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.
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