Genesis 50:22-26 | God Will Surely Visit You

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Take your Bible with me to the book of Genesis.

Genesis chapter 50.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

I had a unique experience this morning.

I had my sermon preached to me.

Much shorter and simpler than I'm going to preach it to you.

But I had it preached to me.

I'm not going to identify the individual by name, but I had a conversation with someone, just asking them how they were doing, and paraphrasing here, the answer was something to the effect of I'm one step closer to eternity.

I read that as negative.

Life's really been hard, right?

That's the pastoral instinct in me.

Why would you say that?

What's been so hard?

That's not how the individual meant the statement, though.

They meant the statement as one of faith and hope.

Looking forward with anticipation and faith to what God has promised.

That's my sermon from Genesis chapter 50.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

And it was preached to me in the last 45 minutes.

Now I want to show you how Joseph says the same thing.

Take your Bible with me to Genesis chapter 50, beginning in verse 22, just the last section this morning.

Genesis 50 · chapter mention

Moses here is concluding the book of Genesis, and we have to remember that Genesis is not really an end.

Genesis is the beginning, right?

That's what the book means.

The word Genesis means beginning.

So we have five more books.

Don't worry, we're not going to go consecutively through that.

Next Sunday morning, we're going to start in Hebrews chapter 1.

Hebrews 1 · chapter mention

But we've been looking at the beginning.

So Genesis is just the beginning of the story for what continues on in the next four books of your Bible.

But it's the end of this particular detailed story of the life of Jacob and his son Joseph.

And the last several chapters are chapters of death.

Jacob dies.

Old and full of days.

And we have a long, drawn-out account of his funeral process.

He's mourned for 70 days by all of the Egyptians, and part of that is an embalming process.

Then they carry his body to Canaan, where they're going to bury him, and when they get there, they have seven more days of mourning.

And then they all travel back to Egypt.

This long, drawn-out process.

Quite a bit of detail about that.

But at the end of the book, the man that we've been learning so much about this summer in verse 26 is given only 11 Hebrew words for the end of his life.

Joseph died.

He died being 110 years old.

And they embalmed him.

And he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

In Hebrew, that sentence is, those two sentences are just eleven words.

That's all that Joseph gets.

His father got weeks.

Joseph gets a short amount.

And it's interesting that Moses here doesn't recount any of the details of Joseph's life.

He doesn't tell us about his accomplishments.

He doesn't relate to us all that Joseph had done.

It's just a few words about the end.

And that's intentional.

Moses doesn't consider any of the history of Joseph worth retelling.

Instead, he sees a final interaction with his ten brothers who sold him into slavery as more significant.

And then Joseph turns and looks ahead.

That's all intentional because Moses wants the end of Genesis to be an emphasis on faith.

Because of God's promises.

That's what Joseph is holding on to.

Because of Joseph's trust in God's promises, he can spend his whole life and even his death on a future he may never see.

That's a challenge for us.

So Moses wraps up both Joseph's life and this book very succinctly, and we need to pay close attention to three characteristics of faith that are represented here.

Look with them, look at them with me, beginning in verses 22 and 23, where we see that faith is not fooled by a good life in the wrong place.

So Joseph remained in Egypt.

Where did they take his dad?

Back home.

Canaan.

He's dead.

They're all back in Egypt.

And they remained there, he and his father's house.

And Joseph lived 110 years, and he saw Ephraim's children of the third generation, the children also of Makir, the son of Manasseh, were counted as Joseph's own.

There's a subtle change that's going on here.

But before that subtle change, Moses tells us that Joseph and his family, his whole household, his father's household, are living a good life in Egypt.

And he shifts now to talking about a household.

It's not Jacob, it's not Joseph, it's not Judah, but there's a shift to his father's house.

Since chapter 37, we've mostly heard about Joseph's brothers and his father.

Now we hear about them all together as a united household.

That's significant because after what Webb read for us in the previous verses, there appears to be forgiveness that's been granted and received, and everybody's living happily ever after.

It's significant also because this becomes a stepping stone to the next page in your Bible.

Exodus chapter 1 pictures this same household from the Egyptian perspective as too numerous, too large to control.

Exodus 1 · chapter mention

And the rest of Exodus represents them as a nation of people.

Then we're told by Moses that Joseph lives to 110 years old.

The Bible pictures that kind of life, the life described here, as a blessed life.

In fact, ancient Egypt considered 110 years old to be the ideal lifetime.

So Joseph is pictured from a worldly perspective, from an Egyptian perspective, from a biblical perspective, as living the ideal blessed life.

The Bible tells us that Joseph saw Ephraim's grandchildren.

So Ephraim was his son, and he saw his son's grandchildren, and that the children of his grandson Makir were literally born on his knees.

Your English Standard Version says they were counted as Joseph's own.

That's an interpretation of the Hebrew phrase.

It sounds a little weird to us for somebody to be born on somebody's knees.

That's legal language in the ancient world.

Maybe you remember that Jacob did this with two of Joseph's sons.

He said, they're now going to be my sons.

And now Joseph does the same with two of his great-grandsons.

But even more than that, other passages of scripture show us how blessed Joseph was.

You remember Job, right?

Job had a family that was all taken away.

And then at the end of the book, we hear that God replaced that family.

God gave him all of those children again, and that he saw four generations of his family after God restored them.

So Scripture says that being able to see multiple generations is a unique blessing from God.

That's why Psalm 128 blesses the man who lives to see his children's children.

Proverbs says that grandchildren are the crown of the aged.

So Moses wants us to see Joseph here at the end of Genesis as not the man who was sold as a slave, who was charged with a crime he didn't commit, who was sent to prison and forgotten there, but as a man who's been uniquely blessed by God.

But he won't let us forget that Joseph received these blessings in Egypt.

Joseph remained in Egypt.

So in the context of God's promises to Abraham and to Isaac and to Jacob that are now being lived out in his twelve sons, the good at the end of the story is received hundreds of miles from the home God promised them.

That reality helps us see the importance of Joseph's statement to his brothers as he speaks to them in verse 24 and 25.

He says, God will visit you and will bring you up out of this land.

This land.

Egypt is this land.

It's not home.

It's where we are now.

But it's not home.

God's going to visit you and you will come up out of this land.

So the family is fed, they are safe, they are growing.

Everything is good.

And Joseph tells them don't forget that the time is going to come to go home.

And God will do that.

Moses implies then that Israel's descendants are comfortable.

Everything's fine.

But Joseph says, you need to expect it to leave.

Be ready to go home.

Personal comfort is, you know, it might be the most effective argument against leaving anywhere.

If you're uncomfortable, it makes it easy to leave.

I had to coach some baseball games this summer in the rain.

That's uncomfortable.

It makes it easy to leave.

But if you're comfortable, wherever that might be, that's an incentive to stick around, to stay.

If you're comfortable long enough, you eventually stop wondering when God's going to come and get you.

But that shouldn't trick Israel.

Nor should it trick the believer in Christ from remembering where their true home is.

Now, don't get me wrong, Moses isn't critical of their comfort.

He just tells the story.

The family is comfortable in Egypt, but Joseph says, be ready to move.

And maybe that should generate a question in our minds.

What has been good in our lives for so long that we've stopped expecting anything else?

That we've stopped expecting God to act.

There's an implied danger then in comfort too.

And that danger is the danger of not being ready.

Maybe not even believing when God says it's time to step out of your comfort zone and follow him.

That's going to happen in the next pages of Exodus.

God will send Moses to Egypt, and the elders of Egypt will look at him and say, What are you thinking?

They didn't believe God said it's time to go.

Even though Moses showed them great signs.

But Joseph here, Joseph is not fooled by the comfortable setting in Egypt.

We know that because of what he says next, and it's a statement that suggests something else about his faith.

And that is that faith rests on God's promises.

He says in verse 24, God will visit you and will bring you up.

Joseph tells his brothers that he's dying.

He says it almost identically to the way his father said it in chapter 48.

But Joseph adds a promise to it, a promise of visitation.

And it's a unique statement, at least in the way that Joseph says it in his original language.

The Hebrew says, visiting, he will visit you.

That seems a little redundant to us, but that's on purpose.

Joseph is speaking about God.

He says, God's going to do something.

Now, how does Joseph know that God's going to visit them and bring them up?

He's stating a fact about a future that we've not seen any evidence for.

Moses tells us nothing about God speaking to Joseph.

We've not heard anything about God giving him more dreams about the future.

But Joseph says it as though it's a certainty.

And God will say the same words, almost identically, syllable for syllable, to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3.16.

He will say to Moses, Go and gather the elders of Israel and say to them, Visited, I have visited you.

And I have seen what has been done to you in Egypt.

Later in Exodus 13, Moses again quotes Joseph's statement as the people are leaving Egypt.

Hear what that says.

Joseph's words become ingrained into family legacy so that they are remembered for four hundred years.

God's promise to visit them is remembered for four centuries.

There's more detail here than that.

And I think commentator Nicholas Lund nails it.

He noticed how Moses lays out Joseph's words.

So the outside lines, the top and the bottom here, are about death.

Joseph says, I'm about to die.

Then at the end, Joseph died.

Inside of those, on both the top and the bottom, is the same promise, God will visit you and will bring you up.

And at the very center here, back to back, are two oaths.

In verse 24, Moses relates Joseph's words as here's God's oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Now I'm going to make you swear an oath.

You swear an oath that God will surely visit you.

He's making his family bank on God's oath.

They make an oath to remember God's promise because God promised.

Two oaths side by side in the middle of the last speech in Genesis.

God issues the first oath, and Joseph demands the second.

You see, Joseph can put his family underneath an oath about the day 400 years further away because God first made a promise.

Hebrews chapter 11 tells us that faith isn't certainty that comes from what we see or know absolutely.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

I think Moses left out any indication that God spoke to Joseph because God didn't speak to Joseph.

God just, Joseph just trusted what God had already said all along the way.

And his faith in God's promises led to his certainty.

Because God first swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

That's a way of saying God made an absolutely certain promise.

And then Joseph makes his whole family swear to trust the promise.

So this isn't just an oath for the brothers, but for the whole house of Jacob.

All of you trust God's promise.

Then we see how much Joseph believes God's promise.

He makes them promise to take his bones with them when God visits them.

And Joseph is planning for his bones to last a long time.

He believes that his family is going to see the land of God's promise.

And he wants his bones to stick around as a sign of faith in that promise.

Notice the difference here between Jacob and Joseph.

Jacob made Joseph swear to bury him back in Canaan.

And that funeral happened fairly quickly.

He said, I believe that's where home is.

I'm trusting that's God's promise.

I want to be buried there.

Joseph is not buried there.

He's instead content to let his body stay with the family until God fulfills his promises.

So both men, Jacob and Joseph, who die at the end of the book, want to rest in God's promise.

Friends, that's a faith-driven future.

Joseph tied his own bones to a promise that wouldn't be fulfilled for 400 years.

Notice one more detail.

In verse 24, Joseph says, God will bring you up.

In verse 25, the same verb is used with a different pronoun.

You shall bring up my bones.

God will bring you up, you bring me up.

God makes the exodus happen.

While Israel carries a box with Joseph's bones.

Joseph never pressures them to escape Egypt or to make something happen in their own power.

He asks them to merely carry something when God arranges their return.

All throughout, he's guiding them to trust in God's promise.

So when Joseph says God will surely visit you, he's not promising when or how.

He's saying just trust that God will.

So they heard that sentence and they lived life in comfort.

And that comfort turned to terror over 400 years.

We need to remember that when God makes promises, the length of time it takes for God to keep the promise, or how good or terrible things might be for us in the meantime says nothing about God's ability to keep his word.

Joseph teaches us to keep our faith in the reality of the promise and to not get distracted by life around us.

That can be difficult sometimes.

Always remember what God says, and that rules how you view what is.

There's a third element of faith that we see here.

It's in verse 26.

Faith holds on and isn't disappointed.

It says, so Joseph died being 110 years old, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

It's interesting that Jacob and Joseph are the only two Hebrew people in Scripture that are said to have been embalmed in an Egyptian way.

Egyptians practiced mummification because they believed a body had to survive into the afterlife for a person to keep on existing.

That was their theology, if you will.

There's no indication at all that Jacob and Joseph believed that.

I think that commentator John Curd is right that for these two men, it was more of a practical solution to a logistical problem.

It's how do you get bodies transferred hundreds of miles over a lot of time to get buried?

We might say they used Egypt's technology, but they rejected Egypt's theology.

So I don't think Moses wants us to get caught up in the embalming, but I do think he wants us to notice the coffin.

Everywhere else in the books of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, that Moses wrote, this word for coffin always refers to a different kind of box.

Everywhere else it refers to the Ark of God's covenant.

So Israel came out of Egypt carrying one box that held Joseph's bones.

Then they stopped at Mount Sinai, and there they would add another box to hold God's words.

And from there on out, one box contained God's words, and the other box represented trust in God's words.

And so finally, after Joseph is embalmed and put in a coffin, Moses' last words are in Egypt.

In Egypt.

So a book that opens gloriously with a very good creation.

And people in a magnificent garden with no needs and no sin and no shame.

That same book closes with a dead man in a box in a foreign country.

We could legitimately call that a tragedy.

But I don't think that's how it's intended to be read.

And we know that because of what's said to us in the New Testament.

Because in Hebrews chapter 11, in the Hall of Fame of faith, there's a man by the name of Joseph.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And there the writer to the Hebrews sums up all of Abraham's life and Isaac's life and Jacob's life and then Joseph's life.

And it says then that these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar.

And having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

So think about this verse in pieces.

They died.

You could say, you could make an argument that that's the theme of Genesis.

And he died, and he died, and he died, and he died, and he died.

But they died, Hebrews 11 says, in faith.

Because they never received what was promised.

Their faith never became reality.

They never saw the fulfillment of God's promise.

It's as though they saw it from a distance and waved hello.

And then the last sentence of Hebrews 11:13 reminds us, I think, of Genesis 50, 22.

Hebrews 11:13

Joseph is at the end of his life with a full family, a perfect life by Egyptian standards, in comfort, but by calling Egypt this land that God is going to visit us in and take us up out of, he implies that he's a stranger there, the whole family or strangers there.

And Hebrews says that was said in faith.

Everyone in Hebrews chapter 11 is like that.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

They never got confused about where they were.

Because they were always looking for the greatest place of God's promise.

Now, this isn't talking about the kinds of things that we hope for as human beings.

It's not talking about waiting for some kind of healing or a reconciled relationship or the patience that we need to get through a financial bind.

This is talking about God's great promises.

Joseph died holding on to God's promise with nothing to show for it.

The only time he went home was to bury his dad.

And then he went back to work in Egypt until he died.

But he trusted that God would keep his word.

And Moses presents that to us as faith.

We can have the same faith in God's word and not be disappointed that we don't yet get to see its complete fulfillment.

But instead, because of faith, we keep looking for what God will do, trusting and believing He will do it.

Now we have a distinct advantage over Joseph.

We know how it turned out.

We find the fulfillment in Exodus 13, 19.

So put yourself 400 years later in Egypt.

There's been all this built-up excitement because of these plagues in Egypt.

And then Moses tells you, we're doing something new.

We're having this thing called a Passover.

You all get ready for that, and you've got to eat this last meal at home, ready to walk out of the city, ready to go.

And somewhere in the excited, antsy, stressed nature of that getting ready, on that Passover night, somebody, Moses, remembered, oh yeah, we need Joseph's bones.

Why?

Because the text tells us that Joseph made the sons of Israel solemnly swear, saying, God will surely visit you, and you will carry up my bones from here.

That's a word-for-word quotation of what is said in Genesis 50.

But it happens 400 years later.

That implies that the promise has been repeated from generation to generation to generation for 400 years.

And God's people kept having faith in God's promises generation after generation.

Parents, grandparents, never underestimate the value of what repeating trust in God's promises can do for your family.

Joseph had a remarkable life, right?

He experienced dreams, divine dreams.

He was empowered to avoid giving in to temptation.

He interpreted others' dreams.

He administered an entire nation.

He fed most of the known world at the time.

And he even forgave the brothers who at one point hated him.

That's a full life.

And out of all of the fourteen chapters of Genesis related to Joseph, the New Testament picks out one detail, just one, to repeat in Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

That one detail is this.

It says, by faith, Joseph at the end of his life made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones.

That's it.

God calls Joseph's commands to his family about his bones, about his coffin, as evidence of his faith.

His faith was that God would visit them.

When the Old Testament was carried over from Hebrew into Greek, that that word Joseph used to indicate God's work, that visiting, is the word that Zechariah the priest would use at the fulfillment of God's word at the birth of his son John the Baptist in Luke chapter 1.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

He would say, Blessed be the Lord God of Israel.

For he has visited and redeemed his people.

Joseph said, God will surely visit you.

And he said that to some nervous, uncertain, maybe frightened brothers in Egypt.

And 400 years later, God visited them to redeem them from slavery in Egypt and to bring them home.

Fifteen hundred years after that, God would visit again, this time Himself, in a manger that led to a cross and finally to a garden tomb that could not hold him.

And so we finished this book the way that Joseph finished his life.

We don't yet see the complete fulfillment of God's promises in the scriptures.

But we press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

We persevere in faith, spending our years on a future we may not live to see.

Telling our families, each generation, keep trusting all the way to the end, for God will surely visit you.

Trust in his promises.

Let me pray for us.

Lord Jesus, thank you that you have visited us to pay the price for our sin.

Oh, we look forward to you visiting again to take us home, to take us up out of our exile, out of our sojourning, our wandering to our true home with you.

Even so come, Lord Jesus, as we look forward to the full realization, fulfillment completely of all of your promises.

Until that day, we trust you day by day.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

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