Genesis: 70 is not a nation

If you don't know who I am, I'm Brandon. I

am the lead pastor of the church. I'm glad you're here.

If you're here for the first time and you're our guest,

I'd love the opportunity to say hi to you, thank

you for coming this morning. I'll be hanging out in

the lobby after the service. Just come by say hi.

I'd love to meet you. Why don't you grab your

bibles turn to Genesis forty five as you're turning there, you.

Just saw that.

Next week is a revival Sunday. We do this several

times a year. We have an amazing guest speaker in

the morning, and then that night we have another guest speaker.

We will be having a special six pm revival worship night.

We do those once a month. If you have not

come to one of those. First off, they're amazing. Second,

this one is extra special because our guest speaker, his

name is John Board, pastors the church in Las Vegas.

And John I was dealing with a chronicle illness that

had lasted almost five years and God miraculously healed him

and he is one hundred percent healed, and he is

going to chair that story Sunday night. It's going to

be a special healing service. So if you need a

physical miracle, you need a miracle in your life, come

Sunday night. If you know anyone who needs a miracle

in their life, comes Sunday night next week. It's going

to be amazing again, six pm next Sunday.

This is it.

We started Genesis in September. Today is the last sermon

in the Genesis series.

Gotta be honest, I'm a little bit sad.

I've enjoyed studying, I've enjoyed preaching. And I say that

I preached through Genesis, not teach through because I consider

myself more of a preacher than I am a teacher,

and I really have the heart of an evangelist. And

my favorite part has been seeing how many people have

begun a relationship with Jesus have gotten saved during this series.

I even remember preaching through a genealogy in Genesis and

one hundred people got saved.

So God is moving.

My favorite thing about Genesis is what you and I learn.

We learn that God from the very beginning, he has

a plan. That you and I are not an accident,

that we are not some cosmic coincidence but we are

created in the image of God. And the amazing thing

about that is, if you are created, you must have

a purpose. And we discovered through this series that God

created a us with a purpose. So as the story goes,

God creates the world, a perfect world, a perfect place

for you and I to live in perfect community with Him.

But the problem is, we didn't want the world that way.

We wanted life on our own terms. So sin enters

the world and it peaks at the time of Noah

when the Bible describes it this way, that every inclination

of the thoughts of the human heart was evil at

all times. So God hits the reset button and he

sends a flood and he destroys the world, only saving

a small remnant to start humanity again. Noah and his

family church. God has a plan since the fall of man.

His plan has been very specific, very singular, very focused,

and that is the redemption of man. And like a

master chess player, he has been moving all of these

pieces in place, setting the world up for a savior,

setting the world up for that moment Jesus would come.

I told you at the very beginning of this that

genesis leads us to the story of Jesus that if

you look closely, you will find Jesus on every page

of the Bible. So as God is moving all of

these pieces into place, he eventually a man, a man

by the name of Abraham, and he tells Abraham, I

want you to leave everything that is familiar. I want

you to move to a place that you've never been before.

But Abraham, if you go, here's my promise for you.

I will make you a great nation. In fact, not.

Only will I make you a great nation, but all

nations will be blessed because of you. God tells Abraham

that someday his descendants will be as numerous as the

sands of the seashore.

God has a plan.

But you and I discover really quickly studying Genesis that

God's timing is not our timing, That God does not

work on the same time for end that you and

I work on, that he has a whole different view

of time. There's this great verse in two Peter three nine,

which says the Lord is not slow in keeping his

promise as some understands slowness, but instead he is patient

with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to

come to repentance.

You see, God is patient. He's slow.

Since the creation of the world, he had you in mind.

He knew that someday you would be sitting at a

service in March of twenty twenty five. And he's patient.

He's not slow like you and I think of slowness.

He's patient because he wants there to be an opportunity

for you to hear the gospel and maybe choose to

follow him.

God has a plan.

And many of you are sitting here and you're like,

peb I've had a promise from God and I.

Still haven't seen it happen.

Man, I took a step of faith, and it seems

like I'm stuck. In fact, it seems like I've gone backwards.

What do we learn from Genesis? Delay is not denial

just because it doesn't happen overnight. God's working on a

whole different time frame than you and I work on.

All right, I introduced you to this family tree. Let

me describe what happens from Abraham. So Abraham gets this

promise that your descendants are gonna be as numerous as

the sand of the sea.

Then he finds out his wife.

Is Baron, and it's not till he is one hundred

years old, that he finally has a son from Sarah,

a man by the name of Isaac. Isaac marys Rebecca.

Isaac and Rebecca are sixty when they start having kids.

They have twin boys, Jacob and Esau. And these twin boys,

they didn't get along very well. So I told you

that story back in January. But God's promise from Abraham

was passed down to Isaac, and that same promise to

Abraham was passed from Isaac to Jacob. Jacob has an

encounter with God where God reminds him.

Of the promise that came to.

His grandfather that all nations are gonna be blessed because

of you.

That I'm gonna make you a great nation.

In fact, Jacob hears that his descendants will be as

numerous as the stars in the sky. And in this

moment where Jacob has his encounter with God, God changes

his name and calls him Israel. Well, eventually Jacob has

twelve sons from four different wives. You see all of

his twelve sons listed here. In fact, we have conveniently

listed them by their birth order.

Reuben, Simeon, Levi.

Judah, and then Finally, his wife Rachel, gives birth to

two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. And I shared with you

that Joseph, the firstborn son of Jacob's favorite wife, was

his favorite, and he made it perfectly clear to all

of his other sons that Joseph is my favorite. And

the Bible tells us that his brothers were not just

jealous of him, but we're told that they hated him

because of his father's favoritism and because Joseph had a dream.

He had a dream that.

Someday the sun, the moon, and all the stars would

bow down to him.

So it's seventeen.

Years old, his brothers plot away to get Joseph out

of their lives, and they have Joseph sold.

Into slavery church. God has a plan.

Did you know that it's two hundred and fifteen years

from the time Abraham was told by God, leave and

I'll make you a great nation to the time Jacob

was born two hundred and fifteen years. God's timing is

not our time. We are told that a thousand years

to us.

Is like one day to God.

Never is it more obvious than his promise to the

people of Israel. Abraham dies eighty years before Joseph is born. Well,

Joseph is a slave in Egypt. Eventually gets thrown in

prison in Egypt, and as we've talked for the last

several weeks, Joseph rises from being a prisoner in Egypt

to being the ruler of Egypt. He goes from the

prison to the palace, and he leads Egypt in this

incredible campaign to feed not just their nation, but the

other nations in the midst of a world world wide famine.

He becomes the leader of this entire effort.

And two years into the famine, he gets reunited with

his brothers. That is, twenty two years after his brothers

sent him into slavery. And as I shared last week,

that in that moment where Joseph is the ruler of Egypt,

when he could have gotten his revenge against his brothers,

instead he showed them mercy and forgiveness.

And that leads us.

Chapter forty five, verse five, Are you with me still?

We're almost done with the intro?

Here we go, all right, And now do not be distressed,

and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here,

because it was to save lives that God sent me.

Ahead of you.

For two years now there has been a famine in

the land, and for the next five years there will

be no plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead

of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth,

to save your lives by a great deliverance. I want

to ask everyone to buy your heads, close your eyes,

repeat this prayer after me. Everyone say, Dear Jesus, speak

to my heart, change my life in Jesus' name.

Amen.

God has a plan, but his timeline is not your timeline.

A day to him is like a thousand years to us.

But delay is not denial. God's at work. It's moving

all these chest pieces into place. So Joseph sends his

brothers back to Israel to go tell their father that

he's alive. Now, remember Jacob hasn't seen his son for

twenty two years.

So go ahead and pop up the blurry map. So

they're here.

They go all the way back up to the blurry

area of Dothan, way up there the top of that

green line. I told you that this round trip journey

takes about six weeks, so they'd been gone from their

father for six weeks.

And then they arrive back and they give Dad the

news here it is remember.

Favorite son Thot got killed twenty two years before by

a wild animal.

He has been in mourning over this ever since. And

now his.

Sons, these ruthless scoundrels, tell him they were just kidding.

They told him Joseph is alive.

In fact, he's the ruler of all of Egypt.

Jacob was stunned.

What a terrible description of Probably the way Jacob responded, it.

Says he didn't believe him.

The actual translation of this Jacob was stunned is that

Jacob's heart fainted.

That means he grew cold, he grew numb.

Jacob passes out like he almost has a heart attack,

realizing Joseph.

Is alive, he's ruling Egypt. And then the sons say, yeah,

we are to take all of our families and all

of our livestock and all of our wealth. We are

to leave where we're at.

And he's got a region of Egypt that he's giving

to us to live, and Joseph is promised that he

will care for us during the entire famine. So they

pack up everything, go back to the blurry map, and

they leave Othan and they settle in the region of

Goshen right here in Egypt. This is also called the

region of Ramses. But this was some of the most

fertile land in all of Egypt. So Joseph gave his

family the best land and promise that he'd care for them.

Now we read when Joseph and his father are finally reunited.

Quick fact, the group that went from here and moved

to Egypt with seventy people total seventy What did God

promise Abraham, I'm gonna make you a great nation. Now

we're almost three hundred years later and they're seventy total

people in his family.

Can I tell you what seventy is not? It is

not a nation.

Some of you have an ancestry dot Com membership. You

spent two hours on ancestry dot com and have found

more more than seventy ancestors of yours. But God gave

a promise, and three hundred years later there seventy. Delay

is not denial, though, God's timing not our timing.

So father and son unite.

In Genesis forty six, Verse twenty nine. Joseph had his

chariot made ready, and he went to Goshen to meet

his father Israel as soon as Joseph appeared before him.

Could you imagine what this must have been like.

He threw his arms around his father and he wept

for a long time. Then Israel, remember Jacob or Israel?

Genesis uses both for the same person. Jacob slash Israel

said to Joseph, now I'm ready to die since I've

seen from myself that you are still alive. He's like,

I can die a happy man knowing you are still alive. Interesting,

Jacob lives another seventeen years in the land of Egypt.

I don't think it's a mistake that Joseph was seventeen

when his brother sold him into slavery, and that at

the end of Jacob's life he gets to spend another

seventeen years with this son.

That he deeply loves.

Here's another interesting part to the story that I want

to share just simply, and this is when Joseph introduces

his biological father Jacob to Pharaoh. I think it's safe

to say, and many scholars put it this way, that

because Joseph had originally believed that my father didn't even

come looking for me, Pharaoh became like a father figure

for him. And so now he's introducing his actual father

to the person that had been in the father figure

role for him.

And this is how they interacted with each other.

Chapter forty seven, verse nine, Jacob said to Pharaoh, the

years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty. My

years have been few, and my years have been difficult,

and they do not equal the years of pilgrimage.

Of my father's.

The thing that I loved so much about this is

the way that Jacob described his life. He said, my

life was a pilgrimage. My life was a journey. Do

you realize that life is a journey, That this life

you have here on earth, you should view this as

as if this is your pilgrimage, Like you are only

here for what is the equivalent of a blink of

an eye. You will spend an eternity in heaven. You

spend so much time in heaven. This is like a

moment that passes, that fleets. But when you view it

as a journey, when you view this life here as

a pilgrimage, you're like Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, where

if you view life this way, you want to make

sure that you leave the greatest impact you can behind,

Because life is a journey. Life is a pilgrimage. Because

Jacob is about to pass away seventeen years later, calls

all of his sons in and he wants to do

the duty of a father. And I shared this at

the beginning of this series about the rights of the

firstborn and the responsibility of a father. And he praised

the fatherly blessing over his twelve sons. And we actually

see this blessing prayed over those sons in Genesis forty nine.

Now you should view it this way, that this is

like a report card. This is like Dad evaluating so

far their lives. And then after he gives them their

report card, he then says, and now here's your future.

He prays a blessing over them all twelve. I want

to take a moment and I want to explain something

because I think this is going to fill in some

of your educational gaps.

When it comes to the Bible.

Ministers or people that teach classes always talk about the

twelve tribes of Israel. They'll talk about the tribe of Benjamin,

the tribe of Manassa, the tribe of Judah.

And here's what you do, uh huh.

Yeah, acting like you have a clue what they're talking about.

But you don't have a clue.

This is enough explanation of where the twelve tribes of

Israel client came from to make you dangerous. Okay, so

go back to the family tree. There are twelve sons,

twelve tribes. Let's go to a map of Israel.

This is.

The twelve sons eventually becoming the twelve tribes of Israel

and the land that they inherit when they move back

to Israel. Genesis ends with seventy people, seventy Hebrews living

in Egypt as a family. Four hundred and fifty years,

those seventy people grow into over one million, and they

leave Egypt and head to the Promised Land and become

a nation. God has a plan, but he's not working

on mine in your timeline, because the day to him

is like a thousand years to us.

But be encouraged.

If God gave you a promise and you haven't seen

it happen yet, delay is not denial. We are now

by the time those twelve brothers die off, generations later

of their descendants come and move back to Israel.

You're over eight hundred years.

After God's promised Abraham do you need to be reminded

that God is not tied to mine and your time frame.

He's working on a whole different time frame. Okay, go

back to the family treat so one at a time.

Jacob calls in his sons. First son is Reuben, and

he says, Reuben, you're my first born. You should get

all the rights of a first born, but you violated it.

See we find out in Genesis that Reuben actually had

sex with one of his father's wives, and as a result,

he forfeited his first born status that was taken away

from him. But God still made him a tribe. So

the tribe of Reuben four hundred and fifty years later

resides here in Israel.

Go back, he.

Calls in Simeon and Levi at the same time. He

lumps them in together because there's a scene in Genesis

that we didn't have a chance to cover where they

go in and they destroy all the Shechemites because the

Shechemites did something to their sister. They wipe them out,

wipe out all of their livestock, and Jacob says, for

the rest of your lives, for the rest of eternity,

you will never partner again. And in fact, going back

over to the map, you're gonna notice that only one

of them actually has land allotted.

You see, the.

Levites become the priestly tribe that instead of any land,

they are given forty eight different cities that they're allowed

to reside in. But Simeon, the tribe of Simeon resides

right here. But you'll notice that it is the only

one with lines through it. You should ask why. Well,

that is because throughout his good job, that was rhetorical.

But thanks for being obedient throughout history.

Eventually the tribe of Simeon gets absorbed into the tribe

of Judah. I'm gonna do one more, go back to

the family tree. You guys, get more. This is as

far as I was able to go in the first service.

I do think it's interesting what happened to Judah because

I preached and told you this horrible story about Judah

and things, and we've read about Judah. We find out

later on that Judah really repented and became a changed man,

and as a result of repentance in being a changed man,

lots of blessing came upon Judah, and Judah's tribe eventually.

Ends up. This entire region.

This is the tribe of Judah, but we.

Know that Joseph was the favorite son.

Keep this map up. I don't know how well you

can read this again. We'll have it in the What's

Next page. You can see this, but you will notice

that there is not a land that says Joseph on here,

And you might be wondering why. Well, right beforehand, Joseph

is meeting with Jacob, or Jacob's meeting with Joseph, and

he says, will you bring in your two sons. So

Joseph brings in Manassa and Frame, and the Bible tells

us the story that Jacob basically adopts Nassa and Frame

as if they're his own sons, and he prays for

them and claims them as his own. I joked when

I read this the first time that it's totally like grandparents.

Grandparents are like, oh, they're grandkids, they take as their own,

and as soon as they poop their diaper, they hand

them back to mom and dad. But you will notice

that Manassa is given land and so is Frame. That

is basically Joseph now residing as if he is the

firstborn son and given a double portion of his father's inheritance,

so he gets two portions of land, one for each

one of his sons. You know how the twelve tribes

of Israel came to be enough to make you very dangerous.

Genesis ends, Jacob passes away. The brothers are still afraid

that Joseph, now that their father is gone, is going

to enact vengeance against them, and Genesis chapter fifty, verse nineteen.

His brothers then came and threw themselves down before him.

They said, we're your slaves. I wonder how this moment was.

He was seventeen when he has a dream that the sun,

the moon, and the eleven stars will doubt bow down

before me. Now he's in probably is eighties, and his

brothers are bowing down before him, saying, we want to

be your slaves. God has a plan, but his timing

isn't always our timing. Delay is not denial. Seventy total

people moved into Egypt. God made a promise to Abraham,

and three hundred years later he has seventy descendants living

as nomads in Egypt. God has a plan, and delay

is not denial. Zechariah four to ten is just this

great reminder. Don't despise small beginnings, like some of you

got us given you a promise, and it seems like

it's still really small the fulfillment of it. Don't despise

those small beginnings, because God rejoices into seeing the work begin.

Four hundred years later, those seventy Hebrews grows into over

a million. They went into Egypt as a family of seventy,

and we read in that Book of Exodus that they

leave Egypt a nation of over a million.

Genesis ends with this verse. So so Joseph.

At the age of one hundred and ten, and after

they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt.

It's fascinating to me.

That Genesis begins with the words let there be light,

and it ends in a coffin in Egypt. God has

a plan. Sometimes it doesn't make sense because his timing

isn't our timing. But he's a master chess player, moving

everything in place for this moment when you would be

here today, so he could reveal himself to you and

how much He loves you. I hope as you look

back at Genesis, you never forget that God has a

plan for you. He has a purpose for you, And

we're going to conclude the series with this song to

remind you of what I want you to remember.

We've built of staying glass castles, raging to the sky

at our best.

To showy your glory at our worst show allright, we've

raised our hands in worship and our fists to stay

our claim.

We've done so much good and so much harm, all

in your grain name.

But when I think about what has the power to.

Change or it could all be said but just one word, ess,

And what if we live with the heart kindness?

What if we.

Love like we've been loved? If that's all that we

are remembered for, well, let that be enough.

So when they stand and tell the stories of who

we are and what we.

Have done, of a thousand things that we.

Can leave behind us, if they say just one word,

we'll let that word be kiness. Oh and let that

word be kindness. And I can't forgive because I've been forgiving.

And I can't show mercy because it's mercy I have received,

and it's the.

Kind of my father, the Bromie back to life, and

it's his kindess that still brings me too. Mineis and

I can't forgive because I've been forgiving, and I can't

show mercy because it's mercy I've received.

And it's the.

Kind And so my father the Bromie back to life,

and it's the kind that still brings me too, mineys.

And what if we lived with the hard kindness?

What if we loved like we've been loved? If that's

all that aware remembered for, will let that beIN off?

So when they stand and tell the stories of who

we are, handle what we have done, over a thousand

things that we can leave behind us. If they say

just one word, we'll let that word be kindness. Let

it be kindness. If they say just one word, we'll

let that word be kindest.