v. 1 The place and nature of Jacob’s worship indicate his state of mind. Beersheba had been Isaac’s primary center and we see him there offering sacrifices to the "God of his father, Isaac." He has a sense of his family responsibilities and the assumption is that he will not leave the promised land without the Lord’s explicit permission. Beersheba, twenty-six miles south of Hebron marked the practical southern boundary of the land. Cultivation stopped there and it was desert until one reached Egypt. Very different from Abraham’s cavalier departure from Canaan during a famine, long ago (12:10).

v. 4 "Joseph’s own hand…" is the promise of a peaceful death after reunion with his long-lost son.

v. 27 The number seventy represents totality (Genesis 10 records seventy nations descending from Noah, the point being that the entire population of the world descended from him). Here, the point is that all Israel went to Egypt. Remember, the earliest readers of Genesis were the Israelites.

v. 28 Judah continues to take a leading part in the family’s affairs. And it is fitting that he, of all men, should be the one to make the final arrangements for the reunion of Jacob and Joseph.

v. 30 Jacob’s former despairing, "I shall go down to the grave mourning," has become a tranquil Nunc Dimittis. [Wenham]

v. 34 Two things may be at work here in Joseph’s careful coaching of his brothers for their interview with Pharaoh. Joseph may want to assure Pharaoh that he has no intention of moving his brothers into positions of power in the Egyptian court; but he seems insistent that his family settle in Goshen and remain shepherds by trade. As one commentator suggests, Joseph wished "to ensure that Pharaoh’s goodwill would be to the family’s real benefit, not to their detriment by drawing them into an alien way of life at the capital." [Kidner]

Now, as I have mentioned a number of times in our study of Genesis, I have a new appreciation of the artful way in which this narrative has been constructed. Every section, every chapter, has its place in the whole by careful design and serves a specific and important purpose in telling the story of the early history of the people of God.

Chapter 46 is no different in this respect. We noticed, at the beginning, that the narrator beautifully draws our attention to the connection between what transpires in this chapter and what has gone before. Jacob goes only as far as Beersheba – where, as we read in 26:23-25, Isaac had built an altar and where the Lord had appeared to him and promised to him all that he had promised first to Abraham. And, now, when God appears to Jacob at Beersheba, these many years later, he identifies himself to Jacob as "the God of your father." And he makes once more, the same promise to Jacob that he had made to Isaac and to Abraham before: "I will make of you a great nation" and "I will bring you back again", i.e. this land of Canaan shall be yours.

You remember how, really from the beginning of the book – at least from chapter 3 – but, especially from the beginning of the Abraham material in chapter 12, our attention has been concentrated on this double promise: of a seed and of the land. "To your offspring I will give this land," God had promised Abraham. And then follow chapter after chapter that are concerned either with the promise of the land or with the promise of the seed. And so with Isaac and so with Jacob, who spends a long time away from the land, but finally returns to it, and the story of whose seed or offspring has occupied us for many chapters now.

And here in chapter 46 the same great subjects re-emerge: the seed and the land. Can Jacob safely leave the Promised Land? Yes, the Lord tells him, because I will bring you back from there – not "you" as an individual (though Jacob will be buried in the Promised Land) but "you" as a family, a people. And, then, all the emphasis falls on the seed, on Jacob’s descendants. In v. 3 the Lord promises to make of Jacob that great nation that he had promised to make of Abraham and of Isaac. And then, notice how often the words "offspring", "sons", and "descendants" occur in the next few verses: 5, 6, twice in seven, 8, and then again in the summary in vv. 26-27. And, of course, the sons are listed by name, with their sons, the lists taking up the largest part of the chapter.

But, there is more. You remember that God, in renewing his covenant with Abraham in chapter 15, had told Abraham that his descendants would be strangers in a land not their own for four hundred years, that they would be enslaved in that land and mistreated, but that finally God would bring them out of there with great wealth and back into the Promised Land (15:13-16).

The chapter we have just read is the beginning of that period of Israel’s sojourn outside of the Promised Land, the beginning of the four hundred years that would end only in the days of Moses. The promise of the Lord is unfolding just as he said.

And that, in itself, is also the continuation of an earlier theme of the book of Genesis, a recapitulation of one of the book’s primary lessons in the life of faith. You remember how it went. The Lord promised Abraham the land and a seed. But it was a very long time before he ever owned a single piece of property in the land of Canaan, and that was only a gravesite. And he promised Abraham descendants. But once Abraham was in the land, everything happened except he and Sarah conceiving a child. The first place Abraham came to in the Promised Land was the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. For the people of that time a tree like that was a fertility tree. Abraham probably thought that he would have a son right away now that God had promised to make of him a great nation and had explicitly promised Abraham at that tree: "to you and your offspring I will give this land." But no son was forthcoming. No child at all. Indeed, as the years passed on any number of occasions the dim hope for a child seemed to have been extinguished altogether. Twice, you remember, Sarah was taken into the harems of neighboring kings.

Abraham had a child by Sarah’s maid, Hagar, but the Lord refused to acknowledge him as the promised heir. Lot would eventually have children – even if from incest –, but not Abraham and Sarah. Twenty five years passed before the birth of Isaac. Abraham was seventy-five when he arrived in Canaan, Isaac wasn’t born until he was one hundred.

And, to tell the truth, it has been slow progress from that point. Isaac was forty before he married Rebekah and they remained childless for twenty years. He was sixty when his twin sons, Jacob and Esau, were born. And then, after the boys have grown up, we must wait another twenty years while Jacob lives, loves, marries twice, and has eleven sons in Paddan Aram. Once back in the Promised Land, no more of which he owns by the way than his grandfather Abraham did, Jacob loses his favorite son Joseph and wearily endures the next twenty years, the patriarch of a family so dysfunctional that no one could conceive of it as being the beginning and the foundation of a great nation.

And now, after all those fits and starts, and after what seems to be, in all honesty, not very much progress toward either the land or the seed, Jacob and his family are told by the Lord to go to live in Egypt and there they will remain for four hundred years! Four centuries later Israel will still be in Egypt, still not have possession of the Promised Land, and the spiritual condition of that holy seed will be, once again, of very doubtful quality.

Or, look at it this way. In 46:3-4 we have God’s last recorded revelation to the patriarchs, the last time, so far as we know, that he spoke to Jacob. The next time the Lord speaks it will be to Moses, four hundred years later. Malachi was the last of the prophets of the ancient epoch. After the word of the Lord stopped coming to Malachi, it fell silent in the world. The only Word from God that God’s people had was the written Word, the record of his having spoken in the past. It would be four hundred years before that Word would come again, to Elizabeth and Zechariah regarding the birth of their son, John, who was to become the forerunner of the Messiah.

Four hundred years is a very long time. None of us, I imagine, can trace his or her family lineage back four hundred years. There have been too many generations; too many major changes in the face of men and nations in four hundred years. We would have to find our ancestors in other parts of the world because they were not in North America four hundred years ago. Not even those who came over on the Mayflower. It wouldn’t sail for another twenty years!

All of this waiting! Indeed, in Genesis, the test of faith is primarily a willingness to wait: to believe that God will keep his word even as years pass with very little to show for the promises that God has made. And, of course, so it would continue.

In Micah 5 we read of the coming of the Messiah, "who will stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the name of the Lord his God." But it was to be seven hundred years before that Messiah would appear. Do you know how long seven hundren years is? Seven hundred years ago the Black Death had not yet visited Europe. It would be still two centuries before Columbus would discover the New World!

And, then, in the NT we read that "this gospel shall be preached throughout the world and then the end shall come" and "behold I am coming quickly; my reward is with me." But who, among those who first heard those words, imagined that Christians two thousand years hence would still be looking for the coming of the Lord?

The Bible furnishes many reasons for all of this waiting, for the tortoise-like progress of the kingdom of God in the world. In Genesis 15 the reason given why Israel must wait four hundred years in Egypt before taking possession of the Promised Land was that the iniquity of the Amorite was not yet full. The Canaanites who then inhabited the land, were not yet so wicked, had not yet so completely defied the revelation of God in nature and in conscience, that God, just and holy as he is, was willing to destroy them and take their land from them. Israel would have to wait. We must wait for Christ’s second coming, the Scripture says, because God does not wish any to perish and because the entire company of his elect must be gathered in to the family before the end can come.

And, in Genesis certainly, the waiting is a test, an exercise of faith, a means by which faith is strengthened and purified. We actually can see that waiting do its work in the hearts of the patriarchs. What weak faith we find in Abraham at the outset. He had been called to Canaan and when famine struck he didn’t think twice about leaving for Egypt. Jacob knows better than that now. When God told Abraham that he would give him a son Abraham, at first, did not believe it, not really; hence the fiasco with Hagar and Ishmael. But, later, after Isaac’s birth after those long years of waiting, when God commanded Abraham to kill his son, Abraham neither debates with God or hesitates, but immediately sets out to obey. He knows by now that God will keep his Word; his faith has grown sturdy through much testing, through much waiting. And if the life we have been called to live is a life of faith, then, no wonder, we wait as much as we do.

Robert Murray McCheyne says somewhere, making comment on the Lord’s parable of the vine and the branches, that "If we only saw the whole, we should see that the Father is doing little else in the world but training his vines." [Bonar, 159]

Well, that is why there is so much waiting in the Christian life. God is after faith in us, an ever-stronger faith. He is "training his vines" to abide in him, which is to say, to have faith in him and to live trusting him and his word. And the primary means of its nurture and its growth is waiting. If God were to fulfill his promises to us immediately, without delay, there would be no faith. Life would be by sight. But by waiting to fulfill his Word, God puts us to believing, even believing against the winds of doubt and time, until we are sure that "the Word of our God stands forever." (Isaiah 40:8)

All of us, everyone, who is a true Christian here this morning, a lover of Christ and his follower, is waiting, waiting long and hard for what the Lord has promised you but what he has not yet given. We wait for our deliverance from sin, which he promised us; we wait for Christ-likeness; we wait for the saving blessings of God in the lives of our children; we wait for the desires of our hearts which the Lord told us he would give us as we delighted ourselves in him; we wait for the joy of our salvation, for the peace that passes all understanding; we wait for the conquest of evil and for the second coming of our Savior and for a hundred things in between. And on and on we wait. And weeks pass, and months, and years, and decades, and even lifetimes, and still we wait. Like Simeon and Anna, in some ways, we will wait all our lives to see the consolation of Israel, and we may not see it. When you and I leave this world, it may be a far darker place than even now it is, with far poorer prospects for the church and kingdom of God.

Think of Mr. Hanson, for years the minister here, who died this morning after a long and painful old age. So much he hoped for but never saw, in his own life and in the life of the kingdom of God. Or think of Christians suffering persecution for their faith around the world, sometimes harrowing persecution – such as we have been thinking about on this Sunday of the year. They wait for so much that they will not likely see in this world. And that is the rub, is it not, for you and for me? The Christian life would be a snap if God fulfilled all his promises to us in a day or two, a week or two, a month or two, or even a year or two. But, if he did, we would not live by faith. We would not be trusting in the Lord our God, but trusting instead in the evidence of our eyes.

After all, is this not part of the point of this chapter? The original readers, the people of Israel, may well have wondered whether the migration to Egypt was a mistake. It was a natural question. Should Jacob and his family have stayed put in Canaan? Might they not have avoided all the agony of those centuries of slavery in Egypt? But, no, the Lord told them to go to Egypt. It was his will to bring them there. And, it was his will to make them wait there for four hundred years! Just as it was his will to make Abraham wait for a son and Isaac to wait for his twin boys and Jacob to wait for Rachel and then for Joseph.

And wait they will, faithful men that they are. For, after all, the Lord has always kept his Word. It may have been twenty-five years in the doing, but Isaac was born just as God had promised; and so Jacob and Esau. It may have been seven hundred years but the Messiah did appear. His Word has never been forfeited yet. Every promise has either been fulfilled or we are waiting for it to be fulfilled. That assurance is what makes us Christians. No wonder, then, that Richard Sibbes should find this waiting in confidence to be the "main difference" between a Christian and an unbeliever.

But notice, how this waiting is done. Jacob and his sons make a great move, are reunited with Joseph, settle in Goshen, negotiate with Pharaoh, take up their duties and renew their livelihood. It is like the one hundred and twenty saints in Jerusalem after the ascension of the Lord. They were told explicitly by the Lord to wait in Jerusalem until the Spirit should be given. And they did. But how did they wait? They prayed – how they must have prayed –, they read the Scriptures – as seems clear from Peter’s speech to them in the Upper Room --, no doubt they talked together of what they had seen and heard in the previous forty days, they even conducted important business – they filled the vacancy left in the twelve by Judas’ defection and suicide. This was not Quaker meeting kind of waiting, where all sit silently until the Spirit should descend. This was waiting full of faith and energy and obedience.

And so it was as the long wait in Egypt began. Life went on, duties were undertaken, spiritual wisdom was exercised in the choice of a place to settle. They would wait, but meantime, they would walk with God and serve Him!

And see how they do. There is the beautiful reunion between Jacob and his son, Joseph. There is a new attitude toward death on Jacob’s part, the same spirit we will hear eighteen centuries later in Simeon’s, "Lord, now let your servant depart in peace…" And there is care taken to be sure that the family will not be compromised in its loyalty to God and his covenant by association with a pagan people. What is that but a beautiful summation of what our lives should be as we wait for the fulfillment of God’s promises to us: love and harmony in the family of God, the faithful embrace and confession of the promise of eternal life – a heavenly mindedness – and a conscientious effort to keep ourselves pure and undefiled by the world.

And, what does God do while the four hundred years begin slowly to pass. He takes his daily interest in the life of his people. What a lovely touch there in v. 4. "And Joseph’s own hand will close your eyes." Jacob might well have thought, the promise of God to him being what it was, that he would die in the Promised Land with his family around him there. But it was not to be. More years, centuries indeed, had to pass before the family could take possession of the land promised to them. But, meantime, God dealt kindly with his servant Jacob. He promised him a quiet death and his loved ones at his bedside, and, especially, the son whose absence he had mourned those twenty-two long years.

We may have to wait, but we will not wait without any number of manifestations and demonstrations of God’s love and care and provision for us, his people. Abraham waited for a long time for a son, but along the way God did many things for him to give him every reason to hope, every reason for confidence in the promise that God had made to him. And so it is with you and me.

How like the situation of Jacob and his family is our own today. How like that of countless generations of the saints. They were given promises from God – mighty and marvelous promises – that were not yet fulfilled. Perhaps have not been fulfilled for two thousand years. But they prayed in hope, they served the Lord in the meantime, and they appreciated the many demonstrations of his love that the Lord grants them from time to time. The author of Hebrews makes just this point about these men and women in his great chapter on faith. The patriarchs did not receive all that was promised to them, but they saw the promises fulfilled from afar and waited all their lives in patient endurance for what they knew would some day be theirs. And so must we, and so can we, surrounded as we are with such a cloud of witnesses. They knew that God would keep his Word. He always had; he always will.

And, knowing how important it is for us that our faith be strengthened, we must expect to be made to wait for many things, and meanwhile we must put our faith to work on those promises of God and seize them from afar as the patriarchs did. And if, as happens from time to time, we are overwhelmed in our waiting, and cry out, "How long, O Lord, how long?" with the help of their example, we can quickly catch ourselves and remember that when the promise is fulfilled, as it surely will be, whatever promise of God, we will look back and say, "It were a well spent journey though seven deaths lay between!"

If you visit Edinburgh, you will be directed to Greyfriars cemetery, where many saints of God and martyrs are buried. The martyrs monument in the cemetery will tell you that some one hundred men buried there were executed for their faith in Jesus Christ the only King and Head of his Church. The NE corner of the cemetery is a hallowed spot because so many of the covenanters who were executed in Edinburgh were buried there – men who had been long waiting for the reformation of the church – and in the SW part there was at one time a covenanter prison where twelve hundred covenanters were kept for five months in terrible conditions after the battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679. Alexander Henderson, the architect of the Covenant is buried near the site of that prison.

But the guidebook won’t tell you much of this. It is more interested in another part of the cemetery’s history, that of a dog named Greyfriar’s Bobbie, who waited fourteen years at his master’s graveside before giving up the ghost himself.

What a contrast and what a spur! If a dog can wait fourteen years for a master who will not come, how long can we wait for promises that are sure to be kept. The saints have waited in hope all of these ages; surely, we cannot do any less.

"In you [O Lord] our fathers put their trust; they trusted and you delivered them. They cried to you and were saved; in you they trusted and were not disappointed. It is essential that the rising generation be able to say the same thing about us!