The Patriarchs

Part II. (xxxix. – xli.) – In these chapters, which give us the second part, according to our division, we have the life of Joseph while he was a separated man in the land of Egypt.

During this time we shall see the beginning of his day, or his exaltation. But ere that come, we are to witness his further sufferings-his sufferings at the hand of strangers.

We may, somewhat naturally, have the thought that the Jew is specially guilty, as far as the moral history of this world goes-specially answerable for sin against the Lord. But in this we are not fully wise. The Jew had, indeed, a special hand in the sorrows of Christ; and, nationally, Israel is under special judgment. But the Gentile is a distinct, not a different man. The ministry of our Lord Jesus tested "the world," as well as "His own." The record touching the cross is this, Of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together. Acts iv. All were guilty there. As the apostle of the Gentiles, in his doctrine, says, the whole world has become guilty before God. Jew and Gentile are all alike proved under sin. Rom. iii.

Our present chapters suggest this. Joseph's affliction, begun among his brethren, is now continued among strangers. His brethren had already hated him, and put him in the pit, and thence taken him to sell him as a bond-slave; an evil woman of the Egyptians now falsely accuses him, and he is put in prison, and then another Egyptian, whom he had served and befriended, forgets him and leaves him. But, however it may be with him, whether at home or abroad, God is with him. This becomes the very characteristic of his history. Chapter xxxix.; Acts vii. For, in His way with His elect, God's sympathy comes first, and then His power, the sympathy which accompanies them through their sorrow, and then the power which delivers them out of it. We are prone to desire present ease, and would have all inconvenience and contradiction removed at once. But this is not His way. When at Bethany "Jesus wept;" and afterwards, but not till afterwards, He said, "Lazarus, come forth." Nature would have had the death, which had called forth the tears, anticipated. We judge that we might have been spared many a trial, and we reason it out as a clear, unquestioned conclusion, that God had power. As the friends of the family at Bethany said, Could not this man, that opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? But they reasoned imperfectly, because they reasoned partially; that is, only on the power of Christ.

We ought to (and we should, had we but bowels in Christ) very chiefly value the age or dispensation of His sympathy; it gives Himself to us in so peculiar a way. And this sympathy was eminently Joseph's, in this day of his affliction. As we said, that "God was with him" is characteristic of his condition. And he had abundant evidence of this. As soon as he is in Potiphar's house, all under his hand, committed to him by his master, prospers. And change of scene works no change in this; for as soon as he is in prison, the same record we read of him, and the same circumstances we see around him. The keeper of the prison puts the same confidence in him that Potiphar his master had; and under his hand in the prison all things prosper, as they had in the Egyptian's house. So that Joseph had full witness from God, that God was sufficient for him.

It was not for such an one to leave the help of the Lord for the help of the creature. But Joseph craves the remembrance and the sympathy of the butler, and would have him give him a good word with the king his master.

This was natural. Joseph had befriended the butler of the king, and such an one was able to befriend him. His craving of his sympathy is not to be condemned on any natural, human, or even moral grounds. But whether it was quite worthy of Joseph to do so may be questioned, whether it was quite the way which faith would have suggested.

And it comes to nothing. The butler, as we know, forgets him, and he is left for two long years in the prison. For God will still be everything to him. Help shall come, but it shall come from Himself. With the Lord, the heaviness of the night is sure to yield to the joy of the morning; and ere this season of his separation from his brethren came to an end, Joseph is released, and blessed, and honoured. It becomes the budding-time of his glories.

Excellent things indeed are found in the condition of the separated Joseph, such things as bear our thoughts to Him who is the greater than Joseph. I would just observe four of them.

1. There is great moral beauty in him. He was a Nazarite then, as pure an one as Daniel in like circumstances, a captive among the uncircumcised, maintaining his circumcision, his separation to God, unspotted. 2. There is precious spiritual gift in him. He was a vessel in God's house, carrying the mind of Christ, and ministering that mind as an oracle of God; like Daniel again, interpreting dreams, and making known even to kings, though still in his day of humiliation, what was coming upon the earth. 3. There is the right hand of power and dignity for him. He is seated nearest the throne, and put in possession of those resources on which his own brethren, who had cast him out, and the whole world beside, are destined ere long to depend for preservation in the earth. 4. There is joy, peculiar joy, prepared for him. The king makes a marriage for him, and he becomes the head of a family among the Gentiles; and this is a source of such joy to him, that he can, in some sense, as the names of his children tell us, forget his kindred, and even rejoice in his affliction.

Surely these are excellent things found in the condition of Joseph while separated from his brethren. And in them we see the Lord Himself in this present age, the season of His separation from Israel. A child might trace the likeness; but He, who reveals to babes and sucklings, has led the way in this. In Stephen's wondrous word, in Acts vii., we get Joseph and others put in kindred place and circumstances with the Lord, who is there called "the Just One." And this is so full of interest, that though it be but incidental, we must turn aside for a little, and listen to that great voice of the Spirit of God.

Stephen appears but for a moment in the course of the divine history; but it is to fill a very eminent and distinguished place. The occasion on which he is seen, and on which he acts, is full of meaning. Jewish enmity was again doing its dark deeds, and the God of glory was again disclosing His brighter purposes.

Stephen is another witness of the Lord passing from earth to heaven, leaving the earth for a season in its unbelief and apostasy, and calling out a people for heavenly places.

Stephen's was another separating era. Abraham's had been such, and so had Joseph's, and so had that of Moses, and that of "the Just One," Jesus. The occasion of the separation from kindred to strangers, (and that is, from earth to heaven,) may be different, but it is alike separation. Abraham was separated, because God was leaving a defiled world unjudged; and unjudged defilement God cannot make His habitation, nor allow it to be the habitation of His elect. The world after the flood had defiled itself, and the Lord was leaving it in its defilement, not purifying it by a second flood; and therefore He becomes a stranger in it Himself, and calls His elect out of it with Him. Thus Abraham is a separated man. Joseph in his day was another; separated from home and kindred, like Abraham; and so Moses. But Joseph and Moses were not separated like Abraham, simply by the call of God out of unjudged defilement, but by the enmity and persecutions of their brethren. And so Jesus, "His own," and the world made by Him refused Him, and would not know Him. Wicked hands slew Him, and the heavens received Him. And so Stephen.

Stephen is, thus, in company with these separated ones, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and "the Just One." And he is naturally directed by the Spirit, to go over their histories in this wondrous chapter. And these separated ones have, at different eras or intervals, in the progress of God's way upon earth, marked out or foreshadowed His higher or richer purposes touching heaven. For their times, as we speak, were transitional.

Stephen's was such. Till his day, the scene in "the Acts of the Apostles" is laid in the earth. In chapter i. the risen Lord had spoken to His apostles of "the kingdom of God." In the same chapter the angels had withdrawn the eyes of the men of Galilee, as they call the disciples, from gazing up into heaven, under the promise that Jesus should return to earth. When the Holy Ghost is given, as in chapter ii., under His baptism it is of things in the earth that the apostles speak. They testify that Jesus was to sit at the right hand of God in heaven, till His foes on earth were made His footstool. They then preach, that upon the repentance of Israel Jesus would return to earth with times of refreshing and restitution, and that He was exalted to give repentance and remission of sins to Israel. Israel is, thus, the people, and the earth the scene, contemplated in the action or testimony of the Spirit in the apostles in these earliest chapters.

But Jewish enmity again takes its way, as it had done in many other days, even from the beginning; and divine grace takes its way also, as it had also done in such other days. And Stephen, under the Spirit of God, takes such a moment as his text. He looks back at the way of the nation, uncircumcised in heart and ear, resisting the Lord in one or another of His witnesses; and he looks back also at the way of the God of glory calling into new and peculiar blessing those whom either earthly pollution or Jewish enmity was separating or casting out.

Thus his own condition at that moment was his text, just as the condition of things in chapter ii. had been Peter's text. Peter preached from the gift of tongues; Stephen, as I may say, from his own face then shining like the face of an angel, and from the enmity of the Jews that was then pressing him and threatening him. The Spirit in Stephen takes up the moment. It was a transitional moment. It was the hour of the shining face and of the murderous stones, of the earth's enmity and of the still brighter, richer discoveries of grace calling to heaven. And Stephen looks back to other histories, histories of other elect ones, who had already filled up kindred moments in the way of God. For the people of the earth are now withstanding God in him, as they had withstood Him in others. As he tells them, they were always resisting the Holy Ghost; the children and the fathers were alike in this, throughout all generations of the nation.

Thus, in Stephen, we are called to witness another great transitional moment. It is such a moment in the Book of the Acts, as Joseph's was in the Book of Genesis. This links Stephen and Joseph, and gives natural occasion to the Holy Ghost in Stephen to make reference, as He does, to Joseph. But if the earth is refusing Stephen a place, as his brethren had refused Joseph a place in the land of his fathers, heaven shall open to Stephen. Grace in God shall be active as enmity in man is active-and the eater shall yield meat. And heaven does therefore open in Acts vii. A ray from thence finds its way out, and gently yet brightly falls upon the face of Stephen, as the people of the earth were casting him out. And thus sealed from heaven and for heaven, he speaks of heaven, and heaven itself opens to him, and then the Holy Ghost Himself guides his eye right upward to heaven, and then his spirit is received of the Lord Jesus into heaven. All is heaven. Stephen gets the pledge or earnest of it first, then the sight of it in its wide-opened glories, and then his place in it with Jesus.

Nothing can exceed, while still in the body, the brightness of such a moment. It was the Transfiguration of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. It was beyond the measure of the patriarch's Bethel; for here the top of the ladder was disclosed, and Stephen was taught to know his place to be there with the Lord, and not at the foot of it merely with Jacob. The moment was transitional, which the time of Genesis xxviii. was not. It had its forecasting rather in the rejected, outcast Joseph finding his richer joys and brighter honours among the distant Gentiles in Egypt. Or rather, if we please, Joseph's history and Stephen's history, are, each of them in its day and its different way, the foreshadowing and the pledge of that glory and inheritance in heaven to which the Church, the election of this age, is called.

Simply and necessarily, therefore, are Joseph and Stephen linked together, as we find in Acts vii. Each of them filled the same transitional place-more vividly marked indeed in Stephen, and properly so-but each of them filled it. All was new and heavenly, as we have seen, with Stephen. It is not downwardsbut upwards he is commanded to look. The angels had told the men of Galilee in chapter i. to take their eyes off from heaven; the Spirit Himself bade Stephen, in chapter vii., to direct his eye right up to heaven. The glory of the terrestrial had been one, the glory of the celestial is now another. Even the gift of Tongues had not pledged heaven to the disciples in chapter ii. There was no transfiguration then, no face shining like the face of an angel. The Holy Ghost was upon the assembly in Jerusalem, but the assembly itself was not in sight of heaven as its home and inheritance. But Stephen was on the confines of the two worlds. His body was the victim of the enmity of man's world, his spirit was about to be received amid the glories of Christ's world. He was rejected by his brethren, accepted by God. All was transitional-and fitly does he look back to Joseph and to Moses, who had been in such a place before him.

And here let me say, suggested by this allusion to Joseph and others in Acts vii., that we are not to be surprised by this typical or parabolic character of Old Testament histories. Quite otherwise. We ought to be fully prepared for it; and that, too, on a very simple principle. God, acting in these histories (we speak to His praise) acts in them (surely) according to Himself and His counsels. And, consequently, these histories become so many revelations of Himself, and of the purposes He is bringing to pass.

An assurance of the inspiration of the narrative does not, therefore, in the full sense, give us God in the narrative. There is purpose as well as veracity in it-there is an "ensample" as well as inspiration. "These things happened to them for ensamples." They happened as they are recorded. There is historic truth in them. But God brought them to pass, in order that they might be "ensamples;" and till we find this ensample, that is, the divine purpose in the history, we have not got God in it. We are to go to these narratives, be they those of Joseph or any other, very much in the mind with which the Prophet had to go to the house of the potter. Jer. xviii. He was to see a real work there; vessels made by the hand and skill of the workman. But there was a lesson in the work, as well as a reality. There was a parable in it; for the Prophet had to see God Himself at the wheel, as well as the potter. So in these histories which we get in Scripture. There is reality in them, exact truthfulness, such as inspiration secures. But there is meaning also; and till we discover that, and learn God and His purpose in the history, we have not really as yet gone down to the potter's house.

But this is only by the way, suggested by the use which the Spirit Himself, through Stephen, makes of the Old Testament stories of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, in that marvellous chapter, Acts vii.

Part III. (xlii. – lvii.) – We now come to Joseph's recovery of his father and his brethren, and its consequences.

Among the things which gave character to Joseph and his circumstances, while he was separated from his brethren, we observed this, that he was put into possession of those resources on which his brethren themselves and all the world beside were to depend for preservation in the earth. The set time for the world drawing on these resources has now arrived; and with that, the set time for Joseph's restoration to his brethren.

Joseph is now in authority. His day of humiliation and sorrow is over. He is at the right hand of the throne of Egypt, and the great executor of all rule and power in the land. None can lift up hand or foot without him. He has received the king's ring, and he rides in the second chariot. He is the treasurer and dispenser of all the wealth of the nation, the one who opened or shut all its storehouses at his pleasure. He that was in the pit is on the throne.

This is Joseph as in resurrection. I say as in resurrection. For the thing itself-resurrection from the dead-had to wait for the day of the Son of the living God, who was to be, in His own person, alive from the dead. But though we could not have "the very image" of this great mystery, yet we have "shadows" of it, both in certain ordinances of the law, and in certain histories of the elect. The dead and the living birds of Leviticus xiv., and the two goats of Leviticus xvi., are among such ordinances; and such historical scenes as the unbinding of Isaac from the altar on Mount Moriah, or Jonah's deliverance from the whale's belly, set forth the same. And so does this season in Joseph's history, being the day of his power and authority in Egypt after his sore troubles in the pit and in the prison. It is Joseph as in resurrection.

The Spirit of God, in chap. xlix., using Jacob as His oracle, looks back at Joseph in this condition, and celebrates him accordingly. "Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall: the archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: but his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob." And having spoken this of Joseph, the Spirit uses it as a figure of a Greater than Joseph; for Jacob adds, "From thence is the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel." We have Christ in Joseph. The risen Christ is seen as in a figure here. All power is now in Him, in heaven and on earth. He is seated at the right hand of the Majesty on high. His title to the resources of creation is sure, sealed by the dignity of the place He now fills. And the resources which He now owns, by-and-by He will use for Israel and for the whole earth, after the pattern of this mystery of Joseph. This we are now about to see.

The famine begins, and the opening of Joseph's storehouses begins, at the close of chap. xli. But the scene is then changed for a season; and the story of the brethren's repentance and acceptance is let in, as a kind of episode. But there is wonderful beauty in this. Because the restitution of all things waits, as we know, for the repentance and fulness of Israel. So that this introduction of the new matter, by way of an episode, in chapters xlii. – xlvi., is full of beauty and meaning; and the scene in Egypt, and the full opening of Joseph's stores for that land and the whole earth, are resumed in due season afterwards, in chapter xlvii. For, "what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" asks the apostle, tracing, under the Spirit, the story of Israel. Rom. xi. "If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fulness?" So that we are prepared for this repentance of the brethren going before the full blessing of the earth.

Over this operation, this process of the softening of their hearts under the hand of Joseph, it would be impossible not to tarry for a while. I must therefore do so. Our own hearts would need something, if we were not alive to this scene, to admire and enjoy it, and be thankful for it; so full is it of the most exquisite touches of true affection, so profound in the disclosure of the moral principles of our nature, and so important in the sight it gives us of the workmanship of God by His Spirit leading sinners, through conviction and the sense of their ruined state, to repentance and newness of life.

The scene of this workmanship of God is laid in a season of need and sorrow, as is common in the ways of the God of all grace. For He does not refuse to be sought by us, when we have no help for it. It was thus with the prodigal; it is thus with Joseph's brethren; and it will, I doubt not, be found by-and-by to have been thus with a goodly portion of those who are to praise His name in glory for ever. The prodigal had no help for it, and back to his father and his father's house he must go. Joseph's brethren have no help for it now, and down to Egypt and Egypt's storehouses they must go. Mean it may be, base it may be, in the heart of man thus to turn to God, when all else is gone. But the Lord will be found by this base and selfish heart. He will condescend to enter, as some one speaks, by these despised doors of nature. For twenty long years Joseph's brethren had lived easy and prosperous, with goods laid up, and blessings plentiful around them, and Joseph and his sorrows had all been forgotten. For a time the prodigal had his money, the portion of his father's goods that had fallen to him; and with his money, as long as it lasted, he took his pleasure, his back turned upon his father. But famine touches "the far country" and "the land of Canaan," and then, whether they will or not, the father's house and Joseph's stores must be sought. See Hosea v. 15.

Thus the scene opens, and Joseph's brethren come down to Egypt to buy food.

As soon as Joseph saw them, he knew them. He "remembered the dreams which he had dreamed of them." But upon this he at once set himself to the task of restoring their souls. See xlii. 9.

Strange, and yet beautiful and excellent! His dreams had merely exalted him above them. Had he sought, therefore, simply to make good those dreams when he thus remembered them, he might at once have revealed himself, and, as the favoured sheaf in the field, or as the sun, the ruling sun, in the heavens, have had them on their faces before him. But to restore their souls, instead of exalting himself, becomes at once his purpose. This was the counsel he took in his heart, as he surveyed the moment when he might have realized his own greatness and their humiliation, according to his dreams. How truly excellent and blessed is this! There was One, in after-days, who, when He took knowledge that He had come from God and went to God, and that the Father had put all things into His hands, rose and girded Himself, and began to wash His disciples' feet. The knowledge of His dignities only led Him to wait on the need of His saints. Who can speak the character of such a moment? But Joseph here, in the far distance, reminds me of it. "He remembered his dreams," dreams which exalted him, and that only; and yet he turns himself at once to the defiled feet, the guilty hearts, the unclean consciences, of his brethren, that he might heal, and wash, and restore them.

Strange, again I say. There was no connection between such remembrance and such action, save as grace, divine grace, of which Joseph was the witness, is known; save as the Jesus of John xiii. is understood.

"Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them, and said unto them, Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are come." This was taking them up for the good work (though the process be humbling and painful) of restoring their souls. The conscience must be faithfully dealt with, if anything be done. And Joseph aims at it at once. He makes himself strange to them. He speaks to them by an interpreter, and he speaks roughly. He must get their conscience into action, let it cost himself in personal feeling what it may. His love, for the present, must be firm; its hour for melting and tenderness is before it. It shall be gratified by-and-by; it must serve now. In the day of their sin they had said of him, "Behold, this dreamer cometh;" and now, in the day of their conviction, he says of them, "Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land are ye come." They had once sold their brother, when their heart knew no pity; now, with all peremptoriness which knew no reserve, one of themselves is taken and bound. But all this was only, in the purpose of grace, to fix the arrow deep in the conscience, there to spend its venom, and there to lay the sentence of death. And this is done. When God acts, the power of the Spirit waits upon the counsel of love. If they be bound in fetters, and be holden in cords of affliction; then He sheweth them their work, and their transgressions that they have exceeded. Job xxxvi. "We are verily guilty concerning our brother," they all say as with one conscience, "in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us."