Joseph's Future Hope

Recapping our final night in Genesis — the deathbed scene that closes the book, and what Joseph's bones are still telling us.

Last night we finished Genesis. Twenty-four sessions through the Joseph story, and we ended where the book ends — with a man about to die, making his family swear an oath about his bones.

If you were there, this is your review. If you missed it, this is what you missed. Either way, read it slow. There's more packed into these five verses than you'd think.

Genesis 50:22–26

22 So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and the house of his father. And Joseph lived one hundred and ten years. 23 And Joseph saw Ephraim's children to the third generation. Moreover, the children of Makir, son of Manasseh, were born on the knees of Joseph. 24 And Joseph said to his brothers, "I am about to die, but God will certainly visit you and bring you up from this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob." 25 Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear an oath, saying, "God will surely visit you, and you shall bring up my bones from here." 26 So Joseph died, being one hundred and ten years old. They embalmed him and he was placed in a coffin in Egypt.

This is Yoseph's deathbed scene, and it's been built to match his father's deathbed scene.

Yaaqov called his sons in and said, "I am about to die." Yoseph says the same thing to his brothers. Yaaqov made Yoseph swear an oath to carry his corpse up to the land and bury him with his forefathers. Yoseph now makes his brothers swear an oath to carry his bones up when God visits them.

Same words. Same oath. Same "going up." It's a deliberate echo, and the author wants us to hear it.

There's an inverted Aqedah scheme running underneath too. In Genesis 22, Abraham swears an oath and the son goes up the mountain. Here the son — Yoseph — swears the oath, and it's his own bones that go up out of exile into the promised land.

This is all about the hope of resurrection. Corpse and bones, linked to the end of exile and the return to the land. Hold that thought, because Ezekiel is coming.

Look at how the passage is framed. He lived 110 years. He died 110 years. He lived in Egypt, and then he was put in a box in Egypt.

That's not an accident. The living and the dying are structurally parallel, and the point lands hard: the whole Egyptian exile is like living in a tomb. He's buried, they put him in a box, and the box is Egypt.

There's a certainty here that the exile will be temporary. Yoseph knows it. He doesn't say "if God visits you." He says God will most certainly visit you.

There's an Israeli scholar, Yair Zakovitch, who wrote on this. His book is "And You Shall Tell Your Son...": The Concept of the Exodus in the Bible, and he traces a larger pattern of migrations in and out of the land. He calls it the W.

Follow the shape of it. Abraham's story starts in Mesopotamia, in Ur of the Chaldees, near Babylon. That results in a going up to Canaan. Then, promptly after arriving, Abraham exiles himself in a famine and goes down to Egypt. Then he comes back to Canaan and stays.

Then in the life of his grandson Yaaqov, Yaaqov has to leave the land after betraying his brother. He goes halfway to Babylon — actually to exactly the spot Abraham left, to Haran, to visit the same relatives Abraham had left. Twenty years there, then he returns from his exile to Canaan. And then we just read his descent into Egypt.

So what Zakovitch is saying is that the migrations of Abraham and the migrations of Yaaqov have been designed as patterns. The ancestors are playing out, in their own stories, the journey set before their descendants. The sons keep replaying the stories of their fathers.

And that's why this moment matters so much. Yoseph is standing at the bottom of one of those descents, and he's already talking about the ascent.

So we went to Ezekiel 37:1–14.

Ezekiel is sitting in a refugee camp in Babylon. The hand of Yahweh comes on him and sets him down in the middle of a valley full of bones. He's a priest. He's surrounded by the remains of dead bodies, and the Spirit makes him walk around them all. Corpse impurity, ritual impurity, the whole thing. Total freak-out territory.

And God asks him, "Son of man, can these bones live?"

Then the command comes: prophesy over the bones. Dry bones, hear the word of Yahweh. I'll put sinews on you, flesh to cover you, skin. I'll put breath in you and make you come alive. Think Genesis 2 — breath entering the dust.

He prophesies. There's a noise, a rattling, and the bones come together, bone to bone. Sinew covers them, flesh grows. But there's no breath. So he prophesies to the breath — the wind — and breath comes into them and they stand on their feet, a vast army.

Then God tells him what it means. These bones are the whole house of Israel. And look what they're saying: our bones are dried up, our hope has perished, we are cut off.

They're physically alive. They're covenantally dead. That's the whole point. When you're cut off from Yahweh, you can be walking around and still be dead. It's the living dead. Paul says the same thing in Ephesians 2 — separate, cut off.

So the covenantal resurrection back into Eden relationship with Yahweh gets described here as the re-creation of a human being. I'll open your graves. You'll come out. I'll bring you into the land. I'll pour out my Spirit on you and place you in your land.

And what comes right after this in Ezekiel? The two sticks — Judah and Joseph.

This vision is filling the mind of somebody who knows the Genesis scroll far better than I do. I hesitate to say much more about it, because it's kind of its own commentary.

Here's the thing I keep coming back to. The biblical story is telling the entire biblical story over and over again.

Each time you cycle through the melody, the place types stay the same, but different names fill the slots. Eden, Ararat, Canaan, Mount Zion. And exile can be so many places — the wilderness, Babylon, Mesopotamia, a field, outside the house, a valley, outside Jerusalem. Even Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom down outside the city walls, is an exile place. That's where all the imagery we connect to hell comes from — what Jesus called Gehenna in Greek, which is just a Greek spelling of the Hebrew gey-hinnom, the valley outside Jerusalem.

These are types of places. They're states of being. And the core slots all come from Genesis 1 through 9. So every time you work through a cycle of the melody, you've told the whole story again.

Which exile are we talking about? Babylonian? Egyptian? Both. And here's why that matters: after the Babylonian exile, the people came back to the land — that's Ezra and Nehemiah. But read those books and they're singing laments about being back in their own land and still slaves to the empires there. So where is exile, really?

It's a state of being. Outside of Eden is exile. You can be standing in Jerusalem and still be in metaphorical exile, because you're outside of Eden.

That's what we have to bring to this moment. Yoseph says to his brothers, Yahweh is going to visit you in the future and bring you up. So make sure my bones go up out of exile.

Yoseph's hope was in a promise he would never see fulfilled in his lifetime, and he staked his burial on it anyway.

He had power. He had position. He had an Egyptian name, an Egyptian wife, Egyptian titles. And he refused to be buried in Egypt, because he knew where home was.

Some of us are in an Egypt season. Things are sustained. There's provision. Maybe even comfort and position. And it gets easy to start calling it home.

But we're citizens of something else.

We are done with Genesis. No study next week — January 5th is when we pick back up, and we open Exodus. I didn't want to start a new book and then immediately vanish for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Same night, same room.

Bring your notes. Exodus picks up right where Yoseph's bones left off.

Praise God for a good run through this book. It's been a joy to walk it with you.

— Pastor Michael Ryan Stotler
    Laughlin Community Church

Missed a session? The full Joseph series is available in our podcast feed.