Joseph and His Brethren by W. K. Tweedie - HTML preview

CHAPTER XI.
THE DEATH OF JACOB.

We have now reached the closing stage of all. For about seventeen years Jacob sojourned in Egypt, and about one hundred and forty-seven here below; but the “evil” of which he complained to Pharaoh is drawing to an end. The patriarch is about to die. Joseph was summoned into his father’s presence, along with his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, who were adopted as his own by the dying patriarch; they received his blessing along with their father (Gen. xlviii.); and after the aged man had prophetically sketched the history or character of each of the future patriarchs, “he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.”

And in concluding these sketches, we may glance again at the mode in which the mighty God brought good to all nations and all times out of the misdeeds of the sons of Jacob. In our world there is much to perplex and bewilder us in studying the ways of Providence, and it is not always easy—for us, at least—to “justify the ways of God to man;” but he will sooner or later justify them himself, and make it plain to all that his ways, like his Word, are pure.

For example, we have already seen what benefits accrued to Joseph himself from the cruelty of his brethren, and how fully he recognized the hand of God in all that had befallen him. Just as Jehovah will make it plain at last, before the assembled world, that the very wrath of man has praised him, in the present instance he made the evil passions of those brothers remarkably advance the eternal purposes of the God of heaven. The promises made to Adam and to Abraham are here helped a stage forward to their fulfilment in spite of all that seems to oppose. Somehow or other, though we cannot see it, or explain it at all, even sin—the abominable thing which God hates—will be made to promote his glory; and of that result we have a specimen in the events of this remarkable family.

To Jacob, also, as well as to the land of Egypt, we see what benefits resulted from the sin of his sons. All the guilt of that sin lay upon them, and was not in the least jot mitigated by the manner in which God overruled it for good; but it is full of encouragement to a child of God, to see it working out the purposes of his Father. Jacob was saved from death by starvation; his family, and myriads besides, were the same: and thus he who sought only to do evil by stirring up the envy of Joseph’s brethren, was compelled to do good thereby again and again.

THE END