It is a noble scene which is brought before us by the simple record of the historian; and I call upon you to behold it, that you may learn what faith can do against the promptings of nature, the suggestions of suspicion, and the dictates of pride.
I know what would be likely to be the uppermost feelings in that expiring man, who, amid all the insignia of authority and wealth, is bidding farewell to brethren and children. I know what he might be expected to do and to say. His wasted features might be lit up with a smile of exultation, as he surveyed the tokens of almost regal state; and he might say to those around, “Behold the glory to which I have raised you, and which I bequeath to you and your posterity. It will be your own fault if this glory decay: the best of all Egypt is yours, if you do not, through indolence or love of change, suffer that it be wrested from your hold.” But nothing of this kind proceeds from the dying man’s lips. Interpret his last words, and they are as though he had said, “Children and brethren, he not deceived by your present prosperity; this is not your home; it is not here, notwithstanding the appearances, that God wills to separate you to Himself. Ye are the descendants of Abraham; and Egypt, with its idols, is no resting-place for such. Ye must be ever on the alert, expecting the signal of departure from a land, whose treasures are but likely to detain you from the high calling designed for you by God. Settle not then yourselves, but be ye always as strangers; strangers where you seem firmly established, and where, by a marvellous concurrence of events, you have risen to dominion.” Such, we say, are virtually the utterances of the expiring patriarch. And when you think that, by these utterances, he was taking the most effectual way of destroying the structure so surprisingly reared, and on which it were incredible that he did not himself gaze with amazement and delight; that he was detaching those whom he loved from all which, on human calculation, was most fitted to uphold them in glory and power, I assent, in all its breadth, to the statement of St. Paul, that it was “by faith” that “Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel.” But we have not yet spoken of Joseph’s giving “commandment concerning his bones”; and this is far too memorable a circumstance to be passed over without special comment. Why, think ye, did Joseph wish to lie unburied in the midst of his people, except that his bones might perpetually preach to them, that Egypt was not to be their home, but must be abandoned for Canaan? The lesson, that they were to be expecting to depart from the country which had received them, he longed to enforce after death, knowing that his brethren would be likely to forget it. But how shall he accomplish this? Let his bones lie unburied because they wait the being carried up to Canaan, and will there not be an abiding memento to the Israelites, that, sooner or later, the Lord will transplant them to the land which He promised to their fathers? It is in this way that we interpret the commandment of Joseph. You have heard of the preaching of a spectre: the spirit that passed before the face of Eliphaz, and caused the hair of his flesh to stand up, came from the invisible world to give emphasis, as well as utterance, to the question, “Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more just than his Maker?” And here you have, not the preaching of a spectre, but the preaching of a skeleton: the bones of Joseph are converted into an orator, and make “mention of the departing of the children of Israel.” The patriarch could no longer warn and command his descendants with the voice of a living man: his tongue was mute in death: but there was eloquence in his sepulchred limbs. Wherefore had he not been gathered to his fathers? It was a dead thing, which nevertheless appeared reluctant to die: it seemed to haunt the earth in its lifelessness, as though it had not finished the office for which it had been born. And since it could not fail to be known for what purpose the body of one, so honoured, lay unburied year after year, did not Joseph’s bones perpetually repeat his dying utterances? and could anything better have been devised to keep up the remembrance of what his last words had taught, than this his subsistence as a skeleton, when he had long ceased to be numbered with the living? But we ought not to fail to observe, before we quit the death-bed of Joseph, that, forasmuch as unquestionably the Spirit of God actuated the expiring patriarch, and perhaps dictated his words, the commandment as to his bones may have been designed to imitate, or illustrate, the truth of a resurrection. I cannot but infer, from this anxiety of Joseph in regard to his grave, that he did not consider the body as a thing to be thrown aside so soon as the vital principle were extinct. He who shows anxiety as to the treatment of his remains shows something of a belief, whether he confess it or not, that these remains are reserved for other purposes and scenes. I can hardly think that Joseph believed that his body would never live again: he would scarcely have provided it a sepulchre in Canaan, if persuaded that, in dying, it would be finally destroyed. His bones might as well have rested in Egypt, had he not imagined them appointed, to the being brought up from the dust and again sinewed with life. But on the supposition of a belief, or even the faintest conjecture, of a resurrection, we seem to understand why the dying patriarch longed to sleep in the promised land. “I will not leave,” he seems to say, “this body to be disregarded, and trampled on, as though it were merely that of an animal whose existence wholly terminates at death. That which God takes care of, reserving it for another life, it becomes not man to despise, as though undeserving a thought. And though the eye of the Almighty would be on my dust in Egypt, as in Canaan, yet would I rather rest with the righteous than with the wicked in the grave, with my fathers and my kinsmen, than with the foreigner and the enemy. If I am to start from long and dark slumbers, let those who wake with me be those whom I have loved, and who are to share with me the unknown existence.” (H. Melvill, B. D.)
The patriarch Joseph as a builder of the city of God
Why does our author fix upon the request of the dying patriarch concerning the removal of his bones to the land of promise, as constituting his special claim to rank amongst the chief builders of the City of Faith? Not certainly because of the lack of other and appropriate material. For Joseph, like Barnabas, was a good man, full of faith, and of the spirit of holiness, and his life from boyhood to old age displayed a conspicuous strength of confidence in the living God as the Redeemer and Ruler of his life. Surely with a biography, every page of which recounts the power and blessedness of trust in the Lord, he must have had deep and strong reason for restricting his choice to the last page of the volume. Did he shrink from including in his list of world-builders any one on whom death had not set its seal of finality--in obedience to the maxim of Solon, “Call no man happy till he is dead”? That cannot be, for this list of world-builders is certainly no mere gathering of the “ last sayings” of dying men. It throbs with the passion, and is luminous with the achievements of full and strong life. In the judgment of the compiler of this list, the patriarch Joseph reveals the unsubduable strength of a valorous soul; when approaching his end, he speaks of the exodus of Israel, and gives commandment concerning his bones. But it is not improbable that the memorable words of Joseph came into his mind as he recalled the vision of the dying patriarch Jacob, imparting his blessing to Ephraim and Manasseh, and adoring God for the manifold mercies of his long life. Making all allowance for the influence of this law of association, yet I feel sure a deeper reason governed his choice of this specific moment in Joseph’s career as signally illustrative of Joseph’s faith. He saw in these words the characteristic quality of the man’s faith--the essential soul of him and of it--living as well as dying, guiding not less than crowning his life; a faith in God essentially patriotic, identifying him with the fortunes of his father’s house and the future of his people, and constituting him one of the founders of the commonwealth of Israel, and thereby one of the builders of the eternal city of God. That such reasoning is valid will appear if we briefly examine the contents and characteristics of Joseph’s faith. His end is nigh; but the soul of the deputy-king is absorbed in thoughts and hopes concerning the future of his brethren, and breathes out its deep yearnings in a solemn adjuration to them to pledge him in an unbroken faith in the living God, the God of Israel. No anxiety for self darkens his last moments; no consideration for his greatness and fame disturbs the serenity of his soul. The request of Joseph concerning his bones, wears, I daresay, to some of us, an aspect of concern for himself, but really it is only an additional witness to the patriotic quality of his faith, and the quenchlessness of his hope. The ruling passion, “love of his brethren,” is strong in death. As the faith of Moses incarnated itself in uncomplaining endurance for forty years of the severest spiritual discipline, and that of Abraham in a splendid venture into a trackless desert at the bidding of the God who had chosen him, so the faith of the patriarch Joseph clad itself in the self-suppressing, pure, and far-seeing patriotism of his farewell appeals and aspirations. Thus, “by faith,” Joseph built the city of God in a day of impending trial and prolonged and acute suffering. But his speech makes clear that his “faith “ rested on the solid basis that human life is a Divine order; that his own life had been moulded by God, the Watcher and Ruler of mankind, who had given him his education, and his place in the administration of the affairs of Egypt and the world. Joseph saw that truth early, and rarely, if ever, lost sight of it. It shines like a brilliant star in the darkest night of his life. It is the thread of gold woven into the web of his character. But this “order” and that “faith “ have for their goal, their “objective,” the future of Israel; the deliverance, guardianship, development, and service of the people of God’s special choice. “By faith,” Joseph makes mention not of his “bones” first, but of the “ departure “ of the children of Israel from Egypt on their way to the new home and fatherland in Palestine. Real faith in God embraces a good future. Joseph had said of his life at each stage, “God did it”--God, first and last--God, and not men, and so his farewell word is a gospel of God and of the future, “God will surely visit you.” For faith in God carries faith in man’s advance, in, his sure if slow, spiritual growth, in the perfection of society and the ascendency of righteousness, peace, and joy. And is not the same device, “God did it,” traceable on the extended walls of our British history? Through all the chaos and disorder, recklessness and revolution of our ancestors, there is a Divine purpose and a Divine energy working out for us a future rich in promise for all the sons of men. The making of the nations is in the hands of its true and trusty souls who expel selfishness by the love of God, self-will by obedience to the Divine order, and despair by a living hope in the redeeming God. It is Joseph who is “crowned amongst his brethren”:--Joseph, not Reuben. The firstborn is deposed. Instability cannot rule, for it cannot guide. Reuben must give way to the stronger soul of the boy he loves. Cruelty pulls down and destroys. “Weapons of violence” may keep off a foe, but they do not guarantee primacy of political power. “By faith” Joseph gains his place, and “by faith” he holds it after his death, advancing his formative and inspiring influence in the life of the people, through that commandment concerning his bones. Patriotism is fed from three perennial fountains--God, the Home, and History. God is the supreme politician; He is the Maker of nations and peoples. He does not leave us solitary, but setteth us in families, cities, nations, and empires. No part of our life is strange to Him; He filleth all in all, and faith in His Divine administration helps each citizen to find his place in the plan of God, to see his duty, to cast out evil, and to build for righteousness and peace. “Christians are the soul of the world,” said the writer of the Epistle to Diognetus. What our politics need is soul; therefore Christians ought to be the best patriots and the most devoted politicians. Fed by faith in God, nourished in homes radiant with His presence, and guided by the Divine flame that burns in the bush of history, it is theirs to make and mould the purest, gladdest, strongest civic life of the world. See to it, therefore, that you choose your legislators for their strong faith in the living God and in the future of humanity. Put your conscience into your choice. Be not deceived by brilliant gifts. Never surrender your power to the greed of place and pelf. But remember, too, that the safety and progress of states and the widening welfare of mankind depend upon the heroic service of individual citizens, on men and women who, through faith in God, are masters of themselves, patient with suffering and failure, but impatient at wrong, iniquity, and dishonour, and who give to the world the distinctive influence of a pure Christian character and the consecrated service of a noble Christian life. “Ye are the light of the world.” “Ye are the salt of the earth.” (J. Clifford, D. D.)
The wonderful story of Joseph’s bones
1. It is not possible to read the life of Joseph without beholding here the portrait of a great man, not merely as commanding and guiding intelligence, but that which is higher yet, a strong and noble, personal character.
2. He was what we should call a self-made man; he was as much so as any man can be a self-made man; his life was one long contest with difficulties, but he overcame them all. He was made by God.
3. The greatness of Joseph was what we call moral greatness. He was not a warrior; he had insight and foresight; and he had that which really makes life easy and character strong. He had principles: faith ruled and controlled his character. And thus he ascended to the place of power in the great land of the Nile. So in the country of the Pyramids he ruled and he died. Can you see him in death?--surrounded by the dusky magnificence of that strong and ancient monarchy, the barbaric pearl and gold there, the Pharoah of that day waiting there and endeavouring to detain awhile the wisdom of that mighty and far-seeing mind. But where is he? Where is Joseph? True to the law of our being, by which to die is to recollect the past existence--as Shakespeare makes even that wicked old Falstaff when dying to revisit innocent scenes and babbling of green fields; and some of you will probably remember the story De Quineey tells of his mother, in his “Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” how, in one memorable moment and instant of her life, when very near to death, her whole life started before her, all its moments successive and yet instantaneous; which leads De Quincey himself to remark, that there is no such thing as “ultimate forgetting”--true to the Divine law, his memory is away in the fields of his youth, fields, perhaps, not seen since the day when he left his father’s house to be a prisoner and an exile. He is among the fields of Hebron, he is a boy again. He sees the tender face of Rachel, his mother, his venerable father, long since gathered to the earlier patriarchs, Shechem, the Ishmaelites, the well--these all rise before his eyes, soon to be dismissed. But other associations will not go; more mysterious presences are about him; unseen fingers are drawing aside the curtains of the future history of his nation and his posterity; the enrapturing visions of death are thronging before him; he sees the persecution and the tyranny of the centuries as they rave and roll round his dust; he sees the march of the multitudes through the wilderness, the dividing sea, the tabernacle, the cloud, the pillar, Canaan, the temple; he sees the hurrying people, the rising thrones, the little mountain monarchy destined to throw a spell of power over the world when obscurity should fold the fame of Egypt and Assyria. Then there came a thought of his own dust. Shall I lie here alone amidst Egyptian sands, while they are there? My bones amidst idolatrous crowds while the people of the covenant have crossed the river to their inheritance? No!
I. See here THE NATIONALITY OF JOSEPH. His heart turns to Canaan. You see, here is an illustration, in the wearied statesman, of that which the apostle assigns to these patriarchs of faith. He, too, by this act, confessed himself a stranger and pilgrim. He who could give this commandment concerning his bones, “declared plainly that he sought a country”; that he, in fact, “was mindful of the country whence he came out, that he desired opportunity to return thither”; nay, that he descried “a better country, a heavenly.”
II. But underlying this there was a far deeper feeling, a far higher and a far mightier without which it would have been the mere boast of race distinction--it was THE LESSON OF FAITH. He believed, “he counted Him faithful who had promised.” Joseph was one of the children of the promise. His affections for his people, for his family, were founded in his affection for God, his father’s God. “I die, but God shall surely visit you.” It was clear to the mind of the patriarch--the affliction, the tyranny, the departure. The world would seek to enslave the Church, and then God would say, “Loose her, and let her go,” and then the Church would arise and depart. He knew the promise made to Abraham by “two immutable things”; he knew the people that were to be “as the stars of the sky in multitude, as the sands on the sea-shore innumerable.” It was Faith--“God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry my bones up from hence”; “he made mention of the departure of the children of Israel, and gave commandment concerning his bones.”
III. He died! Shall we then say here, How men speak when they are dead? May we not say, Read here, in this history, a lesson of THE SUSTAINING POWER THERE IS IN THE MEMORIES OF GREAT AND GOOD MEN. HOW long it seemed, the dreary night--long seemed the covenant lost; it was buried, not lost; those bones were a kind of witness, those dying words were a testimony to the faithfulness of God. Thus often truth is buried, or a noble character seems lost; but fear not for anything on which God has set His seal. At last the moment comes; they hurry out of the land, but they do not in their haste forget those bones, they are borne along with them on their mysterious march. In the long progress through the wilderness old men dropped and died, children were born, children became men and women--still there was the wonderful chest, the bones the same as when they came up from Egypt. In their progress through the desert, by those Sinaitic rocks, the awful dead seemed to add to their criminality, when they doubted; to their hopes, as they moved upon their way, like an enchantment and a terror to such a people. The spell of his words was upon them in which “he gave commandment concerning his bones.” No; great good men do not pass away, as some suppose. We have a very legible illustration in the guardian care exercised over the relics; Joseph lived in the thoughts and affections and hopes of his descendants. The dust of the holy dead is precious, the words of the holy dead are watchwords “Thy dead men shall live together, with My dead body shall they arise.”
IV. I cannot but think that there was here A HINT, A HOPE, AN ASPIRATION “TOUCHING THE RESURRECTION.” I cannot but think that the glorious dreamer anticipated, not only the departure of the tribes, but the final unsealing of all those tombs, and longed rather to be near the old cemetery of Machpelah than amidst the cold, dark, stony, stately rooms of Egyptian pyramids and their coffins. Yes, as in that hour when the tribes in their flight could not leave behind them those bones, but bore them to their appointed resting-place in the promised land, so shall it be in the resurrection of the dead. At the risk of seeming to say what, to fastidious ears, may seem the mere refining of spiritualism, I will say, God will suffer no dust to remain in Egypt that belongs to Canaan; nothing that belongs to Grace shall remain beneath the dominion of Nature; there is an eye that watches; there is a law by which it will resume its own empire. There is a “commandment concerning our bones.” (E. Paxton Hood.)
Sanctity of the body:
Not their historic deeds, but their faith was the point of selection for all the heroes of this great chapter; their forelooking and their belief of things not yet happened, so as to influence their daily life and conduct. Their faith; that is, the power of the sanctified imagination acting upon spiritual and temporal things. Yet, not what they did--their various achievement, but what they were internally, in regard to this one point, determined who should be admitted and who should not. Even the poor harlot of Jericho had a place in this national gallery, because she acted upon a sagacious foresight of faith, and did good to the spies that Israel had sent forth. And what more significant than the same account of Joseph! Egypt was the world’s capital, advanced higher in civilisation than any or all others. Glory, on every side, had its symbols. Now, he-requests of all this regnant glory nothing. In his dying hour it was to him as a fable; as a thing like a summer’s brook run dry. He asks for no history to be chiselled on obelisk or temple facade, or writing upon papyrus. “Swear to me that you will carry my bones to the sepulchre of my fathers, to the cave of Machpelah, where Abraham and Isaac and Jacob rest. Let me slumber among them.” He had never forgotten his country. Egypt could not make him an Egyptian; exile could not make him a foreigner; all the gorgeous civilisation could not make him forget his shepherd-home. Palaces, sculptured temples, magnificent ceremonies of sepulture. He longed to leave the Nile and to sleep where the Jordan rolled, or near it. The faith of his youth and the love of his childhood and fidelity to his nation and his kindred remained uncorrupted by the whole prosperity of his imperial life, and is that nothing? Is this fidelity to brotherhood, native land, and ancestry to be counted as unworthy of a record? Ten thousands of men dwell among us and are cheered by a prosperity such as never came to their earlier years, yet old age will babble still of the circumscription of youth, and the dying fire will kindle a flame of love to the old home, and he were no worthy citizen of this empire who could in his prosperity forget the home of his childhood and the tongue of his people; for among the things that are sacred, none are more so than the remembrances of the paternal roof of childhood. “What!” says the hard Materialist, of this fancy. “Why should he want to take his bones from the sands of Egypt? What matter where the body sleeps? This concern for the perishable body is not scientific; it is a mirage of sentiment.” Nevertheless, sentiment is more fruitful of joy and as fruitful of elevation as science itself. And as the solid earth on which we build is important, and the sky, with its rolling clouds and its translucent atmosphere, not less important, so in human life, while we do not disdain the facts, neither should we disdain the fancies. There is a shock given to a superior sentiment when the body is discarded and thrown out as something worn-out and worthless. All that is noblest in human consciousness, revolts at any indifference of this kind. How well has the body served us; our senses, as if they were so many ministers of God, bringing in treasures hour by hour, year after year, in their round--through the eye. Or who can count what the ear has done for us?-the highway along which have trooped such thoughts, such feelings have been enunciated, such loves have whispered, such sweet sounds ministered to us. Who can tell what that golden gate, the ear, is, through which God’s messages of kindness to men have moved in multitude? What joy have we had in the voice! How well has this strangely delicate, yet wonderfully enduring body served us, with its various implements and organs, secret or open and visible--what a service has it rendered to every one in life! Even by the law of association one should come to honour it. So we do. The poor, helpless, withered, almost speechless old woman that sits in the corner is the mother of our mother. We do not see her palsied and dried like an untimely apple overkept--what we see is her service, her life-love--the atmosphere that springs from affection and fidelity--that is whatwe see as it hovers around about her--the exhalation of the heart, not the despoiling of the body. To this law of association it seems to me the whole world is indebted, I had almost said more than to knowledge itself. Is it no matter, after life is over, what becomes of the body--the fair form of your wife? She taught you the deepest lessons of love, and of the life of love. Could you bear to see her cast out, or to know that she lay on some barren field, or that the wild beasts had devoured her. Everything in a man revolts at that idea of the very form that has been to us as a temple of God, and is sacred to us. Is it nothing to you where your baby sleeps? Could you carry your child on a blustering March day, as I carried mine, amidst the snows, and not shiver yourself, as you laid the dear child into the ground? It is not a phantasy, but an intensely natural feeling that has led the mother to wrap her dead child in flannel that it might be warm in the winter’s grave. And are these associations of the human body of no sanctity and of no value whatsoever? Regard for one’s body should be and often is a moral influence, as certainly it is a refining influence when it is regard for duties owing. Self-respect is one of God’s ministers of education in life. Respect for one’s self is the consciousness that you are a king. If none others think so of you, think so of yourself in all that pertains to real royalty, and not alone in the realm of thought, or of association, or of affection, but in respect to the body. Hold it in honour in life, and for an honourable sepulture in death. He will be likely to respect another man’s person who has a scrupulchre respect for his own. (H. W. Beecher.)
Joseph’s bones:
It may seem surprising that the charge of Joseph concerning his body should be mentioned as a notable act of faith, and not the similar charge delivered by Jacob; for did not Jacob also give commandment concerning his bones (Gen_49:29-31)? Why was not that a case of faith in Jacob as much as in Joseph? We cannot always speak positively of these things, but we think that there is a very decided difference between the two. Jacob’s wish to lie in Machpelah was by himself described as resting mainly on the grounds of natural affection. When his soul should be gathered to his people he would have his body lie side by side with his own relatives. This wish was probably as much an outgoing of nature as an expression of grace. Of course, natural affection would have led Joseph to desire the same thing, but he does not put it on that score. Moreover, you notice that Jacob commands his sons to do with his bones what they could readily do; they were to take him to Machpelah and bury him at once. He knew his son Joseph to be in power in Egypt; and therefore anything that was wanted for his funeral would be provided. Jacob therefore commanded nothing to be done but what could be done; there was no very remarkable exhibition of faith in commanding an immediate funeral which the filial love of Joseph would readily secure. Joseph not only wished to be buried in Machpelah, which was nature, but he would not be buried there till the land was taken possession of, which was an exhibition of the grace of faith. He wished his unburied body to share with the people of God in their captivity and their return. It was faith in Jacob, but it was remarkable faith in Joseph; and God who looks not simply at the act, but at the motive of the act, has been pleased not to put down Jacob as an instance of dying faith in this particular matter of his bones, but to award praise to Joseph as exhibiting in death a memorable degree of confidence in the promise. Probably Jacob’s dying faith, when exercised upon other matters, outshone his faith in connection with his burial, while in his favourite son that matter was his leading proof of faith.
I. THE POWER OF FAITH; the endurance of true faith under three remarkable modes of test.
1. First, the power of faith over worldly prosperity. It is hard to carry a full cup with a steady hand, some spilling will usually occur; but where grace makes rich men, and men in high position and authority to act becomingly, then grace is greatly glorified. You who are rich should see your danger; but let the case of Joseph be your encouragement. There is no need that you should be worldly, there is no need that you should sink the Israelite in the Egyptian.
2. Secondly, you see here the power of his faith exhibited in its triumph over death. He speaks of dying as though it were only a part of living, and comparatively a small matter to him. He gives no evidence of trepidation; but he bears his last witness concerning the faithfulness of God and the infallibility of his promise. Moreover, if I am to gather from the text that the Holy Spirit has singled out the brightest instance of faith in Joseph’s whole life, it is beautiful to remark that the grand old man becomes most illustrious in his last hour. Death did not dim, but rather brightened the gold in his character. On his death-bed, beyond all the rest of his life, his faith, like the setting sun, gilds all around with glory; now that heart and flesh fail him, God becomes more than ever the strength of his life, as He was soon to be his portion for ever.
3. Once more, here is a proof of the power of faith in laughing at impossibilities. It seemed a very unlikely thing that the Israelites should go up out of Egypt. Why should they wish to go?
II. THE WORKINGS OF FAITH.
1. The first fruit of faith in Joseph was this--he would not be an Egyptian. No doubt he would have had a sumptuous tomb enough in Egypt; but no, he will not be buried there, for he is not an Egyptian. In Sakhara, hard by the great pyramid of Pharaoh Apophis, stands at this day the tomb of a prince, whose name and titles are in hieroglyphic writing. The name is “Eitsuph,” and from among his many titles we choose two--“Director of the king’s granaries,” and the other an Egyptian title, “Abrech.” Now this last word is found in the Scriptures, and is that which is translated, “Bow the knee.” It is more than probable that this monument was prepared for Joseph, but he declined the honour. Though his resting-place would have been side by side with the pyramid of one of Mizraim’s greatest monarchs, yet he would not accept the dignity, he would not be aa Egyptian. This is one of the sure workings of faith in a man of wealth and rank; when God places him in circumstances where he might be a worldling of the first order, if his faith be genuine, he says, “No; I will not even at this rate be numbered with the world.”
2. Notice, next, that his faith constrained him to have fellowship with the people of God. Not only does he refuse to be a worldling, but he avows himself an Israelite.
3. His faith led to an open avowal of his confidence in God’s promise. On his death-bed he said, “I die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land.” He also said, “He will bring you to the land which He promised to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Faith cannot be dumb. I have known her tongue to be silent through diffidence, but at last it has been obliged to speak; and why should not your faith oftener speak, for her voice is sweet and her countenance is comely?
4. Moreover, notice, that having faith himself, he would encourage the faith of others. Every time an Israelite thought of the bones of Joseph, he thought, “We are to go out of this country one day.” True faith seeks to propagate herself in the hearts of others. It is a good proof of your own faith when you lay yourself out to promote the faith of others.
5. Joseph’s faith made him have an eye to the spiritualities of the covenant. Joseph had nothing earthly to gain in having his bones buried in Canaan rather than in Egypt; that can make small difference to a dying man. None of us would voluntarily desire to have his bones kept for some hundreds of years out of the ground in order that they might ultimately come into the family sepulchre. I believe he had no eye to the mere secularities of the covenant, but was looking to the spiritual blessings which are revealed in Jesus, the great seed of Abraham.
6. Joseph’s faith in connection with his unburied bones showed itself in his willingness to wait God’s time for the promised blessing.
III. AN EXAMPLE FOR OUR FAITH TO ACT UPON WHEN WE ALSO COME TO THE TIME OF DEATH. What shall I derive any comfort from when I come to die? Come, let me prepare my last dying speech. Now think it over.
1. First, I would imitate Joseph, by deriving my comfort from the covenant. Jesus, who is Himself the covenant, soothes most blessedly the dying beds of His saints. A negro was asked when he had been sitting up to nurse his minister one night, “How is your master?” Said he, “He is dying full of life.” It is a grand thing when one has the covenant to think on. You can then die full of life, you can pass away out of this lower life, being filled with the life eternal before the life temporal has quite gone out, so that you are never emptied out of life, but the life of grace melts into the life of glory, as the river into the ocean.
2. Joseph may be an example to us, in that he drew his consolation from the future of his people. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
