(excerpted from the new manuscript I am working on)
All the leaders of all the Faiths know the predictions of what was to happen to God’s Chosen People of the Biblical Promises. They would go through many tests and trying times but would emerge in the end triumphant as a great national multitude. There is not much agreement, however, as to who exactly it is that this would happen to. Of course, every group includes themselves. There are no mainstream Judeo/Christian denominations that include the people that all the Promises, Patriarchs and Prophets of the Scriptures agree these things would eventually emerge upon. Not the Jews nor the non-Hebrew Gentiles were to be shown to be God’s favored heirs for the Blessings first laid upon Abraham’s mantel for his faithfulness in “the Last Days.”
In the end it was to be the descendants of Joseph, favorite son of Jacob, who were to undergo tremendous and unprecedented national flourishing. And in the last days the children of Joseph and their compatriots would become rejoined to Judah in an inexorable fashion. There would be building warfare by the nation that grew from the son’s of Ishmael — half-brother of Isaac son of Abraham and the firstborn — and Esau — firstborn twin brother of Jacob son of Isaac. Their descendants are believed to be the Arab nations.
No one of real popular consequence has yet put forth the obvious. We know who Judah is and we know the nation linked to them that has emerged as the greatest company of nations the world has ever seen. But the problem is that the Jewish leaders believe they are both Judah and the country that will become the greatest. The mainstream Christian leaders believe that the Gentile Church (with their denomination in the lead or at least among the leaders) is that “blessed multitude”. And this is because of the role that Joseph has been relegated to.
This was illustrated in one of those obscure seemingly unconnected portions of Scripture that no one I know of has made any effective attempt to unpack:
And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked. Mark 14:51-52
This is one of several obvious coincidental symbolic references in the Gospels to Joseph son of Jacob. Recounted in the 39th Chapter of Genesis is the story of Joseph after he had been sold into slavery in Egypt. He had been betrayed by his jealous brothers who resented that he was their father’s favorite and had been having dreams of preeminence among the entire clan that he shared at the family table. They were going to kill him but his older brother Judah intervened and suggested it would be better that they sell him into slavery. The plan had been to slit his throat and bring to Jacob the special “many-colored coat” his father had draped over him one day as he came in from keeping tabs on his brothers out in the fields — covered with his blood. The story was to be that a lion had attacked and killed him. But now in place of Joseph they killed a goat and used that blood instead. Then they sold Joseph to passing Ishmealite traders who in turn sold him to the Egyptian named Potiphar who was the captain of Pharoah’s guard.
Here — hundreds of years before the Mosaic ritual for the Day of Atonement was codified — we have the Yom Kippur sacrifice from the Book of Leviticus played out in jealous sibling intrigue; one goat’s blood covers the sins of the original children of Israel — while the scapegoat is sent off into the wilderness to die and disappear — and their sins with him.
Potiphar liked Joseph and entrusted him with the great riches of his household. Potiphar’s wife liked him as well for her own reasons as he was “well-built and handsome”. But Joseph’s integrity and loyalty to his master would not allow him to do any such thing:
One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, “Come to bed with me!” But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house. When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, she called her household servants. “Look,” she said to them, “this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. When he heard me scream for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.” She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. Then she told him this story: “That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.” When his master heard the story his wife told him, saying, “This is how your slave treated me,” he burned with anger. Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined. Gen. 39: 11-20
Here we have a story of evil temptation and holy resistance, betrayal, false accusation and arrest and confinement where the sure punishment was to be death. It was certainly paralleled in the Gospels by Jesus’s own situation that led to His death. And in Mark we have this seemingly anomalous and unidentified young man who is about to be also taken with the Lord but flees away naked also leaving his cloak behind.
In Mark’s account on the one side we have the one identified as the Lamb of God (in this case “goat of the Lord”, as in Old Testament atonement ritual there were two goats) to be sacrificed; the other to be sent off to die in the wilderness with the naked sins of the people exposed led off not to be heard from again. This unidentified young man is at once Joseph and at the same time the scapegoat of the Mosaic sacrifice:
But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness. Lev. 16:10
And he that let go the goat for the scapegoat shall wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in water, and afterward come into the camp.v. 26
Here we have all the elements: one who runs off after being falsely accused — a naked man and another man holding a cloak in his hand. Scholarship recounts that there could be no possibility of the return of the scapegoat as it “symbolized the utter removal of the sins of the people, which were conveyed away and lost in the depths of the wilderness, whence there was no return.” (from BIBLIOTHECA SACRA 115 (1958): p327 Copyright © 1958 Dallas Theological Seminary)
Joseph’s descendants are everybody else’s scapegoat — the people whose sins were so great that God had to permanently cut them off from Himself — or at least from the major portion of the Abrahamic Birthright that had been bestowed on them in the persons of young Manasseh and the younger Ephraim by their grandfather Jacob in the presence of their father Joseph. (Gen. 48) The Jews came to believe because the Birthright Tribes were lost (thus becoming known as the “Lost Tribes of Israel”) in the wilderness of the pagan world that they were cut off from the Blessings — and since they themselves were back in the Promised Land with a thriving culture and a brand spanking new temple after the return from captivity in Babylon in the 6th Century BCE that God had replaced Joseph with the Judaic Kingdom. The canonical apologists of the emerging Holy Roman Empire carried this “replacement theology” further to postulate that since the Jews had been crushed and dispersed by the Pagan Roman Empire — obviously to the Christians because of the Jews rejection of their own Messiah — that they too had been disqualified by God and now it was the Gentile Church that were God’s chosen recipients of the Blessings of the Patriarchs.
The United States has emerged as the one and only “company of nations” (Gen. 48:19) that fulfills all the Promises and prophetic utterances of what would become of the the descendants of Joseph in “the last days”. Its name — “United States” — is even a perfect alternate linguistic rendering of the phrase from Jacob’s lips as it is most often translated. But it literally means “fullness of the Gentiles” — a phrase repeated by the Apostle Paul at the end of his explanation to the converted pagans of Rome how they were a wild branch grafted onto the cultivated Hebrew tree:
Lest you be wise in your own sight, I want you to understand this mystery: a partial hardening has come upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. Romans 11:25
The United States — the “company of nations” whose citizens have done more to bring more of the non-Semitic peoples of the world in contact with and under the umbrella of the belief systems and cultural morays of what began with Abraham’s little Middle Eastern clan than any other national grouping — is in itself and its actions the “fullness of the Gentiles.” And yet no one who attempts to put forth the obvious — that America is Lost Joseph found — gains acceptance by the Judeo-Christian mainstream.
Joseph is the one Old Testament hero that had no flaws. He did not give in to the temptations of his master’s wife — and it was reported that this was in part out of loyalty to his pagan master. He did not doubt God’s Promise as Abraham did; he did not favor the worldly son over God’s chosen as Isaac did; he did not lie and cheat to get what he felt he deserved as his father Jacob had done. And he resisted illicit sexual temptations as was the downfall of Samson and both Kings David and Solomon. The one who had dreams of preeminence among the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — to whom even the sun, moon and stars of heaven were to pay homage — had become a household slave in Egypt dedicated to his slave-master even to the point of death. There is no sign of resentment against his murderous brethren — no sign of dejection — no loss of faith in his God. And when he reemerges to his brothers he is for all intents and purposes a pagan Egyptian. And — as such — he saves them and the whole known world from a terrible drought and famine in the land.
Did not the United States mirror the Hebrew/Gentile savior Joseph in the post WWII Western world? Why is it so difficult for the West to accept all these signs as meaning what they are telling us?
It is because of the role the Biblical people of the West have relegated the Lost Tribes of Joseph to — they must remain the one example of a formerly “Chosen People ” whose sins were just too much for the All Merciful God of Abraham to forgive — or they will forced to view their own hypocrisies.
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