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Preacher: Ross Macdonald Scripture: Genesis 49:29-50:14
Well this morning we look to get within a week of completing Genesis as we
close out chapter 49 and begin chapter 50.
We're nearly closing the last chapter of the book of Genesis that we've been in now for over
two years and though we'll complete the text of Genesis next week, we'll have perhaps
several more weeks to review the past two years and draw out some of the themes and emphases that we've found
along the way.
As we close out this, or get near to closing out the last chapter of Genesis, we're
also closing out the last chapter of Jacob's life and soon closing out the last
chapter of the life of Joseph.
As we see from our passage, the burial of Jacob is in view.
It's emphasized heavily by repetition, not only the fact of burial, but even the
place of burial, and therefore the significance of burial, and that'll occupy our focus this
morning as we consider the importance of burial and then draw from it the significance of how we
view and how we ought to apply.
Death.
So we begin in Genesis 49, taking up from verse 28, with the burial charge.
And he blessed them, he blessed each one according to his own blessing, and he charged them and said to them, I am to
be gathered to my people.
Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the
cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought
with the field of Ephron the Hittite as a possession for a burial place.
There they buried Abraham and Sarah, his wife.
There they buried Isaac and Rebekah, his wife.
And there I buried Leah.
The field and the cave that is there were purchased from the sons of Heth.
And when Jacob had finished commanding his sons, he drew his feet up onto the bed and
breathed his last and was gathered to his people.
So the blessing has been passed on.
Jacob, ever since he climbed into his deathbed, has had ample time to reflect upon
his life, ample time to consider all of the ways that all of these long
years had come with great triumphs and also come with great tragedies.
Perhaps notes of remorse and regret as he considered great swaths, great decades of his life
that had been given over to sinful passivity as he, through his own failures
as a father, gave way to division in his marriages, division
among his sons, but then also the great triumphs of God's restoration and how
he redeemed these years, especially the latter years of Jacob's life, when he saw his long -lost
son, long feared dead, and how he was able to spend these past 17 years not only with Joseph,
but also with Ephraim and Manasseh, gathering his whole household there in Goshen, spending the
sweet time in the deliverance of God from the judgment of famine.
And now, as he's reflected on his long life and the longer mercies of God within his
life, he is laser focused on his burial, laser focused on returning to
the land of Canaan and returning to the possession within the land, the field that was purchased by Abraham
from Ephraim the Hittite, to be buried in the cave of Machpelah.
It has been a long time in Jacob's life since he had been at the cave of Machpelah.
It had been a long time since he had buried Leah there.
Of course, his beloved Rachel was buried in Ephrathah along the way to Bethlehem, but he
charged his sons, take me back to this place, take me back to this possession, bury me
with my fathers.
I must be gathered to my people.
Lay me down next to my grandparents, Abraham and Sarah.
Lay me next to my mother and my father, Isaac and Rebekah.
Lay me next to my wife, Leah.
So this phrase is sort of the encapsulation of the ending of chapter 49,
gathered to my people.
That's what his desire is, and that's the summation at the end of chapter 49.
When he breathed his last, he was gathered to his people.
And here in this language, we get almost a glimpse of the resurrection hope.
What people?
All of your people are in Goshen.
What do you mean you need to be gathered to your people?
Gathered to my people in the cave of Machpelah.
Gathered to dust?
Gathered to bones?
In what way can you speak of being gathered to your people?
As though they're living, as though they're active in the same way that Jesus defends the charge against
him.
Have you not read that God is the father of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
Therefore, he is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.
We get this resurrection hope in a glimpse in Jacob's desire to be gathered to
his people.
He knows that they too are but asleep, awaiting for the resurrection morn, when God
has consummated his promised redemption.
And in many ways, that is the Christians' resurrection hope.
We also long to be gathered to our people.
Not ties of flesh and blood, though we pray and labor earnestly, I hope,
that many of our kindred will be won to Christ.
But truly, our people are those who are united to our Savior, and we long to be gathered with them.
We long to be gathered with the saints.
Jacob had told Pharaoh, few and evil have been my days, but I can't help but think in
these 17 years, and as he's perched on this seat, having just withdrawn his hands of blessing from his
sons, that he thinks, long have been my years, and God has been faithful to me.
Consider the faith of Jacob's charge.
His utmost concern lies in the promise of God, and that's why he's driven
toward the burial in Canaan.
Moses recounts the death of Jacob with more detail than any other death in the book of Genesis.
Most likely, as far as I can tell, Moses recounts the death of Jacob with more detail, with
more span in the narrative, than any other death in all of Scripture, save the Lord Jesus himself.
And I think that's emphatic as we come to the end of the book.
Remember, how you begin and how you end a book is where you draw out the most significance.
And so the death of Jacob is given all of this space because he lies with this great hope,
and yet he lies short of the fulfillment.
The reason for this length seems to be a reminder of this promised covenant that is yet
still unfolding, yet still in the works, and this faithful man is walking by faith in light of
God's promise, and yet he dies in faith, not having grasped the promise, not
having clutched or opened or found the fulfillment of that great promise.
And so there's a pitching forward toward what God will yet do, even as we come to the end
of this faithful warrior's life.
What does the hymn say?
Soon, soon,.
To faithful warriors comes their rest.
Sooner than we think.
Jacob had hope and faith in God's promises, and all of that is pictured in
the charge and in the repetition and in the detail of this burial plan in Canaan.
It points us to the great promise not only of Jacob, but of Isaac and of Abraham, and in many ways
he's training his sons to have this hope also, that their destiny will not be in the luxury of
Goshen, but it will be as the tent makers and the sheep herders in the land of Canaan.
They too must come to their earthly end.
They too, like he and like his fathers, must live in the great hope of the work
that God has undertaken to do, the work that God will surely accomplish.
They then must gather with their people in promised expectation of that great hope.
That's what Jacob is doing in the blessing of his sons.
That's what Jacob is doing as he gives charges about his burial.
Jacob could not pass until this emphasis is clear.
I love what Spurgeon said about it.
So long as God had this sentence to speak by him, death could not refrain his tongue.
Remember what God had promised Jacob in chapter 46.
Joseph himself will close your eyes, and God was faithful to his word.
Here, Joseph closes the eyes, as it were, of Jacob.
Perhaps the last sight that this aged saint sees is his beloved.
Son, Joseph.
He draws his feet to his bed.
You can imagine him swinging up upon the bed and laying down as if just to fall asleep for the night.
We're reminded of how the morning and evening are the sort of the microcosm, the daily
repetition of the life cycle.
Each night we sleep, and in the morn we arise, and God gives us this daily picture,
this daily ritual of what death is, and what's on the other side of that death for
those who live by faith in hope of God.
The dawning of light and of glory, a new day emerging out of the darkness and
the lostness of the night, slumber being the metaphor primarily for death in the New
Testament.
Drawing his feet onto his bed, lying down as if to sleep, Jacob lies in peace.
Notice how he yields to death with no struggle.
He entered into a new life with a great struggle.
At the the brooks of Jabbok when Joseph was just a toddler, and he had sent everyone ahead of him across
the brook, and there he strove with God and received the name Israel with a great wrestling match that lasted
through the entire night.
He strove with God, and because that encounter with God changed him forever, he received
a new name.
He was a new creation in the grace of God.
And yet here at the very end of his life of faith, notice the peace, notice the calm, notice the
serenity.
There's no great wrestling match.
There's no great horror that freezes his face.
He simply lies down and breathes his last.
We're reminded that how we begin the Christian life is not nearly as important
as how we end the Christian life.
How we start the race is not nearly as important as how we finish the race,
which means we cannot coast on the coattails of how fervent we once were, of how
zealous we used to be, of how we used to indulge on God's Word and give
ourselves over to prayer and witness to anything that was moving.
And now, that was back then, if only I could go back then, but now I'm in the sunset of my walk of faith.
Isn't it time to coast and go with the flow?
Not according to Jacob's life.
Now it's time to ratchet up and press hard, to double down, to run the race as to win.
So the burial charge turns to the burial care, beginning in chapter 50,
verse 1.
Jacob's just breathed his last and we're brought right into the intimacy of that moment when all the sons
realize he has now physically departed from the land of the living and
yet he is truly alive and in the presence of God.
Joseph fell on his father's face and wept over him and
kissed him.
And Joseph commanded his servants, the physicians, to embalm his father.
And so the physicians embalmed Israel.
Forty days were required for him, for such are the days required for those who are embalmed.
And the Egyptians mourned for him seventy days.
So the first thing we see in chapter 50 is the grief of the beloved son.
It had once been the beloved father who grieved the lost son and now it is the beloved son who
grieves the lost father.
And that grief, it turns over not only into the family, but it spills out into the nation.
Notice that because Zaphnath -Paneah, the great lord of the land, is grieving for his father
that the whole land of Egypt joins with him in ceremonial grief and they grieve with him.
There's something to say about that.
Aspect of.
Ceremonial grief.
Who among the Egyptians truly even knew Jacob?
Who among them even had any regard for the sheep herders dwelling in the land of Goshen?
If anything, they probably held them in contempt.
Shepherds are abominable to the Egyptians.
But here, out of due respect and honor to the governor of the land, they mourn
the governor's father.
They mourn Jacob.
And even this ceremonial grief communicates something to us of the bright
spots of Egyptian culture, in my mind, compared to our own society today.
The fact that tragedy can befall us and we don't know what it's like to grieve as a people.
We don't know what it's like to gather often in communities and grieve.
Most likely because the church doesn't know what it's like to gather as a people and
grieve.
The church having lost perhaps century by century or generation by
passing generation, what it means to actually weep with those who are weeping.
Headlines in our day move very fast.
Tragedies come and then they seem to pass almost as quickly as they came.
And that only seems to have accelerated.
I don't think any tragedy has slowed us down as much as perhaps 9 -11.
And I think if 9 -11 or something equivalent were to happen in the year 2023, God forbid,
I don't think we would slow down for half as long.
I don't know that it would stay in the news cycle or if it would have impacted as much as it did back in
2001.
Why is that?
Why have we become passive toward tragedy and the sinking of the Titanic?
People in Europe and in England, France, also here in the United States, they
publicly grieved.
Some of them wore black armbands for over a month as a way of displaying horror
at the significance of the loss of life that had taken place with that tragedy.
How many people can even respond for longer than 15 minutes to tragedies that have that kind of
death toll today?
In our day, life is cheapened for lack of grieving.
Life is cheapened for lack of the intimate grief that we see in Joseph, the
grieving of the family in light of losing their father, and then even the ceremonial grief that
corresponds to the community.
When we lose the ability to grieve, life becomes cheap.
But notice also.
Something else we can appreciate about the Egyptian culture is the care of the body.
Another thing in contrast to our own day that we have largely lost, the significance of the body.
Joseph commands his physicians to embalm his father, and that's something that Egyptian physicians would have been
specialized with.
And of course, Joseph's desire is not to fit into the rituals of the Egyptians, but he's contemplating,
I must fulfill my father's charge.
I must bring him back to the land of Canaan and lay him down with my father's fathers.
And in order to do that, he must be preserved, lest he waste away along that long journey.
And so, of course, the desire is to embalm him for the sake of preserving him in order to be buried.
But even still, there's great desire to care for and preserve the body.
There's not this view that the body is dispensable, that the body is simply a vessel, a shell to be
dispensed.
There's a significance to the body.
The Hebrews know that as well as the Egyptians.
And of course, if you've ever spent any time in your homeschooling material looking at the culture in
the history of ancient Egypt, you're familiar with the process of embalmment.
Everything had to be sought very carefully.
All of the internal organs removed, placed in canopic jars.
Certain resins and salts used to dehydrate the tissues in the flesh.
Great care of aromatics and spices being used to anoint and
adorn the body.
And then linen being wrapped over the body.
In many ways, even thousands of years later, Jesus himself would be experiencing something similar to that
in his own burial preparation.
Not to the great extent of a dehydrating embalmment, but the idea of being wrapped carefully in
linens and covered in spices and rich smelling aromas.
The Hebrew word for embalmment is actually to make spicy, essentially,
to make aromatic.
Care for the body.
Dignity shown to the body.
One of the things that I was genuinely encouraged about, speaking of 9 -11, was when
our forces actually went in and took out Osama bin Laden.
How they removed the body and gave it a proper burial
at sea.
I'm sure there were many people in our culture that had outcry against that.
If there's anyone that we shouldn't, we should, you know, put them on a pike and let all of America walk by and spit on that
man's body.
And I thought, by God's common grace, at least we haven't lost some sense of dignity.
Some sense of honor.
Even someone as villainous and murderous as Osama bin Laden.
The body is shown dignity because the body is made by God.
Why the Egyptians did this is clear.
They tied it into their view of the afterlife.
For them, everything had to be preserved, along with food and everything else needed for afterlife if you were
to be able to have that continued existence beyond death.
For Christians, of course, you don't need the body to be preserved in this way.
In order to experience the afterlife, God is able to gather the ashes or
whatnot.
And that sometimes has been an argument for cremation.
Well, God can gather it all in any way.
It doesn't matter how his people die.
At the end, they will be recomposed, reconstituted, and made new as unto Christ.
But the cost of that is the denigration of the body.
And that is what we see emphasized here with Jacob's burial.
That's the testimony we see uniformly throughout Scripture.
It's only been recently that theology has caught up to this idea of the significance of embodiment.
It seems to be that the transgender nonsense that we see in clown world today has moved some of the
presses to start printing about the importance of flesh.
So we're somewhat slow to retrieve the significance of the body.
But if we've been reading our Bibles carefully, we would know just how important the body.
Is all along.
That we are embodied creatures made by God.
And our soul has the same hope that our body has.
Truly, we will not be detached from the body, but we will have glorified bodies when the Lord
rises us to be with him forever.
The body, then, is a gift from God.
Some of us look at our bodies and say, this is no gift.
This is not the gift.
I would want a different kind of gift.
Keep the receipt.
We can't speak to the mechanics of what that restoration truly looks like.
We know there's continuity, but what that continuity is, who can say?
Something's recognizable about Jesus.
Something's not recognizable about Jesus.
Mistake him for the gardener.
They walk all the way on the road to Emmaus not knowing who they're walking with.
Oh, how their hearts burn within him when they understand.
And so, we, too, recognize there's continuity, and yet there's also radical discontinuity.
Christ is the first fruits of our resurrection hope.
The point here is that we care for the body, and that's why Christians
bury their dead.
The burial request, beginning in verse 4.
Now, when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spoke to the household of Pharaoh saying, If now I've
found favor in your eyes, please speak in the hearing of Pharaoh saying, My father made me swear, saying, Behold,
I am dying 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, and I will come back.
And Pharaoh said, Go up and bury your father, as he made you swear.
So, the father's request is shown honor by the son and even honor by Pharaoh.
Pharaoh showed great respect, great courtesy to Jacob when he encountered him and sent him
toward Goshen.
And, of course, Pharaoh has great admiration and respect for Joseph as second under him.
And so, the fact that this request comes from Joseph would have been granted, of course, even apart from Jacob's
request.
And yet, because it's Jacob's request, it's almost a faithful testimony to Pharaoh.
Well, surely I can bury your father here in much better ways.
What do you have there?
Some cave in a field?
I'm going to make it right.
I'm going to bury your father beyond the wildest dreams of what a burial can be.
In fact, I'm going to start drawing out the blueprints for another great pyramid.
But rather, we have this testimony.
It has to be in the land of Canaan.
And note the grave, which I dug for myself.
It's not like this is some new decision that Jacob came to Goshen and was like, oh, I don't want to be buried here.
Just please at least let me be buried back in Canaan.
No, this was the plan all along.
That's a testimony.
What an amazing thought that he had dug his own grave so many years prior when he
buried his wife Leah, making that nice little plot right next.
Some of you, I understand, even at a young age, have burial plots.
What a wonderful testimony, a recognition.
That's where I'll be one day.
You come across the headstones.
I think there's even some perhaps in our neck of the woods that'll say something like, behold,
passerby, what you are now, I once was.
And where I am now, you will be.
The tombstones that we have in some of these relatively ancient, for the
American context, graveyards are shaped as bedposts would have been shaped.
Again, think of the significance of the sleep, of the resurrection hope, of awaking in a new morn.
So the tombstones having, as it were, the posts or the rounded top, just as a colonial headboard would have
had for a bed.
Jacob's able to testify to his father's faith just by requesting this burial.
And we're also pointed forward.
When Pharaoh says, go up, we think forward to Exodus of another Pharaoh that
will say, go up and get out of Egypt.
We're also pointed, I think, in some ways to Matthew 8.
And what a contrast we have there.
When Joseph comes to Pharaoh, the lord of the land,
please let me go bury my father, Pharaoh says, of course, go.
And how could I prevent you from doing that?
That's what all decency, what all filial reverence requires.
Of course, you must go do that.
But when someone comes up to the lord of glory and says, please let me go bury my father, what does the Lord Jesus say?
Let the dead bury their own dead.
I take precedence even over that.
The chief duty that a son would be expected to perform for his father, Jesus says,
even that cannot lay a claim out of utmost and absolute devotion to me.
You follow me.
Here's the greatest act that Joseph can perform.
And he does it faithfully.
The whole family has now been reunited around their father's faith.
And they all together journey back into the land of Canaan.
And as they go back, we see the burial mourning beginning in verse seven.
So Joseph went up to bury his father.
And with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, all the elders of the
land of Egypt, as well as all of the house of Joseph, his brothers in his father's house.
Only their little ones, their flocks and their herds, they left in the land of Goshen.
And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen.
And it was a very great gathering.
It probably looked like an invasion as far as the Canaanites could tell when they saw this great retinue entering into the land.
Then they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan.
And they mourned there with a great and very solemn lamentation.
And he observed seven days of mourning for his father.
And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning at the threshing floor of Atad, they said, this is a deep
mourning of the Egyptians.
And therefore, its name was called Ebal Mitzrayim, which is beyond the Jordan.
So once again, we come to the significance of mourning.
This time, the testimony is not among the Egyptians, but among the Canaanites.
Truly, someone very significant is buried in this place.
Truly, someone of great magnitude, that even Egyptian nobility have come to mourn him,
is buried here in our land, here in the land of Canaan.
Jacob is buried like a king.
Look at what corresponds to his death.
Servants, flocks, herds, chariots, horsemen, a very great gathering.
And it's there at the threshing floor.
You get this imagery, perhaps, of life and death, of the wheat and the chaff
being separated.
And of course, another great image of that resurrection hope is the body as a seed being
planted in the ground.
So there's some significance to this language, this imagery of a threshing floor, even here in Genesis 50.
And then the word Atad, closest lexical parallel
would be thornbush.
The place of thorns.
Moses seems to include this detail because, again, he's connecting death to this unfolding story of
Genesis 3, the fall.
The wages of sin is death.
And it's been some time, because we've been zooming in on these great lives of faith, since
we've heard the chattering echo of, and he died, and he died, and he
died, and he died.
And now we come to the very end of the book, and more or less we have, and he died,
and he died.
Here in the place of the thorns, here at the threshing floor, here awaiting the promised
redemption that has become dawning, and yet the light is not visible.
Another thing that points us forward in the story is the route that they take.
Another detail included in beyond the Jordan, this threshing floor of Atad which lies beyond the
Jordan, this place which is known to later Israelites as the mourning of the Egyptians,
Ebel Mitzrayim.
Well, that's a rather circuitous route out of Egypt.
It's like taking the long way.
And it's probably because it was an easier journey than taking the direct route.
But interestingly, this is how the Israelites will come out of Egypt in the book of Exodus.
They'll come out in this same way.
So here, the body of Israel is almost doing the recon
route that Israel in Exodus will take.
Another emphasis here we see is the lament.
We're reminded, you know, Joseph had already burst into tears when his father breathed his
last.
There's already been a prolonged period of mourning in Egypt, but even here when they come back to the
land, there's mourning still.
Commentators sometimes are uncomfortable with this.
Calvin talks about the danger of excessive mourning.
And in his context, he probably saw that a lot, living in the days of plagues and, you know,
all sorts of issues and illnesses with life, which he himself, he and his wife experienced, of course.
They, in terms of their child that they lost, his wife who had lost her husband and then eventually
died before Calvin.
Calvin, his whole life was plagued by sickness.
And so he's not speaking out of turn.
He knows what it is to suffer and to grieve.
But he warns against excessive grieving.
But just notice again, we're probably not at risk of excessively grieving
as modern Westerners.
We're probably on the other side of the danger, which is we just don't know how to grieve for any extent.
We don't know what it is to grieve appropriately.
Christ, of course, conquers death.
But we recognize that Christ's conquering of death has begun this time between the times.
We're between the now of Christ's accomplishment and the not yet, awaiting that great consummation when He
will return and we will be caught up with Him.
Christ conquers death, but it's not until we see Him again, according to Revelation 21, that
He wipes the tears from our eyes.
So until we're reunited with our bridegroom, we're meant to be grieving.
There'll be weeping.
There will be fasting, Jesus says.
There's a painful reminder of the curse of sin.
We grieve because death is our enemy.
And though it's the last enemy, we still see its tragic effects in our midst.
And so we grieve.
We don't grieve as those without hope, but we grieve.
We're reminded that one of the great comforts of Christians is to be absent from the body, is to be present
with the Lord.
One of the great reasons we grieve is because those who are present with the Lord are, in a different sense, absent from our body,
absent from us here, absent from our experience, absent from our fellowship.
We're at a unique disadvantage, perhaps, as a relatively young body, demographically, we're somewhat of an oddity.
We don't have too many aged in our ranks.
We have a lack, and I think that's actually a disadvantage.
We're not able to see life in all of its seasons as perhaps we could in other congregations, perhaps
too much, where they don't see the beginnings of the next generation.
They only see the end of their generation.
But truly, a church is blessed when it can behold every season of life, and it can rejoice with
those who are rejoicing of new sprouts around the dinner table, but it can grieve with those
who grieve saints that have gone to their everlasting rest.
And it's when we hold both things in view that we begin to live wisely.
The burial place, verse 12.
So his sons did for him just as he had commanded them.
This is a remarkable note, because remember that for so long, apart from God's grace, his sons
didn't really care at all about him.
They did everything to spite him, and he seemed passive and indifferent to it all.
But God has worked grace in the life of Jacob, has worked grace into the lives of his sons, and everything
that he charges them, they do diligently.
They do it piously.
His sons carried him to the land of Canaan, buried him.
Notice again the heavy repetition between the end of 49 and where we are in chapter 50.
Buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre, which Abraham bought with
the field from Ephron the Hittite as property for a burial place.
And after he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt, he and his brothers, and all who went up with him to
bury his father.
So you see the emphasis still, the repetition.
It frames in 49, 29 through 50, 14.
And as we consider the significance of the place in all of this detail, we've already been told this, so why
remind us of it?
Because of the significance of the land and of Jacob's movement within the land.
Think of Jacob's life.
From Beersheba, where he was raised, to Bethel, when he was on the run
there, encountered God and received the promise of God, to Haran, to Gilead,
to Peniel, to Sukkoth, to Shechem, to Bethel and Ephrathah,
where he buried his beloved, to Migdal -Eder, to Mamre, to Beersheba, when
he sacrificed to God on the way to Goshen.
He's been all around the land, and then into Egypt, and now he's been brought out of Egypt,
and he's back with Abraham and Isaac and Leah in the land of Canaan,
in the cave of Machpelah.
And then the last note is, everyone who had been returned to the land there, they all go
back to Egypt.
It's not just Joseph that says, well, now that we're here, there's really no reason for you to come back.
The famine is all but over, so you might as well resettle here and stay in the land of Canaan, and I'll just go back to
fulfill my duty to Pharaoh.
No, they all go back to Egypt.
And Calvin picks up on this.
He says, they all understand the promise that Jacob had in view that called them back to bury
him in the land also included the promise that God had given to Abraham.
And the promise of Genesis 15 included the fact that for 400 years,
the people of Israel would be in bondage to a nation that was not theirs in a land that did not belong to them.
And so it seems as though they're walking by faith, knowing that God has a desire for them not to stay in the land, but
to go back to that nation that is not theirs, that does not know them and does not belong to them.
And perhaps he's right.
Whether they did it willfully by an open -eyed understanding of the covenant, or they did it
by God's compulsion, by the secret providence of God is immaterial.
God is advancing his purpose as it was laid out to Abraham in Genesis 15.
The author of Hebrews makes the point.
All of these, Jacob included, all of these died
without receiving the promises.
All of these lived by faith in the promise.
All of these died without having received the promise.
God had promised Jacob the land of Canaan, but there he was
dead in Goshen, buried in a cave next to Isaac and next to Abraham, with
no further claim on Canaan than what Abraham had purchased all those years prior.
God had promised to make them a great nation, but there was only 70 in his
household dwelling in the land of Goshen last we saw.
But by faith, he blessed his sons and spoke to their future by faith.
He entrusted himself to be buried in the land knowing that God would be sure to his word.
And so by faith, truly, he walked by God in the hope of glory.
And in that sense, we're no different from Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob as Christians.
We're living in light of the promise of glory, the hope of glory, and yet we're awaiting the
full reception of it.
Now, in market respects, we're very different from these forefathers.
They could only see from afar what we have as an accomplished reality.
It's in the history books that God has fulfilled all that he has promised, Christ being the yes and the
amen.
But the consummation of what he has inaugurated by the death and resurrection of Jesus is what we await.
That is our hope of glory.
And it's amazing how though so much happens between Genesis 50 and the time we get to say the
beginning of the Gospel of Luke, that this promise has never dropped out of view.
So when the angel appears to Mary, when Gabriel announces that the fullness of
time has come, and that Mary will give birth to the promised seed that has been
awaited ever since Genesis 3 .15, the angelic
proclamation includes this promise.
He will reign over the house of Jacob forever.
You see, Genesis 50, so far away from Luke 1,
which to us is so far away from where we are in our present day reality, and yet all of this
corresponds downstream from the promises of Genesis 3 .15.
The promised seed will reign over the house of Jacob forever.
Israel will be saved.
God will be glorified.
So how do we apply these emphases?
The whole emphasis between the middle of chapter 49 and the middle of chapter 50 has been on the death and
burial of Jacob.
How are we to think about these things?
How are we to apply them?
Two simple applications.
Two points of application this morning.
First, we must think about dying.
And second, we must live as though we are dying.
We must think about dying, and we must live as though we are dying.
Now, think about it theologically.
As a church, as Christians engaged in life, in the world, trying to understand what, where to do
as individual believers, but also corporately as a body.
And not just this local body, but the church.
What is the church to do?
How is it to be engaged?
How is it going to be the hands and feet of the heavenly king?
Well, James Bannerman, we talked about some of this yesterday morning, for those who were there.
James Bannerman wrote,.
I'm going to say a wonderful treatise, but I disagree
strongly with so much of its content.
He wrote a wonderful two -volume book on the church, and he wrote it as a Presbyterian churchman, and it's one of the great
classics of Presbyterian ecclesiology.
But I can appreciate so much about it other than perhaps the polity.
James Bannerman, in his two -volume, Ben of Truth, republished it, The Church of Christ.
And he has a chapter in the first volume where he talks about how the church relates to the world.
And the work of the church in relation to the world, he lays out theologically, has everything to do with how
Christ relates to the world.
The church is the body of Christ, and so we look to how Christ relates to the world in his own
ministry, in his own mission statements, in also the logic of what he has provided
and laid down through the apostles and the apostolic foundation.
We look at how Christ related to the world and understand that is how the church is to relate to the world.
And the key is, everything that the church does is involved with God's purpose of grace.
We are defined by God's purpose of grace in the same way that the whole life,.
The whole promise,.
And the whole coming of Jesus is an outflow of God's purpose of grace.
The covenant of grace.
Come to fulfillment.
In history,.
In time,.
Beginning here in Genesis and all the way forward in the little town of Bethlehem.
And Bannerman takes a step forward and he says, the purpose of grace for the church is primarily the
work of conversion and sanctification and
preparation for heaven.
Again, the church relates to the world as Christ relates to the world.
And the way that Christ primarily relates to His work in the world is God's purpose of grace, which
means the church's primary concern is the work of conversion and sanctification
and preparation for heaven.
Bannerman says, by the Spirit of Christ, we carry out the work of redemption
among men which He Himself, when on earth, had only begun.
Now, it struck me as I'm reading this, again, this is a 19th century
perspective of the theology of the church, that the primary focus on the church
is to be the conversion of souls, sanctification, which speaks to discipleship and the holiness of
those converted souls and their preparation for heaven.
And I almost pause in that third point to say, is that really the primary occupation of the church in this world?
Truly conversion.
Who would deny that?
And truly sanctification.
We don't want cheap grace and we don't want wolves mixed among the sheep, but preparation for heaven.
Haven't we had almost too much of that?
Isn't that cloud talk?
Isn't that ethereal language?
And it's easy to dismiss that point and say, actually, preparation for heaven has been a preoccupation
that's taken us away from this world rather than further engaged us with it.
But now I'm beginning to, in light of our time in Genesis, wonder if Bannerman has it more right than we
would think at first.
That it's because we don't know how to grieve and it's because more than ever in human
civilization, death is sequestered from our practical experience.
But the church doesn't understand just how important preparation for death is.
Meaning by it, preparation for the life to come.
And when we lose that emphasis, we lose with it the urgency for conversion and the
urgency for sanctification.
If it's not ultimately about withstanding the judgment to come and standing in the righteousness
of Christ, where does the urgency for sanctification and conversion go?
So the charge that we need to avoid spiritualizing theology, too much heavenly language,
heavenly focus, it's drawing us away from the earth.
Our theology and any talk about the life to come has only been an opiate that has kept
us consumed with what is otherworldly and what is to come rather than what's in front of us, rather than the commission.
And I would say, look carefully at Jacob's life and see that it was because of his glimpse,
it was because he was prepared for death that he was more earnest and more effective than he had been in
almost his entire life prior.
How we prepare for death, how we think about death has everything to do with how we engage this
world.
We cannot miss the emphasis here on the brevity of life.
And when you're thinking about the brevity of life, you're engaged in the life because hope
lies within it, hope lies beyond it.
There's a need to continually press the physicality of God's redemption.
We're trying to do that in Genesis.
Land, seed, dominion, generations, the lordship of Christ over all of the earth
because the promise of Christ is a new heavens and a new earth.
We've pressed that in a myriad of ways and we don't want to lose the emphasis here at the end of Genesis
on faith and hope and a hope of glory yet to come, a hope of glory yet to be
revealed, a preparation for death because our life is but a vapor, a
looking to the upward call of Christ because to die and be present with him is great gain.
So we're not to turn in fleshly or carnal ways toward engaging the world, thinking that somehow
urgency for conversion of souls and sanctification and engagement of every sphere of life under the lordship of
Christ will come about at the expense of ignoring heaven or preparation for death.
It will actually come about because we think about and care about and fixate
our minds upon the reality of our death.
If I had time, I don't have it in front of me so I couldn't quote it.
If you've ever read Jonathan Edwards' resolutions which he wrote as a young man, pay careful attention to how
he considers his mortality in light of those resolutions and how that frames everything he resolves to
do by the grace of God.
We too live by faith in a vapor of life.
Soon, sooner than we think, our faithful rest is coming and we must prepare to die in
the hope of glory.
So we must think about dying.
Do we think about dying?
Every morning that you wake up, do you say, that could have been the night that Jesus warned about in the parable, fool, your life
is required of you this very night.
Thank you for giving me a new day, a new day to live by faith, a new day to
live in the hope of glory, a new day to labor in your vineyard.
Do we think about death?
Renaissance paintings, if you ever go to an art museum, sometimes you'll be struck, you'll have these beautiful still
lifes, burgeoning cornucopias of all sorts of food and
it's meant to be a display of artistic prowess.
All of the textures are very difficult to replicate with oil paints.
So the fact that you could get the grapes to look like grapes and the chalice to have that unique crystal sparkle and the olive
leaves to do what they do all of those textures are a way of simply showcasing your skill as an artist.
So you can picture back in those days, why should I hire you to do a portrait of me?
Well, this is what I'm capable of.
Notice the velvet, notice the grapes, notice the wine,.
Notice the grapes,.
Like anything you throw at me, I can paint very well.
Proof is in the pudding.
But another thing that's unique to the paintings of that period were there was often on that spread somewhere and this images of
flowering life and flourishing abundance, you'd have perhaps a skull.
Or perhaps something associated with a funeral.
You'd have some symbol of death.
And this was called memento mori.
Memento mori simply being a reminder of death.
And it was an equivalent of saying, even as you look at beauty and abundance, be reminded of frailty.
Be reminded that this is passing.
Be reminded that all that glitters is not gold and you too will be buried in a pine box sooner than you think.
We would do well as Christians to have memento mori in our lives.
To be constantly reminded of the fact that our days are counted by the Lord.
It was the Roman emperors when they were awarded a triumph by the Senate.
Part of that triumphal procession, which was ritualistic, would involve a chariot ride and the emperor would have been
dressed, most likely his face painted red to sort of mimic Jupiter, the god of gods, the Roman
pantheon.
And there would have been this chariot ride to the temple of Jupiter as the cheering, parading crowds on either
side gloried in the triumph.
But there was always, part of the Roman ritual, would have been a slave holding the laurel wreath on the chariot as
they rode toward the temple, whispering in the ear, according to Suetonius, remember that you're mortal.
Remember that you're dying.
Remember you're not a god.
You might have this for a day, you might feel like this for a day, but remember you are but a dying man.
The Heidelberg Catechism, we are more familiar with our own Baptist version, which is just a
copy and paste job on the Westminster, and that's fine.
It begins, what?
What is the chief end of man?
Well, if you go about 100 years prior to that, the Heidelberg Catechism, and I'm gonna read the whole answer,
the first question is, what is your only comfort in life and in death?
Because 100 years prior, if you were a Protestant, you had a shorter life expectancy.
You were gonna be persecuted, hunted.
If you taught these things, or you hid things that belonged to those who taught them, you'd probably be burnt at the stake, you'd be imprisoned,
you'd be drowned in lakes.
So what is your only comfort in life and in death?
Because it's gonna be a tough life, and death could be around the corner.
What's your only comfort?
And so the German -speaking world, Dutch -speaking world soon after that grew up learning this catechism, this
is the very first thing they would learn to recite.
And for a lot of them, whether they died at 30, 60, or 80, this was the last thing they would recite too.
My only comfort in life and death is that I'm not my own, but I belong body and soul,
in life and in death to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.
He has fully paid for all of my sins with his precious blood, and he has set me free.
From all the power of the devil, he preserves me in such a way that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from
my head.
Indeed, all things must work together for my salvation.
And therefore, by his Spirit, he assures me of eternal life, makes me heartily willing and ready from now
to live for him.
I think Heidelberg has got us beat.
That is magnificent.
That's the first thing you're teaching young Christians.
You need to be thinking about your death.
You need comfort in order to live, and in order to die.
That's the first thing that the Reformed Protestants were catechizing their youth to understand.
This life is passing by quickly, and you don't have moments to decide later on.
You must have that comfort now.
You must have the grace of God to live for him now.
You must be prepared for life and for death.
And by thinking about death, you become prepared for life.
We don't want to be Christians of whom there are far too many who are preoccupied by the needs of the
day and needs of the week.
We want to be able wisely to take a step back from life and consider our end, like Balaam
did at the end of Numbers 23 in that prophecy where he says, let my end be as the end of the
righteous.
We want to be among those who are engaged in the work of the kingdom because we see what is truly
passing in our midst.
The things that seem so stable and significant are actually the things that are passing.
The things that seem ethereal and let's just gather in black suits and get through this luncheon so we don't have to think about death
anymore.
Those are actually the weighty things that have cement, that have significance.
And so we wake up each morning, memento mori, reminder, we are but flesh.
We are going to die.
And because we're thinking about the fact that we have to approach death, we're becoming conscious as Jacob
on his deathbed for 17 years is becoming conscious about God's providence in his life and God's never
failing mercies.
If I could trust you up to this point, can I not trust you but a little further?
Can I not use this time you're still granting me to redouble my efforts and overcome my failures and stains of the
past?
Focusing on death makes us more conscious of the mercies of God.
Do we have a malfunction as Christians that we're not often thankful or humble enough?
I propose to you, it's because we don't think of our mortality enough.
We don't think of our ends enough.
You want to be thankful?
Start thinking about dying.
Start thinking about the fact that you're dying and you're going to die.
And let that begin to bring reflection upon your life and how God has upheld you and he's been
merciful to you.
I've been reading a book I got a few weeks ago of a preacher
up in the Northern Highlands of Scotland named John MacDonald de Ferintosh.
And there was this wonderful biography written about him called Apostle to the North as he went around different
places and was sort of an open air preacher in the 19th century.
But he also was very instrumental in raising up certain leaders in the Church of Scotland a few
generations after.
And I found a book of some of his sermons and some of his poems.
And toward the end of his life, the illness that eventually took him, he had gangrene through a
wound that didn't heal correctly and it ended up taking his life.
And during that last illness he said to a friend, there are three things which the Lord has done for me
and you would have cause to praise him if he deals with you in the same way.
First, he did not expose my heart's sins to the world.
Second, he did not punish my secret sins in my work.
And third, he did not alienate me from the affections of his people during my entire life.
That's a man that was reflected on the mercies of God.
I am dying, let me recount the faithful deeds of my Savior.
You've never put me to an open shame.
Not that my sins are hidden, but they're not cataloged and put in front of a microscope in such a way
that I'm cut off from the love of your people, which is a reminder of your love for me.
You have been merciful to me.
Thinking of George Matheson, who wrote a tremendous hymn called Oh Love That
Will Not Let Me Go.
And the words are beautiful enough, but I spent some time looking into his life.
He lived with his sister for quite some time.
He was in his 40s and had been truly dependent upon his sister for much of his
life because as a young man, he began to go blind.
He had entered into ministry and was still ministering even as a man that was blind.
But there was no way to reverse or to prevent him from being completely blind.
And when he turned 40, his sister was about to be married the
next day.
She had been engaged to a fiance.
He himself as a young man had been engaged as well.
But when it was discovered that he was going blind irreversibly, the woman bowed out.
I can't sign up for that.
I can't deal with that.
And so he was alone for the rest of his life.
But he had his sister and he lived with his sister.
But now his sister was about to get married the next morning.
So now he'll be alone, truly, truly alone.
And so he wrote this hymn the night before she was married as she's preparing to exchange
these vows of love.
You know, this love that I've been so enthralled with that now I get to finally encapsulate
in the marriage vows and experience the joy of it.
And here's the blind brother thinking, do I have a love like that?
And he wrote this hymn called, Oh, Love That Will Not Let Me Go.
Oh, love that will not let me go.
I rest my weary soul in thee.
I give thee back the life I owe.
That in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.
Oh, light that follows all my way.
I yield my flickering torch to thee.
My heart restores its borrowed ray.
That in thy sunshine's blaze its day may brighter, fairer be.
Oh, joy that seeks me through pain.
I cannot close my heart to thee.
I trace the rainbow through the rain.
I feel the promise is not vain.
That mourn shall tearless be.
Oh, cross that liftest up my head.
I dare not ask to fly from thee.
I lay in dust, life's glory dead.
And from the ground there blossoms red.
Life that shall endless be.
What do you notice about that hymn?
Each stanza begins with some reflection.
First, love, the love that will not let me go.
Light, the light that has pursued me my whole life.
Joy, the joy that I can't experience in this night, but I know waits in the morning.
And the cross that holds all of that together.
And then notice his own emphasis on weakness.
Weary soul, flickering torch.
That day, that mourn, life that will endless be.
Do you see how reflecting on death gives you a greater appreciation for God's grace?
So not only must we think about dying, we must live as though dying.
George Matheson was able to go through heartbreak and hardship in his life
because his life was not caught up with the short span he had on this earth.
His life was pitched forward to a hope of glory.
And that enabled him to minister and to devote himself and to even find joy in
communing with Christ on this side of that hope.
It upheld him as ballast in the storm through the most difficult chapters in his life.
That's what reflecting upon death and what God promises on the other side of death does in the
life of a Christian.
So you must live as though you're dying.
Ben Myers, who wrote an exposition of the Apostles' Creed, he has this amazing sentence.
The Christian life is a mystery.
It moves from death to birth, right?
Think about it.
You're converted from this position of death, dead in your trespasses and sins, to new birth.
You've gone from death to life.
The Christian life is a mystery that moves from death to birth.
At the beginning of the Christian life, we're baptized into Christ's death.
But at the end of the Christian life, we're born into the resurrection.
So we are born as though we are dying.
And we die as those being born.
Isn't that marvelous?
If we view this life as though we've been born into dying so that in
dying, we may be born unto glory.
If we view this life as a preparation for death, we will have greater acknowledgement of
God's mercy, greater sensitivity to God's grace, greater awareness of
opportunities in our midst, greater urgency for people to understand the most important parts
of their life, are not bound up in this world that's rotting and passing away, but are actually held
in trust.
And Christ is the firstfruits of our great hope.
The Spirit is given as a down payment of all that is to come.
Thomas Brooks, one of my favorite Puritans, a Christian knows that his death is the funeral of
all of his sins.
Isn't that beautiful?
A Christian knows that his death is the funeral of all of his sins, all of his sorrows, all of his affliction, all of his temptation,
everything that's frustrated and oppressed him and persecuted him.
He knows that death will be the resurrection of all of his hopes, all of his joys, all of his delights, all of his comforts.
In this body, we do not see Christ, but with death, we go from walking by faith to
beholding by sight.
In death, we go from communing apart from Christ's presence,
but his presence is found by the Spirit, to actually communing with the bodily presence of Christ.
Beholding, as Thomas once beheld, his pierced hands, his wounded side, we behold him,
as the Apostle John would say, we beheld the glory of the only begotten Son of God.
If you want to glorify Christ in your life, live as though you're dying.
If you want to be more urgent and more effective in God's work in this world, live as if you're dying.
Think about death and live as though death is around the corner.
Live in the way that Paul labored among the saints at Philippi.
His whole heart is thrust up, it's so much better to be with Christ.
I want to be with Christ.
I want to die.
I think about death and I want to die, but I know there's more work for me to do here.
One of the other stories that I'll share, we're coming to a close now, we think about the presence
of Christ.
When we think about death, and perhaps as our bodies begin
to wear and we actually approach death, we, like Jacob, perhaps have some sense that
we are on our deathbed, so to speak.
Sometimes we are amazed at just how powerful the presence of the Lord can be.
There's a book, I won't say what it is because I can't recommend the author for a number of reasons, but
part of the book basically documents and makes a case for
spiritual encounters, angelic encounters could it be, for people that were on the brink
of death and recovered.
And how this is widespread, it's a universal phenomenon and it can't be explained in any
medical terms.
It can't be hallucinations or whatnot.
People are lucid, you know, they're not hallucinating in any other respect and there's some
presence, some peace, something that happens often.
And so he's documenting this among believers and unbelievers alike and following through the effects and trying to make
sense of that in scripture.
And I was reminded of, as I was reading from John MacDonald of Ferintosh, one day
he was visiting a friend and the friend was sick in his bed and the friend was dying.
And so John MacDonald said, you know, you've been asking me
and I want to tell you, you know, you've been asking me how things have been with me, how things have been with my walk.
Think of this man, he's sick in his bed, he's looking for some encouragement, some hope.
And he says, I will tell you now, for some time I thought that God was not revealing himself to me in his majesty
as I thought I needed.
And I in my ignorance was often praying that he would do so, right?
Lord, I'm weak, I'm frail, I'm cold, I'm numb.
Won't you show me your glory?
And here's his friend on his deathbed and he's thinking of the presence of Christ and perhaps feeling the
remort and the guilt and the anxiety grip him as he works through reflections upon his life.
And here's John ministering to him and he says, last Sabbath when I went
up to commence the opening prayer at church, I pleaded with the Lord as I've often pleaded with the Lord that he would reveal
himself to me.
But this time he was actually pleased to do it.
And the effect was so overwhelming to my weak frame that I could not get on with my duties for the
rest of the day.
And still to this day I'm suffering from that answered prayer.
The presence of Christ, he's saying, will so overwhelm
you.
Don't be surprised that it may seem distant and it may cause you to doubt and it may be out of view
because if God were to give you but a glimpse of it, it would almost melt you.
And that's the hope of glory.
The radiance of Christ.
I don't know if it's his hands that wipe our tears or the radiance that causes them to dissolve.
When we behold the glory of Christ, when we behold the love
that will not let us go, the light that pursues us our whole lives, the joy that is
corresponding to all of the deepest valleys in the cross that holds all of that together.
We must think about dying.
We must live as though we're dying.
And we remember, as Matheson put it, we lay in dust life's glory dead
and from the ground there blossoms red life that shall endless be.
Let's pray.
Father, perhaps there are some here who feel as I feel, Lord, that we're not fit to contemplate these things,
Lord, because we're so distracted, so carnal, so
short -sighted.
Help us to pray to you, our creator, as though we are dying men and women.
Help us to live the Christian life and the hope of the Christian life as though we are dying men and women.
Let even the youth in this room be wisened by your spirit, Lord,
and not be presumptive and arrogant like the youth of our day in all of their folly, but at a young age reckon their end
and have the desire that comes from you that their end would be as the righteous.
May we all see life on this earth as something that cannot be compared with the weight
of glory that awaits.
I pray, Lord, that you would make us urgent and effective in your kingdom because we're
sobered and humbled and we're filled with gratitude because we reflect on our
death.
And as we reflect on dying and live as though we're dying, we can't help but see your grace and your
goodness surrounding our lives.
Ever graciously, patiently dealing with us and calling us further.
Let not the saints here, Lord, have an overwhelming weight of regret
that they did not think and act and respond to these things.
These things we ask in your son's name.
Amen.