and let me ask you to take your Bibles and turn with me to Romans chapter 8. Romans chapter 8. The Apostle Paul said that we groan inwardly and creation groans awaiting the day of redemption, the day of the new creation. And then he writes, beginning in verse 26, likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. Creation groans, we groan, and so too does the Holy Spirit. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good. For those who are called according to His purpose, for those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom He predestined, He also called. And those whom He called, He also justified. And those whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died. More than that, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. who shall separate us from the love of Christ, shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword, as it is written, for your sake we are being killed all the day long, we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I'm sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen. And now I'm going to ask you to turn to Genesis chapter 50. Genesis chapter 50. If you've been wondering how long it was going to take us to get through the book of Genesis, now you know. Now you know. We're coming to the last verses of this book this morning. And we're going to read from Genesis 50 verse 15 to the end of the chapter. Hear the word of God. When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, it may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him. So they sent a message to Joseph saying, your father gave this command before he died. Say to Joseph, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin because they did evil to you. and now please forgive the transgression of your servants, the servants of the God of your father. Joseph wept when they spoke to him. His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, behold, we are your servants. But Joseph said to them, do not fear for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. So do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones. Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house. Joseph lived for 110 years, and Joseph saw Ephraim's children to the third generation. The children also of Macabre, the son of Manasseh, were counted as Joseph's own. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, God will surely visit you and you shall carry up my bones from here. So Joseph died. Being 110 years old, they embalmed him and he was put in a coffin in Egypt. Let's pray. And now, our Father, with your Holy Word open before us, we pray for your Holy Spirit to lead us. Teach us, O Lord, what we ought to know today as we come to the closing verses of this great book. Show us Jesus and His glory. and make us like Him, we pray. We ask it in His name. Amen. I once took a crash course in orienteering taught by an army ranger. He ran us through the basics of using a compass and map. He taught us how to get our bearings. And then he sent us out to find a series of preset markers. It was a lot of fun, but it wasn't very easy. Let me just say, if you find yourself lost in the woods, I'm probably not the guy to call. I'll be happy to pray for you if you want to call me for that, but I'm not likely the fella to get you back on course and to safety. Orienteering is more difficult than it may at first seem. It is absolutely essential that you have something to guide you, whether it's a map or a compass or the sun, the moon, the stars, you must orient yourself to find your way. And brothers and sisters, that's not only true when you're lost in the forest, But that is true on the path of life as well. As a young man, Joseph found himself disoriented. A stranger in a strange land, sold into slavery and rejected by his brothers, lied about, made a slave, unjustly accused by Potiphar's wife and imprisoned. He suffered loneliness and homesickness, heartache, suffering. How did he orient himself to all of those trials of life? God was with him and he knew it. Do you remember that translation that Tyndale gave of Joseph's life when he translated the text, the Lord was with Joseph and he was a lucky fellow. The Lord was with his servant and he enjoyed the blessings of God's providential guidance. It was through a series of remarkable providences that God took him from prison and elevated him to the second highest position in the land. Eventually, he was reunited with his family. They moved to Egypt during the years of great famine. But now that time has passed, and now they have buried their father. Moses, in the closing verses of this book, brings us to the final events that he wants us to know about the life of this great man. Here in these two final paragraphs, he telescopes events together, events that are actually separated by quite a few decades. And yet they come together here to form the final words of Joseph and the final scenes of his life as they are recorded for us in Holy Scripture. As Joseph looks back on the events that have transpired in his life, and as he looks forward and anticipates what God will do for his people, he does so with confidence and with courage, with hope, and with expectation. Here is a man who has learned to orient his life by the word of God and by the sovereignty of God. And Joseph's final words, therefore, not only leave a lasting legacy, a remarkable legacy for his family, but they are also a stellar example for us. An example that whether we look to the past or to the future, the only real way to orient our lives is with reference to God. Whether we're thinking about all of those things that have happened to us, or whether we look and anticipate our own day of death, the only way to get our bearings in this world is to turn our eyes to Jesus. Now this morning as we conclude our studies in the first book of the Bible, I want you, I invite you to orient your lives with reference to God. I want to invite you to orient your lives by looking with me this morning in both directions, both to the past and to the future. And as we do so, what we need to learn is to learn to look at the past with faith in God's providence. We need to learn to look at the past with faith in God's providence. Now the occasion for Joseph to reflect on the past and the events that had occurred in his life was a renewed sense of guilt on the part of his brothers, with their father now dead and buried in Canaan. His brothers are fearful that Joseph will use this opportunity to take out his revenge on them for what they had done all those years before. They have a deep sense of regret. They realize how wrong they had been to treat him the way they did. They had a sense of remorse, a sense of guilt, and also a sense of fear. With Jacob gone, with no patriarchal protection between themselves and Joseph, What might happen to them? After all, Joseph is still the second most powerful man in the land. He had had Simeon in prison when he took his brothers through that series of tests. Might he now have them imprisoned as well? Might he even have them led to the executioner's block? Well, they didn't want to wait and find out. They didn't want to see what would happen. They preempted the situation by sending a message to Joseph, a message ostensibly from Jacob, their father, a message that he had given to them before he died. Please forgive your brothers for what they have done to you. Notice the way this message of Jacob is worded, forgive their transgressions. They crossed the boundary. They had done what ought not to be done, what ought never to be done, not only in selling him into slavery, but in faking his death, in making their father believe for all those years that he had been torn apart by a beast. Hatred, avarice, deception, sin piled upon sin, transgression. They had sinned against Him. They had missed the mark. They had not treated Him and loved Him as a brother. They had done evil. They had perpetrated moral wrong. There's no candy coating. There's no sugar coating what these men did. But they sent this message from their father asking for forgiveness. They then add to it their own plea, please forgive the sins of the servants of your father's God. And they appeal to him here for not only a family relationship, but a spiritual bond that now exists between them. These are different men. Then we meet back in chapter 37. Please forgive us, they say. And when Joseph heard their plea, he began to weep. What was it that brought this man of God to tears? Was he brokenhearted because he thought they perceived him to be harsh and unloving and bitter and unkind and vengeful? Was it because he saw a profound sense of humility in these men and witnessed the change that had happened in their lives? Was it because of their now professed allegiance to be servants of their father's God? Was it simply an overflow of love or perhaps a combination of them all? He weeps. over the past, over his brothers, over all that has occurred, and they come into his presence and they fall down at his feet in subservience to him. And when that occurs in verse 18, the story has come full circle. Because isn't this how it all began? With Joseph donning his multicolored coat, spreading the news of his dreams. His dreams of those sheaves bowing down to his sheaf. The dream of the sun and the moon and 11 stars bowing down to him. It was Those dreams that made his brothers resentful of him. And now those dreams have been fulfilled as they subject themselves before him. They fell before him. even though they had been reconciled to him years before when he forgave their sin and brought them to Egypt to live with him. These men had a renewed sense of their guilt and sin that rose up like a specter to haunt them. And that really, folks, isn't all of that unusual. The sins of our past often come back to haunt us. Sins that we have confessed, sins that we have brought to the foot of the cross, sins for which we have pled the cleansing of Jesus' blood and the promise that we read earlier in 1 John 1, 9, if we confess our sins. He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. But there are those times in life when a memory of a past transgression, We'll like for these brothers rise up as a specter to haunt us and will fill us with feelings of guilt. An emotional turmoil begins to arise in our hearts. Our minds become clouded with doubt and we begin to wonder, have we been forgiven after all? Has Jesus really been gracious? Have we really been reconciled? to our God, could that thing we did ever, could it ever be truly forgiven? Before Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones went to pastor Westminster Chapel in London, England, he was a minister in Wales in an area called Sandfields in Aberavon. It was there, he said, he witnessed one of the most remarkable conversions he ever saw. A man named William Thomas, nicknamed Staffordshire Bill, was a notorious sinner in town. There was hardly a sin you could name that he had not committed. Bill sold fish door to door, but he could often be seen with his fish cart pulling him home after he had fallen over back onto the pile of fish passed out from his drunkenness. His mouth was so foul the other drunkards in town didn't want to drink with him. He often found himself in the pub drinking himself into oblivion all alone. But one evening, he finally mustered the courage to make it to the church where he had heard God was at work, and that there was hope for a man like him. That evening, the Lord opened his heart. He understood the gospel for the first time, and he was gloriously changed. In fact, when he left the church that evening, someone introduced him to Mrs. Lloyd-Jones and said, this is Stafford Shire Bill. And he said, oh, no, no, no, that's an old, very bad man. I am now William Thomas. He went on to join the church in his late 70s. He took communion that day that he joined for the first time in the evening service and it was a spiritual experience unlike he had ever had in his life. He was euphoric with the peace of God that all of his sins had been forgiven. He went home from church that evening and thinking back over the day and all that had transpired in his life, The memory of a sin from 30 years before came back to him like a flash. It was a blasphemy, a terrible blasphemy that he had uttered in an argument in the pub. Immediately his mind was filled with darkness. Immediately he was filled with fear. immediately doubt flooded his mind. Could that be forgiven? Oh, yes, all the years of drunkenness, all of the lying and the cheating and the deception and immorality that he had committed. Yes, yes, that could be forgiven. But, oh, could this sin be forgiven? Perhaps you've had an experience like that. Perhaps you will have an experience like that when something from your past rises up to haunt you. Sometimes that will occur in the wake of great spiritual victory. That's certainly the case with William Thomas. Sometimes that will occur during times of great physical and emotional stress. This was certainly the case with Joseph's brothers. In fact, they experienced both of those, both spiritual highs and physical lows. They had heard the prophecies that Jacob had uttered over their life in chapter 49, prophecies of God's blessing to come upon them with great richness and abundance. But they had also suffered the heartache of his death and the arduous journey back to Canaan to bury him. And this combination of, if you will, spiritual euphoria, the spiritual high, along with the physical and emotional low, brought them to a time of crisis. Don't be surprised if that kind of thing happens to you. When you go through great times of spiritual blessing, enjoy them, rejoice in them, but be on your guard because Satan is not gonna be happy for you to stay there. He's going to try to destroy that. When you go through great times of stress, times of exhaustion, be on your guard because when you are physically and emotionally weak and compromised, the devil will use those occasions to attack you with doubts and fears. This is exactly what happened to Joseph's brothers. One of the most spiritual things you can do in a time like that is have a good meal and go to bed because your body needs strength. But the ultimate answer to a renewed sense of guilt is a renewed word of grace. When these brothers fell before Joseph. I could imagine that scene, choking out the words through his tears. He says to them, don't be afraid. In fact, he says it twice, verse 19 and again in verse 21. Do not fear. You have no cause to be afraid. Am I in the place of God? Did Joseph see his own position, his own right and privilege to take revenge on these men? Not at all. Beloved, never, Romans 12, 19, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord. What had their intentions been? Joseph doesn't candy coat any of this, does he? You intended evil against me. He doesn't say, well, you should never feel guilty because you didn't do anything wrong. No, they had sinned. They had transgressed. But he doesn't leave it there. You intended evil against me, but God intended it for good. What was the good? To save many people alive. as they are this day. Joseph oriented his life when he looked to the past with a robust faith in the sovereignty of God. And that is always, always a huge source of comfort. Belief in the sovereignty of God should make us, brothers and sisters, the most joyful people around. Verse 20 is really a summary of the gospel itself, isn't it? Read the gospel through the lens of verse 20. When Judas betrayed Jesus, When the Savior was arrested, when the Romans beat Him and eventually nailed Him to the cross, what was their intention? Let's get rid of this pesky messianic pretender. He's causing too much trouble. They intended it for evil. But as Jesus was led to Calvary and nailed to that tree, God intended it for good. Wicked and rebellious sinners intended to destroy the Son of God. And God intended through the death of His Son to save rebellious sinners. They meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. It's that word of the gospel that brings relief to the guilty soul, isn't it? It's that word of the gospel that God, through the grace of His Son and through the death and atoning blood of His sacrifice, washes away all of our iniquity. After celebrating communion that Sunday evening and sinking into despair, William Thomas got up early on Monday morning and made his way to the pastor's house. Dr. Lloyd-Jones said, I have never seen a more miserable, dejected-looking man in my entire life. What had happened? Just the evening before, the entire congregation was rejoicing over the grace of God in this man's life, and now, He's at the bottom of the pit. Dr. Lloyd-Jones invited him in and he began to tell his story. And there, as a loving pastor, Dr. Lloyd-Jones opened up the word of God to him and showed him the promises of the gospel. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven. The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin. And the doubt, and the fear, and the anxiety washed away. And his joy was restored. Folks, that's ultimately the only thing that can restore our souls from that renewed sense of guilt to hear the gospel all over again. God does not call us to live in defeat and depression over our past sins. We are called to forget what He has forgiven. That doesn't mean we pretend it never happened. Yes, we're honest about it. Yes, we lied. Yes, we stole. Yes, we cheated. Yes, we did this. We did that. It's all true. But we don't stay there and we don't wallow there. It's true, but thanks be to God. for His glorious, forgiving, redeeming grace. Wasn't this the Apostle Paul's attitude when he wrote in 1 Timothy, I thank Him who has given me strength, Christ Jesus our Lord, because He is faithful, appointing me to His service, though formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. Paul doesn't candy coat anything about his past. But he doesn't stay there, he doesn't wallow there. But I received mercy, he said. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ overflowed for me with faith and love for all who are in Christ. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am foremost. Yes, it's true. I was insolent. I was a persecutor. I was an opponent. But God has washed it all away in the blood, the precious blood of His Son. Joseph gives us then a perspective, a stable point of orientation. We're looking at our past guilt, but not only to deal with our guilt, but also, brothers and sisters, to deal with the sin that has been committed against us. Whatever the intentions of others, God intends to work good in the lives of His people. I wonder if the Apostle Paul had the story of Joseph running through his mind when he wrote Romans 8.28. I wonder if this was the passage that prompted him to say, we know that all things work together for good, for them that love God, for them that are the called according to his purpose. Because if we submit to the most trying circumstances of life, and think about those that Joseph experienced, his family rejected him, people lied about him and falsely accused him, and yet he submitted to them as a part of God's overarching good intentions. If you and I are willing to do that, then what we will experience is that as God works all things together for good, That good will be His intention to conform you to the image of His Son. As I've told you before, never read Romans 8.28 without also reading Romans 8.29. His purpose through every trial that you face is to make you like Jesus. Looking back at life and what we've done and what's been done to us through the lens of God's providence keeps us from becoming bitter. As you read the story of Joseph, is there heartache? Absolutely. Sadness? You bet. Suffering? No doubt. but not one acrimonious word passes his lips. And with all of the trials that you and I have to face in life, if we are to guard our hearts so that we respond to them as Joseph did to his brothers with tenderness and compassion and forgiveness, we must look at them as acts overruled by God's sovereign and wise intentions. We must learn, brothers and sisters, to orient ourselves by looking at the past with faith in the providence of God. But there's one other perspective here briefly in closing. What about the future then? If we learn to look at the past with faith in God's providence, then, like Joseph, we need to learn to look at the future, faith in God's promises. When you come to verse 22, decades have passed now. Joseph and his family remain in Egypt. He is an elderly man, 110 years old. He's been able to see his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren. But like his father before him, he knows his time to leave this world will soon come. But he dies with assurance that God is going to visit his people. You see that twice, don't you, in the text. I'm about to die, verse 24, but God will visit you. Then in verse 25, God will surely visit you. The expression is different in the ESV, but the underlying Hebrew text is exactly the same. The wording is for emphasis. God will certainly, undoubtedly visit you. And when he does, take my bones with you. Now, what was it that gave Joseph this assurance that God was going to deliver his people? It's because he relied upon the covenant promises God had given to his great-grandfather Abraham. When the Lord formally inaugurated the covenant in Genesis 15, he said this, know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs. and servants there, and they will be afflicted for 400 years. Remember now, this was a part of the covenant. God's gracious covenant included suffering for his people. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possession. Joseph was certain of the future for the people of God because he believed in the promises of God. Isn't that what the author of Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 11, 22? By faith, Joseph at the end of his life made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones. Now why was he concerned about the burial of his bones? Because like his fathers before him, he wanted his final resting place to be in the land of promise. Because just as surely as God would bring his people out of Egypt, he would take them into the land of Canaan. And just as surely as he would take them into the land of Canaan, he would send the Redeemer that he had promised to crush the serpent's head. And the victory of that Redeemer would be accomplished through the cross and testified through the resurrection. Did Joseph know all of those details? He did not. But he did believe in the resurrection of the dead. That's why he encouraged them and actually made them swear that they would bury his bones in the land of promise and hope. One day he believed God would raise the dead. He looked to the future with a great sense of assurance and confidence. I wonder this morning if you can do the same. There is coming a day of resurrection. The Lord Jesus in John 5 said, do not marvel at this, Or an hour is coming when all in the tombs will hear His voice and come out. Those who have done good to the resurrection of life and those who have done evil, the resurrection judgment. There's a coming day. Will it be for you a resurrection of life? Or a resurrection of condemnation? Brothers and sisters, through this series of messages, we've traveled from creation in Eden to a coffin in Egypt. We've witnessed the trials and the triumphs of the people of God. And now as we come to the climax, the hero's dead. But those who die in faith, for those who die in Christ, coffins and Egypt are never, never, never the final word. Let's pray. Father, We thank you for the months that we have spent, indeed the years we have spent in working through the book of Genesis. We praise you, Heavenly Father, for giving us your revelation. Take it now and use it in all of our hearts and lives to refine us, to mold us, to make us, to orient us, to life in this world as we look to the past and as we contemplate the future. Grant that we all might die in faith so that though our bodies are buried, they are done so with the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead. For we ask this in Jesus' name.