Genesis 46:4

What grace on God's part! Famine drove Abram down into Egypt, and he failed badly there, whatever riches he gained. Famine could have drawn Isaac away too, just as it drew his father. But God forbade him to go there, and told him to stay in the land under the assurance of His blessing. Israel needed God to tell him not to fear going down there — and God did tell him. There He would make of him a great nation, with a special comfort nearer still to his heart.

In Genesis 26:2, we read of God appearing to Isaac and saying, "Do not go down to Egypt." Because of this command, Egypt drops out of the picture until we find Joseph carried there. Now, however, the divine direction is exactly opposite, and Jacob was not to be afraid to go. God's word to him was brief, but it contained four distinct promises.

But, in the second place, this would only happen because God Himself would go down with them. Had He not done so, the many evils of that land would quickly have swamped them. As it was, those evils did infect them, as their later history showed; but the presence of God with them secured the testimony to Himself among them.

First, God would so order the stay in Egypt that Jacob's family and descendants would increase there and be welded into a great nation... The troubles of Egypt acted like a furnace of iron, and welded them into a nation that God took for His own. The hour had now come for them to face this hard experience, though at the start everything looked favourable.

So in the third place, God promised that in His own time He would bring them up out of Egypt. Then they would be back in the land that was theirs according to His word. God never swerves from His declared purpose, though to reach it He may take ways that seem to contradict it. So verse 4 shows the difference between God's purpose and His ways. We need to keep that difference in mind in God's dealings with us today.

God promises His own presence with Jacob, and that He would surely bring him back again. This return of course referred to Jacob's descendants, the nation Israel. For as to Jacob himself, Joseph would close his eyes, that is, in death, though he was buried in the land of Canaan. He would not personally experience the sufferings his children would.

What a message this was! How fully it showed Jacob that the Lord had read his whole heart — his present fears and his earlier affections, the mind of the father and the mind of the saint, the desires of nature and the feelings of the spirit. "Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt" calmed the present unease of his renewed mind. "Joseph's hand shall close your eyes" satisfied the older longing of his heart for his long-lost child... The groan he never uttered in any human ear had reached, in all its meaning, the ear of Him who searches the heart.

Jacob's wanderings are the picture of Israel's sad history, and the pledge of their future and blessed restoration to the promised land, as God announced in Gen. 46:4 and predicts in Jacob's last words (Gen. 49). The burials of his body and Joseph's in that land point the same way.