Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #37 in Genesis 37.   We will read Genesis 37:23-24:

And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours that was on him; And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it.

In a prior study we talked about Joseph’s coat that they stripped him out of, and we saw that the “coat of many colours” identifies with Tamar, the daughter of King David.  It was a coat that all the king’s daughters wore that were virgins, and that taught us that it points to spiritual purity, the innocence and righteousness of being without sin. 

Joseph is a type of Christ, and we learned in past studies that his coming to his brethren is a picture of Christ coming into the world, born into the house of Israel, and, finally, going to the cross to demonstrate His bearing the sins of His people at the foundation of the world.  It was as though He was stripped of His righteousness, and that is why Jesus hung on the cross naked, historically.  He was a picture of someone whose sins are exposed.  Jesus had no sins of His own, but He was demonstrating (making manifest) the fact that He had born the sin of His people; He became sin for us at the point of the foundation of the world, thereby becoming filthy with our sins and full of shame, as “nakedness” points to the shamefulness of sin.  That is all in view, spiritually, in our passage. 

We also went to a verse in Job 19:9 that said, “He hath stripped me of my glory,” and that refers to Job who is another man who is a type and figure of the Lord Jesus Christ.  He pictures Christ coming under the wrath of God.  In coming under the wrath of God, Jesus was stripped of His glory.  That magnificent glory of being Eternal God was removed from Him, and He became a transgressor in God’s sight, and the wrath of God was kindled against Him.

We read in Genesis 37:24:

And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it.

The pit points to “hell,” or the “grave.”  We can see this if we go to Proverbs 1:12:

Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:

The grave and the pit are synonymous.  The word “grave” is a translation of the Hebrew word “sheh-ole',” Strong’s #7585, and I think it is equally translated as “hell.”  About 30 times it is translated as “grave,” and about 30 times it is translated as “hell” in the Old Testament.  That is teaching us that hell is the grave.  Hell identifies with death and the grave, and so does the word “pit.”  Verse 12 is using Hebrew parallelism: “Let us swallow them up alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit.”

Another Scripture that uses this word is in Psalm 88:3-7:

For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave. I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man that hath no strength: Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. Selah.

There are a couple of different Hebrew words that are translated as “grave” in this passage, but in verse 3 where it says, “and my life draweth nigh unto the grave,” that is the Hebrew word “sheh-ole',” which is also translated as “hell.”  That is a clear picture with the spiritual context of Joseph coming to his brethren.   They turned on him, and they threw him into the pit.  We can see how that relates to the Jews crying out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”  They wanted Christ dead.

Let us look at one more thing.  In our verse in Genesis 37:24, it says of the pit that there was no water in it.  We immediately think of the parable the Lord told in the Gospel of Luke.  I will read Luke 16:22-23:

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

Notice that the rich man died.  Where do people go after they die?  They go to the grave.  Once again, just as with the Hebrew word “sheh-ole'” being translated half the time as “grave” and half the time as “hell,” it says that the rich man died, and in “hell” he lifted up his eyes.  He is in the grave, and God is simply using the word “hell” to represent the grave.

Let us continue.  Again, it says in Luke 16:23-26:

And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

The rich man is in “hell.”  He is in the “grave.”  He desires just a drop of water, just the smallest amount of water.  He asks that Lazarus be sent with water so that he might cool his tongue because he is tormented in the flame.  But the response from Father Abraham, a type of God Himself, is that it is impossible because of the great gulf.  We cannot send someone from here (the kingdom of God) to someone who is in the grave, or hell, representing the wrath of God.  Once you have died, your fate is sealed.  That has been true throughout the history of the world.  Once a person’s heart stops beating and they die, they go to the physical grave, and there is no further hope for that person. 

Of course some who physically died had been saved, and upon the point of their physical death, their soul went to be with the Lord.  But for any individual who died unsaved, his or her eternal fate was sealed.  You see, that is what God did on May 21, 2011 when He shut the door of heaven.  He sealed the fate of every soul on earth, or for every human being.  In essence, He “slew” all the unsaved people of the world, and they entered into the condition of death where there was no further hope or possibility of salvation.  That meant there is no “Gospel water” as far as salvation of the soul and the hope that a sinner might become saved and be translated from darkness to light.  That hope is now gone.

In Joseph’s case in this historical parable, he is a type and figure of the Lord Jesus who had come to show forth, or to make manifest, His death and what He had done for the sake of His people at the foundation of the world.  So Joseph was thrown into a “pit” like Christ went into the grave as the Lamb was slain at the foundation of the world,.  To be slain means to be killed.  Christ was killed.  He died for the sins of His people, and in His death in that pit (hell or the grave), there was no “water” for Him.  There was no Gospel for the Lord Jesus Christ.  That is, there was no one to save Him.  There was no one to come along and redeem Him from that dire situation of being dead because He was the Redeemer.  He had come to save His people from their sins, and for Him, there was no “water.”  There was no saving Gospel for Jesus Himself, as He had to die and pay the penalty of death.  In other words, He had to go through the death itself, or through hell, to satisfy the Law’s demand: “For the wages of sin is death.”  Once the Law was satisfied and determined that He has sufficiently paid for the sins of each one whose sins He bore, the full payment was made for you and me, if we are truly the elect children of God.  If God has truly saved us, all the sins we committed were laid upon Him before we were ever born, and the full and complete payment was received, and the Law received its satisfaction.  Justice was done.  Vengeance was taken, and Christ made that perfect and complete payment for all His elect.

How could this be?  I do not know, but it was only because He was God that He arose from the dead.  He rose up, without any sin upon Him, thereby proving that the sins were paid for, and He was cleansed by the fires of God’s wrath.  We could say it was the “fire of hell,” although there are no actual fires in a place called “Hell.”  Christ endured the wrath of God, and He rose up in justification, the justification of Himself and the justification of each and every person He had determined to save, the whole company of the elect.  Since this took place at the foundation of the world, then God could precede to create the world and allow the history of the world to play out, beginning with the Garden of Eden and man’s fall into sin.

How tremendously patient is God?  He knows the end from the beginning, and He paid for all the sins of His people before we even existed, and then He created the world, knowing how everything would develop, and then He waited, and waited, in every generation He said, “There is one whose sins I have paid for, so I will send my Word to apply that salvation.”   And through the hearing of the Word, we became saved, and the shed blood of Christ from the foundation of the world was applied.  We read in Hebrews 9:22: “…and without the shedding of blood is no remission.”  And the word “remission” is translated elsewhere as “forgiveness.”  There is no forgiveness of sin without the shedding of blood, and that is why it was absolutely necessary that Christ first die before Abel could have received forgiveness of sin, or Noah could have found grace in the sight of the Lord to receive forgiveness of sin, and so forth. 

The Lord was dipping into the basis of the shed blood of Christ, as it were, and applying the hyssop of His Word to the elect sinners’ hearts.  Blood was shed for you, and blood was shed for me, and we became saved, and that is how it worked out over the thousands of years of history all the way to May 21, 2011, when God completed His magnificent salvation program.

When we get together in our next Bible study, we will continue to look at this historic account in Genesis 37, and we will consider these Ishmeelite merchantmen, once more, as well as other information God gives us in this passage.