Resting in God’s Sovereign Blessing

In Genesis 48, where it says, ‘When Israel saw Joseph’s sons, he said, ‘Who are these?’ (v. 8)—Jacob is not just meeting these two grandsons, Manasseh and Ephraim, for the first time. Now, the chapter does begin by saying, ‘After this, Joseph was told, ‘Behold, your father is ill’ (v. 1), so one might think that the timeline is open. However, at last chapter’s end we were told “Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years” (47:28). So the key detail here can be found in verse 10: ‘Now the eyes of Israel were dim with age, so that he could not see.’ It was just like when his aging father Isaac couldn’t see when he stole the blessing.

Matthew Henry comments that, “Jacob’s dying words are recorded, because he then spoke by a spirit of prophecy.”1 That may be easy to forget. With the eyes of the flesh, he was as blind as a bat; yet through the eyes of the spirit of prophecy, he saw into eternity and forward through redemptive history.

• We must recall how God has blessed us against our original plans.

• We must embrace how God will bless us against our original plans.

Doctrine. Since God’s blessing is sovereign, we must recall with thanksgiving and expect more against our original plans.     

We must recall how God has blessed us against our original plans.

Jacob’s reminiscing is sprinkled throughout this chapter. We see it in his brief covenant history lesson to Joseph (vv. 3-4). We see it in his remembrance of Rachel (v. 7). We see it his parenthetical thanksgiving of seeing their faces (v. 11). We especially see in the praise-filled invocation of his God (vv. 15-16). From this we are taught four truths of God out-blessing our past original plans:

First, the Christian’s conversion testimony recalls God’s faithfulness—‘God Almighty appeared to me … blessed me, and said to me … an everlasting possession’ (vv. 3-4). There’s the gospel right there! It was God who confronted me in my sin, but He gave me new life, and He promised me everlasting life!What the gospel first promised to us is more true to us than ever. But in Jacob’s case it was also a covenant history lesson. All Christian parents and leaders must familiarize their children with God’s whole family history, and that means a view into the covenant. So says Asaph in Psalm 78,

We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done. He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children, that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children, so that they should set their hope in God (Ps. 78:4-7).

Second, the Christian suffers loss along the way: ‘to my sorrow Rachel died in the land of Canaan on the way’ (v. 7). God mingles our blessings in this life, so that they grow, side by side, with those thorns and thistles. We are told, “The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it” (Prov. 10:22). That is, the blessing is pure in itself—so that the sorrow that grows with it is never to be blamed on it. Like the angel with the flaming sword at the re-entry point of the Garden, so there are flaming swords of loss in our life, lest we long to live forever apart from our forever home. It is a gracious pain.

Third, the Christian is given tokens of God’s kindness: hints that all will be put back together in the end. ‘And Israel said to Joseph, ‘I never expected to see your face; and behold, God has let me see your offspring also’ (v. 11). Henry says of this:

It is common for old people to have a very particular affection for their grand-children, perhaps more than they had for their own children when they were little, which Solomon gives a reason for (Prov. 17:6), Children's children are the crown of old men.” Our comforts are then doubly sweet to us when we see them coming from God's hand … [and] How often God, in his merciful providences, outdoes our expectations.2

Fourth, the Christian is comforted by his friendship with Christ above all in the end. As all others fall away—and even those, who through no fault of their own, who are taken away from us:

The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil (vv. 15-16).

It is important that, as we get older, we do as the song says—to count our many blessings; or, as the Psalm we heard from last week: “forget not all his benefits” (Ps. 103:2). If we binge on bitterness, we will have no taste for thanksgiving at just those moments in old age when we so desperately need it for assurance. Jacob is even now teaching the discipline of thanksgiving to his son and his grandsons. Do this early and often.

We must embrace how God will bless us against our original plans.

The core of this passage is the blessing that looks forward. The foundation of our future is Christ’s sovereignty in blessing, the essence of it is our rest in His sovereign blessing, and the bittersweetness of it consists in the reversals of His sovereign blessing. That is, His sovereign blessing does a reversing work on us. It upends our original plans.

First, that foundation: Note how Jacob briefly gets to play the role of a type of Christ. As head of the people of Israel, he does not ask but declares his ownership of these two boys:

And now your two sons, who were born to you in the land of Egypt before I came to you in Egypt, are mine; Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon are. And the children that you fathered after them shall be yours. They shall be called by the name of their brothers in their inheritance (vv. 5-6).

There was the famous statement by Abraham Kuyper, that

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

How much more is this true about Christ’s ownership of each and every Christian! Paul says, “you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God” (Rom. 6:22).

Second, that essence in our final rest: From an earthly perspective, Jacob’s hopes here would eventually be dashed. What does he say in the blessing? He communicates: ‘bless the boys; and in them let my name be carried on’ (v. 16a). Now they would ‘grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth’ (v. 16b). But the tribes that would bear their name would become conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. In between, however, this would bear out. In their commentaries, Waltke and Belcher show how,

The combined population of Ephraim and Manasseh forty years after the Exodus was 85,200. By contrast, the combined population of Reuben and Simeon at the same time of history was only 65,930. In fact, during the wilderness period the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh increased in number but the tribes of Reuben and Simeon decreased in number (see Numbers 26).3

Now Joseph accepts this ownership of his sons. It would seem that he is resting in God’s blessing earlier and better than his father Jacob had ever done. In spite of being the second-most powerful man on the earth, he understands his real and lasting identity as a child of God—that even his children belonged to God, as his great-grandfather Abraham had to learn about his son Isaac (Gen. 22). As Calvin comments here, “he regarded it as a greater privilege to be a son of Jacob, than to preside over a hundred kingdoms.”4

However, things get weird here from his perspective, as it would to any parent. The ceremony is unnatural. Perhaps his father is just old and has messed up. But we have seen it already, haven’t we?

‘And Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, crossing his hands (for Manasseh was the firstborn) … When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, it displeased him, and he took his father’s hand to move it from Ephraim’s head to Manasseh’s head. And Joseph said to his father, “Not this way, my father; since this one is the firstborn, put your right hand on his head.” But his father refused and said, “I know, my son, I know’” (vv. 14, 17-19).

Of course it never adds any detail about Joseph accepting things. Evidently he did, but it hardly matters. God is the ultimate Speaker through Jacob.

So, finally, there is a bittersweetness in God’s sovereign blessing. As we move toward our forever future, our future here in this world is not what we thought it would be. It is not even what we thought that it would be in Christ—“Hope deferred makes the heart sick; but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Prov. 13:12). The Christian life is the bittersweet turning of that original hope deferred, and the healing of a new tree of life growing inside of us. But the bitter and the sweet coexist for a time.

In his commentary, Kidner speaks of the “gentle irony” of Jacob now being on the blesser end of a blessing in which the older will serve the younger—only “now there is no faithless scheming or bitter aftertaste.”5 Boice called this “the high point of Jacob’s long life.”6 And there is certainly New Testament support for that in that, this is what the author of Hebrews recalls in his hall of faith: “By faith Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons of Joseph, bowing in worship over the head of his staff” (Heb. 11:21). The high point of his life turned out to be when the tables were completely turned on his original plans.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. In The City of God, Augustine saw the reversal of hands in the blessing of Joseph’s two sons as a type of what was to come in redemptive history, ultimately ending in the Jews and the Christians:

Now, as Isaac’s two sons, Esau and Jacob, furnished a type of the two people, … so the same thing happened in Joseph’s two sons; for the elder was a type of the Jews, and the younger of the Christians. For when Jacob was blessing them, and laid his right hand on the younger, who was at his left, and his left hand on the elder, who was at his right, this seemed wrong to their father, and he admonished his father by trying to correct the mistake and show him which was the elder. But he would not change his hands, but said, ‘I know, my son, I know. He also shall become a people, and he also shall be exalted; but his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.’ … And what can be more evident than that these two promises comprehend the people of Israel, and the whole world of Abraham’s seed, the one according to the flesh, the other according to faith?7

Now why would THE YOUNGER be “the Christian”? Read the Parables of Jesus, and you’ll see the recurrent theme of either an older and younger son, or an early and a late-comer, or an insider and outsider, and the roles get reversed in that final season of old Israel as well. Now, even if one doesn’t accept that symbolism, at the very least this passage maps out redemptive history leading up to Israel’s expulsion from the land. Although I would recommend looking into that symbolism.

Use 2. Admonition. Someone asked the question after last week—Why didn’t they eventually leave and go back to Canaan, with the news of the famine ending? There may have been a number of factors. In the first place, their whole family had come down, so it wasn’t like they were in normal contact with anyone in Canaan who could have given them this news. At the end of the day, we have to consider the most obvious answer: Comfort. Recall that Jospeh had divine authority behind the number of years the famine would last, so they didn’t really need news either. A conscious decision was made to stay. It may be said that God had already decreed it anyway (cf. Gen. 15:13-16). We grant the point, and yet otherwise bad human decisions are still real secondary causes. Think of the words of Jesus concerning Judas,

The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born (Mat. 26:24).

Therefore, this passage opens up a warning to the Christian to not settle down into chains out of some misplaced fatalism, or, what is more likely, out of comfort.

Use 3. Consolation. This text reminds us that here we have the fruition of this ‘everlasting possession’ (v. 4). We know this by many means. One of the simplest is to recall Paul’s words where “the Scripture … preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Gal. 3:8). So this everlasting possession of Jacob’s is the whole world (Rom. 4:13) to the church and forever. These are all shadows of the ultimate everlasting reward, even that old right hand of Jacob.

“You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11).

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1. Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 90.

2. Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, 90.

3. Belcher, Genesis, 266.

4. Calvin, Commentaries, I:421

5. Kidner, Genesis, 224.

6. Boice, Genesis, III:1148.

7. Augustine, City of God, XVI.42