Returning To Our Proper Place Series

Returning to our Proper Place

A. Return

B. Reassurance

C. Removal Promised

DBF, 7/7/02

It is good to be in the presence of God. I feel safe and comfortable there.

In the last year there were numerous happenings that stole this feeling of safety and comfort to people around the world.

The attacks on September 11, 2001 will be remembered forever and has forever robbed so many people of loved ones, marriages, children and parents. So many people that planned on getting to their proper place with God as soon as this or that situation might come about.

It is amazing the amount of calls for prayer and comfort I received here in Dillingham, Alaska. We are so isolated that not much that occurs outside of this area seems to have too much effect. But this incident did—it drove people in the short time to seek to get towards the proper place that God has called each and every one of us to be.

What is this place?

Being set apart—God tells us throughout his word—be ye holy for I the Lord your God am holy. If we seek out any other place we will be miserable.

Let us walk with Joseph today and seek God’s wisdom and understanding as they prepare to bury Jacob/Israel.

A. Return

Genesis 50:1-14 (KJV)

And Joseph fell upon his father’s face, and wept upon him, and kissed him. [2] And Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father: and the physicians embalmed Israel. [3] And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed: and the Egyptians mourned for him threescore and ten days. [4] And when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spake unto the house of Pharaoh, saying, If now I have found grace in your eyes, speak, I pray you, in the ears of Pharaoh, saying, [5] My father made me swear, saying, Lo, I die: in my grave which I have digged for me in the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again. [6] And Pharaoh said, Go up, and bury thy father, according as he made thee swear.

[7] And Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, [8] And all the house of Joseph, and his brethren, and his father’s house: only their little ones, and their flocks, and their herds, they left in the land of Goshen. [9] And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen: and it was a very great company. [10] And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days. [11] And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians: wherefore the name of it was called Abel-mizraim, which is beyond Jordan. [12] And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them: [13] For his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the field for a possession of a buryingplace of Ephron the Hittite, before Mamre.

[14] And Joseph returned into Egypt, he, and his brethren, and all that went up with him to bury his father, after he had buried his father.

Verse 1-3

We see that Joseph mourns his father whom he loved.

Do we rightly mourn for the sorrows in life—or do we live by a set of rules that say a real man doesn’t cry?

I know that the greatest man and god that I know and love wept at the things he saw around him, and if Jesus felt it natural to cry—I feel that it is natural for a man or women to cry over things that are lost.

Gloria and I had to return to the Philippines last December for the burial of my dearly beloved brother in law Danilo Gonsalez. We participated in a wake for ten day which was something new for me.

The greatest moments of grief to me was getting there and coming to the realization that it was indeed true and when the bearer’s came for the casket. The time in between those were sweet times of rememberance with family and friends.

In like manner the standard time for embalming was 40 days with the total time of mourning in Egypt being about 70 days.

Verse 4-6