After our brief interlude to celebrate Independence Day, we return to the story of Jacob in Genesis 49:1-20. As we pick up the story, he has come to Egypt with his large family to see Joseph before he dies. God has visited Jacob to reassure him that He will be with him in Egypt and keep His promise to bless the nations of the world through him. Jacob lived in Egypt for seventeen years, and at one hundred and forty-seven, told Joseph to return his remains and bury him in the tomb with his beloved Rachel.
So, Jacob knows he is about to die, but one thing remains for him to do. He wants to gather his sons around him for a final word with them. He wants to “bless” each of them. I’ve put the word “bless” in quotation marks to emphasize my perspective on what’s about to happen. If I had been Reuben or several of the other sons, I would have preferred my father not to have “blessed” me this way. You need to read Genesis 49:1-20 to see what I mean.
Here are some examples of the “blessings” Jacob gave his sons.
- Reuben, you started well, but you are going to fail in life.
- Simeon and Levi, your fierce anger will be your undoing.
- Issachar, you are a rawboned donkey who will live your life in hard labor.
- Dan, you are going to be like a snake or viper along the road that causes the horse to throw its rider.
Do you get the idea? These are not the kinds of last words I would want to hear from my dying father. Genesis 49:33 tells us that after he instructed his sons about where to bury him, “He drew his feet up into his bed, breathed his last, and was gathered to his people.”
Each of us has had “important” people speak encouraging and hurtful things into our lives. I’m grateful for many teachers, men and women, who have encouraged and challenged me to live well and develop the gifts God has given me. Experience has taught me the importance of blessing my family members and others with encouraging words and counsel whenever possible.
My work as a therapist has exposed me to the raw reality of how many of my clients were cursed by the thoughtless words and actions of parents or other authority figures, creating emotional wounds that were difficult to overcome. Hopefully, you have been blessed by parents and others who have drawn out the best in you through their words and actions.
My mother and father were positive influences in my life, always wanting the best for me and my siblings. They made mistakes, as all parents do, but I never doubted their love for me. As I was thinking about writing this blog, I recalled a funny thing my dad said to me when I was in my late teens or early twenties. “Cos,” he said, “you could fall in a toilet hole and come out smelling like a rose.” Isn’t this a down-home country way of saying what Romans 8:28 declares about those whose aim is to serve the Lord?
Jacob was 147 years old when he “blessed” his sons, and most of his boys were men well into their forties and fifties. My opinion is that the blessings were simple deductions he made from what he had observed in how they had acted to this point in their lives.
There were notable exceptions, two sons who received unadulterated praise: Joseph and Judah. Jacob expressed great pride in Joseph as the “prince” among his brothers and acknowledged how he had brought unimaginable blessings to him: ” Your father’s blessings are greater than the blessings of the ancient mountains, than the bounty of the age-old hills.” Genesis 49:26.
While Joseph was a wonderful son to Jacob and an excellent servant of God, it is Judah who receives Jacob’s most notable blessing. Jacob’s words to and about him are found in Genesis chapter 49: 8-12. The particular part that got my attention is verse 10, “The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his.”
Do you recognize what this means? What does it have to do with God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
From what lineage was King David? Look at the way God worked through all the generations from Abraham to the promised Messiah by exploring the genealogy of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew. How great is our God!!