Who Is Speaking (Sermon from Genesis 50:20)

In Genesis 50, 20, it 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. Can anybody tell me who is speaking? St. Mary says it was Joseph. Well, as Jason knows, that was a trick question. I'm going to prove to you it was Jesus speaking.

And I'm going to explain that tonight. And you're right, it was Joseph, the man Joseph said it. So don't get confused yet. But I'm going to try to show you guys something that we try to understand when we interpret the Bible. And it's the idea that Jesus Christ is really the focus of the entire Bible. There was never a time that the Bible was simply written just for some people in the Middle East to have some rules to follow and some things to do and to know how to be clean or how to take care of their kids.

The entire Bible has always been a progressive revelation of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. And that started very early on in the book of Genesis. And so we're going to, I'm going to, and I'm going to cover some things rather quickly. and so there's probably questions you may have afterwards and if you do we can keep talking about it the rest of the night.

But there's a few things we're going to look at with Joseph's life that I'm going to try to show you that Joseph was what is called a type of Jesus Christ. And so I'm going to tell you just a little summary of Joseph's life real quick and then think about it as I say it. Do the same things describe Jesus Christ when you think about it. So Joseph's life, I'm going to say he came to his own people and he was rejected by his own people.

He was turned over to the Gentiles. In Joseph's case, he was figuratively dead. He eventually rises to power or kingship. He forgives the people and many are made alive or kept alive as a result. And so I'm going to show you tonight that Jesus Christ is actually the fulfillment of what Joseph's life was just a picture of that God was painting with Joseph's life.

And so just to show you too that we're not necessarily reading into the Bible something that's not there, it's not something we ever want to do, I want to give you a couple definitions of something called typology. And so typology just comes from the word type, and it's the idea that in the Bible, and typology exists in all sorts of literature, not just the Bible, but it's the idea that there were things that God gave us in earlier parts of the Bible that typified, right, there's that word type, what was going to come later. And what was going to come later is ultimately Jesus Christ.

And so we look back and we see Jesus Christ, and we think to ourselves, well, you know, we can read the Gospels, we know about his life. of a people before Jesus Christ had to have a way of knowing what God was going to do. And God did that by showing examples throughout the Old Testament. And so we can read the Old Testament now with the light of the Holy Spirit, with the light of Christ having shown His light on everything, and we can actually see how the Old Testament has been showing Jesus the whole time.

And it actually makes the Old Testament, in my opinion, and I think I'm right, so it's not an opinion, it's a fact, it makes the Old Testament way more exciting and edifying to read when instead of an old book about some sheep herders in the Middle East who went to war with a couple other countries at the time, it's a whole book about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. And when you read it that way, you start to see Jesus in it everywhere, and you start to understand. So I'm going to give you a couple definitions so nobody thinks I'm just reading stuff into text here.

Typology is the study of analogical correspondence among revealed truths about persons, events, institutions, and other things within the historical framework of God's special revelation, which, from a retrospective view, so looking back on it, are of a prophetic nature and are escalated in their meaning. So it's the idea that things that happened in the past that are described in the Old Testament were actually prophesying Jesus Christ's coming, and that it was intentional on God's part. It's not just we read it and we say, ooh, that sounds like Jesus.

This is us realizing that by the power of the Holy Spirit illustrating His text for us, that we now can understand that that's what this text always contained, is this revelation of Jesus Christ. Another definition that was slightly less technical that I thought would be helpful to explain that first one, and this is from Sam Renahan's book, The Mystery of Christ, His Covenant, and His Kingdom. Another definition, this was from a man named Francis Foulkes, though.

All the action of God in the Old Testament, in the Old Testament history, foreshadows his unique action and revelation in Christ. We may say that a type is an event, a series of circumstances, or an aspect of the life of an individual or of the nation, which finds a parallel and a deeper realization in the incarnate life of our Lord, in his provision for the needs of men, or in his judgments in future reign. So that was a lot of stuff in one sentence, and so I would encourage you to maybe read it after and try to digest some of it.

But the idea again is what God did in the Old Testament was really foreshadowing what Christ was going to do but Christ was going to just basically make it all greater Like everything we see in the Old Testament, He made greater. And we have examples of that I'll go over tonight. A type thus presents a pattern of the dealings of God with men that is followed in the antitype.

So the antitype is the thing that fulfills the type. It comes in the place of the type, antitype. and so it comes in the place of it so you have the type which would be like the temple and then you have the anti-type which would be Christ coming so we don't need the old thing anymore and those dealings of God are repeated with a fullness and a finality that they did not exhibit before so that's typology and so when you think about typology it's not simply just looking around all the time and trying to see Jesus everywhere although he is all in all and so you're going to be able to find parallels of Jesus everywhere but it's understanding the text of the Old Testament the way the Holy Spirit intended it to be written one more example to prove that this is a legitimate way to look at the scripture if you look at Luke 24 there's two times in Luke 24 that Jesus explains to the men he's walking with that he's explaining to them everything that was written about him in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms. He showed them how in the Old Testament it had always pointed to him.

But in Luke 24, 44-46, it says, Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. So he just, when Jesus says in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms, in case you don't know this, he's just saying the entire Old Testament. He's not leaving out something.

That was his way of saying everything. Everything had to be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. So you have to have the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ to even understand these things properly. And he said to them, listen he says thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and I'll tell you what you don't see that anywhere in the Old Testament explicitly stated like that I don't see it explicitly written that way but we see things in the Old Testament such as Jonah going in the belly of the fish and either dying or figured or figuratively dying, whichever actually happened with Jonah, I don't know.

And then coming back to life, coming up out of a tomb, as it were. And Jesus even says that's the sign, the sign of Jonah, is what the people were given, that Christ would come and do these things. And so, also there's a piece in Hosea 6, too, where it says something about after two nights I'll be in the ground on a third day rise. you know and you read that with the light of Christ and you say okay the third day rising that sounds like a pretty specific something that God was using to point to the future so now let's look at Joseph's life so turn to Genesis 37 so Joseph is I believe the 11th son of Jacob or of Israel and he's the first one who's the son of the wife that Jacob loved.

And he's the special one that gets all the favoritism. And he is treated differently. And his brothers hate him. And so Joseph's going to typify Christ's life in the ways I mentioned earlier, I think five of them. But the first one is he came to his own people and he was rejected by his own people. So if you look at verses 7 through 11, Joseph has a dream that he tells his brothers about.

He says, Hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. And his brothers said to him, Are you indeed to reign over us? they weren't actually asking a question that was an emphatic way of saying no way this is going to happen so they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said behold I have dreamed another dream behold the sun the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me but when he told it to his father and to his brothers his father rebuked him and said, What is this dream that you have dreamed?

Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind. So now turn to John 1. Keep your finger in Genesis 37 if you want, because we're going to go back there. But in John 1, when John describes Jesus Christ, In verse 11, he says he came to his own and his own people did not receive him.

And we can find several other passages about his being rejected by the Jews. Jesus came as the king of the Jews and they rejected him. He announced who he was. He told them. This wasn't concealed anymore. He told them who he was, what he was going to do, what had to happen.

And they rejected him. He taught the law better than any of them could And so in the first way of Joseph typifying Jesus that we have tonight there more ways than I go over He came to his own people and his own people did not receive him So back to Genesis 37, verse 18. his brothers see him later and it says they saw him from afar and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him you look at Jesus John 11 53 you don't have to turn to all of these It might be too much to go back and forth too much. In Jesus, after he raises Lazarus from the dead, it says, So from that day on, they made plans to put him to death.

So the conspiring of people to kill Jesus Christ was typified in the conspiring of the brothers to kill Joseph or to do away with Joseph. in Genesis 37 20 they say come now let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him and we will see what will become of his dreams so their whole goal here is they're going to make sure this prophecy that he would one day rule is not going to come true right does that sound like anything who else tried to do that Herod right when he tried to kill all the babies right he knew that the king had come and he said I'm going to make sure this doesn't come true and they wanted to do it with Joseph but in Luke 23 53 I also see it says then he took it down talking about Jesus on the cross and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone where no one had yet been laid. So Joseph going down into a pit is typifying Jesus Christ going into the tomb. At this point, Joseph's at least figuratively dead, right?

To his father, he's dead. He's dead to his brothers at this point, too. They know he's not dead because they're going to sell him to the Midianites. But at this point, he's as dead as necessary to his father. in Genesis 37 28 we're going to continue we're looking at him being turned over to the Gentiles I have the verses printed but I like looking in the Bible for them and it gives you guys time to get there too if you weren't in Genesis 37 28 Midianite traders pass by so Joseph's in the pit and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 shekels of silver and they took Joseph to Egypt.

So Joseph is raised out of the pit and sold to the Gentiles at this time. And so they didn't care about his life. They didn't care what happened to him. They got 20 shekels of silver for it. My understanding is that 20 shekels of silver was about what a slave was worth. So they didn't value their own brother more than a slave.

They basically sold him into slavery. But in Matthew 27.9, Jesus Christ is going to fulfill what Joseph typified. well Judas is going to do that in Jesus' life then was fulfilled what had been spoken by the prophet Jeremiah saying and they took the thirty pieces of silver the price of him on whom a price had been set by the sons of Israel and so again we have the sons of Israel sell their brother to the Gentiles for basically a bunch of pieces of silver. It's the same exact thing that happened to Joseph.

God was telling his people thousands of years ago what was going to happen. And they didn't have all the light to understand it that way. But when Jesus came and these things happened, people who believed God should have and would have understood these things by God's grace, and we should today. If you had nothing but the Old Testament, and you had studied the life of Joseph over and over as you were a kid, as a little Hebrew kid, when Jesus came and started fulfilling all these things, it should have made sense to you.

And then the apostles wrote it down for us so that we would be able to have it, and even the people of that day could see some of these details that they may not have known about, like Judas' betrayal. So Joseph came to his own people, was rejected by his own people, and so was Jesus. Joseph was turned over to the Gentiles, and so was Jesus. In Genesis 37-34, we're going to say Joseph is dead.

We know Joseph wasn't truly dead in the sense that we mean dead, But it says, Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned his son many days. So at this point, for all intents and purposes, Joseph is dead. He's been killed. They lied about how it happened, but Jacob thinks his son is dead. Jesus Christ cried out with a loud voice in Matthew 27, 50 and yielded up his spirit.

So it Jesus Christ who really died where Joseph didn actually fully die He was dead to his father in that sense but Jesus Christ really died And then of course when Jacob finds Joseph later it's almost like a resurrection, right? It's the same thing when Isaac was supposed to be sacrificed and Abraham had made up his mind that this is really going to happen. And it tells us later in the Bible that Abraham believed God would raise him from the dead.

And it tells us, which he did, figuratively speaking. and so we're allowed to think about the Bible in these terms because the New Testament writers, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, have given us this method of interpretation where we can understand the Bible in ways that, we'll say, some people won't allow you to do. The Bible is a divinely inspired book, and if you read it the same way you read any other book, you're denying its divine authority and its divine authorship. So you need to read the Bible as if God wrote it and he's going to have his own way that this stuff is going to be revealed to you.

And he's going to use literary devices and he's going to do things that other books do but he's going to be able to do some unique things that maybe we couldn't have even conceived of. Not even maybe, we never could have conceived of. So the fourth thing I'll toss in there is that Joseph rose to power. So look at Genesis 41. In verse 44, so Joseph has interpreted Pharaoh's dreams, and now he's the big man in Egypt, and Pharaoh's real happy with him. and in Genesis 41 verse 44 this is Pharaoh he says, Moreover, Pharaoh said to Joseph I am Pharaoh and without your consent no one shall lift up hand or foot in all the land of Egypt.

Basically made him the ruler. He basically made him second in charge. Almost as if saying, sit at my right hand. Right? and he says and Pharaoh called Joseph's name Zaphonath Paneah and he gave him in marriage Asenath the daughter of Potipharah priest of On so do you know anybody else who was told to sit at the right hand of the king had a name bestowed on him and was given a bride does that sound familiar who else Anybody know?

Jesus, that's right That's right Look at Look at Hebrew Let's look at Hebrew, it's a great book about Jesus Christ The book of Hebrews Look at a couple verses In chapter 1 Verse 13 where God is quoting Psalm 110. And it says, And to which of the angels has he ever said? He's referring to God talking to his son. Jesus says, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.

So Jesus Christ is given the right hand of the king. In Hebrews 2, 7 and 8, it says, you made him for a little while lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet. Philippians 2. He's given a name, right? Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.

So we said Joseph was given power, sit at the right hand of the king in all authority. He was given a name. So Jesus, we just saw those two things happen with Jesus. And if you look at Revelation, I think it's the very last page in my Bible almost, Revelation 22, I think I wrote it down wrong because I thought it was 22. In Revelation 17, the Spirit in the, Revelation 22, verse 17, the Spirit and the Bride say come.

And so you can read the book of Revelation and you can see all about the Bride of Jesus Christ. So that's just one verse to prove that point. So when we look at the typology, one of the criticisms that people might have, because a type is an analogy, right? We're saying this is like this, this, and whenever somebody uses an analogy, the person that doesn't like the analogy just tries to find all the differences.

And so I don't think anybody is arguing that some of these types are perfect, because the whole point of a biblical type is that the fulfillment of the type, the analogy that it's leading up to, is greater than anything that the original types could have ever done. Nobody could die the death Jesus died. Nobody could raise the resurrection that he raised himself.

The Spirit raised him. The Father raised him. Nobody could do what Jesus did. So when we look at the types, what we see are approximations, or what the Bible calls are shadows. So when you think about your shadow, depending on the time of day at least, your shadow approximates what you look like. It's got a little bit of your shape.

There's some sense of it that it's your shadow. It's not somebody else's. and depending on where the light is and how everything else is, you can probably get some pretty good shadows. We can make shadows of bunnies and dogs and all that. I can show you guys how to do that later if you want. But one of the whole points is that the shadow is still the shadow, even though it's not as perfect as the thing that's casting the shadow.

All right, so Jesus cast his shadow throughout the Old Testament. Through the course of redemptive history, God has shown us what Jesus was going to do, but nobody was ever going to be able to do what Jesus could do. That's why some guy like Samson, that was really kind of a bad guy in a lot of ways, can be called a type of Christ. Not because of his righteousness, not because of his wisdom, but because Samson did things that Jesus Christ was going to come and do. and what God showed us through that is that men would always fail that's what he showed us so we would stop having confidence in mere men and we would have confidence in God alone and so he did that for many reasons but one of them was so we could run to him so a couple contrasts for you and we're getting a little longer than I planned so I'm going to run through them if you look at Genesis 37 when they threw him into the pit.

You don't have to look now, I'm going to go through it quick. A goat was killed instead of Joseph. And I thought it was interesting that when Jesus and the whole thing with Barabbas happened, Jesus was killed instead of a goat. I thought it was kind of interesting But a goat was sacrificed instead of Joseph but when Jesus fulfilled the type that Joseph portrayed and pictured Jesus took the sacrifice.

There was no substitute. He was the one that had to do it. Joseph never actually died and resurrected, but Jesus gave up his own life and resurrected himself. John 10 says Jesus has power to raise himself. And he absolutely does, and he absolutely did. and the one key difference with the key verse Genesis 50 20 as for you you meant evil against me but God meant it for good what's the rest of it do you know to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today well in Joseph's case all he could do was keep some people alive so Joseph you should know the story if you don't you can go over with your parents Joseph rose to power, and one of the things he did was he created these storehouses of grains because Egypt had a famine, and it kept a lot of people alive.

So God used Joseph to create that situation where even his own brothers came to get the food because they experienced the famine. But Joseph couldn't bring people back to life from the dead. Joseph had no power to help people who were physically dead and Joseph had no power to help people who were spiritually dead But Jesus Christ didn keep people alive Jesus Christ makes the dead alive And so he's a greater fulfillment, though, of what Joseph pictured for him.

And so anybody here today who has had any experience of being born again, what that means for you is that you were dead. You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the prince of the power of the air, and God quickened you. That's the old King James word for made you alive. He gave you life so that you might believe the gospel.

And if you haven't believed that yourself yet, then you need to cry out to God for mercy. You need to cry out, have mercy on me, O God, a sinner. That's what we say to God when we aren't yet born again. so that God can make us alive. But Jesus is the one who is able to say, as for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good so that today many people could be made alive.

So Jesus is the greater Joseph Joseph prefigured the anointed one the Messiah but Jesus fulfilled all the righteous requirements of the law and it was all by God decree So God meant it for good. It was the sons of Israel that meant evil against Jesus, too, to bring it about that many people should be made alive. The Colossians 2 says, And you who are dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.

This He set aside, nailing it to the cross. Jesus became sin for us, so let us praise Him. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoghlan.net You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.