Are we learning that which God was teaching him there? Are we seeking, with more single heart, the portion of God's strangers and pilgrims, thinking rather of Machpelah than of Egypt, of the rapture that links us with the promise, than of all the daily growing prosperity of this present evil world?
JOSEPH.
GENESIS XXXVII. – L
Joseph becomes principal in the narratives of the Book of Genesis as soon as we reach chap. xxxvii., and so continues, I may say, to the end. So that I now propose to close with this paper on "Joseph," referring to the others, entitled "Enoch," "Noah," "Abraham," "Isaac," "Jacob," as if they had been already read.
Joseph's story has its peculiarity in the midst of the things of Genesis-its own mystery, and its characteristic moral; as the others have. Election, as we have seen, was illustrated in Abraham; sonship, or the adoption of the elect one, in Isaac; discipline of the adopted one in Jacob; and now in Joseph, heirshipis to be.
All this is a divine order.
And, consistently with this, in Joseph we get sufferings before glories, or before the inheritance of the kingdom; all this realizing that word of the apostle, "If children, then heirs … if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together."
For while discipline attaches to us as children, sufferings go before us as heirs; and this gives us the distinction between Jacob and Joseph. It is discipline we see in Jacob, discipline leading him as a child, under the hand of the Father of his spirit, to a participation of God's holiness. It is sufferings, martyr-sufferings, sufferings for righteousness, we see in Joseph, marking his path to glories.
And this is the crowning thing; and thus it comes as the closing thing, in this wondrous Book of Genesis-after this manner perfect in its structure, as it is truthful in its records. One moral after another is studied, one secret after another is revealed, in the artless family scenes which constitute its materials; and in them we learn our calling, the sources and the issues of our history, from our election to our inheritance.
Thus is it for our learning in this Book of Genesis.
But as yet, while we are in this Book, there is no law. We are taught that this was so in Romans v. 13, 14. But we might have perceived it for ourselves. Because, in dispensational age, so to speak, the time of this Book was the time of infancy. The elect were as children who had never left home, never as yet been under a schoolmaster.
Neither is there any miracle. I mean no miracle by the hand of man. For power would no more have suited such hands, than law or a schoolmaster would have suited such an age. And, besides, there was no mission or apostleship to seal. Miracles or "signs following" were not demanded as credentials of a mission. But as soon as we leave this Book, and enter Exodus, we get a mission or an apostleship, and then we get miracles, as seals, to accredit it.
So that what we do not get is just as fitting, from its absence, as what we do get. Neither power nor law would have been in season, and accordingly neither power nor law do we get.
But I will now pass on to Joseph, or to chapters xxxvii. – l.
The materials which we find in these chapters, and which form the history of Joseph, may be separated into four parts:
1. His early times at home in his father's house, in the land of Canaan.
2. His life, as a separated man, in Egypt.
3. His recovery of his kindred, his father and his brethren, and the results of such recovery.
4. His latter times in the land of Egypt till the day of his death.
This may be received as the contents of this wondrous story. The way in which it is told has been witnessed to by the sympathies and sensibilities of thousands of hearts in every generation.
Part I. (xxxvii. xxxviii.) – As soon as we enter on the history, the heir is at once and immediately seen in Joseph. His dreams are dreams of glory. But sufferings as quickly form his present reality.
The story begins by Joseph being a witness both toand against his brethren. He tells his father of their evil deeds, and he tells themselves of his dreams. I cannot blame him in either. I say not how far nature may have soiled him in the doing of these things; but the testimonies themselves were, I believe, under divine authority. There was One who was all perfection, as I need not say, in everything He did or said, and He bore witness against the world, and to His own glories. A want of season and of measure may have soiled these services in Joseph; for a thing out of season and beyond its measure, though right in itself, has contracted defilement. A vessel in the master's house, at times, has to hide, as well as to hold, the treasure that is in it, and should know where, and when, and how, to use it. David had the oil of Samuel, the anointing of the Lord, upon him, and he knew that the kingdom was to be his, but he veiled his glory till Abigail, by faith, owned it. And in this David may have surpassed Joseph. I say not that it was not so. But to tell of what his dreams or his visions in the Spirit had communicated to him, was of God.
And hence his sufferings. The Lord marks him as the heir of glory; he speaks of the goodness he had found, and of the high purpose of God concerning him, and his brethren hate him. They envy him; and who can stand before envy? They had already begrudged him his father's favour, and now they hate him for God's. They hate him for his words and for his dreams; and when in the field together (as of old, it had been with Cain and Abel), they take counsel whether to slay him, to cast him into a pit, or to sell him to strangers.
And this was at a time when he was serving them. He had come a long way to inquire after their welfare, and take their pledge, and to carry them blessings from their father's house with their father's love. Such a moment was their opportunity. It was not as the bearer of good tidings that they received him; but "Behold, this dreamer cometh," they say. "This is the heir" (Matt. xxi. 38); that was the spirit of their words. For envy they deliver them; for his love they are his enemies; and at last they sell him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver.
There may be different measures in the common enmity; but in a great moral sense they are all one generation. Reuben was Jacob's firstborn, and we may suppose that he judged himself more answerable to the aged father for the lad, than any of them. He saves Joseph from the sword, and Judah proposes a sale of him to the merchantmen, in the stead of the pit. After such manners as these there are measures in the common enmity. As some said of Jesus, "He is a good man;" others, "Nay, but He deceiveth the people." In the parable of "the marriage of the king's son," some went to the farm, and some to the merchandize, while others were taking the servants and killing them. But the Lord speaks of all as of one generation. "The remnant of them," He says, "took his servants and slew them." The Judge of all the earth will surely do right, and sins will get their many stripes and their few stripes, but the world has cast out Jesus, and the world is the world; as here, all are the guilty brethren of Joseph; and, as the issue of their counsels and of their common hatred, he is sold to the merchantmen, and by them is carried down to the market of Egypt, for further and profitable sale there.
It is the heartlessness of all this that is specially shocking; and it is that which the prophet Amos, under the Holy Ghost, so solemnly notices in his reference to the affliction of Joseph. Chap. vi. And we, though at this distant day, may take our share of the rebuke of the prophet for like heartlessness, if we can willingly love the world which cast out the true Joseph. And what must we say, when we look on the boasted advance of everything in that world, the constant skill that is exercised in sweeping and garnishing that house which is stained with the blood of Jesus? The beds of ivory, the sound of the viols, the wine, and the chief ointments, were never so abundant as in these days. And if we can take up with life in such a world, are we true, as we ought to be, to the cross of Christ? A heartless heart we have, and a heartless world we live in, as it is heartless brethren of Joseph we are here looking at. One knows it for one's self full well; and surely, I may again say, it is this heartlessness that is principally shocking to ourselves (if one may speak for others), as it was to the Spirit in Amos. We are not "grieved for the affliction of Joseph," we are not true to the rejection of Christ. Worldliness is heartlessness to Him.
What depths there are in the corruption that is in us! As here, they dipped the favoured coat, the coat that the old father had put on Joseph, they dipped it in blood, and sent it to their father with these words: "This have we found: know now whether it be thy son's coat or no." This is the language of Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain was laying the burthen of Abel's blood on the Lord, intimating by these words that the Lord should have been Abel's keeper, seeing He had had such respect to him and his offering. So these words of Joseph's brethren seem to lay the burthen of Joseph's blood upon the aged father, who, if he loved him as well as this coat seemed to say he did, should have looked after him better than this blood seemed to say he had.
What depths, indeed, in the revolted, corrupted heart of man! What discoveries of these depths temptation makes at times! They sinned, in all this, against their aged father, and against their unoffending brother, at a time when the love of the one had counselled, and the love of the other had undertaken, a mission to them of grace and blessing; as is said of a generation which they represent both morally and typically, "They please not God, and are contrary to all men."
Dark deeds indeed! Joseph's blood is upon themselves, let them seek to hide it as they may; and the day is before them when their sin shall find them out, and this blood upon Joseph's coat shall be a swift witness against them. For the present they do but prosper in wickedness, that they may fill up their measure. The course of Joseph's history is interrupted, that we might get this sight of them during Joseph's separation from them. Chap. xxxviii. affords it to us. And it is indeed apostasy, full departure from "the way of the Lord," in which Abraham had walked, and in which he had commanded his children and his household after him to walk. Judah deals treacherously, marrying the daughter of Shuah. The way of the Lord is utterly despised and forsaken by Judah. Still grace gets pledge here. Pharez is a second supplanter. The hope of Israel is in the womb, a blessing is in the cluster; but truly it is such a cluster of a wild vine as might well be doomed to the sickle, if sovereign, abounding grace did not say, Destroy it not. Isa. lxv. 8; Matt. i. 3.
And such is the sin of the nation of Israel, as of this, their own father Judah; and such the grace in which the nation shall stand in the latter day. Grace shall then reign in the story of Israel, as it now does in the person of every saint, elected in the sovereign good pleasure of God, and made a monument of the saving power of Christ.
We may not be prepared for this grace of God in some of its surpassing exhibitions. We may be less prepared for it than we think. Jonah was not, Ananias was not, Peter was not. Jonah iv.; Acts ix. and x. We are not always practised, skilful weigh-masters in the use of the balances, the weights and measures of the sanctuary. Are the heartlessness of chap. xxxvii., and the defilement of chap. xxxviii., and that, too, when found together, too bad? I ask. After all this are we prepared for "repentance and remission of sins" in the grace of God? The moral sense, the natural conscience, self-righteousness, the laws of society, and the judgments of men, supply us with false weights and measures, and we carry them about with us more than we are aware of. But they are an abomination. Deut. xxv. 16. In our thoughts, the way of the harlot and the publican are worse than the easy, respectable course of the world. Had we the balances of the sanctuary, we should assay things otherwise. "That which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God."
Part II. (xxxix. – xli.) – In these chapters, which give us the second part, according to our division, we have the life of Joseph while he was a separated man in the land of Egypt.
During this time we shall see the beginning of his day, or his exaltation. But ere that come, we are to witness his further sufferings-his sufferings at the hand of strangers.
We may, somewhat naturally, have the thought that the Jew is specially guilty, as far as the moral history of this world goes-specially answerable for sin against the Lord. But in this we are not fully wise. The Jew had, indeed, a special hand in the sorrows of Christ; and, nationally, Israel is under special judgment. But the Gentile is a distinct, not a different man. The ministry of our Lord Jesus tested "the world," as well as "His own." The record touching the cross is this, Of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together. Acts iv. All were guilty there. As the apostle of the Gentiles, in his doctrine, says, the whole world has become guilty before God. Jew and Gentile are all alike proved under sin. Rom. iii.
Our present chapters suggest this. Joseph's affliction, begun among his brethren, is now continued among strangers. His brethren had already hated him, and put him in the pit, and thence taken him to sell him as a bond-slave; an evil woman of the Egyptians now falsely accuses him, and he is put in prison, and then another Egyptian, whom he had served and befriended, forgets him and leaves him. But, however it may be with him, whether at home or abroad, God is with him. This becomes the very characteristic of his history. Chapter xxxix.; Acts vii. For, in His way with His elect, God's sympathy comes first, and then His power, the sympathy which accompanies them through their sorrow, and then the power which delivers them out of it. We are prone to desire present ease, and would have all inconvenience and contradiction removed at once. But this is not His way. When at Bethany "Jesus wept;" and afterwards, but not till afterwards, He said, "Lazarus, come forth." Nature would have had the death, which had called forth the tears, anticipated. We judge that we might have been spared many a trial, and we reason it out as a clear, unquestioned conclusion, that God had power. As the friends of the family at Bethany said, Could not this man, that opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? But they reasoned imperfectly, because they reasoned partially; that is, only on the power of Christ.
We ought to (and we should, had we but bowels in Christ) very chiefly value the age or dispensation of His sympathy; it gives Himself to us in so peculiar a way. And this sympathy was eminently Joseph's, in this day of his affliction. As we said, that "God was with him" is characteristic of his condition. And he had abundant evidence of this. As soon as he is in Potiphar's house, all under his hand, committed to him by his master, prospers. And change of scene works no change in this; for as soon as he is in prison, the same record we read of him, and the same circumstances we see around him. The keeper of the prison puts the same confidence in him that Potiphar his master had; and under his hand in the prison all things prosper, as they had in the Egyptian's house. So that Joseph had full witness from God, that God was sufficient for him.
It was not for such an one to leave the help of the Lord for the help of the creature. But Joseph craves the remembrance and the sympathy of the butler, and would have him give him a good word with the king his master.
This was natural. Joseph had befriended the butler of the king, and such an one was able to befriend him. His craving of his sympathy is not to be condemned on any natural, human, or even moral grounds. But whether it was quite worthy of Joseph to do so may be questioned, whether it was quite the way which faith would have suggested.
And it comes to nothing. The butler, as we know, forgets him, and he is left for two long years in the prison. For God will still be everything to him. Help shall come, but it shall come from Himself. With the Lord, the heaviness of the night is sure to yield to the joy of the morning; and ere this season of his separation from his brethren came to an end, Joseph is released, and blessed, and honoured. It becomes the budding-time of his glories.
Excellent things indeed are found in the condition of the separated Joseph, such things as bear our thoughts to Him who is the greater than Joseph. I would just observe four of them.
1. There is great moral beauty in him. He was a Nazarite then, as pure an one as Daniel in like circumstances, a captive among the uncircumcised, maintaining his circumcision, his separation to God, unspotted. 2. There is precious spiritual gift in him. He was a vessel in God's house, carrying the mind of Christ, and ministering that mind as an oracle of God; like Daniel again, interpreting dreams, and making known even to kings, though still in his day of humiliation, what was coming upon the earth. 3. There is the right hand of power and dignity for him. He is seated nearest the throne, and put in possession of those resources on which his own brethren, who had cast him out, and the whole world beside, are destined ere long to depend for preservation in the earth. 4. There is joy, peculiar joy, prepared for him. The king makes a marriage for him, and he becomes the head of a family among the Gentiles; and this is a source of such joy to him, that he can, in some sense, as the names of his children tell us, forget his kindred, and even rejoice in his affliction.
Surely these are excellent things found in the condition of Joseph while separated from his brethren. And in them we see the Lord Himself in this present age, the season of His separation from Israel. A child might trace the likeness; but He, who reveals to babes and sucklings, has led the way in this. In Stephen's wondrous word, in Acts vii., we get Joseph and others put in kindred place and circumstances with the Lord, who is there called "the Just One." And this is so full of interest, that though it be but incidental, we must turn aside for a little, and listen to that great voice of the Spirit of God.
Stephen appears but for a moment in the course of the divine history; but it is to fill a very eminent and distinguished place. The occasion on which he is seen, and on which he acts, is full of meaning. Jewish enmity was again doing its dark deeds, and the God of glory was again disclosing His brighter purposes.
Stephen is another witness of the Lord passing from earth to heaven, leaving the earth for a season in its unbelief and apostasy, and calling out a people for heavenly places.
Stephen's was another separating era. Abraham's had been such, and so had Joseph's, and so had that of Moses, and that of "the Just One," Jesus. The occasion of the separation from kindred to strangers, (and that is, from earth to heaven,) may be different, but it is alike separation. Abraham was separated, because God was leaving a defiled world unjudged; and unjudged defilement God cannot make His habitation, nor allow it to be the habitation of His elect. The world after the flood had defiled itself, and the Lord was leaving it in its defilement, not purifying it by a second flood; and therefore He becomes a stranger in it Himself, and calls His elect out of it with Him. Thus Abraham is a separated man. Joseph in his day was another; separated from home and kindred, like Abraham; and so Moses. But Joseph and Moses were not separated like Abraham, simply by the call of God out of unjudged defilement, but by the enmity and persecutions of their brethren. And so Jesus, "His own," and the world made by Him refused Him, and would not know Him. Wicked hands slew Him, and the heavens received Him. And so Stephen.
Stephen is, thus, in company with these separated ones, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and "the Just One." And he is naturally directed by the Spirit, to go over their histories in this wondrous chapter. And these separated ones have, at different eras or intervals, in the progress of God's way upon earth, marked out or foreshadowed His higher or richer purposes touching heaven. For their times, as we speak, were transitional.
Stephen's was such. Till his day, the scene in "the Acts of the Apostles" is laid in the earth. In chapter i. the risen Lord had spoken to His apostles of "the kingdom of God." In the same chapter the angels had withdrawn the eyes of the men of Galilee, as they call the disciples, from gazing up into heaven, under the promise that Jesus should return to earth. When the Holy Ghost is given, as in chapter ii., under His baptism it is of things in the earth that the apostles speak. They testify that Jesus was to sit at the right hand of God in heaven, till His foes on earth were made His footstool. They then preach, that upon the repentance of Israel Jesus would return to earth with times of refreshing and restitution, and that He was exalted to give repentance and remission of sins to Israel. Israel is, thus, the people, and the earth the scene, contemplated in the action or testimony of the Spirit in the apostles in these earliest chapters.
But Jewish enmity again takes its way, as it had done in many other days, even from the beginning; and divine grace takes its way also, as it had also done in such other days. And Stephen, under the Spirit of God, takes such a moment as his text. He looks back at the way of the nation, uncircumcised in heart and ear, resisting the Lord in one or another of His witnesses; and he looks back also at the way of the God of glory calling into new and peculiar blessing those whom either earthly pollution or Jewish enmity was separating or casting out.
Thus his own condition at that moment was his text, just as the condition of things in chapter ii. had been Peter's text. Peter preached from the gift of tongues; Stephen, as I may say, from his own face then shining like the face of an angel, and from the enmity of the Jews that was then pressing him and threatening him. The Spirit in Stephen takes up the moment. It was a transitional moment. It was the hour of the shining face and of the murderous stones, of the earth's enmity and of the still brighter, richer discoveries of grace calling to heaven. And Stephen looks back to other histories, histories of other elect ones, who had already filled up kindred moments in the way of God. For the people of the earth are now withstanding God in him, as they had withstood Him in others. As he tells them, they were always resisting the Holy Ghost; the children and the fathers were alike in this, throughout all generations of the nation.
Thus, in Stephen, we are called to witness another great transitional moment. It is such a moment in the Book of the Acts, as Joseph's was in the Book of Genesis. This links Stephen and Joseph, and gives natural occasion to the Holy Ghost in Stephen to make reference, as He does, to Joseph. But if the earth is refusing Stephen a place, as his brethren had refused Joseph a place in the land of his fathers, heaven shall open to Stephen. Grace in God shall be active as enmity in man is active-and the eater shall yield meat. And heaven does therefore open in Acts vii. A ray from thence finds its way out, and gently yet brightly falls upon the face of Stephen, as the people of the earth were casting him out. And thus sealed from heaven and for heaven, he speaks of heaven, and heaven itself opens to him, and then the Holy Ghost Himself guides his eye right upward to heaven, and then his spirit is received of the Lord Jesus into heaven. All is heaven. Stephen gets the pledge or earnest of it first, then the sight of it in its wide-opened glories, and then his place in it with Jesus.
Nothing can exceed, while still in the body, the brightness of such a moment. It was the Transfiguration of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. It was beyond the measure of the patriarch's Bethel; for here the top of the ladder was disclosed, and Stephen was taught to know his place to be there with the Lord, and not at the foot of it merely with Jacob. The moment was transitional, which the time of Genesis xxviii. was not. It had its forecasting rather in the rejected, outcast Joseph finding his richer joys and brighter honours among the distant Gentiles in Egypt. Or rather, if we please, Joseph's history and Stephen's history, are, each of them in its day and its different way, the foreshadowing and the pledge of that glory and inheritance in heaven to which the Church, the election of this age, is called.
Simply and necessarily, therefore, are Joseph and Stephen linked together, as we find in Acts vii. Each of them filled the same transitional place-more vividly marked indeed in Stephen, and properly so-but each of them filled it. All was new and heavenly, as we have seen, with Stephen. It is not downwardsbut upwards he is commanded to look. The angels had told the men of Galilee in chapter i. to take their eyes off from heaven; the Spirit Himself bade Stephen, in chapter vii., to direct his eye right up to heaven. The glory of the terrestrial had been one, the glory of the celestial is now another. Even the gift of Tongues had not pledged heaven to the disciples in chapter ii. There was no transfiguration then, no face shining like the face of an angel. The Holy Ghost was upon the assembly in Jerusalem, but the assembly itself was not in sight of heaven as its home and inheritance. But Stephen was on the confines of the two worlds. His body was the victim of the enmity of man's world, his spirit was about to be received amid the glories of Christ's world. He was rejected by his brethren, accepted by God. All was transitional-and fitly does he look back to Joseph and to Moses, who had been in such a place before him.
And here let me say, suggested by this allusion to Joseph and others in Acts vii., that we are not to be surprised by this typical or parabolic character of Old Testament histories. Quite otherwise. We ought to be fully prepared for it; and that, too, on a very simple principle. God, acting in these histories (we speak to His praise) acts in them (surely) according to Himself and His counsels. And, consequently, these histories become so many revelations of Himself, and of the purposes He is bringing to pass.
An assurance of the inspiration of the narrative does not, therefore, in the full sense, give us God in the narrative. There is purpose as well as veracity in it-there is an "ensample" as well as inspiration. "These things happened to them for ensamples." They happened as they are recorded. There is historic truth in them. But God brought them to pass, in order that they might be "ensamples;" and till we find this ensample, that is, the divine purpose in the history, we have not got God in it. We are to go to these narratives, be they those of Joseph or any other, very much in the mind with which the Prophet had to go to the house of the potter. Jer. xviii. He was to see a real work there; vessels made by the hand and skill of the workman. But there was a lesson in the work, as well as a reality. There was a parable in it; for the Prophet had to see God Himself at the wheel, as well as the potter. So in these histories which we get in Scripture. There is reality in them, exact truthfulness, such as inspiration secures. But there is meaning also; and till we discover that, and learn God and His purpose in the history, we have not really as yet gone down to the potter's house.
But this is only by the way, suggested by the use which the Spirit Himself, through Stephen, makes of the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, in that marvellous chapter, Acts vii.
Part III. (xlii. – lvii.) – We now come to Joseph's recovery of his father and his brethren, and its consequences.
Among the things which gave character to Joseph and his circumstances, while he was separated from his brethren, we observed this, that he was put into possession of those resources on which his brethren themselves and all the world beside were to depend for preservation in the earth. The set time for the world drawing on these resources has now arrived; and with that, the set time for Joseph's restoration to his brethren.
Joseph is now in authority. His day of humiliation and sorrow is over. He is at the right hand of the throne of Egypt, and the great executor of all rule and power in the land. None can lift up hand or foot without him. He has received the king's ring, and he rides in the second chariot. He is the treasurer and dispenser of all the wealth of the nation, the one who opened or shut all its storehouses at his pleasure. He that was in the pit is on the throne.
This is Joseph as in resurrection. I say as in resurrection. For the thing itself-resurrection from the dead-had to wait for the day of the Son of the living God, who was to be, in His own person, alive from the dead. But though we could not have "the very image" of this great mystery, yet we have "shadows" of it, both in certain ordinances of the law, and in certain histories of the elect. The dead and the living birds of Leviticus xiv., and the two goats of Leviticus xvi., are among such ordinances; and such historical scenes as the unbinding of Isaac from the altar on Mount Moriah, or Jonah's deliverance from the whale's belly, set forth the same. And so does this season in Joseph's history, being the day of his power and authority in Egypt after his sore troubles in the pit and in the prison. It is Joseph as in resurrection.