Unlocking the Bible

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 brothers thought they had got rid of him by selling him to travelling camel traders as a slave and covering his special coat with the blood of a goat to trick their father into believing that his favourite son was dead. Yet Joseph could see that God’s hand was in it. He could look back on his work in Egypt, having been elevated to high office following his interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream (i.e. there would be seven fat years with good harvest, and seven lean years to follow). By advising that food should be stored during the plentiful years he had actually saved the whole nation of Egypt – and his own family when they also became short of food. He became their saviour.

God’s providence can also be seen in the movement of Joseph’s family down to Egypt. Although God had promised the land to them, he had told Abraham many years previously that he would have to leave his family in Egypt for 400 years ‘until the wickedness of the Amorites was complete’. God would not let the family of Abraham take the promised land from those living in it until they became so dreadful that they forfeited their right to both their land and their lives. God is a moral God: he would not just push one people out and his own people in. Archaeology has indicated to us just how dreadful these people were. Venereal diseases were rife in the land of Canaan because of their corrupt sexual practices. Eventually they reached the point of no return, and only then did God say that his people could have their land. Those who complain about God’s injustice in giving that land to the Jews are quite mistaken.

But there were other reasons too. God wanted his chosen people to become slaves. It was part of his plan to rescue them from slavery so that they would be grateful to him and live his way, becoming a model for the whole world to see how blessed people are when they live under the government of heaven. So he let them go through the evils of slavery, working seven days a week for no pay, with no land of their own, no money of their own, nothing of their own. Then, as they cried out to him, he reached down and rescued them with his mighty hand. God let it happen for his own purposes. He wanted them to know that it was God who delivered them and gave them their own land.

3. JOSEPH’S CHARACTER

We can also approach the narrative as a study of Joseph’s character. The remarkable thing is that nothing said about Joseph is bad. We have already noted that the Bible tells the whole truth about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who certainly had their weaknesses and sins. Not one word of criticism is levelled at Joseph. The worst thing he did was to be a bit tactless and tell his brothers about his dream of future greatness, but there is no trace whatever of a wrong attitude or reaction in Joseph’s character. His reactions as he sinks down the social ladder are first class: there is no trace of resentment, no complaining, no questioning of God, no sense of injustice that he should finish up in prison, on death row in Pharaoh’s jail. Furthermore, even though he was far from home and totally unknown, he maintained his integrity when Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him. Even at rock bottom, languishing in jail, his concern seems to have been primarily to help others as he seeks to comfort Pharaoh’s cup bearer and baker. Joseph is a man who seems to have no concern for himself, but a deep concern for everyone else.

His character is also flawless when he ascends to be second-in-command of Pharaoh’s government. Note his reaction to the brothers who had sold him into slavery. He gives them food and refuses to charge them for it, putting the money back in their sacks. He forgives them with tears, intercedes for them with Pharaoh, and purchases the best land in the Nile delta so that they may live there. They had thrown him out and told his father that he was dead, but here he is providing for their every need.

Joseph is unspoiled either by humiliation or by honour. He is a man of total integrity and the only one so presented in the Old Testament. All the Old Testament characters are presented with their weaknesses as well as their strengths, but here is a man who only has strengths. There is only one other person in the Bible who is like this.

There is one chapter in the middle of the story of Joseph that comes as a shock. It is about his brother Judah. In the middle of the story about this good man there comes a stark contrast with his own brother Judah. Judah visits a woman he thinks is a prostitute, but who is actually his daughter-in-law with a veil on. He takes part in incest and the sordid story is told right in the middle of the Joseph narrative. Why is it there? It is there because it serves to highlight Joseph’s integrity by contrast. Just as Abraham was contrasted with Lot, Isaac with Ishmael and Jacob with Esau, so Joseph is contrasted with Judah.

4. A REFLECTION OF JESUS

So far we have discussed this story at three levels: the human story of a man who was taken all the way down to the bottom and then climbed right up to the top, and who became the saviour of his people and the Lord of Egypt; the story of God’s overruling of this man’s life, using it to save his people; and finally the story of a man of total integrity, who all the way down and all the way up remained a man of truth and honest goodness.

Each level of the story reminds us of another: Jesus himself. Joseph becomes what is known as a type of Jesus. ‘Type’ in this sense means ‘foreshadowing’. It is as if God is showing us in the life of Joseph what he is going to do with his own son. Like Joseph, his own son would be rejected by his brethren and taken all the way down to utter humiliation, then raised to be ‘Saviour’ and ‘Lord’ of his people.

Once we recognize the ‘type’, the comparisons are remarkable. The more we read the story of Joseph the more we see this picture of Jesus, as if God knew all along what he was going to do and was giving hints to his people. Jesus himself encouraged the Jews to ‘search the Scriptures, for they bear witness of me’, referring to the Old Testament. As we read the Old Testament we should always be looking for Jesus, for his likeness, for his shadow. Jesus himself is the substance, but his shadow falls right across the pages of the Old Testament, especially in Genesis.

Jesus in Genesis

Once we have seen that Joseph is a picture of Jesus, we can see Jesus in many other places throughout Genesis. Joseph is a model of God’s response to faith in him, and his story demonstrates how God can take a person’s life and use him to deliver his people from their need, lifting him up to be Saviour and Lord.

GENEALOGIES

The genealogies in Genesis are in fact the genealogy of our Lord Jesus Christ. If you read Matthew 1 and Luke 3 you will find in the genealogies there names from the book of Genesis. Jesus is of the line of Seth, which comes straight down to the son of Mary. Thus anyone who is in Christ is also reading their own family tree. These are the most important ancestors we have, because through faith in Christ we have become sons of Abraham.

ISAAC

When we examine the characters in Genesis we can see similarities to Jesus. We have noted Joseph already, but let us go back to the time when Abraham was told to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. He was told to go to a specific mountain called Moriah. Years later that same mountain was known as Golgotha, the place where God sacrificed his only son. Genesis 22 tells us that Isaac was Abraham’s only beloved son – and we have seen already how Isaac was in his early thirties by then, strong enough to resist his father, but he submitted to being bound and put on the altar.

God stopped Abraham at the crucial point and provided another sacrifice, a ram with its head caught in thorns. Centuries later John the Baptist would say of Jesus, ‘Behold the “ram” of God that takes away the sins of the world’. The word ‘lamb’ is often applied to Jesus, but little, cuddly lambs were never offered for sacrifice – the sacrifices were one-year-old rams with horns. Jesus is depicted in the book of Revelation as the ram with seven horns signifying strength – ‘a ram of God’. God provided a ram for Abraham to offer in place of his son, a ram with his head caught in the thorns, and God also announced a new name to himself: ‘I am always your provider’. At that same spot another young man in his early thirties was sacrificed with his head caught in thorns. Do you see there a picture of Jesus?

MELCHIZEDEK

It is also worth looking carefully at a strange encounter Abraham had with a man who was both a king and a priest. He was king over the city of Salem (which later became Jerusalem). When Abraham was on his way back from rescuing his family after they had been kidnapped, he arrived with the spoils from the enemy near the city of Salem. This was then a pagan city, nothing to do with Abraham’s Godly line. He was met by the strange figure of Melchizedek, who was both a priest and a king, a very unusual combination, never found in Israel. This ‘King Priest’ brought out bread and wine as refreshments for Abraham and his troops and Abraham gave him a tenth of all the spoils of the battle, a tithe of the treasure. In the New Testament we are told that Jesus is a priest forever in the order of Melchizedek.

JACOB’S LADDER

And what about Jacob’s ladder? When Jacob ran away from home he slept outside at night with his head on a stone and dreamt of a ladder (actually more like an escalator). The Hebrew implies that the ladder was moving, and that there was one ladder moving up and one ladder moving down, with angels ascending and descending. Jacob knew that at the top of the ladders was heaven, where God lived.

When he woke he promised to give a tenth of everything he made to God. The giving of tithes was not part of the law until the time of Moses. (Jacob’s offer of a tenth of his possessions was more in the nature of a bargain with God: you bring me back home safely and I will give you a tithe. It is not, however, possible to bargain with God – God makes a covenant with you, not the other way round – and Jacob had to learn that the hard way later.)

Centuries later, when Jesus met a man called Nathaniel, he said to Nathaniel, ‘I saw you sitting under the fig tree. I noticed you and you are a Jew in whom there is no guile, no deceit.’ Nathaniel asked him how he knew this. Jesus replied, ‘You think that is wonderful, that I know the details of your life. What will you think if you see angels ascending and descending on the son of man?’ He is saying, ‘I am Jacob’s ladder, I am the link between earth and heaven. I am the new ladder.’

ADAM AND EVE

Further back, in Genesis 3, God made a promise in the middle of his punishment of Adam and Eve. He said to the serpent that the seed – or offspring – of the woman (seed is masculine in the Hebrew) would bruise the serpent’s head, even while the serpent bruised the offspring’s heel. Bruising a heel is not fatal, but bruising a head is and this is the very first promise that God would one day deal Satan a fatal blow. We now know who it was who bound the strong man and spoilt his goods.

In Romans 5, Paul tells us that as one man’s disobedience brought death, so one man’s obedience brought life, implying that Jesus is a second Adam. It was in the Garden of Eden that Adam said ‘I won’t’ and it was in the Garden of Gethsemane that Jesus said ‘not my will but yours be done’. What a contrast! They each began a human race: Adam was the first man of the homo sapiens race; Jesus was the first of the homo novus.

We are all born homo sapiens, and through God we can become homo novus. The New Testament talks about the new man, the new humanity. There are two human races on earth today: you are either in Adam or you are in Christ. There is a whole new human race and it is going to inhabit a totally new planet earth – indeed a whole new universe.

CREATION

One of the most remarkable things said about Jesus in the New Testament is that he was responsible for the creation of the universe. The early disciples came to see that Jesus was involved in the events of Genesis 1. As John said at the start of his Gospel, ‘without him nothing was made that has been made’.

When we read Genesis 1, therefore, we find that Jesus was there. God said, ‘Let us make man in our image’. Jesus was part of the plurality of the Godhead.

We have known for several decades now that the earth’s surface is on flat plates of rock floating on molten rock, and that these plates are constantly moving, rubbing against each other to cause earthquakes. When it was discovered that these plates moved to form the land masses we have today, the scientists needed to coin a new word for the plates. They called them ‘tectonic plates’. In Greek the word tectone means ‘carpenter’. The whole planet earth on which we live is the work of a carpenter from Nazareth – and his name is the Lord Jesus Christ!

So we finish our studies in Genesis where we began, with creation. God is indeed answering his problem of what to do when humans rebel. The solution is Jesus Christ, through whom the world came to be, for whom it was made, and by whom we discover the answer to all our questions.

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EXODUS

Introduction

Exodus is the story of the biggest escape in history. Over two million slaves escape from one of the most highly fortified nations in the entire world. It is humanly impossible, an extraordinary story, and it features a series of miracles, including some of the best known in the whole Bible. The leader of the Israelites at the time was a man named Moses. He saw more miracles than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob put together – in some places a number following one after another as God intervened on behalf of his people. Some of the miracles sound a bit like magic, for example when Moses’ stick turns into a snake, but most of them are clear manipulations of nature, as God proves his power over all that he has made for the good of his people.

The original Hebrew title for Exodus was ‘These are the names’, these being the first words of the book to appear on the scroll when the priest came to read them. Our name ‘Exodus’ comes from the Greek ex-hodos – literally ex: ‘out’, hoddos: ‘way’ (similar to the Latin word exit), ‘the way out’.