Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #16 in Genesis 37, and we will read Genesis 37:9-11:

And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth? And his brethren envied him; but his father observed the saying.

As I mentioned last time, this was Joseph’s second dream.  He may have had other dreams, but these are the two the Lord recorded early in his life, and they were pointing to two distinct period of times: 1) the first dream pointing to the time 11, 000 years into earth’s history, which is why 11 brothers are in view; and 2) the second dream pointing to the time 13,000 years into earth’s history.  They point to the two comings of Christ.

Also, the dreaming identifies with “prophesy.”  If you remember, we saw the link between “dreams” and “prophecy,”  when we read Deuteronomy 13:1-5, where we see that God connects dreams to prophecy.  So the two dreams identify with two periods of prophecy, and it was after Christ’s first coming that the Holy Spirit was poured out the first time in 33 A. D.; and it was after Christ’s second coming (officially in the year 1994) as Judge, when the Holy Spirit was poured out a second time.  And the pouring out of the Holy Spirit identifies with prophesying, and that is what the dreams identify with here.

We had begun to talk about the “sun,” as Jacob related himself to the “sun” and Joseph’s mother to the “moon.”  And of course the eleven brethren pointed to the “stars.”  We saw that in the Bible the “sun” is a type and figure of God.  Psalm 84:11 is an excellent verse that shows that, and we also went to Psalm 119, but there is more Scripture that proves that God is likened to the “sun,” if we turn to Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament.  It says in Malachi 4:2:

But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

Again, this is the word spelled “s-u-n.”  We have to be careful because we know that God is also called the Son, with an “o.”  But here, He is the “Sun of righteousness,” and that would be the Lord Jesus who is also eternal God. 

Christ is typified by the sun in several places.  For example, turn to Matthew 17:1:

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.

The face of the Lord Jesus Christ shined as the sun.  It was a brilliant light, in other words.  And of course Jesus is declared to be “the Light of the world,” in John 1:4-5:

In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

He is the “light” because in Him is the life that He made possible for His people by dying for us.  Through His death, we will live (forever), and keep in mind that Christ died at the foundation of the world, and He also rose up at that time to be declared the Son of God.  At the point of coming up out of death and rising to life, He became the “form” of the day of salvation.  So when the Lord says, “This is the day which JEHOVAH hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it,” what He has in mind spiritually is the fact that now there is the Gospel light that would shine into the darkness of sin that was everywhere in this world.  And in shining, it would accomplish the salvation of God as the Word would go forth and save those for whom Christ died.  The sun shining in the sky above has everything to do with that “day of salvation.”  God placed the sun in the sky, shining light down upon the world as a “living parable,” as Psalm 19:1-2 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God…Day unto day uttereth speech...”   What is it speaking?  What is it declaring?  “Here is the Light of the world, and it is God.  The Light of the world is the Lord Jesus Christ.”  And men rise up every day, and they go out into the world that is under the sun, and throughout the workday, the light of the sun is testifying as a living declaration every day of our lives that God is the Creator, and that God (who is Saviour) has provided light that is the life of man, and that light is in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Also in the New Testament, we can go to Revelation 10 that speaks of the Lord Jesus as a mighty angel, or mighty messenger, in Revelation 10:1:

And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire:

Again, his face was as the sun, just as it said of Christ in Matthew 17:2.  So JEHOVAH God is a “sun and a shield.”  He is as this glorious light that God established in the skies above, and it speaks volumes, although the people of the world cannot understand it fully.  Nonetheless, it is an ongoing testimony to man that there is a God, and that He does save a people for Himself.

As we are looking at the “sun,” the Bible tells us in some places of the sun going down.  Remember that we went to Psalm 104:19 in our last study.  Let us turn back there again.  It says in Psalm 104:19:

He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.

Here, we can apply those other Scriptures about JEHOVAH God being a sun, or the Lord Jesus Christ being like the sun, as His face shined like the sun.  He is typified by the sun, and here God is telling us, “The sun knoweth his going down.”  Obviously, it is not referring to the “ball of fire” that we see in the sky; the physical sun does not know anything.  It has no mind.  It has no knowledge.  Someone might say, “Well, all this is really saying is that God set the sun in motion when He established the sun, moon, and stars, and He designed them to be timekeepers.”  We know this when we go back to Genesis 1:14-15:

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.

So it is basically saying that God made them, and He designed the sun to rise at a certain time, and to go down at a certain time, and in that sense the sun knows his going down.  Is that the explanation?  Well, on the surface that is correct, and practically speaking it is true, but the language here says, “The sun knoweth his going down…” The masculine pronoun “his” is used here, so it is referring to Christ, or to God, as we have proven from the Bible.  The sun is a type and figure of God.  Yes, there is a surface meaning in that the Lord appointed the timekeepers, and they do their job of maintaining the time that God set them in motion to maintain, day after day, and year after year.  They operate and function in that manner, but this is the Bible, and in the Bible all Scripture has a deeper spiritual meaning.  The whole Bible is a parable, and we must look for the deeper meaning.  So we would ask, “Who does the sun represent?”  The answer is that the sun represents Christ, eternal God.  “And what does it mean that the sun (Christ) knows his going down?” 

First, what does it mean when the sun was shining in its brightness throughout the day?  And we have a good understanding of that as meaning “the day of salvation,” and the day of salvation was “twelve hours.”  This was what the Lord Jesus declared in John 11:9:

Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.

Who is the Light of the world?  Christ is the Light of the world.  He is as the day, but here He is putting a “number” on the day.  It is not the 24-hour day because that includes the portion of night.  But as far as the time in which the sun shines and provides light, it is 12 hours, and we know the 12 hours relates to the work day discussed in Matthew 20 where the householder hired laborers to work in his vineyard at the third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour, and then at the “eleventh hour.”  He went off the pattern, and he hired the last group of laborers for just “one hour,” and that is pointed out in the parable.  Then came the end of the day after 12 hours.  After the last hour expired, then we read in Matthew 20:8:

So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.

Then the others complained because the last group hired only worked “one hour,” and that is our proof that it was from the eleventh hour to the twelfth hour, precisely, which was the 12-hour day the Lord Jesus spoke of in John 11:9.  Then if we turn to John 9, Christ speaks of “working the works of God” in John 9:4:

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.

And the work that God sent Him to perform was “the work of faith.”  You can read this work in John 6:29:

This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.

Jesus performed this work that He was sent to do while it was day, as represented by the 12-hour workday.  It all fits together perfectly, as we compare John 11:9 about the 12 hours in the day with Matthew 20:8, which says that Christ must work the works while it is day.  Then it says, “…the night cometh, when no man can work.”  The spiritual meaning is clear, although there are some people that do not want to understand that, and they reject it, and they insist that it must continue to be “the day of salvation.”  And yet God indicates that the day of salvation is a 12-hour day, and that last hour, the “one hour,” represents the Great Tribulation.  The Lord further indicated by opening up the biblical calendar of history and other things He opened at the time of the end, that the Great Tribulation was exactly 23 years (8,400 days), from May 21, 1988 through May 21, 2011, and then the Great Tribulation concluded.  Along with it, the workday concluded, and the twelfth hour was reached because the Great Tribulation’s ending means that the “hour” is finished, and that was the “last hour,” the eleventh to the twelfth hour.  And the day wherein Christ was performing the work He was sent to perform (that ye believe) came to an end, and the night (or even) came when no man can work. 

It was typical throughout the history of the world that men started work when the sun came up, and they stopped working when the sun went down.  And Christ is the “man” that finished His work in the day (of salvation), and now He is unable to work because it is night – Judgment Day has come.  When the Bible says, “immediately after that tribulation,”  we can understand it to mean “immediately after the twelfth hour,” because the Tribulation is that “one hour,” and immediately after that twelfth hour, “the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven…”  The Gospel light is in submission to Christ, just as the sun, moon, and stars bowed down to Joseph.  It is according to the Lord Jesus’ will and the plan of God, as “the sun knoweth his going down.”  It is the appointed Day of Judgment.  Everything is in its season, and this is what the Bible is teaching for our time because we are living in the Day of Judgment, and the Lord is fulfilling these things.  He is fulfilling Joseph’s dream, and He has been fulfilling it since the year 1988.