Genesis 49:1–2
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
We live in an age that has declared war on fatherhood. Our culture alternates between portraying fathers as bumbling, incompetent fools in our entertainment and as oppressive, toxic tyrants in our academic theories. Both caricatures serve the same demonic purpose: to sever the roots of covenantal succession and to create a generation of orphans, unmoored from their past and uncertain of their future. The modern secular project requires the abolition of the patriarch, because a man who knows who he is, who knows who his father is, and who knows who his God is, is a man who cannot be easily ruled by the Nanny State. The world wants autonomous individuals, disconnected from any authority but their own appetites. But God builds His kingdom through families, through covenant lines, through fathers and sons. And so, when we come to a passage like this, we are not simply reading the quaint, deathbed ramblings of an old man.