Gen. 48
ONE of the things about which we are often liable to err is the spiritual condition of God’s dear children. We cannot always discern a man’s state by his words. When we complain of a person not seeing as we do in any given case, it may be that the Lord is leading his soul into some other spiritual exercise, in which he becomes absorbed. “They, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.” There are some Christians who seldom fail on great occasions, and yet who continually offend in small matters, and vice versa. Some, of whom we expect the least, make the best testimony in the day of trial; others, of whom we should hope the most, fail on some special occasions.
Joseph and Jacob in their state of soul, as exhibited in Genesis 48, strikingly illustrate these remarks. As soon as God had completed His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He brings out in Joseph a most prominent type of the already promised seed. In the history, as well as in the personal ways of Joseph, we have the most affecting discoveries of the person and grace of the Lord Jesus. The history is always fresh, and available alike to the little child and to the matured saint. But, in every type, there is some striking defect in the person exhibiting it, by which we are to see that “this shall not be the same.” Jesus must have the excellence in all things. Upon the other hand, where he Spirit of God has been obligated to show forth the failure in the personal qualities of some man, who is otherwise, and by his position, a marked type of Christ, something is brought out very fixedly to stamp the Character of an otherwise entirely defective man. We see this remarkably exhibited in Samson and Jacob.
Trial and discipline are seen in the case of Jacob. His history portrays the sorrows incident to an unquiet saint, who wishes to have his promised blessings in his own way, and the chastisements inflicted upon him by the Lord as a consequence; but throughout we are forced to see the constant care of the Lord over him, because election is also involved in trial and discipline. His life was one of failure. “Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been,” was his confession to Pharaoh, yet the Spirit of God takes care to record, that “by faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph, and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff.”
In tracing the character of Joseph, we have heard it seriously argued, that the cup by which his servant said he divined, was a proof that he practiced heathen rites; but, we are to observe, (Gen. 44:5,5Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby indeed he divineth? ye have done evil in so doing. (Genesis 44:5)) that it was the steward only who said of it, “whereby indeed he divineth,” and that Joseph’s own account of himself is only, “Wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine” (margin, “make trial”). We believe that the silver cup in Benjamin’s sack is only to be used by us now as a proof that God, by means of Christ, can prove the most innocent to be guilty; and this upon our own asseveration, as Benjamin, the most innocent, was found an offender by a rule of his own laying down. But this by the way.
What then, is the failure of Joseph? Surely Gen. 48 will furnish an answer. Jacob was on his death-bed full of faith, and Joseph going to close his eyes takes with him his two sons, no doubt to get his father’s blessing for them. Here occurs a scene illustrative in Jacob’s case of that Scripture, “The day of death is better than the day of one’s birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart” (Eccl. 7:1, 21A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one's birth. 2It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. (Ecclesiastes 7:1‑2)).
Jacob, on the arrival of his son by the bedside, briefly relates the appearance of God Almighty to him at Luz, and the promised blessing. He then prophetically places Ephraim and Manasseh (not Manasseh and Ephraim as Joseph was hoping) among the number of his children, and touchingly alludes to the death and burial of Joseph’s mother. It is evident that his deepest affections were with this dear son now before him; and that the decision he afterward evinced not to meet his fleshly desires must have been a real grief to him. Meanwhile he wakes up, as it were, to the presence of Joseph’s sons, and desires that they may be brought near, that he might bless them. Here begins the failure of Joseph: his ears had, without doubt, heard the previous announcement of the name of Ephraim before that of Manasseh (vs. 5), and he ought to have argued from the prophetic strain, in which Jacob was delivering himself, that this was no mistake, and no unmeaning change. It would have been well, then, had he stood a little in awe, and let it appear how God was going to act, instead of making a fleshly arrangement, by which, like his grandmother, Rebecca of old, he sought to practice upon the declining strength and dim eyesight of his father, and thus secure the right of the first-born to Manasseh: and this attempt was the more sorrowful, inasmuch as beginning from his great grandfather, Abraham, downwards―the blessing through Isaac, Jacob, and himself, had ever gone in the way of God’s election and calling, and not according to the will of the flesh (John 1:1313Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:13)). Joseph, fearful of losing the blessing for Manasseh, contrives, by taking him in his left hand, to place him opposite his father’s right, but the artifice does not succeed; and when his father crosses his hands, and blesses Ephraim first, we are told “it displeased him, and he held up his father’s hand to remove it from Ephraim’s head,” and he said, “Not so my father.” Here, then, was assuredly a gap in the faith of Joseph! Prosperity is dangerous for any saint. “The house of feasting,” at Pharaoh’s court, may have weakened for the moment the spiritual elements in the otherwise faithful Joseph. He had forgotten the old announcement, that “the elder shall serve the younger,” and wanted a house for himself to be built up, not by God’s Spirit, but upon its own foundation; and he had, like all of us, to receive his blessings by the crossing of his own will. “If any man will be wise in this weed, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.”
This little history may be of use to us as a warning against undue expectations for our children. “The blessing of the Lord it maketh rich, and He addeth no sorrow with it.” If we are training them with an undue bias, owing to some natural qualifications or expectations, it is most probable that the end will be disappointment. The Lord has made himself the center of blessing, both for ourselves and them.
But what of Jacob in all this touching scene? What of him who had seconded his mother’s scheme for the disfranchising of his brother’s rights; and who, in this present instance, must have had that sin painfully brought home to him―of him who had pilled the white strakes in the hazel and chestnut rods, that he might increase to his own interest the speckled and spotted cattle―of him who stole away unawares from his father-in-law; and who, after all his brother Esau’s kindness to him, broke his promise by going to Succoth instead of Seir―of him whose life, in the midst, notwithstanding, of powerful deliverances on the part of God, had been a series of contrivances for his own interest, although we can also discern a certain trust in the Lord? Let us behold him now on his death bed, with the beloved son before him, at the report of whose death he had refused to be comforted. How all the graces of the saint shine forth, mingled also with a full tide of natural affection. He learns now, for the first time, to put everything into its place. As to confession-mark how he alludes (vs. 11) to his want of faith, in not believing that God would be better than his fears concerning Joseph. See him (vs. 15) in contrast with his own crooked ways, confessing that it was the God before whom his fathers had walked, that had fed him up to that day; and, behold him, whilst feelingly commenting on the death of Rachel, and looking upon Joseph with the tenderest affection, yet steadily declining to meet his wishes concerning the first-born after the flesh. Again, we see him triumphing in faith, whilst worshipping with his staff as a pilgrim, in the certainty of the land of Canaan being theirs by an everlasting possession; and, in the next chapter, insisting upon being buried in the field of Ephron the Hittite, thereby pledging himself to a personal interest in that land.
All this was Jacob on his death-bed―and such for the moment was not Joseph. Prosperity had made him forget himself. Jacob, with his eyes dim, and his life at its last, was made to see, that it is “not of him that willeth, nor of him that month, but of God that showeth mercy.” It was his last day on earth. Oh! how much happier would he have been, had he learned the secret, that “the flesh profiteth nothing,” a little earlier in his life; then, indeed, had his “peace flowed as a river;” then, indeed, as God had truly been with him in all his difficulties, so he would have learned that they were sent but for the exercise of his faith, and would have found them but the occasions for drawing upon the fullness of God. Surely in our place of death and resurrection, we have need of more practical exhibitions of our own death at the Cross, and of our risen life in Him. May we, too, learn in the failure of Joseph, the danger of prosperous circumstances, blinding our eyes to the purposes of God concerning ourselves and children.