It is thought-provoking that the first book of the Bible should begin with the awesome statement "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," but end with the gloomy statement, "He was put in a coffin in Egypt." All those exciting, burgeoning possibilities shrunk to this narrow, tragic issue! Genesis is only the Bible's first book of course; that gloomy observation will yield to the unfolding plan of the world's redemption. But it is a chilling comment on the mortality that descended on God's creation in consequence of human sin.
It is further remarkable that Joseph's death figures in three of only four references to his life story in the rest of the Bible. (Other references are to his name, not to his saga.)
• The first is Psalm 105:16 - 22, to which we have already referred;
• The second is Acts 6:9 - 18, where Stephen recalls the outline of Joseph's story; surprisingly perhaps, about one third of his telling of it is concerned with Joseph's death and burial;
• The third is Hebrews 11:22 where even more surprisingly the only feature of the story chosen to illustrate Joseph's faith at all is the provision he made for his burial.
• The fourth will shortly be revealed!
One of the ground rules for understanding the Old Testament is to consult the direct references to it in the New. Our studies so far have shown us how much instruction for faith the unfolding story of Joseph's life supplies, yet it is largely ignored in the remainder of the Bible and this curious last comment is the one most fastened upon. Let us examine it to see why.
We need first to recapitulate the later phase of Joseph's life, and the larger background to it.
After the succession of disasters that befell him in his early life and the dizzy heights to which he subsequently rose in middle life, his later life tapers off into a rather pedestrian concluding chapter. The glory seems somehow to have departed, and we are not given much indication of the reason for it.
Almost the last episode of any grandeur had been the funeral procession to Canaan to bury old Jacob, his father - an event of some pomp and circumstance in the Egyptian style which hugely impressed the locals:
"So Joseph went up to bury his father; and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, as well as all the household of Joseph, his brothers, and his father's household ... And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen; it was a very great company. At the threshing floor of Atad, beyond the Jordan, they lamented there with a very great and sorrowful lamentation; Joseph made a mourning for his father seven days. When the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning on the threshing floor of Atad, they said, "This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians." So the place was named Abelmizraim - The Mourning of Egypt.
Thus Jacob's sons did for him as he had commanded them; they carried him to the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field at Machpelah, to the east of Mamre, which Abraham bought, with the field, from Ephron the Hittite, to possess as a burying place." (50:7 ff)
I have quoted that episode at some length because its final statement is the first clue we have to the significance of the directions Joseph gave for his own burial: "the cave of the field at Machpelah ... which Abraham bought, with the field, from Ephron the Hittite, to possess ..."
Abraham's purchase of that field had been a conscious and deliberate act of faith. God had promised to his descendants after him all the land whereon his feet would tread, from Beersheba in the south to Dan in the north. He was never in his lifetime to see the promise fulfilled. He travelled through the land, from its northern to its southern extremities, and beyond; he dwelt for a time within its borders. But none of it did he ever possess. He was a stranger and a sojourner in the land of promise all his days. The one bit of it he did possess was that field and its cave at Machpelah. And his purchase of it as a burying place was an expression of the faith he had in the promise God had made to him. Like Jeremiah's later purchase of a field in Anathoth, beyond Israel's borders when it was still in foreign hands, it was his way of saying, "The land is ours, though it is as yet denied us, since God has promised it. Past all the ambitious greed and power of man to deny it to us, I believe the promise of God that He will make it ours."
An episode from my sons' childhood will illustrate this. While we lived in Cambridge, the lads were eager collectors of a series of stamps commemorating England's participation in the World Cup Soccer Series of 1966 which she won. Now it happened that a part of the issue was printed with an error. The newspaper running the promotion offered a quite considerable sum of money - in terms of a boy's pocket money anyway - to any who had received the defective issue: £10 as I recall for each stamp of a run of five. Now it happened that both my sons had received all five! Fifty pounds they were due for. I remember coming home round the corner into Durnford Way one evening in our little Morris Minor, to be met in the middle of the road by an excited Nigel, waving a newspaper in his hand, and running up to my car window shouting, "Dad, we're rich, we're rich!" At that moment he had not received a penny. All he had was the promise the newspaper had made. But he believed it. He was as excited by the promise of this massive fortune as if he had it in his hand. That is the sort of excitement Abraham knew ... and Isaac after him, and Jacob after him (that is why he required of his family that they bury him where Abraham had been buried) ... and Joseph after him! "I am about to die," he said, "but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob." God had promised, and they believed. Are we as sure of the promises of God, so as to be excited about them?
It is no small thing to have such faith. It was no small thing in Joseph. To his natural mind it must have seemed highly improbable. When he spoke, Israel was settled in Goshen, and so increasing in numbers and wealth that any move from Egypt must have seemed more and more unlikely as the days went by. And if signs of their later oppression were already beginning to appear, what likelihood was there that they would ever escape Egypt's containing cavalry?
Joseph's eyes however were fixed, not on things seen, but on things unseen. The years of prestige and power and affluence he had enjoyed had not distracted him; through them all he had secretly nourished the promises in his breast.
F. B. Meyer: "Three hundred years before, the great founder of the nation, Abraham, had watched all day beside an altar, scaring away the vultures which, attracted by the flesh that lay upon it, hovered around. At length, as the sun went down, the watcher fell asleep - it is hard to watch with God - and in his sleep he dreamed. A dense and awful gloom seemed to enclose him and to oppress his soul, and, as upon a screen, there passed across the vista of his dream successive glimpses of the future of his race: glimpses which a Divine voice interpreted to his ear. He saw them exiled to a foreign country, saw them enslaved there, lingering in slavery while three generations of their sons bloomed like spring flowers, only to be cut down by the keen sickle of death. The Lord said to Abram, 'Know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in a land not theirs, and will be slaves there, and they will be oppressed for four hundred years.' We know how exactly that horror was justified by events so soon to take place. 'The Egyptians made the people of Israel to serve with rigour, and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick, and in all kinds of work in the field; in all their work they made them serve with rigour.'" (F. B. Meyer, "Joseph" Morgan & Scott, p. 181)
The first symptoms of anti-Semitism were already brooding over the closing hour of the great Egyptian Vizier. We do not know how clear those symptoms were. But there is lacking from the sparse record of Joseph's old age any hint of the honours he had once enjoyed. Eighty years had passed since he had first stood before Pharaoh in his young manhood, sixty since he had carried the body of his dead father Jacob to its resting place in Hebron. He had been at the zenith of his prowess then. In Egypt the days of mourning for old Jacob had been but two less in number than for a Pharaoh himself. But as Joseph's life drew toward its end, the shadow of a great eclipse was creeping over the face of his people's destiny. No notice seems to have been taken in Egypt of his death. No splendid sarcophagus was fashioned for his burial, no pomp and ceremony was readied for it. His personal influence was now a dead letter, and his people daily more entrenched in Egypt.
Where was there any sign that the promises were moving toward their fulfilment? It must have been hard, must it not, to sustain his faith in the promises as death drew on and all the circumstances of life seemed only to be hardening against them?
Now perhaps we can better appreciate why the writer to the Hebrews should have singled out that bright shining of confidence in God in the gathering gloom at Joseph's end: "By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his burial." (11:22) Like Abraham before him, "No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised." (Romans 4:20)
It reveals something of immense significance about Joseph, that. It shows what were the inner springs of life that rose in him.
If I may splice together some telling observations made by both Alexander MacLaren and F. B. Meyer, "He bore an Egyptian title, he married an Egyptian wife, he reared his children in Egypt, he engaged in Egyptian court life, Egyptian politics and Egyptian trade, he filled his place at Pharaoh's court; but his dying words open a window into his soul, and betray how little he had felt that he belonged to the order of things in the midst of which he had been required to live. Though surrounded by an ancient civilisation; dwelling among granite temples and solid pyramids and firm-based sphinxes, the very emblems of eternity; and acquainted every day with the symbols and ceremonies of a religion which constituted a potent mix strong enough to swamp the outlook and the consciousness of any normal mind, he yet confessed that "he had here no continuing city, but sought one to come." "He looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
• "He died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that he was a stranger and an exile" in Egypt. (Hebrews 11:10, 13)
Do we? Or do our homes so preoccupy us, our ambitions so absorb us, our this-worldly occupations so engross us that we have lost sight long since of the goal of our pilgrimage through this world?
Where do we live? ... really? It is possible to reside at an address, but to have our real life somewhere else altogether. Edgar Frank's poem, in which he imagined the life of a Hebrew slave in Goshen, might be adapted to apply to Joseph:
I do not live in Egypt. I eat there, sleep there, work there;
I live in Canaan, where Abram dwelt and Isaac loved and Jacob toiled.
Think not my life is lost because you see a foreign place.
I have my dreams God gave me, His promises my fathers knew...
Mine is an enchantment transcending time and place:
I live, not in Goshen, but in the land of Promise.
Are our pursuits all bounded by the narrow horizons of this world? Have we lost sight of the end for which God gave us life ... forgotten whither we are bound? Are we more concerned to line the nest in which we shall spend our old age than to prepare the place in which we shall spend all our after life? Because if we are, it is (to quote F. B. Meyer again),
"simply useless to claim kinship with the mighty stream of pilgrims constantly pouring through the earth toward the city that has foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God. On the other hand, it is conceivable that you may be at the head of a large establishment, engaged in many workaday undertakings, attached to present tasks by imperious duties ... and yet, like Joseph, your heart be detached from things seen and temporal, and be engaged with secret longings to things unseen and eternal."
"If indeed you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on things that are on earth." (Colossians 3:1)
Notice finally the wisdom that prompted Joseph's last request.
"Joseph took an oath of the sons of Israel, saying, 'God will visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.' So Joseph died, and they embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt." (50:25)
For upwards of three hundred years that coffin lay somewhere in Goshen, a silent reminder of the promise God had made to Israel and of Joseph's faith in it. When, through the bitter years that followed their Egyptian taskmasters dealt harshly with the people so they were tempted to despair, were there any who, passing by that mummy case with its mouldering remains, drew fresh heart from the promise which Joseph had believed, and for whose fulfilment his bones waited to be carried up? Or were there any, grown content with the leeks, garlics and onions the Egyptians daily provided so they no longer lifted their eyes to horizons of promise, who were solemnised by the mute testimony that rough, wooden box bore to the future that God was secretly, slowly, but surely preparing for them?
We have no unburied bones to revive our drooping spirits, or raise our eyes to brighter horizons; we have instead ... an empty grave, to tell us that this world is not our home, but the place into which our great High Priest has gone ahead of us, into Heaven itself, where He appears already in the presence of God on our behalf.
And then we read in Exodus 13:19 (this is the fourth reference I have kept up my sleeve), "And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him; for Joseph had solemnly sworn the people of Israel, saying, 'God will visit you; then you must carry my bones with you from here.'"
So all through the years of their desert pilgrimage, along with all the paraphernalia they carried for their camp, they bore that coffin ...
• between the divided waters of the Sea
• past the bitter waters of Marah to the oasis of Elim with its twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees
• to the foot of Horeb where the Ten Words of God were uttered in their hearing and graven on tablets of stone
• to Rephidim, where they put God to the test, and He rebuked their lack of trust with the provision of water and victory over their enemies the Amalekites
• on and on through forty years of learning, till they witnessed at last the fall of Jericho and they swarmed into the land of milk and honey, and took possession of the land.And they finally laid the coffin to rest in its place in ...
• Shechem: the place where Abraham first pitched his tent in the land of promise after he had ventured forth from Ur,
• the place where Jacob bought his first piece of ground in the land of promise, like Abraham before him, where he erected an altar to celebrate God's faithfulness through all the tortuous years,
• and near to Dothan where Joseph's brothers had cast him into the pit five hundred years before!
That coffin they had carried with them bore silent testimony to the God of their Fathers, to His unseen Presence with them at every stage of their pilgrimage, and to the promise of the assured future He was unfolding before them.
The elements set forth on the Communion Table have been provided by a greater than Joseph to bear a silent testimony to those same things. Let us take their message to our hearts, and suffer our hearts thereby to be twined more closely to the promises and our blessed God Who made them.
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