Take out your Bibles and turn to our scripture text this evening, Genesis chapter 49, beginning in verse 29. And we'll be reading through the end of the book, as this will be our last time in the book of Genesis together, particularly as we're going through the narrative of Joseph and his brothers. We're looking at the entirety of the passage that is printed for you in your bulletin, but to begin, I will merely read through verse 14 of chapter 50. So beginning in Genesis chapter 49, verse 29, and reading through Genesis chapter 50 and verse 14. So hear the word of the Lord. Then he, that is Jacob, commanded them, his brothers, and said to them, his sons, excuse me, and said to them, I am to be gathered to my people. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephraim the Hittite, and the cave that is in the field of Machpelah to the east of Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephraim the Hittite to possess as a burying place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah, his wife. There they buried Isaac and Rebekah, his wife. And there I buried Leah. The field and the cave that is in it were bought from the Hittites. When Jacob finished commanding his sons, he drew up his feet into the bed and breathed his last and was gathered to his people. Then Joseph fell on his father's face and wept over him and kissed him. And Joseph commanded his servants, the physicians, to embalm his father. So the physicians embalmed Israel. Forty days were required for it, for that is how many are required for embalming. And the Egyptians wept for him seventy days. And when the days of weeping for him were passed, Joseph spoke to the household of Pharaoh, saying, If now I have found favor in your eyes, please speak in the ears of Pharaoh saying, my father made me swear saying, I am about to die. In my tomb that I hoot out for myself in the land of Canaan, there shall you bury me. Now, therefore, let me please go up and bury my father that I will return. And Pharaoh answered, go up and bury your father as he has made you swear. So Joseph went up to bury his father. With him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, as well as all the household of Joseph, his brothers, and his father's household. Only their children, their flocks, and their herds were left in the land of Goshen. And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen. It was a very great company. When they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they lamented there with a very great and grievous lamentation. And he made a mourning for his father seven days. When the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning on the threshing floor of Atad, they said, this is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians. Therefore, the place was called Avel Mitzrayim. It is beyond Jordan. Thus the sons did for him as he had commanded them, and for his sons carried him to the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field at Machphala to the east of Mamre, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess as a burying place. After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt with his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father. As for the reading of God's word, let us pray and give him thanks for it. Heavenly Father, indeed we do give you great thanks for your word, that through your prophet Moses, you speak to your people, that you encourage and exhort our hearts to see our savior, that salvation that you provided for us in your son. We pray in his name, amen. You may have noticed if you're a sport fan or have seen in the news that the Women's World Cup is beginning in New Zealand, in Australia. And it seems that every time there's a World Cup, the prognosticators say, this will be the year. Now's the time for soccer to finally take its place in America's heart. It is going to become the most popular sport in America, like it is all over the world. Every time so far they've been wrong. But the reason they can say this is because the favorite sport of Americans has changed over time. Now the pollsters would tell you that professional football is the favorite sport of most Americans. Prior to that, it was professional baseball. If you go back a hundred years ago, though, the most popular sports in all the land were horse racing and boxing. Both had much to do with gambling. Some things never change. But a hundred years ago, the great heavyweight champion of that era was Jack Johnson, the Galveston Giant. Boxing has gone out of favor. I couldn't even tell you who the heavyweight champion of the world is today, perhaps because there's up to four of them. There are four different associations now hand out such a belt. But 100 years ago, the Galveston giant Jack Johnson was heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915. But in America at that time, Unfortunately, many were upset that the heavyweight champion of the world was a black man. And so the writer Jack London coined the phrase that you may have heard, the great white hope. If you ever wonder where that phrase came from, it was because Jack London thought the country needed a white boxer to take the heavyweight crown. And I mention this to you tonight, I assure you, not for the reason of endorsing that sort of racial preference, but merely to highlight the fact that we all have great hopes of some sort. Maybe we have a great Republican or Democrat hope. Perhaps we have a great inventor hope. Perhaps we have a great you know, technology whiz who's going to invent the next great technology to make life amazing. To place all our hope in a figure, a leader who will give our life meaning and purpose and something to reach out and hold on to. A great white hope for Jack London. The problem was, The problem is that these hopes all fade. Jack London didn't coin that phrase for any boxer. He had one in mind, and no one's ever heard of him. His great hope faded away to the pages of history. The politician that we hope gets elected or reelected next year will leave office a few years after that. Some of the things he does or she does will be reversed the very day that person leaves office. But in Genesis chapter 50, friends, we have the people of God clinging to a hope that is eternal. A hope that, as Peter says in his epistle, is kept in heaven for you. And it's not a technological guru who's going to invent the next device to change your life. Your hope is in a person who is eternal, who is the Lord Jesus Christ, who from before the foundation of the world was planning your salvation. And as we'll see in this text has been working out all things for it. So as we look at this text this evening, we'll see three things about this hope. We'll see the place of hope. We'll see the permanence of our hope. And we'll see the provider of that hope. The place, the permanence, the provider. We begin with the place of hope in the verses that I've read for you so far. We read of the burial of Jacob. You noticed what really dominated the discussion of Jacob's death was what? His instructions of where to be buried. From verses 28 to 33, he mentions the Hittites three times. He mentions the purchase of the field two times. He mentions this very specific place, this very specific cave in which his bones, his embalmed body was to be placed. And then the rest of our text was merely the carrying out of those instructions. We read his instructions in verses 29 to 32, and he mentioned this cave again and again and again. And the reason this cave is so important is actually traced all the way back to chapter 23 when Abraham's wife, Sarah, dies. He goes to the Hittites, and in chapter 23, he bargains with them for this cave, for this field and cave, so that he would have a burial place for his wife, for himself, for his progeny. And if you know anything about the patriarchal history of Genesis, you'll know why this field and this cave were so important. It was the only land that Abraham ever possessed in the promised land. That's why he's careful to call it his property in this text. Keep in mind that the Lord promised to Abraham's descendants all the promised land, that he would give him this land as their everlasting possession. But when Abraham died, he held one field. And that was the field bought from Ephron, the Hittite, the cave. in the field of Machpelah to the east of memory. When Abraham dies, the one who received the promise of all the promised land, he at that point possessed one little field, one little plot of land. So he's buying this land from the Hittites, not merely to provide a burial place for his wife, but he's doing so to demonstrate his faith in the promises of God. For as I alluded to just a minute ago, in Genesis chapter 13, the Lord comes to Abraham and makes this great promise. In chapter 13, verse 14, lift up your eyes and look for the place where you are, north and south and east and west, for all the land that you see I will give to you and your offspring forever. He says, arise, walk through the length and breadth of the land where I will give it to you and to his offspring. This was a land of promise. This was a land that God had sworn to give to the Israelites. And Jacob had that same faith, that the Lord who had promised them that land would see it through. You see, if Abraham or if Jacob didn't believe the Lord's promise, they would have never bought or used that cave. For why would you put your, you know, eternal resting place in a place that's surrounded by pagans, surrounded by Canaanites if you thought that they would always be there. I guarantee you that in the middle of the great World War II, no American was wanting to be married in Nazi Germany. And in fact, when the time the war was over, they made sure that there were no Americans buried there. And you go there today, there are no American soldiers buried in German soil. So why would Abraham want to be buried in the midst of Canaanites, of pagans? Because he believed the promise of the Lord that one day the entire stretch of land would belong to his people. And Jacob, by making his family go out of their way to return his body there, shows that he has the same faith. Think about it. Where is Jacob? He's in Egypt. The Egyptians knew how to do tombs. I mean, the entire world, if they could pick one place to be buried, they surely would have picked Egypt. Consider the pyramids. It's just a really big tomb. Consider Howard Carter discovering the tomb of King Tutankhamen and all the riches and the glories. If you wanted to get buried in the ancient world, boy, Egypt was the place to be. But Jacob says, no, take me back to the promised land. Take me back to the land that the Lord promised my grandfather, Abraham, because I believe that that will be our inheritance as the people. We'll see why this is so important in a minute for us. But first consider, beginning in verse 7, how this large retinue mourns, goes to bury Jacob. Of course, they're doing so out of respect to Joseph, because Joseph is now the second highest man in all the land, and out of esteem for him, they esteem his father. They go and bury him, and they surprise even the Canaanites by their mourning, so much so that the Canaanites name this place Abel Mitzrayim. Abel means mourning. Mitzrayim means Egypt, literally means the kingdom of two Egypts, upper and lower Egypt. And the locals, They're mentioned here because their response was probably stark. They're probably wondering, you know, what's up with all these rich Egyptians in this backwater? You know, what are they doing here? We're not used to Egyptian funeral trains coming through town. Perhaps you're wondering, yeah, Pastor, what is the big deal? Church of Christ, just as the people in this text had their hope in the promised land of God's people. We have a place of hope in the promised land of God's people. Is that your hope? What is the place of your hope? Remember, friends, the promised land in the Old Testament in the new covenant expands to fill all the earth. That when John has the vision of the things that are to come, he sees Jesus declaring that he was making all things new, that the new heavens and new earth will be one. As the Lord comes to dwell with his people, the promised land won't be merely Canaan. It won't be merely the land of Israel. It'll be the eternal, glorious new heavens and new earth where we will be forever with the Lord. That's why Abraham can receive that promise that the Lord will give him the promised land forever. Not because there has to be Jews living in Israel for the promise to be fulfilled, but because that promise will be fulfilled in the promised land of the entire earth. Is that the place of your hope? Is your hope the new heavens and the new earth when Christ will return and make these all things new? And I ask you this question because it's easy to say that mentally. Yes, that's my hope. But in the way in which we live our lives, it's often hard to see that hope. We worry and we fret about the things of this life only. We are indistinguishable in the way in which we spend our money and our time and our resources from those around us who think they better have their best life and most possessions now because this is the best it's going to get, they think. They think once they die, that's the end of existence, so we're going to live life to the fullest now. And often Christians buy into that idol. We want to have the happiest life now, no suffering. No hard work of sanctification, of iron sharpening iron. The place of our hope is eternal. When this world is refined with fire and burned up before it is made new, the things of our life that are temporal will disappear. It won't matter how many miles we'd had or didn't have on our car, or how many square feet our house was, or how many changes of clothes we had in our three closets. What matters is that our hope is in the promised land that is to come. I'm reminded of Hebrews chapter 11, when the writer, the preacher to the Hebrews was speaking of what faith was like in the Old Testament. And when he speaks of the patriarchs of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, he says, they died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country that is a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has promised for them a city. Do you long for that better country? Are you seeking your best and most fulfilling life now? Are you longing for that better country, that heavenly city where the glory of the Lord will be as obvious as the nose on your face? It'll be right before you forever. Now don't hear what I'm not saying. In the meantime, yes, we live in this world. We mourn. We mourn greatly like the family of Jacob did. We wait. We long, we desire with eager expectation that which is to come. Because we live and we mourn and we wait in hope. Because the same Lord who promised this land to our forefathers of the faith has promised us a better country, a new heavens and a new earth. That's why Peter can begin his first epistle with a burst of exaltation when he says, blessed to be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance. the inheritance, that which we are to receive from our Father, an inheritance that is imperishable, unfading, undefiled, kept in heaven for you. This is the great place of our hope, the eternal promised land. Maybe you doubt that you're ever going to actually get it. You think it's plausible, perhaps, but you fear that when you die, your body will go to the grave and you'll never see life again. But how do we know that our hope is in the right place? How do we know it's not misplaced? How do we know it's secure? That it's worth holding on to? That brings me to our second point this evening, the provider of this hope. Provider of this hope. Let me pick up reading in verse 15. Let's see where the text goes from here. Verse 15, 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 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. You can understand the anguish and the angst of the brothers, can't you? They knew what they had done to Joseph. Perhaps they feared that Joseph was just playing nice, not wanting to upset their father. That he had something planned in retribution, just waiting for their father to die. And then perhaps he would come upon them with a vengeance. Keep in mind, he sits at the right hand of the most powerful king on earth. if Joseph wanted to make their lives miserable or end their lives. He certainly could have. They're so afraid that at first they only sent a messenger to Joseph. And Joseph is so saddened by what the messenger says that he weeps when the messengers speak to him. And that must have been a sign to the brothers. Okay, maybe we could risk coming to him ourselves. So they do in verse 18. They fall down before him and say, we are your servants. You know, they're pleading for mercy. They're in that place where they wonder, will evil win out? Will the sins that we have done, will perhaps the revenge that our brother wants to wreak on us win out? And many times we ask that same question. Will the evil of this age win out? Why not live for the present? Why save my hope for that which is to come? The brothers fear what is to come based on their past sin. And maybe our doubt doesn't come from our own sin, although often it does. We know our own hearts. We know the ways in which we have sinned against God and against our fellow men and women. But perhaps we fear that our hope is insecure because of what we have done. or perhaps were just fretful and have a hard time trusting the Lord. But did you hear the reassurance that Joseph brought to them in verse 20? In the midst of their fear, in the midst of their trembling, he says, 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. Friends, I can't understate, I can't overstate, I should say, the importance, the beauty of this statement. Joseph recognizes their sin, doesn't he? He doesn't pretend like they had it against him. Joseph comes in and says, yes, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And that's why God is the provider of your hope, because God is working out all things for the good of his people, for their very salvation. Notice that Joseph doesn't say, you meant evil against me. And so God had to turn to plan B and to scratch his head and kind of figure out how can I clean up this mess and maybe twist it around so some good things come. No. Joseph says God meant it for good. It was part of his plan. Everything that befalls us in this life is not a surprise to God. It's not something that God has to somehow overcome or see if he's more powerful than you. It's not a shock. to the Lord when things are not as we may want them to be. Does this make God the author of evil? Does this make God the author of sin? No, because his intentions are only good, and his intentions are always carried out. There's no room in there for sin. There's no room in there for deceit on the Lord's part, because his intentions are perfectly good and perfectly carried out in your life, friends, in your life. You look and you know that you sin. You know that others sin against you. You know how people harm you. You know how you are short-tempered with others. You know how you do not always give people their fair share. Joseph doesn't pretend that sin doesn't exist. Joseph says, in the midst of the darkness of this world, God is working out his good purposes for his people. Isn't that what he says? God meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive. You probably know that this isn't the only statement in scripture that refers to the way in which God is working out all things for the good of his people. Probably know how Paul says the exact same thing in Romans chapter eight, verse 28. We know that for those who love God, All things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Again, notice it's all things. It's not despite all things. Despite what's going on over here, God's gonna work over here, you know, sort of make a MacGyver out of things so that everything can work out in the end. God is working out all these things over here for the good of those who are called according to his purpose. Called according to his purpose. That he has spoken a word of calling that effectually brings his people to him and it is for his purpose of bringing glory to his name, of making his attributes visible in the world, of making his people more like Christ, of showing us how he is the only true God, of demonstrating his power and authority over idols, that we could go on and on and on according to the purposes that God has. But they fundamentally all come back to those main purposes, that God is bringing His glory to fall through our, in our eyes, in the eyes of the world. And that is our greatest good. That's why He is the provider of our hope. Nothing in your life will surprise your Heavenly Father. Nothing in the world will make the promises that He gave you for an eternity in the promised land shaky, or suspect, or perhaps not come to pass. No. Joseph Paul says all things are working together for good. Even the worst of events. I mean, this was pretty bad, wasn't it? Had brothers first wanting to kill their brother, then selling him into slavery, pulling a fast one on their father to convince him that a wild animal had killed him. Selling him down into Egypt where most slaves only survived a few years because of the harshness of the work. That's pretty bad, that God, but yet God was using that for his good. But even the worst event in all of human history, as evil, as wrong from our perspective than it was, was God's working out his good. When the Apostle Peter is preaching on the day of Pentecost, he's referring to Jesus. how Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. No surprise to God, it was according to his plan. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. Again, Paul recognizes that man was sinful, that man was evil in that event. Killing the son of glory by the hands of lawful men. He says that was according to the definite plan for knowledge of God, for your salvation. That the sacrifice of his son would win atonement for all his beloved people. Friends, that's the provider of your hope. The one who is working, again, not despite Pilate and Herod, and Annas and Caiaphas and all those evil men who were working together to kill the only innocent human that ever walked the earth. No, he was working through that for your good, for your salvation, your forgiveness of sins and his glory. So surely whatever is in your life, that you feel puts your hope in jeopardy, the powers of evil around you, religions that are becoming more popular, the hate of the Lord, the despising of Christian truth and Christian lifestyles in the public square, whatever it is that you think, oh, my hope is fading. Oh, no, it is not. For this God is still active. He's still working his will for your good. why Joseph could look at his brothers and forgive them. Because one came to forgive us. We were the crucifiers. We were the ones who, because of our sin, had to have him hanging there. But it was for us, his crucifiers, that he came. If that's the provider of our hope, in the place of hope, Our text ends with a permanence of our hope, a permanence of our hope. For what good is hope if it is fading away? But it is not. If you read the last five verses of this book, beginning in verse 22, you hear that, so Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father's house, Joseph lived 110 years, and Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation, his children also Baqir, the son of Manasseh, were counted as Joseph's own. And Joseph said to his brothers, I'm 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 there, here. So Joseph died being 110 years old. They embalmed him. He was put in a coffin in Egypt. So there's a long gap. After the death of Joseph's father, evidently that gap was long enough that the conditions on the ground changed that it wasn't feasible when Joseph died to bury him in the promised land. So Joseph clearly wants to get back there. But what's his main concern? You shall carry up my bones from here. Why is he so interested in his bones? Why is he placed in a coffin? The only mention of a coffin in the book of Genesis for the preservation of his bones. Because he wants his body preserved in the promised land. Because he knows his death is not the end of his physical existence. He knows that there is yet a future for his body. That's why believers for centuries, for millennia, have cared for dead bodies, have placed them in the ground. That's why Christians traditionally didn't incinerate their bodies like trash in a blast furnace, but buried and cared for their bodies. Because there is a future yet to come for our physical existence. Think about this. The people of God had to keep track of this coffin for 300 years. They had to keep track of where it was and what they were going to do with it if and when they ever got out of Egypt. Think of what that meant in the Exodus. They had to haul it through the Red Sea. Think about what that meant for 40 years in the wilderness. They had to bring this coffin with them. How easy would it have been to say, forget it, it's too heavy. We're tired of dragging it around. But they understood the permanence of their hope, that there was a future yet to come for the body. That the respect and the honor they give to the body was a sign that the Lord would one day stitch that body back together in resurrection life, based on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Hebrews 11, which I mentioned earlier, when it comes to Joseph, said that this was a sign of Joseph's faith. This wasn't merely he wanted to make sure he was buried. in a place of his own choosing, it was a sign of his faith, Hebrews says. By faith, Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the Exodus to the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones. That's all it says about him. Of all the things the writer of Hebrews could have said about Joseph that we've seen from chapter 37 onward, he zeroes in on this. He gave directions for his bones. He saw the future yet to come for his body. And out of that hope, He asked for his bones to be preserved. The physical body, friends, is important. It's a permanent fixture of eternal life. You see, when I spoke at our first point of the promised land as the place of our hope, I hope we didn't envision yourself as a spirit floating around, playing on the clouds, like an ethereal existence. No. I hope you had flesh and blood that you had the same for the resurrection body that Christ had when he rose from the dead. For what does Paul say in 1 Corinthians 15? that just as Christ put on the imperishable, so will you put on the imperishable, that you will be more fully clothed, that your body will be more clothed, more body-like than it ever has been before, because it'll be perfect in glory forever. That's the permanence of your hope, seen even in instructions given for an old man's bones. One commentator puts it this way, we place the dead body in a box as a testimony to our faith. There is of an exodus yet to come when the final trumpet shall sound and the dead in Christ shall rise. So put this last chapter and a half together, what do you get? You have a place of hope, an eternal promised land. a body, a permanence of hope, that your body will be dwelling in the new heavens and new earth forever with your Savior. For he is the provider of your hope. As even now, through all your struggles, he is working out his perfect plan in your life to bring you into glory, where you will dwell with him forever. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that here in the first book of the Bible, you give us a wonderful picture of the end. When Christ returns and the dead and Christ shall rise first, we shall be given perfect bodies to dwell in your presence forever. That all the work you're doing now of bringing your glory and our good to bear through your will, will explode into a cavalcade of eternal worship. As we, with real physical knees, fall before the throne of Christ, sing praises to him. Oh, Lord, may that hope utterly pervade every aspect of our lives here and now. May we long for, may we taste it as we desire the return of Christ. Lord, as the apostle prays, so do we, Lord Christ. Come quickly, Jesus. I pray it your name. Amen.