CRITICAL NOTES.—
Genesis 50:23. Of the third generation.] “Either sons belonging to, or sons of, the third generation. If the former, then his (Joseph’s) great,—if the latter, his great-great-grandchildren.” (Alford.)—Were brought up upon Joseph’s knees.] The meaning is, that they were placed upon his knees, when new-born, for his recognition and blessing (Genesis 30:3).
Genesis 50:25. Ye shall carry up my bones from hence.] The record of his burial is preserved (Exodus 13:19; Joshua 24:32). It was at Shechem.—
Genesis 50:26. He was put in a coffin in Egypt] “The mummy of Joseph was put, as was the duty of the embalmers, in a chest of wood, such as may be seen in our museums to this day.” (Alford.)
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Genesis 50:22-26
DYING JOSEPH
I. Satisfied with the goodness of the Lord. He had his misfortunes, his days of evil; but they were the consequences of his integrity, not of his sin. The “evil report” carried to his father, though prompted by a sense of duty, was the occasion of his slavery. His invincible purity was the cause of his imprisonment. Yet his career was, on the whole marked by success. “The Lord was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man.” For eighty years he lived as prime minister of Egypt, and died at the age of an hundred and ten years. “He saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation: the children also of Machir, the son of Manasseh, were brought up upon Joseph’s knees.” He had seen the goodness of the Lord in a long life, an honoured old age, and a prosperous family. The morning of his life was clouded, but the clouds had passed away, and his evening sky is pure.
II. Full of faith. He was one of those heroes of faith commended in Hebrews 11. His faith made him,
1. Sure of God’s Covenant. “God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land, unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” (Genesis 50:24.) But, how did Joseph know that his people would ever quit Egypt? We answer, by faith. He trusted in God. He had in his soul the sure conviction of things not seen. Faith looks to the future, but, at the same time, gives to that future a substantial existence; so that the soul is conscious of a higher and more perfect state of things than that which surrounds it here. Joseph was sure of that covenant which promised deliverance and the possession of the good land. Faith made him,
2. Superior to the world. Joseph was an illustration of St. Paul’s words, “We walk by faith, not by sight.” His dying words show that, after all, he was very little at home in Egypt, though, to all outward appearance, he was one of its people. He bore an Egyptian name—a high sounding title. He married an Egyptian woman of rank. But he was still an Israelite at heart, with all the convictions, aims, and hopes of his nation. The pomp and state in which he lived afforded him no true rest for his heart and soul. Prime Minister of Egypt as he was, his last words open a window in his soul, and declare how little he belonged to that state of things in which he had been content to live. He was content to feel and know, that like his fathers, he was but a stranger and a sojourner. Dying, he said, “Carry up my bones from hence.” His faith made him superior to the world in which he lived and moved. He passed the time of his sojourning there as an alien; for his true home and all his desire was the Promised Land. And faith ought to produce such effects in us. The believer is not of this world. His true home is on high. His “life is hid with Christ in God.” The centre of his interest is changed from earth to heaven. His faith also made him,
3. The possessor of immortality. His commandment concerning his bones may have been dictated by a natural instinct. We cherish a feeling that, somehow, after death, our bodies still remain part of ourselves. Our ideas of existence are all associated with material substance and form. Joseph may also have been influenced by a natural desire that his grave should not be among strangers, but among his own kindred. When old Barzillai was offered by the king to spend the remnant of his age in the palace at Jerusalem, he said—“Let thy servant, I pray thee, turn back again, that I may die in mine own city, and be buried by the grave of my father and my mother.” (2 Samuel 19:37.) But whatever other motives Joseph had, this is certain, that he believed in God’s covenant promise and claimed his share in it. God had proclaimed Himself to the patriarchs as their God. His covenant relation to them implied a life beyond the grave. “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Men who stand so with God can never really die. The soul that has once looked up, by faith, into the face of its unseen Father, cannot be left in the grave. The patriarchs still exist. They are before God, and beneath His eye. While they were living here they may have wandered far in sin, darkness, and error. They may have served other gods, as Abraham did before he was called to the life of faith; but the one true God, who is the Judge of all, is their God now. Joseph felt that within him which triumphed over death. All was failing him on earth, but his faith held on to God. When his brethren stood around his dying bed, they could not help fearing that when this powerful prince was gone, disaster must fall upon their people. But the dying man lays firm hold upon the promise, that word of God which cannot pass away. “I die,” he says, but “God will surely visit you.” He is not going to die. He lives on for ever to be the portion and strength of his people when their heart and flesh fail.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON THE VERSES
Genesis 50:22-23. If children’s children are the glory of old men, they were so in a very eminent degree to Joseph, who was assured that the blessings of Divine goodness should descend upon his head in the persons of his descendants.—(Bush.)
Genesis 50:24. It is clear that when Joseph was dying, his thoughts were not engrossed by his own concerns, although he was on the borders of the everlasting world. His mind was at perfect ease concerning his own state; but he did what he could to console the hearts of his brethren, and of all his father’s house, whom his death was depriving of their last earthly friend. He does not refer them to any new discoveries made to himself, but to the well-known promise made to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. When there was no written word of God, His afflicted people found a sufficient ground for their faith and hope in the sure promises handed down from father to son. How superior are our privileges, who enjoy that precious volume filled with promises as the heaven is with stars.—(Bush.)
That is the best thought of death, to remember the promise of God and His gracious redemption.—(Lange).
Genesis 50:25. Joseph saw, by that creative faith, his family in prosperity, even in affluence; but he felt that this was not their rest. A higher life than that of affluence, a nobler destiny than that of stagnant rest, there must be for them in the future; else all the anticipations of a purer earth, and a holier world, which imagination bodied forth within his soul, were empty dreams, not the intuitions of God’s Spirit. It was this idea of perfection, which was “the substance of things hoped for,” that carried him far beyond the period of his own death, and made him feel himself a partaker of his nation’s blessed future. They who have lived as Joseph lived, just in proportion to their purity and unselfishness, must believe in immortality. They cannot but believe it. The eternal existence is already pulsing in their veins; the life of trust and high hope, and sublime longings after perfection, with which the decay of the frame has nothing at all to do. That is gone—yes—but it was not that life in which they lived; and when it finished, what had that ruin to do with the destruction of the immortal? Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. “Christ in you” is “the hope of glory.”—(Robertson).
Genesis 50:26. We collect from this a hint of the resurrection of the body. The Egyptian mode of sepulture was by embalming; and the Hebrews, too, attached much importance to the body after death. Joseph commanded his countrymen to preserve his bones to take away with them. In this we detect that unmistakable human craving, not only for immortality, but immortality associated with a form. The Egyptians had a kind of feeling, that while the mummy lasted, the man had not yet perished from earth. Christianity does not disappoint, but rather meets that feeling. It grants to the materialist, by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that future life shall be associated with a material form. It grants to the spiritualist all he ought to wish, that the spirit shall be free from evil. For it is a mistake of ultra spiritualism to connect degradation with the thought of a risen body; or to suppose that a mind, unbound by the limitations of space, is a more spiritual idea of resurrection than the other. The opposite to spirituality is not materialism, but sin; the form of matter does not degrade.—(Robertson).
It all ends with the coffin, the mourning for the dead, the funeral procession, and the glance into the future life. The age of promise is over; there follows now a silent chasm of four hundred years, until out of the rushes of the Nile there is lifted up a weeping infant in a little reed-formed ark. The age of law begins, which endures for fifteen hundred years. Then in Bethlehem—Ephratah is there born another infant, and with him begins the happy time, the day of light, and quickening grace.—(Krummacher.)
The sacred writer here takes leave of the chosen family, and closes the Bible of the sons of Israel. It is truly a wonderful book. It lifts the veil of mystery that hangs over the present condition of the human race. It records the origin and fall of man, and thus explains the co-existence of moral evil and a moral sense, and the hereditary memory of God and judgment in the soul of man. It gradually unfolds the purpose and method of grace through a deliverer who is successively announced the seed of the woman, of Shem, of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah. So much of this plan of mercy is revealed from time to time to the human race as comports with the progress they have made in the education of the intellectual, moral, and active faculties. This only authentic epitome of primeval history is worthy of the constant study of intelligent and responsible man.—(Murphy.)
THE END.