God Will Complete His Plan of Salvation

We have made it to the end of Genesis. Thirty-seven sermons in all for these 50 chapters. On September 1 last year, I preached a sermon with a title that was intended to be the theme for the next year of sermons, which concludes today: “The Saving Beauty of the Biblical Story.” My aim has been to help us better understanding the “biblical story” and to better savor its “saving beauty.” It is my opinion and observation, based quite a bit on my own life experience, that many Christians today need some reforming regarding how we read the biblical story.

I trust the Lord has helped us achieve this aim. I do think that the book of Genesis is one of the absolute best places in the Bible to help us reform in our reading of the story. After all, if we get off on the wrong track with Genesis, who knows where we will end up.

Our passage today begins in Genesis 49:29 and takes us to the end of Genesis. Here we see Jacob’s death and burial (Gen 49:29-50:14), Joseph’s assurance to his fearful brothers (Gen 50:15-21), and finally a brief account of Joseph’s death (Gen 50:22-26). So, this passage is about death—the death of Jacob and Joseph in particular—and sets us up for what will happen after that. What does it teach us? It teaches us that faith in God does not end at death. Rather, true, saving faith means believing and trusting that God will complete his plan of salvation even though we die before seeing it brought to that promised completion.

Follow along with me as we consider here death and its sorrow, its aftermath, and its end.

Death and Its Sorrow

First, death and its sorrow. Ever since Genesis 47:28, we’ve been anticipating Jacob’s death. It has been delayed by two chapters as he completed his deathbed task of passing along the Abrahamic blessing to his sons, to the twelve tribes of Israel. As the book of Genesis comes to a close, we are moving on from the patriarchal narratives, in which the hope of salvation is carried forward by one individual after another, to the story of national Israel—“the twelve tribes of Israel” that is first mentioned in Genesis 49:28—who will now carry forward that same hope.

A Significant Death

When we read the account of Jacob’s death and burial, I’m struck by the lament, the sorrow, the weeping, that marks the story.

In verse 1, we read that “Joseph fell on his father’s face and wept over him and kissed him.” In verse 3, we read that “the Egyptians wept for him seventy days.” And then, in verse 10, when the Egyptian entourage arrived in Canaan to bury Jacob, “they lamented there with a very great and grievous lamentation, and [Joseph] made a mourning for his father seven days.” The lament made an impression on the inhabitants of the land, verse 11 tells us, as they commented, “This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians.”

What impression does all this lament make on us?

We can recognize at the very least the humanness of this story. Those of us who have lost a dearly loved one understand the deep emotion that is portrayed here. Such heavy expressions of grief are not typically encouraged in our culture. “I’m sorry for your loss. Take a day off for a funeral. Be back to work tomorrow.”

Death brings with it deep emotions of grief and sorrow. And Jacob’s death, in the context of Genesis, is a significant death. The narrator has given us a picture here of the Egyptians and the Canaanites attending to and noting his death and funeral ceremony. As the originator of the nation of Israel, the people through whom God has promised to bring salvation to the world, Jacob’s death is noteworthy for everybody. Does his death mean the death of the divine promise?

Gathered to His People

You see, as history moves from one generation to the next, the pressing question, from a theological perspective, is what will happen to God’s promise, to God’s plan of salvation? While Jacob was alive, the promise was alive with him. Will the promise live on to the next generation? That’s the pressing question.

Jacob’s death and the lament that loudly surrounds it in our passage today challenges so much of what passes for essential Christian theology. Why the grief? Why the lament? Cheer up! Isn’t Jacob in a better place now?

Well, maybe. There’s a phrase that is used here that needs a comment. In Genesis 49:29, Jacob speaks of his coming death as his being “gathered to my people.”  The narrator uses that same expression in verse 33: Jacob “breathed his last and was gathered to his people.” Many commentators simply state that the phrase refers to the soul of a person going to meet those who preceded him in the afterlife.[1] We could read it that way, as many have done when they hear David say, about his infant child who had recently died, "Now he is dead. . . . Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.””

But this is not as cheery as we might like to make it. Death, in the Old Testament, is a sad, dark, and mysterious reality. “It was not seen . . . as a happy release, an escape of the soul from the prison-house of the body.”[2] Death was not a victor, that took us to the happy end after a rather annoyingly bodily life of struggle.

Contrast this with so much that passes these days for the essence of the Christian faith, a story about how to get to heaven when you die, and we can see that, unless we want to marginalize what the Old Testament emphasizes, we need to reorder our own understanding of what the biblical story is all about.

It’s not that there is no belief in an afterlife; it’s just that not much was said about it. The attention and fascination, the basis of hope in the Old Testament, is on what God had promised.

The hope of the biblical writers, which was strong and constant, focused not upon the fate of humans after death, but on the fate of Israel and her promised land. The nation and land of the present world were far more important than what happened to an individual beyond the grave.[3]

And that’s why in this story, when Jacob dies, the living lament. They grieve. They weep. Death is an enemy to the biblical story. And it would appear, at this moment of Jacob’s death, that the enemy has won.

Death and Its Aftermath

After all, death often causes quite a bit of chaos and instability. Death changes things, doesn’t it?

I once heard a sobering answer to this question: “What do you think the world will look like in 100 years?” We might be imagining how technology will change the landscape or how international wars might leave its mark. But the most sobering and realistic answer is this. What will the world look like in 100 years? All new people.

When someone dies, the world changes. So, notice here the aftermath of Jacob’s death.

Opportunity for Revenge

When Joseph and his family all returned from burying Jacob in Canaan, Joseph’s brothers sent a message to Joseph. They were afraid that, now that Jacob was dead, Joseph would take out his revenge on the evil things they had done to him those many years ago.

The fear of Joseph’s brothers, in spite of 17 years of being reunited with Joseph in Egypt, seems reasonable. With their father Jacob dead, what was to stop Joseph from exerting his power over the rest of the family, getting his payback from the years of mistreatment? Their anxiety at this particular moment, one commentator observes, is “quite realistic psychologically.”[4]

The fear of Joseph’s brothers is reasonable, because so often this is exactly what happens when death comes. Death is such a devastating reality that there is a significant aftermath that comes in its wake. All kinds of jockeying for power takes place. When one goes down, it is the opportunity for someone else to step up.

Have No Fear

Death seems to always have its way, so it is tempting to conclude that the only way to deal with it is to collude with it and become agents of death ourselves. Just think of it. The only way to keep from dying is to take out whatever threatens to take us out. Bomb them before they bomb you.

Joseph’s brothers aren’t in a position to take out Joseph, however, so they come asking for peace. The brothers send a message to Joseph, saying that before he died Jacob had given his last will and testament in the form of a message to Joseph. “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.” So, Joseph’s brothers ask him to honor their father’s dying wish. “Please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father” (v. 17).

What follows is a touching scene but also an apt conclusion to the Joseph story and indeed to the whole book of Genesis. Upon hearing these words from his brothers, Joseph wept. An interesting response, don’t you think? Why would Joseph weep here? The text does not tell us, and there could be a number of things that this moment has stirred up in Joseph. But perhaps we can see the answer by what happens next.

It is in verse 18 that Joseph’s brothers come into his presence after they had sent the message ahead of them pleading for Joseph’s forgiveness. They “fell down before him and said, ‘Behold, we are your servants.’” Joseph’s response, in verses 19-21, includes saying twice, “Do not fear.” As verse 21 concludes, “he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.”

I couldn’t help but recall here Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. When the prodigal “came to himself,” he resolved to go back to the father he had treated so unjustly and say, “I have sinned, I am not worthy to be called your son, make me one of your slaves.” But the prodigal’s father, “saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him” (Lk 15:20). Do you see the similarities here? I think this gives insight into Joseph’s tears and his response.

Remember what the story told us about Joseph and his brothers previously, when they were first reunited there in Egypt. On three occasions throughout that ordeal Joseph was moved to tears (Gen 42:24; 43:30; 45:2). His tears reflect his genuine love and compassion for his brothers, but they also reflect his genuine pain and heartache, that which Joseph himself fears. Joseph’s brothers fear his wrath—justly deserved it seems. But what Joseph fears is their unbelief that he has not one ounce of desire to act against them but only to love them and to care for them. He doesn’t view them as servants but as family. He doesn’t want revenge; he wants reconciliation. Like the father of the prodigal, Joseph’s heart is in no way against his brothers—he yearns for them to be in communion with each other.

Providence and Grace

What explains Joseph’s attitude here? Two things. Providence and grace.

There can hardly be a clearer testimony to the providence of God than what we find in Genesis 50:20. “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” This correlates with Paul’s claim in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good.” Here we are on holy ground: the providence of God stated so clearly and illustrated so vividly can both comfort us and trouble us. That’s great that God will turn everything for good. But couldn’t he just as well achieve the good without the trouble in the first place? If you’ve ever asked that question, you are in good company, for that’s the question Jesus himself asked while he agonized in Gethsemane.

The providence of God is a profound mystery. It will defy any attempt to explain it in a way that it all makes sense. But one thing is clearly meant to be seen in the mystery, and that is the equally profound reality of God’s love.

You see, as we have observed several times throughout this final part of Genesis, Joseph is to be understood as a type of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is himself, of course, the clearest revelation of the one true God. But hold that thought for a moment and try to understand this, that before we get to Jesus we see Joseph representing for us not just part of Israel’s story but the summation of the whole story.[5]From these very first moments in history when it is even possible to speak of Israel as a nation, the nation “is characterized by rebellion and rejection of God’s leaders.”[6]And yet, it is this rebellion and rejection that ends up leading to the only hope for salvation.

And that’s what also explains the grace with which Joseph responds to his brothers. By the time, then, that we have come to the end of the Joseph narrative in Genesis, we see that Joseph has “learned obedience through what he suffered,” a phrase that in Hebrews refers to our Lord Jesus himself (Heb 5:8). Joseph is able to extend grace to his brothers precisely because he has learned to trust in and to live by the providence of God.

And so, providence and grace. Twin aspects of God’s character and attributes that offer us a power that endures even in the aftermath of death.

Death and Its End

As we come, then, to the end of our study of Genesis, notice the hope that the story gives us in the face of the devastating reality of death. Can there be an end to death?

Remain in the Promised Land

This final passage in Genesis tells us of the death of both Jacob and Joseph, and in both accounts we find these men giving direction about what to do with their physical remains. Jacob commanded his sons to “bury me with my fathers” in the burial site that Abraham had purchased in Genesis 23, and in which Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob’s wife, Leah, were all buried. Joseph made his kinfolk vow that one day when they would leave Egypt they were to take his bones with them, which they did centuries later (Exod 13:19).

Why are Jacob and Joseph so interested in where the remains of their bodies would be interred? The answer is quite clear if we’ve been following the story with any concentration at all. It’s because the “end” that these patriarchs were looking for was not where their disembodied souls would go when they died but rather the promise that God had made to them, that one day their family would live in the promised land forever.[7] So here’s the point: the concern about where the body would be buried was an expression of faith in God and what he had promised.

God Will Visit You

Now please don’t say, “Well, that’s all really nice and interesting for those Old Testament characters, but our hope is different in the New Testament era.” You might not think you are saying that, but if all of a sudden the hope we are living for is essentially death, “going to heaven when we die,” then we have in fact changed the story and changed our hope.

The New Testament itself does not take us that way. In the great “hall of faith” chapter in Hebrews 11, we are that it was by faith Joseph, “at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones” (Heb 11:22). What kind of faith was Joseph demonstrating? Faith that God would indeed fulfill the great Abrahamic promise, a promise which is all about what God will do here on earth, not so much there in heaven.

This is one of the great reasons why the Judeo-Christian preference has consistently been for burial over cremation. Of course on one level it doesn’t matter—and no one should say that to be cremated is to commit an unpardonable sin—but the burying of the dead is quite obviously a much clearer pointer to what the biblical hope is all about.

It's not that there is no such thing as an afterlife. It’s just that this is not—decisively not—what the entire biblical story emphasizes. The book of Genesis itself will sum it up for us nicely. The God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1)—this God, the Creator God—“will surely visit you” (Gen 50:25). He will act again, to rescue and save his people and his creation in which he always intended for them to live forever. Here on earth, not there in heaven.

The last verse in the book of Genesis (50:26) goes like this: “So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.” Hebrew scholar Robert Alter helps us appreciate the literary genius of Genesis.

The book that began with an image of God’s breath moving across the vast expanses of the primordial deep to bring the world and all life into being ends with this image of a body in a box, a mummy in a coffin. . . . Out of the contraction of this moment of mortuary enclosure, a new expansion, and new births, will follow. Exodus begins with a proliferation of births, a pointed repetition of the primeval blessing to be fruitful and multiply, and just as the survival of the flood was represented as a second creation, the leader who is to forge the creation of the nation will be borne on the water in a little box—not . . . “the coffin” of the end of Genesis but . . . “the ark” that keeps Noah and his seed alive.[8]

That is what the story is all about. From beginning to end.

Death and Resurrection

Our task as Christians is to believe the story, to put our faith entirely in it, because we have all our hope in the “saving beauty of the biblical story.” The biblical story which is about the Creator God and the promise of New Creation, that God will not let his creation perish and succumb once and for all to death, but that he will save it from death once and for all.

In other words, that God will do for his people and indeed for all creation what he did for Jesus on Easter Sunday. Jesus, “the firstborn from the dead” as Paul puts it in Colossians 1:18, Jesus who lives now not in an immortal soul, but in an immortal body.

This is the Christian hope and the end of death itself.

Brothers and sisters, may the gospel we proclaim be consistent with this story and with its hope, first announced to us in the book of Genesis itself. The good news is that in Abraham’s offspring—that is, in Israel (that is, in the true Israel, Jesus, Israel’s messiah)—all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Because only in Jesus, crucified, buried, resurrected, ascended, and coming again, do we find the promise of the end of death itself.

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[1] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16–50, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 2, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker (Dallas: Word Books, 1994), 160.

[2] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003), 91.

[3] Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 99.

[4] G. von Rad, cited in Wenham, Genesis 16–50, 489.

[5] Samuel Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince: The Joseph Story in Biblical Theology, New Studies in Biblical Theology, vol. 59, ed. D. A. Carson (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 133.

[6] Emadi, From Prisoner to Prince, 129.

[7] Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, 100.

[8] Robert Alter, Genesis: Translation and Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 306.