In Romans 8:23-24, Paul writes about us “eagerly waiting for our adoption as God’s children” – with the new bodies he promised us too – and it’s our hope in this happening that “saves us.” It’s what keeps us going in a world with so much evil, the hope that one day all evil will be gone.
How it will all be gone was already being hinted at by Jacob in Genesis 49:8-12, in the amazing parallels between what Judah and his descendants would be like, and Jesus. Which ties in with what John wrote in 1 John 3:8, that “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” – or “liquidate the devil’s activities,” as one translation phrases it. To free the world of evil, in other words.
And it’s in these parallels between what Jacob said would happen in Judah’s own life in Genesis 49 – and in the life of his most famous descendant, King David – that picture Jesus and HIS power, authority and kingship being accepted by all nations (8-10) as the means by which evil will be eradicated.
Isaiah wrote of this in Isaiah 11:1 too, of the time when a “shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse (David’s family), and from his roots a Branch (a descendant of David) will bear fruit,” who will “strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked” (4), and “In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious” (10). A world free of evil at last, at the hands of this “Root” from David’s family, clearly identified as Jesus, “the Root of David,” in Revelation 5:5.
Is this, then, what Jacob was also describing back in Genesis 49:11 – a time when the abundance is so great it’s no problem when “tethering a donkey to a vine and its colt to the choicest branch” if they go ahead and eat the branches and the fruit on them; and there’s so much wine you could wash your clothes in it instead of water. And such staggering abundance did exist in king Solomon’s day. He was “greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth” (1 Kings 10:23). He “lacked nothing” (1 Kings 4:27), and “during his lifetime Judah and Israel lived in safety” (25) and “they ate, drank and were happy” (20).
But it didn’t last, and Solomon himself “did evil in the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 11:6). So who and what was Jacob getting at in Genesis 49, then? Well, it seems that “Jacob knew about Jesus”….(next blog)
