When I was an English literature student I was taught that, to grasp a great book, you must work on grasping its start and its finish.
So here we are in the closing chapters of Genesis. Lots to enjoy here. I love the comic realism of the Israelite countryfolk voicing their darkest fears as to the worst thing that Egypt’s overlord (Joseph) might do: `He wants to attack us, and overpower us, and seize us as slaves, and take our donkeys!’ (43:18). There’s lots in Genesis like that which helps us see the real, complex people – Sarah pushing Abram to sleep with Hagar but then getting mad when it doesn’t work out as she wanted – `You’re to blame for the wrong I’m suffering!’(16:5); Rachel’s outburst yelled at Jacob, `Give me children or I’ll die!`(30:1)… But the end of Jacob’s story here, ch48, is one I find deeply moving, and (if we’ve mixed much with really old people) so realistic in its record of an old, old man. Joseph brings his two sons to Jacob so that he may bless them. Jacob sits up on the bed and starts to do so (vv2-6) – but then his mind drifts off (you can just feel it), drifts back into the past to his beloved lost Rachel, how she died, where he had to bury her (v7). And then his mind drifts back to the present, and with puzzlement he looks at the two boys in front of him: `Who are these?`(v8).
But the chapter is really about what he does next: he deliberately gives the key blessing to the younger, not the firstborn. It’s been suggested that he’s giving voice to God’s sovereign, elective strategy. I wonder. I suspect the superb Australian writer John Hercus is right: Jacob couldn’t bring himself to give the firstborn that blessing that for himself, the second twin, had had such huge significance (as if enough trouble hadn’t come through all that). It’s Jacob’s self-centredness that’s still been coming out in all the `me me me` verses (34:30 when his daughter’s been raped; 42:36; 43:6). Jacob, says Hercus, is `still twisted, still complex`; it’s pre-Pentecost, and without the ongoing work of God the Holy Spirit inside a person, transformation will be seriously limited. How much we need, daily, to ask to be filled, and changed, by the Spirit!
Then look at the book’s last chapter. Hebrews 11 (always a great guide to what counts in the old testament) highlights 50:25, Joseph’s deathbed commitment to God’s promised land, as one of the great statements of faith in Scripture. And it would have made a great ending to Genesis. But the Holy Spirit closes the book with something else: `So Joseph died… And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt` (v26). He’d promised his brothers he’d look after their descendants (v21); but no one can guarantee that totally, and on the Bible’s next page, that dead Joseph is totally forgotten, and Israel is enslaved (Ex 1:8).
What’s the lesson? When I was a youth leader one of our students found the perfect church. I warned her not to place all her faith there, otherwise it would be hammered if ever her church imploded. Which it did, and as far as I know she’s never joined a church since. No one, no one even that we respect, is the messiah; if we think Christian leaders don’t have feet of clay, we haven’t read much of the Bible, certainly not 2 Corinthians or Galatians. (Thank God He loves us so much nonetheless…)
But there’s a bigger lesson, that we see in the way God designed the shapes of several old testament books. The end of Genesis matches the end of Deuteronomy, where we see Moses’ inability to bring Israel into the promised land. Or the end of Judges; Judges tells of many God-gifted deliverers, but none can arrest the progress to the terrible degradation of the last chapters. So in 1 Samuel, Israel tries something else, guidance by a king, with the appointment of an apparently ideal candidate, Saul; but Saul turns out a disaster, and in the book’s last chapter he’s killed and Israel is overcome by the Philistines. David is then raised up as Israel’s deliverer in 2 Samuel; but again the book’s last chapter shows David’s arrogance leading directly to the deaths of 70,000 of his people. And then compare Jesus’ words in the last chapter of Matthew: `I am with you always!`; no `coffin in Egypt` there! It’s the lesson the old testament finds all sorts of ways to teach us: there only ever was and only ever will be one Messiah, one Saviour, one Person we can totally rely on; no one and nothing else (no leader, not the Law, not even a religion God set up in detail Himself) will do; there’s no other Name whereby we must be saved…
So it is that Genesis closes. There’s no one, there’s no one like Jesus; there’s no one, there’s no one like Him…
