Genesis
50:22 ¶ 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 whom 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.[1]
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 noted 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)[2]
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.
[2] Richard
Dawkins, River out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 154-155.
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