Clough Genesis Lesson 99

Jacob’s deathbed prophetic words continue – Genesis 49:13-33

 

Beginning at verse 13, “Zebulun shall dwell at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for a haven of ships; and his border shall be unto Zidon.  [14] Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens;
[15] And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute. [16] Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. [17] Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that bites the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward. [18] I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD. [19] Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last. [20] Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties. [21] Naphtali is a hind let loose: he gives goodly words.

 

[22] Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall; [23] The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: [24] But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel), [25] Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb: [26] The blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills: they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.

 

[27] Benjamin shall consume as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil. [28] All these are the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that their father spoke unto them, and blessed them; every one according to his blessing he blessed them. [29] And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, [30] In the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying place. [31] There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. [32] The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth. [33] And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.”

 

This is a section of Genesis toward the end that is a fitting termination for the entire book.  This book, of course, is one of beginnings; it is a book that covers every phase of life and therefore obviously not to be left out is that particular phase of life of the death and dying.  Death and dying are an unpopular topic because they force us to recall the extreme sensitivity of life, the fact that it’s tenuous, the fact that it can be eliminated in a moment of time and creatures don’t like to think about that, particularly fallen creatures.  And so there’s a natural aversion to dealing with these principles of death and dying. 

 

We so far have dealt with three of these and these are quite important because there’s a battle for your mind today in the world at large between the Lord Jesus Christ and Satan.  Each has an articulated philosophy; each has a position on every issue of life, there is no neutrality and though you may be very sincere, you can follow unconsciously and almost unwillingly in one or the other.  And therefore we want to show how the Word of God copes with each way of life and copes with it in a non-neutral way so that either we adhere to the Scriptures or we rebel against the Scriptures but there is no neutral ground. 

 

The first principle that we have studied is the principle that the dying have a right to know; this is expressed several times in the Scriptures and it’s one that is important; a dying person has got to be able to cope with matters in his dying moments and he can’t cope with those, in fact you cut them off from trying to cope with those things in their life that need to be coped with, you cut them off and you steal from them if you do not let the dying person know that, in fact, he is dying. 

 

A second principle that we have studied is that the dying person, that these people have a right to remain lucid as long as possible, so that they are able to verbally communicate with other people, they are able to verbally communicate with God.  And you see, again we rob the dying of this privilege if we drug them, anesthetize them into unconsciousness.  Granted, sometimes pain medication is obviously needed, obviously!  All we’re saying is let’s postpone it as long as possible while a person is trying to come to grips with spiritual issues. 

 

Finally, the third principle that we’ve worked on the last two or three weeks is that the dying, particularly the heads of home, have a right to rule their posterity.  This is one that seems a little strange but in Genesis 49 Jacob is ruling his posterity from his deathbed in two ways.  One way is through the allocation of inheritance; the other way is through giving instructions for his own funeral. Both of these are illustrations of the dying generation giving information that applies to the living surviving generation. 

 

Now over against these three principles we have the modern views, views that I have seen again and again as I’ve visited in hospitals and as I’ve been active in situations involving death, just experience.  And some of you today are in the medical profession, you’re nurses or doctors or other people, training to be, and you know that this kind of thing goes on.  Those of you who have had severe illness in your family, you’ve seen these principles violated.

 

Let’s look at some of the implications.  On the other side, over against the first principle, that the dying have a right to know they’re dying goes this strange line of logic: well, now, there’s so and so and so and so has terminal illness, now we’d better not tell him that he really has terminal illness because if we tell him that then that’s going to create all kinds of psychological problems and that’s going to complicate the situation, and they may go into hysteria, how can we know that they’re going to be able to cope with that situation?  And so therefore the sovereignty over control of the knowledge of true death is conveyed out of the hands of the person who’s dying over into the hands of the self-appointed experts at the deathbed scene.  But you see, the fallacy in this line of logic is how do you know that the person can’t cope with that situation, and more importantly, even if they can’t it still may be God’s will to let them know that they are dying; there may be needed repentance, and therefore, if we withhold information we’re opposing the Spirit of God at that situation and we’re opposing it supposedly out of good motive, but those motives aren’t good; we have to trust to God; “speak the truth in love.”  This is what the Scriptures say and this is what the Scriptures mean, and that includes speaking the truth in love when it comes to terminal illness with a dying friend. 

 

So we have a waged war here, do the dying have a right to know or not.  If we say they do we are confessing thereby our trust that God is sovereign in the circumstance, that if I do tell this person that they’re going to die in, say three or four weeks, or there’s a good probability, you can’t ever prophesy but you can tell them that there’s a good probability and they flip out or they do some crazy thing, that’s not my responsibility.  My responsibility is to make the truth known and they are responsible before God how to respond to the truth.  

Now a second principle that opposes the Scriptural one is that the dying have a right to remain lucid and I gave you some illustrations of where that isn’t followed.  But let’s just look at the implications if you reverse that statement.  The implication that the dying do not have a right… do not have a right to remain lucid follows from a materialist view of sickness and death and disease, and the materialist view of man is just matter and motion, and if he’s merely matter and motion it follows quite quickly that the ultimate issue is pain, physical pain, and therefore at all odds we have to cope with physical pain, that is the most important thing about that person laying there.  Is it?  From a scriptural point of view man is not mere matter and motion, man has a soul and he therefore has spiritual concerns, and therefore those spiritual concerns have to be dealt with.  Prayer may be needed; forgiveness to other people in the immediate body of survivors may be needed.  What do you do?  Do you cut the person off from that?  You do if you think that pain is the ultimate enemy.  We don’t say that; as Christians we have to say the ultimate enemy of man isn’t physical pain, the ultimate enemy of man is the unfulfilled wile of God.

 

A third principle that opposes the biblical principle is the dying have a right to rule their posterity.  Now this is a matter of law in the United States, in the reverse sense.  All courts of law that I know of refuse to permit finality in the hands of the dying and there may be good legal reasons for doing this, I just observe it.  There was a very famous case in American history when this worked against the Christian cause.  We go back into the last part of the 17th century and the early part of the 18th century.  In what was the Massachusetts Commonwealth the Puritans had made a mistake; their first mistake was starting public education because they thought always that the public would be controlled by Christian principles and in that the erred. 

 

But their second mistake was they let the public own the church building and so you can go through the old, old towns of New England, particularly in the central part of Massachusetts and you drive by and you can see these churches to this day; some have been converted into general stores, others into museums, one or two are still in use but you’ll see these buildings and that is one of the great tragedies of New England history because what happened in those buildings was this: the Congregation­al­ists who at the time were strong Puritan believers, conservative, believed the Bible and so on, these people controlled the way the town voted, and how the town voted went the church.  Well, as the Puritan era went on they got weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker until they lost the 51% control and then the Unitarians and the Deists took over property after property after property in New England; it was just a matter of a town vote and all of a sudden, all these thousands of dollars worth of church property and the libraries that were in the buildings went immediately into the hands of the Unitarians and the Deists.  It was a tragic, tragic maneuver. 

 

Well, some of the families that had given money to those buildings, their grandchildren went to the courts of the State of Massachusetts and they sued because they said this building is not being used for what grandpa said it was supposed to be used for; and the went to court and the court’s verdict was the dead hand does not rule present property, and thus was born a stream of logic that says that the people who have passed on cannot control their own wealth.

 

This was repeated in another tragedy in American history and that was the endowments behind many of the early colleges in America.  Places like Harvard University, whether you know it or not, were originally created by the Puritans to train young men to teach the Word of God.  Thus, Harvard’s first courses were Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic; that was the purpose of Harvard University.  And finally as philosophy shifted then these great endowments, thousands and thousands of dollars that had been invested to make Harvard University function now came under the control of the succeeding generations that defied the faith of their fathers and then again, lawsuit after lawsuit on the part of the grandchildren of these wealthy families.  No dice; the dead hand does not rule present property.  And so was born the fallacy of endowment, and this is always a case and this is why today the conservative movement in evangelical Christianity has small, largely speaking, small property holdings and very little endowments.  And that’s the reason; the lesson learned from the 17th and 18th centuries that the dead hand does not rule the present property. Here we find, however, that the dying do have a right to rule present property and that’s the Scriptural position.  If you cut this right off then you cut off the right of a person to be a dominion person. 

 

We’ve seen so far in Genesis 49:1-2 we’ve seen principles 1 and 2 function.  Jacob, the old man, does know that he is dying.  Obviously he knows that he is dying because he takes precautions to call his sons to his death bed before he dies.  There’s no duplicity, there’s no conspiracy in the home, oh, don’t tell father Jacob that he’s dying, he might get upset, why he might have a stroke and then he really would die.  See, that kind of thinking; that is wrong.  That is un-faith, that is not trusting the Lord who told us to speak the truth in love.  Well, Jacob has been told that he’s dying, and by the way, if you’ve been around dying people, nine times out of ten they know they’re dying, intuitively they know they’re dying so all you do is you create tremendous impediments to true communications, that’s all you’ve accomplished,  you haven’t kept any information from them at all.

 

The second principle we’ve seen in verses 1-2 and that is that Jacob, the old man, is lucid; he thinks, true he’s not discussing the latest football score, but he has more important things to discuss than the latest football score; he has eternity to discuss; he has the future of his name to discuss in his sons.  That is a discussion point.  And now from verse 3 onward we have this third principle and that is that he is ruling his firstborn.  He’s going to do this two ways.  In the first part of these verses he’s going to do it by his allocation of inheritance.  The old man has that right, he has the right to give an inheritance, he has the right to take away the inheritance.  Under the Old Testament law and incidentally outside of the Old Testament generally this was done through allocating to the firstborn son two portions of the normal split.  So if you had three boys in your family then you would divide your property into four parts, not three parts and you’d give two parts to your oldest son, one part to your second born son and one part to your third born son and that’s the way the property would be broken up. 

 

Why, you say, is that favoring the firstborn?  No, the firstborn son has to have part of his property because he’s going to use that as investment capital in his calling.  You see, they didn’t have large banks and the loans that you could get in those days was tremendously high interest, almost as high as the ones we have today, and so therefore the people, if they ever wanted to progress in business, it was a family proposition.  The families were your capital building basis in the ancient world. So these first sections of property all had to do with capital assets for that boy’s property.  The reason the firstborn boy was given this extra hunk of cash or landholding was because he had the additional responsibility of taking care of his parents when they were old.  And the idea of two parts prevented his capital from getting liquidated and destroyed by working with his parents.  Many families have had that experience.  I had that in my family.  My family inheritance went down the drain in medical bills, simply because my father had to take care of his parents and my mother had to take care of her parents and there was no extra money, that was it.  So you can just make mincemeat out of a family inheritance by medical bills.  And many families have lost thousands and thousands of dollars this way so it’s a very real concern. 

And this is why in the Old Testament there was that protection; the firstborn, since he also bore the responsibility of caring for his aged parents he also had to inherit that much more money.  But as we see, the firstborn son wasn’t always the one to get the firstborn rights; the firstborn rights were given to the son who was spiritually qualified.  And that’s what Jacob is doing in this chapter, as he goes from one son to the next son to the next son to the next son, he is allocating the inheritance on the basis of each son’s spiritual qualification. Hence, Genesis 49 becomes a tremendous study of men, of their weaknesses and of their strengths because this is the old man who has had lots and lots and lots of experience at watching boys and he’s going to now give the evaluation of what he likes in his sons and what he doesn’t like in his sons.  He’s quite sensitive to this because he knows, as every parent knows, that your own sin nature, embarrassing as it is, it comes out in all your sons.  And that’s why sometimes children are so frustrating to you, because you know they are?  Little mirrors, here you are daddy.  So parents basically have this kind of ambiguous feeling toward their children, they love them but then they’re kind of yeah, I know where you got that from.

 

So Jacob is looking at each one of his sons in that light.  Then after he does that, he’s going to show a second way, not only by the allocation of inheritance but he’s also going to show, okay, we’re going to have complete directions on the funeral, complete preplanning of the funeral.  Again, these are topics that people don’t like to talk about but they’re topics in the real world.  What is more certain in your life than the fact you’re going to die?  I don’t know of many things that are more certain and yet what the thing that we always want to avoid talking about?  Exactly the thing that is the most certain.

 

Let’s review some of these boys.  In verse 3-3 we studied the firstborn son, it was Reuben. Then we studied Simeon and Levi, and then we studied Judah.  Each of these boys shows a kind of male that exists.  The first one, Reuben shows the kind of guy that basically is impatient; he just has a streak of tremendous impatience.  By itself that isn’t bad.  As the New Jersey dairy has a slogan, our milk is not given by contented cows, they want to do better.  And so people who are absolutely content basically do not make good leaders. There has to be some impatience to motivate to action. 

 

But the trouble with the Reuben’s of this world is that as he did in verse 4, he tries to usurp his father’s position before his father is ready to give him his position.  That’s the significance of that clause you see, “because you went up to thy father’s bed” in verse 4.  Now while obviously a sexual sin is meant the sex part of it isn’t the real issue.  The real issue is that by seizing control of the concubine he is seizing control of his father’s position.  This can be illustrated later on in the ancient kings.  To claim the throne you didn’t have to walk into the treasury and rip off the crown and put it on your head and walk around town and say hey, I’m the new king. That wasn’t the way you did it.  The way you did it, one of the ways was you maneuvered yourself into the king’s harem and say I control this woman, this woman, this woman, this woman, this woman, this woman, and this woman, you just sort them out and take your pick and if you could do that and get away with it, that was tantamount to claiming the throne. So that’s the cultural motif in verse 4, it’s deeper than just a mere sexual sin. 

 

So we say, therefore, that Reuben was the impatient one; he wants to stand in his father’s position before it’s his right to stand in his father’s position and you see this today in many, many different kinds of young guys; they think they know more than they really do and therefore they always want to assume a position that they have no right to assume; they do not have the experience, they do not have the background to assume roles ahead of time and so we have this tendency in Christian circles, we have it in non-Christian circles.  Oftentimes they are allowed to do this because of the lack of people that ought to be qualified and in most cases the Reuben’s always wind up ruining the system.  And you’ll notice in verse 4 what the prophecy is about this kind of a guy.  If he doesn’t change and he continues to act this way, “you shall never excel,” it’s a sentence of doom.  That kind of a male behavior is never going to excel in this world because the guy who’s always trying to grab a position ahead of the time when God wants him to have that position is never equipped, he can’t function inside an authority structure and he’s going to be one very frustrated man for all his life. 

 

The second two boys, Simeon and Levi, had a little different problem. Rather than impatience being the problem, we would say they were impetuous.  They were violent, they were vengeful.  Now in one sense they were right; after all, their sister had been raped, that’s the incident in verses 6-7, their sister had been raped and they wanted to do something to correct the situation.  Their standards were right, they were right in wanting to do something about applying those standards but what they finally wound up doing was taking the prerogative of the fourth divine institution, which is the state, the government, and saying I am not just going to defend myself but I am going to execute judgment that is only the prerogative of the state.  That’s vengeance; this is why in the New Testament you have two chapters tied together the way they are: Romans 12 says “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”  Now many Christians will read that passage and they’ll say oh, that’s just idealism, that really doesn’t work in this world.  Wrong!  Because Romans 12 has to be tied with Romans 13 and in Romans 13 that tells you how God executes vengeance.  If “Vengeance is Mine, and I will repay,” the guy who’s saying here, and he’s saying okay, I’m going to trust the Lord and here You are Lord, I’m giving you the right to execute vengeance, there it is, all laid out for you, if that’s the situation how can he expect God in his day, in his time execute vengeance?  Answer: Romans 13, the sword of the state.  So the state has the right for vengeance, not the individual.

 

Well, the Levi’s and the Simeon’s want to beyond self-defense and want to go all the way over into the realm of executing judgment and they’re wrong.  Where do you see the Simeon and Levi type men today?  They are the terrorists; they are the revolutionaries of our time and you’ll hear more about terrorists and revolutionaries.  The technology of our world is increasing and someday, horrible though it may be and what an awful scenario and every security force in the world fears the day but let’s face it, it doesn’t take much more than a first year graduate student in physics with the proper materials to assemble a nuclear device.  Now imagine what a terrorist could do with a nuclear device planted downtown in a major metropolitan area and says this nuclear device can be radio activated and I will trigger this thing if you don’t do this, this, this and this.  It’d be a tremendous awful nightmare scenario but it is possible.  It’s possible right now for one single terrorist with one vial to immobilize this entire city, there’s just one or two places in this city, all he has to do is break something, and boom down goes the city and you with it, all of us.  That is how vulnerable our society is to the Simeon’s and the Levi’s; these kind of boys can’t be allowed to have power and this is why in verse 7 you have the father’s discipline upon that behavior pattern in the male.  Whenever you see these kinds of guys, the answer is divide them and scatter them.  It’s quite easy to do because they are such vindictive individuals they can’t get along among themselves and so therefore they tend to fragment and become impotent.

 

Then we have the fourth son who represents a third kind of male and he is the responsible type.  Judah, you notice in verse 10, received the Messianic promise; the Messianic promise of leadership is not given to Reuben, rightfully the firstborn, he’s given to Judah.  Now why is it given to Judah?  Because Judah was not totally moral, Genesis 38 tells you that; Judah, it wasn’t that he was morally perfect but the point was that when the chips were down and somebody needed to do something, a decision had to be made, somebody said hey, the buck stops here, I’ll assume the responsibility and I’m going to do something.  That was Judah.  And so since Judah was the responsible one, following the law of Scripture, responsible men always get more responsibility.  In any organization, all other things being equal of course, you watch it, responsibility will always flow to the guys who are responsible.  Not necessarily to the guys that are the smartest, not necessarily to the guys that are big party boys, but responsibility will flow to the men who are responsible, who do their job, maybe they’re not the shining stars and the great heroes.

 

It says Judah was a lion but that doesn’t mean that he was physically big; Judah simply was lion-hearted, that’s what that lion means in verse 9.  Lion-hearted means that he was basically big.  Why was he big?  Because he had a good relationship with God and that made his soul big, and men who are big are like the lion.  I used the illustration of the dog and said if you want to see this operate in the animal realm it’s very much like it operates in the human realm, you watch how a big dog, well-trained big dog works versus a small dog.  And you walk around among a big dog, a big dog is not threatened because he could take your arm off if he wanted, and so he kind of sits there and looks at you, if you want to pet the head fine, pet the head, but be careful; that’s the way the relationship is. And you go around some little yip yap and he’s always biting your ankle.  And this is the same thing with people, if you ever notice this.  The people who have basically accomplished things in life, who are basically confident, don’t get agitated over every little thing but your little people are always the nitpickers, they’ve always got something to criticize this and criticize that, and when you really spread out the criticism and lay it out on the table to see what it’s all about, it’s usually trivial and the reason is because they’re trivial.  Trivial people can’t think of anything profound so that’s why they have to criticize something; they’ve got to do something with their brain.  So watch the difference between little dogs and big dogs. 

 

So we have the four sons; now let’s look at the rest of these people.  Notice each boy is known by his father and the reason is because responsibility is something that is brought up in the family.  This is our chart of the various sectors of life.  There’s the first divine institution that deals with responsibility; the second one, marriage; the third one family; the fourth one the state.  And in the third institution of parents and family, that’s where authority is learned and Judah, while he wasn’t a doormat, that’s a caricature of Biblical authority, Judah did want to do something and he appealed to two major authorities in his life.  One was his own father when his father was stymied, he just seemed to be paralyzed into indecision, Judah said dad, we’ve got to do something, we’re starving; now send me down to Egypt, I’ll bear the responsibility but let’s get the show on the road. There he was conscious of his father’s authority, he wasn’t disobedient, he wasn’t disrespectful but he said dad, we’ve got to do something.  He appealed to authority.

 

And the second appeal that Judah made was to quote “The Man” in Egypt which really was Joseph we found out later, and even there Judah was alive, he was vigorous, he was not a doormat, but at the same time he respected Joseph’s rank. So Judah inherits the authority and it’s interesting that verse 20, the scepter, is the symbol of authority.  So not only does he get responsibility but he gets authority.  Authority and discipline go together and they are both products of the home. 

 

Now it’s interesting, in a very recent issue of U. S. News & World Report, there’s an interview with General Robert Barrow, commandant of the U. S. Marine Corps, and General Barrow is asked to comment on today’s Marine recruits, since we have a few here in the congregation.  “General Barrow, is it more difficult to train Marines today than it was 20 years ago?”  His answer, “Oh yes indeed, if I may talk about something that troubles me about our country it’s the family.  I see serious problems in that great institution called the American family.  I don’t know what the causes are, whether it’s high mobility, the great quest for material things, disinterest in religion or what, but not many families have disciplined children and that’s where it all starts.” 

 

Then the reporter asked General Barrow a second question, he said, “Well, if the problem is in the home why do you guys, when you recruit, place such emphasis on the fellows getting their high school diplomas before they go in.”  The background for this being the Marines at one time permitted non high school graduates in, during the bad days of the early 70s and they were very sorry they ever opened the door to that group.  Here’s what he responded by saying: “It isn’t the piece of paper the high school diploma that means something; it’s an indication of something else more important.  If a recruit has a diploma the chances are he comes from a stable home where there’s at least enough love, concern, and encouragement for him to want to finish high school, and conversely very often the fellow who’s dropped out of school probably came from a home where it’s chaotic, broken, even though the mother and the father may physically still be there.  Back in the early 70s I talked to many of these youngsters,” at that time General Barrow was commandant of the Paris Island Base, “because we had to discharge many of them, just kept discharging them because they couldn’t make it and it bothered me because we were putting another notch on each of these boy’s failure sticks.  And I’d ask myself, God, what is going on here.”  And so they go on to compare discipline then and discipline now. 

 

And so the reporter asked him another question.  “Well what happens when you take boys that have no discipline and you put them into the Marines?  How do they take to that?  He says, and this is interesting, “Most of them grab it like they have a vitamin deficiency; they want it.  That’s s surprise, but they really do.  Despite some inadequacy of background they have a thirst for discipline.  I think there are two things that motivate young men to want to become a Marine; both of them probably in his subconscious mind.  One is he wants to prove his manliness and one way to do that is through discipline; self-discipline is in my judgment the basis of all manliness; if he can come to us and become a disciplined individual, meeting our high standards for instant willing obedience to orders, he is satisfying one of his own requirements.”  And it goes on to describe a second thing.  He says, “Second, the Marine Corps is not a religion but it’s sort of religious like, and I believe that self-denial is the basis of much of religion.  People really want to believe in something; make a commitment and a sacrifice, so they come to us and they make a sacrifice, they give up all the long hair, they give up their funny clothes, they give up their loud music, they give up their civilian kind of freedom to be a Marine and they make a commitment.”  And he goes on to describe this as flowing out of a basic home situation.

 

So the dynamics of Genesis 49 fit the present world we’re looking at.  Let’s look, beginning at verse 13 and see all the other sons; we’ve studied four of the key sons but now we want to look at the rest of them.  Some names you will be familiar with; some names you will not be familiar with.  And all of these names, incidentally, are names that describe something of what the prophecy is about; like Zebulun means dwelling and he says, “Zebulun shall dwell at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for a haven of ships; [and his border shall be unto Zidon.]”  So we interpret verse 13 to mean Zebulun kind of men are your natural made businessmen.  They are the traders, they are the little kids in high school that by the time that in the sophomore or freshman year they’ve already got a business trading pencils or something, they’re just natural born businessmen, and that’s Zebulun.

 

The nest one is Issachar; [14, “Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens;
[15] And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto tribute.”]  Issachar is the kind of man who is a hard worker but he’s basically docile; these are the kind of men who sometimes are the most hard working men in the community, they are guys that will work, work, work, work, work, work, work, and then after 30 years have nothing to show for their work, they are still at the same level, there’s no zeal for promotion, there’s no zeal for advancement, and that’s why it in ends, “he bowed his shoulder to bear and he became a servant” or a slave.  It’s not that Issachar is a lazy man, he’s not lazy, he’s a very hard worker but he just never seems to desire greater responsibility; he has no initiative, in other words.

 

Another man, verses 16-18 is Dan.  This chart will show you where some of these men are located because the physical location of the men are their inheritance.  This is problematical, you’ll notice the verse says you will be by the sea, the best information we have from the text is that Zebulun settled here in the center of the valley of Jezreel, which means he never got to the sea and it’s just problematical whether he did and we just don’t have a record of it.  Not much is known about him.  Dan settled along here; the word “Dan” means judgment, and it’s interesting, you’ll notice in verse 16, “Dan shall judge, [his people, as one of the tribes of Israel. [17] Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that bites the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”] Well, one of the most famous judges of the Bible came from the tribe of Dan; Dan was a man who meant he was a freedom fighter and the man’s name was Samson.  Samson was out of the tribe of Dan.  But also in verse 17 you find something disturbing because if you look at verse 17 you find a very definite Satan motif to this particular Dan and this is interesting because Stan will usually use false consciences to gain entrée. Satan never walks up to you with a sign that says hey, do you want to sin?  Red coat, pitch fork, that’s not how Satan approaches.  Satan always approaches under the guise of doing something good.  And this is why the very person, Dan, who’s involved in judgment, is very close to Satan and the tribe of Dan was the first tribe in Jewish history to become involved, officially, in idolatry.  So there’s the future of Dan. 

 

Dan also was such a problem that in verse 18 you have an interruption in the text.  [18. “I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD.”]   You go through this and here’s dying Jacob on his bed and he’s going from one boy to the other, apparently they’re all around his bedside, and he’s just pointing to one boy and he’s saying this, this, this, this and then he goes to the next son, this, this, this, and now he comes to Dan and he starts to describe what’s going on with Dan and then he stops; and what you have in verse 18 is an interruption, it’s a prayer, so apparently what the old man is doing is he sees what’s going on and is going to happen to that son and his progeny and he stops right there in going around the bedside and he says, “Lord, I wait for thy salvation.”  In other words, it makes him mindful for the need for God’s saving grace.  The word “salvation” in verse 18 is one of those firsts in the Bible, the first time it occurs in this kind of a context in all of God’s Scripture.  It is when he’s face to face with the horrible possibility that evil will come into his own family, the he says, O Lord, I wait for thy salvation.

 

[19] “Gad, a troop shall overcome him: [but he shall overcome at the last].”  Gad is the kind of man who is tenacious; Gad settled over here on the east side of the Jordan River, and of course when the Arabs would come over, any time to attack the Jews, guess who they hit first—Gad.  So Gad was always in a situation involving being oppressed, that’s why the verse starts out by saying, “a troop shall overcome him,” but in the end, he will overcome them.  That’s the kind of guy that’s not the shining light, he’s not the hero, he’s not the most bright guy in the class or the greatest athlete on the team but he’s the fellow that just keeps on, keeps on, keeps on, keeps on, keeps on and he finally makes it.  He out perseveres his opponents.

 

Asher, here’s another kind of fellow; Asher obviously, you read verse 20, [“Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal dainties.”] it’s talking about agricultural prosperity; we have quite a few of the men like that in this part of the country; they’re men who love the soil, men who are emotionally linked to the soil; men who can’t get the land out of their heart.  They want that land, they’re rooted to the land and they want to care for the land, they want to see the land produce.  It is the farmer heart that is just inborn in some men, and no matter what happens they still are farmers at heart. 

 

Naphtali is hard, I’m not sure how to interpret verse 21, [“Naphtali is a hind let loose: he gives goodly words.”], the last part of it says “he gives skillful words,” and I do know that Barak came out of Naphtali and he was tied in with prophecy in Judges 5 but whether that means the prophets will come out of Naphtali, there’s a possibility, but then the metaphor, “a hind let loose” would indicate independent spirit.  So this probably is a fellow who is basically his own man and operates independently.  I’m not sure of that interpretation though.

 

Genesis 49:22-26 is Joseph.  Now, as your eye skims down, if you have a modern translation you’ll see this better, you’ll notice that just one verse per boy, or maybe two or three verses per boy, except for two and who are they?  One of the boys is Judah, verse 8, the second boy is Joseph, verse 22.  Both those boys are given extra blessings.  Judah inherits the leadership role of the firstborn; Joseph inherits the economic blessings of the firstborn. [22, “Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall; [23] The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: [24] But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel), [25] Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies under, blessings of the breasts, and of the womb: [26] The blessings of thy father have prevailed above the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the everlasting hills: they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.

 

Interestingly in history if we replace this map which dates 1100 BC with another map that dates approximately two centuries later, we see what happened to the nation Israel.  This nation divided and became known as Judah and Israel, southern kingdom, northern kingdom.  This actual division occurred in 930, somewhat after the time of that chart.  Now notice the name Judah, and I want you to look at this map just long enough so your eye mentally traces the outline of the territory called Judah.  Get that fixed in your mind; now I’m going to change the map with the original allocation of the tribes and notice which tribes are now absorbed.  Here’s Judah, he remains but Simeon and Benjamin no longer show; they have been dominated and absorbed by Judah.  All right, all the other tribes, here Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, Zebulun, Naphtali, Asher, all these tribes are known as Israel or sometimes Ephraim, the son of Joseph.  So in place of these tribes, you now have these tribes, two.  And there you have the outplaying of history. 

 

Now look at the dates and now I want you to perform with me a thought experiment, in your mind’s eye of your own imagination, involving you personally and your own family.  Here’s the experiment.  Visualize yourself digging through your own family records and you go back and you find your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great grandfather and you have this family tree, your family tree laid out on the table and you go all the way back to 900 AD.  So there’s your great-great, great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather back there and you discover in the archives of you family records that you’ve discovered from somewhere, you find that this old great-great, great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather prophesied or said that you would be in a certain profession and today you’re in that profession. 

 

Now just think of the effect this would have on you, if you knew that 900 years ago one of your forefathers said that this would be the trend of your family, suppose the name, Smith, for example, comes out of Smith, the family name was derived from the middle ages, these people were actively involved in a skill and they came to be known as Smith because they were smiths, that was their skill.  And let’s suppose for the sake of argument that has basically been the industry of your family.  And back in 900 AD there was somebody that said this will be the main occupation of my sons, and it’s turned out to be that way.  Okay, visualize that and now ask yourself this question:  What does that do to the way you think about your family unit.  If you think that your present is shaped in the past by your great-great, great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather 900 years prior and what he basically said has explained event after event after event after event in your own home, doesn’t that build you a sense of solidarity with the past; doesn’t that strengthen you sense of how important your particular family line is.  Doesn’t that plug you into history?  You see, that’s the way the Bible views things and that’s what you’re looking at in this chapter.  Jacob is dominating history, he’s ruling his posterity. 

 

All right, verse 27, he goes to the last boy, Benjamin.  Benjamin is said to be a cruel man and a ruler.  And later on Benjamin expresses this nature; you can read it for yourself in Judges, the last part of the chapters.  [27, “Benjamin shall consume as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.”]

 

So verses 3-27 deal with the old man ruling his posterity by allocating inheritance.  Now verses 28-33 he does something that all too few people are doing today and that is, he’s making specific provisions for his own burial and his own funeral.  Now I’m not getting commissions from the local funeral parlor, believe me, but this is a portion of the Scripture that is a wisdom portion, and we have to confess, this is a model.  Let’s look at it.  Verse 19, “And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite,” he specifies where he is going to be buried.  He says in verse 30, he describes the history of that particular cemetery plot and he says Abraham bought it “[In the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a burying place.]”  In verse 31, Abraham and Sarah are there, Isaac and Rebekah are there, [“There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife;] and there I buried Leah.” 

 

So the second thing besides specifying his place of burial he gives his boys a little review of their family history.  You think about that; when you die, records die with you; it’s gone, it’s irretrievable.  Try to dig up your own family, you can get back three or four generations and then it’s stymied because great-grandfather when he died was out in the Civil War or something and got blown away and everything got blown away with him, and there goes your family documents, everything gone.

 

The third thing that he does, verse 30 and verse 32 he mentions money and finances, and he says son, I have paid for this in full, there is no need for any further investment; no need for some hot salesman to come along and sell you something extra because all of it has been purchased, period.  [32, “The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth.”] 

 

Now let’s contrast what happens, and I as a pastor observe this time and time after time.  Here’s a lady who loses her husband; now she’s left, the husband’s body has been rolled out of the hospital room down to the morgue and now, “well Mrs. So and So, what do you want to do with the body.”  Well, that’s not quite the time for someone to come up to a bereaved wife and ask her what she wants to do with the body, particularly of her husband.  And so here she is, she’s lost the main wage earner in her home, right away you’ve got an emotional crisis there, she’s got to make a hasty decision, in a matter of hours or days, that amounts financially to almost buying a car, she has no usual comparison with various options that you can take, doesn’t know about those, emotionally she is down and doesn’t feel like making any decision and usually entrusts the decision making to someone else at that critical point.  She is usually ignorant what the law says versus what other people say the law says about the disposition of dead bodies.  And so on; there are a lot of details here, and as we go further through this passage I’m going to show you the details.

 

Later on we will print up a check list for LBC people where you personally will know these details ahead of time so you won’t be ripped off and taken advantage of in a moment of crisis.  Now what’s happening, and this is not an attack on the funeral industry, there are lots of good people in it, it’s not an attack that way.  But there are trends in that industry that are very anti-biblical.  Here, for example is a report done in 1970 by some sociologists trying to justify why in our day the trend is for high expense funerals.  Now you say well, it’s because of inflation.  Oh no, here’s the reason: The amount of money spent on a funeral is not just the mere exchange of cash between two agents but it is a secular ritual that assumes significance because it displaces diminished ceremonial observances for the dead.  Our view is that because people increasingly lack religious and ceremonial mechanisms and arrangements that once existed to help them cope with death, monetary expenditures have taken on added importance as a means for allowing the bereaved to express both to themselves and to others their sentiments for the deceased.” 

 

Now where does that come from Scripture?  Do you see anywhere in verse 29, 30 and 31 Jacob says well sons, if you really love me you’ll buy a platinum encased casket and put it on a diamond pedestal, if you really love me.  Now where is that here?  That’s not found in the Scripture.  But that has intruded itself, largely because of spiritual reasons.  People naturally feel guilty; after someone has died in the family there’s lots of guilt because usually what’s happened is the person who has died might have had a bad relationship with so and so and so and so, so they feel like well gosh, now we can’t forgive, there’s no person to person conversation any longer because they’re gone, so now to placate my guilty conscience, to act as an act of self atonement, what do I do?  I sacrificially give until it hurts to make this funeral elaborate, and that way I express my guilty conscience. You see, there are spiritual dynamics that are working here.  The sociologist here that wrote this report, not being Christians, not studied the Bible the way I have and others who have spoken to the issue, they interpret this as just a device to heal.  More and more they say that what we need besides conventional funerals is we need to add counseling services to the funeral directors, and of course, this intrudes directly upon the office of the clergy.  So this is the trend you see as you get further and further away from Christian standards you’re going to have a reversion to paganism in the culture, and right smack dab here in the funeral industry you see it occur.

 

All right, Jacob has solved his problem, and in verse 33, after giving three instructions where he is to be buried, telling his sons the economics of the situation, by the way, the man’s name at the end of verse 30, you see that “Ephron, the Hittite,” that’s just not put in there to be interesting.  Ephron, the Hittite is the guy who holds the receipt for the purchase of the property, that’s why his name is there.  He’s telling them if you want proof of purchase, there it is.  So that’s all tied in with the economics of what the old man has provided for.  And then he says the family history of verse 31.  Finally, finishing this, verse 33, “And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons,” notice the word “command,” the dying have a right to rule their posterity, “when he made an end of commanding his sons, then he gathered up his feet into the bed, then he yielded up the ghost, then he was gathered unto his people.”

 

Now isn’t that an orderly picture of death?  Everything done decently and in order.  How could this be?  Because he was a man who had solved his eternal problems.  He was a man who was so sure of his personal relationship to God he did not fear to discuss the details of his own death.  He was comfortable, however comfortable you can be, but he was basically comfortable dealing with this topic because he basically solved the root problem which was the sting of death, which is guilt. 

 

We’re going to sing…..