Untitled Sermon (2)

Foreign Sons: Manasseh and Ephraim

The End of Genesis seems like a hodgepodge of different stories that only loosely go together. Reading it, one gets the sense that the author was as eager to be done with the book as some of us might be! There are, however, two predominant themes that run throughout this last section, from chpt. 47-50, and we will be turning to those two themes as we close the book of Genesis these two weeks.

The first of those themes, and the one we will focus on today, is family. Of course, the whole story of Joseph has really been all about family, and in fact, the whole book has been about family. We have been following the story of this one family since Chapter 12, when God first called Abraham to follow him out into a strange new land. So it makes sense that the closing of Genesis would necessarily deal with family.

There’s a problem, however, of who is considered to be family and who is not. Because while Joseph was far away in Egypt, he took a foreign wife. As we’ve already seen, that wasn’t exactly smiled upon on Abraham’s family. Perhaps you’ll remember how negatively speaks of Esau when he took a foreign wife. Or maybe you remember the great effort that Abraham went through to ensure his son Isaac married a wife from his home land, and not from among the Canaanites.

So, while the reunion of Jacob and Joseph was supposed to be a happy affair, this marriage made things a little awkward. I’m sure many of us can relate: most people know at least one friend or family member who dated or married a woman that didn’t quite sit well with the rest of the family. I’ve been there myself! My first girlfriend in college had different colored hair every day, and a pet raccoon that lived in her couch. My sister and parents weren’t exactly fans!

So while Joseph’s wife probably didn’t have a pet raccoon, she was an Egyptian, and she was the daughter of an Egyptian priest to boot! Not only that, but after marrying her, Joseph went so far as to name his kids “forget them” and “I’m better off here anyway”, regarding his family. So the question had to be addressed: are Manasseh and Ephraim really a part of this family? Are they included in God’s promise with the rest of Jacob’s grandchildren?

To this question, Jacob answers a resounding “Yes”. In fact, Jacob goes even farther than a simple yes. Not only does he consider Manasseh and Ephraim to be legitimate children of Joseph, but he even says he considers them to be as good as his own children!

Grafted In

All of this might seem inconsequential to us, but it shouldn’t! Jacob’s acceptance of Joseph’s foreign born children is a very clear foreshadowing of the gospel. For the longest time, Jews and Gentiles were at odds with one another. There was a very serious animosity and hatred between Jews and Gentiles, and it was perhaps at the worst it had ever been when Jesus finally arrived on the scene. The Jews were chosen by God through Abraham in order to be a blessing to the Gentile nations, but they had gotten so caught up in their interpretation of the Law and in the way they’d been treated by Gentiles in the past that they refused to even be at the same table with a Gentile in Jesus’s day.

While we might scoff at such an attitude today, this was not without good reason! The Israelites in Jacob’s day discouraged foreign marriage because of their faithfulness to God’s promise, and because they didn’t want foreign wives and husbands to lead their children into idolatry. These were, seemingly, good reasons not to marry non-Israelites. Likewise, the Jews of Jesus’s day had good reason not to like Gentiles. Their homeland had been invaded time and time again by foreign nations. Just a few hundred years before Jesus came, the Greeks invaded Israel and desecrated the temple itself. They set up idols inside the temple, which lead to a huge rebellion. A few years later, Rome also invaded Israel. When the Roman general Pompei entered the temple at found no idols or statues of the Gods, he called the Jews atheists!

Not only that, but certain religious customs tended to isolate the Jews from the rest of society. They couldn’t eat with the gentiles because of kosher food laws, and their circumcision lead to all manner of name-calling. For various reasons, it was pretty easy in that time period to tell who was circumcised and who was not. Not only did the Greeks think the Jews were strange for circumcising their boys, but they also accused them of being perverts!

And so the Jews and Gentiles did not get along. Could you imagine living in a land that had constantly been invaded, and where your invaders not only took control of your land, but constantly ridiculed you for being different, constantly made fun of your most sacred holidays and rituals? It’s really no wonder that the Jews couldn’t get along with the Gentiles.

In fact, by Jesus’s time, the temple had a literal wall built around it, and there were massive stone signs that warned Gentiles not to go beyond a certain point in the temple. They divided Jews and Gentiles (the few Gentiles that wanted to worship at the temple, anyway).

And so the same question put before Jacob was put before the Jews of Jesus’s time: Who is included in the family of Abraham? Who can receive God’s promise? The majority of the Jewish people seemed to want to answer, “only us”, and they would not accept the foreign-born Gentiles into the family.

This is where our text from Ephesians comes in. Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the temple walls separating Jew from Gentile have been torn down. There is no longer Jew nor Gentile, but all have been made one in Christ. Jesus made room for the foreign born children in God’s family. And that is why we now sit here in church together, worshipping the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!

This is really a much more extraordinary claim than we give it credit for. What Paul and the other New Testament writers tell us time and time again is not simply “Jesus saved you from sin”, but also that “Jesus adopted you into the family of God.” I don’t think the Church always really understands the gravity of that adoption. And a failure to understand what that means usually leads some to want to do away with the Old Testament entirely.

Dark Blessings

By Grace Alone

B- Grafted In

Manasseh and Ephraim brought into the family

Gentiles brought into the family

C- Dark Blessings

D- What kind of family?

Why there was hostility between Jew and Gentile

E-

The Dividing Wall broken

Now we are children of Abraham

We inherit the promise

The OT is now our family story too

What kind of family have we come into?

Blessings of Jacob seem dark

Family not chosen by their own merits- but by God’s grace

Inclusion of Manasseh and Ephraim-Jew and Gentile- hints at undoing of Babel