THE LIVES OF THE PATRIACHS #10 | JOSEPH: THE FATHER OF LOVE #2

Pastor Christopher Choo

Lesson 3691

THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS #10

JOSEPH: THE FATHER OF LOVE #2

In Israel, every Friday night when children are blessed at the Shabbat table, daughters are told to be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, but sons are blessed to be like Ephraim and Manasseh (Joseph’s two sons) and not Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

 Why?  Because Joseph’s sons were the first Jewish children to be born in a society where Jews were a significant minority and yet still hold on to their Jewish identity. 

Ephraim and Manasseh are role models for every generation of Jewish children who face this same struggle.

Joseph maintained his identity not by avoiding Egyptian culture or by isolating himself. Rather, he played an integral role in Egyptian society. After all, it was Joseph who saved Egypt from destruction and starvation.

The brothers of Joseph symbolized the notion that Jews should live insular lives to prevent the risk of assimilation and disappearance.

Joseph, on the other hand, represents the view that Jewish survival depends on integration with the outside world.

In the end, it is Joseph’s view that prevails and teaches the value and necessity for some type of participation in the outside world.

What is the spiritual lesson here?

It is Joseph's love for God and God's covenantal people that led Joseph to do what he did in Egypt.

This was Joseph’s loving legacy: his dedication to God no matter the circumstance or what life brings. 

We also see that part of Joseph’s legacy is that he was the first Jew who maintained this dedication and faith despite living in a foreign culture. All of the lures of ancient Egypt — the grand pyramids, the exotic culture, the wondrous Nile, the power of office, the animalistic gods — did not entice Joseph to forget his roots, his Jewish identity.

Joseph’s desire to reunite and reconcile with his brothers also provides evidence that his heritage and roots are important to who he is. 

And to that end he acted in faith - by making his brother's vow to take his body to be buried in the Promised Land - but outside the confines of the cave which served as the patriarchal tomb at Machpelah. 

This bold act of faith prophetically declared that the Jewish homeland was bigger than the confines of a small cave of death but land they had to possess as a nation to live as a freedman, not slaves in the land of the living not of the dead.