Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence
Joseph’s faith in God
This is the one act of Joseph’s life which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews selects as the sign that he too lived by faith.
It was at once a proof of how entirely he believed God’s promise, and of how earnestly he longed for its fulfilment. It was a sign of how little he felt himself at home in Egypt, though to outward appearance he had become completely one of its people. The ancestral spirit was in him true and strong, though he was “ separate from his brethren.” This incident, with the New Testament commentary on it, leads us to a truth which we often lose sight of.
I. FAITH IS ALWAYS THE SAME, THOUGH KNOWLEDGE VARIES. There is a vast difference between a man’s creed and a man’s faith. The one may vary-does vary within very wide limits; the other remains the same. What makes a Christian is not theology in the head, but faith and love in the heart. The dry light of the understanding is of no use to anybody. Our creed must be turned into a faith before it has power to bless and save.
II. FAITH HAS ITS NOBLEST OFFICE IN DETACHING FROM THE PRESENT. All his life long, from the day of his captivity, Joseph was an Egyptian in outward seeming. He filled his place at Pharaoh’s court; but his dying words open a window into his soul, and betray how little he had felt that he belonged to the order of things in which he had been content to live. He too confessed that here he had no continuing city, but sought one to come. Dying, he said, “Carry my bones up from hence.” Living, the hope of the inheritance must have burned in his heart as a hidden light, and made him an alien everywhere but upon its blessed soft. Faith will produce just such effects. Does anything but Christian faith engage the heart to love and all the longing wishes to set towards the things that are unseen and eternal? Whatever makes a man live in the past and in the future raises him; but high above all others stand those to whom the past is an apocalypse of God, with Calvary for its centre, and all the future is fellowship with Christ and joy in the heavens.
III. FAITH MAKES MEN ENERGETIC IN THE DUTIES OF THE PRESENT. Joseph was a true Hebrew all his days; but that did not make him run away from Pharaoh’s service. He lived by hope, and that made him the better worker in the passing moment. True Christian faith teaches us that this is the workshop where God makes men, and the next the palace where He shows them. The end makes the means important. This is the secret of doing with our might whatsoever our hand finds to do--to trust Christ, to live with Him and by the hope of the inheritance. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
Joseph’s instructions as to the disposal of his body:
To keep alive among them the truth that they were yet to go to Canaan, and to preserve in the midst of them the evidence of his faith that they should ultimately possess that land, he left his body, embalmed, yet unburied, among them, with the instruction that when they did go, they should take it along with them. They say that at the feasts of Egypt it was usual to bring a mummy to the table, that the guests might be reminded thereby of their mortality. But Joseph here left his coffined body to his people, that by its presence among them, and preservation by them, they might never forget that Egypt was not their final resting-place--their national home--and might be stimulated to hold themselves in constant readiness to arise and go to their own land. (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
The fulfilment of Joseph’s request as to his body:
How was this request of Joseph’s fulfilled? Read with me these two passages, and you will see: “And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you” (Exo_13:19). It was a terrible night. The destroying angel had passed through Egypt and laid low the first-born, in every household. The panic-stricken Pharaoh had ordered the Israelites away at once, and they started in great haste. Yet even in that crisis they did not forget the descending obligation of the oath which their fathers had sworn to Joseph, and they took time to carry with them his remains. Read again: “And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for a hundred pieces of silver; and it became the inheritance of the children of Joseph” (Jos_24:32). Thus, between the death and burial of Joseph an interval of probably from three to four hundred years elapsed, during all of which his remains were kept by the children of Israel, a witness to the faith by which he was animated, and a prophecy of their ultimate possession of the land of Canaan, so that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews had a right to say, “By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones” (Heb_11:22). (W. M. Taylor, D. D.)
Dying orders:
The narrative reminds us of the memorable orders given by Lord Nelson when dying. As his comrades raised him from the deck where he had fallen after receiving the fatal wound, he exclaimed, “I die.” On his way to the cabin, whither they immediately conveyed him, his observant eye perceived that the tiller ropes had been shot away. Still interested in circumstances from which he was soon to take a final departure, he instantly gave the order, “Replace the ropes.” Laid upon a cot, he said to the attendant surgeon, “Leave me; render aid to those who can be profited by it.” Entertaining the same twofold conviction he entertained when he issued the order for battle--victory for England, death for Nelson--he lay calmly awaiting the anticipated result. Thinking, apparently, of the signal which for the encouragement of his soldiers he had exhibited from the mast-head as the two fleets came within range--“England expects every man to do his duty to-day” he whispered, I have done my duty. As Hardy, the captain of the ship, reported, “The victory is complete,” he slowly raised himself upon his arm to give his last order: “Bring the fleet to anchor to-night.” When reminded that this duty would devolve upon another, he sternly exclaimed, “Hardy, obey my order; anchor to-night.” Obedience to that dying order might have saved many a dismantled ship and hundreds of lives. But when the winds which scattered and nearly wrecked England’s victorious navy were howling through the torn rigging and sinking one disabled ship after another, the voice which gave this needed order, and could have enforced it, was silent in death. Nelson’s last energies were expended in giving a command in the interests of a nation whose honour he had died in defending: a command which he hoped would be obeyed after his death, though it might call for the surrender of present advantages in the anticipation of future security. Believing fully that a severe storm was pending, he gave an order which, though it could be of no value to him, might prove, if obeyed, an inestimable blessing to those who should survive him, and might save England’s victorious fleet. In this incident three facts are especially worthy of note, as having a parallel in the dying words of Joseph: the conviction that he stood by death’s river, that victory awaited his countrymen, that they needed an order which should be obeyed after his death. (J. S. Van Dyke.)
