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50 And to Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, whom Asenath, the daughter of Poti-Pherah priest of On, bore to him. 51 Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: “For God has made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house.” 52 And the name of the second he called Ephraim: “For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.” ~ Genesis 41:50-52
Today, we continue our study of Genesis 41 where Joseph has been summonsed by Pharaoh and he has successfully interpreted his dreams. As a result, Pharaoh exalted Joseph to the second most powerful position in the world, second only to himself. And yet, even though Joseph was exalted to such a high and exalted position, he never exacted revenge upon anyone who had earlier treated him badly. The naming of his first two sons reveals the deep work that God accomplished in Joseph in just 30 years of his life.
In v.50 of today's passage we read, "And to Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, whom Asenath, the daughter of Poti-Pherah priest of On, bore to him."
Here again, like so many times before, we have a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ through the yielded life of Joseph. It was the Lord Jesus who came to save sinful man from the affliction of his sin. Joseph would not have been able to reflect the image of his Maker as he did if he had fed the flesh. No, Joseph resisted revenge, bitterness and the many other expressions of the flesh that could have defined him. As a result, God used Joseph to save many.
Since Joseph saw the wisdom of being defined by God, in another picture of the Lord Jesus, he obtained a gentile wife. Asenath was given to Joseph as wife. Having rendered sin and death null and void at the cross at Calvary, the Lord Jesus Christ was given by His Father a gentile bride of which you and I are a part.
The Priests of On worshipped the sun god "Ra." By marrying an Israelite, Asenath escaped the pagan practices of the Egyptians. And, since Joseph was such a strong man of God, we have reason to believe he had a strong influence on leading her to learn more about the God of the Bible. Asenath provides a picture of you and me who once were dead hearted toward our Creator. But, this is where the Lord Jesus came seeking us and because He did, we were rescued from our pagan stance before God.
In v.51 of today's passage we read, "Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: 'For God has made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house.'"
The firstborn child of Joseph was named Manasseh which means "God has made me forget." Joseph, instead of holding on to his grudges, he chose to forget about the ill-treatment and the pain it caused. Joseph decided to even name his firstborn son "Forget About It." Forgiving and forgetting is a great policy when someone has hurt us. Adopting the victim's mentality never serves anyone well at all. And, we live in a world that plays to the adoption of the victim's mentality and it only takes us to the way of the self which only destroys us.
In Hebrew, and thus in the Bible, to forget something doesn’t mean that something was forgotten due to the fading of one's memory. In the Bible to forget brings with it the idea of the choice of forgetting in the way of taking something away. And so Joseph, who was named from the words "to take away," was able himself to take away the bad memory of the awful moments that he had to endure at the hands of those he cared about a lot. In like manner, when God said he will forget our sins, He didn’t develop amnesia, it meant that He actively made a choice to take away the memory of our sin. When He remembers someone, it doesn’t mean He ever forgot them, but that He was drawing them nearer to Himself to help them to know Him.
As soon as he started to rip out the pages of his life and shred them, God said, "Wait a minute, I’ve got a lot of good purposes for those bad stories." This is when we come to the place that we are truly being defined by God, when we are able to be fruitful through our suffering. God doesn’t comfort us to make us comfortable. No, He comforts us to make us comfort-able, able to comfort those with the comfort we have received from Him through our suffering. We must be careful not to rip out those painful stories and forget them. We must be diligent to allow God to heal them and then use them for His glory in the lives of others.
In v.52 of today's passage we read, "And the name of the second he called Ephraim: 'For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.'"
Joseph’s second son was named "Ephraim" which means "double fruitful" or "twice fruitful." God brought out of Joseph's afflictions a really good story. Joseph, in advance, could not have known that God would bring about so much spiritual fruit through his sufferings. However, we do know that the suffering Joseph experienced and the good that brought about in the process was completely consistent with the teachings within the Bible.
In John 12:24 we read, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit."
Dying must occur in order for the fruit to be born, and unless this death occurs, the grain of wheat would remain only a single seed, bearing no fruit at all. The Lord Jesus used this analogy to symbolize His life and the suffering that He was about to endure at Calvary in order to bear the fruit that God had ordained for Him. Then in the verses immediately following, He revealed that the same principle of spiritual fruit bearing that was at work in His life, would also be at work in the lives of all those who follow Him.
Watchman Nee once said, "God’s means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker. That is surely rather a peculiar way of victory, you say; but it is the divine way. God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our old man but by crucifying him; not by helping him to do anything, but by removing him from the scene of action."
