LOST TRIBES
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Genesis 49, I Chronicles 5
Stay tuned for straight talk about God with your host Jack Flaws. (Music)
Okay. What are we trying to do on this show? We’re trying to shine a little light into a dark corner of traditional history in order to find the source of one of the major misconceptions of the last 2500 years. See. A vast majority of the traditional church, of traditional Christianity still thinks that the kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes has disappeared or that they are Jews possibly – a lot of people think that the Israelites, because the Jews are Israelites and they are, Israelites is only the name given to people who are descended from the patriarch, Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. That’s a pivotal point right there, but a lot of people know that even though they do forget it sometimes.
Care to listen while you read?
His name was changed to Israel so from then on all of his descendants were known as Israelites sometimes they’re called Jacobites sometimes they’re called the sons of Jacob or the sons of Israel which starts to get a little confusing, but if you remember that Jacob’s name was Israel and Israel’s name was Jacob, then you can avoid a lot of trouble. But the Jews, although they are Israelites, sons of Jacob, sons of Israel, all the sons of Israel, sons of Jacob are not Jews.
Now, that’s a big point of confusion. The ten tribed kingdom to the north as opposed to the two tribed kingdom of Judah to the south, were never called Jews. Never, ever. They’re called Israelites but they’re not Jews. A lot of people think that the ten tribed kingdom are Jews and they disappeared. The ten tribes have disappeared. Now, the Jews have not disappeared. None of the Jews have disappeared. You can find them all over the world. Some people even think that they are the ten tribed kingdom or part of the ten tribed kingdom. And that may or may not be true depending on who’s saying that I’m part of the ten tribed kingdom. If the ten tribed kingdom has not disappeared, the descendants, the people of the ten tribed kingdom – if they haven’t disappeared in history, then they gotta be someplace. And somebody’s gotta be able to say, “I belong to that bunch of people.” The problem that arises is that there are many, many promises and blessings and prophecies that were given by the God of the Bible to the progenitor of the house of Israel. Abraham was a progenitor. Isaac, Jacob whose name was changed to Israel. Moses before the Israelites, all the Israelites went into the Promised Land, he blessed all the tribes and gave out things and prophesied a little bit here and there for some of them, most of them actually. And down through the history of the nation of Israel, all 12 tribes, prophets have come to the front, and said this is gonna happen or you will be blessed or this is this is what it’s going to be like later on.” And we can’t find those things in history if we look for the Jew.
And what we wind up thinking is that these promises, blessings and prophecies and so forth have not come to pass. Can’t find the people and if you can’t find the people, then the promises must not be valid any more. See? Now, that means to some intelligent folks, that the God of the Bible isn’t good enough to keep his word or good enough to take a second look at. Now, I don’t blame them, you know. Until you get into a study of history and how it relates to the Bible and what happens to the people who are listed in the Bible after we read the accounts and they pass out of the history of the Bible itself. It looks like this God of the Old Testament and the New Testament I assume is a sometime yes sometime no kind of person because he makes promises to some people and they come true and he promised, for instance, Abram that he’d have a son, some 15 to 20 years before Isaac was born. Well that came to pass. Yeah hooray for God you know. He came through on a promise and then when you study some of the other promises that were made to Abraham, and try to put those into history, you can’t find who fulfilled those promises. So why bother, let’s go to Reno examine get drunk. For instance, some of the promises to Abraham, they were promises just about to everybody on the way down the line. There’s Abraham David Joseph, some of the promises to Abraham where that his descendants would number so many people that they’d be like the stars of the heavens or the sand of the sea. That’s a lot of people.
Another promise to Abraham was that his descendants would be a company of nations; not just one nation, not a great nation -- that’s in one of the chapters also -- but a company of nations means a world empire. Well if you start to get into a history of the nation Israel after they came out of Egypt and conquered the people that were in the Palestinian area then you find that they eventually did form one tight cohesive nation, but not a world empire. Once their nation was established and they took possession of their land that the God of the Bible promised to them, they didn’t go on like the United States or some of the other nations of the world and engage in imperialism or colonialism. They stayed right where they were. When King David set up the kingdom and finished conquering the people that were in that geographical area, they didn’t get a army together and strike out and try to go down to Egypt and conquer Egypt or up to Assyria or over to Babylon or any of that. They stayed right where they were and hung out and got prosperous and were living a good life for about 70 years under David. [[NOTE: I misspoke here. It’s only 40 years.]] So company of nations doesn’t apply. And once the northern and the southern kingdom split apart, well, then they’re lost you know. The northern tribes go into bondage with Assyria and the southern tribes of Judah go into bondage in Babylon for 70 years and then 50 thousand of them, a piddley little 50,000 out of 600 and some thousand, come back and rebuild the city and rebuild the temple and co-mingle with a lot of other kinds of people that happen to be there. They never became this company of nations, World Empire. And yet, the God of the Bible promised Abraham that his descendants would be that world empire.
He also promised that – one of the promises to Abraham that those people would push the other peoples of the earth to the ends of the earth, which you know when you look at it in context means they will become a colonizing force in the world. Well, the Jews never did that. You know and once the kingdom split, they were gone from history and you know, how does that work? Well, unfulfilled promises, it looks like
There’s a few promises to David that we can come to in psalm 89 – there’s a few promises that were given by the prophet Nathan. He comes into David after the kingdom is completely set up and they’re living prosperously. Their enemies were all taken care of and everything’s wonderful. And this prophet comes in and he says, “Oh, David, thus saith God, ‘I’m gonna give Israel a land of their own.” I can imagine what David looked like. “Yeah. What?, Say whaaat!” They already had a land of their own. They spent a long, long time conquering all the people around them and setting up this kingdom and going through all that. And now they’re settled and they don’t have enemies any more and you know that’s the land of their own, isn’t it? Well not according to prophet Nathan. He also says, when they get to this place of their own, they’re not going to move any more. Now, that doesn’t make any sense either you know. They’re not gonna move any more.
Another one that Nathan says to David is that their old enemies are going to leave them alone. Well if you look at the, at the Jews you can see for sure that that doesn’t fit at all because up to that point, there were several enemies like the Philistines. You hear a lot about the Philistines, if you study the stories of the Bible. The Philistines were a big force against Israel. The Philistines were the people that Samson was involved in and the people that Goliath was from. And we got the Philistines and the Canaanites, Edomites, and a bunch of those peoples that surround the Palestine area and they were always at war. They were always at odds with the Israelis. They were always having trouble with them. They go off to be captive in Babylon. They come back after 70 years and start rebuilding the city and rebuilding and they get right back into trouble with those same people. So evidently Nathan had too much to drink the night before or he just didn’t know what he was talking about when he said this old enemies are going to leave them alone or there’s another explanation of course.
How about Joseph.? Joseph was the 11th son of Jacob so he was the fourth generation down from Abraham. There’s a blessing to Joseph that says that, “Ephraim,” which is his son Ephraim would be a multitude of nations” which is pretty much the same as company of nations. , it doesn’t necessarily mean a cohesive company of nations but it amounts to pretty much the same thing. And if Abraham ‘s descendants are going to be a company of nations, a world empire, then a multitude of nations includes that world empire and possibly even more. I don’t know how many you want to say “multitude“ amounts to, but there’s the promise that Joseph’s son would become a multitude of nations. It also says that his other son – his oldest son, Manasseh was to be a great nation. So Manasseh was one of the first people, tribes to be carried out of the land of Israel by the Assyrian empire when they came and conquered the ten tribed kingdom. They were gone. And so was Ephraim for that matter. Ephraim happened to be the ruling tribe of the ten tribed kingdom because he was the one that got Joseph’s birthright blessing. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a few minutes.
And in Jeremiah chapter 31 verse 35, there’s another astounding prophecy for Israel. It says that Israel will remain a nation forever, that is, unless somebody can take the sun and the stars and the seasons and change all of that. I wasn’t gonna read Jeremiah to you, but it’s very interesting what the God of the Bible has to say through Jeremiah to these people. What was that? That verse was 31:35. Okay. Here we are 31:35 “Thus saith the Lord which giveth the sun for light by day and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea and the waves thereof roar, the Lord of hosts is his name.” Okay. Now, we know who’s talking here. This guy who runs everything. Okay. He runs the night and the day and the moon and the stars and the sun and the waves of the ocean and all that. He runs everything. He’s talking and he says, “If those ordinances,” – the moon, and the stars, and the sun and the waves – “If those ordinances depart before me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel,” the descendants of Israel – that’s Jacob now, the descendants of Jacob, all right Israel is Jacob’s name. “Then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me forever.” Now, that kind of a backward way of saying that if you can take away the stars and the sun, then Israel will not be a nation any longer. And if you do it from a positive direction, us that Israel will be a nation, – the sons of Israel, the sons of Jacob – will be a nation forever. As long as the sun in it’s path.
That’s some pretty heavy stuff, especially, in light of the fact that they don’t exist any more, supposedly. Of course, this whole long study is to show that they, indeed, do exist and the lost tribes of Israel aren’t lost at all. They were found tribes of Israel. They’d been found over the last hundreds of years starting, with – well, maybe not starting specifically, but starting with 19 – 1847, 1847 when a man named Layard uncovered Nineveh, the ancient Assyrian capital, and with his archaeological digs there in Nineveh, uncovered the royal palace and the royal library of Nineveh.
Not only that, there was another fellow named Rawlenson, Colonel Rawlenson, discovered and deciphered the Behistun rock. The Behistun rock is over there in the Middle East. And it’s a 100 feet high, not the rock itself but this inscription, is a 100 feet high and a 150 feet long and it’s in three different languages, tells a big long story, has a picture of the Assyrian, the king and he’s got his foot placed on one person whose laying down at his feet. And they’re nine other people stretched out in front of him and in front of his advisors and lawyers and stuff are behind him. And what we find on a Behistun rock and the Assyrian tablets from the royal library is that this ten-tribe kingdom lost it’s name. That’s all it did. They’re called by a lot of different names.
Well, there are unconditional promises and conditional promises that are listed by the God of the Bible through his prophets and things like that. For instance, Jeroboam, when the kingdom split up, the southern kingdom of Judah was ruled by a man named Rehoboam. The northern people kingdom wound up being ruled by a man named Jeroboam. They weren’t related. They were actually from different tribes, but the God of the Bible comes to Jeroboam and says, “Hey, if you do like David did, my favorite king, and keep all my laws and you know, help the people out and be a good king, be righteous and all that, I’ll bless you the same as I blessed David, you know, you’ll have a wonderful kingdom and everything will be honky dory.” But Jeroboam doesn’t do that, see. He goes off to the side and that’s a long story. We’ll get into that eventually in the this study, but he doesn’t do what God put on there as conditional for his being a great king and his kingdom going on like David’s. So he didn’t receive the promises.
And you keep hearing me say that names – the names are extremely important because there are so many different names and that’s one of the reasons like I say why the lost tribes got lost in the first place because names changed. People didn’t change. You just don’t wipe out five and a half million people, you know. The names all got changed. Well, the names that are listed in the Bible -- I’m just gonna read a few of them – for the northern kingdom of Israel. The northern kingdom got had many names -- the house of Ephraim, the headquarters tribe of the ten tribed kingdom, the house of Ephraim. It was also called Samaria, known as Samaria because the capital was moved there by the sixth king Omri. It was also known as the house of Joseph. You can find that in a lot of places. It’s referred to as the house of Joseph, because Joseph was the father of the headquarters tribe, the headquarters man, Ephraim – that was Joseph’s father – so it’s called the House of Joseph sometimes. Sometime it’s called the house of Israel – talked about that already because Jacob as we’ll see through Scripture a little bit later in this show, – Jacob said that Joseph’s sons would take on his name, that they’ll be called by my name, Israel. And when they became the headquarters tribe and the leading tribe of the northern kingdom of Israel, they called them Israel because that’s what their name was. Israel. Changed their name to Israel. So they’re called the house of Israel. They’re also called the kingdom of Israel. Also the house of Omri, that sixth king.
Well, the southern kingdom, the two tribed kingdom was known as not quite so many names. You can find them as the house of Judah or the kingdom of Judah or sometimes referred to as Jerusalem, which is the capital city. So the kingdom of Jerusalem supposedly only you don’t say kingdom of Jerusalem, us Jerusalem will this or Jerusalem will that or house of Judah or sometimes. just Judah.
The same goes for the northern, the northern kingdom, sometimes this were just called Israel and you have to be careful when the word Israel is all alone because it could be the man Israel or it could be the nation Israel or it could be the ten tribed kingdom of the north Israel. So you have to be real careful and get the context of the passage to determine which Israel that is. So that’s a little about the names.
But just as important as the names, probably more important, is the birthright. Now, the birthright, what we understand the birthright intellectually, but in our society, we don’t do too much about the birthright, you know. The kids inherit. The kids, plural. See? Daddy dies and the estate is parceled out to everybody. Well, that’s somewhat of a recent development. Back in biblical times, the first-born got everything. Everything. You know, and I suppose if he was a nice guy, that his little brothers and sisters could live there at court and have a lot of advantages and things, but they didn’t own all that much you know. Everything of substance went to the first-born – all the land, all the cattle, all the money, all the different possessions, the rulership of the family, you know. He was the guy who made up the rules for the family and said what went and what didn’t. Okay. Everything to do with the family went to the first-born. Now, it’s extremely important to remember that.
The bloodline, the birthright line, if you will, the word we’re looking at, the line of Abraham goes from Abraham through Isaac, his first-born son, by his wife Sarah. He had another son before that, but it wasn’t by his wife. So it goes from Abraham to Isaac, and then from Isaac to Jacob, which again isn’t the very first-born, because Jacob had a brother called Esau. And they were twins. And Esau came out first, with Jacob grabbing onto his heel. That’s what Jacob means “heel catcher.” Well, through a set of circumstances, Jacob winds up receiving the birthright. And Jacob’s first-born was Reuben out of the 12 sons that he had. But Reuben, well, let’s just stop with that there. We’ll get to the rest of this in a minute.
But we come now in the birthright line to a crossroads of the Bible. We get to Reuben and try to follow this line. We come to a crossroads, and that crossroads is one of the pivotal – that’s why I call it a crossroads see -- pivotal things about this birthright and the descendancy and the lost tribes and this whole study. One of the main misconceptions that happens. you just read through and pass over this stuff and you don’t realize what it is that’s being said. And the main passages that we’re worried about here is Genesis 48 and 49, those two chapters and 1 Chronicles 5 and those chapters show that the birthright got mixed around. When it passed on from Jacob, he didn’t pass it to Reuben. It got mixed around, and we’re going to get into that in a lot of detail today. That’s the main part of this lesson today. And understanding that these passages will open great gobs of the Bible to understanding, and it takes the confusion out of who’s who. You might want to run and get that Bible now if you haven’t got it already and we’re going to look up a bunch of verses and try to pin this birthright thing down so that we have a really good solid place to work from now on. And we’ll be able to show that these promises and blessings have to go a certain place and not the place we usually think they would go okay. Okay.
Jacob is just about to pass on the birthright to his sons. He’s getting old. He’s in Egypt. Anybody’s who’s done any Sunday school in their lives remembers this son of Jacob called Joseph -- the coat of many colors. And he was Jacob’s favorite son even though he was the 11th born. He was his favorite son. And Joseph had a couple of dreams that said he was going to be ruler of the family, and the rest of the family was going to bow down to him and he’s kind of a wiseacre anyway, you know, proud, wise acre guy. And his brothers didn’t like him very much. So to make a long story short, they sold him into slavery rather than killing him. He went off to Egypt, interpreted a dream, a couple of dreams for the Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and became a high Mucky Muck in the Egyptian hierarchy and eventually wound up ruling all Egypt under the Pharaoh. Pharaoh means king. It doesn’t – it’s not a specific name. It’s just king. That’s all it means in Egyptian. The Pharaoh --he was up there, and he was down there in, I should say, in upper Egypt up on the plateau, and he was having his fun up there.
And Joseph was ruling everything. There was a heavy famine that Joseph had prepared very carefully for and the people came and said, “Hey, we need some food.” He said, “Well, give me some money.” Well, after they gave him all their money and still needed food because the famine went on for seven years, he said, “Well, sell me all your cattle.” So he give them some more grain. This isn’t just 2- or 300 people. This is the land of Egypt and some of the surrounding countryside also came to Egypt to buy grain. Well, after the money was gone and the people sold their cattle to him, then they still didn’t have any food, so they sold their land and they even sold themselves into service. Some people call it slavery, but service is good enough of the king, which was nominally Pharaoh, but Joseph, if you read the passages, he was moving people around like checkers you know. He’d take a bunch here and move them over there. He owned all the land. He owned all the people. He owned all the money. He owned all the cattle. He owned everything. And by the time that had come to pass Jacob and the rest of his family, the rest of the Joseph’s brothers and their wives and their kids, 70 of them altogether had come to Egypt to get away from the famine that also was happening in their land of Canaan. Well, Joseph you know took them right in. Pharaoh took them right in.
In fact, and this is a really important point to remember is that Jacob and these kids weren’t – they weren’t little children you know – his sons, you know, they weren’t some back of the desert shepherds you know with a couple of hundred sheep. Jacob was the king of Canaan, the king of Canaan. He was very rich. They were very powerful. They were the force in that geographical area and Joseph says, “Hey, come up here and live in Egypt. We’ve got a lot of food. .” The Pharaoh meets them when Jacob shows up. The passage in the Bible of the meeting says that Jacob blessed the Pharaoh. Now, some little back of the desert shepherd with a couple hundred sheep doesn’t even get in to see the Pharaoh and if he does and the Pharaoh doesn’t dip his scepter to say, it’s okay if you approach, he gets killed . You don’t even come into the presence of the king without getting your head taken off, see. And here’s this back of the desert shepherd blessing the king, the Pharaoh of Egypt, uh-huh. Uh-huh. He had to be something really special and when you look at Jacob way down the line when he actually dies, the kings of all the surrounding countries came to his funeral and made a great big show out of his death. So that just establishes who Jacob really was okay. Joseph is absolute despot of Egypt. Jacob comes with the family, and they’re all living there and they’re ruling – these 70 people, this family of Jacob or Israel which is his name at the end. His name isn’t Jacob any more. It’s Israel. They’re ruling Egypt. Well, when Jacob dies, I mean he’s still the father. He’s still the patriarch, and Joseph still does what he tells him even though he’s ruling Egypt. When Jacob’s about to die, he’s going to pass on the birthright. That’s what he we want to look at in more detail, this birth right thing because this is where, like I said before, the birthright doesn’t pass on in a normal manner.
Look up Genesis 35:22. Genesis 35:22, “And it came to pass when Israel dwelt in the land that Reuben” – remember Reuben; his first-born Reuben was the first-born of Jacob, and normally, the first-born gets it all. He gets everything, the land, the cattle, the right to rule the family, make the rules up and all that stuff. When Israel dwelt in that land, when Jacob dwelt in that land that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his father’s concubine. She had some sons by Jacob. So essentially, it was kind of like a wife see. That’s you know some of the sons of the twelve kids of Israel, Jacob, was, was the sons of this concubine, Bilhah. And Reuben went in and laid with his father’s concubine, and Israel heard it and that’s what happened when they were there. Okay. There’s another, another version of that, or a cross reference of that same story in Genesis 49: 3. Genesis 49: 3 talks about Reuben. It says, “ Thou art my first-born, my might and my beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, the excellency of power, unstable as water. Thou shalt not excel because thou wentest up to thy father’s bed. Then defilest thou it.” He went up to my couch. I’m not gonna dwell on that too much, but he you know he went in unto as they say, in the Bible his father’s wife. Basically speaking, the mother of some of his brother’s.
Then if his father, if Reuben doesn’t get the birthright, then the next one in line, the second born gets the birthright. And it’s the way it would have gone, but in chapter 49 verse 5 to 7, we find out what happens to the second born son, and even the third born son starting from verse 5, it says, “Simeon,” which is the second born, “and Levi” which is the third born are brethren. – “Instruments of cruelty are in their habitations. Oh my soul, come thou not into their secret, unto their assembly. Mine honor be not thou united. For in their anger, they slew a man.” Now, this wasn’t just one man. They did a lot of bad stuff. “And in their self will, they digged down a wall.” What does “digged down a wall?” My margin says that they houghed oxen. You figure that out. We’re gonna go on. The seventh verse says, “cursed be their anger, for it was first and their wrath. For it was cruel. I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel.” In other words they lost the birthright too. So the first, the second, and the third sons that would have you know produced the line of birthright are out the window. And what are we left with?
We’re let with Judah, the fourth born. Well, we take next, 49, that’s verse 8. “Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise. Thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies. Thy father, thy father’s children shall bow down before them. Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, thou art gone up. He stooped down. He crouched as a lion and as an old lion. Who shall rise him up.” Here’s the promise. Here’s the part of the birthright. Here’s where it starts to split. The birthright is split, not down the middle either, just a little bit. Just a little bit of a split goes one way and a whole bunch goes the other way. Verse ten says, the scepter.” The right to rule, the kingship “shall not depart from Judah.” Now, that means that Judah is going to have the right to rule the family. And when it becomes a nation, the descendants of Judah will be the ones who will have the right to rule the nation. It goes on to say “nor a lawgiver from between his feet until Shiloh come.” Shiloh in the Bible is another name for Christ. So that means that Judah the fourth born son of Israel is going to inherit the right to rule and the right to make all the laws. .
Now what happened to all the land? What happened to all the money? All that good stuff, you know, the prosperity, the blessing and all that. Well, we go over in the same chapter to verse 26 and we find what Joseph gets because the passage from 22 through 26 involves Joseph. What does he get? Well Joseph in verse 26, “the blessing of thy father have prevailed about the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the ever lasting hills. They shall be on the head of Joseph.” All the blessings. All the blessings are on the head of Joseph. “and on the crown of the head of him that was separated from his brethren.” Joseph gets it all. He’s the 11th born son, not the fourth or the fifth. So Judah auto winds up getting the right to rule the family and the right to make the laws, and Joseph gets everything else.
Well, now we have to take this one step farther and back up one chapter into chapter 48 to delineate a little bit more closely what happens after Joseph. 48 chapter five, I mean verse five is where Jacob is adopting the sons of Joseph. You see, when Joseph was ruling Egypt, he had a wife and he had two kids, Ephraim and Manasseh. Actually he had Manasseh first. Manasseh was the older of the two sons. And Joseph, you know he’s got two half Egyptian sons. Well, Jacob has him bring those sons along and that’s what’s happening here. And their, – and he says, “And now, thy two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, are mine which were born to thee in the land of Egypt before I came to thee in the land of Egypt.” This is Jacob talking. “Before I got there to Egypt and you know brought the family, your two sons, those ones you had then are mine.” He’s adopting them, “as Reuben and Simeon. They shall be mine.” Okay, in other words, and you see Reuben and Simeon are the first two born. First-born is Ruben and second one is Simeon. And he has made Ephraim the first-born and Manasseh the second born. In the sixth verse, he clarifies it even further, “and thy issue – thy descendants, your sons after this, ” Which thou begetest after them shall be thine.” Those -- all those kids after Ephraim and Manasseh were born, they will be yours but those two kids are mine. “and shall be called after the name of their brethren and their inheritance.” Those are the sons of Joseph, but not Ephraim and Manasseh because Ephraim and Manasseh are mine. He adopts them okay.
Well, let’s look at 48: 16 – 19 and, we see what the blessings of Ephraim and Manasseh are going to be because Joseph brings the two sons and he’s got Manasseh on the side that relates to Joseph’s right hand. See? So he’s got – I mean the left hand. He’s got Manasseh on his – just a second, Ed’s coming in the door here. He’s bringing – try to get this picture. Joseph is sitting on this chair and Jacob, rather, is sitting on a chair, Joseph brings his two sons in and he offers his older son, Manasseh, to Jacob on Jacob’s right hand because the right hand is the hand that passes along the first blessing, the best stuff. Okay. So Joseph is standing there with Manasseh on his left side and Ephraim on his right side. And he pushes the kids forward a little bit, you know, and says, “Get up there and get your blessing.” And Jacob crosses his hands. And he raise his right hand not on Manasseh the older of the two, but on Ephraim, the younger. And he raises his left hand on Manasseh. So that’s the picture what’s happening here. Starting with verse 16 okay, “the angel which redeemed me,” this is Jacob talking about “from all evil, bless the lads. Let my name be named on them.” They’re gonna be called Israel from then on “and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.” Okay there’s one blessing. “And when Joseph saw that his father had laid his right hand on the head of Ephraim, it displeased him and he held up his father’s hand to remove it from Ephraim’s head unto Manasseh’s head. And Joseph said unto his father “Not so my father, for this is the first-born. Put thy right hand upon his head. And his father refused and said, ‘I know it my son. I know it. He also shall become a people. He also shall become great.” Talking about Manasseh, “But truly his younger brother shall be greater than he and his seed shall become a multitude of nations.” So Ephraim, Jacob is blessing the two kids and Ephraim, the younger son is going to be placed over the older son, Manasseh and become a multitude of nations even though Manasseh is going to become a great nation, a great people, Ephraim is the one those going to be the head guy. He gets the most, the blessing. Joseph gets all the birthright except the right to rule the family and the right to make the laws and that goes to Judah, but he gets everything else and that’s passed right down to Ephraim and Manasseh. And then it splits a little bit and Ephraim is going to be the head tribe and become a company of nations, a world empire, a multitude of nations.
Now, let’s take a quick look at I Chronicles on page 487 in my Bible and that should be within a hundred pages of the Bible your looking at. First chronicles chapter 5, the very first verse, “Now, the sons of Reuben, the firstborn of Israel, for he is the firstborn for as much as is he defiled his father’s bed, his birthright was given unto his sons of Joseph. the son of Israel” son of Jacob, right? “And the genealogy is not to be reckoned after the birthright. Now, there’s the cross-reference. The book of chronicles is a history of the nation. It’s Israel’s history according to the southern kingdom of Judah. The southern kingdom of Judah wrote this history of the nation of Israel. And that’s what the, two books of chronicles are. The two books of kings is the same history as viewed by the northern kingdom of Israel. Okay it’s very clear there. Joseph gets the birthright, because Reuben you know messed up. Now, if we go on, what we find in verse two again is clarification for Judah. “For Judah prevailed above his brethren and of him came the chief ruler, but the birthright was Joseph’s.” That’s what the verse says. So Judah gets to be the ruler and Joseph gets all the good stuff.
Now a lot of people like I said before give up on the God of the Bible because the traditional church says that the Jews, because they haven’t done their history work, they think the Jews have to fulfill these promises to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, all of that, Joseph. And if they can’t make it fit Jews, then they try the church. See. A multitude of people? Well, the Christian church is a multitude of people. Well, any intelligent person will see somebody trying to twist that around and be turned off and say, that’s crazy. It can’t possibly be the church you know. It just doesn’t work.
And if they can’t make some of these promises work for the Jews or the church, they’ll lay it on Christ. Oh, yeah. Well, these promises are fulfilled in Christ you know. Well, you can’t call the Jews a nation forever. There were long periods of time when they weren’t a nation. You know. They were conquered, taken away. Jerusalem was split, burned to the ground and the Jews were scattered all over the world. They never were, constantly forever according to the sun in the sky and the stars like we talked about earlier, they weren’t a nation forever. The Christian church was not a nation forever. I mean most of these promises are things that happen way, way before Christ, centuries before Christ even turned on the scene. So there weren’t any Christians. There weren’t about to be any Christians for a long time. The church can’t possibly fulfill, maybe a few little promises here and there. You can twist them around and make em fall on the church, but it don’t work that way for all the promises and if all the promises don’t come to pass then you can’t depend on what all the promises say. So the God of the Bible must be a liar or fickle or something you know. But these things don’t happen when you try to lay them on the Jews, the church, or Christ. It just don’t happen. And mainly that’s because of slipping by in the reading, in the study, Genesis 48 and 49 and I Chronicles 5 that we just got through going through. They don’t realize that, these people who are laying the promises in the wrong place, don’t realize this they’re looking in the wrong place. And in their zeal to make it all work, it comes out all backward you know. And just doesn’t work. We’ve got to keep Judah and Joseph separate. Judah and Israel separate.
And just knowing this one fact – that’s why I call it a crossroad’s of the Bible – just knowing this one fact that the birthright was split and now, their viewed as two separate people, the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel will open up practically the whole Bible to you, including the New Testament. There are a lot of references in the New Testament to the house of Israel, which has nothing to do with the Jews. The house of Israel. Over and over again you’ll find that Christ and the apostles and the disciples are sent to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Now, when you know the kingdom split and all of the Old Testament in the prophesies and the prophets, they’re called the house of Israel and it is house of Judah, then all of a sudden, the understanding comes in the New Testament that when Jesus says, “I am not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that doesn’t mean the Jews at all although he was right there amongst the Jews. That’s where it started, but the reason what he’s saying, in other words, interpreted is the reason that I came is for the people that are lost in the ten tribes. And any one else that wants to come along too. See, but that’s why I was sent. He specifically tells his apostles and disciples at one point, “Don’t go to Samaria. Don’t go there. Don’t go here. Don’t go this place. Don’t go that place. Go to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” Well, if you don’t know that the two kingdoms split and he’s not saying anything about the house of Judah, just talking about the house of Israel, your gonna think he’s talking about the Jews or Israel at that time you know, which were ruled by the Romans and Israel later on. And Israel today, for instance. Oh yeah, he was sent for Israel. Well that isn’t simply true. Just isn’t simply true. The lost sheep of the House of Israel. House-of-Israel is very important. Okay. So all the land, all the cattle, all the money, the possessions, the blessings, the promises, the prophesies, all go to Joseph. They all go to Joseph.
There’s a few specific ones that go to Judah but all that stuff goes to Joseph and from Joseph it passes to Ephraim and from Ephraim it spreads out over the whole ten tribed kingdom of Israel, the northern kingdom and Judah again only gets the right to rule. Now, we can see how that works out because when they first got together a king, the first king of the nation of Israel was a guy named Saul. Well Saul was out of the tribe of Benjamin. So God didn’t keep his promise about a ruler coming out of Judah. Well, God, didn’t have anything to do with it. The people got together and they demanded that they have a king, “oh we want a king like everybody else. You know all these other nations have kings and we want a king too.” And they picked one out. So he wound up not being from the tribe of Judah. Well, the other part of that story is that the prophet Samuel who has two whole books in the Bible went and anointed a kid, a little shepherd kid and said your going to be the king of Israel. Well that was David. And the very next king was David. When Saul was out of the picture, David was the king. Now, David, through the prophet Samuel, was God’s choice and of course David is out of the tribe of Judah. When God’s in control, things happen the way he says it’s gonna happen, in other words. See. He got the descendant of Judah together for the kingship and from then on until the kingdom split it was a descendant out of the land of Judah who ruled over Israel of course that was only one more king, Solomon because after Solomon died, the kingdom split immediately and from then on, the ruler of the southern kingdom of Judah always was a descendant of Judah. , not the kingdom, but the man. The man, Judah. The son that got the birthright, the part of birthright that called for the scepter and the law making. The kings of Judah, the kingdom of Judah from then on all were out of the descendancy of the man, the patriarch, Judah. The northern kingdom wasn’t, but interestingly enough, the guy that we named earlier, Jeroboam, who became the king of the northern tribes of Israel happened to be out of the tribe of Ephraim. He was working for Rehoboam, you know, at the palace there. He was working in the palace with Rehoboam and he split and there’s a really neat prophecy happening in the Bible where the prophet Ahijah comes and talks to Jeroboam about the kingdom splitting. We’ll get into that probable next week I think. So it turns out, coincidentally, hat somebody from the tribe of Ephraim who got the blessing, the highest part of blessing for the northern ten tribes turns out to be the first ruler of the ten tribes after the kingdoms split. See.
Well, now what we’ve got is Jacob splitting the birthright. Judah gets the scepter. Joseph rules. Joseph gets all the cattle, the land and everything. Joseph hasn’t given up ruling yet. Jacob dies and they go on living in Egypt. And Joseph rules for 80 years.
Now, the family of Jacob or Israel, the 70 of them that went there, they stayed and had a lot of kids and became a nation the land of Egypt and they were there for over 400 years, some 430 years. The first 80 of those years or maybe 78 or 9, Joseph was the absolute ruler. Well, who takes over then? Joseph, when Joseph dies at 110 years old, who takes over? Well, if your gonna follow the law of the family, then somebody from the tribe of Judah who got the right to rule takes over. That’s who’s gonna rule Egypt now. And considering the fact the slavery thing that we hear about, in bondage and in the brick pits and all of that stuff that they went through, only happened for the last hundred years of the 430, we got over 250 years – longer that this country has been in existence that a time period that’s ruled by the sons of Judah, the line of Judah for 250 years, they ruled Egypt. For over 300 years, these people, these shepherds came and ruled over the whole land of Egypt. Now by way of clarification, you can go to Ezekiel chapter 23 – I’m not gonna do that now, but you can go there yourself. And it goes into a lot of detail concerning the two kingdoms. Actually it’s a pretty dirty story. Sounds like a prophecy but actually it’s history because Ezekiel wrote while he was in with the people from the southern kingdom of Judah after Nebuchadnezzer, the king of Babylon, came and conquered Jerusalem and took the temple and busted it down and everything. And he’s over there writing down at least 120 years after the northern kingdom was taken away by Assyria. So it reads like prophecy but it’s actually history. And we’ll try to draw these ends together next week as we move toward the history of the northern, as we move forward rather toward the history of the ten tribed kingdom of Joseph, Ephraim, Samaria, Israel. Take your pick of any name you want there. The amazing part of the northern kingdoms’ history is when we trace them to the area beyond the Black Sea as they become the Celtic tribes and it’s only when we recognize that the Celts are the lost tribes that we can fit those promises and the blessings together into a proper picture. But that’s gonna take a lot of time. It’s gonna take many weeks of piling up a lot of detailed evidence so that it just isn’t something that rolls off the top of somebody’s tongue and says, oh this is this. You know. It’s not an easy answer.
In the meantime, you might want to tune in next week and stretch with Jack on history and philosophy of the Bible.
Lost Tribes series index page.
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