Chapter 12: Joseph At The Death Bed Of Jacob
CHAPTER 12: JOSEPH AT THE DEATH BED OF JACOB
(Genesis 47:27-31.)
"This hath He clone; and shall we not adore Him?
This shall He do; and can we still despair?
Come, let us quickly fling ourselves before Him.
Cast at His feet the burden of our care.
"Yea, thro' life, death, thro' sorrow, and thro' sinning,
He shall suffice me, for He hath sufficed:
Christ is the end--for Christ was the beginning;
Christ the beginning--for the end is Christ."
F. W. H. MYERS.
JACOB DWELT IN the land of Goshen; there his sons led their flocks over the rich pasture-lands, and laid the foundation of the great wealth which has ever been a distinguishing mark of this highly-favoured nation. "They grew and multiplied exceedingly." So seventeen uneventful years went by. And as the old man became more and more infirm, his spirit was cheered and sustained by the love of Joseph, and by the satisfied joy of his heart in the honour and splendour of his son. Evidently Joseph was the stay of that waning life; and it is not remarkable therefore that the patriarch summoned him not once, or even twice, but thrice, to his death-bed. It is on those visits that we may dwell for a little now.
Evidently there is something to repay us. The Bible is a book of life. Its pages are devoted to the deeds rather than the deaths of its heroes. Their biographies fill whole books, whilst single verses are enough for their dying words. Whenever, therefore, a death-scene is described with some minuteness, we may be sure that there is something which demands our attentive heed. So it is here.
I. JOSEPH'S FIRST VISIT
"The time drew nigh that Israel must die." How inexorable is the "must" of death! There is no possibility of evading its summons. When it lays its long, cold hand on the shoulder of the Ancient Mariner, however eager the guests to hear his story, he must arise and follow. By many years had Jacob exceeded the ordinary span of modern life; and, in spite of much hardship and privation, like the apple at the extremity of the bough, which eludes the hand of the gatherer, he had evaded the reach of death; but this could not be for ever. The failing powers of his life gave warning that the silver cord was strained to breaking, and that the machinery of nature was on the point of giving way. He must die.
But his death was a rift in the dark clouds that veiled the future world from his sons and their children, giving them a glimpse of its reality and beauty. And we can gather some of the conceptions which must have flashed across the mind of Joseph, as he obeyed the summons of his father, and stood beside that dying bed.
One of the most sublime verses in the New Testament declares that "Christ has abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel." There is a most inspiring rhythm in the words; but we must not suppose that the Gospel has revealed that concerning which nothing was previously known. Long before our Lord walked this world, carrying at his girdle the keys of Resurrection and Life, men cherished the hope of eternal life: the Gospel simply threw fuller light on that which had been before partially hidden, as the rising sun reveals the clear outlines of the landscape which had lain indistinct and hazy, in the grey dawn. Christ drew from the window the curtain, through which the morning light had been feebly struggling to the sleeper's eyes.
The evidence of this is not far to seek. Daniel teaches in plainest language the truth of a general resurrection to endless life or endless shame. Ecclesiastes closes with an explicit statement of the spirit's return to its giver, and of final judgment. The book of Job, whatever date may be assigned to it, has been called a very hymn of immortality: he knew at least that his "Redeemer lived, and that he should stand up at the last upon the earth, and after his skin had been destroyed, yet from his flesh he should see God" (Job 19:25-26, R.V.). In the Book of Psalms we have no uncertain evidence of the tenacity with which pious Jews clung to these hopes. "Thou wilt not leave my soul in sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life" (Psa. 16:10-11, R.V.). And it is just this faith in and yearning after a life beyond the grave which is the true key-note of the lives of the three great patriarchs who lie together in Machpelah's ancient cave.
Why did they wander to and fro in the land of promise as sojourners in a strange land? Why were they content to have no inheritance--no, not so much as a place to put their feet on? Why did Abraham dwell with Isaac and Jacob in frail, shifting tents, rather than in towns like Sodom and Gomorrah? What did Abraham mean when he said to the sons of Heth, "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you"? And what was the thought in Jacob's mind, when, in the presence of the haughty Pharaoh, he described his life as a "pilgrimage"? The answer is clearly given in the roll-call of God's heroes contained in Hebrews 11. "They sought a country, a fatherland." And they were so absorbed with this one thought, that they could not settle to any inheritance in Canaan. Their refusal to have anything more than a grave in the soil of the promised land shows how eagerly they looked for the land that was very far off.
At first, no doubt, they thought that Canaan Was to be the land of promise. But when they waited for it year after year, and still it was withheld, they looked into the deed of gift again, and learned that there were depths in it of which they had never dreamed; and as they still watched and waited, the gauzy mists of time parted, and in the dim haze there loomed upon their vision a land of which the land of milk and honey was a poor type; and instead of a city built by human hands, there arose before them the fair vision of the crystal wails and the pearly gates of the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God, and which He hath prepared for them that love Him. Yonder was their fatherland. Yonder their true city. Yonder their home. And their pilgrim-life bore evidence to the reality and certainty of their faith.
This belief in "the city of God," of which in after-days Augustine wrote on the coast of Africa, and which has sustained so many saintly souls, animated their lives, cheered them in death, and cast a bright ray across the gloom of the grave. "These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off (as the minarets and parapets of some distant city), and were persuaded of them and embraced them." The Revised Version says, "They greeted them from afar," as the wanderer greets his longed-for home, when he sees it from afar. With what eagerness, with what earnest yearnings, with what fond anticipation, must these weary wanderers have looked for heaven! Well might Jacob, on this his death-bed, stay the progress of his parting exhortations to say, "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord." This took the bitterness out of his death.
And notice, Jacob did not regard the future life as a mere stale of existence striped of all those associations which make life worth the having. Indeed, in this he seems to have had truer thoughts than many who are found in Christian churches. He said, "I am to be gathered unto my people." He surely did not mean simply that he was to be buried in their tomb, for he expresses that thought afterwards in the words, "Bury me with my fathers in the cave of Machpelah." Nay, he meant to say that for him the city to which he went was the gathering-place of his clan, the rendezvous of elect souls, the home of all who were his people because they were God's.
Year after year the people have been gathering there, as highland clans in olden days were gathered to a central trysting-place by the bearers of the Fiery Cross. All noble, saintly souls are assembled yonder, and await us.
And when we leave this world, it will not be to go into a cold, unsympathizing, grave-like realm, where no voice shall greet, no smile welcome us. But we shall go to our people; those whom we have loved and lost, those who are awaiting our coming with fond affection, and who will administer a choral entrance to us into that world of everlasting re-union.
But it was not simply to express these hopes that the dying patriarch summoned the beloved Joseph to his side. The father wanted to bind the son by a solemn promise not to have him buried in the land of his exile, but to carry him back to that lone cave, which seemed an outpost in the hostile and distant land of Canaan. For seventeen years Jacob had been familiar with Egypt's splendid temples, obelisks, and pyramids; he had been surrounded with all the comforts that Joseph's filial love could devise or his munificence execute; but nothing could make him forget that distant cave, which was before Mamre, in the land of Canaan. To him interment in the most splendid pyramid in Egypt was not for a moment to be compared with burial in that solitary and humble sepulchre, where the mortal remains of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, and of the faithful Leah, lay waiting the day of resurrection.
Human nature was not different then from what it is to-day. Our truest home is still by the graves of the beloved dead. Wherever we wander, our hearts return thither, as the eye of the sailor to the Pole-star. And for this cause, many a warrior, dying in some distant land, has asked that his remains might be placed, not in the splendid Minster or the national Walhalla, but in the quiet country graveyard, where the moss-covered tombstones repeat in successive generations, the family name. It was natural, then, for Jacob to wish to be buried in Machpelah.
But there was something more than natural sentiment. He was a man of faith. He knew and cherished the ancient promise made by God to His friend, the patriarch Abraham, that Canaan should become the possession of his seed. That promise was the old man's stay. He knew that Canaan and not Egypt was the destined abiding-place of his people. They would not always live in Egypt, however fertile its Goshens or friendly its peoples. The trumpet would sound the summons of their departure. If, then, he were buried in Egypt, he would be left behind, a stranger amongst strangers. No, this could not be. If they are to leave, he must leave before them. If they are to settle in the land of promise, he will go first as their forerunner. And though he could not share the perils and pains and glories of the exodus, he will be there to meet them when in after-years their bands enter upon their inheritance.
"If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me. Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: but I will lie with my fathers; and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burying-place." What son could resist that appeal? Can any of us resist the last appeals of our beloved? Joseph was too good and tender to hesitate for a single moment. "And he said, I will do as thou hast said." But the old man was not content with a mere promise. "And he said, Swear unto me And he sware unto him. And Israel bowed himself upon the bed's head" So ended Joseph's first visit to his dying father.
II. JOSEPH'S SECOND VISIT.
Tidings came to the Prime Minister of Egypt that his father was sick and wished to see him. And he went to him without delay, taking with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. He, no doubt, guessed that his father's sickness was the last stage of his decay; and the form of the message may have been agreed on by them in previous conversations as the significant sign from one to the other that the sands of time had nearly run out in that aged, battered, and timeworn body.
When Joseph arrived at his father's dwelling, the gift of his own munificence, the aged patriarch seems to have been lying still, with closed eyes, in the extreme of physical exhaustion. He was too weak to notice any of those familiar forms that stood around him. But when one told him and said, "Behold, thy son Joseph is come," the sound of that loved name revived him, and he made a great effort, and, propped by pillows, sat up upon the bed.
There was clearly no decay in his power of recollection, as the old man reviewed the past. Again he seemed to be lying at the foot of the mystic ladder, with its angels trooping up and down, whilst God Almighty stood above, and pledged Himself to make him fruitful, and to give to him and his seed the land in which his forefathers had been strangers, for an everlasting possession. No lapse of time could erase the impression which those words had made. Even though he had lived to out-measure the years of a Methuselah, they would still ring in musical cadence Within his heart. And had not God fulfilled them a thousand limes over, so that not one good thing had failed?---and his seed was sure of the land, though as yet far removed from its actual possession. And as his recollection embraced the past, it was also vividly alive to more recent incidents in the family history. He did not forget that Joseph, who leant over his dying form, had two sons; and he announced his intention of adopting them as his own. "Thy two sons, which were born unto thee in the land of Egypt, before I came unto thee into Egypt, are mine: as Reuben and Simeon, they shall be mine." By that act, whilst Joseph's name was expunged from the map of Canaan, yet he himself became possessed of a double portion of his area, because Ephraim and Manasseh would henceforth stand there as his representatives.
And when he had said so much, his mind wandered away. He saw again that scene on the hilly road to Bethlehem, just outside the little village, where his onward progress was suddenly halted, and all his camp was hushed into the stillness of a dread suspense, as the life of the beloved Rachel trembled in the balance. He could never forget that moment. His dying eyes could see again the spot where he buried her, "there in the way of Ephrath."
"Be near me when all else is from me drifting,
Stars, sky, home-pictures, days of shade and shine,
And kindly faces to my own uplifting,
The love that answers mine.
"Suffice it, if my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven by Thine abounding grace,
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned,
Unto my fitting place."
WHITTIER.
When the old man came back from his pathetic reverie, the first sight which arrested him was the presence of the awe-struck boys, who were drinking in every look and word, with fixed and almost breathless heed.
"Who are these?" said Israel. "They are my sons," was the proud and immediate reply, "whom God hath given me in this place." And Israel said, "Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them."
And so they were brought near, and the aged lips were pressed on the young foreheads, and the aged arms were put feebly around the young and slender forms. And then again the dying man wandered back to a grief which had left as deep a scar as his sorrow for the 'beloved Rachel, and turning to Joseph, he reminded him of the long years during which he thought he would never look again upon his face. But now, God, who may keep men waiting, but loves to fill their lives ultimately with blessing, had shown him also his seed.
With prophetic insight he crossed his hands, as the two lads waited before him for his blessing, so that his right found its way to the head of the younger, whilst his left alighted on that of the elder. By that act he reversed the ' verdict of their birth, and gave the younger precedence over the elder. It was useless for Joseph to remonstrate, and to urge the claims of his first-born. The old man knew quite well what he was doing, and that he was on the line of the divine purpose. "I know it, my son, I know it; he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations."
There was nothing arbitrary in this; for in all likelihood there were qualities in Ephraim, as afterwards in his descendants, which naturally put him in the foremost place. The Old Testament is full of hope for younger sons: Jacob was a younger son; so was Moses; so was .Gideon; so was David. It is not an unmitigated blessing to be born into the world with a great name and estate and traditions; it is better to trust in one's own right arm and in the blessing of the Almighty. God is no respecter of. persons, and He will lift the youngest into the front rank if only he sees the qualities which warrant it; whilst He will put back the foremost into the lower ranks if they are deficient in noble attributes. Thus the first become last, and the last first.
With hands crossed over the young heads the patriarch spoke sweet and grateful words of the Angel who had redeemed him from all evil; and his words are so chosen, and that name is so placed in parallelism with the name of God who had shepherded him all his life long, that we are convinced that he is speaking of the Angel-Jehovah, who is so often referred to on the pages of the Old Testament; and who can be no other than the Second Person of the ever-blessed Trinity, whose delights have always been with the sons of men, and who, before He took on Himself the form of a man, was often found in that of an angel.
We, too, have an Angel guardian, yea, the Angel, who is Jesus Christ the Lord. If you want to be redeemed from all evil, especially from the evil of sin, make much of Him. And if He began his redemptive work long years before He suffered, died, and rose, how much more will He do for us now that He sits on the right hand of God l Take heart, you who are anxious about your daily food. Listen to the testimony of this dying man, that God had fed him all his life long unto that day. And if God did so for a hundred and forty-seven years, surely He will not forget you during the briefer span Of your few days.
There was one thing only more to say, before this memorable interview ended. Years before, Jacob had become embroiled through the dastardly treachery of his sons, in conflict with the original inhabitants of Canaan, and had been compelled, in self-defense, to acquire by force a parcel of land, with his sword and with his bow. This he gave as an additional portion to his favorite son.
Would that all young persons who read these lines may so act towards their parents that they may never give them an anxious moment: that they may be their pride in life; their stay in death: so that in after-years they may have the memory of death-bed blessings, and may have nothing to regret! A parent's dying blessing is a richer legacy than gold or lands.
III. JOSEPH'S THIRD AND LAST VISIT.
Once more Joseph visited that death-chamber. This was the third time and the last. But this time he stood only as one of twelve strong, bearded men, who gathered around the aged form of their father, his face shadowed by death, his spirit aglow with the light of prophecy. How intense the awe with which they heard their names called, one by one, by the old man's trembling voice, now pausing for breath, now speaking with great difficulty! The character of each is criticized with prophetic insight; the salient points of their past history are vividly brought to mind; and some foreshadowing is given them of their future.
This scene is an anticipation of the Judgment-seat: where men shah hear the story of their lives passed under review; and a sentence passed, against which there shall be no appeal.
But the dying patriarch speaks with peculiar sweetness and grace, when he comes to touch on the destiny of his favorite son. His words brim with tenderness, and move with a stateliness and eloquence, which indicate how his heart was stirred to its depths. This was his swan-song, the final outburst of the music of his soul, the last flash of that Spirit of Inspiration, which dwelt also in him. What a glimpse is given to us into the depths of his soul; the secret thoughts of fruitfulness, patience, and strength, and the far-reaching conceptions of blessedness, which had been wrought out within him by the slow process of years of sorrow and training!
A few more sentences to Benjamin, and the venerable patriarch drew up his feet into his bed, and quietly breathed his last, and was gathered unto his people. But that eager, much-tried spirit passed up and away into other scenes of more exalted fellowship and ministry, with no pause in his life, for in after-years God attested his continued existence and energy when He called Himself "the God of Jacob," for God is not God of the dead, but of the living. And Joseph fell upon his father's face, and wept upon him, and pressed his warm lips on the death-cold clay; and he commanded the physicians to embalm his body, so cheating death of its immediate victory.