In the conflicts of the saints, not only is Satan defeated, but the tried saint learns fresh secrets about his own feebleness and the resources and grace of God. So, I may add, in the wanderings of the heart, in departure from the power of faith and hope, not only is the soul chastened and exercised, but it learns, to God’s glory, that it must come back to that posture in which the Lord first set it. These thoughts may introduce us to the closing period of Jacob’s history.
At the beginning Jacob had a title to the inheritance in the grace and sovereignty of God. “The elder shall serve the younger” was the decree that God had pronounced in his favor. The rights of nature in the person of Esau were not allowed to stand in his way. The purpose of the grace of God secured everything to him; this is his only but all-sufficient title, as it is ours. From simple confidence in this he departed. He sought to get his brother’s seal to this title (Gen. 25:3131And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright. (Genesis 25:31)), and then, in guile, to get his father’s also (Gen. 27). This was a fraud, and twenty years’ exile, endured in the midst of wrongs and oppressions, was the divine discipline.
Confidence in God
But this was also “confidence in the flesh.” It was Galatianism — a seeking to get our title to blessing, or to birthright, or to inheritance from God, sealed by some other hand than His.
In the end, however, his soul is found in the exercise of the simplest confidence. He is about to die, and the sons of Joseph, which he had by the Egyptian, are brought before him. He at once adopts them. They had no title — at least none to the rights of the firstborn, but Jacob adopts them and puts them in the place of the firstborn, giving them a double portion and treating them as though they had been Reuben and Simeon.
In all this there was the stern refusal to confer with flesh and blood. His own bowels might have pleaded for his own firstborn. But no, Reuben must give place to Joseph, who, in his sons Ephraim and Manasseh, shall have one portion above his brethren. Grace shall prevail. Faith shall read its title to birthright, blessing, divine inheritance, and all things, to the full gainsaying of the claims of flesh and blood, or rights of nature.
The Purpose of God in Grace
But further, Manasseh the elder shall yield to Ephraim the younger, as Reuben the firstborn has been made to yield to Joseph the eleventh, and this, too, in despite of the most affecting pleadings and struggles of nature. In the bowels of a father, Joseph contends for the rights of Manasseh, and Jacob feels for him in those yearnings. In answer to them he says, “I know it, my son, I know it.” But he must pass on till he gets beyond the hearing of the cry of nature and publishes the purpose of God and the title of grace, setting Ephraim above Manasseh (Gen. 48).
Thus is he brought to occupy the very ground where the hand of God had set him at the beginning, and from which, through confidence in the flesh, he departed. He now learns that those whom God blesses shall be blest, that His grace needs not the help of flesh, nor His promise the seal of man. Nay, but that rather, in spite of flesh and in independence of man, God will make it good. Had it been needful for Jacob, to the securing of the divine inheritance to him, to procure his dying father Isaac’s blessing, Jacob now sees in his setting Ephraim above Manasseh, in spite of Joseph, that God could and would have brought it about. He had desired Isaac’s own seal to his title under God, but now he learns that God can vindicate the title He confers and make good the undertakings and promises of His grace, in spite, as it were, of even earth and hell, the reluctance of nature, or all the struggles of flesh and blood.
J. G. Bellett