Today in God's Word—December 2024
East Tallassee Church of Christ
December 6, Genesis 50
"God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here." - Genesis 50:25
Over the past four decades of ministry, I've conducted several funerals when the service would be far from the actual burial place. After the local funeral, the body would be transported to the distant burial site, maybe an old family cemetery and laid to rest. Some of those trips were quite long. But none of them were as long as the burial trip Joseph and his brothers made when Jacob died. Their father bound them by oath to take his body from Egypt back to Canaan to be buried at Machpelah, where his grandparents (Abraham and Sarah) and parents (Isaac and Rebekah) were entombed.
The Egyptians were quite advanced in the art of preserving human remains. Perhaps you've seen some of their ancient embalming work on a mummy in a modern museum. Jacob's body was embalmed, no doubt out of respect for Joseph's father, but also for the practical reasons of the length of time and great distance between the time and place of his death and burial.
Jacob's insistence on being returned to Machpelah was a testimony to his faith in God's promise to someday give his descendants the land. The promise God first made to Abraham was now four generations old. Jacob lived long enough to see the promise about moving to Egypt fulfilled. But the return and possession of the land of Canaan was still centuries in the future when he died.
After the long journey, and many days of solemn mourning, Joseph and the rest of Jacob’s family returned to Egypt, along with the Egyptians who accompanied them. The brothers were afraid, still plagued by guilty memory of what they had done to Joseph years before. They worried that Joseph would now turn on them and take revenge for their past cruelty. They went to Joseph and said that Jacob wanted him to pardon them for the wrong they had done. Don't you think Jacob would have told Joseph in person if he'd wanted him to do this? Joseph assured his brothers that he was not going to harm them. He told them that God had used for good what they intended as evil against him. He promised to provide for them. He calmed their fears and treated them with kindness.
Joseph's life was long and eventful. He had gone from being the favored son in his father's house to being a slave boy in Potiphar’s house in Egypt. Then he went from being a servant to being a prisoner because of Mrs. Potiphar’s lies. Then came the fellow prisoners’ dreams that Joseph interpreted. That finally got Joseph out of prison to appear in Pharaoh's court. Joseph the prisoner was promoted to be governor over all Egypt. When the famine began, Joseph’s childhood dreams about his family bowing to him ignited his brothers’ hatred. But the dreams came true in real life when his family came to Egypt to get food.
Now as an old man, Joseph could see God's hand in all the adversity he had suffered. He trusted God's promises. Because God said so, he fully expected Israel to return from Egypt to Canaan, and he ordered that his body should be kept and taken by that future generation when they headed back. When he died at 110 years old, Joseph's body was embalmed like his father's. It would be centuries, not days or weeks before his remains would be transported to Canaan. He would be buried, not at Machpelah, but on the land Jacob had bought at Shechem.
In the end of Genesis, both Jacob and Joseph believed what you and I have been taught since the first chapter of Genesis. Remember? "God said... and it was so." Like their forefather Abraham, these great men trusted God and took him at his word. They demonstrated their faith by their lives. They taught their family about the great God who had chosen them as his people to accomplish his purpose. I pray that God would grant you and me the grace to do the same for our children and the generations to come in our own families.
Copyright © 2021 by Michael B. McElroy. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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