Gracious indeed is it towards all of us His elect ones, to have such a sight as this, such a specimen (may I so call it?) of divine patience, wisdom, and goodness, as this. It is peculiar indeed, having its own place amid the infinite forms and characters which grace assumes in relation to the need of the saints. Jacob's last days were his golden days. To others, to their flocks and herds, Egypt was a land of Goshen; but it was not to Jacob's flocks and herds, for we do not read that he had any; but it was to Jacob's soul that Egypt was a Goshen, the very richest, fairest, best-watered land his spirit had ever enjoyed. It was more really the gate of heaven to him than Bethel had been. It was more the face of God to him than Peniel had been. He had the Lord in secret and in silence with him there, but in real, living power. With all that would naturally have kept him at home on the earth he was a stranger. In Egypt Jacob was a delivered, extricated man, as from the beginning and all through he had been a chosen and a called one.
Are we learning that which God was teaching him there? Are we seeking, with more single heart, the portion of God's strangers and pilgrims, thinking rather of Machpelah than of Egypt, of the rapture that links us with the promise, than of all the daily growing prosperity of this present evil world?
JOSEPH.
GENESIS XXXVII.-L.
Joseph becomes principal in the narratives of the Book of Genesis as soon as we reach chap. xxxvii., and so continues, I may say, to the end. So that I now propose to close with this paper on "Joseph," referring to the others, entitled "Enoch," "Noah," "Abraham," "Isaac," "Jacob," as if they had been already read.
Joseph's story has its peculiarity in the midst of the things of Genesis--its own mystery, and its characteristic moral; as the others have. Election, as we have seen, was illustrated in Abraham; sonship, or the adoption of the elect one, in Isaac; discipline of the adopted one in Jacob; and now in Joseph, heirship is to be.
All this is a divine order.
And, consistently with this, in Joseph we get sufferings before glories, or before the inheritance of the kingdom; all this realizing that word of the apostle, "If children, then heirs ... if so be that we suffer with Him, that we may be also glorified together."
For while discipline attaches to us as children, sufferings go before us as heirs; and this gives us the distinction between Jacob and Joseph. It is discipline we see in Jacob, discipline leading him as a child, under the hand of the Father of his spirit, to a participation of God's holiness. It is sufferings, martyr-sufferings, sufferings for righteousness, we see in Joseph, marking his path to glories.
And this is the crowning thing; and thus it comes as the closing thing, in this wondrous Book of Genesis--after this manner perfect in its structure, as it is truthful in its records. One moral after another is studied, one secret after another is revealed, in the artless family scenes which constitute its materials; and in them we learn our calling, the sources and the issues of our history, from our election to our inheritance.