SOVEREIGN GRACE RULES THE NATIONS

Genesis 47: 13-27

INTRODUCTION

In 1989 I spent ten days in Beijing, China. One day our group went shopping just north of Tianamen square in a large department store with many floors. During the hour we spent in the shop, I was somehow separated from the rest of the group. I did not realize it until I finished a purchase and headed for the door to the street. As I walked out onto the steps leading down from the store, I looked out onto a river of black haired heads flowing past me on the sidewalk. There was not a white person to be seen. I immediately became unsure of which way I was to go to get back to the hotel in front of which our bus stopped. I felt, in the midst of thousands of people, completely alone and extremely vulnerable. I could feel panic rising in me. There were three different roads leaving the plaza in front of the department store. I resolutely chose one of them and began to walk in the river of Chinese people in what I hoped was the direction of the rest of my group. The next fifteen minutes were some of the most frightening I have experienced as I recognized no one and nothing and felt like I was walking down the street naked as I received the frank, inquisitive gazes of the crowds that walked past me the other way. I was never so glad to see a bus in my life. I had to restrain myself from running up and hugging the first member of our group that I came upon.

This sense of aloneness and vulnerability I had, being the only person like me in a sea of other humans in a country not my own is the sort of experience that Jacob and his nomadic family encountered as they moved into the land of Goshen, on the eastern edge of the powerful and alien Egypt. This is how refugees and immigrants feel. It ought also to be the experience of Christians as we live in this alien world. I say “ought” because most of us do not think of ourselves as strangers and aliens, living in a foreign land. We do not think of ourselves, especially as citizens of the U.S., as a minority group of exiles, living as refuges until we can return to our home. It is easy for us, here in the U.S. to feel right at home, to view ourselves as part of the powerful majority, rather than the vulnerable minority. Yet, the Bible repeatedly describes us as strangers and aliens, living in a world that is not our home, eagerly looking forward to the day our Lord comes to take us to our eternal home with him.

However, while the Scriptures are quite clear that out condition is exactly like that of Jacob’s small family of shepherds living as refugees in Egypt, yet we are not to live frightened and cowering in our Christian ghetto. We are to remain separate from the world while we engage the world and seek to influence it for the sake of Christ. We seek to expand the rule of Christ in the world without becoming like the world. There is a real tension in the Christian life. How do we live as refugees and yet live as if we are part of the most powerful force on planet earth, the church of Jesus Christ? In our passage today, God gives us, in Joseph’s rule over Egypt and provision for his family, the key to living out this tension. We are able to remain distinct but confident people because our God is sovereignly ruling over the nations of the world. We live in the knowledge that while we are currently a despised minority, yet our brother, Jesus Christ, is the king of the universe. His purposes are going to prevail. He is sovereignly directing all the affairs of the world towards his perfect ends. He is moving all things toward that day when the “kingdoms of this world will become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ.” So even while we live as strangers and aliens in the world, yet, as Peter tells us, we live among the pagans in such a way that they will glorify God on the day he comes.

MAIN POINT
Jesus Christ sovereignly rules over the nations so that…

I. The nations submit to him (vv. 13-26, esp. v. 21)

We are faced today with a passage in the Bible that is hard to understand how it can help us. For nine chapters of Genesis we’ve been taken up with the intensely personal and emotional story of Joseph’s betrayal and suffering, his alienation from his family, his brothers journey from hard-hearted unbelief into repentance and faith and the final reunion and reconciliation of this family. However, today we are informed by Moses of an apparently hard-hearted, cruel and indifferent Joseph who takes advantage of the famine that God sent, to enslave an entire population of human beings. If “all Scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness”, how does this story, help us? I am convinced that this story is a great help to our faith and I hope to show you how it is. First, I want to make sure you see the flow of what happens. Second, I want you to see that Joseph is not being a hard-hearted tyrant. Third, I want to show you why Moses included this story to help us in our faith.

First of all let’s get the outline of the story. If you’ll remember, nine years prior to the events recorded in Genesis 47, God gave two dreams to Pharaoh on the same night that terrified him. He dreamed of seven fat cows coming up out of the Nile River grazing among the reeds. Then he saw seven thin, ugly cows come up and eat the seven fat cows but even after eating them, they remained thin and ugly. This dream startled him awake in terror. After falling back asleep, he dreamed of seven plump ears of corn growing on a single stalk. Then seven thin ears of corn, scorched by the east wind, came up on a stalk and swallowed up the seven plump ears, yet remained thin and scorched. The dreams terrified Pharaoh and when he called together all his advisors and all the sorcerers of his kingdom no one could interpret the dreams. Joseph was brought from prison and he told Pharaoh that God was letting him know what he was about to do. God was going to give seven years of super abundant harvests throughout Egypt. These seven years of abundance would be followed by seven years of famine that would be so severe that no one would remember the years of abundance. Joseph then proposed a plan to store up all the surplus grain during the years of abundance so that there would be food in Egypt when the years of famine hit.

In 47:13, we are in at least the third year of the famine and you can see the devastation it is causing. The land of Egypt and Canaan waste away under the harshness of the famine. There is no food being grown anywhere, due to the harshness of the weather. Mass starvation and malnutrition have the peoples of the Middle East in their grip. The people come to Joseph to buy food. Joseph collects all the money in Egypt and Canaan and turns it over to Pharaoh. The people come to him, pleading with him to give them food, admitting that they are out of money. Therefore, Joseph sells them food in exchange for all their livestock. After a year of trading livestock for food, all of the livestock belongs to Pharaoh. Again the people come to him and plead with him to continue giving them food. He agrees to give them food in exchange for the deeds to their lands. This means that the entire population of Egypt enters into serfdom. They become tenant farmers, sharecroppers. Joseph gives them grain for food and for seed to plant so they can grow their own crops. Pharaoh owns all the land and the seed to plant. They can use four fifths of what they produce for themselves but they must give 1/5th or 20% of their harvest each year to Pharaoh. This arrangement, this law that Joseph institutes lasts for at least 440 years according to v. 26.

How do we know that Joseph’s actions here are not tyrannical, cruel and unjust but rather benevolent and fair? I will give you five ways we know that Joseph is being benevolent and just in what he does. First, while this is not free enterprise democracy, this is not the slavery that Europeans inflicted on the peoples of Africa. The situation that Joseph made law was the common economic structure for most of the world’s history. The vast majority of human beings through the centuries lived in this kind of serfdom. While not free in the sense we understand it, they were secure. Pharaoh took care of the people in exchange for 20% of the fruit of their labor. Second, the people of Egypt ran out of food because they did not take the word of God through Joseph serious. They knew the famine was coming; yet, they did not store up grain for themselves but sold it to Joseph to store up in national granaries. They had reaped economic benefit during the years of abundance rather than storing up their own surplus. They are in need because of their greed. Third, it is not unjust to sell your product for a fair price. Joseph is not price gouging. As I said, they had sold all this grain to Joseph to begin with and it was not wrong for Joseph to sell it back. He was under no obligation to give it away. Fourth, Joseph was not acting for his own personal gain. He was acting as the officer of the duly authorized government, Pharaoh. The text is quite clear that Joseph did not personally profit from the sale of the grain. Rather Pharaoh, as the king of Egypt, is the one who came to own all that was within his borders. Fifth and most importantly, look at v. 25. How do the people of Egypt feel about what Joseph has done? They view what he has done as perfectly just and incredibly kind. He has saved their lives. They view his actions as mercy or grace. They are happy to be servants of Pharaoh. There is absolutely no sense of injustice or grievance in their response but only gratitude.

Now how does this help us? As I’ve repeatedly told you over the years, one of the key questions you have to answer when you are trying to figure out what a particular passage in the Bible means you have to ask what the original author meant to communicate to the original audience. How would the nation of Israel, camped on the eastern shore of the Jordan river, preparing to go into Canaan and fight against fierce enemies in fortified cities have been helped by this? There are many ways that they would have felt the same sense of vulnerability that Jacob and his family felt moving to Egypt. They are about to enter into a foreign land in order to conquer it. They would see in Joseph’s rise from slavery to glory and his subjection of the Egyptian people the sovereign grace of God at work on behalf of his people. It would give them confidence to remain faithful as God’s people and to advance the work of God’s kingdom by entering into the Promised land and fighting against God’s enemies. They would see in this story that while there may be suffering and uncertainty for God’s people now, that God is working out a great and glorious salvation through the promised and coming Savior.

The Egyptian people are subjected to Joseph through the power of God. First, consider that the famine itself is sent by God. The Egyptians are in need because God took away their supply of food. Second, Joseph’s entire life was ordained by God to bring him to this position of power and influence. God is the one who enabled Joseph to interpret the dreams, gave him the plan to meet the need, and gave him favor in the eyes of Pharaoh to exalt him to this place of power. We ought to see our Lord Christ in this picture of Joseph. He is right now ruling over the nations. He is right now creating need among the peoples of the world. Wars, famines, earthquakes, bad weather, accidents, all manner of suffering are ordained by God to awaken the peoples of the world to the fact that they are not in charge of the world. As C.S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures. He speaks to us in our conscience. But he shouts to us in our pain. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

The sense of anxiety and uncertainty that grips our nation in this time of conflict is meant by God to awaken arrogant, self-sufficient Americans to the uncertainty of life. We should be praying that the threat of terrorism and the animosity of the world community and the threat to American soldiers awaken our own people to their true condition. Human beings, nations only exist by the decree and pleasure of God. He can at any moment take your life away from you. He can at any moment destroy all the worldly comforts you presently enjoy. He can at any moment, destroy the U.S.A. The Lord Jesus Christ, our suffering and now glorified brother is right now working throughout the nations of the world to bring the nations of the world into submission to himself by creating need.

He is also bringing the nations of the world into submission by requiring that the peoples of the world give up all they have in order to receive his salvation. God forces upon us what we most hate to admit. We are needy, dependent people. Through hardship and through the gospel of Jesus he confronts proud humanity with the fact that the only way we can survive, we can be rescued is by giving up all that we own in order to have the salvation that he offers. The glad surrender of all they possess and of their very selves to Pharaoh at the command of Joseph is a picture of what Christ is requiring of every human being to be kept safe from the terrible trouble that is coming upon the whole world, the day of God’s wrath. Verse 25 is the glad cry of every person who is awakened to their true condition and the condition of the world. They rejoice that in exchange for all they own and their very lives they are given life, receive God’s favor and become servants of the great king. This is what God is doing in the nations and it is what he is doing in your life. He is attempting to confront you with your need by removing earthly comforts so that you will willingly give up all you own and all attempts to be made happy here and to go to Christ to receive divine life, favor from God and so become servants of your Creator and Savior.

Jesus Christ sovereignly rules over the nations so that…

II. The nations enjoy his favor (vv. 13-26, esp. v. 25)

While the nation of Israel in the desert would have greatly appreciated this picture of the sovereign power of God subjecting the proud and pagan nation of Egypt there is a part of this story that would be troubling and apparently contradictory. While Joseph is one of the descendants of Abraham and while he does subject the pagan Egyptians, yet he is the agent of blessing to the Egyptians. In fact, it is through him that all later Pharaohs become more powerful. It was a later Pharaoh who used this power that Joseph had gained for him to cruelly oppress the people of Israel. Joseph indirectly makes the enslavement of his own people possible by putting Pharaoh in absolute and unrivaled control of Egypt. Notice another strange thing that Joseph facilitates in v. 22. Joseph enabled the pagan priesthood to promote a false religion by his wise administration of the resources of Egypt. How can this be that God’s agent for the salvation of his people also provides resources so that a pagan religion can flourish? This pagan religion was adopted by the descendants of Jacob’s family and became the source of all kinds of trouble for them. When Aaron built his golden calf, he learned that craft and the immoral worship that accompanied the worship of the idol in Egypt, from these priests who Joseph preserved. Several of the prophets make the point that the Israelites were worshipping idols while still living in Egypt. Wouldn’t it strike the people of Israel, in the desert, as strange that the work of Joseph actually enabled the spread of pagan religion that eventually became a source of God’s judgment upon them?

What we are witnessing in the provision of Joseph for the pagan Egyptians is what Jesus said in Matthew 5:45, “God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” This is what Paul says in Acts 14. He heals a crippled man in the idol worshipping Greek town of Lystra. After he heals the man the local pagan priest and the people are convinced that he is the god Hermes and Barnabas is the Greek god Zeus in human form. They bring a bull to sacrifice to them. Paul has to strenuously protest to get them to stop. This is part of what he says, “In the past he (God) let all the nations go their own way. Yet he has not left himself without testimony: He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their season. He provides you with plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.” Joseph’s provision for Egypt is a picture of God’s mercy and love for human beings of all kinds. He is kind to the wicked. He provides them with life, food, and shelter and even fills their hearts with joy, in spite of the fact that they continue to oppose him and his people. This is called “common grace”. It is common, not because it is so inconsequential but because it is common to all humans, both believers and non-believers. “God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. He has compassion on all he has made.”

I don’t know if you ever think about this but who gave Adolph Hitler life and then gave him every breath he took while he plotted and carried out the destruction of the Jewish people and most of Europe? God did. Who gives breath to the thousands of Moslem imams who call Moslems to pray to the false god, Allah, three times every day throughout the world? The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, the Holy, Triune God does. Who gives criminals healthy minds and bodies so that they can carry out their violent acts? God himself sustains their lives. Who gives proud and greedy Americans the ability to make money and to spend money on themselves rather than giving to help the poor and needy? The suffering Savior, Jesus Christ, upholds every American by the word of his power.

Why is God so kind to wicked people? There are two reasons. First, the rest of the verse I just quoted from Psalm 145 says goes on to say this, “All you have made will praise you, O Lord, your saints will extol you.” Paul in Romans 4:3-5 says to proud, self-righteous, religious people, “So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness leads to repentance?” Then Paul again, when preaching to the idol worshipping and proud people of Athens, after recounting all the kindness of God to them says, “God did this (gave you life, breath and everything else) so that you will seek him.” God is kind to the nations of the world for one reason; so that the peoples of the world will turn from worshipping false gods and seek the one and only God who exists. Verse 25 is a statement of the kind of effect God intends to have upon humans who worship false gods. He intends for them to see Jesus as the only Savior and to give away all they have in order to obtain all that he wants to give them. He is kind to every human being so that every human will gratefully acknowledge that Jesus alone has saved their lives. He is merciful so that every human being will ask Jesus to have mercy upon them. He provides unrighteous people with life and breath and everything else so that they will gladly become the slaves of Jesus.

The second reason God is so kind to the wicked is given by Paul in Romans 1: 20. “For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse.” The kindness of God to the peoples of the world, if it does not lead to their salvation will justify their condemnation. No one will ever be able to stand before God and say I did not know that I was worshipping a false god. I did not know that I owed you all my thanks and trust and obedience. Every mouth will be silenced before God on the day of judgment as each one comes face to face with the great God who has given them every good thing they ever experienced on earth but used his gifts to please themselves and to worship false gods.

Jesus Christ sovereignly rules over the nations so that…

III. His church flourishes among the nations (vv. 12 & 27)

Look at the verses that begin and end this account of Joseph’s enslaving of the Egyptian population in exchange for food. Read verses 12 and 27. During the years that Joseph is selling the people of Egypt food in exchange for everything they possess, he is providing food freely to his family in the land of Goshen. During the years, that the Egyptian people lose everything and become the servants of Pharaoh the nation of Israel acquires property, is fruitful, and multiplies. At the very same time that God, through Joseph is subjecting the pagan nation, he is exalting his chosen people. God’s people flourish while the people of the world languish.

For those of you who are familiar with the book of Genesis as a whole, you will recognize the last part of v. 27. When God created human beings in Genesis 1 we are told that God blessed Adam and Eve and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” When sin entered the world, it appeared that humankind would not fulfill this command and experience this promise as God destroyed the human race in the flood. However, he repeated the command to Noah. Again, it is hard to see how this promise was being fulfilled, as the only people who seemed to multiply were the wicked. Then in Genesis 12 God chose Abraham and promised him that he would be fruitful and would increase in number until he had as many descendants as there are stars in the heavens. However, Abraham only had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. The chosen son, Isaac only had two sons, Esau and Jacob, even though God made the same promise to him. While Jacob, the chosen son, has twelve sons the promise of God of a numerous and fruitful people has not materialized in at least 200 years. This verse is the first time we begin to see the promise of God coming true.

The flourishing of the people of God in the land of Egypt where they are aliens and strangers is a picture of the flourishing of the church of Jesus Christ through the centuries. Jesus Christ promised, just before he ascended into heaven, that his church would be so fruitful and increase in numbers so that disciples would be made in every nation. He promised that we would be witnesses to him among all the people groups of the world. In the book of Revelation we are told that the company of God’s chosen, saved people who will be gathered around the throne of Jesus in worship at the end of the ages is “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language…” Jesus has been caring for and building his church among the nations of the world for centuries. I want you to look at this chart that was put together by the U.S. Center for World Missions that shows the progress of the church through the centuries. Show chart of unreached people groups from Desiring God, p. 195.

While this chart is encouraging there yet remains almost 3 billion people in about 10,000 people groups that still do not have a self-sustaining and multiplying church in their midst. However, the hope that v. 27 gives us is that just as God caused his people to flourish while living in Egypt, the land of slavery and suffering, so we can be sure that he is going to cause his church to be fruitful and increase in numbers throughout all the peoples of the world. We do not know if the United States will flourish. We do know that the church of Jesus Christ is going to continue to grow and increase in number until the return of Christ at the end of the ages. It is this promise that the church will be fruitful and increase in number that gives us hope that sending a team of eleven to Mongolia this summer is a good idea. God intends his church to grow in Mongolia and so we can have good hope that God will use us to help his church in Mongolia to grow. The fruitfulness of Christ’s church is the reason that our missionries can have good hope that as they work among peoples of other lands that God will use them to build his church among these people. As we see how God, against all probabilities, cause this small band of about one hundred people to become a mighty nation of over 2 million, we ought to expect that he is going to cause us to be fruitful and to increase in number here in Janesville. He has many other people in this city whom he intends to turn into his worshippers and he wants us to be a part of that work. We really can expect that as we expand our facility and our vision of what God wants to do that increasing numbers of people are going to join us in exalting in God.

Jesus Christ sovereignly rules over the nations so that…

May the Lord cause his word to be honored and spread rapidly in us and through us into the world in which we live.