Unlocking the Bible. David Pawson

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СКАЧАТЬ second promise was to give them descendants. He said there would always be descendants of Abraham on the earth. And he said this in spite of both Abraham’s and Sarah’s advancing years.

      The third promise was that he would use them to bless or to curse every other nation. The calling of the Jews is to share God with everybody. It is a calling that can cut both ways, for God said to Abraham, ‘Those who curse you will be cursed, those who bless you will be blessed.’ In return God expected first that every male Jew would be circumcised as a sign that they were born into that covenant, and second that Abraham would obey God and do everything God told him to do.

      This covenant is at the very heart of the Bible and is the basis upon which God said, ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’, a phrase which is repeated all the way through the Bible until the very last page in Revelation. It tells us that God wants to stick with us. At the very end of the Bible God himself moves out of heaven and comes down to earth to live with us on a new earth for ever.

      Isaac

      We know less about him than about his father Abraham or his son, Jacob, but he is the vital link between them. His faith is to be seen in his accepting God’s choice of a wife, staying in the land of Canaan when famine struck and leaving the land to his son even though he did not possess it in fact, only in promise. Sadly, his loss of sight in old age led to deception by his own family.

      Jacob

      Jacob is perhaps the most colourful of the three men. Even when he was being born he was holding the heel of his twin brother Esau, he was grasping from the very beginning. Esau went to live in a place we now call Petra, where it is still possible to view amazing temples carved out of the red sandstone. It was here that Esau formed the nation of Edom. The hatred between Ishmael and Isaac still exists in the Middle East in the tension between Arab and Jew, but the hatred between Esau and Jacob has disappeared. The last Edomites were known by the name of Herod and it was a descendant of Esau who was King of the Jews when Jesus was born. He killed all the babies in Bethlehem to try to get rid of this descendant of Jacob who was born to be King.

      Inheritance

      Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all showed their faith in one extraordinary, final way. They each left their sons what they did not actually possess. Abraham said to Isaac that he was leaving to him the whole land around them. Isaac also said to Jacob that he was leaving him the whole land, and Jacob said to his 12 boys that he was leaving them the whole land of Canaan. But not one of them possessed what they bequeathed. Only Abraham actually owned any land and this was just the cave at Hebron where Sarah lay buried. They each believed that God had given to them what they were bequeathing, and that one day the whole land would be theirs.

      When we read about these men much later in the Bible in Hebrews 11, we discover that ‘all these people were still living by faith when they died’. They were all commended for their faith, ‘yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect’. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are not dead. We can see the tombs of their bodies in Hebron, but they are not dead. Jesus said that God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – not was but is. He is not the God of dead people: he is the God of the living.

      Joseph

      The final part of Genesis concerns a story which is familiar to many, the story of Joseph. It is a story that appeals to children as well as adults, a ‘goody wins over the baddy’ story. It has even been made into a musical, although the popular references to a multicoloured coat are probably inaccurate. It was more likely a coat specifically with long sleeves, rather than any kind of multicoloured garment – the major point being that Joseph was made foreman over the others and wore attire which emphasized that he did not have to do manual work. Such preference was odd since Joseph was not the eldest son, so it led to considerable resentment.

      Joseph is the fourth generation, the great-grandson of Abraham, and yet again he is not the eldest. There is a clear pattern here: the natural heir does not receive the blessing. God chooses in his grace who receives it. The pattern has been for it to be one of the younger sons.

      In one important way, however, the pattern does not continue. I noted earlier that there is a great difference between Joseph and the previous three generations. God never calls himself ‘the God of Joseph’. Angels never appear to Joseph and his brothers are not rejected like those of the other three. His brothers are included in the Godly line of Seth, so there is not the same contrast to be seen in that respect. Furthermore, Joseph is never spoken to directly by God. He receives dreams and is given the interpretation of dreams, but he never actually receives communication from God as the other three patriarchs do.

      So it seems that somehow Joseph stands on his own. Why is he different, and why are we told his story?

      In part the reason is obvious, for his story links in naturally with the very next book in the Bible. In Exodus we find this family in slavery in Egypt and somehow we need to explain how they got there. The story of Joseph is the vital link, explaining how Jacob and his family migrated down to Egypt for the same reason that Abraham and Isaac had gone down to Egypt earlier: because of a shortage of food. (Egypt does not depend on rain since it has the River Nile flowing down from the Ethiopian highlands, whereas the land of Israel depends for its crops totally on rain brought by the west wind from the Mediterranean.) At the very least, therefore, the story of Joseph is there to link us with the next part of the Bible. The curtain falls after Joseph for some 400 years, about which we know nothing, and when it lifts again the family has become a people of many hundreds of thousands – but now they are slaves in Egypt.

      If this is the only reason that the story of Joseph is included in Genesis, then it hardly explains why so much space is given to it. We are told almost as much detail as we are about Abraham and far more than we are about Isaac or Jacob. Why are we told about Joseph in such detail? Is it simply the example of a good man with the moral that good triumphs in the end? Surely there is more to it than that.

      There are at least four levels at which we can read the story of Joseph.

      1. THE HUMAN ANGLE

      The first level is simply the human level. It is a vivid story told superbly with very real characters. It is a great adventure, stranger than fiction. There are some extraordinary coincidences in it, and you could summarize Joseph’s life in two chapters: Chapter 1, down, and Chapter 2, up. He went all the way down from being the favourite son of his father to becoming a household slave, and he went all the way up from being a forgotten prisoner to being Prime Minister. In between we have the envy of his brothers which brought him low, and the key to a successful ending lying in the dreams. At the human level, therefore, it makes a good musical show for London’s West End and thousands see it and enjoy it.

      2. GOD’S ANGLE

      You can also read the story from God’s angle. Even though he does not actually talk to Joseph, he is there behind the scenes, the invisible God arranging circumstances for his purposes and plans and revealing them through dreams. It is clear in the Bible that sometimes God needs to speak to his people in this way, but it always needs an interpretation. Joseph said these dreams were from God and that the interpretation would come from God. Daniel would later be noted for the same gift. Joseph believed that his circumstances were overruled by God and that God was behind the things that happened to him.

      The key verse in the story of Joseph is found in Chapter 45, verse 7, when he finally made himself known to his brothers after humbling and embarrassing them greatly. Having forgiven them for what they had done to him, he then said, ‘But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.’

      Joseph’s СКАЧАТЬ