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Introduction Introduction We have a longer text to go through today, so I’m just going to read it and then we’ll dive in. The Hourglass I have an hourglass here that is going to represent our life. When a man or woman is born, that moment when that baby slips out of the shoot and takes it’s first breath represents the turning of the glass and the sand begins to fall. With every minute of your life, a grain falls through that tiny crack. You can see the pile accumulating at the bottom of the jar. But here’s the thing about life. Nobody knows how much sand is in the glass. You don’t know how much is left. It could be 30 seconds, 30 minutes, 30 years, or more. But the rate at which that remaining sand empties is fixed. Minute by minute, hour by hour, that sand empties. The pile grows at a fixed rate. And then one day, time runs out. All of those things we worked so hard for, the years and years of education, the work projects that you were so proud of, the years of paying down that mortgage, the years of investing, the gadgets and trinkets aquired, the trading up of furniture, cars, houses, it’s all reduced to a pile of sand at the bottom of an hour glass. And interestingly, most of what we spent time doing in life does very little to prepare us for what we will experience in that moment. There is coming a day when we will realize that the end is drawing near and for most this will summon up feelings of tremendous fear. Here’s the question we are dealing with this morning: How will you deal with that fear? How will you deal with the knowledge that the end is coming soon? When you hear the death chains rattling, how will you find peace and security when all the things that normally stabilize you are cut away? Today in our text we find Jacob in his final days. And he speaks with lucidity. His life has taught him lessons that he’s ready to impart. Jacob is prepared to die in peace. Jacob Now to really appreciate his peaceful deathbed condition we have to remember how little peace Jacob experienced in his life. Seeing Jacob trusting God with total security upon his deathbed is certainly not what we would have expected. Just spend a couple minutes with me in your mind thinking about the life of Jacob. Jacob is one of those guys, that if you met him when he was 20 years old, I don’t think you would have liked him. He wore his insecurity on his sleeve. You can’t understand Jacob until you realize that his entire life was a quest for security and peace. Jacob was absolutely ruled by the fear of being unaccepted. He was so needy. He just longed for acceptance and approval, and this longing for acceptance created great unrest and shaped every aspect of his life. Some people, when they feel rejected or insecure, they recoil in hurt and shrink back. Others do the opposite. Other people fight. Jacob was a fighter. He responded to insecurity by quarreling with everyone he met. He was always in conflict with people. Always. Think about Jacob’s life. Jacob came out of the womb fighting. He came out clutching his twin brother’s heel. And that would become a metaphor for his entire life, clutching at the heel but never quite obtaining. He wrestles away his brother’s birthright for a pot of soup. Then when his father dies, he cons away his brother’s blessing. He had to fight with Esau to get his father’s love and he never got it. He’s got this wily scheme where he struggles to get the wife he wanted. He’s got this gimmicky strategy where he deceives with goats and herds and struggles and wrestles to get the career he wanted. And by the time you get to the Joseph narrative you see all this unresolved insecurity expressing itself in relationships inside the home. The love-starved wives are in conflict with him and each other. The love-starved brothers fight and wrestle with one another, a mirror image of their love-starved father who wrestles with himself and God. Jacob scratched, bit, and clawed to find security, grasping at the heel. And he suffered. By the time we get to the end of Jacob’s life, which is the passage we read today, we see that all that suffering softened him. We see a portrait of a softer Jacob whose body is old and crippled and brittle but his heart is supple and fleshy; we see sheets of scales flaking off and falling to the ground. He has finally stopped trying to manipulate and blame others and instead he simply trusts the Lord and in so doing experiences incredible peace. So today we are going to learn from Jacob three lessons of a man whose life had been changed by the peace of God. We will learn from Jacob how to finish life with security. How do we die of cancer without fear? It’s not easy. If ever there is a time when the security anchors of your life are cut away, it’s when you hear the death chains rattling. What can you cling to in moments like these? As humans, when we sense instability, we reach for what we know. It’s no time to experiment with new centers of security. Dangerous times, unfamiliar times. These are not times for risk. It’s time to go with what you know works. In moments like these we return to time- tested strongholds. Jacob’s hourglass was nearly empty. He’s got just a pinch of sand left in the top of the glass. What time-tested stronghold does he shelter beneath? What security blankets does Jacob reach for? This first point is an observation of what he does not reach for. He does not reach for Egypt. And just that is absolutely shocking, because so much good had come from Egypt. Egypt had been very kind to Jacob. Egypt had literally saved his life. The food, the land, and the bounty in times of famine. Keep in mind the geography of the narrative. Jacob is coming down from the hill country of Judea in Israel. Here’s a picture of what the area around Shechem looks like today. I mean this is rocky, thorny, hard land. Not a lot of water. You have to scratch out a living up here. As a shepherd you have to live a nomadic life moving from hill to hill. You have to move your flocks around according to the season. In the best of years it’s arid. And when the drought hits, you can imagine whatever little vegetation exists here is just baked and scorched into carbon gravel. So they are starving to death in this hot desert. And you remember the narrative. Joseph’s brother’s go to get Jacob, and bring him where? To Egypt! Here come the carts so full, you could imagine the grain spilling over the side rails and the axles bending. Joseph’s family comes down they are given the best of the land. The well-watered plains of goshen. So here’s a picture of modern day goshen. Would you rather live in Shechem or Goshen? The Nile Delta is flat and you have rich, thick grass in loamy soil totally free of rocks. I mean, in a time when most of Jacob’s buddies back in Canaan are starving to death, his tribe is living off the fat of the land. I mean what’s working here. What’s the time-tested stronghold here? Is Canaan working or is Egypt working? “Everyone in Egypt is being so kind to me. We were welcomed in a royal parade. I mean, I know the whole promises of God thing, but man this is nice.” Do events like these not condition a man to think, “When in crisis, flee to Egypt for safety?” Of course! There would have been a huge temptations here for Jacob in these moments of crisis to reach for Egypt. But here’s our point: Jacob finished the race of life, Distrusting Egypt’s Generosity. Here’s where we see this in the text. Jacob sees his son Joseph and you have this strange custom where he takes Joseph’s hand and places it on his thigh and he makes his son Joseph swear, “Don’t bury me here in Egypt.” He’s so deadly serious. You could imagine Joseph saying, “Dad, is Egypt so bad? I mean look at all Egypt has done for you? Is it so bad? Why do you feel the need to be carried clear back to that desert?” Here’s the thing that Jacob got right. Yes, it was Egypt’s grain that saved his family’s life. Yes, it was Egypt’s soil that grew the crops they needed to live. Yes, it was the water that came out of Egypt’s Nile that quenched their thirsty mouths. But it was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that made Egypt and conscripted its resources to save his chosen people. You see, he recognized that the blessings of this world are owned by God. When we are given gifts from the world, we are not to thank the world, we are to thank God.
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