Back Home Away from Home
Genesis 46 and 47 set the stage for the final scenes of this first book of the Bible. ‘Beersheba’ (v. 1) was one place where both Abraham and Isaac had dwelt (cf. 21:22-34; 26:23-33), and was the southernmost part of the Promised Land on the way down to Egypt. Boice points out that only a few times in the Scriptures does God Himself call out to His chosen vessel, and in a double-exclamation: “Abraham, Abraham!” (Gen. 22:11), “Samuel! Samuel!” (1 Sam. 3:10) and “Saul, Saul” (Acts 9:4) were the others.1 Now, why ‘Jacob, Jacob’ (v. 2) again, after he had consistently been getting called Israel in the narrative? One more trip back to school. What is he to learn, and what are we to learn through his final lesson?
Sojourners until Late in Life and Out of Places of Death
Stewards until Late in Life and Out of Places of Death
Doctrine. God restores covenant families and raises multitudes late in life and out of places of death.
Sojourners Late in Life and Out of Places of Death
Before we see that God redeems our sojourning in this world, we have to first see that God ordains our sojourning in this world. What’s a sojourner? We also the word pilgrim as a synonym. It’s one who travels, but it’s not one whose merely wandering, much less one who is lost. It’s also not an exile per se. That gets confused a lot today.
Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great nation. I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes (46:3-4).
Why might he have been afraid? In his sermon on this passage, Charles Spurgeon suggested that part of it was the memory of the stories he heard—not only of the nightmare experiences that Abraham had there, but of that detail in the covenant prophecy, “that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years” (Gen. 15:13).
A mature Christian is someone who knows they are a sojourner in the proper sense. That, “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14). Notice he didn’t say, “Here we have no city,” since it is God’s will that we remain for a time, or even “Here we have no important city,” since it is God’s glory at stake on this stage. But rather, here we have no lasting city. This makes up the mature Christian’s posture and message.
They said to Pharaoh, We have come to sojourn in the land, for there is no pasture for your servants’ flocks, for the famine is severe in the land of Canaan. And now, please let your servants dwell in the land of Goshen” (47:4).
Because of trust already build up with Joseph, Pharaoh added, ‘Let them settle in the land of Goshen, and if you know any able men among them, put them in charge of my livestock’ (47:6). He simply assumed they would be as good at their jobs as Joseph was at his! This why they even have an audience in this court: as the church appeared before courts because, like their Lord, they grew “in stature9 and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52), and therefore were “having favor with all the people” (Acts 2:47).
Twice Jacob refers to the whole of one’s life as a SOJOURNING.
And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The days of the years of my sojourning are 130 years. Few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their sojourning” (47:9).
There is a kind of threat to worldly power that you want to be as a Christian, but then there is also a kind of threat to the personhood of our neighbors that we want to assure them that we are not. Mature Christian wisdom can tell the difference. One of the fruits of the prophecy of the gospel going out to the world was what the nations would say, as they come into contact with Christ’s people:
“all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isa. 2:2-3)
This stress of the sojourn can settle someone and says, “I’m not here to obtain what you want. I have a far greater treasure awaiting me … But I have something that you can see the wisdom of if you will embrace God’s design.”
Note this last detail about their meeting: ‘And Jacob blessed Pharaoh and went out from the presence of Pharaoh’ (47:10). Jacob had the sense now that his God, the God of his fathers, the one, true God, was in charge of everything, and that therefore he—Jacob—had within his mouth and his hands, God’s own power to bless.
The Psalmist asked on behalf of God’s children in Babylonian exile:
“How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4)
He posed this question in response to the Babylonians mocking the children of Israel. “Sing us one of your songs,” for their own amusement. But Pharaoh was calling for a different tune. This shows us the contrast between the Christian acting as if he is defeated in exile, or if he is a sojourner with confidence that Christ is on the throne.
Stewards Late in Life and Out of Places of Death
The first thing to note about stewardship was Joseph’s counsel to the family. He was already thinking ahead. In the very same breath that they were to assure the Egyptians that they were sojourners, they reserved for themselves a place to plant roots and grow.
“When Pharaoh calls you and says, ‘What is your occupation?’ you shall say, ‘Your servants have been keepers of livestock from our youth even until now, both we and our fathers,’ in order that you may dwell in the land of Goshen, for every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians” (46:33-34).
We saw already that foreigners were an abomination to eat with (43:32); but shepherds in particular—for what reason we are not told—were also to be kept at the outside.
The remainder of chapter 47 returns to the fallout of the famine. When, ‘Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, in exchange for the grain that they bought’ (v. 14) this is the beginning of things getting worse, and entering the “dog-days” of the famine. This tests whether Joseph’s calculations were enough. They were. Once the people had sold everything they had to be fed, even down to their own lives, their response was still: ‘You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh’ (v. 25). Obviously there is a miraculous aspect here that is unique, since God controlled when it would end, but the truth of stewardship remains the same. Those who know God and trust God most are entrusted to care for others.
This is an important biblical passage teaching what a steward is. Joseph wasn’t just a steward of a bare resource called grain, but of more precious resources called human souls, and more than that—the souls and destiny of God’s own people. A steward is one who has been given charge of a Master’s things. He will report back, and he is expected to bring returns, gains, to leave it better than how he found it. And Joseph (as Jacob before him) was to leave God’s covenant people in a better place than where he found them. That’s hard to see here, because they’re not even home anymore—not the place that they thought would be their forever home.
Our big idea was that God restores covenant families and raises multitudes late in life and out of places of death. Here He raised up that most consequential family of all antiquity, and brings life to the world out of the place of desert tombs.
God had already been fulfilling His promises to Abraham. And here is another: ‘All the persons of the house of Jacob who came into Egypt were seventy’ (46:27). Even in the heading to the list of names—‘these are the names of the descendants of Israel, who came into Egypt’ (46:8)—there is the reminder that this people, already growing is in embryonic form, as if Egypt were the womb and the slavery to come its birth pangs, where the eventual redemption of the people would birth a nation. Between the sixty-six persons (v. 26) and seventy (v. 27), some commentators suggest it is a typical rounded number, as the Bible often uses it. However, since they are in back to back verses—however one counts the sixty-six—there is nothing unreasonable about saying that Joseph, his wife, and two sons, are counted as “in the house” of Jacob, since they did not come down immediately with Jacob, but only symbolically.
We may wonder whether the analysis of Calvin is any help here. He said,
The statement that there were but seventy souls, while Stephen (Acts 7:14) adds five more, is made, I doubt not, by an error of the transcribers. For the solution of Augustine is weak, that Stephen, by a prolepsis, enumerates also three who afterwards were born in Egypt; for he must then have formed a far longer catalogue. Again, this interpretation is repugnant to the design of the Holy Spirit, as we shall hereafter see: because the subject here treated of, is not respecting the number of children Jacob left behind him at his death, but respecting the number of his family on the day when he went down into Egypt.2
But how does God raise multitudes late in life and out of places of death? He can do so in several ways. One way is given by Jesus to Peter,
Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. But many who are first will be last, and the last first (Mk. 10:29-31).
Down to the present day, we see this way constantly fulfilled. When Adoniram Judson died, he was tempted to think his mission to Burma was a waste, but, by latest count there are now in that nation, now called Myanmar, 3.5 million Christians, or over 8% of the population. I will let others debate whether he is a good example or not, given what happened to his family. My only point is that God is able to raise up from the smallest smoldering wick of an aging saint a multitude and a nation.
But there is that most ordinary means of multiplying redeemed image bearers, and that is God’s word through covenant families. In the Bible, God’s covenant is fundamentally His promise, sealed in His Son’s own blood. Jacob’s family was at the beginning of that family, but because that blood which guaranteed their trajectory is above all time and place, it never loses its power even down to our day.
We do not see—while we are alive here—the ultimate fruit that God cultivates through our lives. When Paul says to the Corinthians, “your labor in the Lord is not in vein” (1 Cor. 15:58), he has this partly in mind. God will raise up plants you were working on, that you thought were long dead. But the other part of Paul’s thought carries an imperative: “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Jacob may have had to be carried in on a wagon, but he did speak to Pharaoh. Go get yourself a wagon for the long haul for your own home, and never give up praying for them, and putting your hands and feet where your prayers are. And, church—be a wagon for saints to finish well. That’s the FIRST application as we close. Let me briefly give you two others.
Practical Use of the Doctrine
Use 1. Correction. In Joseph’s sojourner-steward strategy, we are taught what seems like a paradox today. God’s people are to be sojourners passing through and stewards not just passing through. This flies in the face of the doctrine PIETISM that has been at the core of Evangelicalism for over a century, but which has dominated our doctrine for the last twenty years especially. And young men especially are mercifully rejecting it, but, as always, there are many imbalances.
In these green pastures, we will grow and begin to exercise dominion; and out in these green pastures, we are not meddling in what is not ours. It’s both. And in that balance, if we exercise dominion and God gives an abundance, that is in accord with nature.
Use 2. Consolation. Jacob realized one last time that God was completely faithful, but this completeness does not mean that everything will turn out just as we would want it to. The family would be reunited, and so the promise of this offspring to come would happen as well. But it would have to pass through Egypt and in a way where he would never see the other side of in his lifetime. So it is with the course-corrections we are given.
“Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy” (Ps. 103:2-4).
Those last words which the LORD said to Jacob are one of those beautiful personal touches in Scripture—‘and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes’ (46:4). Joseph wasn’t lost to his father the same way that the Prodigal Son was lost to his, but, in the end, it doesn’t really matter if the son is ok. As John said to his spiritual children, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 Jn. 4). What more peaceful way, then, to go home.
But even if the type of Christ does not literally close the eyes of the father who is faithful to the end—that One who the Bible says sticks closer than a brother, He will be the last one standing by you in that time, and the first you see in glory.
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1. Boice, Genesis, III:
2. Calvin, Commentaries, I:
