Clough Genesis Lesson 98

Jacob’s deathbed prophetic words to four of his sons – Genesis 49:1-12

In the last few chapters of the book of Genesis we’ve noticed the finale to the book being death and dying, and probably beyond the topics of religion and politics there are no two more unacceptable topics for polite dinner conversation than these. So therefore we will speak of them. The Scriptures consider these kinds of issues and insist that men talk about them and talk not only about them but talk all the way until they have found solutions.

We’ve looked at some of the principles of death and dying; let’s summarize them. We’ve seen three so far. One is that the dying have a right to know they are dying. And there’s a reason behind that, it’s not an arbitrary principle or rule hanging in thin air; there’s a very good reason why the dying ought to have some knowledge that they’re dying because then they can make adjustments, they can pray with the light that they are dying, they can read Scripture in the light that they are dying, they can reconcile friendships that have been ruptured in the light of the fact that they’re dying. When a person who is dying does not know that they are dying and has been systematically deceived, then you have stolen from them the opportunities for correction and reconciliation.

A second principle is that the dying have a right to remain coherent as long as possible, rather than being drugged into a stupor. This doesn’t mean that drugs aren’t ever to be used by the Lord Jesus Christ, when He died on the cross significantly refused medication prior to the finishing of His work; then after His finishing work on the cross, then He said “I thirst,” and then He was given what would amount to a medicinal drink. The significance, then, that the Lord Jesus Christ gave us the basis of this second principle, that the worst enemy at death is not the pain, the horrible pain that goes with it often. What is the worst enemy of the Christian is sitting there knowing you’re going to meet God in a matter of minutes with unfulfilled commandments and obligations. That’s the worst pain and therefore it’s that pain that must be dealt with first and then after that we’ll talk about physical pain. So the second principle of dying is that the dying have a right to remain coherent as long as they can.

A third principle is that the dying have a right to rule their posterity, that means they have a right to make decisions that have implications as to their children and their children’s children. The mandate to man in the Garden of Eden to subdue the earth is not done away with ten minutes before death; it’s not done away with until the last breath and while there is yet breath there is yet rule, there is yet the mandate. And so we have these three principles of dying. And they’re God’s principles, they’re not mine, I didn’t make them up, they’re not just Moses’ principles, they are the principles of God who has revealed them to us.

Interestingly after the sermon last Sunday a couple was telling me of another couple, Christian couple, friends of theirs; they had a small child, this child had a swelling in the abdominal area and was subsequently diagnosed with having a very unusual form of cancer peculiar to infants. But the doctors, apparently in this case, did not have the moral courage to tell this couple that the prognosis of that child was death, 99%, you never make 100% but 99% probable. But they didn’t tell them that; they told them well, we have gone in and we’ve cut some of the cancer out of your baby, haven’t got it all but we’ve got most of it and we think that the chances are good. But the chances are very bad and the parents weren’t around, in fact the father wasn’t even around when the child died, and here’s an example, had that child been of God-consciousness, the age of accountability, the parents would have been robbed of a right to lead their own child to Jesus Christ because of a medical authority who systematically cloaked the whole case in deception, with no authority given him to do this. So we have this bizarre thing that goes on in our time and this is not blaming all doctors, there are many that do valiantly; it’s just that increasingly like all fields, medicine is coming under the inevitable cloak of humanistic values and we’re paying the price.

And here we see the same old thing that we’ve mentioned time and time again; boys that have gone through school have been taught in the (quote) “neutral” (end quote) classroom and have gone on through medical school, all taught in a very sterile and neutral environment, and come out and make very neutral decisions. Here’s an example of what I mean: Dallas Morning News, August 11. “An alliance of Dallas churches has proposed guidelines for separation of church and state for the Dallas independent school district that virtually would eliminate religion from the classroom. Since Thanksgiving day” this is an example, an excerpt, “Since Thanksgiving day is considered a religious holiday by some, programs, if held, shall emphasize those aspects of our society about which any citizen might be thankful without religious themes or expressions.”

It’s striking that they picked the holiday of Thanksgiving because anybody with a first grade knowledge of American history would understand that the whole entire day of Thanksgiving was because of the Christian faith; after all, when the pilgrims survived a bleak winter and they had a good crop that summer, it was on the shores of Cape Cod that they set up the first Thanksgiving and they weren’t thanking random air molecules for their blessing, they were thanking a personal sovereign God for their blessing. They weren’t talking about evolutionary progress and they weren’t just sentimentalizing and sending Thanksgiving cards to each other. That wasn’t the point; the whole holiday itself is meaningless without the personal God of the Puritans and the pilgrims; just absolutely meaningless. But here we have a group of desperate compromising clergymen who, to avoid their own obligation to insist upon the fact that nothing is neutral, including 2 + 2 is 4, they do not want to take the stand, and therefore trying to diffuse the conflict it always seems to get diffused in our direction; never the other side. The compromises we always make, why doesn’t the other side make the compromises? But of course, as is so typical in Dallas, with deafening silence the many fundamentalist churches there say nothing in response.

This is what goes on. Here we have again the dogma of humanist neutrality seizing control, nobody raises a voice and so it triumphs. And the long term result is now we have doctors, skilled in their field, who consider the patient to be just a battleground for chemical warfare rather than a soul primarily and a body secondarily. This is all gone by the wayside. Why? Because as night follows day it’s just as logical if you start with (quote) “neutrality” you’re going to wind up with neutrality.

Now we have these three principles of Genesis that thoroughly challenge this idea; again the three principles before we continue our study in Genesis 49. The dying have a right to know they are dying. They have a right to remain coherent as long as possible. And they have a right to rule their posterity and all these principles follow from the biblical faith that man is created, fiat creation in the Garden of Eden, not millions and millions of years of rocks turning into men but an instant fiat supernatural creation of man made in God’s image, therefore he’s valuable, and that he is not matter in motion, he is a body and a spirit and a living soul.

Now in Genesis 49 Jacob continues. He continues this third principle of dying and that is the dying have a right to rule their posterity. Last week we introduced an idea that is as unpopular almost as death itself in our society because we’ve downgraded it so much and that is the dogma of inheritance, the idea of inheritance. It’s one that’s forgotten primarily because there’s so little of it. Revolutionary ages always strike first at inheritance; always will strike first at inheritance. Last week we showed you some of the things that are involved in inheritance; when you look at that word, “inheritance” many think of money, that my dad has his business and he’s going to give 50% of the capital of that business to me when he dies. And we think monetarily, but the Bible urges us to think in larger circles than just the monetary.

There are other things that we inherit and last week we gave you nine of them. We inherit life from Adam. We inherit death from the curse. We inherit the Bible and the Lord from Jacob. We inherit eternal life from the Lord Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, and so on and so on and so on. All these are given to us, we didn’t make them, we didn’t start in our moment of history. We are the result of many thousands of moments of history before: we inherit. Jacob, the old dying man is in a position where he can rule his posterity and the one final authority he has in the third divine institution is the authority of disinheritance.

You see, each one of the divine institutions, volition or responsibility, marriage, family and the state, each one of these sectors of society has a tool of authority. In the state, the fourth divine institution, the tool is capital punishment. That is the final bottom line of where the authority of the state lies. Of course we have people today wanting to do away with that so that way they can have more rebellion and more chaos. However, in the third divine institution, the family, the bottom line is finally the old man’s power to disinherit. He can withhold or he can give, and Jacob is withholding and giving. This is his final rule of how he can do that, and yet in our own land today the courts have systematically stripped the power of the dying to do this.

I’ll give you a very famous example in American history when this happened. It was back in the days when many people, Christian, godly families in New England had financed schools like Harvard University, Andover, Dartmouth, and many of these schools had been originally financed and heavily endowed for the express purpose of training men for the clergy, training men to teach the classic theology of historic Christianity. And when these schools began to apostacize and go liberal, many of the grandchildren of those former contributors sued those universities and the courts of the state of Massachusetts made the following ruling: that the dead hand does not rule. And so the state of Massachusetts destroyed the idea of the rule of inheritance and since then it has been weakened further by court decision after court decision. This, what Jacob is saying, would be defied by our present laws of the land.

Let’s watch what Jacob does. He assembles his sons together, Genesis 49:1-2, he says “Gather together, that I may tell you that which will befall you in the last days.” We said last week the term “last days” is a technical expression; it refers not to the last days of the individual boys, it refers to the last days of history, the last hours before the great judgment. It is a technical term borne of Old Testament thoughts. He says, [2] “Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of Jacob, and hearken unto Israel, your dad.” So there is his authority as a father and he’s about to show this authority in his dying breath by systematically causing inheritance, transferring inheritance and disinheriting. It is his right because the property is his until this point.

Genesis 49:3-12, which we will study this morning, deal with four sons and as we go through these sons I want you to look at something because there are many, many lessons here, as always, but we can only point you to some key lesson. The one key lesson to look at, here’s the old father talking to four boys and he’s going to show us what he’s looking for in his men. So what we have here is a catalogue of male character, and if Jacob is a prophet of God, then Jacob’s evaluation of men is God’s evaluation of men.

Now this is interesting because today men are looking for standards by which to judge themselves. It’s largely lacking in our culture. Here is one of those passages of Scripture that give us men some guidance. The first boy that is approached, verses 3-4, is Reuben. Incidentally, before I go any further there was a feedback card that said how old was Manasseh and Ephraim, and I think if you’ll look back in the text, measure how long Jacob was in the land, Jacob died at 147, he was 130 when he went down to Egypt, if Ephraim and Manasseh were born a couple of years before he went down into Egypt that would make them about 19 or 20 so the answer to whoever it was that put in the feedback card, how old were Ephraim and Manasseh, probably about 20; they were his grandchildren, but they were about 20 when they inherited in this passage.

Genesis 49:3, “Reuben, you art my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power: [4] Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou went up to thy father’s bed; then defiled thou it: he went up to my couch.” Now there are some cultural situations in these verses that you want to be aware of to see the magnitude of why he’s angry at this son, Reuben. First, let’s remember about the firstborn son. Again, in our culture I would imagine that most of you who have wills, and I hope if your Christian parents you certainly have your will because driving around Lubbock is dangerous. The idea is that the firstborn in the Bible had two portions of the inheritance. So if you had, say number one son, number two son, and say number three was a daughter, you’d divide your inheritance probably four ways; one to number three, one to number two and two parts to number one; that was normally the way it was done.

And you say well how unfair, this is favoring one sibling over another, creating dissent in the home. No it isn’t because with the added wealth transferred to the firstborn son went the added responsibility of taking care of mother and dad. In their old age there was no social security; in their old age there was no welfare program of the state. They had some welfare programs but not for this part. This was a family responsibility and therefore mother and father had to be taken care of by their younger son and because it also the Bible’s position that the firstborn son ought not to be penalized for the responsibility, he ought not to have to go into poverty to pay for his parents in their old age; the parents provided ahead of time for him by giving him a double portion, and they said son, when we are old this is your portion, you take care of us and then you take care of the family property. So they gave the son the tools and the resources to do this so he wouldn’t deplete his own wealth. Hence, the double portion going to the firstborn.

That was normally the case, but the Bible is not mechanical. God’s laws are never like a computer program, they’re very personal and very tailored to detail. And in this case you want to watch something because in this case Jacob has number one son, number two son, number three son and number four son; you’ll see all four sons today. The number one son is Reuben, the one you’re looking at right now who is obviously declared to be the firstborn, but the property of the firstborn goes to… well, the property of the firstborn goes way down to Joseph, number 10 or 11 in the line and the leadership of the firstborn gets transferred to number 4. What you’re looking at in verses 3-4, though it may strike you as pious and nice and gentlemanly, is a quite shocking thing. Verses 3 and 4 is a young man, probably 35 or 40, facing his father on his death bed and getting disinherited. That’s what it’s all about. Verses 3-4 is the stripping of Reuben of his firstborn rights. This is what the old man does at the time of his death. He disinherits his firstborn son and moves that blessing over to number four son. He has a right as the father to do this and no court in the land of Israel can intervene in the father’s right. The father may be wrong but that is the way the courts of the land would uphold it in that day.

Now why did he do this? He wasn’t being unreasonable. Verse 4 tells us why, he was looking at the character of this firstborn son, and men in the Bible were measured, primarily not by the size of their biceps but by the size of their moral strength, and Reuben doesn’t have it, he’s “unstable as water” it says. “Thou shalt not excel,” water, by the way, is always used metaphorically in the Scripture as chaos and so here he says you are as “unstable as water,” and you’re never going to amount to a hill of beans is what he tells his son, because you are just the kind of individual, and this is a certain way some men are, and the Bible talks about this kind of a man and it talks to the fathers to say if you have a son like this, pray for him and try to straighten him out. Don’t raise a Reuben because he is not worth being put over your inheritance and your family property or your family holdings. The Reuben’s of this world are usurpers. Let’s watch why?

It says, “because you went up to your father’s bed,” turn to Genesis 35:22, it’s a small little notice in the Bible, it’s one of those little verses that you can pass over and never think about, but it’s one of those verses that gives you a tip on a man’s character, and hence is used to measure that man later. “And it came to pass, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his fathers’ concubine: And Israel heard it.” And then the text seemingly, almost passively, goes on and lists the sons. Well now what is all this about? This is not just sexual, it’s not just that he got an attraction for this woman but he was the oldest son and therefore at age wise was closest to the age of women who would be in his father’s harem. That’s true, but it’s not just primarily sexual, there’s a deeper meaning to going in to his father’s concubine than merely sexual attraction.

That theme, we don’t have time to prove it from the Scripture this morning but you’ll have to take my word for it or look it up yourself, if you watch various passages in Samuel and Kings and Chronicles and you watch the life of the kings, you’ll quickly discover that anybody that dared come into the harem of the king was claiming throne rights. You see the word “harem,” and we facetiously use it for playboys today, but harem meant protection at one point; it meant that there were a certain number of females in the entourage of this king and the harem, the word “harem” means to draw a line around it and nobody else… they’re off limits, period. Solomon had a thousand in his harem so he had quite a large girl’s dorm, and he had gates around it, that’s what the word “harem” meant. In fact, to show you the force of “harem” it is the same word that is used for holy war later on in the text, when it talks about holy war and it says go destroy everything, it says “harem” it, it means dedicate it to God and it’s wholly God’s and no on else’s. So it’s the harem right.

Now if you want a story about this I think it’s in 1 Kings where Bathsheba comes into Solomon and she’s pleading that one of the other sons has some of David’s concubines and you read the story and you wonder, why does Solomon get so hacked at Bathsheba; well, Bathsheba was the kind of woman that was apparently a very beautiful woman but kind of stupid between the ears, and she never understood what the rules of the court were all about. And so when she walked in there and was asking, Solomon said you’re jeopardizing my throne, and she kind of gave a dumb look at him and wondered what was all that about, because when you give away part of that harem you are saying I have crown rights.

Now apparently that is what is involved in Genesis 35:22 here. It’s more than just a little sexual affair; what is involved is that Reuben can’t wait until his father dies before he’s trying to usurp his father’s position. In other words, Reuben is a usurper and usurpers have an interesting trait in their soul and that is that they’re very impatient people, they always want everything yesterday. So here’s Reuben, kind of on his father’s heels all the time, can’t wait until he dies so he can get all the goods. Well, that’s the background for why Jacob disinherits him.

On the way back to Genesis 49 go to I Chronicles 5:1 and I’ll prove that that’s the correct interpretation, it’s not arbitrary, the Bible cannot be interpreted any way you want if you have any sensitivity to good literature. Good literature is meant to be interpreted one way; that’s why the authors take all the time they do to write and in 1 Chronicles 5: you have a priestly notice; this is a notice from the priestly account, Chronicles being a priestly account and here you have a notice that tells exactly what’s going on. It says, “Now the sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel,” then it’s a parenthesis if you have a King James, (for he was the firstborn; but forasmuch as he defiled his father’s bed, his birthright was given unto the sons of Joseph, the son of Israel, and the genealogy is not to be reckoned after the birthright. [2] For Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief ruler [prince]; but the birthright was Joseph’s).” That is a priestly editorial remark put into the text to show you why the Bible is written the way it is; it’s just a little informative note.

More on Reuben now; Genesis 49:4 pictures his dislocation from firstborn position. Now there’s a lesson for us Christians. Here’s the family of Jacob; Reuben is not thrown out of the family; once a member of the family he’s always a member of the family. But here’s Reuben, Simeon, Levi and Judah; four boys we’re going to talk about this morning. What is happening here is that Jacob, the old man, is jockeying them around in place; he is organizing which position they hold in that family. And that’s his right as a father to do that.

Now similarly, all of us who are Christians, who have trusted in Jesus Christ have eternal security because we are justified. But that is not to say that Jesus Christ can’t put us in positions of rank forever and ever and ever. The Bible refers to this under the doctrine of rewards. What are the rewards; they seem to be linked to crowns in the Scripture and it means a position of rule or a position of responsibility. So on a very small scale, what you have in Genesis 49, this relocation of the sons and where they’re going to stand in the family, though not casting them out, is exactly the same kind of thing that you and I would face as Christians before the Lord Jesus Christ, who is our head of our family. And He’s going to say you I want here, you I want here, you are a character and violated Scripture and rebelled every time you turned around so you’re going to go over here, you’re a janitor detail on the 8^th floor of the New Jerusalem and then somebody else will be over on another detail. Still members of the kingdom but the positions are sovereignly bestowed and bestowed in such a way that they correspond to things we do and don’t do in our lives.

Reuben has been disinherited, so much for Reuben. Now verse 5-7, the next two boys come up, Simeon and Levi. “Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. [6] O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they digged down a wall. [7]: Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.”

Simeon and Levi, what did they do? Turn to Genesis 34, just to recall briefly the story there. In Genesis 34 you remember the story, Jacob and his family were dwelling near Shechem. The Bible doesn’t say it but apparently there was very few girls in the family; Jacob was like some of our productive fathers in LBC, they all have boys, and so with very few girls in the family, naturally Dinah, one of the girls, didn’t have anybody to play with. So the Bible says she’d go down the street and she’d start playing with some of the girls in the city, which is fine, okay, only one problem. The girls that she went to play with had big brothers and big brothers thought that Dinah was a pretty good looking little chick and one thing led to another and Dinah got raped.

So her brothers, Simeon and Levi, decided they were going to do something about it, again without daddy’s approval, and without discussing it and in Genesis 34:25 you see their plan. “It came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. [26] And they slew Hamor and Shechem, his son, with the edge of the sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem’s house, and went out. [27] The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city, because they defiled their sister. [28] They took the sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in the city, and that which was in the field, [29] And all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives they took captive, and spoiled all that was in the house.” Talk about gang warfare, the dramatists would have Simeon and Levi come in black jackets and motorcycles. [30] “And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me to make me stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather themselves together against me, and they’re going to kill me.”

Now the whole episode back here in Genesis 34 shows the lack of control of Jacob. And it also shows the profound disobedience of their sons; now there were ways of handling this problem that were perfectly just, but they flew off the handle and they wanted vengeance. They were very harsh men; they were men who were exceedingly cruel. You see, executing justice does not always mean harshness and Simeon and Levi were that harsh kind of individuals, just went in there with their swords and killed and wiped everything out. And if you notice, back in Genesis 49, not only did they kill everybody but to show their extreme lack of control it says that [5] “instruments of cruelty are in their habitation,”[7] “cursed be their anger and their wrath.” Then in verse 6 it says “they slew a man and they dug down a wall,” in other words it was almost like unauthorized holy war. Nobody told them to do that. If there was anybody who would have told them to do that it was Jacob, not themselves.

So now with these two boys you see something else interesting about men. The first man was an impatient man and he was a usurper. He wanted everything yesterday and so he tried to maneuver, and Jacob said huh-un, I don’t want that kind of a guy the head of the family corporation so get out, you’ll be down on the line. Next in age came Simeon and Levi, they were disqualified from any significant thing and the significant thing that they were disqualified is given in such a way in verse 6 it doesn’t dawn on you what’s being said until you think about it for a minute. In verse 6, to understand that expression, “oh my soul, don’t come into their secret,” or “my honor, don’t come into their assembly,” to understand that clause you’ve got to drop down to the end of verse 7 where it says, “I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.”

Now what kind of an interpretation can we come to from those two parts of the text? What does it mean to scatter them in the land of Israel; what would that mean politically? If you visualize the land of Israel and you have each tribe allocated in a certain area, all these tribes had territories, who was going to rule in these territories? The head of the tribe. In other words, they formed like counties in America, and they’d exercise their power in these counties. Well, if he’s going to scatter them in and among, the word “in” here means among, if he’s going to scatter them among Israel, what has he thereby deprived both Simeon and Levi of? He’s deprived them of the right to administer and to rule because they’re scattered into small communities, some over in this tribe, some in this tribe, some over here, and they never can get large enough power of their tribe together to rule anybody. Now does it make sense, verse 7, “I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel,” I will prevent them from gaining power. Does that make sense in the light of what they did in verse 5? Of course it does; they are unfit instruments to wield power; they tried prematurely to use the sword, therefore they are disqualified from ever using the sword. And so they are scattered, meaning they have no judicial authority for the rest of the history of Israel

Now this was played out in a very interesting way. By the way, the word “assembly” in verse 6 means, assembly meaning the assembly that gathers together to do the ruling. This was played out in a most marvelous way and to see it I want to take you to a chapter that’s parallel with Genesis 49 but occurs 400 years later. Instead of being under Jacob it occurs under Moses. The chapter is Deuteronomy 33 because in Deuteronomy 33 Moses is dying and when he dies he allocates inheritance among the tribe and so it’s a very parallel chapter to Genesis 49. If you scan the list you’ll see at Deuteronomy 33:6 it starts with Reuben, Reuben’s the first born, but not much is said about Reuben, you know, “Let Reuben live, and not die,” well, that’s a real accomplishment, and that’s all there is to Reuben, he’s just kind of existing and that kind of fits with exactly what Jacob said was going to happen.

But notice, if you just skim quickly down, verse after verse after verse and log mentally in your mind the names of the sons that are talked about, you’ll notice one’s missing. It’s Simeon; Simeon doesn’t receive any large area of land to rule. Why? “I will scatter you among the nation,” you will never rule, Simeon, you couldn’t keep your stuff together, you couldn’t keep your cool, you couldn’t keep yourself disciplined but you blew up and you destroyed and you started a war unnecessarily and I’m not having that kind of a man rule my posterity. All right, and he doesn’t and Deuteronomy 33 shows you this.

But then to act as an encouragement, and here’s an interesting principle that ought to encourage some of you Christians who have passed through some trying times of God’s discipline, verses 8-11 speaks of Levi. Levi was given the same destiny as Simeon, he was to be scattered, he was never to rule in the political power of the state because he was volatile in his personality. However, later on there came a time when Levi, the tribe of Levi, saw there was apostasy and they were so zealous to obey the Scriptures that they killed some of their own tribe to conform to the Scripture. There were some traitors, unlike our day they don’t reward the Jane Fonda’s with fat movie contracts, they stoned them to death. In this case they got rid of traitors to their cause and they did it by stoning and other means. And to commemorate this, in Deuteronomy 33:8-10, Levi, although he is still scattered, and this is something to notice about a principle of life, when God puts you in a straightjacket and you think oh, this is oppressive and here you are squished because God has narrowed it in on you, just remember, God is the master chess player and he always designs His straightjacket so all sorts of interesting things can be done inside them. You know, Houdini made his famous escape out of straightjackets and people who know him know he was a contortionist and he could do interesting things with his wrist and hand muscles inside straightjackets and handcuffs and get out of them very quickly. Although we don’t get out of God’s straightjackets, when He graces us He turns cursing into blessing, He will bless us right in the middle of that straightjacket and we think gosh, lots of room here now, but it’s the same straightjacket.

All right, Levi faces that problem; Levi is restricted from ever ruling politically in the nation. You say isn’t that horrible? How is God ever going to bless Levi without breaking His original curse? Ah, what He’s going to do, verse 10, “You will teach Jacob thine ordinances, and Israel thy law; they shall put incense before thee, and the whole burnt sacrifice upon thine altar.” Do you know what happened? The nation got in the land, they needed a priesthood. They needed some group of people that would take care of the Word of God, copy the scrolls, the Torah, take those scrolls around from village to village and teach the people the Word of God. They needed somebody to maintain the cultist around the temple; they needed all these services. Who was available? Levi, and so out of the cursing came fantastic blessing because what tribe got to be closest to God? Levi. And they started off cursed.

So when you feel like God crunches you, be careful of the whispering siren song of Satan, and he’s done this to thousands of Christians in our day; once you feel the wrath of God you begin to think well, I sinned so badly and I screwed up so completely that my life, frankly, isn’t worth anything any more. So I guess I’m just kind of relegated to a 15^th class Christian for the rest of my life. I’ve screwed up over here I’ve screwed up over here, he’s disciplined me, He’s taken this away from me, He’s taken that away from me, it’s all over. And so you pout for the rest of your life; you go into a blue flunk for the next 15 years, and that’s the way you live your life, a great testimony for Christ. Now that’s not the way God wants it and that’s not the way He treats us, and Levi is an example of this. Once Levi, just once, all it was, God looking, just once, is there any hope for this guy; yeah, look at that, he did something right, he was able to walk and breathe at the same time and so finally he got it together and God blessed him and gave him a position of authority, closest of all the tribes, it was the Levites that got a chance to work with the sacred vessels; no other tribe did, not even Judah. So there’s an example for your encouragement; don’t you let Satan discourage you, when God spanks He doesn’t spank to smash you, He spanks to edify you.

Back to Genesis 49; we’ve seen the first three sons. And we’ve seen defects in their male character. One, Reuben was the impetuous male; Simeon and Levi were impetuous but they were violently impetuous, they were the kind that go out and beat everybody up, the goon squad. Then Genesis 49:8-12 we find Judah. Now Judah is interesting because he gets the role of the firstborn as far as leadership is concerned. Notice the first verse, [8] “Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee.” Now all those are connotations of leadership. Number one, “he whom thy brethren shall praise,” means they respect him; that means he’s a leader. He’s got to be respectable to be the leader. Then it says, “your hand will be on the neck of your enemies,” he will be the military leader of the nation, leadership and military power in a fallen world go together. “…thy father’s children shall bow down before thee,” that’s honor, that’ reverence. So Judah receives the leadership.

Now if we’re a man and we’re sitting here looking at this text and we’re wondering about our souls and if this really represents how God works with men, then we ought to say well, let’s look and see what the heck was the difference between Reuben, Simeon and Levi over here, and Judah on the other hand, because if we could find out what this fellow did that this guy didn’t it would be a key of pleasing God as a man. So let’s look at Judah and what God is excited about in his soul.

Genesis 49:9, “Judah is a lion’s cub: from the prey, my son, you have gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion;” it says in the King James but I think it’s a feminine noun, “who shall rouse him up? [10] The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.”

Verses 9 and 10 tell us what God liked about Judah. Now let’s think over the many weeks in Sunday morning service we’ve gone through all these stories. We’ve gone from one story to another and from time to time I always mention Judah. Now today we’re going to take all that data, very quickly, in just a few minutes and tie it together for you in one package and show you these isolated instances and how the sovereignty of God was working in their lives to produce this lion.

First of all, when you work with a metaphor in the Bible, the first thing you want to do is don’t sweat the spiritual lesson. Get to the physical metaphor first, find out everything you can about the physical metaphor. Now what’s true of a lion? Jus think a minute; watching how a lion walks. Now lions can be very quick, they’re a heavy cat but boy, they can move it when they want to peel out. But if you generally watch a lion move, it is one of the most beautiful majestic things you’ve ever seen, the muscles ripple and the cat just walks along, perfect coordination, just a picture of controlled power. He’s got strength but it’s not abused, it’s not wasted. And the two metaphors, the characteristics of a lion that are mentioned in verse 9 is he’s come up from the prey, literally, it’s far better translated in your more modern translations and you’ll see, it was talking about he comes up from the prey, the idea is that the lion has gotten his prey, he’s at the end of the struggle and he’s relaxed.

So it’s a picture of a lion at a particular point in his life. It’s the lion after he struggles and he’s at rest. That’s what he’s saying to Judah; Judah, you’ve had all this struggle in your life, but Judah, you’ve learned. Here’s the lion who’s gone out on the hunt and he’s been victorious and he brings back the prey and there’s some confusion in the text here but it appears that the secondary metaphor is the mother lion who’s lying there, it’s a family lions, the father lion has gone out and he’s got the meat and he’s brought it back and the female lion is lying there, and there’s a cub also in the picture. Judah is very sensitive, incidentally, to the metaphor of the lion; the Israeli Air Force’s top fighter interceptor today is called Kfir which is named exactly for this, the lion cub. That’s the Hebrew word for lion cub. And the lion is the picture of controlled strength; he deploys when he needs to and when he doesn’t, he doesn’t.

Maybe I could get this across better if you could think of dogs for a moment. It’s always struck me peculiar about watching big dogs and little dogs. Ever notice the character difference; you see a very big well trained German shepherd and if he’s well trained he’ll sit there and I’ve seen them in New York City on the edge of a subway platform, the seeing eye dog, and I’ve seen little kids come up and pull the tail, pull the ears on that big dog and the dog would just sit there and take it, and here he is inches away from the subway platform, all he had to do was just one bite and this kid would evaporate. There’s no problem with power and strength, but here’s this German shepherd and he’s controlled and he stays there and he takes it and he takes it and he takes it.

Now contrast that behavior to some little yip-yap pup that’s always biting your ankles or biting holes in your sox, you know people are like that. The little people are always biting your ankle, criticizing and criticizing some little picky little point because the poor people aren’t big enough to look any higher than you ankles and therefore they can’t make any profound criticisms except little ones. But they bother you, they’re the kind of people you’d like to just step on them once in a while. Those are the little people that are generally a pain in the neck. And then your big people, they know they’re big and it really frankly doesn’t bother them, and you’ll notice that in life, the men who are basically stable have been men, they’ve played in the high school football team or something so they don’t have to go out and prove themselves all over again, and they basically are men who are stable. Those are the big men.

Well, this is the point of this metaphor of the lion, Judah is a man who has proved himself; he doesn’t have to go out here tomorrow and beat somebody up in the alley to show what a man he is. He’s proved that; but more important than just the physical side of his character is his moral side and that’s what I want to show you. Turn to Genesis 43:9-10. There were many instances in Judah’s life and by the way, when Judah is pictured as the lion and the man who inherits leadership, do you remember that chapter that tells you that Judah was just as big a sinner as all the rest of them? Genesis 38, remember the Tamar incident; that’s just to show you the grace of God. Judah had his shortcomings; every leader has his rebellious areas against God, always will, and Judah did.

But there was a difference between Judah basically and his brothers and Genesis 43:9-10, of all the events I think this one shows his lion-like character. Here he is, and you remember the scene was that the brothers were afraid to go down into Egypt again because they were afraid they were going to mess up with “The Man” down there that we later found out was Joseph, and his father is petrified, he doesn’t know what he’s doing either, and so here they are starving, their animals are dying of starvation out on the range because there’s no grass and everything is cratering and everybody is hand-wringing, what are we going to do what are we going to do kind of thing. And along comes, in verse 9-10, Judah.

And he says look, let’s go down there, verse 8 is where he says it, “Judah said unto Israel, his father, Send the lad with me, and we will arise and go do, that we may live and not die, both we, and you, and also our little ones. [9] I will be surety for him; of my hand shall thou require him: if I bring him not unto thee, and set him before thee, then let me bear the blame forever, [10] For unless we had lingered, surely now we had returned the second time.” In other words, what he’s saying, gentlemen, all we’re going around here is dilly-dallying and dilly-dallying and our food supply is getting less and less and less, and I understand, Jacob, my father, I understand you’re concerned with this. Look, I’ll take the little kid down with me and you can go kill me if you want. Now what character, what kind of moral trait does Judah show here? I say that he shows responsible initiative and that’s what God is primarily looking at when he’s looking at a man; he’s not looking at a goon like Samson. Samson had a big body and he had a very tiny spirit and the result was he was a hooligan, and that was his role, God used him to start wars, but that really wasn’t such an honorable profession.

So God doesn’t look at the Samson’s as the picture of the great man; the kind of man God looks at is the Judah type man, the lion, who is a man who has sinned, yes he does, but he’s responsible and when the chips are down he assumes responsibility and at least makes a try to do something to solve the problem, instead of worrying about it, instead of running way, instead of getting violent like Simeon and Levi, he’s basically a man who undertakes responsibility. See, number one trait, responsibility. Some of you men here run your businesses and you tell me all the time, yeah, if I could only get somebody responsible, talk about jobs, there’s plenty of jobs for somebody who wants responsibility; and that’s a problem, even with Christian young men, finding a responsible one who will grab a responsibility and day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out run with it. Instead we have the flaky types that get froth at the mouth for three or four weeks and I’m so great, the Lord led me to do this, the Lord led me to do that, fine; if the Lord led to do that how come you’re not on the job a year and a half later. Well, the Lord led me somewhere else.

Let’s look at Genesis 49, Judah is a lion because he learned responsibility, he was not a rebellious son, remember he honored his father, but he wasn’t afraid, either, to appeal to his father. He would come up when he thought that Jacob was wrong and say dad, I think you’re wrong and here’s why, and here’s what I suggest we do about it. Oh, Jacob said you’re right, go ahead, great, be my guest, and he did.

So now he’s rewarded and he’s rewarded two ways, verse 10, and then verse 11-10. In Genesis 49:10 his reward is Messianic. Here is a prophecy of the Lord Jesus Christ and here is what determines that the Messianic seed will now be passed through Judah. Why? Because in His Jewishness, now I don’t know how you can explain this other than there’s something here that’s going on that biologists haven’t found out yet but I’ve seen this time and again in Scripture and it just puzzles me, because we learn in school that there’s not such a thing as the inheritance of an acquired characteristic, yet what is the fundamental feature of all our natures but the sin nature. Isn’t this an acquired characteristic, and isn’t it inherited? And so if the sin nature can be inherited, I wonder if moral character can be inherited of some sort, some how. And so apparently Judah develops in the lineage of the Jew this lion-like nature that is sort of hidden there and at times breaks forth and will, of course, under the supernatural work of the virgin birth culminate in the Lord Jesus Christ, who in the book of Revelation is known as “the lion of the tribe of Judah.” This is why C. S. Lewis in the delightful children’s stories pictures Aslund, the Christ-type and of all the animals in the story he’s the lion. And you remember what the little girl says: and he’s not a tame lion either. That’s always the picture, you see, of God and His aseity, in His power, untamed by man.

Now Judah receives the scepter; now in the King James you see two words, “scepter” and “lawgiver,” they mean the same thing. I don’t know why they translated it “lawgiver” but if you ever read books on history and you can visualize a throne, here’s the king, and he’s sitting there and he has this staff and there’s usually an emblem up in the staff and the staff is usually… when he’s sitting on the throne it’s usually between his knees. Well, that’s what’s mentioned there, it’s the scepter of authority and it’s not just a short scepter, it’s a tall thing that touches the floor, and so when it says “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, or the lawgiver from between his feet,” it’s referring to this shaft which is the authority of his regal position in the kingdom. And it says it won’t “until Shiloh come,” now if you have a modern translation you can see there’s a lot of debate on the exact wording here but there is no debate on what the idea is and the idea, however, you translate the particulars, the idea is the Messiah and His kingdom, because at the end it says, “unto Him the gathering of the people will be,” meaning He will have eventually worldwide authority. Now there are leadership manuals upon leadership manuals upon leadership manuals written today for the corporations to run their show. Here is one of your leadership passages in the Scripture and it shows you what it takes to be a leader is this lion-like character. Judah historically shows it sinfully and godly. You don’t have to be a sinless person to have that trait; Judah had it.

Now verses 11-12 are somewhat difficult to appreciate because like the Song of Songs it’s highly metaphorical language and we look at it that’s kind of strange but let me try to show you what the logic is. “Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine;” well now if you were a poor farmer and you had a small vineyard, I guarantee you you wouldn’t be tying animals onto your grape vines; it takes the things five years to produce grapes anyway, and after you’ve pruned them and you’ve fertilized them and watered them, you don’t want some jerk donkey, some ass to walk through your grapevines. So obviously if he’s tying his donkey to the grapevine, what does it tell you about his grapevine? That he’s got so many he doesn’t sweat it. Wealth…wealth is what this metaphor is all about. Let’s go further, “he washed his garments in wine,” under what condition, besides being a candidate for the funny farm, would you break a few bottles of wine and fill your washing machine with it. Well, obviously if you had enough wine that it was cheap enough to be like water, only then would do that. So again, this is a metaphor of wealth. Verse 12, “His eyes shall be red with wine,” not talking about the morning after, this is talking about the… it’s an idiom for wealth, it’s presented in the vineyard terminology, the whole thing, except the last one, “and his teeth white with milk,” means he must wash his teeth with milk or something, he ran out of collate or something else. It’s the idea of all of the blessings that accrue to Judah.

Now let’s just back off for a moment and look at something. Let’s look at the obvious; we can get all hung up on the details but let’s just look at the obvious. Verse 9 is the character of this man who is responsible enough to inherit leadership. Verse 10, 11 and 12 show you the benefits of that kind of character. What are the two benefits primarily mentioned? The responsible man will get more responsibility and more opportunities; the same illustration we saw with Joseph. The world is so hurting for somebody that will assume responsibility you don’t have to be a genius, all you have to be is a responsible idiot and it will flow your way, just do a good job and pole will beat down the path to your door. And the second part is wealth; that doesn’t always follow but generally it does. Wealthy people are wealthy because they’ve learned how to make wealth. It’s kind of obvious and so our society kinds of punishes them, the graduated income tax, the wealthier you are the more evil you are, which translated the more productive you are the more evil you are. That shows you how we think in today’s society.

However, we want to conclude and I want to pull this together, particularly for the men. We talked about four men in this passage and we’re going to talk about more men in ensuing Sundays before we’re done with this. And not only are we talking about young men, we’re talking about the old man, Jacob, because here’s a man in his dying breath whose ruling his posterity. Now isn’t it striking that you can skim if you want to, down further into the passage and you can study verse after verse after verse and you see that in the dying moment this man is not talking about the weather, he’s not talking about his sheep business, he’s not even talking about his wife or really details of his family. He is talking about cosmic questions that extend to the end of history. He says verse 2, let me show you son, what will be your destiny to the last moments of history itself.

Now it’s my contention that the evangelical church today is not meeting the need of its men, and it’s not doing so, not because it’s sinful, it’s just that we are trying to awaken in the 20^th century, we’ve come from a severe damaged of the 20s and 30s when the liberals stripped us clean of everything we had and we’re trying to rebuild; if the Lord tarry maybe we can do it. But what we’re trying to do is regather Scriptural principles and one of the last ones that we seem to be gathering is how does God work with men? And you walk in the average Christian bookstore and what do you find for the men? How to be a better husband; how to rule your home better and all the rest of it. Now that’s true, but it’s my contention that man will not be motivated to do that unless he has first met a God who can be a hero to him. Men need heroes. And that’s what motivates men.

Consider the great acts of history; at critical moments in the battle it’s been guys that have gone out and died because of some man and what he said; they have had a hero, a man who they could follow to hell and back again if that was necessary. And you get a man who sees a hero and you’ve got his allegiance and you’ve got his heart, every time. Now the Bible knows this because there’s a strange terminology that later in the Old Testament prophets occurs; it’s one of God’s names; it’s called in the Hebrew, El Gabor, and El Gabor literally translated means the hero God, or the heroic God; it means something that turns men on. And when a man is turned on and he sees the big picture, then he can come back and work with the details, but what happens, I think, is that men become truncated, cut off, frustrated because they never have this outlook and they feel they want to be majestic, they want to worship something majestic and every time they get their wrists slapped because they’ve got to do this and they’ve got to do something else. These are responsibilities, yes, but there’s never a big enough reason why, why do we have to do this? And so the Bible shows God approaching men in very interesting ways. Here the old man is discussing the large elements of history. Think of what a dinnertime conversation must have been. Yeah, sure, they talked about the soccer practice with Simeon and Levi versus the Shechemites or something. I’m sure that came up at the table, they weren’t always talking cosmic questions, but at times they would, and they’d gather these guys together and here’s one of them at the death bed now… the death bed, and they’re talking big questions. What a marvelous conversation to be around, just sit and watch these men bat around the universe.

Do you know why I know that men want this, not only because I’m a man and I like that, but I’ve watched the men as I’ve taught, right here in this auditorium, I watched some of you guys when I was dealing with Genesis 10 and 11, we started about the God who moves continents around, the tower of Babel incident and some of the men just came out of their pews, I could have had an invitation right then. Now why was that? Women weren’t particular sent by that but the men were. And then the other Wednesday night when we had Mr. Hanson here and he was talking about the nature of the universe and he dealt with the idea the basis of the earth may be the center of the whole universe; it’s his belief it is, that the earth doesn’t even rotate, the universe rotates around the earth. And then he started giving the physics of the problem, the equations of motions, he was talking about the all these neat things. I walked back at the back of this auditorium after that was all over and I looked forward because I like to just kind of from the back sometimes watch what’s going on and here was, standing at this first pew, and around him were three concentric circles of all men, not one woman there, now it wasn’t that I think the women hated the guy, it was just that something he said brought something out of the men.

And I recently had this pointed out to me, it was course at DTS, that and the professor that taught the course was discussing wisdom literature in the book of Job and he noticed a marvelous thing in this passage, it’s so obvious I don’t know why all the times I’ve read Job it never dawned on me; Job is an illustration of a male that is crushed, a male who has to be motivated to pick himself up off the ground and do something, a man who’s been shattered, his business is shattered, his health is broken, his wife wants him to commit suicide, yak, yak, yak, yak, yak. His children are lost, some of them killed. So if you ever had a gooed up wreckage of a man it’s Job. So now, here comes God and He’s got to deal with a man, person to person now. Now how does God deal with a busted up man? He comes and He gives him an exam, 70 questions Job, fill-in type. And He starts talking about Job, and what are the 70 questions about? How many times do you spank your child when he drops the ball… NO! None of those questions are even asked.

When God goes to Job to try to pick up and heal this wreckage of a man, the questions He asks from Job, why don’t you come out here and watch this lightening display. Ever think of the electrical charges I zap between these cumulonimbus clouds, I want you to come out here and look at the dew on the grass, ever think of how that moisture gets there, hydrological transport systems in the atmosphere, I want you to consider this. And He just whips out one after another, 70 questions about everything in the universe, the atmosphere, the sea, the climate. You read those questions, the animals, did you ever wrestle with a dinosaur, you know, kind of odd for us but in Job’s day apparently the dinosaurs were not yet extinct after the flood because there are dinosaur descriptions in that chapter, it’s unavoidable. And He says you know when you go out hunting, and he describes hunting the different kind of animals, and the guy’s sitting there, yeah, yeah, yeah, and finally, after 70 of these questions Job gets it all together.

Now would you tell me why it is that when God goes to pick up a busted man He uses that strange approach. I suggest there’s a reason. God knows how men think better than the men know how they think, and what a man needs is a majestic deity to love, to worship, and be his hero. And if a guy can have a hero, it seems like he can take the other things of life. Job got it all together once he saw that point; as a man, he moved right on with no sweat, fine, because he had a God big enough for him, a God he didn’t have to be ashamed of, a God he’d die for. That’s the kind of God that the Bible wants to present to man and I insist that that is the kind of God that is not being presented to most men in evangelical churches today.

So with all that in Job, let’s sing for our hymn today How Great Thou Art….