Genesis 49

Genesis 49:28-50

Section 6. (Genesis 49:28-33.)The final victory: of life over death, and of God over evil. The sixth section closes Joseph’s history and the book together: a sweet if a solemn ending; for what does the number speak of but of the limit of man’s life of toil, -a limit imposed through sin, and for our discipline because of it, -a limit in which we recognize God’s mastery of evil, the victory of good over it? Just so does this last section speak. One might say its subject is death: Jacob dies and Joseph dies. All that our hearts have linked themselves with passes under the shadow in which for the present we leave them, though in the faith of a future beyond. And this, we may be sure, is good. The night lets fall the dew.

Our souls grow soft and tender with fruitful memories. Day and night together, linked by the ordinance of God, we learn to link, and call it, from the brightness that is in it, but “one ‘day.’” There are two points, as I take it, in this section. First, Jacob dies, and is buried. Again we find him charging, this time all his sons, to bury him with his fathers in Machpelah. Do we not need the impressive reiteration that the promise of life is all untouched by death? The living man sends his dead body in to take possession in hope of his inheritance. Jacob they bury with great lamentation, and the Egyptians -all the world -lament. We read of nothing like this in the case of Abraham or Isaac, or even of Joseph afterward. Why does the Spirit of God dilate on this mourning for Jacob? It is in “the threshing-floor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan,” that this mourning of the Egyptians is specially marked; and Atad is the buck-thorn, from one of the kinds of which tradition asserts that Christ’s crown of thorns was procured. It is not necessary to affirm this in order to get the lesson from it. The threshing-floor conveys aptly the very moral of Jacob’s life of discipline.

The thorn is the sign of the curse, -the growth of a barren soil. These thoughts associate themselves together without difficulty. The “thorn in the flesh” was a needful discipline for even the chief of the apostles. The threshing-floor of buckthorn doubly emphasizes, then, the sorrow of Jacob’s life, “beyond Jordan,” -that is, the earth-side of death, looking, as we mostly do in Scripture, from Canaan, not toward it. Here are the thorns, and here is the threshing-floor; and here, too, is the mourning. Only, the world, as well as faith, can see the thorns; but faith alone can see the threshing-floor.

The world laments the “few and evil days,” -the blighting and the poverty of life. Faith, smiling through her tears, owns the necessary chastening of a Father’s love. Joseph and the Egyptians are not one, although the Canaanites may indeed confound them. In the second and last place, we have Joseph before us -Christ abiding when all else departs; and abiding in His love unchangeably. The unbelief of Joseph’s brethren only brings out and confirms to them this. How the truth of Christ’s love is questioned by His own, because of the testimony of our lives against us! Conscience may rightly upbraid us: Christ does not upbraid. Let us not make our Joseph weep afresh. Now Joseph himself departs; but we have not lost him: here is an exception from all else we have seen. He is not to be buried. Why? There is absolutely no thought of burial, so far as this book is concerned. Israel’s future departure from Egypt is seen in faith, and when God visits them, and they become pilgrims, they are to carry his bones with them on their pilgrimage. Though He be no longer dead, but living, are we not also bidden to “bear about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be manifested in our body”? Sweet and suited admonition wherewith to close the story of “Life” in the book of Genesis. “That the life may be :” is it not the great aim of all these communications to us? Let us turn it into a prayer, and make it our own: Blessed Saviour, grant that in us indeed Thy life may be manifest!