All Meant for Good

Thirty-four months. Over a hundred sermons. One book. In opening our ears and hearts to the word of God in Genesis, we peered behind eternity's veil to behold a Triune God of Love beyond space and time, fully blessed, fully joyous. We heard Love speak a world into existence, crafting the universe like a temple, filling it with the richness of his creatures and finally installing his sacred image in his sanctuary. He appointed humanity rulers of the earth, protectors of the garden, priests mediating creation's love for her Creator. We learned the wisdom of the way all things were meant to be, and were tutored in the original law. But then we heard the voice of the tempter, and with the introduction of sin's disorder, we watched in dismay as all things fell apart, and as we left our first home as exiles, stripped of our original grace and derailed from our destiny.

We studied the birth of a new generation, the escalation of greed into violence, the emergence of conflict and civilization, and the descent of a world speeding towards its doom. Our idylls of a heroic golden age were rent asunder, its myths disrobed and despoiled by Noah's vision. And though none heeded his preaching, yet in the grand judgment of the world that then was, we saw the paradigm of creation's deconstruction and rehabilitation, a pledge of new creation to come. In the first covenant of God's peace toward creation, we received further law, yet continued to show our disgrace in the new garden. Our lofty boasts were toppled, and Babylon's ideology was debunked; scattered as unintentional missionaries, the family tree of the nations seemed hopeless under the sway of deceiving fallen powers. But amidst the morass, we met the mystery of divine election: one simple man, with no merits to claim, plucked from the heart of Sumerian paganism and called to sally forth in faith, encouraged and enticed by the promises of Babel's work's failed fruit being made fruitful in him as a grace.

Abraham was tested over and over by barrenness of land and body, by comfortable customs and sensible schemes, by the outlandish extravagance of divine promises and the weighty burden of divine commands. But step by step, through covenants committing God to this family's welfare and this family to God's fight with the principle of fleshly power, Abraham was forged into a man of immense merit, embodying his faith in the height of worship, surrendering his beloved son, his sole hope of a future, into God's hands on the mountain. That son, returned to life, would be the carrier of the covenant. His own sons, twins at war from the womb, would wrestle over birthright and blessing until, through a pedagogy of painful payback, Jacob at last understood what it was to wrestle with God and man and be Israel. Gifted with sons, he would struggle all his life to prevent his family from flying apart, to preserve for God this brotherhood as the basis for the great nation his seed was meant to become, a nation able to at last inherit the land of promise and to shine as a light in the world, a beacon of blessing for all nations to cure the curse. Generations had risen, generations had fallen asleep, returning as dust to the dust whence they came, yet being gathered to their people in hope of something more. It was in such hope that Jacob died, and was buried in Canaan as a testimony even in the pregnant silence of the tomb.

Now, as they return to their families in Egypt, it occurs to the ten older brothers that their father's absence from this earthly scene might have consequences for the relationship among his sons going forward. In the previous generation, when Jacob had seized his brother's blessing, Esau had so loathed Jacob as to scheme, “The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob” (Genesis 27:41). Esau was willing to delay his vengeance until after Isaac's funeral. It occurs to the brothers that Joseph could have been doing the same thing all this time: playing nice for their dad's sake while he lived, patiently delaying until after his demise to exact his revenge.¹ The brothers wince to recall how skilled Joseph proved at putting on a false face before.

They spoke their worries among themselves, “still haunted by guilt and fear because of their crimes.”² For “if Joseph will hate us and will surely return to us all the evil that we dealt to him...!” (Genesis 50:15), they “now suspect Joseph will retaliate for their mistreatment of him those many years ago.”³ And now, to make matters worse, their dad's last moments had been spent in bestowing the royal blessing not on Joseph but on Judah; so, if Joseph's at all like they were, he'll resent the insult and lash out to protect his privilege.⁴ So now, they fear, “Joseph will have them killed,” them and their families; and what could they do to stop him?⁵

The brothers send a messenger to Joseph, someone acting at their command to represent them;⁶ later Jews took it to be “Bilhah, Joseph's foster-mother,” as the person he'd be most willing to hear out.⁷ The message contains the late Jacob's final wish and command – or so they say (Genesis 50:16). We could take them as telling the truth, quoting something he'd really said to them.⁸ Then again, Joseph was there as Jacob died, and if he had a last message for Joseph, he could've said so then and there,⁹ suggesting “these fabricated words of their father.”¹⁰ The brothers frame their own appeal as if Jacob's to cast their cause as the survival of his legacy; his dying hopes would be retrospectively tainted if his faith in their shared future were nullified by bloodshed.¹¹

Supposedly, what Jacob left instructions to tell Joseph from beyond the grave is: “I pray you, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they dealt evil to you” (Genesis 50:17). Before, we've caught the brothers privately admitting they were “guilty concerning our brother,” having “sinned against” him (Genesis 42:21-22); when Joseph had accused them of repaying evil in place of good, Judah lamented the indefensible “iniquity” in them all which God had exposed (Genesis 44:4, 16). Now, they more forthrightly and directly confess their wrong. “How powerful is the accusation of conscience!... Under pressure from no one, they turn their own accusers.”¹² They say they dealt evil to him, identify it as a sin, and even call it trespass or transgression or rebellion, a criminal act crying out in the name of justice for punishment.

To their father's alleged words, the brothers append their own plea: “And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father” (Genesis 50:17). They don't and won't appeal to Joseph on the basis of brotherhood, which would ring hollow after they ignored his brotherhood back then. Instead, they try to turn Joseph's attention to the God of Israel, “not 'of your God' or 'of our God,' but of 'your father's God.'”¹³ Posing themselves as this God's humble servants, even if they no longer deserve for Joseph to see them as brothers, he may still be gracious to them as an act of piety for his father's God's sake; they pile all their hopes here on “the consciousness of God as the most powerful factor controlling human behavior.”¹⁴ So, in their own voice, they ask him to pardon their rebellion against God, their trespass against him, their grave crime and mortal sin. “For the first time perhaps, they confront the dastardly betrayal of brotherhood in its enormity and ask forgiveness.”¹⁵

Hearing their message, “Joseph wept when they spoke to him” (Genesis 50:17). Why? “Did Joseph break into tears because he was distressed that his brothers must assume that it was he who revealed their crime? Or did the whole trauma come rushing back to him?”¹⁶ Or “he realizes that they still do not trust him,” or maybe “he is disappointed that they resort to a deceptive scheme to win his favor,” echoing the deception in the garden.¹⁷ How could they still harbor suspicion of lurking resentments and lethal intentions, how could they fear him as duplicitous? How, “despite years of living together,” can “Joseph's brothers still fear him”?¹⁸ Don't they know the law's already written on his heart: “you shall not hate your brother..., you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people” (Leviticus 19:17)? How could they think him an Esau to them?

The brothers' messenger returns, relaying to them the account of Joseph's wordless tears. This, it so happens, is “the seventh and last time that Joseph is said to have wept.”¹⁹ Now “his brother's also came,” ushered into his halls, to the same room where, seventeen years ago, Judah had pleaded unknowingly with his lost little brother. Then, in fear for their youngest brother Benjamin, they “came to Joseph's house... and fell before his face to the land” (Genesis 44:14); now again, “they went and fell before his face” (Genesis 50:18). Then, Judah insisted that, “behold, we are servants of my lord” (Genesis 44:16); now again, they all together say to Joseph, “Behold, we are your servants” (Genesis 50:18), like Egyptians pledging to “be servants to Pharaoh” (Genesis 47:25).²⁰ But this time, they can see it's Joseph. In pleading for their lives, they knowingly fall before their brother's face and offer up their present and future liberty as a sacrificial reparation for the wrongs of their pasts.²¹

In service of symmetry, in this penultimate scene of Joseph and his brothers, Joseph can't help but remember his dreams shared back in his second scene with his brothers. In the first of two dreams he'd dreamed, the eleven of them had been present in person, binding sheaves of wheat in the field, “and behold, my sheaf arose and even stood upright, and behold, your sheaves circled and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). This was what they'd mocked first, scoffing at the notion Joseph could ever reign or hold dominion over them (Genesis 37:8). But in fact we've seen this fulfilled: Joseph's sheaf of wheat stood upright in its fullness to show Joseph would have the grain supply; theirs bowed down to it because, in their emptiness, they'd be in need of his fullness.²²

But then there was that other dream: “Behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me,” he'd boasted (Genesis 37:9). It seems, in this dream, that Joseph's got the heavens at his beck and call; his father had then rebuked him before his brothers: “Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow down before you to the land” (Genesis 37:10)? Ludicrous! But now the opportunity to finish living out its promise of divine power over his family seems to be before him. He's been lord of the land, master of the palace, a father to the king of Upper and Lower Egypt (Genesis 45:8). He's seen his father and brothers all bow down to him at one point or another, and now here are those brothers, face-down on his floor, offering him all he's ever dreamt of; they “submit to Joseph's dominion” with full awareness and conviction, and “the second dream is about to be realized” in the very way they'd all understood it all those years before.²³

The ball is fully in Joseph's court. He's shown wisdom and discernment in interpreting dreams, he's reunited with his family these past seventeen years, he's loved and lost and found again; so what does the dream mean to him now, in the years of his maturity? We'll want to listen carefully to every word Joseph speaks. And he starts in a promising way: “Don't be afraid!”, so often a message of divine encouragement. But he follows it with a rhetorical question: “For am I in the place of God?” (Genesis 50:19). Well, Joseph, that's just the substantial question we've been asking for years! In your second dream, you sure did seem to assume the place of God, receiving the adoration of the heavenly host.²⁴ But now he treats the thought as absurd. After years of posturing like an Egyptian god on earth, he renounces standing the pose of the divine. He won't profess to sit on the Most High's throne, won't pretend he can weigh the human heart so as to judge the lives and souls of his brethren.²⁵

What does this mean for Joseph's dream? Is it abandoned, canceled, returned to sender? Or is Joseph realizing his dad and brothers, and no doubt he himself, took it all wrong from the start? Think of the other five dreams in Joseph's stories. They all featured food and drink – grapes on a vine, bread in a basket, meat and wheat at the riverbank; even Joseph's first dream was at harvest. This alone seemed to stand apart. But in the dreams he had told to him in Egypt, any time something was counted – three grape clusters, three baskets, seven cows, seven ears of grain – Joseph's wisdom was taking it as a measure of time. So why, as he remembers recounting a dream with sun, moon, and eleven stars, wouldn't he count? If God made those lights in heaven “for signs and seasons and days and years” (Genesis 1:14), why not count them as thirteen years, the length of time from his sale as a slave at age 17 to his promotion over the whole land of Egypt at age 30? Or why not even multiply the sun and moon by the stars for the twenty-two years until Joseph sees his family again?²⁶ Taken this way, the cosmic dream is already fulfilled: he was elevated after thirteen years, and provided grain for his brothers and father after twenty-two; Joseph's second dream can be a confirmation of the first dream.²⁷

What does this mean for Joseph's story? He asks, “Am I in the place of God?” (Genesis 50:19). Only one other time does anybody in the Bible ask that, and it's Joseph's future dad reproaching Joseph's future mom. Speaking in envy of her sister Leah, Rachel had demanded of Jacob that he “give me sons, and if not, I'll die!” (Genesis 30:1). His anger sparking at the immature love of his life, Jacob had retorted to her, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2). It wasn't Jacob's prerogative to create life at his whim; it was God's, to give or withhold from Rachel the fruit of her womb – who would be Joseph. Joseph now borrows his father's phrase to confess that, if creation was God's business and not Jacob's, then judgment of creation is God's business and not Joseph's. And the same God who held back and then gave Rachel her Joseph is the God who purposed Joseph, from that once-barren womb, for the ups and downs of the life that followed.²⁸

And what does this mean for the big picture of Genesis? Joseph won't aspire to seat himself on the throne of the Most High, won't imagine himself Lawgiver and Judge, won't enslave his brethren to himself, won't wield his power as a law unto himself. Joseph won't, in other words, heed the Serpent's hiss.²⁹ Remember that, so long ago? “You will not 'surely die'! For God knows that, in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God!” (Genesis 3:5). With such a vision, with such a dream, did the Serpent tempt humanity, to will ourselves into the place of God, that we might by our wisdom and might decree all things, decide all things, claim all things, judge all things. Joseph now mocks the folly of the Serpent's version of 'opening' the eyes.

Turning back to his brothers, “as for you, you planned evil upon me” (Genesis 50:20). Joseph isn't sugarcoating anything. He isn't denying or excusing the motives out of which his brothers had acted; he isn't supposing they meant well and just got confused or misguided. He agrees with their characterization of what they'd done, that they plotted harm for him and intended an evil outcome for him. The word Joseph picks suggests scheming, plotting, thinking, inventing evil, like with “the evil of Haman the Agagite and the scheme that he schemed against the Jews” (Esther 8:3). The psalmists are constantly contending with “evil humanity... who plot evil things in their heart” like serpents (Psalm 140:1-3). And it seems, in those cases, that our best hope is that God “frustrates the plots of the peoples” (Psalm 33:20), so that, when “they plot a purpose, they will not be able” to carry it through at all (Psalm 21:11). Even better is when the “evil scheme that he had schemed... should return onto his own head” (Esther 9:25), so “let them be caught in the purposes they have plotted” (Psalm 10:2).

But Joseph now adds that this isn't even half the picture. Because “you planned evil upon me; God planned it unto good!” (Genesis 50:20). Joseph, seeing “even in human sin the opportunity for divine providence,”³⁰ has a faith that “God knows how to turn to good account the evil deeds of others.”³¹ The brothers, yes, “planned harm..., but God reconfigured their evil and produced good from it.”³² In God's hands, their scheme brought an unwitting good to Joseph: through the crucible of Egyptian slavery, he matured and prospered in ways he'd never have in Canaan. But their scheme also brought unwitting good to themselves. They'd meant to rid themselves of an annoying little brother; instead, rather than frustrating their plot in its tracks or returning it onto their own heads, God harnessed it “to preserve for you a remnant..., to sustain lives for you” (Genesis 45:7), so that “remedies for a future famine would be made ready for those who plotted their brother's death.”³³

So Joseph assures his brothers that, in a way, “it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:8). God worked through their actions, through their scheming – not by inspiring the wicked thoughts of their hearts, nor by endorsing the cruelty of their hands, but by operating through it from above and within. God, as universal cause, is “intimately present and active in all created being,” enabling his creatures to act in every action insofar as it's action,³⁴ so “it is impossible for anything to occur outside the order of the divine government.”³⁵ “Many are the plans in the heart of man, but it's the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21). Weaving their plans and schemes into his grander tapestry, even the darkest and foulest human choices “are somehow subsumed under God's sovereign will, are even used by God for the good of Jacob's family.”³⁶ “God meant past betrayals for good and will resurrect their failures into surprising new life.”³⁷ They sold Joseph, but God sent Joseph: the very same deed that was, in its human aspect, a great and cruel evil was in fact plotted by divine providence to a very different end. So “their crafty sale of Joseph became the Lord's errand.”³⁸

Initially, Joseph thought of this as a special gift for his brothers: “God sent me before you,” to prepare a place for this one chosen family in the midst of a crisis (Genesis 45:7). But now he sees an even broader perspective. Their scheme brought unwitting good to the world as a whole, because the peoples of Egypt, Canaan, and other lands were able to survive the famine precisely because Joseph was where God had sent him.³⁹ God purposes all this “to bring it about, as it is this day, that many people be sustained alive” (Genesis 50:20), all “thanks to the creative God's wisdom transforming all their wickedness into good,” blessing all the families of the earth.⁴⁰

This right here is “the theological stance that has helped [Joseph] make sense of his life,” and the very same key unlocks more doors than Israel could count.⁴¹ Through the prophet, God assured his people that, when the years apportioned to their imperial captors were completed, “I will visit you and will fulfill toward you my good word and will bring you back to this place, for I know the plans I plan toward you..., plans for peace and not for evil, to give you future and hope” (Jeremiah 29:10-11). “The actions of most-wicked men are transformed by his dispensation to a successful outcome,”⁴² “untwisted, cleansed, and turned around for good, life-giving purposes” in the hands of a God of Love.⁴³ Laban plotted evil, to exploit his son-in-law, but God planned it unto good, returning Jacob wealthy and free. Jacob schemed many a scheme against others, but God planned them all unto good, wrestling Jacob into a new calling. The builders of Babel planned their project of pride, but God planned it unto good, filling the earth. Cain plotted his brother's murder out of envy, but God planned Abel's martyrdom for good, a lasting testimony. Adam and Eve plotted their fruit-filching for selfish gain, leading at first to a curse and an exile, but what were God's plans in it? A wise woman assured a king that, though death holds sway in the world, yet God doesn't lift away life from his creation, but “he plans plans such that the banished one isn't banished from him” (2 Samuel 14:14). “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”⁴⁴

We're getting far ahead of ourselves. But it's no coincidence that here, so close to the end of Genesis, Joseph's words, contrasting divine good and human evil, echo the early chapters' Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:9). The Serpent's very temptation was for us to grasp for ourselves at such privilege, to become “as gods, knowing good and evil,” deciding on it for ourselves (Genesis 3:5). But Joseph confesses here that, however skilled we are at corrupting good into the evils of our choosing, God alone is wise to transmute our very evil choices into the gold of his goodness.⁴⁵ And a world governed by such a divine alchemist is one where godhood doesn't need our grabby, grubby fingers – a world where a Joseph can release the weight of good and evil back into the hands of the Creator, who is wiser than we to visit or forgive the iniquities of his creatures.⁴⁶

So Joseph “refuses to give evil the final word..., refuses to bow to the plans, the intentions, or the ways of evil,” but, “neither succumbing nor retaliating, he yields place to God and cooperates with God to turn evil into good, chaos into order, and potential death into spared life.”⁴⁷ He urges his brothers not to be afraid he'll take matters into his own hands, that he'll return evil for evil. Their evil intent was superintended by God for his good plan, their repentance for their transgression is evident, and they mustn't grieve themselves with pains and toils for it like the pains and toils, the griefs and sorrows, of laboring for bread on a cursed ground (Genesis 3:17; 45:5).⁴⁸

But Joseph will cooperate with God's transmutation of the base into the noble. Imitating God, Joseph “strives to reward with kindness those who are maliciously disposed” to him.⁴⁹ “Do good to those who hate you,” says the Lord (Luke 6:27), and if even “your enemy is hungry, feed him” (Proverbs 25:21; cf. Romans 12:20). So, says Joseph, “I will provide for you and for your little ones” (Genesis 50:21; cf. 45:11; 47:12). Even now that the famine's twelve years gone and the Sons of Israel are nestled in Egypt's most pleasant and fruitful nook, Joseph will provide for them in an ongoing way. That makes him the polar opposite of Cain, because Joseph, quite consciously, commits to being his brothers' keeper – their protector and provider, who uses his power not to harm or control but to strengthen and sustain his brethren and their families.⁵⁰ He just wants them to know and see and understand how he “loved them beyond measure,” as if to tell them that “their life was my life, and every pain of theirs was my pain, every ailment of theirs was my sickness, their wish was my wish,” and that, rather than claim them as his slaves in perpetual penance, in love he'd be “among them as one of the least.”⁵¹

With “words of peace” like these, Joseph “comforted them and spoke to their hearts” (Genesis 50:21).⁵² Joseph doesn't speak the word in our hearing, but it's plain to see he affirms here his forgiveness of the past, imaging the God who parades before Moses a glory “merciful and gracious..., abounding in kindness and faithfulness..., forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). The brothers need to be persuaded. Isn't that too good to be true? Is it possible either God or man should be so faithful and kind, so gracious and merciful, as to forgive so freely? They struggle with “believing that one wronged can live without retribution,” hence God's later gift of an “economy of sacrifice... showing the way in which the rupture of human sin can be overcome.”⁵³ But here and now, Joseph speaks comfort, speaks the 'Noah' language of covenant peace and new creation, to lift up his penitent brethren's fallen faces and “to finally end the saga of jealousy and distrust.”⁵⁴

And when we come to the final moments of Genesis, to whom does Joseph speak his dying words of assurance and promise? “Joseph said to his brothers” (Genesis 50:24) such things about “the destiny of a family chosen by God for a mission... waiting to be fulfilled since the beginning of creation.”⁵⁵ In the thrill of his message, don't neglect to see its hearers: his brothers.⁵⁶ The first brothers in Genesis parted by cold-blooded murder. Abram and Lot's brother-like tension could only be resolved by separation into different lands before spiraling out of control. In the next generation, Ishmael's mockery and mistreatment of little Isaac was resolved by banishment to the desert; then, Esau was determined to deal out lethal vengeance on his brother, and while Jacob appeased Esau by humility and offerings, their teary reunion fell short of reunification; Jacob talked his way out of it, leery of Esau's might. Here, we've had more brothers than ever, who nearly all united in a conspiracy of Cainite violence. But it didn't end with the shedding of blood, as it could have; it didn't end with a quick separation of territory, or with exile of the persecutors, or with an uneasy appeasement and a lingering estrangement. Instead, Joseph forgave. In the wake of evil schemes, Joseph plans to continue as his brothers' keeper. Joseph rebuilds his relationship with them, and, to his dying day, he'll live as one community with them. This long story that “begins in hatred and envy... ends in harmony,”⁵⁷ letting brothers at last “become a single community.”⁵⁸ “Behold, how good and pleasant” is this resolution of reconciliation (Psalm 133:1)!⁵⁹

And so here, at the closing of Genesis, Joseph offers us a glimpse – however partial – of a man who protectively keeps the brothers and the land around him, who works to sustain the lives of others and to freely feed the world of creatures, who wields his dominion as a servant of the servants of God, who cedes God's place to God alone and presses forward in forgiveness and reconciliation. Such a man ties a preliminary bow in the many plotlines that unraveled into chaos in Eden.⁶⁰ But for ultimate resolution, we need not just a new Adam but a Last Adam. And that's our great and glorious Redeemer sent from above, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:6-7). Though really and truly in the place of God, he emptied himself on earth, forswearing the prerogatives of his heavenly throne.

He ministered, he taught, and he rode into Jerusalem as the promised holder of Judah's scepter, acclaimed there by adoring crowds of pilgrims who sang their hopes of salvation: Hosanna, “hosanna in the highest,” please save us now (Mark 11:10)! But “the chief priests and Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin..., and from that day on, they plotted to put [Jesus] to death” (John 11:47, 53). And three days from now, as “the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him..., Judas Iscariot, who was one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them” (Mark 14:1, 10). Thursday night, after washing his disciples' feet and providing them his body and blood for food and drink, “the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners” (Mark 14:41). The next morning, a crowd incited by these leaders “shouted all the more, 'Crucify him!', so Pilate... delivered him to be crucified” (Mark 15:14-15).

But this was “the ultimate expression of God using the evil actions of wicked men” – Pharisees and Pilate, chief priests and chief traitors and crowds of crucify-him chanters – “to accomplish redemption.”⁶¹ St. Peter preaches that Jesus was, in fact, “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” so that, “by the hands of lawless men” who “crucified and killed” him (Acts 2:23) and did “whatever [God's] hand and [God's] plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:28), God might provide thereby for “the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7), and “gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52), and “destroy the works of the devil” from Genesis 3 on (1 John 3:8). Oh, scribes and soldiers and disloyal disciples, Jews and Gentiles and sinful hearts today, all schemed evil against the Son of God, to “kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours” (Luke 20:14); God planned it all unto our good, to make us “fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17).

Because, God be most mightily praised, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death” (Acts 2:24), that Jesus might be both “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). “After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3), but not before giving his promise to be with us and provide for us and our little ones “always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). And to reassure us of this, just as Joseph “comforted [his brothers] and spoke to them in the heart,”⁶² so Jesus supplied “the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in [Jesus'] name... Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.... Let not your hearts be troubled,” he speaks still to our hearts, “neither let them be afraid” (John 14:26-27). This same Comforter “helps us in our weakness” and “intercedes for us with groanings inexpressible” (Romans 8:26), so that “no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22).

And “the mystery of Christ... has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:4-5). Almighty God “provides universally for all being,” so “it belongs to his providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the universe may not be hindered.”⁶³ But more than that, if it belongs to his love to permit and even plan the death of his own beloved Son for sinners, then “how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). For “we know that, to those who love God” as Joseph did, “all things he works together into good, to those who are called according to purpose” (Romans 8:28). If we “cleave to [God] with total loving devotion, all things... collaborate and help” us toward “the good that is never subject to change,”⁶⁴ and “these evils” of our lives “are turned to good by their good use.”⁶⁵ If hearts love God – and “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5) – then such hearts, like St. Augustine says, “find God good in all circumstances, whether he is chastising them or consoling them, whether putting them through their paces or crowning their efforts, whether purifying or illuminating,”⁶⁶ because “all things he works together into good” (Romans 8:28).

In that faith, “if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life; more than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5:10-11), since the plan of God all along was that Christ “might reconcile us... into one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility; and he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Ephesians 2:16-17). Freed from the anxieties of Cain and the contempt of Ishmael and the wrath of Esau, we “aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace” (2 Corinthians 13:11), “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” as “one Body... called to the one hope that belongs to your call” (Ephesians 4:3-4).

Joseph's final witness to reconciliation, wrapping up the Book of Genesis with a brothers' keeper who refuses to enslave his brethren, points us to that “hope that the creation itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption,” the futility of Genesis 3, “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). And with such hope, and faith in the God who plans unto good even all the evil that sinners and Satan ever could scheme, “the sufferings of the present time aren't worth comparing to the glory that's to be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18), by the hand of the Jesus who's been preached by every line in Genesis, from 'in the beginning' (the first word) to 'in Egypt' (the last word).

For if God works into good even the evils invented by betraying brothers and pharaonic tyrants, seducing serpents and famine's curse, and even trespasses now transfigured by forgiveness, then “who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). If faith in such a God can hurl mountains to the heart of the sea, who can successfully stand athwart the mission entrusted to Man and Woman in Eden's Garden? Who can stem the tide of “all the earth” being “filled with the glory of the LORD” (Numbers 14:21)? Who can chainsaw the Tree of Life and salt its stump? Who can cast down for eternity the humble in heart who, by God's word, are finally exalted (James 4:10)? Who can silence creation's loud hosannas, who can dethrone the King of Love, who can give death the final word when death is predestined to die away and be forgotten? Who can cling to grudges in paradise, and who can separate brethren from our God's bond of peace? Who can deny blessing to any of the families of the earth? Here's the hope of Genesis, the certitude of the saints: that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Amen!

Abel-mizraim

It's been a long journey to here, to this end. Jacob, born in Canaan as the grandson of Abraham, had to flee his parental home and native land to his uncle, where he married and had children, albeit in a form of captivity. It took many years to get home again, and a lot of reliance on the God who'd committed to be with him on his way – yet Jacob's history of trickery and deceit continued to haunt him, producing fitting trickery and cheating aimed back at him by so many others in his life, including ultimately his sons when they faked their younger brother's death and sold him in slavery into Egypt. Now, after over two decades of agony, Jacob's learned that Joseph is alive and thriving in Egypt. But when they're face-to-face at last, it's clear that Joseph is barely recognizable – he's at once the long-lost beloved son and the assimilated foreigner, a would-be Egyptian god on earth. Joseph settles Israel and his sons in the lush Egyptian region of Goshen in the Nile Delta, the place away from Canaan where they're meant to grow into a great nation (Genesis 46:3). But will it entrap them in forgetfulness?

We now find that “Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years” (Genesis 47:28), a mirror to the seventeen years Joseph had lived with Jacob in other lands like Aram and Canaan (Genesis 37:2),¹ in much the same way Abraham had lived seventy-five years with his father Terah and then seventy-five years into the life of his own son Isaac (Genesis 21:5; 25:7).² In Jacob's opinion on arriving in Egypt, “few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not reached the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their sojourning” (Genesis 47:9); now we find“the days of Jacob, the years of his life, were 147 years” (Genesis 47:28). And there's actually a pattern, a formula, that unites Jacob's years to the years of his fathers. Abraham lived 175 years, seven times five times five; Isaac lived 180 years, five times six times six; now Jacob lives 147 years, three times seven times seven – the first number keeps dropping by two, while the number that gets squared creeps up by one each time.³ The effect is, in each case, if you add the numbers instead of multiplying them, you get – maybe you guessed this – seventeen years. Each of these lives has been leading here.

Jacob knows he's been sent here. God told him when he stopped at Beersheba and sought the Lord. “Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt.... I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph will set his hand on your eyes,” to close them in death (Genesis 46:3-4). God had assured him Joseph was alive, that Joseph would live to stand by his deathbed, would be the last loving face Jacob would see. But after seventeen years, how reassuring is that? Jacob sees more than ever how deeply assimilated Joseph has become, is concerned what it would mean “if Joseph remains in charge of Israel's future” after Jacob's gone.⁴ Whose vision will then prevail: Jacob's remembrance of Isaac and Abraham, or Joseph's Egyptian temptation?⁵

After Jacob's lifespan is tallied up, we expect it to be followed by the report of his death; it's always been 'so-and-so lived yea many years, and he died.' But Jacob puts off dying; he's too busy for that just yet, has things to do and issues to resolve.⁶ So Israel calls for Joseph and makes his first attempt “to put his house in order” while there's still time.⁷ Israel's diplomatic about it, prefacing his request humbly: “If, please, I have found grace in your eyes..., do with me kindness and truth” (Genesis 47:29). It's an odd way for a father to address a son. But Israel knows what he's doing with this uncomfortably flattering opening. Dealing kindly, faithfully, and truly with Israel looks like this: “Please don't bury me in Egypt”; in fact, when the time comes, you have to “carry me out of Egypt” (Genesis 47:29-30). Even after seventeen years in Goshen's luxury and with government handouts courtesy of Joseph, Egypt is to Israel “a foreign place that is no home for him,” and although he has tolerated it in these last years of life for God's sake, Israel doesn't want to settle there permanently in death.⁸

The other side of Israel's request is for Joseph to “let me lie down with my fathers,” which in practice would be to “bury me in their tomb” (Genesis 47:30). As a rule, for people in the Middle East back then, dying outside your homeland and away from your ancestors felt like “a cursed death,”⁹ and Egyptians were very sensitive to this too. An Egyptian story has an exile praying, “Whichever god fated this flight, may you be content and put me home.... What is more important than interring my corpse in the land you gave me birth in?”¹⁰ In Egyptian belief, in fact, Egyptians couldn't “be reborn” into the afterlife unless “buried in their native land.”¹¹ Israel isn't so worried about that, but he does value being reunited with his ancestors and is also hoping that a trip to the ancestral tomb will stir Joseph's suppressed memories of Canaan and stoke his desire to remember.¹² Israel is as much in a battle for Joseph's soul as for the fate of his own bodily remains.¹³

Joseph, his Egyptian perspective sympathetic to burial in one's native land, is quick to agree to his dad's dying request, and agrees to “do according to your words” (Genesis 47:30). But Israel asked for more than words in response; he'd asked for a solemn gesture to mark the commitment: “Please put your hand under my thigh” (Genesis 47:29). What a throwback! Before Israel had even been born, his grandfather had uttered the exact same words, when commissioning his chief steward to arrange a good marriage for his son Isaac: “Please put your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the LORD, God of heaven and God of earth, that you won't take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites among whom I'm dwelling, but to my land and my kinsmen you'll go and take a wife for my son Isaac” (Genesis 24:2-4).¹⁴

In both cases, the elder's last request for this strange solemn gesture entails something not to do: bury Israel in Egypt, or marry Isaac to a Canaanite woman who can't give birth to Israel at all. And in both cases, the request also entails something to do: carry the body of Israel back to the ancestors, and go to Abraham's land and kin to find the mother of the next generation of God's promises: Joseph's grandma Rebekah. To make things even more striking, what does Abraham's emissary say to Rebekah's family? That marrying her to Isaac, sight unseen and in simple faith, would be “doing kindness and truth to my master” Abraham (Genesis 24:49), the same phrase Rebekah's beloved son now uses to appeal to his own beloved son (Genesis 47:29).¹⁵ Doing kindness and truth to Abraham's line means attending to Israel's God-ordained future,¹⁶ pointing ahead to God's revelation of himself to Moses as a God “abounding in kindness and truth” (Exodus 34:6).

Like Abraham, this is too big a deal to trust to mere words; and Israel understands that Joseph fundamentally disagrees with him about their family's future. So he insists on something more binding than a promise: an oath before God. The earliest story of Jacob after his in utero shenanigans was of a day Esau had hungered after a hard hunt and was desperate enough to make a dumb deal; pressed to sell off his birthright for a mess of pottage and bread, he readily agreed, but Jacob extracted an oath from him to bind him to his decision made in the grip of temptation and weakness (Genesis 25:32-33). Now, with much nobler motives, Jacob as Israel will exact an oath, not from a brother about a birthright, but about a son's commitment to honor him rightly in death.¹⁷

As readily as Esau did, Joseph complies: “He swore to him,” “and Jacob accepted the oath of his son.”¹⁸ Where the steward's oath transferred all action away from Abraham and Esau's oath prompted Jacob's gift of bread and lentil stew, Joseph's oath leads to this: “Israel bowed himself on the head of the bed” (Genesis 47:31), maybe expressing gratitude to Joseph and arguably fulfilling Joseph's second dream.¹⁹ But in the Greek Bible, here “Israel bowed down on the top of his staff,” and the New Testament then focuses on this moment, how “by faith Jacob... worshipped on the top of his staff” (Hebrews 11:21), a sign of Christ's worship of God atop his cross.

Joseph goes home, out of Goshen. Jacob stays there, tended by his family. Eventually, Jacob's health takes an even sharper turn for the worse, and word gets to Joseph, who ventures back to Goshen to visit his dad. At the same time, word of Joseph's approach reaches Jacob. Joseph brought with him his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim, while “Israel strengthened himself and sat up on his bed,” preparing for his second attempt to put his house in order and win Joseph back to the legacy of Abraham (Genesis 48:1-2).

Jacob starts by reviewing with Joseph the revelation from thirteen chapters ago, when El Shaddai had appeared to him at Bethel (Genesis 48:3-4; cf. 35:9-12). But if you compare Jacob's retelling, he changes a blessing to a promise, simplifies the language, emphasizes that the revelation was in Canaan, and substitutes in a line from God's earlier pledge to Abraham, that Israel's seed would inherit “this land... for an everlasting possession” (Genesis 48:4; cf. 17:8). He also recalls that it was after that Bethel revelation that “Rachel died on me... when there was still a stretch of land to go to Ephrath, and I buried her there on the way to Ephrath” (Genesis 48:7; cf. 35:16-19). He emphasizes here now that Joseph's late mother died and was buried “in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 48:7). Jacob only interrupts his trip down memory lane by declaring his intention to adopt Joseph's sons, counting them as replacements for the other children Rachel could've had if she hadn't died so young.²⁰

So “now your two sons, who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, are mine; Ephraim and Manasseh, as Reuben and Simeon, shall be mine” (Genesis 48:5). Effectively elevating Joseph's sons to the level of Jacob's two oldest, he's promoting Joseph to the status of firstborn, giving him a double portion of the family inheritance by awarding shares to both Manasseh and Ephraim. At the same time, Jacob is subtly bypassing Joseph and Asenath's Egyptian influence by attaching these two boys – now in their early twenties – directly to the stature of sons of Israel, and wrapping all Joseph's future progeny back into the fold.²¹

Without further ado, Israel – not Jacob, Israel – sees the sons of Joseph and asks, “Who are these?” (Genesis 48:8). It's an odd question, coming after he's already spoken their names! Although we'll soon read that “the eyes of Jacob were heavy from old age, he was unable to see” (Genesis 48:10), that isn't it. This question was part of the adoption ceremony, and Joseph is supposed to acknowledge Israel's claim on his sons. But Joseph's identification of them is that “my sons are they, whom God has given to me in this place” (Genesis 48:9). It almost sounds like Jacob's answer to Esau's question, “the children with whom God has graced your servant” (Genesis 33:5), but Joseph very clearly emphasizes his sense of ownership: not 'the children,' but 'my sons'; not God gracing a humble servant, but God giving 'to me;' and God did so “in this,” in Egypt – Joseph is effectively affirming his belief that God's vision for the family is a thoroughly Egyptian future.²²

But Israel doesn't back down. He aims to bless them, asking Joseph to please bring them close enough for him to kiss them, embrace them. And after Israel glorifies God for reuniting them and showing him Joseph's seed, Joseph surrenders control, bringing out Manasseh and Ephraim to present them to Israel; and, remedying the imbalance from their last visit, now Joseph “bowed himself with his nose to the land” (Genesis 48:11-12).²³ But he aims still, in presenting his sons, to manipulate how the blessing proceeds, like Rebekah did with blind Isaac. Joseph stations his privileged firstborn Manasseh at Israel's right hand, and the younger Ephraim at Israel's left (Genesis 48:13). We expect, given that Jacob's in worse shape now than Isaac was then, that the powerful and persuasive Joseph will have free rein. But Israel “crossed his hands” to put his right hand on Ephraim's head and his left hand on Manasseh's, and it's in that position that he invokes God, emphasizing the godly legacy of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel and praying that this legacy be carried on in these boys (Genesis 48:14-16).

As Joseph watches, he doesn't react with pride or delight. Actually, “Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, and it was evil in his eyes” (Genesis 48:17). Joseph doesn't accept displacement of his firstborn, doesn't allow his dad to choose the younger over the elder – which is mighty rich, from a man who lived his life being favored above his older brothers! Joseph's fighting here against the totality of Genesis, where Jacob was blessed over the elder Esau, where Isaac was chosen instead of the elder Ishmael, where Abel was accepted when his older brother Cain was spurned, and where, from the very dawn of things, it was to the last-born of creation – to humanity – that God had granted dominion.

Where God called that creation very good, Joseph sees here in its echo something bad. And his assumption is that his father's confused, that it's Israel who's lost the plot. So Joseph interrupts the blessing. He “grasped his father's hand to turn it aside from the head of Ephraim to the head of Manasseh, and Joseph said to his father, 'Not so, my father, for this is the firstborn! Put your right hand on his head!'” (Genesis 48:17-18). But it isn't Israel who's gotten confused. He knows exactly what he's doing. Resisting Joseph's pull, he concedes a bright future for Manasseh, but turns the emphasis back to Ephraim. Remember that Joseph named Manasseh to mark his ability to forget the legacy of where he'd come from, and Ephraim to celebrate God's gift of fruitfulness in a place of affliction (Genesis 41:51-52). Manasseh's message of detachment can't have priority over fruitfulness.²⁴ And so Israel prophesies an even greater destiny for the younger Ephraim (Genesis 48:19-20), for he “saw in the Spirit a type of the people who was to come later,” the inspired value of the younger gaining the precedence over the predecessor – this, precisely in service to the true tradition of the fathers.²⁵ And thus “by faith, Jacob, as he died, blessed each of the sons of Joseph” rightly (Hebrews 11:21).

Turning his attention back to Joseph, Israel insists that “God will be with you” – that's a group you, not a single you – and, what's more, God “will return you to the land of your fathers,” setting things right again (Genesis 48:21). Israel insists that the people's future isn't in Egypt, isn't in this land of splendor and power, but in the land trodden down by several generations of the chosen line – that's the land where Israel belongs. “As for me, I have given to you” – and now this is Joseph specifically – “one shoulder above your brothers, which I took from the hand of the Amorite” (Genesis 48:22). The word Israel uses here is 'Shechem': he bequeaths the fruit of that horrid conquest to Joseph, that Joseph has a property stake in the land he's wanted to reject.

As the next chapter opens, Jacob knows he has an oath from Joseph about his burial, and has leveraged the day of blessing Ephraim and Manasseh, but he still can't be sure he's won Joseph over, that his affairs are truly in order. So he summons his sons as a group, all twelve, to gather together and “hear Israel your father” (Genesis 49:1-2). We explored those prophetic blessings in depth last Sunday. After Joseph's heard his dream transferred to Judah (Genesis 49:8), he gets a blessing of his own as one among many. Israel puns on Ephraim's name in labeling Joseph a “fruitful son” (Genesis 49:22), calls on Joseph to trust in “the God of your father..., the Stone of Israel” (Genesis 49:24-25), emphasizes the potency of “the blessings of your father,” and hints that Joseph's enjoyment of such blessings hinges on consecrating himself apart from his shaved Egyptian style (Genesis 49:26). This blessing amounts to Israel taking “one last shot at Joseph in an attempt to convince him that the future lies in embracing his covenantal history rather than abandoning it.”²⁶

Blessings done, Israel speaks to these twelve sons, imposing on them collectively by command what he already asked of Joseph by petition and oath, “rejoicing in spirit as he gave the last instructions for his burial.”²⁷ Aware of his impending death, he instructs them very specifically to “bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite... in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess as a burial place” (Genesis 49:29-30). Israel's rehearsing a story from twenty-six chapters ago, when Abraham negotiated with the Sons of Heth near Hebron so that, however outlandish the price, his family would own and retain in perpetuity this land “to possess as a burial place” (Genesis 23:20).

Israel goes on now to reflect that “there they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife, and there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife, and there I buried Leah” (Genesis 49:31). We might have thought that, at some point during the years, Jacob would've relocated Rachel's bones to Machpelah from the path to Ephrath – but he didn't do that, not even when it was reopened for Isaac's burial. Israel chooses family solidarity now over dear love. He points all his sons to the value of the generations that came before them, of heeding the duties children owe their parents, to a place marking the legal title Abraham secured for the sons of Israel in their promised land.²⁸

Israel's dying charge to his sons shows his final expression of faith in the promises God had spoken to Abraham, had spoken to Isaac, had spoken to himself: that God was committed unilaterally to give Canaan's land over to the children of Abraham, to the Sons of Israel; that the future of the family therefore had to be there, in Canaan, meaning that Egypt could be at most a temporary refuge, but could never become their homeland, could never be their destiny, could never be somewhere to make themselves indefinitely comfortable – could never be a place to which they could afford, therefore, to assimilate at the cost of the promises and the mission.²⁹

So “Jacob finished to command his sons” – now he's just the man Jacob, not the personification of the nation Israel – and Jacob does three things. First, where a couple chapters ago he “sat up on the bed” (Genesis 48:2), now “he gathered up his feet into the bed” (Genesis 49:33).³⁰ Not only does that wrap up this section, but it closes out his big journey of life, which began when, in leaving Bethel the first time, “Jacob lifted up his feet and went to the land of the sons of the east” (Genesis 29:1).³¹ Now, instead of lifting his feet to journey onward to east or west, he gathers them into bed to rest them at last, “as though accepting the event with enjoyment.”³² Second, “he expired” (Genesis 49:33), something we've heard of Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael (Genesis 25:8, 17; 35:29). But in all those cases, the next word was always 'and-he-died.' Even in the flood, when “all flesh that moved on the earth expired,” we hear promptly that “all that was on the dry land died” (Genesis 7:21-22). But here, the word 'died' is left unused, having already been used enough in leading us here. The third phrase given to Jacob is that, like Abraham and Isaac and Ishmael, “he was gathered to his people” (Genesis 49:33). Israel's vision of a good and peaceful death was joining the revered ancestors, being brought into their company and fellowship, cementing the relationship eternally – also physically, as an ideal, but certainly spiritually.³³

Father Jacob has exhaled his final breath. His heart ceases to beat. His body grows quiet and still. It remains as he's gathered to his people, to the community of ancestors who've awaited his spirit. “Joseph fell on his father's face” in grief, “and he wept over him and kissed him” (Genesis 50:1). Nobody can compete with this man's emotional intensity. His actions are “especially tender” here, paying back his father's adoptive kisses of Ephraim and Manasseh by kissing the body that had once been Jacob.³⁴ It's fitting that, after Jacob gathered his sons together and gathered his feet into the bed and was gathered to his people, we see this strong reaction from his son whose name, you maybe remember, means 'Gathered.' And thus Joseph has been gathered there to close his father's unseeing eyes in death, just as God had promised Jacob seventeen years before (Genesis 46:4).³⁵

Joseph, out of love, is determined to give his father only the best; and as lord of the land, he believes the best is thoroughly Egyptian. He refuses to see, as the Egyptians couldn't see, that no mortal efforts could bring back together that which death has broken.³⁶ So “Joseph commanded his servants the healers to embalm his father, and the healers embalmed Israel” (Genesis 50:2). It's an immensely startling statement, one of only two times this word is used in the whole Bible; it's so surprising, it got edited out of the Greek Old Testament.³⁷ Israel was embalmed by Egyptian healers, by Egyptian professionals in Joseph's employ, in Egyptian style.

The Egyptian approach to death was all about putting the many different parts of a person back together: their name, their shadow, their life-force, their personality, their body. In the Egyptian mind, the life-force and the personality still “depended partly on the physical body for their continuing survival,” needing it as a “physical anchor” that allowed the soul to be sustained there perpetually.³⁸ Joseph has perhaps, over time, been won over to this way of thinking about life and death. So he turns his body over to the healers; whether they were the real professional priests or a substitute, it's hard to say. But these 'healers' shove a metal tool up the nostril that once was Jacob's; they break through a bone to gain access to his brain cavity; they swirl the tool around, carving up the brain into pieces small enough to be hooked and dragged out. They pour molten resin up his nose in through the hole to coat and disinfect the area where the brain used to be; they plug the nostrils with linen. With a knife, they slice open Jacob's left side, opening a hole through which they can pull out his intestines, his liver, his kidneys, his lungs with surgical finesse. They wash out the body cavity with water and wine; they dry Jacob inside and out, first with linen cloths, then by immersing him and his extracted organs in a natural salt blend. They fill him with it, coat him with it, let him sit there for forty days, drying out like leather.³⁹ And so “fulfilled for it were forty days,” says the Bible, “for thusly are the days of embalming fulfilled” (Genesis 50:3).

But then followed another thirty days. Joseph's servants, these healers, would've taken the dried corpse out of the salt, and over thirty days they rubbed it with oil, restoring suppleness and flexibility to the shriveled limbs. Then, after anointing the body with spices and perfumes, they carefully wrapped it in strips of linen, which were meant to protect the body both physically and spiritually; customarily, the priests wove many amulets in with the bandages, giving the deceased instructions for the journey into the afterlife. All this they would've done while reciting various protective spells over the body; only after that would the embalmers release the body.⁴⁰ That came at the end of seventy days, the overall timeframe for the elite mummification process.⁴¹

Alongside this whole process, we read, “Egypt wept for him seventy days” (Genesis 50:3). Thus “in days of old, a foreign people wept for the patriarch Jacob, and made the fate of a stranger its own.”⁴² In effect, “Jacob is apparently being accorded royal honors,” treated as though he himself had been Pharaoh,⁴³ because according to a later Greek observer, in Egypt the death of a pharaoh meant that “all the inhabitants of Egypt united in mourning for him, rending their garments, closing the temples, stopping the sacrifices, and celebrating no festivals for seventy-two days; and, plastering their heads with mud and wrapping strips of linen cloth below their breasts..., twice each day, reciting the dirge in a rhythmic chant, they sang the praises of the deceased, recalling his virtues.”⁴⁴ That's what they do for Jacob, suggesting the postmortem “exaltation of the last patriarch as a king.”⁴⁵ How far the chosen have come now! But it's fitting; in fact, Egyptians wrote the name of the founder of one of their foreign-blooded dynasties as... Yakob-mu.⁴⁶

Once those seventy days of weeping were past, “Joseph spoke to the house of Pharaoh,” asking them to convey a message to the king. It's strange, if you think about it; we've always seen Joseph approach Pharaoh directly. But in his mourning, he's unclean and unshaven, looking more Hebrew than he has ever since the day he left his prison.⁴⁷ What's more, none of the pharaohs of the era reigned long enough for this to be the same pharaoh who exalted Joseph. In his appeal, he skips past his father's rejection of Egypt, glosses over the differences between Hebrew cave burials and Egyptian entombment, and asks permission to just fulfill the oath his father made him swear.⁴⁸ The very fact that the so-called 'lord of the land' has to ask permission to venture next-door suggests that Egypt lords over Joseph more than it's the other way around. And there are resonances in Joseph's request with a later petition from Moses to Pharaoh, relaying God's demand that Pharaoh “let my people go, that they may feast to me in the wilderness” (Exodus 5:1). In that later case, Pharaoh's reply was cruel and impious: “I don't know the LORD, and I also won't let Israel go!” (Isaiah 5:3). But here we see Joseph released to “go up and bury your father” Israel, “as he made you swear” (Genesis 50:4-6) – and so he'll go “with the explicit permission” of a softer-hearted king than Moses was one day to face.⁴⁹

So Joseph went, with “all the house of Joseph and his brothers and their father's house; only their little ones and their flocks and their herds did they leave in the land of Goshen; and there went up with him both chariots and horsemen” (Genesis 50:8-9). There's a shadow of a cloud here: did they leave the kids and livestock since they just weren't needed, or because they were effectively hostages ensuring the return of the Sons of Israel to Egypt as promised?⁵⁰ In the next book, when Pharaoh begrudgingly compromises after suffering seven plagues, Moses insists that “with our young and with our old we will go, with our sons and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds we will go” (Exodus 10:9). But Pharaoh raged and raved his refusal, insisting he'd never “let you go and your little ones” (Exodus 10:10) – just like Joseph's trip here. It took two more plagues to get Pharaoh to let the children go, but still he demanded the flocks and herds stay behind (Exodus 10:24); and when Moses pointed out that sacrifice required flocks and herds, negotiations broke down irredeemably, leading to the tenth plague, harshest of them all (Exodus 10:25-29). “And Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his servants and all Egypt; and there was a great outcry in Egypt,” and only then did Pharaoh let them “take also your flocks, also your herds, as you have said, and go – and also, bless me!” he begged (Exodus 12:30-32).

Here, the Sons of Israel seem content to leave behind the livestock and little ones. But they go up out of Egypt with “all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt” (Genesis 50:7). These are the Egyptian elite; no wonder they have chariots and horsemen with them as an honor guard, protecting them from “potential trouble in Sinai and Canaan on the journey.”⁵¹ The whole combined group, making “a very glorious camp” (Genesis 50:9), march forth as “a funeral procession befitting a king,”⁵² “and the entourage moved along like a great army.”⁵³ An Egyptian around this time pictured a funeral procession like this: “The procession's following is made for you on the day of interment, the mummy-case of gold, with head of lapis-lazuli, the sky above as you lie on the bier, oxen drawing you, chanters in front of you; funerary dances are done for you at your tomb's mouth.”⁵⁴ Ordinarily, there would've been family and professional mourners crying around the sled, led by priests throwing milk and waving incense, all flanked by a pair of women dressed as Egyptian goddesses.⁵⁵ Whether they went with Joseph or not, this is definitely an Egyptian funeral.⁵⁶

But they stop at “the threshing-floor of the bramble beyond the Jordan” – we don't know where that is, not even which side of the river they mean – where “they lamented there with a very great and heavy lamentation, and [Joseph] made a mourning for his father for seven days,” the Hebrew custom following this Egyptian funeral (Genesis 50:10). But when Canaanite observers looked in at them from the outside, “they said, 'A heavy mourning is this by the Egyptians!' On this basis, it was called Abel-mizraim” (Genesis 50:11). It seems that, to Canaanite eyes, this whole “mixed company of Israelites and Egyptians is seen as Egyptian.”⁵⁷

Here's where the Sons of Israel push forward, leaving all their Egyptian escort behind.⁵⁸ The twelve brothers go it alone, obeying their father's dying command. They trudge over Canaan's landscape, carrying their dad's body, struggling to coordinate together, as if sharing his limp;⁵⁹ they make their way to Hebron, where they open the ancestral tomb and lay Jacob's mummy to rest beside the bones of Leah, near Isaac and Rebekah, near Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 50:13). There are no Egyptian rituals here: no sem priest clad in leopard skin, no lector-priests reciting prayers to false gods, no chants to restore Jacob's five senses, no ritually opening Jacob's mouth with a knife used to cut umbilical cords, no Egyptian funeral feast.⁶⁰ There they leave him. Goodbye, Jacob.

The action of the scene then winds down quickly enough. “Joseph returned to Egypt, him and his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father, after he had buried his father” (Genesis 50:14). Joseph and the Egyptians lead the Sons of Israel back into Egypt; unknowingly, Joseph seems almost a “benevolent despot who holds his family captive” in a foreign land that mustn't become their hearts' home.⁶¹ But things look different as we jump fifty-four years into the future. At the time of Jacob's death, Joseph was 56, Reuben, Simeon, and Levi were in their early sixties, seven other brothers were in their late fifties, and Benjamin was 42. Then “Joseph settled in Egypt, he and his father's house; and Joseph lived 110 years” (Genesis 50:22). It's a long time to live – the ideal age, to the Egyptian mind – and it also brings closure to the pattern of the lifespans of Abraham (7 x (5 x 5)), Isaac (5 x (6 x 6)), and Jacob (3 x (7 x 7)): Joseph lives (5 x 5) + (6 x 6) + (7 x 7) years.⁶²

A lot can happen in fifty-four more years. “Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation; the children also of Machir son of Manasseh were born on Joseph's knees” (Genesis 50:23). He's become a great-great-grandpa, and no doubt he has plenty of great-great-grandkids to know and love. At the same time, the famine from which Joseph saved Egypt and Canaan is now a footnote to history books in the eyes of all but the oldest Egyptians. It's unlikely that the current pharaoh (or pharaohs) is even related to the pharaoh Joseph met at first. Joseph may be rich and respected, but he's certainly long out of public office; and with the advancing of decade upon decade, he's had plenty of time to ponder his late father's words and read the hieroglyphs on the wall.

And now, like Jacob before him, it's Joseph's turn to go the way of all flesh. But as he gathers his brethren to his side, he makes it clear that Israel has won his tug-of-war with Joseph from beyond the grave.⁶³ Joseph can at last divest himself of his Egyptian vision; we see here “the final deathbed repudiation by Joseph of his Egyptian identity.”⁶⁴ He'll no more walk like an Egyptian, talk like an Egyptian, think and feel like an Egyptian. He stands instead in solidarity with the people of the mission, the heirs of Abraham, the Sons of Israel. “I am dying,” he tells his brethren, “but God will surely visit you and will bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob” (Genesis 50:24). Here at last, for the first time, we have that threefold roster of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob – the human end of God's covenant (Exodus 2:24).

On that basis, as his father once exacted an oath from him, so Joseph now exacts an oath from all the Sons of Israel, as a covenant family and emerging national community, that in the day he foresees, “you shall carry up my bones from this” (Genesis 50:25). Where a middle-aged Joseph had credited God with giving him sons “in this” Egypt, now an older, wiser Joseph has certitude the same God will enable Israel's Sons to carry his bones up “from this.” He's realized “that Egypt is not his permanent home.”⁶⁵

So “both Jacob and Joseph gave instructions for their burial as a way of foretelling the return.”⁶⁶ Jacob's funeral instructions were what they were, “not without reason, but to let them have a glimpse of the real prospect of returning themselves some day to the promised land.”⁶⁷ It's no coincidence that the gathered mourners on the move are described as “a very glorious camp” (Genesis 50:9), looking ahead to “the camp of Israel” following their God's leading on their way up from Egypt (Exodus 14:19). As was to happen centuries later, this funerary camp “came through the desert with the body along the way that the people of Israel were led by Moses.”⁶⁸ And though we can't quite place Abel-mizraim on a map, they may have gone the long way to loop around the far side of Jordan, just where Moses and the Sons of Israel would go as they prepared to enter the land.⁶⁹ Genesis is clearly writing Jacob's funeral to foreshadow the fuller, truer exodus that was to come.⁷⁰

And now Joseph realizes that; he has faith that the promises of God to his ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are going to hold true, because God is true and faithful, loving and good, merciful and gracious to the uttermost. “By faith Joseph, finishing, recollected about the exodus of the Sons of Israel and gave instructions about his bones” (Hebrews 11:21). So, says he, “while you are taking my bones up there, the Lord will be with you in the light.”⁷¹ Centuries go by. Joseph's bones wait in Egypt, sealed up in their coffin (Genesis 50:26). At last, the day of Israel's visitation is upon them, and “in orderly ranks, the Sons of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt; and Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had placed the Sons of Israel under solemn oath, saying, 'God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from this with you'” (Exodus 13:18-19).

This coffin with Joseph's remains, hundreds of years old, is brought to the shore of the sea; it passes between the parted waters while God “gets glory over Pharaoh and his chariots and his horsemen” (Exodus 14:18), judging them for failing to match the merit of their forefathers who accompanied the Sons of Israel in peace at Jacob's funeral (Genesis 50:7-9). The box of Joseph's bones, finally freed from Egypt where he'd chosen to wait with his suffering people in solidarity, moves with the camp of Israel to the base of a mountain; Joseph's bones rattle at the thunder and trumpets, are perfumed by the smoke and flame billowing from the manifestation of God, the LORD (Exodus 19:16-19). And nine months later, Joseph's box isn't the only box in the camp; it has a much lovelier twin. See, the second-to-last word in Genesis, 'coffin' or 'box,' shows up a lot in the Bible; it's the word usually pointing to the 'Ark' of the Covenant. And so when the camp follows the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, they carry two boxes: one containing the bones of Joseph, having eagerly awaited this day by faith, and the other containing the Law of the LORD, tablets of stone inscribed by the fiery finger of a faithful Father.

For forty years, these boxes dwell in the desert, detained from their destiny by the disobedience of the Sons of Israel. But a generation passes away; Moses and Aaron have died on their mountain heights. Joseph's great heir Joshua, leading the tribes into the land of God's promise as they follow God's sacred box through parted waters once more (Joshua 3:14-17), lives to match the years of his great forefather (Joshua 24:29). But in his last days, “the bones of Joseph which the Sons of Israel had brought up out of Egypt, they buried at Shechem, in the plot of field which Jacob had bought from the sons of Hamor father of Shechem” – Israel had bequeathed that spot to “the sons of Joseph for an inheritance” (Joshua 24:32; cf. Genesis 48:22). There at that “field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph,” a man would one day sit by a well and offer living water to an astonished woman who'd make him known to her fellow children of Joseph as “indeed the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

Why was it that Jacob was so desirous to be buried with his holy ancestors rather than in Egypt? Because, said one ancient Christian, Jacob “was expecting the resurrection of the dead, so that, when the cry occurs and the sound of the trumpet takes place, his resurrection will be close to that of his fathers, and at the time of the resurrection he will not be mingled with the wicked who will return to Sheol.”⁷² He was “not assigning the hope of his bones in second place, for he was taking care of such, not as being destroyed, but as going to come to life again.”⁷³ And when our Lord came, who bestowed living water, he declared, “As for the resurrection of the dead, haven't you read what was said to you by God: 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not God of the dead, but of the living!” (Matthew 22:31-32).⁷⁴

It was “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” who “glorified his Servant, Jesus..., the Author of Life, whom God raised from the dead; to this we are witnesses,” preached St. Peter (Acts 3:13-15). If Jacob and Joseph looked forward, by faith in the promises of the faithful God of their fathers, to their coming earthly exodus out of Egypt's land to inherit their destiny, so we, by faith in the promises of that same faithful God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who raised Jesus, look forward beyond by faith to a similar exodus as our Lord's, an exodus “out of death into life” already accomplished in Spirit (1 John 3:14; cf. Romans 6:13), but perfected in body also when we “may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:11). And so now, “thanks to the grace of God, since death has been turned into slumber and life's end into repose, and since there is a great certitude of resurrection, we rejoice and exult at it like people moving from one life to another..., from a worse to a better, from a temporary to an eternal, from an earthly to a heavenly.”⁷⁵

This is what Christ our Lord came for, “to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, in order that the nations might glorify God for his mercy” (Romans 15:8). For “all these” like Abraham and Isaac, like Jacob and Joseph and the ancient Sons of Israel, “though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect” (Hebrews 11:39-40). For if Abraham and Isaac and Jacob were each, at the death of their bodies, gathered to their people, to which people do we hope to be gathered with them? Isn't it “to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven..., and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 12:22-24)?⁷⁶ For then “many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11), gathered to this saintly festivity in the splendor of El Shaddai, the LORD.

And so may it be for us, if – as was Father Israel's vindicated hope for his son Joseph – we turn from our visions of a self-made Eden in Egypt's bosom and fix the eyes of our hearts upon “the hope to which [God] has called you..., the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come; and he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the Church which is his Body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:18-23). Thanks be to our great and faithful God! Amen.