Hello again an welcome back for the first episode this week in the life of Joseph, a very important Bible character.  His story is of course famous, so you probably know what’s going to happen already.  However, as we begin this part of the Bible, I want to point out that Joseph is used as a type character in order to foreshadow the life of Christ.  So, Joseph has a special role to fill in the narrative of the Bible that points forward to the coming of the Messiah in the first century.  As such, the Bible isn’t going to record any of the sins he committed, not because he was perfect as Christ was, but in order to not obscure the reference to Jesus.  Jesus was totally unique, and Joseph serves in the text just as an indicator of Jesus’ coming advent, rather than a perfect duplicate.

So, then, as we move forward in Genesis, try to look for parallels between Jesus and Joseph.  There are a bunch of them to find if you think about it, though of course obviously not everything about these two people will be the same.  I think this is a really interesting thing to do along with the reading, because it serves to show that Christ is all over the Bible.  Even the oldest parts of it in Genesis that record the early history of the Jews are pointing to the coming of Christ.

We’ll talk more about this later.  For now, have a great day, and post some comments to let me know what you’re thinking about these passages of scripture.