1. For more than twenty years Jacob mourned for Joseph as dead. The monotony of those years was broken only by new misfortunes, which came upon each other's heels, as the messengers of calamity to Job. But the night of weeping was followed by the morning of joy. Joy looked in at the old man's window; and sorrow and sighing fled away. What a confusion of emotion must have filled his heart when his sons stood once again before him with such amazing tidings! Benjamin was there, and Simeon. Love had welded them together in the furnace of sorrow, like a twelve-linked chain, no link of which would ever again be missing. The God of their fathers had met with them; and henceforward would supply their needs so fully, that they could have no further lack, though the famine should last thrice seven years. And, above all, Joseph was yet alive; and he was governor over all the land of Egypt. What wonder that the aged heart stood still, and its machinery almost threatened to break down, beneath the pressure of sudden rapture. At first he could not believe it all. But the sight of the waggons convinced him. Then there came forth a gleam of the royal spirit of faith-the spirit of Jacob revived, and Israel said, “It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive; I will go and see him before I die.”
It was a momentous resolution. He was called upon to abandon, for an indefinite period, the land which God had given him as the heir of His promise. With very great toil and not a little danger had Jacob won his way back to Canaan from Mesopotamia; on this return he had spent the best years of his life, and now he was resting there in his old age, having seen his children's children, and expecting nothing but a peaceful departure to his fathers. But suddenly the waggons of Pharaoh stand at his tent-door, and while the parched and bare pastures bid him go to the plenty of Egypt, to which the voice of his long-lost son invites him, he hears a summons which, however trying, he cannot disregard.
2. Even when he started on his journey, Jacob would seem to have been doubtful as to his proper course, or even, as has been said, “engaged in eager debate as to the path of duty.” Abraham, when in Egypt, had been brought into great danger; Isaac had been forbidden to go thither. Moreover, Egypt was not only a heathen land, but one in which idolatry had long been practised and had assumed gross forms of a revolting character. Still, it would seem, though in much doubt, he determined to go-he quitted Hebron, and “took his journey with all that he had,” and proceeding southwards to the extreme limits of the Holy Land, to the very verge of the Desert, halted at Beersheba. There, his doubts were ended. During many years of solitary sorrow he had had no vision of the Highest. Earthly pain had absorbed him as it often absorbs us, and he was in danger of losing God had it tortured him much longer. He was growing inwardly in strength, unconsciously; but had no delight come to transfigure his soul, he might now have broken down in misery. Therefore God came to him upon a tide of joy, and the old spiritual Presence that had met him at Bethel and Peniel was realized again. As he passed by Beersheba, he offered sacrifices; God spake to him in the visions of the night, and again confirmed his promise, adding to it words that told him his long sorrow was remembered by God, and that God was partaker of his joy. “I will go down with thee into Egypt; … and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.” It was the last of the visions. God came no more outwardly, for He needed not. In the new peace and joy of life, Jacob felt God for ever dwelling in his heart. The Omnipresent One had come to abide in him as a well-loved guest who would have the closest spiritual union with him. The work had been done; the long education was finished. It only remained for him in quiet contemplation to re-live the past, to round into perfection within himself all he had been taught, to look forward with ever-brightening hope to death and God.
3. It was with such knowledge and such feelings that Jacob went down into Egypt, and came into the presence of Pharaoh. What a strange apparition to pass so calmly and unconsciously into the presence of a king; to stand in its grand and fresh simplicity amid the worldly splendours and exact formalities of a court! This pastoral chieftain, his raiment fragrant of the pastures, his eyes bedimmed with age, his withered face lined and furrowed with the marks of a vast and varied experience, must have seemed to the Egyptian courtiers like a being from another world. Something, indeed, of the awe and strangeness of this feeling appears in Pharaoh's question, “How many are the days of the years of thy life?”-words in which there is a tone as it were of softness and wonder, as if the king would fain realize, in the drawing out of his phrase, the many days of those long years through which the patriarch had lived and struggled and suffered. It was just the kind of question, and just the mode of putting it, to awaken in the patriarch's mind the thousand slumbering memories of the past. Throwing back his gaze over that sad and chequered history which we have reviewed, he sees it at length in its true character. Not by any means such a course as he had once dreamed of, when he had schemed and deceived to secure it-brilliant, successful, victorious! No! “Few and evil,” he answers, “have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.”
At length Jacob sees what life is-not a march of warriors, not even a joyous harvest of the years; but only a pilgrimage; a passing through and not abiding; yea, the passing through a desert, where the patches of verdure are few, and the hot stretches of sand many and interminable; not a home for a man to lay up his treasure in, but a country strange and barren, to be traversed and left behind.
That life is so short and so sad is the universal complaint. What is any man's? A pilgrimage, a tale that is told, a handbreadth, a dream, a sleep, a vapour, a shadow, a fading flower, a wind, nothing, vanity. That is empirical life as all men find it. “What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!”
A moment's halt, a momentary taste,
Of being from the well amid the waste,
And lo! the phantom caravan has reached
The nothing it set out from-Oh, make haste!
Is life itself, then, evil? Does Jacob, whose days have been few and evil, think so? Is he one of “the weary pessimists, life's tired-out guests,” who cry that life is not worth living. No, it is only his life, or any actual man's life, that is evil. Life, the gift of God, is worthy of the Giver. To every true Hebrew and every true man life is essentially, wonderfully good-if only it were longer, and we better! Our sorrowful complaint that our days are few and evil is the pathetic evidence of the presence in every human soul of a craving for life as God meant it to be-an ideal, a perfect life. We hunger and thirst for it-for a life sweet, and pure, and everlasting.1 [Note: J. Strachan, Hebrew Ideals, ii. 144.]
Some have the great grace given them of late years to go in and out, to lie down and rise up, always staff in hand, like apostles on pilgrimage-always with loins girt, never with more in the purse than will carry them one stage on, never with more in their wardrobe than the daily wear. Like Wesley, if they are suddenly taken, they have left no engagements unfulfilled, they have no letters to answer, or matters to arrange. The children they leave cannot but talk about them as if they had just been seen off on some happy excursion; no farewells to say, no tears to be shed; nothing but to go after them in a day or two.2 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 133.]
