40 Minutes In The Old Testament - 40 Minutes In The Old Testament: Episode 60

Episode Date: October 25, 2016

You get five extra minutes in this episode as Chad and Daniel wrap up the book of Genesis. Blessings are given, Jacob dies, forgiveness is everywhere and our teeth are white with milk. Check it out!

Welcome to 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. This is the final episode in the book of Genesis. 60 episodes in and we are about to wrap up Genesis which means we've done 10 more episodes than there are chapters but it's been good

but I'm excited to wrap up a book we made it through a book so we can have some sense of completion Chad I'm extremely pumped 60 episodes 50 chapters I think that's pretty fair for a book

like Genesis. We could probably spend five years pretty easily, but there's too much good stuff waiting for us, so we've got to move along. In fact, I promised last episode that we would finish Genesis, so we're going to cover two chapters

today. We've got a lot of good stuff to get to. All right, we better get after it to make you a man of your word. Man of my word. All right, well, let's do it. So, we wrapped up with the end of chapter 48 last time, the whole chapter is really about the blessing that Jacob

gave to he gave it to Joseph, but he really gave it to Joseph's two sons what happened was that, of course Joseph is not the firstborn, but the blessing of the firstborn was placed upon Joseph via his two sons, Ephraim and

Manasseh, so they will inherit together the blessing of their father and the blessing of the firstborn So we have this kind of deathbed scene, or almost deathbed scene, where Jacob, the patriarch, gives his blessing to these two grandsons, and as we talked about, he switches the order. So instead of blessing with his right hand the firstborn of these two, he blesses the secondborn, thus that theme of reversal that we've seen throughout the book of Genesis, and that we'll see in the future as well. So we're still kind of in the same setting, really, with chapter 49, because Jacob is, in chapter 47 and 48, he's an old man, he's near death, and so this is kind of him making sure that before he dies, that he says everything that he wants to say.

And he has a lot to say. He did a lot of speaking in chapter 48, and almost all of chapter 49 is Jacob talking as well. So this is a pretty well-known chapter, a very different chapter for Genesis, and one that is unique in that it's more, I guess what you would say, prophetic than anything else that you find in the book of Genesis, just as far as quantity goes. So it's usually called, I think, the blessing of Jacob, but that's kind of a misnomer because, as we'll see, not everything that Jacob says here is a word of blessing. You might call it kind of the last will and testament of Jacob. Some people title this chapter the Testament of Jacob, because really what he's doing is, before he dies, he is saying words to each of his 12 sons that in some way forecast their future. So this is what will happen, not necessarily to the son himself, but to those who come from the son, so to the tribes that will be the descendants of each of these 12 sons of Jacob. and one thing that's unique about this chapter is uh this even though we've had a little bit of poetry in the book of genesis almost this whole chapter is poetry which is is kind of a unique

form of of uh well of any of any language's expression but of hebrew as well because you have a lot compacted into poetry you have a lot of metaphors a lot of images that are used a lot of allusions, and so it's different in that respect as well. So it's actually perfectly positioned because you've got all this history behind it from Genesis 1 to chapter 48, and what chapter 49 does is it kind of broadens our horizons so that as we're looking ahead, not just to Exodus, but to really the whole rest of the Old Testament, and most importantly to the climax of the Old Testament, in the coming of the Messiah, it opens up that vista for us to give us this broad overview of the future. Now, we're not going to spend time with each of the words

that Jacob gives to his 12 sons, because it would just take too much time. But what I'll do, I'll make a couple of comments about the first three, and then I want to focus especially upon what he says to Judah, because in what he says to Judah, we have a prophecy of who the Messiah will be and the characteristics and the blessings of his reign. So we'll get to that in just a minute. The chapter starts out this way. It says, Then Jacob summoned his sons and said, Assemble yourselves, that I may tell you what shall befall you in days to come. Now that A particular expression in days to come is significant. Ahri Tayamim in Hebrew.

It really, and later on, especially in the prophets, it comes to mean the latter days or the eschatological days or the days of the Messiah. So that phrase is packed with meaning much later on because it's talking about what is going to come to pass when God's promises all come to fulfillment. But so the very way this chapter begins gives it this note of importance about what is to come in the future. So he starts out with his firstborn, with Reuben. And as we talked about on numerous occasions, even though Reuben was the firstborn, the blessing of the firstborn was going to be taken away from him. And this is where we see it finally made explicit. So he says, Reuben, you are my firstborn, my might and the beginning of my strength, preeminent in dignity and preeminent in power.

So it starts out pretty well. You're thinking, all right, yeah, Reuben, he's firstborn. He's got all of this power, all of this preeminence. And then it changes tone. He says, uncontrolled as water. You shall not have preeminence, because you went up to your father's bed, then you defiled it. So this is, of course, in reference back to what Reuben did years before when he had sex with his father's co-wife, with his, I guess, I don't know exactly what you'd call it.

It's not his stepmom, but it was something like that anyway. And so because of that sinful action, he is cut off from the blessing of the firstborn. And we've kind of seen his, I guess, deterioration over the course of the whole Joseph story because he keeps going farther and farther down in importance and centrality to the story. Okay, so the blessing is taken away from Reuben. Well, what about Simeon and Levi because they're next in line. Well, again, as we've talked about, the blessing that might have passed to them is not going to pass to them because of what they did. So he starts out right away by saying, Simeon and Levi are brothers.

Their swords are implements of violence. And this is in reference back to what they did to the male inhabitants of the city of Shechem. You'll recall that their sister was raped by the prince of that city. And as a result, the brothers came up with this plan to trick them all by having them circumcised. And when they were in pain the third day, Simeon and Levi go in and they slaughter all the male inhabitants of the city. Their dad is very upset about this. And as a result of that, the blessing is not going to pass to them either. So, I mean, we've had the firstborn, and now we have the second and the thirdborn.

Not positive words spoken to them. Now, this is all setting the stage, though, for what we're about to hear. so three not blessings but and not necessarily curses but uh kind of uh i don't know what you we don't really have a word they're not anti-blessings but these are prophecies that have a more i guess negative tone to them in reference to these three sons but that darkness if you will all sets the stage for the light that's about to dawn when we get to to judah because the tone is going to radically change and what we hear pronounced upon judah is going to be complete blessing completely positive and and not only that but we're going to see here

one of the prophecies of the one who would come from the tribe of judah the messiah so here's how it starts out he says judah your brothers shall praise you your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies your father's sons shall bow down to you so pretty pretty heightened language already already here at the first so your your brother shall praise you now that in and of itself is is pretty uh unusual because it's very very rare in the old testament for anyone to receive praise besides yahweh almost always if you have praise being bestowed it's upon it's upon god so his brothers are praising him and he says your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies your father's son shall bow down to you now ironically this is

kind of a this is sort of the joseph language right he had the dreams about his brothers bowing down to him which which happened in egypt but here it's the the son's bowing down onto joseph but to Judah. So you kind of got his own family bowing down to him and praising him. And not only that, not only those who are closest to him showing him reverence and giving him praise, but those who are opposed to him being conquered by him because his hand is on the neck of his enemies. It's kind of this picture of the enemies running away, trying to get away from the superior power. And Judah reaches out with his hand and he and he grabs grabs the the neck of his of his enemy so you got this image of a praise and of uh of submission and of conquest already at the beginning of what

he has to say about judah you know i think it's i think the the tendency because of the language and the and sort of these the contrasts between these sort of negative words he has to say at first to his first brothers and then the positive words of Judah and you say like okay so let me get I think I've got this figured out these guys were bad

and sort of messed up and so they got and we've talked about this but now we're actually seeing it these guys were bad and messed up so they don't get the blessing and then Judah was was good but Judah's not good no not by any stretch

of the imagination at all he's not good he so i mean uh in a lot of ways like what what like judah might be worse than these guys like what he's he's the one that came up with the idea to sell joseph into slavery yes yeah it was it was his it was his plan he saved him from being murdered he so he saved him from fraticide but he's still sold him into slavery and you know that's and we're not and we even talked about his uh sex with his daughter-in-law so this one dude's disqualified because like he hooked up with his whatever that was like not really stepmom but whatever his his father's side mom he hooked up with his dad's side project yeah this dude like hooked up with

his daughter-in-law like i don't know i'd be just like well that's bad but you're right these guys Yeah, I know. So it's like, I don't know, man. This dude is, I'll just say, this dude is a symbol of someone who is coming that is righteous, but in and of himself is not that righteous of a dude. And so I don't, I think because of that, you can't put too much stock in.

These guys didn't get blessed in the same way because they were bad. This guy got blessed because he was good, but more of this is who's going to get the blessing because this is where the line of Christ is going to come from. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it underscores the fact that grace has nothing to do with fairness. It's not as if God's justice works the same way that ours does. We reward those who are good.

We punish those who are evil. But grace doesn't work that way. Grace is not fair. grace is anything about that. In fact, it seems at times to be immoral and unjust the way that God works, but that's the confounding and beautiful nature of grace, is that those who are undeserving get grace, and those who think they're deserving, then they get the opposite. So yeah, in this case, yeah, it's not as if Judah, because of his high moral standards and his excellent character, he receives this blessing. No, the only reason that Judah is praised the way he is, is because

it's kind of a retroactive, if you will, because of the Messiah coming from the tribe of Judah, that blessing retroactively is spoken to Judah, because to use biblical language, the Messiah is already in the loins of Judah, so he's already there, he's going to be born, so he in a sense is already present within judah awaiting his incarnation and as a result of that judah gets the blessing but it's it's completely an external kind of righteousness just like ours is yeah that's a reason the blessings pronounced on him yeah it's it's uh it's not he's not blessed because of what he's done or failed to do but because of who he is and and that that who he is well a lot of times we think like well that's you know who we are has to do with what we've done or failed to

do but in this case it doesn't it has to do just with who you are who who is going to be coming through you it's like it's like when uh jesus divides the sheep and the goats and then uh and like he says hey these guys you know you didn't do this stuff and then these guys did this stuff and nobody knows what he's talking about because he's not really dividing them up according to what they did or didn't do that's not how he divided them up he didn't divide them up first by what they are so so so you're judah that's who you are and like you you are who the messiah is going to come through regardless of what you've done or failed to do like that's that's who you are uh and so and so this blessing goes to you because is this the same way uh david's a dirt

bag and all these all these other people are dirt bags but because of who they are and because like that's that's the that's that's the lineage that's good that that christ is going to have They're preserved. There are certain things that happen to them. Yeah. And knowing the whole story, I'm glad that the Messiah did not come from the tribe of Joseph. Because if he had, that would only strengthen this tendency we have to think that God has a certain favoritism for those who are righteous. So the Messiah doesn't come from the tribe of the one who was, no doubt, the most moral among the brothers. He comes from one who was one of the worst, which underscores the fact that he's the savior. He's the savior of those from whose tribe he comes.

he comes from a messed up family from a messed up tribe whose patriarch did terrible things because he's the savior of sinners he's not the savior of the righteous all right so uh let's kind of move on here to see what else we have to say so he he then switches jacob switches the imagery a little bit and as is very common throughout the old testament he uses animal metaphors to describe the patriarch Judah. In fact, we see this throughout this particular blessing. There's a whole lot of animal images that are applied to the brothers. So here he says, Judah is a lion's whelp. From the prey, my son, you have gone up. He couches, he lies down as a lion, and as a lion, who dares rouse him up? So first of all,

He pictures the brothers bowing down to him and praising him and he being the conqueror of his adversaries. And now he switches to the picture of the king of beasts to the lion. And he's kind of expanding the whole image of him conquering his enemies. You don't mess with a lion. This lion has prey. He crouches down like a lion. No one messes with him. No one rouses him up because there is no one above him.

So this is, using the animal imagery, this is reinforcing the idea of this dominance that Judah is going to have over his brothers. In fact, over more than just his brothers. So he's conquering, he's praised, he's adored. And then we get to verse 10, and he switches it up once again. And it's in verse 10 that we have this most explicit reference to really who we're talking about. I mean, the ultimate reference of these prophetic words. It says, the scepter, this ruling staff, the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet until Shiloh comes. and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.

Now we've got to talk about this a minute. If you're just listening and you're not looking at your Bible, then you don't realize that maybe your Bible has a different translation than this. There's a whole lot of various ways that this particular verse is rendered. So I'll go through it bit by bit and kind of explain it a little bit. First of all, the first couple of phrases are pretty clear. talking about the scepter and the ruler's staff

the scepter or the ruler's staff and this is emblematic of someone who is in charge who's a king who is a ruler so the scepter was the icon of his kingship and his ruler's staff

between his feet you kind of have this picture of someone sitting on their throne and they have their staff and their ruling staff and their scepter in their hand and it's between their feet. They're holding it as they sit on the throne. So this is expanding this idea of him being the one that the brothers bow down to

because he is the ruler. And then we have this phrase, and this is really the phrase that gets the most attention. It says, my translation says, Until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Now, a lot of translations render that differently. The Hebrew here is a little bit unclear, and that's why you have different kinds of English translations. I think this actually works, that Shiloh here is simply a name for this ruling figure who is to come. It is the name in other parts of the Old Testament of a town, but this is talking about a person.

The problem is we don't know exactly what it means as a personal name. But we do know that this was understood as a name for the Messiah way back. In fact, I was looking at one of the Dead Sea Scrolls in talking about Genesis chapter 49, references Shiloh as being the anointed one, as being the Messiah. The Dead Sea Scrolls are, of course, dated from 1st century B.C., 1st century A.D., so it kind of gives us a good reference for how Jews of even the time of Jesus were understanding this verse to refer to the Messiah. So this particular prophecy of the Messiah, you see it reflected in these Dead Sea Scrolls. You see that already from Genesis, Genesis chapter 49, Genesis 3, we have these explicit promises of the one who is to come.

So let me go on and wrap up this particular section about Judah, and then I'll go back and kind of summarize everything. So Jacob goes on to use some really lavish language to describe the blessings that are going to be part of this Shiloh's kingdom, of the Messianic kingdom. He says, in reference to the Messiah, He ties his foal to the vine and his donkey's colt to the choice vine. He washes his garments in wine and his robes in the blood of grapes. His eyes are dull from wine and his teeth white from milk. This is a great example of how you kind of have to have a different mindset that when you hear descriptions like this, you've got to put on your Old Testament way of thinking,

because this is not the usual way that the New Testament describes the lavish blessings of the kingdom of God. But this is typical Old Testament stuff. It's using earthly blessings to describe spiritual blessings. So he starts out here by talking about he's tying his foal or his donkey's colt to a grapevine. Well, you don't do that. You don't do that because if you tie a donkey to a grapevine, he's going to sit there and he's going to eat up the grapevine. He's going to devour that which you don't want to be devoured.

It would be kind of like lighting a cigarette with a dollar bill. It seems wasteful. but the point is that there's there's there's the vineyards are so lavish there's so many of them this is such a rich kingdom that it really doesn't matter let the donkey eat the uh eat the vine there's there's you know 10 million acres more of them so that that's kind of the imagery here uh this this huge vineyard that has more than enough that's never going to be never going to never going to go away, never going to be eaten up. You can even tie your donkey to the vine, and everything's going to be cool.

That reminds me of when people talk about, like, man, can't wait to get to the heaven man's streets of gold. And I'm like, you know that the reason the streets are paved with gold there is not because gold is so valuable, but because it isn't. because like there's just like it's there's there's so much of the of good things it's like hey what should we do with all this gold i don't know like use it as asphalt pave the streets in it i guess right right just tread it underfoot like that's it says something about like the extravagant um the lack of lack uh there's no there's nothing yeah what are you gonna do you

don't need gold like grapevines whatever like just hey hitch a donkey to it hey streets yeah pave them with gold whatever yeah that's exactly it i mean that's kind of the same message that we have from like he washes his garments in wine his robes in the blood of grapes yeah so you know instead of instead of saving this this fine wine for a very special occasion you just use it for everyday purposes so it's it's not talking about dyeing your clothes with with wine it's just talking about hey let's just use let's use let's use the best of the wine to i don't know to water our yard or to wash our car or to wash our clothes in because there's you're never going to run out at the point yeah i do wish i do wish it also said uh and he will light his pipe with hundred

dollar bills yeah i i wish jacob would have inserted that but uh he i guess uh we'll we'll have to we'll have to kind of apply that in our own day right yeah so there's there's lack of lack as you said there's uh this beautiful abundant wealth everywhere that you everywhere that you look so much wine that his eyes are dull from it and his teeth are white from milk so what's all this mean well this is the old testament's way of telling us that in days to come in the latter days that from the tribe of judah not from the tribe of ruben or levi or simeon or issachar or zebulun or even joseph but from the tribe of judah the messiah will come. He's going to be powerful as a lion. His kingdom will have no end, and his kingdom

will be so rich and abundant that there will never be any lack of not just the daily essentials, but the finest things that we have in this life. So this is a beautiful depiction of not on the blessings of the Messiah, but specifically from where he is to come. This is where we get, of course, the phrase, well, not explicitly. We get this phrase, the lion of the tribe of Judah. We get that from the book of Revelation. But the book of Revelation gets it from Genesis chapter 49. So Christ is the lion of the tribe of Judah.

It's kind of a blending together of a couple of these verses from this prophecy that Jacob utters. And we see hints of this throughout the Old Testament. Of course, it's from the tribe of Judah that David comes, and all of the kings of Israel, of the southern kingdom anyway, come from this tribe. So we see it already established in the Davidic line of kings, and then we see it finally coming to its fulfillment when Christ is born of the tribe of Judah. The Jews of that time believed that this was a Messianic Messiah, as we see evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls. And this is fulfilled in the blessings that we have in the kingdom of God. So that's all that Jacob has to say to Judah.

But it's more than enough to give us a beautiful picture of what we have waiting for us and what we have already in the kingdom of God now. And he goes on in the rest of the chapter to talk about various things related to the remainder of his sons, which we're not going to spend time talking about. The only one that I'll point out is the one that he utters in reference to Joseph. He talks about the might of Joseph, the blessings that are going to be poured out upon Joseph, which does come to fulfillment. but Joseph comes to be associated especially with the northern tribes of Israel and the power they had, the wealth that they had.

And so on his favorite son, he speaks words of blessing piled upon blessing. Unfortunately, as it turned out historically, the northern tribes represented by Joseph abandoned the way of the patriarch, and instead of being faithful as he was, they were unfaithful. and went chasing after other gods and ended up being destroyed in 722 by the Assyrians. And so those tribes vanished, the ten tribes, and the only tribes that really remained were Judah and Benjamin. So Judah in the southern kingdom remained, and it's from, of course, from that tribe that finally the Messianic king will come. So that's the blessing of the Testament of Jacob in reference to his twelve sons.

You can check out the details sometime when you have time and see what he says to each of the rest of the sons. We've got to move on because we've got another chapter to go. The way this chapter ends is saying that he charges his sons to bury him with his fathers back in the cave that's in the field of Ephraim the Hittite. We talked about that when we were discussing Abraham and his burial of his wife, Sarah. So he charges his sons before his death not to bury him in Egypt, but to carry him to the promised land and to bury his body there. And then the chapter ends with Jacob drawing his feet into the bed and breathing his last, and it says he was gathered to his people. So after Jacob has had all that he has to say, after he has prophesied the future of the various tribes, including the Messiah, then he finally breathes his last. So that's the way the chapter ends.

And then the last chapter, which we'll jump into now, it tells us, first of all, about the dutiful fulfillment of their father's last wishes by the brothers. Joseph falls on his father's face he weeps over him he kisses him and as a way of expressing his deep grief Joseph was the closest of the brothers to his father and so his death affects him the most and then we have a switch to practical matters

because in order to fulfill the wish of their fathers then they have to have a period of mourning and then they have to finally get him to the promised land, and that's for burial. And that's what the first few verses of chapter 50 talk about. We kind of have an interesting historical note here because it says that the physicians of Egypt embalmed his father. This was, of course, embalming is very characteristic of the Egyptians. This is the way they cared for their own dead, more for religious reasons than anything else. but joseph takes advantage of their skills to embalm his his father's his father there's a

there's a period of mourning that takes place where even the egyptians are are mourning officially for 70 days for for the patriarch which that's pretty impressive gives the impression that you know it was this was a he wasn't just a kind of a forgotten old man but that he had reached uh uh some kind of preeminence in egypt too alongside joseph yeah i mean yeah i mean you're talking about a guy who hasn't been there terribly long i mean he's been been there a while but yeah i mean you don't obviously we're not told um you know what what those seven was it 17 years right um what those 17 years are like and what he's doing but uh but 70 days man that's a that's That's quite a while. It's over two months.

That's a long time of official mourning. Yeah, I think it does. It points to the fact that not only was Joseph important, but his father was as well, and perhaps some of his brothers. We don't know, but certainly his father was. The honor that was given to Joseph was also given to his dad. And not only that, but we have a huge procession that now begins. They're in Egypt. They've embalmed Jacob, but they've got to get him to the place where they're going to bury him. So we have Joseph and the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his household, and it says all the elders of the land of Egypt.

So this huge entourage of people begin making this pilgrimage from Egypt all the way to the burial site. So I don't know how many people we're talking about. It doesn't give us a number, but this is a huge group of people. So they march out of Egypt. They're burying the body of Jacob along the way. They stop at a certain point, and they have seven more days of lamentation for Jacob. In fact, we have this interesting observation that the Canaanites, they were kind of standing at a distance

watching this taking place and the Canaanites were so impressed by the mourning of the Egyptians for Jacob that they named the place after what was going on there this is a place that's heavy with tears

Abel Mizrayim this place of mourning for the Egyptians so this is attracting attention of the locals as well. Well, they finally get him to where he's to be buried. They bury their father, and then they return to Egypt. And you might think that that would be where the chapter would end, but it's not. And you might think that after 17 years have passed, after Joseph has cared for his brothers and for their families, after everything really seems

to be fine family-wise that what happens next wouldn't happen, but in fact it does. And we've referenced this before. We'll wrap it up here. It says, when Joseph's brother saw their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph should bear a grudge against us and pay us back in full for all the wrong which we did to him? So their sin from, my goodness, decades ago is still bothering them. And they have this picture of Joseph as if he's just biding his time, waiting until his dad finally dies for him to seek vengeance against his brother. And so they come up with this story. They sent a message to Joseph, and they said, your father charged us before he died, saying, thus you shall say to Joseph, please forgive, I beg you, please forgive

the transgression of your brothers in their sin for they did you wrong so these these brothers uh we've talked about how uh you know uh old guilt gathers no rust and these brothers still feel guilty they're still scared that joseph is going to seek vengeance against them and they come up with a story uh about their their dad you know telling them to tell this to joseph all of which was, which was untrue. They just made up the whole thing. Jacob never found out. There's no evidence that Jacob ever found out what his sons did, did to Joseph. Joseph's response to them is, is, is one of the best verses in Genesis. He says, do not be afraid for am I in God's place. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this

present result to preserve many people alive so don't be afraid i will provide for you and your little ones so joseph more or less says the same thing here which he said when he was first reconciled to his brothers look yeah i mean you meant evil you sinned against me but what was really happening was that god was bringing me through your sin down into egypt in order that He might bring about salvation for you and for Egypt and for many other people as well. So just because you did this wrong doesn't mean that it turned out wrong in the end, because the God who cares for us, the God who loves us, is able to use even the most evil of actions in order to bring about good for us, which is what He's done.

So I don't seek vengeance. Instead, I give thanks to God for the way in which He has brought about a good result from from uh these actions yeah it's it's it's a pretty awesome response i mean if you can think about like someone that's in a whole lot of power that maybe you've sinned against i don't know like god uh and uh and maybe you'd be concerned that he is going to and he's just biding his time until he you know there there is this sort of picture of god out there that oh god just biding his time and then when he comes back uh he's just gonna that's when you're gonna get yours yeah he's gonna lower the boom it's gonna like retribution and uh and i think

that uh that that's no that's it's not that's not the case uh that that not not for uh not for us that he's going to that he instead he makes a promise like joseph does and says hey you don't have, you don't have to worry about this. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to provide for you. Like, yeah, you've done evil things. I mean, primarily, I mean, uh, much like, you know, Peter does in, uh, in Acts chapter two. I mean, like he's talking to a literal group of people that said that, you know, you crucified the sin of God, but I mean, I can just as easily, that can just as easily be said about me. And, uh, am I going to be, am I going to be paid back for this? Am I going to be, am I going to be held responsible for this? And the answer is no,

no i'm not uh that that even though that is uh profoundly wicked that instead god is going to love and care for me and uh and the and my family yeah and that's that's the that's the best way to end because it ends on this note of grace and acceptance and god's ways of using the sinful actions of people in order to bring about good good for us and that that in many ways is the way that uh the the whole story of genesis communicates god's grace to us you have these messed up situations sinful people sinful actions taking place but behind it all is the god who loves his people who forgives his people and who is bringing all of this history toward its eventual fulfillment and the one who will pay the price for all the sinful actions of the past, present, and future.

So in that way, Genesis is a beautiful summation of the way that God is always at work, acting in grace and mercy for those whom he loves in Christ, the promised Messiah. Indeed. Genesis is this big, right from the beginning, you have creation but it's not very far in that we that we hit the fall and uh and from that point on genesis is sort of just one big huge dumpster fire and but it's a dumpster fire that god is is using to uh to bring about reconciliation uh to bring about the the messiah who's going to um assume all of this stuff to himself and you see that sort of culminate right here

and Chad everything in the Old Testament from this point on is sweet right? I mean this is it they're forgiven people finally get their act together and live upright moral lives and God just stands in heaven applauding them

that's pretty much what happens the rest of the Old Testament that's it starting next week we'll get into Exodus which is just a whole lot of bliss and just reveling in the forgiveness of God yeah I can't wait

to get to Exodus everybody stay tuned and if you like Genesis then I think you're going to love Exodus because we're going to see in manifold ways the way that God is

active amongst his people and this beautiful incredible pictures of the coming salvation that is prophesied there so all right all right well that's it that is it uh thank you guys so much for uh for hanging out with us if you've been here from the beginning or maybe uh you got here way later because you you jumped in halfway through went back and started listening and maybe very long time from now you're listening finally listening to this one i know a lot of

people are a lot of people have done that there's people that are that are many many months behind as they jumped in and had to go all the way back. But if you've enjoyed Genesis, we certainly have enjoyed doing this. And join us for Exodus. If you want to, by the way, this is the last time I'm going to say this. If you are listening to this currently,

we are going to be in Dallas on the 29th of October. So if you listen to this relatively close to when it airs, you should come out. If you're anywhere in the Dallas-Fort Worth area or a driving distance, or if you just feel like jumping on a plane and coming, you should come hang out with us in Dallas. We're going to be talking about Jesus parables, and I'll be there. Chad will be there.

Elise Fitzpatrick, Donovan Riley, Daniel Ben-Vorez. It's going to be a great time. So you can go over to ChristHoleFast.org, and all the information that you need for that event is there. Also, if you have enjoyed us walking through Genesis, you plan on walking through Exodus with us, and you think that's something that's worth investing in, and you would like to support the stuff that we do,

you can go over to ChristWillFast.org, go over to the support page, and you can make a one-time donation or a reoccurring donation, and that really does help offset the expenses it takes to keep the website running and podcast hosting and doing events and all that stuff. So thank you so much for considering doing that, and thank you for those who have done it.

we will be back next week with Exodus.