Truth For Life

Guest (Male): Will your faith stand the test of time? Will it remain vibrant in your retirement years and will it extend even beyond your death to future generations? We'll find out how that's possible today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg examines the unwavering faith of a man who lived 110 years.

Alistair Begg: Can I invite you to take your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis chapter 50 and to verse 22 and to follow along as I read? Joseph stayed in Egypt along with all his father's family. He lived 110 years and saw the third generation of Ephraim's children. Also the children of Makir son of Manasseh were placed at birth on Joseph's knees.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." And Joseph made the sons of Israel swear an oath and said, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place." So Joseph died at the age of 110. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt. Amen.

Well, the young man of 17 to whom we were introduced in Genesis 37:2 is now 110. He has lived long enough to see his great-great-grandchildren. Indeed, he lived so long that in the Egyptian mind, he was a man uniquely blessed. There are significant writings in Egyptian history that pinpoint this very age and beyond as being a distinction of the signal blessing of God. And God in his providence, recognizing this, marks Joseph out here at the very end of his life, as in his middle years and as in the beginning.

With his great-great-grandchildren able to meet him and respond to him and then to pass the word on to their children and to their children's children, you have a period of about 100 years following the death of Joseph where there were still people who could speak with clarity concerning the amazing story of this man's life. As subsequent generations inquired about his coffin in Egypt—and that phrase "a coffin in Egypt" is there as the final statement in Genesis—that coffin was going to point subsequent generations forward, allowing them to recognize that the reason the coffin was being kept was not on account of some morbid interest in bones, but it was being kept in order that it may stand as a vital symbol to the provision of God in the past and to the prospect of a glorious deliverance in the future.

First point by way of exposition is that we see here in this record Joseph standing the test of time. Now this becomes apparent when we recognize that in this opening phrase of verse 22, "Joseph stayed in Egypt along with all his father's family," it covers some 50 or 60 years of Joseph's life. This is not immediately apparent to us until we work the mathematics out. And we can say with some clarity certain things. For example, we can note that 93 years have passed since Joseph was taken out of the pit and sold to the Ishmaelite traders. That's a long time. That's a wheen of years. 93 years have gone by since the day that his brothers finally capitulated to the circumstances and said, "Fine, let's sell him rather than kill him and at least we'll be done with him." And on that day, they had gathered up his coat, they had marred it with the blood of an animal, they had taken it back to his dad, and they had engaged in this dreadful hypocrisy and lying concerning what had happened to Joseph. That was 93 years ago.

It's 80 years since he had stood for the first time before Pharaoh. You remember how he had become well known on account of his wisdom. And someone had said to Pharaoh in the face of his dreams, which he found so disturbing in the night, "If you get this young guy Joseph, he'll be able to take care of it for you." And there in Genesis chapter 41 and verse 14, we have Joseph standing before Pharaoh for the first time. And Pharaoh saying, "Now I hear that you're able to do this." And the great reply of Joseph: "I cannot, but God who is in heaven can." And if you recall, we said that is the posture always of usefulness in the affairs of God's people, the acknowledgment that we cannot but that God can, and that God chooses to do what we cannot as a result of his great grace.

80 years have passed. 50 or 60 years have passed since the last verse of chapter 49. And the last verse of 49 records for us the death of his father, Jacob. So here in this little phrase, "Joseph stayed in Egypt along with all his father's family," we have compressed about 60 years of life. We actually have a lifetime—the silent years, if you like. Compared to all of the drama that was represented in the saga of Joseph's early days, all the things that the scriptures pinpoint and highlight for us and cast illumination upon, compared to all of that, these subsequent years—the second half of his life, if you like—while certainly not unworthy of consideration, are actually given no consideration in the scriptures.

We could say that probably they were fairly routine. We might even regard them as being humdrum, at times a wee bit boring. He must have looked back and said, "I don't wish for those days again. But man, I remember when I was there and I remember when that happened and this." And basically every day's just about the same. We get up and we gosh around Goshen and we do some things. And it's okay, but it's different. You see, it's one thing to have a vibrant and an unwavering faith when we're in the middle of the battle, when we're struck by the challenges and the difficulties of life, when we're in the formative years, if you care, when we're in the establishing of things, whether it be within the realm of our physical existence or in the realm of business life or family life or whatever it is. And in the midst of all that coming and going and all the demands upon us, we keep our nose to the grindstone and we walk with Christ and we follow hard after him and we listen to his voice and we keep on.

It's one thing to have a vibrant faith in the midst of that. It is quite another to live a life of steady obedience in the everyday routine of life. And frankly, it is the everyday routine of life with which most of us are familiar. Certainly none of us can approximate to the life of Joseph. I don't care how dramatic your life has been. I don't care if you fell out of airplanes. You can't come close to what Joseph was dealing with in these first 50 or 60 years. Unbelievable drama. And for most of us, we get up and we do the same things over and over again. And it's all a long slide into the retirement years.

And just when you're happily watching a golf tournament on television, you have to be subjected to Smith Barney and their friends and all these guys scaring you when you're just trying to have a nice quiet afternoon, scaring you about your retirement and telling you, "You know, you haven't compounded the interest enough. You're in deep trouble. If you're 45 and you've missed the window, do you realize this? Do you realize that?" The sweat is breaking out on your forehead and all you're trying to do is live your middle years and watch golf. I'm not talking about being unprepared and foolish. Let me just stop for a moment on these retirement years, because they're getting a little close for some of us. Some of us are in them.

Are we going to buy this mythology that what you do in your life is kill yourself for as long as you can to line the nest in which you plan to hibernate? So that the whole of life is just a preparation for hibernation? And you begin early on to think about what the nest will be like, where the nest will be, who'll be in the nest with me. But it is all focused towards finally having made it to the point where we will be able to take the benefits of all this hard work and these resources and we'll be able essentially to chill out or burn out, depending on which part of the country we're planning on doing it in. And people who have done that, are doing that, and are planning to do that run the risk—and mark my words carefully—run the risk of living with totally earthbound horizons, run the risk of expressing only earthly preoccupations, run the risk of ending the life of faith in the routine, humdrum retirement years with a sorry loss of the vibrancy which may well have marked the early part of the 10,000 meters.

And I want just to pause for a moment and say to myself and to you, what are you planning to do between the years of 60 and 110? Are we simply going to hibernate or are we going to stay the test of time? Peter Cotterell, who was Director of Missions at LBC, came to that task having spent about a quarter of a century as a missionary in Ethiopia. He then went on to serve as the principal of the institution. He was a man of academic standing in the secular world, not simply in the world of Christendom—highly intelligent man. In concluding his responsibilities as the principal of the theological institution and in receiving the honorary doctorates which were conferred upon him to mark the occasion, he took the opportunity to let the people know what he was planning on doing next. And he and his wife were heading back to Ethiopia to spend the remainder of their days working with the African church to ground them in the truth of the gospel, to enable them in the challenge of evangelism. But he certainly wasn't going to hibernate.

People often speak about the church as if the great resource of the church is in its youth. The future of the church is admittedly in its youth, but its resource is not in its youth. Youth are untried. Youth have no experience. Youth have no resources bar the resource of their exuberance. The real resource of this church, as in any church, begins around the age of 50, 55. And just at the point where people have put themselves in a position financially, emotionally, familiarly to become an incredible amount of use, they start to talk hibernation. You can't find them. You can't count on them.

And so I want to just give a word of warning and encouragement to all who are beginning to think in that way. I want to ask you, what are you planning to do between the age of 60 and 110? Are you just going to sit on the resource or are you going to use it? The gifts of administration that have made you strategic in your sphere of influence, are you planning simply to wait on the clock, the Rolex watch, and then chill out in Florida? Or how about bailing out now and utilizing your resource with some of the great Christian organizations that are represented both in the eastern block and in the western block and give the rest, the last 50 years of your life, to service for Jesus Christ? Doctors, nurses, school teachers, biologists, carpenters, engineers—investing yourselves for the kingdom.

I don't want to set for you a standard higher than that which I live by or want to live by, because I can only speak to you in recognizing that the scriptures speak to me. And I've been asking myself this question: what do I really want to do? And what would I do if I had the opportunity to do it and if I was completely free? How many games of golf would I want to play? The answer is a lot. As many as possible. In as nice a climate as possible. Now that's the want question. Then there is the ought question: what ought I to do? It's the same question that confronts us in every consideration along the journey of life, but peculiarly so when we think in terms of the opportunity that resource and a life well spent brings to us.

And here we see in this little phrase, Joseph stays the test of time. His horizons are way beyond Egypt. His horizons are not focused in himself. They don't begin and end with him. His little world doesn't isn't bordered on the north and the south and the and the east and the west by Joseph. He's looking way ahead. His responsibility as he sees it is to ensure that those who are his children and his children's children's children do not settle down in Egypt, that they don't become comfortable in Egypt, but instead that they remain unsettled enough so that one day they might be truly settled in the land of promise.

You see, if you try and think in contemporary terms of what had happened here, you've got a refugee people who, in much the same way as we've seen in the scenes of Rwanda, have been moving, migrating across vast tracts of the country. They didn't sort of relocate in Egypt. They went to Egypt because they knew if they didn't go to Egypt they were dead. And they went there for food. And having taken themselves into Egypt in the experience of famine, they have worked through these days. But now the famine is history. Now the famine is past. The famine is forgotten. And the refugees have grown accustomed to life in Egypt. They've grown accustomed to living in this nice section of Goshen. They have begun to multiply. They have begun to enjoy the benefits of this refugee existence.

And in contemporary terms, it's often like people, for example, from Vietnam. I remember meeting somebody in Toronto when I was waiting in line to go up the CN Tower, is it? And in the course of conversation, when you wind your way through those roped-off sections, I engaged this family in conversation and the gentleman, it turned out, was from Vietnam. And I said, "Aren't you enjoying your visit here?" "Oh no," he said, "I'm not visiting here. I live here." I said, "Well, how long have you lived here?" "Well," he said, "I lived here since I was four. And what do you do?" "Well," he said, "I came with nothing. And when I mean—when I say nothing, I mean nothing." "And what do you do now?" "Well, I have dairy marts," I think it was, or convenience marts, he said to me. And it wasn't in the singular, it was in the plural: marts. And it turned out to me that he had a significant little stash of convenience marts and he'd done very well. And I asked him, "Do you miss Vietnam?" "Oh no," he said, "America very nice. America so kind to me. America very nice." "How about your kids?" "Oh, they don't know anything about Vietnam." "Your grandchildren?" "Oh, they don't know Vietnam. It's America now. We live in America. Very kind in America."

Now that's exactly, you see, what they were facing. "Hey, what about Canaan?" "What?" "What about the land of promise?" "Excuse me? No, we live in Egypt. I went to school in Egypt, met my girlfriend in Egypt, got married in Egypt, had my kids in Egypt. What are you on about?" And you see, Joseph's responsibility in staying the course of time was to ensure that the root structure only went down so far. It mustn't go so deep that when the trumpet blew, as it were, when the wagons began to roll and when the opportunity came for them to head for the place of God's appointing, the people would be up and ready for the task.

Now there were two factors which worked to this end. One was the fact that the Egyptians themselves did not like fraternizing with these people from Canaan. And we saw that back in chapter 46 when Joseph says to his brothers, "Now let me tell you what to say when Pharaoh asks you what your occupation is." You see the skill and wisdom of Joseph here. He's crafty. "What is your occupation?" Pharaoh says. "Let me tell you how you answer that. Tell him this: 'Your servants have tended livestock from our boyhood on, just as our fathers did.' Then you will be allowed to settle in the region of Goshen, for all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians."

In other words, don't tell them anything except the truth. Just you tell them that you were shepherds. They don't like you. They don't like shepherds. And they'll be glad to put you over in this corner here, and it's a really nice corner. So that worked in their favor. And then there was the constant reminder of Joseph himself. And clearly the last words of Joseph would be expressive of the kind of theme song of his life. In verse 24, "God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land." In verse 25, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must take my bones up out of this land."

Did you have a relationship with your grandpa when you were a kid? One of mine was gone before I was born, so I only had one. But he and I were real close. He would take me places when my father wouldn't allow me to go places. He was a great grandpa. And we would do all sorts of magical things. Indeed, I was recalling just this week the unbelievable simplicity of my life as a kid. That my life was so ordinary that a good day for me was my grandfather taking me on the bus, public transportation, to the terminus. Didn't matter where the terminus was. We would choose names that were appealing to us, like Auchinshuggle. And he would say, "Do you know where Auchinshuggle is?" And I'd say, "No, is it really a place?" He'd say, "Let's find out." We get on the bus, we go to Auchinshuggle. We would eat toffees on the way there and toffees on the way back and that was it. And every so often we would do dramatic things like get off the bus and go into what we thought was a really tall building, you know, like 10 stories at that time, which was the biggest around. And we would go in and we would ride the elevator up to the 10th floor and then we would look out over the balcony and then we would get back on the elevator and ride it back down to the bottom again and then we get back on the bus. That was a big day for me.

But you see, I didn't care really where we went or what we did. This is a hard thing for us to learn in this high-tech computer age, grandpas, dads. I didn't care where we went or what we did. I just cared that I was with him. And in those journeys, he taught me about life. And he taught me about God. And he said things over and over and over and over again. I don't think he did it deliberately. He never had a day timer. I'm sure he didn't put it up. But if I—and you can all do the same. You can reiterate things. And it would be no different for these grandchildren. "Were you over at Grandpa's house?" "Yes." "Where were you?" "I went over to see Grandpa Joseph." "What was he saying?" "Same thing he always says." "Was he singing his songs?" "Oh, he was singing his songs." "What songs was he singing?" "Same songs he always sings." "Was he doing his favorite?" "He was doing his favorite." "Can you sing it?" "Yes, I can. How does it go?" "We're on our way to Canaan, we shall not be moved. On our way to Canaan, we shall not be moved."

And so when the passing of Grandpa goes and the grandchild goes down the road, he remembers. He says, "You know, I remember standing there with my grandfather and he says, 'You know what, son? We're going to go to Canaan one day. I don't want you to like this place too much because we're leaving. Don't you get yourself too embroiled in this because we're going somewhere else.'"

Guest (Male): You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. And we'll hear more tomorrow about living by faith. In today's message, Alistair addressed retirement and how we shouldn't just chill out or hibernate in our later years, but continue to use our gifts to serve Jesus and to plan for the kingdom. Now since Alistair last year concluded his time as the senior pastor at Parkside Church, he's been doing just that. He's been speaking to others, sharing the gospel. In fact, if you'd like to view Alistair's speaking schedule so you can pray for him as he travels and teaches, visit truthforlife.org/events.

In fact, tomorrow Alistair is speaking to college students at Liberty University in Virginia, so please pray that God will use his teaching in the lives of all who attend. Also there's a big event coming up this fall. It's the annual Basics Conference and it's taking place on the West Coast this year. So if you serve as a pastor or elder at your church, let me invite you to join Alistair in Valencia, California for the Basics West Coast Pastors Conference. It will be held on Tuesday, September 29th and Wednesday, September 30th. If you're in ministry, learn more and register to attend at basicsconference.org.

Thanks for listening today. As Joseph faced his death, he was not one who proudly proclaimed, "I did it my way." Tomorrow we'll learn how we can face our final parting without fear and use it to bless those we will leave behind. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the learning is for living.