v. 1 "days to come" literally "in the latter days", a phrase that only appears in prophetic contexts. Jacob is giving a prophecy here.

v. 4 Once again in Genesis, the eldest son (as before Cain, Ishmael, Esau, and Er) loses his privileged position because of his sin. The incident referred to we remember from 35:22. Upon the death of Rachel, Reuben, Leah’s son and Jacob’s first son, sought to ensure that he would assume leadership of the family. He did it in the pagan way, by sleeping with his father’s concubine, Bilhah, treating his father, Jacob, as though he were as good as dead. Jacob’s long and eerie silence about the episode is now broken with this curse and judgment. [Wenham] In v. 3 we hear what might have been, in v. 4, the ruin of hopes and expectations by sin. Interestingly, in confirmation of Jacob’s words, later on in Israel’s history there is no trace of Reuben’s original primacy. The tribe settled in the Transjordan, outside the actual borders of Canaan, and faded out of the national history: no prophet, judge, or king came from Reuben.

v. 7 Simeon and Levi, you remember from Genesis 34, led the violent and treacherous attack on the Shechemites in revenge for the rape of their sister Dinah by Shechem, the son of the Hamor, the ruler of that area. Jacob calls them "brothers" here in the sense of "allies" or "confederates" in their scheme. Brutal vengefulness is no quality to be desired in a ruler, so these two brothers are disqualified as well.

v. 12 We looked at this text briefly in our consideration of Judah’s spiritual renewal in chapter 44 and in connection with our observation that he, alone among all the brothers, had come to the point where he was willing to lay down his life for another, his brother Benjamin, even for Benjamin who had been up to that point, his enemy in the family, one of his father’s favored sons, a son of Rachel. Judah, we said, was the true hero of the Joseph story, and now comes the seal of that, his reward in the testament of his father, Jacob. Judah had come to care deeply for the happiness of his father, and now it becomes Jacob’s happiness to prophesy the greatest things of all for his fourth son. The other brothers would bow down to him; he will go in conquest over his enemies, a fierce lion that seizes its prey and dares anyone to challenge it (perhaps a reference in the first place to the military conquests of King David) – remember in 36:31 we learn that at least the final editing of the book of Genesis did not take place until there were kings in Israel – and the readers of the book then would surely have thought of David, the "lion of Judah" as he came to be known. In v. 10 we learn that the rulers or kings will come from Judah ("between his feet" is a euphemism for the private parts and so a reference to his progeny). The sense seems to be that a great king will come from Judah, that is, the Messiah. And this is confirmed in the promise that the obedience of the nations will be his and, in v. 11, by this characteristic description of the prosperity of the Messiah’s kingdom: there will be such a superabundance of grapes no one will care if the animals eat their fill and such an abundance of wine that one can wash one’s clothes in it. This description of the Messiah's reign is like that given in Isaiah and the other prophets.

v. 21 The remaining sons of Leah and the two concubines are spoken of much more briefly. To put it mildly, these verses are full of translation problems and questions of interpretation that, to this point, no one can answer with any certainty. The tribe of Zebulun was, for example, not given land by the seashore when Canaan was divided among the tribes by Joshua, but "live by the seashore may be an idiom meaning something else." Issachar will live in fertile country and be enslaved by his neighbors, presumably Canaanites, or, in other words, the descendants of Issachar will prefer to be serfs on good land rather than shepherds or herdsmen in a poorer part of the country. But, it is not known for sure how that prophesy was fulfilled. Dan apparently is being depicted as a weaker tribe, as we would guess from Judges, but its victories will benefit the entire nation, just as the victories of greater tribes. Jewish commentators long took the reference to the viper as a prophesy of Samson, who was a Danite. The Gadites, according to 1 Chronicles 5:18; 12:8, were famed for their military prowess. Most of the statements about various sons and their descendants employ puns on the name. The saying about Gad is one long pun: v. 19 consists of six words in the Hebrew and four of the six include the "gd" that makes "Gad."

v. 26 Joseph’s blessing is much longer as befits his place in the narrative. As had already been said earlier (48:22), Joseph was given the rights of the first born (a point made explicit in 1 Chronicles 5:1-2). "Blessing" is one of the key words in Genesis, occurring some eighty-eight times. Here, in the finale of Jacob’s last words, the root occurs six times (the noun five times and the verb once). The God-given blessings of the future will far eclipse the blessings already experienced [Wenham, 486].

v. 27 The contrast between the young and helpless Benjamin we have known in the narrative to this point and the ravenous wolf is striking. The reference seems clearly to be to Benjamin’s later military exploits. Ehud, the Benjamite delivered Israel from the Moabites; and Saul and Jonathan were Benjamites, both great warriors.

v. 33 "gathered to his peoples" almost certainly refers to Jacob’s soul being reunited to the souls of his forefathers in the afterlife. The phrase is separate from the idea of burial and, in any case, here explicitly the burial occurs long after Jacob was gathered to his people, because Jacob’s body was taken to Canaan for burial. There has long been a prejudice in liberal scholarship against the idea of the hope of life after death in Israel; Israel’s early faith should have been too primitive for that, so the reasoning goes. But there is nothing primitive about the theology of Genesis – the Bible’s whole faith is here! And there is substantial other evidence to the same effect. What is more, we are taught in Hebrews, for example, that the patriarchs were precisely looking for a heavenly country and knew very well that their destiny did not lie in this world.

For any Israelite reader of Genesis 48 and 49, the testament of Jacob, his specific and particular blessing of each of his sons, including his adopted sons, Joseph’s sons Ephraim and Manasseh, reported in the previous chapter, would be significant as an account of the origins of Israel’s national life. They would read these prophesies of the patriarch, Jacob, and understand more clearly than we can today, why each of the twelve tribes had the history that it had and why each tribe’s defining character was what it was.

And clearly this is the significance of these two chapters at the very end of the narrative of Genesis. They are laying the foundation for the national life of Jacob’s descendants. This is a prophesy of the nation of Israel. The sons of Jacob are what are called "eponymous ancestors." That is, they give their name to the nation – these names here, Reuben, Levi, Gad, and the like, are not merely the sons of Jacob, they are the names of the tribes of Israel. This is the interpretation of this material given by the narrator himself in his conclusion in v. 28: "these are the twelve tribes of Israel."

You remember that, at the very beginning of the Abraham material, God promised Abram that he would make of him a great nation. That is the first line of the covenant promise in Genesis 12:2-3. To have a nation one must have a people, which is why the seed is such an important subject in Genesis. And by this time in the historical development of the covenant we have twelve sons, each with his family, coalescing into an infant nation. It is still a family, but Jacob can see the nation opening before his failing sight. Twice in the later chapters of Genesis, the word "Israel" is used with the connotation of a national people, most recently in this very context, in 48:20 (also 34:7).

To have a nation one also needs a land, which is why the land figures so prominently in the unfolding drama of Genesis – God is promising the provision of a land for this nation he has promised will come from Abraham.

To have a nation one must further have a government, and already here, in Jacob’s blessing of Judah, there is reference made to a king, a royal ruler who will descend from Judah. Israel will have kings and then a King!

And, finally, to have a nation, one needs some form of a constitution or political manifesto. That will come in detail in the next book of Moses with the giving of the Law at Sinai. Up to this point, that constitution is God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to the extent it had been revealed. It was that covenant that bound this now greatly extended family together in common cause and in a sense of common origin. That origin, of course, was the election of God, and that imparted to Israel’s national life a sacred character – in the same way, though in a much less significant way our Revolution imparted to the American nation a sense of divine calling and high purpose. Nations are like that. There is a sense of sacred origin and common cause that binds a people together under a single government ruling according to a particular ideal. But this nation, Israel, had an origin far more sacred and an ideal far more pure and a government that came from God himself. And that is why the Israel of God – the church of the Lord Jesus Christ – is still in the world today and will be to the end of the age, while all other nations have come and gone.

In one sense we can divide the OT according to this understanding of Israel as a nation. Genesis through Joshua concern themselves with the seed or the people; with the constitution; and with the land. Judges through Chronicles concern themselves with kingship and the government of the Israelite nation. And alongside the histories of the OT, we have the prophets, whose entire ministry is to summon Israel back to the true and original understanding of her existence as God’s people, in the land God promised to them, under the law God revealed to them, and under kings God provided to rule over them according to that law. In any case, in Genesis 49, we have the end of the book linking up with the chief themes of the earlier part of Genesis and preparing the way for the development of those same themes still further in the next book. It is in this sense, that in Hebrews 11:21 we read that, "by faith Jacob, when he was dying, blessed each of Jacob’s sons…" This testament, this blessing, was an act of faith on Jacob’s part because it revealed his conviction that, as God had promised his grandfather, from his seed would come a great nation.

So these last chapters, that may seem to the unobservant reader of Genesis something of an anti-climax, are in fact a summing up and a sending on ahead. What we have in chapter 49, painted admittedly in broad brush, is a review of Israel’s future. Jacob speaks of the decline of the tribes of Reuben and Simeon, of the ascendance of Judah, Ephraim, and Manasseh (Joseph), of the rich land the nation would inherit in due time, of the oppression of Issachar, Dan, and Gad, and so on. It is only a very rough sketch of the history that will follow, but it gathers up the expectation of Genesis and casts it into the future where it will be fulfilled hundreds of years later when Israel inherits the Promised Land. God’s blessing will accompany his people and they will become that nation God had promised to make of Abraham and his seed.

And, in that way, these two chapters of Genesis paint a picture of the life of the church and kingdom of God for all ages, even our own. We think back over the story of Jacob’s sons, the rivalry, the cruelty, the sins of passion and envy, and then, the grace of God making something pure and good out of all of that evil. And we look forward, with Jacob’s prophesy in hand, to the years, the centuries that would follow and see the same. Moments of sterling faith – the exodus, the conquest, the reigns of David, Hezekiah, and Josiah – mixed together with a great deal of faithlessness and worldliness and corruption: the wilderness, the period of the Judges, Saul’s spiritual collapse, the reigns of Jeroboam, Ahab, and Manasseh. We have before us the conquest and Israel’s settlement in the land, but we have also still further in the future, the catastrophic judgment of the Northern Kingdom – the ten northern tribes – and the exile of the southern kingdom.

And there is still more. We have the promise to Judah that a great king would come from his issue, and the Lord Jesus did appear some 1800 years later. But the kingdom of that Lion of the tribe of Judah has not appeared yet in its consummation, such as we see described in vv. 10-12. The obedience of the nations is not yet fully his, and there is not yet the prosperity described in those memorable images of a donkey tied to a grape vine and of clothes being washed with wine.

What we have in Jacob’s blessing of his sons is, in effect, a philosophy of history, an account of how the kingdom of God will make its way through the world – in fits and stages, in triumph and failure – yet all the while the blessing of God accumulates. The community of nations being formed out of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is being formed, as God in the gospel draws sinners to himself from every tongue, tribe, and nation, the Israel of God today a far larger, far more impressive presence and force in the world than ever it was in Jacob’s day. Yet, still today, God’s people, like the patriarchs before them await the consummation of the kingdom of God. Generation after generation of the saints are gathered to their fathers, and the history rolls on to its appointed end: when, no one knows.

But all of this history is being worked out in and through the lives of individual believers – first these twelve men and then the multitudes of their spiritual descendants, including you and me.

That, too, is part of the picture here. For the twelve sons of Jacob are, surely, every Christian, every member of God’s covenant family. There are those in the church who never entirely recover from sins committed and from acts of foolishness earlier in their lives, like Reuben. We have our hotheads, like Simeon and Levi, who cause us a lot of trouble along the way. You will have read, some of you, in the Christian press recently, about the President of a Christian college back East, who was dismissed by the Board of Trustees because he could not control his flaming temper. We have had such in this church. Any church of any size has Levis and Simeons in the congregation. The church always has people who, like Issachar, are willing to do almost anything to maintain peace and comfort, and people like Gad who are immediately ready for any confrontation. And, of course, there are plenty of us, all of us to some degree, who can see that our lives have been marked, for good and for ill, by our parents and by the atmosphere they created in the home in which we were raised. Think back on Jacob’s life – all his sins and failures; his refusal to discipline his children; his perverse refusal to banish the disunity from his household and create among his children a spirit of love and harmony. No doubt much of what his sons became resulted in some way from the home in which they were raised. Genesis makes no bones about that. And we can see it for ourselves in virtually any Christian life we choose to study.

Just as, in Revelation 2 and 3, we read of congregations that we can easily find in the church today – indeed, to some degree, every congregation finds itself in those descriptions – , so in Genesis 49 we find every Christian. It is not, of course, the sum total of all possible characteristics, but a sampling that reminds us of the motley crew from which God creates the nation he promised to Abraham. We stand much further down the road than Jacob did, but we could say very similar things about our children and their descendants and the lives they would lead and the generations of the church they would form, if, that is, we had the prophetic foresight that Jacob did.

Far down the ages now,
Much of her journey done,
The pilgrim church pursues her way
Until her crown be won;
The story of the past
Comes up before her view;
How well it seems to suit her still,
Old, and yet ever new.

‘Tis the repeated tale
Of sin and weariness;
Of grace and love yet flowing down
To pardon and to bless;
No wider is the gate,
No broader is the way,
No smoother is the ancient path
That leads to light and day.

No sweeter is the cup,
Nor less our lot of ill;
‘Twas tribulation ages since’
‘Tis tribulation still;
No slacker grows the fight,
No feebler is the foe,
Nor less the need of armor tried,
Of shield and spear and bow.

Thus onward still we press,
Through evil and through good;
Through pain and poverty and want,
Through peril and through blood:
Still faithful to our God,
And to our Captain true,
We follow where he leads the way,
The kingdom in our view. (Horatius Bonar)

That is the way of it for the Christian. That was the way of it when Jacob was in the world; it was the way of it for his believing descendants; it was the way of it for the apostles and early Christians; it was the way of it for those who kept a dim light shining through the darkness of medieval Europe; it was the way of it for the generation of the Reformation; it was the way of it before, through, and after the great revivals of Western Christianity, it is the way of it for those who are the inheritance of the great missionary enterprise of the 19^th century who form the church in large areas of the world where it never existed until 150 years ago; and it is the way of it today for every Christian and every congregation of Christians, including our own.

And what is our response to that? Well, it should be Jacob’s own, which is found in a striking interruption of the narrative in v. 18. "I look for your deliverance, O Lord." He is in the midst of the blessing of his sons, the prophecy of the future nation that would come from them. And, he interrupts his prophetic survey with this prayer. It comes unbidden out of his heart. He has said enough about his sons to feel how many difficulties lie ahead. It is a prayer like Habbakuk’s, who knowing that the Babylonians must come to punish Judah, cries out, "Lord, in your wrath remember to be merciful!" Jacob realizes how frail his sons are; perhaps he realizes how many sinful tendencies they had inherited from him! "I look for your deliverance, Lord."

And, so, today. The church beset with enemies within and without. She is often so weak, so sinful. And each of us the same! Whether it is old sins that have left their mark, like Reuben’s; or a raging temper like Levi’s, or a combative and confrontational spirit, like Gad’s, it is of this material that God must built his holy nation! "I look for your deliverance, Lord."

And on we travel. For if Genesis has taught us anything it is that where sin abounds, grace much more abounds, and that the Almighty God, infinite in mercy, can and will build a glorious temple out of all this wood, hay, and stubble. And if the day of the donkey being tied to the grape vine is still well beyond us, and we will come to the end of our days and be gathered to our fathers, we will tell our children, as Jacob told his,

I shall sleep sound in Jesus,
Fill’d with his likeness rise,
To live and to adore him,
To see him with these eyes.
‘Tween me and resurrection
But Paradise doth stand;
Then – then for glory dwelling
In Immanuel’s land.