The Bones of Joseph by Theron Brown

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 28, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 21.

The Bones of Joseph.

By Theron Brown

THE highest quality of love is its endlessness, but it can last only as its object lasts, and it is an instinct of personal affection to cling to aspects and outlines, and insist on the corporeal duration of what it holds dear. This demand, seen in the tender reverence of the ancient Egyptians for once-animated clay, led them to invent a kind of visible immortality for it; and if that had been all Joseph thought of when he "gave commandment concerning his bones," and all that was in the minds of his posterity while they hoarded and watched his embalmed remains for more than two hundred years, then the modern mourner could plead some precedent for holding passionately to the relics of his dead, and refusing to let them return to dust.

But it was not all. "By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel." "God will surely visit you," he said, "and bring you out of this land into the land which he sware to Abraham . . . and ye shall carry up my bones:—" and though their sworn promise to fulfill that last command was sacred, it was swallowed up in the greater sworn promise that their future inheritance was sure. We believe that the faith and hope of a dying Hebrew, when he spoke of being "gathered to his fathers," contemplated, beyond mere burial companionship, his reunion with them in "a better country, even an heavenly," and that Joseph bequeathed this faith to his people along with the solemn bequest and charge of his coffined body. They loved and revered the image of the man who had been the shepherd and father of their nation, and his history was their pride; but his dead form, held in their keeping through generations of affliction, became less and less a memory, and more and more a prophecy. Least of all could such a legacy represent mere horror of decay.

Few can misunderstand, and fewer will rudely rebuke, the outcry of a bereaved heart for the very person of its loved and lost. The Bible utters no such rebuke. The individual make and mien of no human being was ever a whim; but each creation was wisely and divinely planned; and God keeps the plan. To bear this in mind only refines and glorifies our wish and hope and faith to see and know our dead again, "raised in incorruption."

But on that "holy ground" every restored life will wear the personality that never dies. It has only exchanged the faded for the freshened rose. Anything less than such continuity of being and sameness of characteristics would make the "rising again" an impertinence of terms. The New Testament doctrine of the resurrection of the body appropriates with singular fitness the poetical promise in Isa. 26:19, as a classic quotation; and the prophet's language there seems to have borrowed its imagery from the same doctrine, as believed in his day. This promise of corporeal resurrection, addresses the only sense in us that could appreciate its precious import.

"That which hath been shall be" is the inevitable habit of thought even in the most purified hopes of bereaved affection, and the mould in which memory has cast the lost objects of love is the one that shapes the fruition of their looked-for return. But to keep their bodies above ground, in mockery of companionship, is virtually a jealous distrust of the Divine Preserver, and too much resembles a pagan worship. Christian faith retains the affectionate idea in mourning, without its grossness, and regards not an artificial but a spiritual immortality. Luther said of the little bird, "He lets God think for him;" so the Christian mourner lets God keep for him.

Lay the dear mortal relics away, then,—tenderly indeed, but lay them away,—out of sight. And be assured that when the dominion of death is forever past, the restored ones will appear with the very presence that has always been suggested by the mention of their names, or with every mark of recognition that can make reunion unmistakable. Until the fullness of that glad hour the repose of those who sleep in Jesus is safer and sweeter than the slumbers of the embalmed Pharaohs in their Memphian shrouds; and we no further need the company of their dust than as a monitor of life to come. The bones of Joseph kept alive in Hebrew hearts the expectation of the promised land. In proportion as the same hope is preached today from every mound watered with loving tears, is the bitterness of death taken away.—Rev. Theron Brown, in the Watchman.