Genesis 40 Series, Part 4, Verses 1-4

Hello, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis. Tonight is study #4 of Genesis 40, and we have been reading Genesis 40:1-4:

And it came to pass after these things, that the butler of the king of Egypt and his baker had offended their lord the king of Egypt. And Pharaoh was wroth against two of his officers, against the chief of the butlers, and against the chief of the bakers. And he put them in ward in the house of the captain of the guard, into the prison, the place where Joseph was bound. And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he served them: and they continued a season in ward.

Last time we were talking about the prison, and spiritually the prison is the world. All in the world are prisoners prior to salvation. They are prisoners to sin and to Satan. You can look at 2Timothy 2:25-26 and Proverbs 5:22. There are many verses that touch upon this, including 1Peter 3. Once we have the spiritual understanding of a prison that God uses to represent the sinner and his sins in this world, then immediately we can understand what is being said in 1Peter 3:18-19:

For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison;

Theologians who are not careful have come up with all sorts of fanciful ideas, which are really crazy ideas. They think that Christ went to hell and preached to people in hell. Yes, it is true that the Bible does refer to hell, or the bottomless pit, as prison, but that is not what is in view. We do not preach to people in hell. We know the Gospel is in view because verse 20 says, “Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah…” Whenever we see the word “longsuffering,” we know that salvation is in view. To prove that, turn to 2Peter 3:15:

And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation…

What does that mean? It means that the Lord put up with sinners and the rebelliousness of mankind for one purpose – salvation. In other words, He did not come in Judgment Day until mankind had been rebelling and sinning against Him for thousands of year. He did not bring sudden judgment upon them, and He was longsuffering for the purpose of salvation because there were many elect to be born in future generations. So God allowed the world to continue, and that is what God being longsuffering in the days of Noah is teaching us. God was longsuffering before He brought the flood, and the flood is a picture of judgment: “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” 

Then it says in 1Peter 3:20:

…when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.

The preparation of the ark and Noah being a preacher of righteousness presents the picture that it was through the building of the ark and the preaching of Noah that his family became saved. It is very possible that the last of the eight souls that were saved became saved on the very last day before the flood. Once the last one was saved, God brought the judgment. There was no more longsuffering. The longsuffering period was over. 

Again, in 1Peter 3:19 it says that Christ went and preached unto the spirits in prison while the ark was being put together and was under construction, and that was the proclamation of the Gospel to the people of that day. I am sure that Noah went about preaching in that area. You know, the people of the world in that day were probably fairly close together in proximity, although there could have been a few nomads. Man’s tendency is to come together in community, and there were only a million or two million people in the population. And there was a man building a ship on dry ground, and he would certainly have told them the reason why. “What are you doing? What is the point of this?” He would have responded, “God told me he is going to destroy the world, and God told me there was a 120-year timeline.” We can read that in Genesis 6:3:

And JEHOVAH said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.

There would be 120 years to build the ark, and this would have been quite a project with no modern tools. But for 120 years, Noah would have preached, and from what we understand from the Bible God uses people to bring the Gospel: “…How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!” And it certainly was good news. It was a way of escape and deliverance, and a way to survive the flood, but people mocked and ridiculed Noah, and they paid no attention. And yet it was Christ preaching through Noah. There is a similar verse that is almost identical. The other verse is in Isaiah 52:7:
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation…” But this verse uses the masculine singular pronoun “he,” which points to Christ. And Jesus was ultimately the one who was preaching when the truth of the Gospel was proclaimed at any point in history. It was Christ moving within individuals to will and to do of His good pleasure in proclaiming the Gospel. Thereby it was Jesus who preached to the spirits in prison, and that would happen when the Gospel was proclaimed to the souls of men bound about with the cords of their own iniquity, and in captivity to sin and to Satan. They could not free themselves. No man cannot truly repent of himself. 

Yes, with a lot of effort a man can turn from a single thing like alcoholism. Alcoholism has killed many men. Now we have twelve-step programs, and they can get a sponsor, and they can go to meetings for years and years. When they have a desire to drink, they call their sponsor, and with much help from others they may be able to stop drinking, but many fall back into that sin. But that is just one sin, and it is an outward sin.

The real problem is in the heart, and the Bible does not hold back when it comes to describing the heart of man. It tells us the truth. The Bible is the “mirror of the soul,” and it tells us that the heart is desperately wicked and deceitful above all things. God tells us what is going on in the heart in Matthew 15:18-20:

But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.

Out of the heart flows all manner of filthy iniquity. And we are not just talking about surface things like smoking, drinking, overeating, and lusting. These are surface issues. I have used this example in the past, and I think it is helpful to show the actual condition. When God speaks of our hearts and biblical repentance, He is talking about turning from the sin of the heart. That is, the flow of iniquity must be turned off completely, and that is why man needs a new heart. No man can get himself saved. It is an action of God. Nobody can remove their heart and give himself a new heart. That is God’s work. But my analogy regards an incident with an oil rig. There was a mishap and there was a gusher of oil spewing forth from deep in the sea, and the oil was coming to the surface of the sea and killing sea creatures and birds. There was a filthy mess on the surface of the sea, and it was a few weeks before they could cap the gusher at the bottom. And all they could do was to clean what came to the surface, and they would wash the animals with dish detergent to remove the oil, and so forth. They did their best to clean the oil off the surface. And that describes repentance when some people can turn from surface sins, and they associate that with their salvation: “You know, I stopped drinking twenty years ago when I turned to Christ.” As soon as someone says that he turned to Christ, it is revealing because he thinks it is something he did – it was his work. That is not true repentance. It is by God’s grace that we can turn to Him. Jesus said, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” In true repentance, there will be a cleaning up of the surface sins, but more than that God cleans up below. He stops the gusher of sin by taking out our old heart and giving us a new heart and spirit. And from that point forward, there is no iniquity coming forth from the heart. That is part of the gift that comes with salvation, and from that point the struggle is with the flesh because we still have fleshly bodies that have not been transformed into new spiritual bodies. That does not happen until the very end.

But true repentance has to do with the turning of that source of sin which is in the heart. So when Christ was preaching to the spirits in prison in the days of Noah when the ark was being constructed, the Gospel was being proclaimed by Noah, and it did accomplish the work that the Lord sent it forth to do, which was to save “few.” And we are really struck by just how few were saved. There were just eight souls saved out of a world of one or two million. We cannot put a percentage on that. But now in a world of about eight billion, a great multitude has been saved, but the largest number we can read about is about 200 million, which we read about in Revelation 9. So if 200 million were saved during the Great Tribulation before God ended His salvation program, that would mean there were 7 billion and 800 million people who are not saved. It is a massive difference, which is why we never want to get in a situation of looking at majorities as far as Bible truths, as the churches do. God deals with His true people, and it is often the case that it is just one lone prophet like Micaiah, or Jeremiah, or Daniel that is faithful. Then we can read of almost whole nations that had become unfaithful. But remember that God had reserved to Himself seven thousand people in Isarel that had not bowed the knee to Baal, but there could have been a handful of millions of people in Isarel. So we do not look to numbers for truth, but we look only to the Bible for truth.

I think we have the idea of the meaning of “prison.” Prison points to the spiritual condition of mankind as he lives in the world apart from God. Christ came to set the captives free, but it was only the elect captives. 

Lord willing, when we get together in our next study we will continue to look at the spiritual teachings in this wonderful chapter in the book of Genesis.