22
¶ And Joseph dwelt in Egypt, he, and his
father’s house: and Joseph lived an hundred and ten years. 23 And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the
third generation: the children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were brought
up upon Joseph’s knees. 24 And Joseph
said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out
of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
25 And Joseph took an oath of the
children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my
bones from hence. 26 So Joseph died,
being an hundred and ten years old: and they embalmed him, and he was put in a
coffin in Egypt.
Genesis,
also known as the First Book of Moses,
covers nearly half of history from the creation of the physical universe and
life until the people that God carved out of fallen mankind for Himself are
secure in Egypt. Egypt will be a nursery where this people can grow from a few
into many. In God’s ministry of reconciliation, drawing mankind to Himself,
Genesis lays out the first steps, dealing with man’s sin, using man’s foolish
and often wicked choices, and going beyond anything that man himself planned to
produce this end result of salvation for those who would receive God in the
flesh for their salvation.
It began with a world much different than we live in
today. Nothing was meant to die. As one non-Christian evolutionary biologist
pointed out, which I referenced earlier;
Humans on rare occasions may survive to 120 years, some turtles to 200.
But all animals eventually die. Many single-cell organisms may die, as the result of accident or starvation; in fact the vast
majority do. But there is nothing programmed into them that says they must die. Death did not appear
simultaneously with life. This is one of the most important and profound
statements in all of biology. At the very least it deserves repetition: Death is not inextricably intertwined with
the definition of life. (50)
But, Adam, the first
man, stood by and watched his wife, Eve, get taken in by Satan’s rebellion
against God, his desire to be God and then followed her lead. She was tempted
by the three things that mankind has ever since then fallen to repeatedly.
Genesis
3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree
was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he
did eat.
1John
2:15 Love not the world, neither the
things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father
is not in him. 16 For all that is in the
world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the
Father, but is of the world. 17 And the
world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God
abideth for ever.
As Jesus warned the religious of His day of walking on
earth as a human being;
Luke
16:15 And he said unto them, Ye are they
which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that
which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.
Genetically, spiritually, psychologically, culturally,
and in every way all human behavior was tainted by this willingness to exercise
their free will to defy God’s commands and break fellowship with him. The
result was death for all living thing, decay and corruption. Death became the
primary cause of disruption of God’s perfect plan, a judgment on all of the
earth for man’s sin. We alone bear the responsibility for all death from the
African savanna to the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, from the hospital in
town to a lonely hut in the wilderness.
Man suffered and suffers;
Romans
5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin
entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for
that all have sinned:
Hebrews
2:15 And deliver them who through fear
of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.
And, in fact, all creation suffers because of man’s
sin.
Romans
8:22 For we know that the whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
Another atheist science writer notes with no hope of
reconciliation;
The total amount of
suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.
During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of
animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering
with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites;
thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be
so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead
to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and
misery is restored….In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic
replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get
lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The
universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there
is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind,
pitiless indifference. (51)
These men have no hope nor do they have any
understanding because they reject God’s revelation of His ministry of
reconciling mankind to Himself. But we know the truth and should teach it to
each other and to our children.
Now, God, the Creator of all things and master of all
reality, has taken a people for Himself from out of a sin-darkened world
through which He will insert Himself physically into this dimension of
existence for a brief time as one of us while still being fully God. Thus ends
the first book of the account given to Moses, the story of God’s ministry, His-story.
And so, the first half of history ends in a coffin in Egypt.
(50) William
R. Clark, Sex and the Origins of Death
(London: Oxford University Press, 1998), 54.
(51) Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books,
1995), 154-155.
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