Recently I spoke on Genesis 46–47 at Berean Memorial Church in Irving, TX. Leon Adkins is the pastor. I found six reasons in those two chapters why God sent Israel to Egypt for 400 years.
Reason number one: God made Israel a great nation before He sent it back to the Promised Land. See especially Gen 46:3–4, “I will make of you a great nation there,” and, “I with go down with you to Egypt and I will surely bring you up again.”
At the end of 400 years, the seventy members of Jacob’s family who went to Egypt had grown to over two million Israelites who left Egypt for the Promised Land. That was a great nation. But was that a fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give them an astronomical number of descendants (Gen 22:17; 26:4; 32:12)? Almost certainly, the answer is no. During the Millennium, the population of Israel will surely exceed one billion. I can’t imagine its being smaller than the size of China and India today. And if children are born on the new earth, the population of Israel will eventually be truly astronomical.
Reason number two: God reunited Jacob and his clan with Joseph (Gen 46:28–30). The Lord wanted the family back together. Jacob needed to learn that his favorite son was alive, and he needed to see him and his two sons.
Family is important to the Lord. This was not some minor reason why the nation went to Egypt. After all, the Lord could have waited until Jacob died before sending the family to Egypt.
Reason number three: Sending the clan to Egypt allowed them to remain a separate people.
Had the clan stayed in Canaan, the people would likely have intermarried and ceased being a separate nation. The later history of Israel showed the danger of intermarrying with the Gentiles. See Ezra 10.
Since “every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians” (Gen 46:34), the Egyptians would not seek to intermarry with the people of Israel.
Joseph left nothing to chance. He had planned this out. His brothers were to say that they had been shepherds since their youth so that they would be separated from the Egyptians.
Von Rad calls this “a little masterpiece of court diplomacy” (Genesis, p. 404), adding, “By strongly emphasizing the fact that his relatives are shepherds and instructing his brothers not to conceal their profession, he indicates he knows in advance what Pharaoh’s decision will be; and things actually turn out as the experienced minister had foreseen” (p. 404).
This may well have been by divine revelation. God surely wanted the new nation to develop by itself, avoiding intermarriage with the Egyptians. He may well have revealed this to Joseph.
A small band of people went to Egypt. Four centuries later, over two million left to return to the Promised Land. This was all part of God’s plan. “Out of Egypt I have called my Son” was true of the nation (Hosea 11:1) and of the Lord Jesus as well (Matt 2:15).i
I will discuss the remaining three reasons in my next blog.
Keep grace in focus and you will see the hand of God in history past, present, and future.
i In a sense, this is yet another reason. Israel’s going down to Egypt and returning to the Promised Land was a type of Christ doing the same thing.
