Godbey's Commentary - Acts - Romans - Enter His Rest

conservatism of Pharaoh and Egypt to Joseph and Israel vividly symbolizes the glorious millennial
reign of our Lord, when all the kings of the earth shall submit obsequiously and co-operate
conservatively in the mighty theocracy. Though Joseph died one hundred and fifty years before the
departure of the children of Israel out of Egypt, pursuant to his predictions of the coming exodus and
return to Canaan, they embalmed his body in a stone coffin, kept it through all those years, and
finally, as history says, carried it on a wagon drawn by twelve oxen, heading the procession out of
Egypt, through the Red Sea, forty years in the wilderness, then through the rifted waters of Jordan’s
swelling flood into the Promised Land, where they buried him in the sepulcher which Abraham
bought from the sons of Emmor in Sychem, the remains of Jacob having been carried up by Joseph
in person and buried with Abraham and Isaac in the sepulcher of Machpelah.
MOSES TYPICAL OF CHRIST.
17-40. While Joseph so beautifully and vividly emblematizes King Jesus, both in His humiliation
and in His glory, Moses equally grandly emblematizes the mediatorial Christ, himself not only the
prophet and legislator of Israel and the world, but the mediator of the old covenant, as Christ is of
the new. As the royal generations quickly come and go after the death of Joseph, they soon not only
forget his brilliant and beneficent reign, but alarmed at the rapid multiplication of Israel
[providentially enjoying the protection of the greatest military power on earth, during their national
minority], lest in process of time becoming greater than the Egyptians, and joining their enemies in
time of war, they may actually subjugate them. Therefore the king resorts to the stratagem of
infanticide to arrest the alarming rapidity of Israel’s multiplication.
20. “At which time Moses was born, and was beautiful unto God.” The E.V. does not give you
the clear translation of this beautiful passage, which reveals that Moses was beautiful in the divine
estimation, being doubtless the finest looking baby the world had ever seen. [Of course, Adam and
Eve were perfect specimens of humanity, but they never were babies.] Amram and Jochebed are not
only charmed with the transcendent beauty of their baby, but divinely impressed that he is a
messenger sent of God. Therefore, having faith in God, they manage to hide him in their home three
months. Now the imperial soldiers have become so rampant searching the Hebrew premises and
killing the boy babies, they see to their sorrow they can hide him no longer. Trusting God, they resort
to a stratagem, manufacture the ark of bulrushes, water-proof with the wonderful Egyptian cement,
deposit their precious baby in it and commit him to the dubious waves of the Nile, about two hours
before day, thus turning him over to the providence of God. His unsuspected little sister Miriam, who
afterward became a flaming holiness evangelist, now only seven years old, follows along the bank,
keeping her young eagle eye on the floating ark.
21. “He having been deposited, the daughter of Pharaoh took him and adopted him unto herself
for a son.” Contemporary Egyptian history says that this daughter of Pharaoh, the heir to the throne
in the blood-royal, her father now very old, was then a widow without an heir, her husband having
fallen on the battlefield of Thebes, while leading the Egyptian armies against the Ethiopians, during
that long and exterminating war of several generations, in which the Egyptians and Ethiopians, the
two greatest nations on the earth, desperately contested the metropolitanship of the globe, Egypt
finally triumphing. Such was the anxiety of the young queen to transmit the kingdom in her own
family, that seeing the foundling, charmed by his beauty and smitten with most profound sympathy