Day 29: Genesis 48-50

Welcome to 5 -Minute Bible, your daily guide for your daily reading. Today's January 29th and we'll be covering

Genesis 48 -50. Now today's reading brings the book of Genesis to its deliberate and unsettling conclusion.

Genesis 48 -50 does not allow us to end the book with closure or fulfillment, neither with victory or rest.

It ends with the grandson of Abraham speaking blessings over the future generations as he breathes his last and goes down to death in a foreign land.

Now the irony should not be missed here, the book of beginnings concludes with a foreboding end. The prophecy of God remains alive but unrealized, the people who were promised a land now live in another.

And Genesis closes by teaching us how God intends his people to live and die while waiting on his promises to come true.

Now with that, Genesis 48 opens with Jacob blessing Joseph's sons Ephraim and Manasseh In a final familiar reversal,

Jacob places the greater blessing upon the younger son, reaffirming this culture -reversing pattern that has shaped the entire book.

And in this we see that God's purpose is advanced not through natural strength or human expectation but through God's sovereign election.

The future of the covenant will move forward according to God's wisdom and not through human striving. In Genesis 49,

Israel gathers his sons around his deathbed and what follows is not a final farewell but a prophetic declaration.

Jacob speaks a word over his sons that expose their character and announce consequences for their sin and words that unveil the destiny for each of them.

In these pronouncements, their sin is not erased, their violence is not forgotten and yet hope emerges unmistakably through Judah.

The same man whose life collapsed into rank immorality just a few chapters before, now through repentance and sanctification is going to be the head over the ruling tribe of all of Israel.

He's going to have the kingly tribe from which the kings are going to come beginning with a man named David and coming to its full completion in the true son of Judah, Jesus Christ.

Now with that, Genesis 50 brings the narrative to an emotional close. Jacob dies and is carried back to the land of his forefathers and buried in the family cave.

Joseph's brothers still haunted by their past fear, retaliation from their brother now that their father is dead.

But instead, Joseph responds to them with words that interpret the entire book of Genesis. What you meant for evil,

God meant for good. And that has been the thread that has run through every page of this book.

What man meant for evil, God intended for good. That's the theme that's shaped the narrative so far and it's going to catapult us 400 years into the future when we begin the book of Exodus tomorrow morning.

Now as you read today, I want you to ask the following question. Why would God choose to end his book of life beginning with death and exile and 400 years of waiting?

And that's because Genesis is not merely a book of arrivals. It is a book anchored in the promises of God. It's a promise that God will undo the curse of Adam and untangle the sin that spread through Noah's family and bring salvation to the world through the line of Abraham.

Again and again and again, God's timing refuses to bend to human expectations but his faithfulness never wavers.

What he has spoken, he will bring to pass in his appointed time and that's what holds the entire narrative together.

So God ends the book of beginnings with a moment that feels like an end. He closes the book with death and exile and waiting to teach his people that true faith is not formed by sight but by faith.

And this unresolved tension of Genesis is deliberate. It presses us forward and away from premature closure and towards the decisive act of redemption that God himself is going to bring in the fullness of time.

Now the central pattern in Genesis 48 through 50 is that faith outlives the faithful. Jacob blesses a future he will not see.

He dies without even touching any of the fulfillment yet he does not die without certainty because his confidence rests in the word of God alone and not in visible results.

And this pattern defines our work in the kingdom of Christ as well. We're not called to finish the project but to build faithfully during our lifetimes.

Most of us are going to labor our entire lives constructing only a very small corner of the walls of Christendom.

We're going to lay the foundations. We're going to raise up a few bricks and we're going to repair what was broken before us and we're going to work with our hammers and our trowels in hand knowing that much of what we build will not be completed by us but by our children and our children's children after them.

Yet we don't work anxiously and we don't work in vain. We labor diligently delightfully faithfully and fruitfully because the promise does not rest on our strength or lifespan but it rests on the faithfulness of the king who is sworn to bring it to pass and he surely will.

Now Genesis 48 through 50 unmistakably points and urgently so to Jesus Christ.

Judah's blessing anticipates this coming Shiloh who's not only going to have the rule over God's people but he's going to have the obedience of all of the nations and he's going to have a kingdom so prosperous that you could even tie up a donkey to a grapevine which means you have so many grapevines that you don't care if the donkey eats the one you tied him up to.

He's going to have a kingdom that's so rich that it flows like wine. He's going to have a kingdom that's so beautiful and glorious that it that your teeth are going to be whitened from how much milk you could drink.

The point is from an ancient metaphor standpoint this kingdom that the Shiloh which is unmistakably

Jesus the kingdom he brings is going to be so prosperous that you could strain with language to even describe it.

And that's what we're seeing even today that Jesus is bringing that richness and depth and beauty.

His first miracle in the Gospels was turning water into wine. He is the one that is promised to Judah in Judah's line.

Now Joseph's declaration that God turns evil into good reaches its ultimate meaning at the cross where humanity's greatest act of rebellion becomes

God's greatest act of salvation. Joseph forgives his brothers entrusting justice to God foreshadowing

Christ who forgives those who betrayed him while bearing their judgment himself.

But the final image of Genesis is not a throne or a kingdom. It's a coffin. Joseph's bones rest in Egypt testifying that death has not yet been defeated.

The book of Genesis ends by insisting that God's promises cannot be completed without a resurrection.

Those bones cry out for exodus. They cry out for Christ and in Jesus God does not merely bring his people back to the land.

He conquers the grave itself securing a future that death can no longer interrupt.

Now as you read Genesis 48 through 50 today I want you to feel the weight of how this book ends.

The promise stands. The people wait. Death remains. Genesis closes its pages not with resolution but with expectation and tomorrow we're going to see how a new book begins that story and takes that story even further.

God's people are going to multiply. They're going to suffer. They're going to cry out and God will act with tremendous severity to bring his people out of Egypt.

But with that read your Bible carefully devotionally and joyfully and may the Lord use his word to sanctify you completely and we will continue our journey in the book of Exodus tomorrow.