Sunday Night, July 5, 2020 PM

All right, well, as you open your

Bibles to Genesis chapter 50, let's go ahead and start with a word of prayer. Father, I thank you so much for gathering us together tonight.

I thank you for the joy of Christian fellowship, and I thank you for the truths of your word that are never changing.

And I pray tonight that you would encourage us with the meaning of your word, and as we look at Christ, I pray that you would help us to follow him with zeal and with joy, trusting only in him for our salvation.

We pray these things for Christ's sake, amen. So Genesis 50, here's the last chapter of the book.

A few of you had expressed fear that you would die before we got to this point, and I understand

I feared that for myself. So Genesis chapter 50, the title of the lesson tonight is simply faith, which

I think is a good contender for the theme of the whole book.

Of course, we have the term Genesis because it's about beginnings, the beginning of the world, the beginning of the promise of the gospel, the beginning of the nation of Israel, the beginning of Scripture, and so on, a lot of different beginnings.

And so that, of course, is why we have it as the name. And yet as we think about the contents of the book of Genesis, we can easily see how much of it pertains to faith.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the

Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. What does that have to do with faith?

Well, Hebrews 11, verses 1 through 3,

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. While we may think that only has to do with that which is yet to come, we read,

For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

The very start of this book, when we read, In the beginning, God, we know that we're reading something about faith.

We are reading something that requires faith. It's by faith that we understand that God made everything in the way that he did.

As we think about the story past the six unique miracle -filled days in which

God made all things, God made man on the sixth day, just two of them,

Adam and Eve, and immediately set them on a course of faith.

Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.

To start with just two of you, and then to be called to fill up the earth, and not simply just fill up the earth, but also subdue the earth, well, that requires faith.

That requires faith. We think of the story of Abraham, how he was called out of his land of Ur to go to a land he had never seen, to leave his family and his familiarity, and go to a land he had not seen, a man without children, to whom

God promised children without reckoning, a journey of faith.

And so, we have many different stories in Genesis that have to do with faith, and it's really about tracing the promise that God made in Genesis 3 .15,

that the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent, though there would be enmity, there would be victory, and we have this first gospel promise.

And so, all the attention really was on the seed. Who would the seed be? And we've traced that promise all the way through, we've come to the blessings that Jacob gave to his children, and we saw how different.

He spoke of Judah, and even though he's very favorable to Joseph, in fact, had chosen him as his firstborn, gave him the double portion, even the things he said about Joseph were not in comparison with what he said of Judah.

So we've been paying attention to who the seed is, and we see that through Judah comes Shiloh, the one to whom it all belongs.

The scepter would not depart from the tribe of Judah, that the king to come would come through him.

And now we come to the close of the story in chapter 50, and more about faith here.

These are hard times, as Joseph is going to mourn for the death of his father.

The famine has had its effect. The family has been displaced from the land of Canaan, and they are down in Egypt.

So there are a lot of changes that have occurred, a lot of difficulties that have occurred.

And so we're seeing a close to the story, which would be of some interest to the

Israelites. How did we end up in Egypt in the first place? Why was it that we stuck around, and why is it that we're hauling somebody's bones up out of Egypt to bury them in the land of Canaan?

I mean, they carry those bones around for 40 -plus years through the wilderness, so they could finally bury them in the Promised Land. I don't know who it was who was in charge of carrying the bones.

But carrying those bones, it was a long time before they could actually bury the bones of Joseph in the land of Canaan.

So it's of definite interest to the Israelites, but it's also of interest to us, the story of faith in the context of real life and real difficult times.

I remember speaking to a friend of mine in college, and he asked me, what is faith?

And I said, well, faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

And when he heard my reply, he dismissed my answer with a single word of profanity. Of course, he was a pastoral ministry student, just like I was.

There were some differences between us, though. He did not believe that the Bible was the word of God, that it only gave witness to the word somehow, that there were many errors in it.

And he did not believe that God knew the future or that the future was indeed knowable. He was experimental in his theology, ascribing a feminine gender to the

Holy Spirit. And he rejected the ideas of any structured, organized church.

He did not believe that once you became a Christian, that that meant you would stay that way. And he was enduring a time of personal crisis, so I was not actually surprised at all at his answer.

Many years later, I talked with him on the phone, and God had gotten a hold of him, and he was a lot better.

So I praise the Lord for that. I had a good time of fellowship on the phone. But at that time, he was in a world of hurt due to the teaching he was absorbing.

Well, as we look at this chapter, and I'm going to read verses 1 through 14 in a moment, what we are called to do here is simply to glorify

Christ through the practice and the perspective of faith, to glorify Christ through the practice and perspective of faith.

Genesis 50 verses 1 through 14, then Joseph fell on his father's face and wept over him and kissed him.

Joseph commanded his servants, the physicians, to embalm his father. So the physicians embalmed

Israel. Now 40 days were required for it, just for such is the period required for embalming.

And the Egyptians wept for him 70 days. When the days of mourning for him were passed,

Joseph spoke to the household of Pharaoh saying, if now I have found favor in your sight, please speak to Pharaoh saying, my father has made me swear saying, behold,

I am about to die in my grave, which I dug for myself in the land of Canaan. There you shall bury me.

Now therefore, please let me go up and bury my father. Then I will return. Pharaoh said, go up and bury your father as he made you swear.

So Joseph went up to bury his father, and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, and all the household of Joseph and his brothers and his father's household.

They left only their little ones and their flocks and their herds in the land of Goshen. There also went up with him both chariots and horsemen, and it was a very great company.

When they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they lamented there with a very great and sorrowful lamentation, and he observed seven days mourning for his father.

Now when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning at the threshing floor of Atad, they said, this is a grievous mourning for the

Egyptians. Therefore it was named Abel Mithraim, which is beyond the

Jordan. Thus his sons did for him as he had charged them, for his sons carried him to the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre, which

Abraham had bought along with the field for a burial site from Ephron the

Hittite. After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt, he and his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father.

As we think about the practice of faith, we see

Joseph and his brothers acting according to faith in the midst of their sorrow, in the midst of their sorrow, and that as they live out their faith, they must do so publicly, and they live it out as a witness to those around them, even if they didn't understand what was going on.

But we see the sorrow, Jacob dies, Israel dies. So many years that Joseph and his father were separated, forcibly separated by the evil committed by Joseph's brothers.

So many years that they lost, that they didn't have together to spend time with each other. But they did get a few years together down in Egypt in Jacob's latter time.

And after Jacob dies, Joseph, we see, falls on his father's face and he weeps over him and he kisses him.

Now as we think about the way in which Joseph mourns, we see that it is both passionate and instinctive, but it is also structured.

And this is the way that we often mourn, is it not, especially for one that we love who has died.

As believers, we are admonished in 1 Thessalonians 4, 13 and 14, but we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope.

It doesn't say that you will not grieve, but that you will not grieve as those with no hope.

There is a difference in the grieving for those who have hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus.

Jacob died as a man of faith. He knew that he would be with his ancestors, he would be with his people, long before his body was buried in the ground.

But he still wanted his body buried in the ground in a very specific instruction. Now, he did not give instructions to Joseph to embalm his body.

He did not give instructions to Joseph to make sure that the Egyptians mourned for him 70 days. His instructions to his son was that he would be buried in the field of Ephraim the

Hittite, the only piece of land that Abraham owned out of the promised land. He wanted to be buried in the promised land.

He wanted to be buried there where Abraham was buried and where Isaac was buried. And why did he want to be buried in that way?

Well, he saw himself planting his bones, planting his dead body as a seed of hope in the land that was promised to him.

There was something significant about the way he would be buried. And this is an instruction out of faith, and Joseph and his brothers honor his father, and they follow through as well in faith.

Later on, we'll see that Joseph gives instructions. He, too, wants to make sure that when they leave

Egypt, when the people leave Egypt, that the instructions would be handed down in the generations to bring

Joseph's bones up out of Egypt and buried in the promised land as well. So yes, there was mourning.

There was weeping and grieving. There is, essentially, throughout the land of Egypt, the flags basically flew at half mast for 70 days for the father of Joseph.

They were under official grieving, official mourning in Egypt for 70 days for the father of Joseph.

We see how significant God made Joseph to the nation of Egypt, the way in which God used

Joseph, a descendant of Abraham, to bless this nation and all the other nations who would have starved to death had it not been for the grace of God and his wisdom in the life of Joseph.

And so when his father dies, we see all of these pagans mourning. An interesting thing crops up here.

As he is embalmed for 40 days, and then you have the 30 days of mourning after that.

To have spent all this time, all of Egypt, focused on the mourning of Jacob, and then to hear that they were going to move his body out of Egypt back to this land up north, how many times would the question have been asked, well, why are we doing that?

Why are we going to take Joseph's father to Canaan?

What's the point? I mean, the food is here, Joseph's second in command here, why not bury him here?

And every single time that happened, in the weeping, in the mourning of these believers, there'd be an opportunity to explain why.

Do we see that? He even speaks to Pharaoh. Joseph must speak to Pharaoh to get permission to do this. He says,

I promised my father that I would bury him in Canaan, and I must be a man of my word.

And so he can't keep this faith private, he can't hide it away and only have it unto himself.

He must live it out. He must keep his promise to his father.

And so great company then goes to the Canaanites. It's a witness to the Egyptians, and they all get involved.

All these servants of Pharaoh, the elders of Pharaoh's household, the elders of the land of Egypt, all these most important people, all get in a parade to go to the promised land.

And they're taking one of the patriarchs back to the promised land to be buried there because of the promises that God made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Do we see the most powerful nation on the planet, Egypt, is all in on honoring one of the patriarchs, all about following through on a sign of faith based on the word of God.

Look how many people are now focused on the promises that God has made.

And so when all of Egypt essentially shows up in the land of Canaan, they come to the threshing floor of Attad and they have a moment there or a week there of mourning.

And then the Canaanites see this, and they don't understand exactly what they're looking at.

The Canaanites are like, this is weird. A whole bunch of people just came up and they all look like they're Egyptians. They all came up out of the land of Egypt.

There's a massive amount of Egyptians here and they're all mourning. They're all weeping and wailing and lamenting.

And so they named that place Abel Mitzrayim, which is a kind of a funny name.

Abel means a water course or a field, and it rhymes with Abel, which means mourning.

Mitzrayim means Egypt. So this name contains a pun, which communicates that this place once had a stream or field of mourning

Egyptians. It's like, why is this place called Abel Mitzrayim?

Well, once upon a time, a whole bunch of Egyptians just showed up and they all just cried for like seven days.

And this brings to mind that not everybody's going to understand what is going on when we live out our faith.

When we do things, when we follow through on what we're commanded to do and called to do, it's very likely that all sorts of people are not going to understand what in the world that is and why in the world are they doing that.

But notice that's not one of the prerequisites for obedience, of living out our faith.

It's not required that everybody understand, accept, and approve what we do before we do it.

We can go ahead and do it and follow what God has for us, and it may cause a great deal of confusion.

But in the providence of God, it may end up leaving artifacts behind which can be used later. Why is that place called

Abel Mitzrayim? Well, tell the story until finally someone tells the story behind the story.

In these ways, God leaves the artifacts of his glory in the history of our lives.

Our faith is to be lived out, and therefore it's going to be obvious. The late

Senator Kennedy told his biographer that the resurrection always gave him a lot of hope. And the biographer was stunned and said,

I've never heard you talk about anything like that before. Right? Well, he is a

Kennedy. To which he replied, well, why would you? It's a private matter. But Jesus said in Matthew 10, 32 and 33, therefore everyone who confesses me before men,

I will also confess him before my Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, I will also deny him before my

Father who is in heaven. Our faith must be public. Jesus did not hide himself from the world.

From his birth to his death, his life was public. He had a public death and a public birth.

It was obvious. It was on display. And we should embrace our purpose as a people of grace in the light of the world.

First Peter 2, 9 says, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Well, there's the practice of faith and then there's the perspective of faith in verses 15 and following.

When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?

So they sent a message to Joseph saying, your father charged us before he died saying, thus you shall say to Joseph, please forgive,

I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin for they did you wrong. And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the

God of your father. And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, behold, we are your servants.

Joseph said to them, do not be afraid for am I in God's place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring out this present result to preserve many people alive.

So therefore do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your little ones. So he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

Now Joseph stayed in Egypt, he and his father's household and Joseph lived 110 years. Joseph saw the third generation of Ephraim's sons.

And also the sons of Makir, the son of Manasseh were born on Joseph's knees. Joseph said to his brothers,

I'm about to die, but God will surely take care of you and bring you up from this land to the land which he promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob.

Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, God will surely take care of you and you shall carry my bones up from here.

So Joseph died at the age of 110 years and he was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt.

So the perspective of faith, I think, is obvious here in two ways. The perspective of faith concerning the past and the perspective of faith concerning the future.

And what we have, first of all, is the perspective of faith concerning the past. When Jacob dies, as is often the case in families, there is some concern that when a patriarch or a matriarch dies, that the fighting will ensue among the children, that what used to hold them together is now gone and now all sorts of, and there's plenty of stories and anecdotal evidence that we can think about that.

But in particular, these brothers are concerned that now that Jacob is dead,

Joseph will finally have opportunity to take his revenge upon them. And it would be very easy as second in command of Egypt, where all of his brothers are dependent upon him for their needs, for their supplies.

By this time, Pharaoh owns almost all the land in Egypt and Joseph's in charge of everything so he could easily take vengeance upon them.

And so they kind of revert back to their old ways and they make up a story. You know, before dad died, he said, be nice to us.

But notice that, what is the truth here? The truth is that Joseph's brothers had terribly wronged him, hadn't they?

They terribly wronged him. They're the ones who did it, not somebody else. It was them. It was them.

They are, of course, concerned about any kind of vengeance upon them would have an impact upon their children and hurt them as well.

But they are just hoping that Joseph will not take revenge.

When Joseph gets this made up message, he weeps. He weeps. He's still in mourning for his father.

This just adds to the, but it had already been resolved.

He had told them that. It had already been resolved. He had already forgiven them. Why are they bringing it back up?

Guilt? Shame? Somehow it's, I feel like they can't make it up to Joseph, self -preservation.

Notice what they do. I mean, they did wrong Joseph, but Joseph forgave them.

But notice what they do. They make up a story. They make up a story.

It's almost believable, but they make up a story. And they come and they fall down before him and they say, we are your servants, which makes a lot of sense.

I mean, after all, he is the prime minister. And they're just hoping he won't pay them back.

What does Joseph say? Am I in God's place? Am I in God's place?

Is it Joseph's place to exercise vengeance upon these people who have so greatly wronged him?

Or to exercise vengeance upon their descendants? Or to give instructions to his fourth generation to rise up against their fourth generation and exercise vengeance?

Are any of these people in God's place? And the answer is no.

And Joseph had already forgiven them. And it was a wrong thing. It was an evil thing that they had done. But he forgave them.

Notice the solace of God's sovereignty here, of perspective of faith and reflection upon the past.

Evil things indeed have happened in the past, but what perspective are we to have? The perspective of faith.

He says, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result to preserve many people alive.

So therefore, do not be afraid. I will provide for you and your little ones. Why can Joseph forgive them?

Because he knows he's not God, and he knows the God who is God. And that God is the

God who triumphs over evil. And indeed, the evil of man in the hands of God becomes good as he turns it that way.

That's the kind of God that we serve. So man may plan evil, but God determines the outcome and the results.

Proverbs 16 .9 says, the mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps. Proverbs 19 .21,

many plans are in a man's heart, but the counsel of the Lord will stand. Psalm 115 .3

says, but our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases. Psalm 135 .6, whatever the

Lord pleases, he does in heaven and in earth and in the seas and in all the deeps. And we have no better example of God using the evil of man to accomplish the good other than in the death of Jesus Christ.

In Acts 4 .27 -28, the disciples pray, for truly in this city they were gathered together against your holy servant

Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel.

And what did they gather to do but to murder the Son of God? But they say they are gathered together, verse 28, to do whatever your hand and your purpose predestined to occur.

So we see the kind of God that we serve, and at the heart of the gospel is a trust that God is able to take that which is evil in the past and turn it for the good.

I think that a lot of the problems of our day would be solved if folks would take

Joseph's perspective and say, am I in God's place? Am I in God's place?

Is it really Joseph's job to get vengeance on those who wronged him? Is he in God's place?

No, he's not, and neither is his fourth generation, or fifth generation, or sixth generation.

We must have the right perspective on our past to interpret the past through the lens of the gospel through faith.

Also, concerning the future, Joseph says to the descendants of Israel, to his children and the children of his brothers, what does he say to them?

He says in verse 24, I'm about to die. So he's not going to see what's going to happen next.

I'm about to die, but God will surely take care of you and bring you up from this land to the land which he promised on oath to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

Joseph's going to die. He's not going to see it with his own eyes. He's not going to see the exodus. He's not going to see the demise of the new line of Pharaohs.

He's not going to see the parting of the Red Sea and the passing away of the first generation, but the triumph of the second generation entering the land of Canaan.

He's not going to see it, but he knows it's going to happen. God promised it was going to happen, and so that's his perspective of faith.

And he says, surely God will visit you. He's saying God's going to come and care for you.

We can't see what's going to happen generations from now. We don't see how it is that indeed all the enemies of Christ will be under his feet.

We don't know how that's going to happen. We don't see it now, do we? We're like the writer of Hebrews.

We don't see everything in subjection under Christ now, but we live by faith that that will be the case, that that will be the case.

So as we look at the past and the injustices and the evils and the things that have taken place in the past, we must do so with the perspective of faith, knowing that God is sovereign, that he's in control, and he will turn it for the good.

And as far as the future is concerned, which can often look bleak and uncertain, we still must live by a perspective of faith, knowing that God will accomplish the things that he said he will do and that he will keep his promises.

And that's how we have to live. We have to live as a people of faith, people of faith who do not walk by sight, but walk by our trust in the word of God.

Well, let's close our time tonight by singing the doxology together.