Kootenai Church Morning Worship

Well Abraham, Isaac, and now Jacob—this is the third of these three patriarchs. These are the three founding patriarchs of the nation of Israel. These are three men to whom God attaches His own name in Scripture. You see it when you read through Scripture and you read of the God of Jacob or the God of Isaac or the God of Abraham or, when they're all three put together, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And sometimes just in a shortened form—the God of our fathers—and by fathers, usually the author means the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob being the fathers.
God attaches His own name to these men's names throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament. So for instance, when Moses was commanded to lead the children of Israel up out of Egypt in the exodus, we read in Exodus 3:16, “Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, has appeared to me, saying, “I am indeed concerned about you and what has been done to you in Egypt.”’” That is a passage that is quoted by Jesus in the New Testament. Matthew 22:32: “‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’ . . . He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”
Peter, in Acts 3, says, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His servant Jesus, the one whom you delivered and disowned in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him” (v. 13). So that description, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is connected to God because of—or those names are connected to God's name because of the covenant that God made with those three men. Or actually He made it with Abraham and then reconfirmed and reiterated the promises of that covenant to Isaac and then confirmed and reiterated the promises again to Isaac's son, Jacob.
So as we study the Old Testament plan of salvation, it goes all the way back to Abraham, and we cannot divorce God's plan of salvation from the Abrahamic covenant. It is only inside of the Abrahamic covenant that salvation is offered to or provided to Gentiles. Outside of that, there is no salvation promised to Gentiles, but because of God's work through and in the Abrahamic covenant and in time, the study of the doctrine of salvation, God's plan of salvation through history, is rooted and grounded in the promises that God made to Abraham.
And that name is attached to those men, God's name is attached to those men, because those men, and the promises that God made to Abraham specifically, determine—how we understand the Abrahamic covenant determines what it is that's going to happen in the future. Our understanding of future events comes back to the promises that God made to those three men. So our study of faith and what it means, the working of God, the providence of God, the promises of God, God's plan of salvation, the future, the history of the world, all of it comes down to and is rooted in this Abrahamic covenant, these three men, that our God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And these are imperfect men, but they still left us a legacy of faith. And we're seeing that even in the midst of their imperfections and their idiosyncrasies and their sin and their blatant failures, God still used these men and He still worked through these men.
And our next example now is in verse 21 in Hebrews 11, and it is Jacob. We've looked at Abraham in verse 17, Isaac in verse 20, and now we turn our attention to Jacob. And our pattern here is going to be the same that we've done in the last couple of weeks. We have to jump right into the story of Jacob because last week I ran up against the clock in our study of Isaac. And I could have divided that into two messages. Mercifully for you, I didn't. It was only one message. But I have even more material to go through with Jacob because Scripture says so much more about Jacob than it does about Isaac. So our pattern is going to be the same. We're going to in a moment go back to the book of Genesis, but I want you to just observe the details of Hebrews 11:21, observe the things that are mentioned here so that when we go back to Genesis, then we will see what it is that the author is referring to here in Hebrews 11.
Verse 21: “By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.” I want you to notice three things. First, the instance that is chosen here to highlight Jacob’s faith is something that was done in his dying moments. And as it turns out, it is much closer to his dying moments than Isaac's blessing of his two sons. Isaac thought he was dying. Jacob actually was dying when he blessed both the sons of Joseph. And this is something that we highlighted last week, that for Isaac and Jacob and Joseph, these three men, the example of faith that's given in Hebrews 11:20, 21, and 22, these are all things that came from their dying moments or something that happened at the end of their life where, at least in Isaac's case, he thought he was dying.
And we would have to observe that and ask, “Why is it that the author chooses instances from the lives of these three men that pertain to moments when they were dying? Why does he do that?” Certainly there are other examples from the lives of those men that the author could have cited. For instance, he could have said concerning Isaac, “By faith Isaac prayed and Rebekah his wife conceived after twenty years of barrenness.” He could have done that. For Jacob, he could have said, “By faith Jacob returned to the land of Israel with his four wives and all of his children and was reconciled to his brother Esau,” or, “By faith Jacob wrestled with God and asked for God's blessing and would not let God go until God blessed him.” For Joseph he could have said, “By faith Joseph rebuffed the advances of Pharaoh's”—I don't know if you’d use the word rebuffed, but “avoided the advances of Pharaoh's wife in faithfulness to God because he didn't want to sin against God.”
There are examples of faith from all three of these men that he could have cited, but instead the author zeroes in on these examples of faith in their dying moments. And I think that the reason for that is to show how their faith was present and preserved them all the way to the end of their lives. So it's not just a faith that they had in the beginning that petered out over time. It's not a faith that waxed and waned and grew strong and grew weak and then was absent from their lives in their dying moments. No, these men were as strong in faith at the end of their life when they were lying on death's bed and the specter of death hung over their head like dark, foreboding clouds. Their faith was strong in those moments, and in those moments they're still expressing their confidence in God and what God had promised to give them.
And second, I think the reason that these examples are cited from the moments of their death is to show us that really their faith was in a resurrection. Their faith was in what God was going to give them in the resurrection. These promises would be fulfilled, not in this life, but in the life that is to come, and these men would enjoy the full reception of and the full benefit of all of these blessings, not in this life, but in the resurrection.
Second, I want you to notice that the act of faith is in blessing his descendants just as with Isaac in verse 20: “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau.” Well, verse 21: “By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph.” So this is an act of faith that is conferring upon Joseph's sons blessings that Jacob himself had received from Isaac.
And third, I want you to notice in Hebrews 11:21 that it is in faith while he was dying that he worshipped. His dying moments were worshipful moments. It is in his death and it is in faith that he is not only blessing Joseph's sons, but he is also leaning on the top of his staff and worshipping God as he is dying. So the faith of Jacob is active in dying, in blessing, and in worshipping. And that would be our three-point outline if we were sticking here, but we're not. We're going back to Genesis.
So turn back now to Genesis 28. And we're going to notice Jacob dying and blessing and worshipping in Genesis 28. Now when we last left Jacob, he had just robbed the blessing from Esau. And so the Jacob that we're talking about here is the same Jacob who finagled his way into the birthright and then into the blessings. It's the same Jacob whose ignoble shenanigans we looked at last week. And we're going to fast-forward through Genesis from chapter 28. We're going to go all the way to chapter 48 today. So we're going to be giving an overview of twenty chapters. I know.
And so I need to set a little bit of a context for this. And some of what I'm about to say here is going to be of trivial interest to you, but I want to do some math and overlap some lives here so we have some idea of the order of these events and the ages of what's unfolding for us in the lives of these patriarchs. So you are welcome to check my math for two reasons. Number one, I am the product of the public school system. And number two, I did not pay attention when I was in the public school system. So I have two strikes against me already. So feel free to examine this as I go through it.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham was one hundred years old when Isaac was born. Abraham was one hundred seventy-five years old when he died, which means that when Abraham died, Isaac was how old? Seventy-five years. Yep, you're all with me to this point, right? Cause we're not all public school students here. You're all with me to this point. So Abraham was one hundred years old when Isaac was born. Abraham dies at one hundred seventy-five. Isaac, when he married Rebekah, was forty years old (Gen. 25). She was barren for twenty years. And when Isaac and Rebekah conceived and the twins, Jacob and Esau, were born, Isaac was sixty years old. Now, if Isaac was seventy-five years old when Abraham died, and Jacob was born when Isaac was sixty years old, that means that Jacob was how old when Abraham died? Fifteen, which means that Esau was how old when Abraham died? Carry the one—also fifteen because Jacob and Esau were twins. I know some of you are like, OK, I missed the math somewhere. That's it, they were twins. So he was also fifteen years old.
Now Esau married at the age of forty. Esau married at the age of forty, which means Jacob was how old when Esau married? Keep testing you—forty years old, right? Now as soon as Jacob had stolen the birthright blessing from Esau, it says that Jacob was commanded by Isaac and Rebekah to go to another land outside of there and to not take a wife from the sons of the Canaanites, but instead to go back to Rebekah's family and take a wife from there. And at that time when Esau heard what Jacob was commanded, he went and took another wife and added her to the wives that he already had, which means that when Jacob stole the blessing from Esau, he was how old? At least forty.
Now in your mind, how old did you picture Jacob being when he and Rebekah finagled that whole thing and worked together to take that from him? What were you thinking, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, fifteen years old, maybe something like that? He was minimum forty years old when he stole the blessing from Esau.
Then Jacob departed from the land of Canaan, and he was gone for at least fifteen years. He worked seven years for Leah, and then he worked seven years for Rachel. And by the time he comes back into the land, he has four wives, the handmaids or the maids of both of those two women, plus eleven of his twelve sons are born. And he's had daughters who have been born in the meantime as well. So if Jacob was forty years old when he stole the blessing from Esau and then he fled the land for at least fifteen years, we could probably estimate—we know that when he came back to the land that he reconciled with Esau and then at some point buried Isaac, who died at the age of a hundred and eighty. And Jacob then was a hundred and twenty when he and Esau buried Isaac. He would have been a hundred and twenty years old. And then Jacob is a hundred and thirty by the time he gets down into the land of Egypt.
Now why do I go through all of that? To simply say that the age of Jacob and Esau—when Jacob stole the blessing from him, Jacob would have had to have been minimum forty years old. He could have been older than that because there's a large window in which those events could have happened. We know that by the time he comes back to the land of Canaan, which is the land of Israel that was promised to him, the promised land, by the time he comes back there, he had to have been old enough to have conceived eleven of his twelve children. So he's an older man, which would put him probably somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five or eighty years old, I'm guessing. Scripture doesn't nail that down unless there's some detail that I'm unaware of. So these are old men to whom these events are happening in Genesis as we read them.
Now, let's fast-forward through the life of Jacob. First, after Jacob steals the blessing from Esau, Isaac sends him away to get a wife. And when he does so, he reaffirms the covenant that God made with Abraham and confers these blessings upon Jacob now, not just a second time, but also recognizing the providence of God, that God was involved in orchestrating the events that happened as they unfolded. In His providence, He used the deception of Jacob in deceiving Esau to get the blessing upon Jacob, which is where God had intended it to go from the beginning. So in chapter 28, verse 3, Isaac, as he’s sending Jacob away, reconfirms the blessing that God would give to him.
3 May God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples.
4 May He also give you the blessing of Abraham, to you and to your descendants with you, that you may possess the land of your sojournings, which God gave to Abraham. (Gen. 28:3–4 NASB)
So there Isaac is simply recognizing that God's hand has been involved in this and I'm sending you away. But even though you're going outside of the land that God has promised to Abraham and to me and now to you, God is going to give to you everything that He has promised to Abraham. So Jacob is now the promised seed.
Chapter 28, verse 10:
10 Then Jacob departed [and here's where God reconfirms the blessings to Jacob] from Beersheba and went toward Haran.
11 He came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head, and lay down in that place.
12 He had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
13 And behold, the Lord stood above it and said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants.
14 Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and in you and in your descendants shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
15 Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
16 Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
17 He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Gen. 28:10–17 NASB)
So Jacob at that moment got a vision, a glimpse into Heaven, and in that moment, God took the opportunity to reconfirm the blessings and to remind Jacob that what was promised to Abraham was not the Heaven into which Jacob was looking. It was nothing that was going to be given to him when he died and went to Heaven. Again, the promise has to do with the land. Verses 13–14: “The land on which you lie, I will give it to you and to your descendants. Your descendants will also be like the dust of the earth.” And this is confirmed to Jacob before he has a wife or any children. He is single, he has no descendants, and God has reiterated to him, “Though you're going out of the land, I'm going to bring you back here. I'm going to fulfill all of My word just as I promised Abraham and to your father Isaac.”
In chapter 29, Jacob meets Rachel, and then he is tricked into taking a woman that he did not love. There's a little bit of poetic justice in that, is there not? You kind of read that and you have a hard time feeling sorry for Jacob when he gets sort of tricked into that. He wakes up with a wife that he didn't bargain for after working seven years for her, and then he has to work another seven years for Rachel. And she bears children to him (chapter 30). Kids are born to him, maids bear children. You can just look through the narrative as I'm fast-forwarding here.
Jacob actually ended up with four wives and a whole bunch of children. And it's very difficult at this point not to hear the lyrics of a 1990s Rich Mullins song echoing around in your head, right? “Jacob he loved Rachel and Rachel she loved him, and Leah was just there for dramatic effect” (Mullins, “Jacob and 2 Women”). Am I the only one that knows that song? Couple others? Yeah, The World as Best as I Remember It. It's this whole story that we're hearing here. If you listen to the song, then you know where this is going.
In chapter 31, Jacob ends up leaving Laban and tricks Laban out of some of his herd after Laban had taken advantage of him on numerous occasions. In chapter 32, he prepares to meet Esau. Now the last time he saw his brother Esau was right after he had tricked him out of the blessing and Esau was in a murderous rage waiting for his father Isaac to die so then he could kill Jacob. So Jacob was fearful. And in chapter 32, verse 11, he, in praying, prays for deliverance from his brother Esau, but he reminds God of the promises that God had made to him. Verse 11: “Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau; for I fear him, that he will come and attack me and the mothers with the children.” And now he's speaking to the Lord, and he reminds the Lord, “For You said, ‘I will surely prosper you and make your descendants as the sand of the sea, which is too great to be numbered’” (v. 12).
Jacob is terrified at the prospect of meeting his brother because the last time he saw Esau, Esau was kind of giving him one of those nods like, “Yeah, our paths are going to cross again, and when they do, it's not going to be good for you. Dad will be dead, and we will reconcile all of this at some point. You can run away now, but our eyes will meet again.” That was the last Jacob saw of Esau, and now he is about to meet Esau, approach Esau, and he is fearful that Esau has not had any of his anger assuaged and he is going to be equally as angry as he was when he left him. And of course he has every reason then to fear for his life.
So he reminds God, “Look, You said all of my descendants, and here I have them—four wives and all these kids. These are the ones to whom You have promised this land. So I'm just reminding You, Lord, before I go meet my brother, these are the ones. You have to keep them alive, them and me. Just remember that tomorrow when we meet.”
And then Jacob wrestled with God. Chapter 32, verse 24: “Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.” This is the angel of the Lord, a preincarnate appearance of the Christ.
25 When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob's thigh was dislocated while he wrestled with him.
26 Then he said, “Let me go, for the dawn is breaking.” But he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”
27 So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.”
28 He said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel; for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed.”
29 Then Jacob asked him and said, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And he blessed him there.
30 So Jacob named the place Peniel, for he said, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved.” (Gen. 32:25–30 NASB)
He understood that he was wrestling with somebody who was in physical appearance and physical form God in the flesh or some sort of physical manifestation of God, Yahweh.
“Now the sun rose upon him just as he crossed over Penuel, and he was limping on his thigh” (v. 31). This is what most commentators believe is the conversion experience for Jacob. Now, it's hard to know for certain, but it seems as if Jacob's demeanor changes from this point forward. From this point forward, he has been now physically handicapped. He is limping after his thigh has been put out of socket, so now he's having a hard time walking. And what is he about to do? He's about to meet his brother Esau. And he might wish at that moment that he at least had the ability to run from Esau if things kind of soured, but now he doesn't have the ability to run from Esau. Now he is really dependent upon the Lord. And his demeanor and his attitude from this point forward changed.
Notice that his name has changed to Israel, and I'm not going to refer to him as Israel but just as Jacob. I'm having a hard enough time keeping Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob separate in my mind as I'm rattling off names. I'm not going to add Israel to the mix. But the name Jacob meant “heel grabber.” The name Israel means “God's fighter” or “he who strives with God.” And that's truly just as good of a description of him as was the name Jacob because he ends up in the course of his life fighting with his brother, his father, his father-in-law, his wives, and now he's wrestled with God. And he's physically handicapped and must now rely upon God for protection.
Genesis 33—here's where he meets Esau. “Then Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him” (v. 1). That would just strike terror into your heart. “So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. He put the maids and their children in front, and Leah and her children next, and Rachel and Joseph last” (vv. 1–2).
Now here's a man who grew up in a home where daddy played favorites and didn't even try hiding it from him, and he has done the same thing. Now he has put the maids and the children that he has with them out in front, and then Leah in the middle, and then Rachel and Joseph very last. Rachel was the woman that he loved in the beginning. She was his favorite wife. And now he has a favorite son, and it's Joseph.
If you're one of those kids and you're up at the front of that line, what are you thinking? You're thinking, “Oh, I get to ride in the front caravan now. Finally! I get the front seat up here with the adults.” And then your dad says to you or you overhear him saying to the wives, “We just hope that if Esau goes on a murderous rampage, he's sick of killing women and children by the time he gets back to Joseph. So we're putting all the rest of you up front.” And if you were Reuben or Simeon or Levi, any one of the first four or five firstborn sons, what would you be thinking? “Pardon me? You're putting me up here why?” He's obviously showing favorites here.
In chapter 35, Jacob moves to Bethel, where God appears and confirms the promises again. Chapter 35, verse 9:
9 Then God appeared to Jacob again when he came from Paddan-aram, and He blessed him.
10 God said to him, “Your name is Jacob; you shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name.” Thus He called him Israel.
11 God also said to him, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come forth from you.
12 The land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, I will give it to you, and I will give the land to your descendants after you.” (Gen. 35:9–12 NASB)
In verses 16–21, Rachel dies while giving birth to Benjamin. Chapter 36 details Esau's children and the chiefs that came from him. Chapter 37 picks up the story of Joseph, who takes the stage of the narrative really from this point forward, with the exception of chapter 38. And from this point forward, really it's Joseph's story, which intersects later on with Jacob. And we'll come back to Joseph next week.
Joseph's story intersects with Jacob because Jacob sends Joseph off to visit his brothers. And you remember that they plot his murder and then Reuben rescues him from the hands of his brothers. And instead, they come and concoct this story, sell him into slavery. He goes down into Egypt. And then his brothers lie to their father, Jacob, telling Jacob that he was attacked on the way and they found his coat covered with blood. And so, yeah, Joseph must be dead. And they kept this a secret from Jacob all of these years until finally we get to chapter 45 after Joseph, who has become now a prince in the land of Egypt and has stored up all of the grain in the land of Egypt and is providing to others during the midst of a famine, reveals himself to his brothers. Verse 24 of chapter 45:
24 So he sent his brothers away, and as they departed, he said to them, “Do not quarrel on the journey.”
25 Then they went up from Egypt, and came to the land of Canaan to their father Jacob.
26 And they told him, saying, “Joseph is still alive, and indeed he is ruler over all the land of Egypt.” But he was stunned, for he did not believe them.
27 When they told him all the words of Joseph that he had spoken to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived [he's 130 at this point, close to it].
28 Then Israel said, “It is enough; my son Joseph is still alive. I will go and see him before I die.” (Gen. 45:24–28 NASB)
Now, this puts a little bit of a pep in his step. He kind of has a reason to live after this, and it revives him. He gets into the caravan that Joseph has sent to take him back to the land of Egypt and goes down to the land of Egypt. By this point, Jacob had been in the land for a number of years, probably some decades. He has lived in tents like Isaac and Abraham. And he knows the land is his, and he expected at this point to die in that land just as Abraham had and just as Isaac had. But circumstances now seem to be driving Jacob out of the land of Israel and into the land of Egypt. He was going down to Egypt and leaving the land. And God had promised to bring him back to the land and to give him that land, and now it seems that the famine and the circumstances are driving him and all of his descendants out of the land that God had promised and down into the land of Egypt.
Chapter 46, verse 1:
1 So Israel set out with all that he had, and came to Beersheba, and offered sacrifices to the God of his father Isaac.
2 And God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said, “Jacob, Jacob.” And he said, “Here I am.”
3 He said, “I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for I will make you a great nation there.
4 I will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also surely bring you up again; and Joseph will close your eyes.” (Gen. 46:1–4 NASB)
So the famine notwithstanding, all of them, every descendant, was to go down to the land of Egypt and to leave the land that God had promised them. And it seems as if now the providence of God was taking away from them what had already been promised to them. Jacob is going to die down in the land of Egypt, and Joseph is going to close his eyes, as the text says.
Chapter 47, verse 7: “Then Joseph brought his father”—so now Jacob has arrived in the land of Egypt. Joseph has already intended to give them the best of the land, the land of Goshen. Verse 7:
7 Joseph brought his father Jacob and presented him to Pharaoh; and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.
8 Pharaoh said to Jacob, “How many years have you lived?”
9 So Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The years of my sojourning [notice that word—the years of my sojourning; he still views himself as an alien and an exile, a stranger in the land] are one hundred and thirty; few and unpleasant have been the years of my life, nor have they attained the years that my fathers lived during the days of their sojourning.”
10 And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from his presence.
11 So Joseph settled his father and his brothers and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had ordered.
12 Joseph provided his father and his brothers and all his father’s household with food, according to their little ones. (Gen. 47:7–12 NASB)
So you notice his perspective, that he is a sojourner. So like Abraham and like Isaac, he viewed himself as one who lived in the land of Canaan but never possessed it. But he is waiting on the promises to be fulfilled. But now there's been this turn of events where Jacob has been taken down into Egypt out of the land that he is promised, and all his descendants are down there.
And now we come to the point where Jacob blesses the descendants of Joseph. We've reached now the end of Jacob's life. He comes into the land of Egypt at 130. Chapter 47, verse 27: “Now Israel lived in the land of Egypt, in Goshen, and they acquired property in it and were fruitful and became very numerous.” I want you to notice that. That's very significant. The children of Israel are there. They have acquired property. They have prospered in the land. They've become very numerous.
Verse 28: “Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years; so the length of Jacob's life was one hundred and forty-seven years.” Those last few years of his life were the most comfortable years that he had ever spent anywhere. He’s not in tents. He's in the land of Goshen. Every need he has ever had has been provided. Every want he could—the prince of Egypt is his son. Do you think he wanted for anything for seventeen years? Do you think there's any comfort, any convenience, any modern technology, anything at all that Jacob lacked during the closing seventeen years of his life? Not a one. I think it's Spurgeon who said not a dog in the land of Egypt would have barked toward Jacob without Joseph taking action to defend him and move on his behalf. Everything Jacob could have wanted, he had. He's in the best of the land of Egypt. And his son controls the treasury and all of the food in the land for all of that time.
Chapter 47, verse 29:
29 When the time for Israel to die drew near, he called his son Joseph and said to him, “Please, if I have found favor in your sight, place now your hand under my thigh and deal with me in kindness and faithfulness [this was an ancient way of swearing from one person to another]. Please do not bury me in Egypt,
30 but when I lie down with my fathers, you shall carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial place.” And he said, “I will do as you have said.”
31 He said, “Swear to me.” So he swore to him. Then Israel bowed in worship at the head of the bed. (Gen. 47:29–31 NASB)
That's the phrase that's quoted in Hebrews 11. I'll just read to you Hebrews 11:21 again: “By faith Jacob, as he was dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph [so this is the occasion of it], and worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff.” Hold on a second. Verse 31 of Genesis 47 says, “Israel bowed in worship at the head of the bed.” Hebrews says he bowed in worship leaning on the top of his staff. So which is it? Is that a contradiction? Did anybody notice that before I highlighted it? Maybe I should have just shut up and saved myself in the next sixty seconds or so. I'll try and explain to you why it is that there is a difference in translation there.
What is in the book of Genesis is the Masoretic text, and it renders that word as “bed.” It is the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Hebrew text, that renders it as “staff.” The author of Hebrews is using the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which reads that he “worshiped, leaning on the top of his staff,” and the Greek translation translates that word as “staff” instead of “bed.” Why is that? It is because in the ancient Hebrew, there were vowel sounds, but there were no written vowels in the Hebrew language. So imagine that you had a language with no written vowels but instead you just had consonants. And then imagine that you came across the word s-t-f-f. What would that be? It could be staff, could be stiff, could be stuff. It could be any one of those. And you wouldn't know that, unless you lived in an oral culture where that type of thing was communicated. You wouldn't know which one of those words it should be unless you had some indication as to what the vowel sound should be.
And it wasn't until AD 600—that's eight hundred years after the Septuagint was translated—that the Masoretic text started putting in little dots and dashes in the Hebrew language in order to indicate what the vowel pronunciation of those words should be. So when you have the Hebrew Bible, it just has that type of a consonant language, which could be staff, or it could be bed. And the author of Hebrews, because he's citing the LXX, the Septuagint, he translates it or brings that into our Bible as staff. It means that Israel, Jacob, worshipped, leaning on the top of his staff or leaning at the head of his bed. And since the Spirit of God used the Septuagint translation in Hebrews, I think it is best to understand even the Hebrew there as being a reference to leaning on the top of his staff.
And why the word staff, and why would the author of Hebrews include that? The staff is a symbol of what? What do you do when you have a staff? Other than swing it at your disobedient children, what do you do with the staff? You're walking with it, right? You're journeying, sojourning. And what has the whole theme of this portion of Hebrews been? That these men are just sojourners. That is why I think the author of Hebrews highlights that. He cites the Septuagint rather than rendering it as the Hebrew might have because he is trying to emphasize the fact that even at the end of his life, here's a man who, with his staff by his side—it’s as if he is ready to get up and go. And he is worshipping while leaning on his staff, probably also at the head of his bed.
Chapter 48, verse 1, is the author's way, Moses's way, of including all of these events together. Genesis 48:1: “Now it came about after these things that Joseph was told, ‘Behold, your father is sick.’ So he took his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim with him.” So Jacob is sick and he is in bed. He is weak. Verse 10 of chapter 48 says he is blind. He has just asked Joseph to promise him that when he dies and lays down with his fathers, that he would take his body up out of the land of Egypt and bury it in the land of Canaan. This is what he desired. He knows that the Lord is going to fulfill His promise to give the land to him and to his descendants. He knows that he will walk in that land again at some point. And even though he has lived in Egypt for seventeen years in the most lavish comfort that he has ever enjoyed in his lifetime, his heart is really back in Canaan, in tents.
C. H. Spurgeon described it this way:
Those seventeen years must have been bright and full of rest for the old man, but sense has not killed his faith, luxury has not destroyed his spirituality. His heart is still in the tents where he had dwelt as a sojourner with God. You can see that not even one single rootlet of his soul has taken hold upon Egypt. His first anxiety is to take care that not even his bones shall lie in Goshen, but that his body shall be taken out of that country as a reminder to his family that they are not Egyptians, and they cannot be made the subjects of Pharaoh, and that Canaan is their possession to which they must go. By his dying charge to bury him in Machpelah, he practically teaches his descendants that they must set loose of all the good land which they have possessed in Goshen, for their inheritance did not lie on the banks of the Nile, but on the other side of the desert in Canaan, and they must be on tiptoe to journey there. The blessing which he gave to the sons of Joseph was but an utterance of his firm faith in the covenant which gave the land to him and to his seed. It was confirmed by that faith of his which let go of the present and grasped the future, renounced the temporal and seized the eternal, refusing the treasures of Egypt and clinging to the covenant of God.
You see, so even as death is overshadowing him, and death is a very real specter in his life, haunting over him, as it were, he understands that his home is not in Egypt. That's not where his inheritance is. And though he expects to die there, he knows that someday he will walk in the land of Canaan, not as a sojourner, but as an owner, and not as an alien, but as a possessor of that land. And he's asking God to take him back there. He wants to go back to that land so that he can be buried in the land that is given to him and rest in that land until the day that God raises him from the dead and gives it to him. He understood what his inheritance entailed, and he did not let his heart get tied to this world.
How tempting it would have been. Right? To be in Egypt and to enjoy all of those comforts and say, “This is really comfortable. This is the best I've had it. My whole life, this is the best I've had it. I live in houses now. Everything I need has been provided for me now. Everything I could ask for is here. I'm not even sure I really want to go back to the land of Canaan and live in tents.” And yet Jacob's heart was not there. His seventeen years in the land of Egypt did not lessen his confidence one wit that God would give him the land.
Look at verse 2 of chapter 48:
2 When it was told to Jacob, “Behold, your son Joseph has come to you,” Israel collected his strength and sat up in the bed.
3 Then Jacob said to Joseph, “God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me,
4 and He said to me, ‘Behold, I will make you fruitful and numerous, and I will make you a company of peoples, and will give this land to your descendants after you for an everlasting possession.’
5 Now your two sons, who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, are mine; Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon are.
6 But your offspring that have been born after them shall be yours; they shall be called by the names of their brothers in their inheritance.” (Gen. 48:2–6 NASB)
In this statement, Jacob is adopting Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manassah, who were born to him in Egypt. He is adopting them as his own. And those two sons end up being included in the promises given to Jacob, and they end up getting territories within the land of Israel when God eventually gives them the land. And they get those territories because—and we skipped over this part—because Reuben, Jacob's firstborn son, ended up sleeping with one of Jacob's wives, and thus disqualified himself from getting that inheritance. And so when Jacob gives the blessing to Ephraim and Manasseh, he is really giving to Joseph a double portion of the inheritance. Because now Joseph's inheritance becomes that which is given to Ephraim, as well as that which is given to Manasseh. So Joseph ends up not really getting an inheritance, as it were, himself, named that way, but all of Joseph's descendants end up becoming named by Ephraim and Manasseh. So they get the inheritance that Reuben has forfeited. So Joseph ends up becoming, in a sense, the firstborn, getting a double portion of the inheritance. And he's passing that on here to Joseph's sons.
Jacob is conferring—listen to this—Jacob is conferring the rights of the land promises to Ephraim and to Manasseh, a land that he did not yet possess, a land in which he was not living, and a land that he would never see again. But he is conferring those blessings on those two boys. That is faith. It is the conviction of what you do not see. It is confidence in what you know to be true because God said it, even though you have not experienced it or tasted it yet. He is conferring blessings and an inheritance in that land upon two of his grandsons, and it was a land that he wasn't in at the time, and he was not going to see again before he died.
Verses 8–9: “When Israel saw Joseph's sons, he said, ‘Who are these?’ Joseph said to his father, ‘These are my sons, whom God has given me here.’ So he said, ‘Bring them to me, please, that I may bless them.’” It seems like this scene is somewhat familiar, right? “The eyes of Israel were so dim from age that he could not see” (v. 10). So as he has Joseph's sons before him, he says, “Who are these?” I wonder if Jacob was remembering that time when Isaac was blind and couldn't see who it was that he was blessing. And now he sees himself in the same position that his father Isaac was in and wants to make sure that he gets the blessing straight. And he does get the blessing straight. It doesn't look like he's going to get it straight at first. Verse 10:
10 The eyes of Israel were so dim from age that he could not see. Then Joseph brought them close to him, and he kissed them and embraced them.
11 Israel said to Joseph, “I never expected to see your face, and behold, God has let me see your children as well.”
12 Then Joseph took them from his knees, and bowed with his face to the ground.
13 Joseph took them both, Ephraim with his right hand toward Israel's left, and Manasseh with his left hand toward Israel's right, and brought them close to him.
14 But Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on Manasseh’s head, crossing his hands, although Manasseh was the firstborn. (Gen. 48:10–14 NASB)
So Joseph is facing him, and he puts Manasseh on Jacob's right and Ephraim on Jacob's left, intending for Jacob to give the greater blessing to the firstborn, which was Manasseh, and the lesser blessing to the secondborn, which was Ephraim. And Jacob does the exact opposite of what Joseph was intending, and that is he crosses his hands like this to put his right hand and the greater blessing on the younger son Ephraim, and his left hand and the lesser blessing on his older son Manasseh. And of course this would cause Jacob to object to this, which he does later on.
Jacob's intention is to bestow the greater blessing on the younger son. As it turns out, it was God's will in that moment for Jacob to bestow the greater blessing on the younger son, just as it had been God's intention for Isaac to bestow the greater blessing on the younger son, Jacob, when Jacob was a child. But now Jacob is about to do the same thing, and he is being obedient to God unlike his father Isaac. Because of Isaac's disobedience—remember the whole fiasco we looked at last week? All the sin that went on there? Jacob has learned his lesson, and he is now bestowing the blessings in the proper order, much to Joseph's chagrin. Verse 15:
15 He blessed Joseph, and said, “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day,
16 the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and may my name live on in them, and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and may they grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth. (Gen. 48:15–16 NASB)
Notice the intimate language that Jacob uses to describe God there. The God who has been his shepherd, the God who has redeemed him. By the way, this is the first time in the book of Genesis that God is referred to as a Redeemer, first time in Scripture that God is referred to as a Redeemer. Jacob has understood something of God's nature there as he refers to Him as a Redeemer.
Verses 17–18: “When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on Ephraim's head, it displeased him; and he grasped his father's hand to remove it from Ephraim's head to Manasseh's head. Joseph said to his father, ‘Not so, my father, for this one is the firstborn. Place your right hand on his head.’” He assumes that the blind old man has got this wrong and he has crossed his hands inadvertently.
19 But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know; he also will become a people and he also will be great. However, his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his descendants shall become a multitude of nations.”
20 He blessed them that day, saying, “By you Israel will pronounce blessing, saying, ‘May God make you like Ephraim and Manasseh!’” Thus he put Ephraim before Manasseh. (Gen. 48:19–20 NASB)
So that's the blessing. How is it an expression of Jacob's faith? It's an expression of Jacob's faith because he is conferring upon these two sons blessings which could have belonged to Joseph. He is now putting them on the head of these two sons, and he is making them great and giving them equal status, adopting them into the promises, promises he has not yet realized. And if you were an unbeliever sitting there that day and you observed what was going on, you would have thought, “What is this crazy old man doing? He's not even in this land. He's never possessed any part of that land. Until a few years ago, he was living in tents in that land. And now he's conferring these and he's giving that land to his sons as if he actually possesses it?” Yes. Because in Jacob's mind, he did already possess them because God had promised that land to him. And he was absolutely certain that he would get it.
In chapter 49, he blesses the rest of the descendants, the rest of his sons there. These two occasions are closely associated, probably at the same time. After blessing the sons of Joseph, Jacob would have turned and blessed the other sons. And that entire chapter is filled with the blessings that are given to the other tribes. It's interesting, and we don't have time to go through them. I'm certainly not going to read them, but those blessings that he bestows upon those other sons have hints of the land promises, the land that each tribe would eventually get. There's some descriptions of that, as well as the prosperity and future events that would happen to each of those children. Particularly of interest is the blessing that is given to the son Judah, because he is described as the one who would rule, a scepter that would never depart from the tribe of Judah, speaking of this King that would come and rule, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, which is the Lord Jesus Christ. And Jacob foresaw all of that by faith.
Genesis 49:28:
28 All these are the twelve tribes of Israel, and this is what their father said to them when he blessed them. He blessed them, every one with the blessing appropriate to him.
29 Then he charged them and said to them, “I am about to be gathered to my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite,
30 in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought along with the field from Ephron the Hittite for a burial site.
31 There they buried Abraham and his wife Sarah, there they buried Isaac and his wife Rebekah, and there I buried Leah—
32 the field and the cave that is in it, purchased from the sons of Heth.” (Gen. 49:28–32 NASB)
And he is giving instructions here regarding his body. And by the way, the practice of burial only makes sense if you believe in bodily resurrection. Because the practice of burying somebody is in fact a testimony to the theology of bodily resurrection. We bury bodies instead of burn bodies. That's not to say that cremation is sin or that you've messed up the plan of God in resurrection if you have cremated somebody. But it is to say that burial is a theological statement. We put the body in the ground because we are saying when we do so that we believe that this body will rise again. And if you look at cemeteries, you'll see that all of the graves are facing to the east. Why is it that graves face to the east? Because we believe that when the Son of Man comes again, He will raise the dead from out of the ground and they will come up and they will be facing the east. Burial is a Christian practice, and it is a theological statement that we make when we bury somebody.
Well, this theological statement is a twofold symbolism. First, there is the symbolism that, yes, we believe this body will rise from the dead, but then there is the symbolism that I want to be buried in the land that I am going to be given so that when I am resurrected, I'll be right there. It will be a short journey back to the land that God has given to me. This is faith on display.
Verse 33: “When Jacob finished charging his sons, he drew his feet into the bed and breathed his last, and was gathered to his people.” By the way, if I get to choose how it is that I die, I want it to look something like this. This is how I want to go. I wouldn't mind it being quick, but if it's going to be slow, I want it to look just like it has right here for this man of faith.
Well, that's Jacob's life. And though the early years of his life were not characterized by the most noble of events—certainly was not—he ended his life well, facing death with peace and resolve. And that really is the evidence of his faith. There's something about the reality of death and facing it that strips away all of the shams and the pretenses and the fakery, isn't there? You're standing there and you're looking at the veil and you're about to pass through it and you know that death is nigh. There's something about facing the reality of that that just—all the pretenses get washed away. And unless your conscience is seared, unless your mind is diluted and you're under the judgment of God, everything unreal, everything fake, all of the false priorities that you have, all the pretenses, the sham faith, if it is a sham faith, all of it melts away. Because it is in death that we come face-to-face with the realities that we have believed and trusted all of our lives.
And death for Jacob was not the refutation of God's promises. In fact, it was the pathway to God's greatest blessings. Death has no sting for the believer and really brings us no loss. We don't lose in death anything that is truly cherishable or anything that we truly should cherish because death can take nothing of any real value from us. It can only take this world from us. But it can't take anything of real value from us.
And his final act, Jacob's final act, is the consummate expression of faith because everything that he saw in his dying moments, everything Jacob saw suggested to him that that promise was now much harder to be fulfilled, right? Because now how many of Jacob's descendants were living in the land that God had promised to him? Zero. All of them are in Egypt, all of them are comfortable, they are multiplying. And with every generation that would pass, it would be that much more unlikely that they would ever leave that land. I mean, something would have to happen to get all of those descendants of Jacob to say, “You know what, we really don't like being here.” They would have to have everything taken from them. They would have to be maybe enslaved. They would have to be maybe beaten and made to make bricks or something horrible like that before they would sort of lose the taste for Egypt.
But as Jacob is dying. All of his descendants are comfortable. They're prosperous. They have their own property now. They have acquired possession. This is the best that it has ever been for them. And he has to be looking at the multiple generations laid out in front of him and thinking to himself, “We've just come down here. I have no descendants in the land of Canaan. In fact, the likelihood that all of these people will ever want to go back is almost zero. Who would ever want to leave this to go back there and dwell in tents again?” And yet he is confident that God will bring them back, so much so that he gives orders that his bones be taken up back to the land of Canaan. Why? So that when the children of Israel go back and get that land, he will already be there waiting for them. That is how confident he is in the promises of God.
Jacob expressed that confidence that God would give him the land, that he would possess it, and then he begins allotting portions of that inheritance to his sons before he even had it himself. That is faith. He was confident of what he had not seen, and he was convinced of the very thing that he hoped for, and he was unwavering in that to the very end. May God grant to you and I the same quality, the same kind, and the same perseverance of faith.