R.C. Sproul

And Joseph said to his brethren, I am dying.

But God will surely visit you and bring you out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

And Joseph took an oath from the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.

And so Joseph died, being 110 years old.

They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.

were prophetic of the future work of God where God would at some later date once again be present among his people and remove them from Egypt and take them to the promised land.

We have come to the end of our study of the life of Joseph.

But it's not quite the end of what the Bible says about this man.

The book of Exodus begins with an ominous statement where we read in chapter 1 of Exodus, verse 8, Now there arose a new king over Egypt who did not know Joseph.

And what follows there is the story of what had taken place 400 years after the family of Jacob moved to the land of Goshen.

There arose a new king who didn't know Joseph, who had forgotten Joseph, who wasn't concerned to honor the pledge that Joseph had made to his family.

and the pledge that the earlier Pharaoh had made to protect these people.

And the new Pharaoh took this opportunity to enslave the Israelites, setting the stage for the most dramatic act of redemption in the whole Old Testament, namely the exodus of Israel out of Egypt.

The Bible tells us later on in Exodus that when the Exodus took place, before Moses led all of these people into the wilderness, one of the first things he did was he got the bones of Joseph and said, if we're leaving, we're taking the bones of our patriarch with us to the promised land.

We've just completed this lengthy study of Joseph.

I pray that none of us will ever be like that Pharaoh who forgot Joseph.

Joseph's brothers came and bowed down before him with their faces to the earth."

Already we see the beginnings of the fulfillment of the dream that Joseph had that got him in so much trouble with his brothers in the first place.

And here, over 20 years later, that dream is being fulfilled as they come and prostrate themselves before their brother.

But they're not doing this as willing obeisance to Joseph because they don't know that they are bowing down before Joseph.