Words To Live By - Genesis 48-49 Series

Anna called for me because she was dying. This was last year. She knew that she was dying. She had been to our church, visited a few times as she was going through her cancer treatments. But now she knew that she was dying and in her last days, so she called for me. I went over to her to the house where she was staying and my desire was to encourage her in the midst of the challenges that she was facing. When I got there, the caretaker says she can't really talk because just she's so weak in her life right now. But when I went into her room, all of a sudden she regained some strength. Although she could only whisper, she had lots of things to say to me. I listened to her talk about important things in her life. I listened to her talk about things just about her history. I mean she talked a lot in that time that I was with her and I went away encouraged. I came to encourage, but I went away encouraged by this lady who loved Jesus so much, even in her dying days.

I thought about that story this week as we entered our story in Genesis 48. If you don't have a Bible in front of you, you can go to the YouVersion of the Bible, where all of our notes are present. So if you go open your Bible, you can look at the YouVersion of the Bible. And when you open it up, you go to events, choose Calvary Chapel, and you'll see all of the scripture that we're going to use today. Those of you over here, you get to look at it.

But we're entering in this story into Jacob's room where he's dying. So the picture is Jacob is sick, he's dying, and his son and his grandkids come into the picture. They're coming into the situation so that they can see what's going on and they can spend some time with him. I want you to enter with me into the story, would you.

Notice Genesis 48:1. Some time later Joseph was told, “Your father is ill.” So he took his two sons Manasseh and Ephraim… Now Manasseh is the older one; Ephraim is the younger one. That's why they're in that order – Manasseh and Ephraim along with him. When Jacob was told, “Your son Joseph has come to you,” (notice what happened) Israel rallied his strength and sat up on the bed. You can just picture the story. You're in this room, and Israel sees his son and his grandsons, and so he gets his energy together and he's ready to do something. We're going to see what he does.

Jacob said to Joseph (verse 3), “God Almighty…” Now, I just got to stop there because he's using the word El Shaddai. The Great God Almighty. He starts that way, even though he is very weak, I'm sure, and not saying it as loud as I am. But he's saying – “God Almighty appeared to me.” And he's going to tell us about two of the most important decisions he made in his life. They're the most important decisions you'll make in your life too.

The first important decision that anyone can ever make is a personal relationship with God. He's going to tell us the story of how when he left home, went off to college, so to speak (although he was really going off to get a wife…although some people go to college do get a wife). But the point is, he was leaving home and he's going off now. You remember that story where he goes to bed that night and takes a rock and he uses that is a pillow. There was this stairway to heaven with angels ascending and descending, representing this opportunity for Jacob to have a personal relationship with God. God said to him, “I will be with you as you go on to Paddan Aram.” And so he's going to tell us that story now.

Notice what he says. He says – “God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and there he blessed me and said to me, ‘I am going to do three things. I’m going to make you fruitful and increase your numbers. I will make you a community of peoples, and I will give this land as an everlasting possession to your descendants after you.’” So he's sharing within that most important decision.

Now look at verse 5. He says – “Now then, your two sons born to you in Egypt before I came to you here will be reckoned as mine.” Notice how he switches the order. Do you see that in the passage? He switches the order of the names. He says – Ephraim and Manasseh. He doesn't say Manasseh and Ephraim. He switches their names. That's going to be important as you kind of read through the story. He says – “They will be mine, just as Reuben and Simeon are mine.” So what he's doing is he's adopting these two boys as his own. They're going to have the same privileges as those would be in my family.