Genesis 48

God is the Giver of every good gift. To receive the blessing of God is to be blessed indeed. Joseph has been the provider for his father and his brothers during a desperate time of famine. Yet Joseph knows that the blessing he needs for his own future and for the lives of his sons, is that which will come from God through the hands of his father, Jacob.

When Jacob's days on this earth were almost at an end, Joseph came to him with Manasseh and Ephraim, his sons. Jacob summoned his strength to speak a word to his favorite son before he died. He reminded Joseph of the covenant promises that God had spoken.

Jacob was at the end of his life. His beloved Rachel was long gone. He remembered her as he completed his last acts of faith. He would have loved to have had more time with her, and he would have considered it to be a great blessing to have more children by her. He brought the sons of Joseph near him as if they were his own. They too were descendants of Rachel. He kissed them and embraced them. He considered the goodness of God. Once he had been so sure that Joseph was dead. Now he was alive, and he was able to speak the blessing of God upon two more sons. And he worshiped the Lord.

The time had come to give the blessing of God upon Manasseh and Ephraim. Jacob was a man who had reached the end of his days. His senses were failing him. It was easy for Joseph to conclude, even with respect, that Jacob did not know up from down. Yet God was still in control of his life, and God will bless whom He will. The aged Jacob could not do much, but he could see forward to a day when the Word and will of God would bring a greater blessing on the descendants of one of these two boys. The second boy, Ephraim, would take the lead over his older brother, Manasseh.

Joseph had a tender respect for his father. Yet it seemed evident to him that his father's age was showing. Joseph had arranged the boys so that the best hand of blessing, Jacob's right hand, would rest on the head of the older boy, Manasseh. But Jacob knew better. In a surprising prophetic Word, Jacob crossed his hands and deliberately put his right hand on Ephraim, and his left hand on Manasseh.

With this deliberate reversal of the customary order, this man whom God had preferred above his older brother Esau so many years before now gave the words of covenant blessing to the sons of Joseph. He remembered the faithfulness of God over many generations, and he spoke the right words about the future, trusting that he truly was an agent of the Lord's bounty to Joseph's sons.

Jacob called on the Name of the God of Abraham and Isaac. He spoke of the Shepherd over his life over these 147 years. He called Him the angel who had redeemed him from all evil. He spoke words from on high, words that would take many generations to reach fruition, words that only the Lord God could bring about. God overturned the thoughts and intentions of Joseph, the second in command in Egypt, and blessed Ephraim above his older brother, Manasseh, by the word of Jacob.

God had carried Jacob throughout his life, shepherding him through the evil actions of Laban and the murderous hatred of young Esau. God had brought him through his sons' vicious behavior against the people of the land, when they misused the sign of the covenant to create an advantage that would allow them to kill the Shechemites. Especially, the Lord carried him through years of mourning the loss of a son who was now before him as the father of Ephraim and Manasseh. Jacob had become a great man through his wrestlings with God. He had faced a grief that he had once thought would take him to the grave. He had lived to speak words of blessing upon Pharaoh, and now, as he prepared to die, he knew more than the great Joseph did about which of his hands to lay upon the heads of each of his grandsons. According to his word, God would cause Ephraim and Manasseh to be a multitude in the midst of the earth.

Ephraim would eventually be the more numerous and prominent tribe and would be synonymous with the northern part of Israel that would be sent forth among the nations in the days of the Assyrian Empire and beyond. Jacob says here that Ephraim would be a fullness or multitude of nations. One part of the tribe of Manasseh would settle in Gilead to the east, while the other would join Ephraim in the west. The Lord would not forget these numerous descendants of Jacob, though it would be through Judah, settling in the south of Canaan, that the Messiah would come. The promised descendant of the great man of Judah, King David, was to be not only the leader of His own tribe in Israel, but the King of all the Jews.

After Jesus had risen from the dead and the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the day of Pentecost, God, through the apostle Peter, would address the assembled Jewish worshipers not as one tribe or another, but as “men of Israel.” Through the Jews, words of the greatest blessing were not only spoken to Jerusalem and Judea, but even into the territory that had once been the land of the northern tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the land of Samaria. Even that great expansion of the people of Christ was not enough. It was the Lord's intention to put His right hand of blessing now upon people from every tribe and tongue and nation, even to the very uttermost parts of the earth.

Through union with the most favored Son of God, Jesus Christ, we have received the full blessing of the Lord. We are victorious in Him, and in His Name, God has determined to be with us forever.