whose teaching you can assemble a list of people like Who’s Who in early America. Under his teaching there are, I believe three presidents, something like four or five vice presidents, something like 30 or 40 congressmen of the first congress. This was the influence of one Christian minister. He taught the gospel faithfully and taught the fact that the Word of God applies to every area. John Witherspoon had tremendous influence. You won’t read this in your high school history course because most high school history courses have been designed by unbelievers who have a vested interest at hiding this data from you lest your naïve virgin eyes see the Christian foundations of this nation, and because we are taught history in this skewed way we never come across these facts. But John Witherspoon not only was a great teacher, a great college president, a great patriot of our country, he also issued a very famous essay on the subject of money. It was handed out as a tract in the early colonial days and it was one of those little known controversies in our history but one which we wish had been better known.

Here is what John Witherspoon wrote about this method of legal tender and currency of the Christian. Notice the insight; here is a man who think along the lines of God’s moral principles and he realizes that as a Christian man, if he has a personal relationship with Christ, and if Christ is the Creator of every area including the currency area, then it must follow logically, and many Christians don’t see how it does follow logically, it must follow logically that I must articulate these biblical principles in every area of my king’s domain, for not to say this is to say that Christ was not the Creator, that Christ has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical realm around me. Not Witherspoon and not many men think the Lord did this. But here’s what he said about money:

“What is commonly called paper money is not, properly speaking, money at all. To arm such bills with the authority of the state and make them a legal tender in all payments is an absurdity so great that it is not easy to speak with propriety upon it. If you make a law that I shall be obligated to sell my grain, my cattle, or any commodity I own at a certain price, you not only do what is unjust and impolitic, but with all respect be it said, you speak nonsense, for I do not sell them at all, then you take them away from me.”

Now what Witherspoon was arguing in context was that he was arguing that when the Congress printed money, go ahead, print paper money, he wasn’t arguing against paper money, what he was saying was don’t make the paper money legal tender, make it like a check; you can offer a check to a merchant and he says I don’t like your check, give me money. He has a choice as to how he accepts it and it’s his right to reject your check if he thinks your check isn’t worth anything. That’s his option, that way it keeps the system pure because it’s constantly being purged of bad checks. Now what Witherspoon is saying, how do you know when you pull out the paper that that’s not a bad check. Years ago when it was a silver certificate and it had the little red seal on it, if you didn’t like the idea of everybody paying you in silver certificates, what you could do was go down to the bank and redeem it and get silver back for it and say okay, now I’ve got something worthwhile, the paper is just a symbol, it stands for something that has value and so I can do that, I can redeem my paper money.

But once we make paper money but once we make paper money legal tender now we introduce problems because if the government doesn’t want to back the currency with metals, you and I are stuck because we’ve got to accept worthless paper, like Ludwig von [can’t understand word] of Austria said, “Governments are a strange thing; they can take that which is worth something,” that is a piece of paper, “print it and make it worth nothing.” And this is exactly what the modern money supply is.

So John Witherspoon and others, pleaded with the Americans, don’t make paper money legal tender. They didn’t listen; in fact not only have we not listened but any time you hear wage and price controls mentioned in our country you are listening to the same thing. And Christians, incidentally, are even sucked up by this; they say there’s such a thing as a just price. Now this is a concept oftentimes Christians use. Oftentimes they will use this because they’re under influence by communism: just price, fair wage, now let’s look at those two things because Joseph is involved in this and you can’t get background of Genesis 47 until you appreciate processes here. This is why we’re taking a few minutes to explain this.

The idea of a just price for something, you may be selling a car or a house and you say well, I have such and such in mind for my house and that’s just price. Says you, but who determines the just price? Whoever buys your house; finally the just priced is determined by the seller/buyer transaction; it’s not determined by anything else. You could have your house lined with gold and if somebody is only going to give you two bucks, that’s all it’s worth, two bucks. You may think it’s worth more but it isn’t. Now people don’t like this, they don’t like to be at the mercy of the buyer/seller arrangement, so historically what people have always tried to do is set up a government bureaucracy that determines just price and fair wages. The only problem with this, great though it may sound, is who says that the bureaucrats that determine this are any smarter than the people that are buying. You see, that’s the problem, there are no Joseph’s today. There are not omniscient evaluators and therefore the nearest thing we have to go on is let the market determine the price and wages. You say everything is inflating; that’s one of putting it, another way of saying it is everything’s getting worthless and that’s a fairer way of saying it. So the market is the ultimate decider, not the state.

Well, in this case it says the money failed. Let’s notice what happened when the money fails. In Genesis 47:14 it’s very clear that the money is failing because they are running out of metal, presumably gold and silver. They are running out of it because there’s been a transfer of commodities; the silver and the gold has gone into the hands of Pharaoh and the grain has gone into the hands of the people, there’s been a trade off. Well now what do the people do that want more grain and have less silver and gold? They have basically run out of money. But this money could fail in another way. Let’s visualize a situation where you have a thousand Kruggerands, a massive amount of wealth, let’s just say a thousand Kruggerands, and all of a sudden there’s a great famine and there’s no food to be found, no food, nowhere. How much are your Kruggerands now worth? Nothing, because right now the issue is survival and you can’t eat Kruggerands. So the point is that money, or anything, is not determined by intrinsic value.

I’ll show you how Jesus made use of this in a very interesting way in the Sermon on the Mount. One has to see this to see where the argument in Genesis is going. Matthew 6:19-20, it’s a very well known passage of Scripture but I want to show you some of the implications of this passage of Scripture, implications which many are slow to take. Jesus says, “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal,” what He’s saying is that all value on earth is non-intrinsic; that means there is no such thing as a hunk of gold that’s worth so much. You may have land out here, you may have invested in this fine, you may have invested in a house, you may have invested in 3 or 4 houses and have rental property, fine. You may have bought Kruggerands, great; you may have bought silver dollars, wonderful. Only one problem with all of it; it has not intrinsic value. The reason is I can show you a scenario where your property is worthless, namely a famine. In a famine situation what you need is food and if you can’t get food you can’t use it for anything, so whatever wealth is theoretical name, it’s a vacuous term, it doesn’t have any inherent value.

All right, then, where does value come from? Now here’s a central cardinal point of biblical thought; it’s one that is very crucial to understand the role of God. There is no object on the face of this earth, including a person, that has intrinsic value; we’ll see that shortly too because finally these people are going to trade their bodies for food and in this situation they are worthless. There is no such thing as anything on the face of the earth that has inherent value, but man, because of his tendency to idolatrize, he says this thing in itself, X, Y or Z, those things have value and if I could just get those I have value. No you don’t, those are valuable only insofar as other people say they are valuable and they say they are valuable by the market demand. An example once again; let’s suppose the money supply fails and you’ve lost all your possessions but you have skill, say the ability to fix automobiles, you’ve studied auto mechanics. Now in this situation are you worth something to society? Yes you are, because you have a skill that they need, they need their automobiles fixed, so they say I want you here because you’re valuable. Why are you valuable? Because I need automobiles fixed, that’s why you’re valuable. Suppose it’s somebody else here that doesn’t even know what end of the bolt the nut goes on and in a situation where we need cars fixed that person is worthless. Now people don’t like to see things this way but apart from the Scripture, this is exactly the way it is. You are worth no more, I am worth no more than what other people think I am and are willing to pay for my services of my possessions, that’s it. And if nobody else wants it, then there’s no value.

In other words, what we’re saying is that what gives value is not objects; objects are not the source of value. What is the source of value is personal crediting or imputation. Only as I impute value does a thing have value. And what Jesus is saying is when you “lay up treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, where thieves break through and steal,” not only, He says, do these objects have no value but in a fallen world what’s happening to them? They’re cratering slowly, they’re dissolving slowly. Look at it, moth, what’s he talking about? Clothes. He’s saying… in the ancient world clothes were very expensive, it took a long time to make clothes and he says that’s fine, He’s not knocking it but he’s saying if that’s your treasure, and by the idea of treasure He means your final reference point in value, if your final reference point is your clothing, figuring that some day when things are bad you can sell your clothes and get a couple thousand for it, He says watch out, the moth can eat it overnight. Your treasure is vulnerable to deterioration. So not only does it not have a value in and of itself, but the value that other people credit it can change because it and they live in a fallen world.

So this is why the admonition in Matthew 6:20, “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt and where thieves do not break through nor steal.” Now in the book of Matthew, whenever you see the kingdom of heaven, or we say to heaven, or swear by heaven, this is a euphemism for God. The word “heaven” stands for God in Matthew’s writing. So now reread this: “But lay up for yourselves treasures with God,” is the sense of that. Now what’s a treasure with God? It means that God imputes value; remember what we said, nothing has value except some person give it value. How much was a Jew worth to the Nazi’s. Not much, those of you who watched The Holocaust, don’t you remember the line, when the Germans ran out of bullets and they figured listen, these Jews aren’t even worth bullets, bullets are expensive, we need those, so one Jew is worth less than a bullet. How would the value of your life to be determined by the value of the price in bullets; that’s happened in history and it’s a graphic reminder of the fact that there are no such things, either, as human rights. No such thing as human rights. Humans have value only in so far as God gives them value and as He considers them valuable. And if He doesn’t consider them valuable there’s no absolute value. We give temporal value to things; God gives absolute value to things, but it’s either us or God doing it, there’s nothing in and of the person or in and of the object. So Jesus has warned us about this in verse 21 He makes the final application, “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” In other words, where your safe value is there is where your center of concern will be; it’s an axiom, it follows.

Now watch what happens in Genesis 47, the money fails and so the society begins to, like the weed patch, it begins to grow and deteriorate. So the next thing that comes up after the failure of the money supply is the cattle, [16, “And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail. [17] And they brought their cattle unto 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] 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 that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands,”] and at the end of verse 18 they are left with “our bodies and our lands.” This is poverty; you can talk all you want to, incidentally, about human rights; show me a human right that can be exercised apart from property. We have this thing, it’s this very cliché and it’s so nice, I’m for human rights but I don’t regard property, property is not really a concern, it’s the human being that’s the concern, lofty sentiments. Show me how we can have concern for people without having concern for their property. Nobody has yet shown that. So here we have a situation in Genesis where now they are down to their bodies and their lands and they begin to auction off their land.

The bottom line is they’ve lost everything, all their property and when they have lost their lands they have lost their freedom and that’s the story of Genesis 47. You don’t lose your freedom any other way than by surrender of property. This is why in South America, and in Asia, and I will say in Europe and to a certain degree in North America, we have the Marxists who insist that freedom has nothing to do with property. It has everything to do with property. Look at this verse, we have nothing left 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 be not desolate.”]

And now in verse 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: so the land became Pharaoh’s.” Now you know what the Egyptians were known for in history—the pyramids. And many have been the scholars who have remarked that those pyramids are but pictures of the whole social order; the social order itself was a pyramid; it was one of the massive totalitarian systems that the world has ever seen. Max Weber, who was a historian in economics said this inn 1909 the date is important, 1909, he said (quote) “to this day there has never existed a bureaucracy which could compare to that of Egypt,” (eng quote). And Joseph was one of the great architects of one of the most damnable totalitarian systems the world has ever seen. Under God’s will Joseph condemned the Egyptians to the fruitful result of their own apostate faith; they wanted it, he gave it to them. There’s no compulsion in Genesis 47. From verse 13 on to verse 20 show me one verse that says Joseph forced it upon the people. He didn’t force it, they willing gave of themselves and they voluntarily entered slavery.

Let’s apply this, this principle of property and loss of freedom. The Egyptians sold their property and we’ll call that a capital asset, though the Marxists always like to attack capitalists, college professors whose salaries by paid by the capitalists always love to attack the capitalist, and capitalism is a bad word so I will use it. Capitalism is attacked by the communists as being the source of all the world’s evils. That’s obviously stupid because the communists are capitalists; here’s why—capital can’t be destroyed. You’ll always have capital, the question isn’t whether capital exists, the question is who owns the capital. It’s ownership of capital, not capital that’s the problem, and so the communist answer and the Marxist answer is we’ve got to break up those large big bad wealthy families, it’s a sin to be wealthy. Just like in the United States, the same mentality, it’s a sin to own a gun. Says who? Did wealth ever hurt anybody? No it didn’t. People will misuse it but don’t judge somebody before they’ve misused something. And guns can be misused but don’t judge somebody before. But the communist says no-no, we’ve got to get rid of all the wealthy people. So all the wealthy people are ripped off and the capital flows where? To the state. So under communism who is the capitalist? The state. And who is it that runs the state. The communists. Well, now isn’t that a wonderful arrangement, they turn out to be the capitalists after its all over. We have sort of a shell game and all of a sudden who winds up with the shells and the pea? It’s the communists that have it.

Pharaoh, in verse 20, is a totalitarian; we call this a fascist regime; Pharaoh owns all the capital of the country. Communism, socialism, and fascism concentrate the assets here, all the time proclaiming oh, this is all owned by the people, the people. Is the post office owned by the people? Oh yes, the people, it’s the government. Ah, do my taxes go to pay for it and yours? Yes. Oh, so then parts of that post office are ours, right, we paid for it. Try going down and getting your brick. You can’t, can you. It’s yours but does it really mean you have disposition of it? No-no, the government decides what to do with all your tax money that went into the post office, so in effect do you have it? No you don’t. So all this talk about oh, the people own this and the people own that and the people do something else is baloney, the people don’t have anything to do with it; it’s the bureaucrats that manage it that have to do with it, not the people.

So Pharaoh is the one who ultimately winds up with all the capital as a result of this little thing that goes on here in the days of Joseph. At my surprise birthday party two weeks ago one girl had a little box and she engraved the following inscription on the top of the box; this is a well-known inscription but it’s humorous and it gets this point of what we’re talking about, these different political systems over. The first word is the word socialism. “Socialism means you have two cows and give one to your neighbor. Communism means that you have two cows; the government takes both and gives you the milk. New Dealism means that you have two cows, the government takes both, shoots one, milks the other and throws the milk away.” But the finest definition is the last one, “Capitalism; you have two cows, you sell one and buy a bull.” And this is the obvious difference between where you have owners, individual owners interesting in producing wealth and multiplication of wealth and assets and the state that just simply hordes the assets.

So Joseph is in a position along with Pharaoh of being the capitalist. As I said it’s not a moral slam on Joseph, Joseph is simply executing a sort of judgment upon Egypt during this time. But now look what happens immediately in verse 21. [“And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.”] Connect it up with the statement in verse 20 where the land was all the governments and now we find immediately what is the government doing? Starting a massive bussing program, moving the people from one place to another. If they had busses Pharaoh would have had all these yellow school buses going back and forth from the Nile to move the people from one city to the next. What gives him the right to move people? Because he owns them, they’re slaves to him. You see, the government can’t do that as long as individuals have power and wealth by themselves; take it away and the government can take it all. And this is what’s going on here. It’s a lesson to learn, it’s repeated time and again and if you want a cross reference in the Scriptures to a very famous parallel, 2 Samuel 8 is when it started to happen in the nation Israel and you can read it there sometime for your own study.

So now he begins to move the people, true this is all done for the good of the people, and in this case it was the good of the people, but why was it the good of the people? Because you had a Joseph at the helm. In other words, yes, you had a pyramid; the pyramid worked while you had Joe at the top. But Joe was omniscient, not because he was omniscient but he had a hotline with God, he had communication with God so he could predict everything he needed and the pyramid worked, right? With a Joseph. And that’s the point; every totalitarian system would work if you had a Joseph at its helm; the problem is, where is the Joseph today.

I’ll show you what happened to this pyramid, turn to Exodus 1:8 and look at what happened. That’s all that had to happen to turn a beneficent totalitarian scheme into one of the most awful things of ancient history. Exodus 1:8, that’s all that had to happen, a change of personnel. Look at it. [“Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.” Ah, and what happened by the time you read to the end of this very chapter? You have one of the first recorded genocides in history, an attempted destruction and obliteration of one people from the face of the earth. Why? People look at that, how did such a thing happen? Because somebody built a massive pyramidal society, totalitarian, fascist, with all the capital concentrated in the hands of a few. And all it took was a few bad people at the top. You see the power; you see why it’s wrong to concentrate wealth in the hands of the government like this?

Back to Genesis 47. It winds up, this section, verses 23-26, that Joseph gives them instructions as now the vassals…the vassals of Pharaoh. “Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day” notice, “I have bought you this day.” You see, what we have here theologically is a reverse Exodus. Later the Jews will be bought by God into freedom; Joseph buys the Egyptians into bondage. And so he says “I have bought you this day, and your land for Pharaoh: [lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall sow the land. [24] And it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for food for your little ones. [25] And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s servants. [26] And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part; except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaoh’s.”] He tells about the seed and the taxes and so forth.

But then notice, in verse 22, “Only the land of the priests bought he not; for the priests had a portion assigned them of Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them: wherefore they sold not their lands.” Oh yes, here’s another comment on every scheme of organized power that the earth has ever seen. All the way from Plato, down to the latest communist, here’s what always happens. In spite of the elitist schemes there’s always a segment of society that somehow escapes. Guess who? It’s always the elite; in Plato it was the philosopher king; everybody else had to adhere to the law except us. And in the communist state what happens, oh, everybody’s equal, except some people are a little more equal than others, namely the communist bureaucrats.

So about 15-20 years ago there was a very famous book that came out that was written by a former communist of Yugoslavia, Djylas’ book, The New Class, and Djylas’ book was simply this; he said look, in Yugoslavia who owns the biggest cars? Communist party members! Who owns their homes and who has the biggest apartments? Communist party members! Who is it that gets the passes for travel all over the country? Communist party members! Wait a minute; I thought this was a work of paradise where everybody’s equal. Oh no, there are some exceptions. And it is here; same exceptions, and on a minor scale you see it today; your children are bused. What about some of the legislatures who vote that law; are their children bused? If it’s really true that these schemes are so great, why don’t we see the Kennedy children, for example, if I might raise an embarrassing, why don’t we find the Kennedy children attending integrated schools in the middle of Washington DC? How come, because for some strange reason that repeats itself a thousand times it’s always the elite that tell everybody else how to do it but they don’t do it. And so who will be the guardians of Egyptian society? The priests. And who is it that keeps their capital? The priests, a beautiful arrangement; if you can pull it off more credit to you. But there are some other groups that also get off and that’s the last part of the chapter, verses 27-31.

Now watch it here, because the Word of God is pulling a swift one on us; this is why I’ve been building all this about money and currency and finance and loss of freedom because I want you to see something. Genesis 27:27, “And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possessions therein,” they had what? “They had possessions.” What does that mean? They had capital; they were one of the great remnants who were free; they had capital, they had the best land, they had the flocks, look at them, they “grew, and multiplied exceedingly,” they prospered in verse 27. So now you see the process of differentiation take place in history; here you have the Egyptians, ever growing, more and more and more consistent with their apostate human viewpoint idea of how we ought to live and they all become slaves, and here are the Jews who have been given redemptive calling by God, and He’s nudging them, and He’s interfering them and He’s justified them so therefore He can treat them fairly, and so He looks down and He starts to move them into freedom, and the Egyptians go into bondage. See the difference starting to crop up.

Verse 27 might be a fitting end to the chapter except like we’ve seen so many times in the chapters of Genesis it seems like the author leads us with what looks like a climax and a conclusion and then he tacks something on that looks totally disconnected, and yet when you look at it again it’s not totally disconnected. So what are we to do with verses 28-31? The story could have ended at the end of verse 27 but it doesn’t. We’ve got ask ourselves why does the story end at verse 31; obviously some idea must be contained in those verses that God the Holy Spirit wants you to see and wants me to see.

Verse 28, “And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years: so the whole age of Jacob was an hundred forty and seven years. [29] And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: [30 But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and] bury me in their burying place,” the father’s burying place; [“And he said, I will do as thou hast said. [31] And he said, Swear unto me. And he swore unto him. And Israel bowed himself upon the bed’s head.”] Swear this to me, and Joseph does. What’s all this about; obviously it’s about death, so what. It’s a reminder of something very powerful. Incidentally, all the chapters from here on in are going to deal with the theme of death and preparation for dying and we’re going to have some kind of interesting things to say about how to prepare for your death and some interesting collisions with what goes on often times in the medical community over this problem of preparing patients for death. But this will be the subject of the next 3 or 4 chapters.

Now in this section death seems to be tacked on to this, what looked liked a rising curve of prosperity. Let’s go back to the metaphor of the field with the weeds. Let’s just suppose we’re working this field, overgrown with weeds, you come into it, you say I want to produce grapes and so therefore we want to plant a vineyard. And so you work hard in the field and you plant your vineyard, it looks great, produces tremendous amounts of grapes. Question: do you leave the grapes on the vine in the field? No, the vines are harvested and the grapes are taken off the field for a destiny separate for the field. Now if the field is history then what we’re saying is that when men, believers, trust in the Lord they work on another frequency; they’re like those grapes, they’re destined for something outside of history, something in the eternal state, something to be forever and ever and ever and ever in the presence of God. That’s the destiny. So when you have death introduced in verses 28-31 it’s a cut off of verse 27.

Verse 27 shows you yes, the Jews are becoming distinct; the Jews have freedom and the Egyptians have slavery and bondage but that’s not the last word; the Jews don’t live here just for time; they live for eternity and there’s a large reason for them here. And that larger reason has to be protected, and therefore there are some strange things that occur and it ties these strange things together. Jacob, in verse 28 terminates at 147 years; even long-term people come to an end. So you can have differentiation in history but that can’t be the ultimate story of our life. So you’re different, so you have freedom and everybody else is a slave, so what, what does that do, after I die what does that do for me? Really nothing except it gives me good memories. So what else is new; I obviously, and you have to, have something bigger to live for than just time. Well, this is what these verses do; they start to move our attention away from even Egypt unto the long, long-term program of God.

Back in verse 29 it says, “I pray thee, put your hand under my thigh,” now this is a strange oath form and it’s found only two places in the Scripture, and most scholars who have studied this, looking back at the rabbinic commentaries particularly, notice that back in chapter 24:2 as well as here this oath form is found. The oath form is not “put your hand under my thigh” but it means to touch the male sex organ and that’s what the oath was about. Now why was it there and why is it painted in these terms? What’s the theme of Genesis? The Messianic seed. What was the theme we introduced at the beginning of this chapter last week? The idea of corporate personality, remember, where Abraham went Levi went; where Abraham went, even though Levi wasn’t born Abraham carried him around. All right; who is being sworn upon in verse 29? The old man, Jacob, and what is in Jacob’s loins but the genetic material of the Lord Jesus Christ; the genetic material of the whole nation. And so the oath form emphasizes exactly that part of the body that viewed as carrying the seed for the future.

What you’ve got in verse 29 is a very strong reference to the future orientation to the Bible authors; they’re not looking just at their present prosperity, that’s fickle, it can come and it can go. Exodus 1 it’s going to go. So that isn’t the end; the last part of the chapter can’t be verse 27, it’s got to be something that sows it up for eternity, and that’s what Jacob is saying, and he’s saying, verse 30, “I will lie with my fathers,” the fathers that have died before him, he’s looking at eternity.

Now we’re going to show you three New Testament passages that apply this truth for every day life. Turn to Hebrews 11; the authors of the New Testament picked off this theme very skillfully and reworked it and used it several places. In Hebrews 11:1, the famous description of faith: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Now many people read verse 1 wrongly, they say that faith is the evidence of things invisible in the sense that you’ll never see them, like for example, the complex and comprehensive relationship of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. No, that’s not what verse 1 is talking about. Verse 1, when it says “the evidences of things not seen” would be best understood as saying the evidences of things not yet seen. In other words, they will be seen, they are future components to God’s plan but they’re not seen now. Fait looks forward, it’s future oriented to what God is going to pull off, not what he’s doing right now, what He is going to do.

With that in mind, look at Heb 11:13, 14, 15 and 16, here is the patriarchal concept of the pilgrimage. That’s the idea that’s involved here, that even though God gives me freedom today as He did in Genesis 47 from the Egyptians, that freedom is precariously balanced; it’s part of the world where moth and rust doth corrupt and the thieves break through and steal and when another Pharaoh who knows not Joseph can ruin it all. So I can’t have my treasure in vulnerable surroundings; I have to have it in invulnerable, imperishable surroundings. So Hebrews 11:13 comments on this mentality. Now watch how it’s applied to everyday living.

“These all died in faith,” who’s “these all?” Those are the patriarchs, they “all died in faith, not having received the promises but having seen them” where, in the past? No! “in the far off,” future, they did not receive them but they saw them in the far off future, “they embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth,” this is not just for Thanksgiving stories, “pilgrims” is a noun which refers to a person who basically hangs loose; that’s the best contemporary definition I could give to the world pilgrim, not hang loose in the sense of being purposeless, but rather, you’ve got your eyes and you’re marching to a drum beat that’s not part of this system; it’s as though you’re listening to a different frequency, so you’re hanging lose and you don’t become entangled in the things of this world. You engage them, after all, the Jews in Goshen grew fine herds, they wore the same clothes as the Egyptians, they were there physically but spiritually they were hanging loose, there was this disjunction.

And so it says in verse 14, “They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country,” not that they’ve found on, they see, one. [15] “And truly, if the had been mindful of that country from which they came out, they might have had opportunity to return. [16] But now they desire a getter country, that is, an heavenly one; wherefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared for them a city.” Verse 15 is the key of what this means in everyday living. What it means is that if they did not have the future orientation, if they kept thinking in terms of security now, in this world, peace and affluence here, then they would have gone back to it; they would have sunk back to the same levels, finally, as the Egyptians. The thing that keeps a Christian separated is not setting down and vowing to keep five taboos; I will not do this, I will not do that, I will not do something else, blah, blah, blah. Because that doesn’t have any energy to it. What keeps a Christian biblically separate is that simply he’s obsessed with another concern and it just overrides the present things; he’s simply not that interested in the things that are present centered.

Now that’s what you want to strive for, the fact that you live in the world but it doesn’t really turn you on that much. What turns you on is anticipating your eternal relationship, face to face, with God the Father. If that isn’t the biggest turn-on in your life, then you’ve got a spiritual problem; you may not even be a Christian. That’s the sequence and order.

Now verse 24 and 27, another application, same principle in every day kinds of decisions. Here’s Moses, what does he say in verse 24? “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, [25] Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for season, [26] Esteeming the reproach of Christ grater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward.” See in verse 26 it’s wealth, and who is imputing wealth? The riches of Egypt are only as wealthy as people think they are. And Moses doesn’t think they are, he thinks Christ is more worthwhile. And there again, Moses was able in verse 25 to make a significant risky break because he was marching to a different tone. And everybody around him probably thought he was nuts; all right, so they’re entitled to their opinion but he went on anyway.

I’ve been reading the biography of Cornelius Van Til and in this particular biography of Van Til who is one of the great Christian apologists in the 20^th century, he lived through the fundamentalist/modernist controversy in those 20s and 30s when Princeton seminary went, and I’ve often said that when the liberals took over from the fundamentalists they stole all our property, they took our schools, they took our scholars and for the last 40 years this is where we’ve been; we’ve largely been without the great people. And I thought in terms of property, and I thought well, particularly in the Presbyterian Church, the general assembly owns the local church building so your local congregations lost it through simple legal title to the property. Well, that’s partly true but this biography brings out another point. When it came down to 1929 and the men had to pull out of Princeton seminary, which was the bastion of evangelical conservative Presbyterianism at the time, when they finally left, when Machen walked out, Van Til walked out, and Robert Dick Wilson walked out, I always like to quote him because people think fundies are ignorant, he knew 45 languages. And he and the other “ignorant” fundies walked out of Princeton and left. But when they did, behold a strange thing; there were thousands of Presbyterian ministers that refused to follow them, and this biography notes the fact that most of them were the older men who could have provided leadership for the conservative cause and didn’t. Why? They were old men in the pulpits of America and they had their pension, and it was the pension system in the Presbyterian Church that kept the conservative older men, who could have been the leaders, kept them involved where they could be suppressed and manipulated by the liberals and the conservatives went out, young men, inexperienced, tried to build a new deck. Why? Because these older men didn’t have the perspective of Moses. To hell with the pension, the hell with it, who cares about a pension when the whole cause of the gospel is at stake; forget the pension, the Lord’s been designing pension plans for eternity, He’ll take care of that problem, doesn’t have to worry about losing all your investments in the stocks. The funny part was, that was 1929. You see, it’s so stupid, so silly, and what could be a better illustration of “where moth and rust doth corrupt, and depression break through and steal.” But no, it was the pension, all those wonderful stocks that were there in 1929. I couldn’t lose the ministry and go and side with the godly remnant of Presbyterians because I had to stay and guard my pension. Now imagine how those same guys must have felt five years later. See, it’s the same old lesson.

One other New Testament passage, Romans 8:18, same principle applied to the same kinds of decisions. This one emphasizes physical suffering. “I reckon that suffering of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us, [19] For the earnest expectation of the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons of God” He’s talking here about physical affliction and what does he say in verse 18? Value, I reckon, I impute, I credit that the sufferings of this time aren’t worth worrying about in the light of eternity. This is the eternal perspective. Now just facing it from Romans 8, from Hebrews 11, those two examples, look it; these men made decisions that endangered their own peace and affluence and so on. We as Christians are going to go through the same process; it is becoming increasingly obvious that this is going to become the conflict for the next 10 to 20 years. Some of you are Christian parents who are concerned about your children; who knows that five years from now you won’t be where the Christian parents of Ohio are, behind bars because you sent your children to an unaccredited school. Who knows where we’ll all be in five years if this same governmental interference doesn’t come on the younger couples can postpone it a while till their children get up here, but those with children in the school ranks, it’s going to be an interesting conflict, and then you’ll have the choice, whether to maintain your short-term enjoyment with peace and prosperity and not get feathers ruffled and the waves raised or are you going to stand for the gospel and finally make a decision one way or the other. See, a whole generation of the future waits, just like the men who failed in 1929 ruined us for 50 years in this country.

Looking at it, if the Lord doesn’t come back, what about our children? What happens when the crunch comes down and we have to choose and we say well, maybe we can oouch buy this time. And finally you don’t have any more place to oouch, it’s all taken. The eternal perspective looks forward in time.

We’re going to conclude by singing….