Chapter 8
How Joseph’s Greatness Was
Attained
“God is an Englishman”
Or so it was said by many people outside of the British Isles in the
19th century. What accounts for this startling expression of speech from the
previous century? If England’s status in the world today is a shadow of what it
was one hundred years ago, you would have had a difficult time convincing
anyone who lived in the 1800s that God was not somehow divinely prospering the
politicians, statesmen, diplomats, explorers, generals, admirals, soldiers,
architects, engineers, scientists, inventors, bankers, businessmen,
shopkeepers, and entrepreneurs of the British Isles.
The prosperity of Joseph
Perhaps it is significant that the name “Joseph” in the Hebrew —
Yowceph — literally means, “let him add,” implying prosperity. Certainly as the
descendants of Joseph, the people of Great Britain enjoyed a prosperity that no
other people in the record of human history had ever achieved. To many
observers both in and out of Britain, it appeared that success came to the
British people whether or not they even pursued it — whether or not they made wise or foolish choices.
It was as though certain unconditional blessings were overtaking them
(Deuteronomy 28:2). It was this very kind of “inevitable” success which
inspired Cambridge professor of modern history (1834-1895) and author of The
Expansion of England (1884), John Robert Seeley’s well-known observation that
England acquired her globe-girdling Empire “in a fit of absence of mind.”
The 19th became Britain’s century. The British — specialists it seems
in “muddling through” — seemed unable to do anything wrong. To their own
astonishment, they found themselves ruling about a quarter of the world’s
population and a fifth of its landmass. British rule extended over not just any
locations but the choicest and most fertile territories on earth.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States’ fortunes were about
to bloom as well. This was the time that a 2,520-year withholding of the
birthright to the descendants of Israel drew to a close. It is hardly
surprising that educated people of the day saw the hand of God in the process.
It was hard to miss.
One example of many comes from Lord Rosebery, a former British
Foreign Secretary (1886, 1892-1894) and Prime Minister (1894-1895). He spoke in
November 1900 to the students of Glasgow University about the British Empire:
“How marvelous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but by the work of
men’s hands; cemented with men’s honest blood and with a world of tears, welded
by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach
incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and
splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human, for the most heedless and
the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.
“Growing as trees grow, while others slept; fed by the faults of
others as well as the character of our fathers; reaching with a ripple of a
restless tide over tracts, and islands and continents, until our little Britain
woke up to find herself the foster-mother of nations and the source of united
empires. Do we not hail in this less the energy and fortune of a race than the
supreme direction of the Almighty?”
In those more biblically literate times, people like Lord Rosebery saw
some parallel between their own remarkable circumstance and that of the chosen
people of ancient Israel. Was not God blessing them as he had promised to bless
those same ancient people? It did not seem unreasonable to see the British
Empire as the Kingdom of God on earth and the British people as the “chosen of
God.”
The British Empire
Many of the builders of the empire aspired to construct a peaceful,
happy, unified domain with a quarter of the world’s population living under
British rule. To their great credit, British administrators sent to colonial
and imperial territories throughout the globe did an admirable job in
establishing and extending law and order. In many regions, the British
presence stimulated economic development and brought Western technological
advances.
The Pax Britannica enforced peaceful conditions in many regions of the
world formerly troubled by war. Men like William Wilberforce (1759-1833) were
instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade. And British
missionaries became the bearers of Christianity to people from one end of the
globe to the other.
However, for all the good that the empire may have accomplished, it
fell far short of the realities that the Kingdom of God will bring. Christ’s
kingdom will be worldwide (Psalm 47:1-9). If the British brought with them
their own laws, Christ will bring and enforce the law of God (Isaiah 2:3;
11:2-5).
British prosperity was transient and accompanied by all the attendant
social evils that are so often found in industrial civilizations. The economic
stability brought by Jesus Christ to humanity will be pure, equitable, and
enduring (Isaiah 65:22-23; Amos 9:13; Micah 4:4).
The peace of the British Empire was a human creation — something
dependent on control of strategic passageways, overwhelming military might, and
technological superiority. Moreover, in places the Empire itself was a
perpetual battlefield, troubled by numberless imperial wars. There was even
conflict between the British government and the various English, Celtic, and
Dutch populations in Ireland and South Africa.
The peace of Christ (Isaiah 9:6) will be based on a remarkable change
in human behavior induced by the writing of the law of God on the hearts of the
men and women of the world (Ezekiel 36:26-27; Matthew 11:28-30). The hopes of
Englishmen to Christianize the world fell far short of expectations. Jesus
Christ will succeed where all who have gone before Him have failed (Jeremiah
31:34). Inevitable tendencies toward ambition and selfinterest limited even the
best British intentions. In contrast, Christ will rule with fairness and equity
(Matthew 20:20-28).
If the British Empire had its various flaws, shortcomings, and weaknesses,
it nevertheless provides us with a pattern pointing to the fulfillment of some
of the most important and exciting prophecies in all the Bible. But first let’s
understand a little bit of its history.
The historic importance of the 19th century
Britain was not always “great.” Indeed, the real rise of both Britain
and America came after 1800. Herbert Armstrong wrote: “It may not be generally
realized — but neither Britain nor the United States became great world powers
until the nineteenth century. Suddenly, in the very beginning of the nineteenth
century, these two — until then small, relatively unimportant countries —
suddenly spurted to national power and greatness among nations, as no nations
had ever grown and multiplied in wealth, resources and power before...
“Never did any people or nation spread out and grow so suddenly and
rapidly into such magnitude of national power... And nearly all this wealth
came to us after A.D. 1800!” (United States and Britain in Prophecy, pp.
9, 11, 155, 161).
Only a couple of centuries before becoming the premier power of the
world, England stood “in the margin of European economy and culture.” On the
eve of those 16th century events that would initiate a slow but rarely
interrupted ascension in England’s power and influence, the Hapsburg Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles V aptly characterized the relative place of England in the
comity of European nations. He is said to have remarked “I speak Latin to God,
Italian to musicians, Spanish to ladies, French at court, German to servants,
and English to my horses” (Eugene Weber, Modern History of Europe, p.
130).
How did such a reversal of fortunes occur over the following two
hundred years? More importantly, why did it occur when it did? Historians have
revealed much about the process of England’s rise to power, but they remain
largely as powerless as ever in explaining the timing of it all. That dimension
of the story requires an insight accessible only through an understanding of
the mind and plan of God.
The industrial and economic growth of the Anglo-American world began
to crescendo in the mid- to late-18th century. Economic historians argue
furiously about the point at which the industrialization process reached
critical mass. Generally speaking, the earliest dates suggested are the 1750s
and the latest near the turn of the 19th century. In any case, the proximity of
these dates to the issuing of the Birthright to Joseph’s seed helps to make
sense of the failure of so many previous kingdoms and empires to develop an
industrial economic base, a fact that has long puzzled historians. Why did
industrial “take-off” not occur before it did? The answer is simple. It was not
according to the master plan and timetable of Almighty God (Isaiah 46:9-10).
One of the best assessments of the timing of industrialization comes
from conservative historian, Charles Wilson, who writes in England’s
Apprenticeship: “As yet [ca. 1763] ‘industry’ did not mean industrialization as
a later age was to understand it. The manufacturing part of the economy was
like the components of a watch ready for assembly but not interacting with each
other.”
There were already urban industries (like brewing, soap boiling, sugar
refining, etc.) but industry as a whole was far from urbanized. The greater
part of the expanding export trade was sustained by rural and semi-rural
industries organized on a domestic basis. “Factories there were, but few of
them were mechanized on a [large] scale” (chapter 14 summary, p. 312).
In other words, as the 19th century approached the stage was set for
the industrial take-off.
Britain’s industrial revolution
The true catalyst for the industrial process, the steam engine, was a
replacement for the Newcomen engine, an atmospheric pump created in 1712 to
lift water from mines. Newcomen’s machine was in no small way a product of the
late-17th century wood shortage in Britain.
With little wood available for fuel, the English found an alternate
source for heat: coal. And coal mines required removal of water from mines that
began to become increasingly deep. During the late-18th and early-20th century
French Wars, the need to extract metals for the war effort required deeper
mining than ever before. Thus arose another incentive to improve pumping
capacity. In 1768, James Watt, the “father of the Industrial Revolution,” built
his first working model of the steam engine. He patented it in 1769.
The year 1776 was a landmark one (see Marshall B. Davidson, The
Horizon History of the World in 1776). By that date, the steam engine was
in practical use and within another decade — just a few years prior to the
French Revolution of 1789 which significantly slowed industrial development in
France — it became a commercial success. Interestingly, the same year the steam
engine became a practical tool in England, American colonists declared their
independence initiating the separation of Ephraim and Manasseh prophetically
forecast in Genesis 48:16, 19. A Scottish University of Glasgow professor of
moral philosophy, Adam Smith, published Wealth of Nations, which became
the intellectual and philosophical support structure for England’s developing
capitalist economy.
That economic system propelled the Western world in general and the
British economy in particular to unprecedented heights. The gospel of
laissez-faire articulated by Smith gave the rising commercial, industrial, and
entrepreneurial classes of the British Isles the moral sanction they needed to
implement “the most fundamental transformation of human life in the history of
the world recorded in written documents” (Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire,
p. 13).
For England, industrial supremacy was an important factor in the
successful neutralization of the threat posed by Napoleon. It placed in the
hands of Englishmen a kind of Promethean fire which made possible the eventual
broadcasting of British imperial power around the globe — the somewhat
haphazard, ill-planned construction of an empire on which the 19th century sun
would never set.
If British diplomats and statesmen lacked a grand design and blueprint
for the construction of that imperial edifice, it nevertheless became the
largest and most beneficent empire in all of world history.
There is little wonder that historians often describe the 19th century
as the “British century.”
The significance of 2,520 Years
However historians or theologians may interpret these astonishing
developments, it is undeniable that this flowering of Anglo-Saxon power came
some 2,520 years after Israel’s demise and disappearance as a result of the
invasion of the Assyrians.
What happened around that time among the British and American people
bears witness to the fulfillment of the prophecies recorded in Genesis 48 and
49. The developments forecast in these prophecies were most dramatically
fulfilled in the Anglo- American setting between about 1660 and 1820 C.E.
The former was the year of the restoration of Charles II and the
Stuart monarchy by the “Convention” Parliament. By the latter date, the dust
from the Napoleonic Wars had settled and England began to lapse into the
Splendid Isolation which allowed her to concentrate on the development that
made her the foremost nation-state in the 19th century world.
It was between these years that the stage was set for the
Anglo-American ascendancy of the two most recent centuries of human history. Is
this historical happenstance or part of the unfolding of the greater purpose,
plan, and design of Almighty God?
To answer this question, we must realize that God often places
conditions on the blessings which He promises (e.g., Genesis 17:1). The promise
to the generation of Israelites who left Egypt was conditional. The Israelites
almost immediately disqualified themselves (Numbers 13:17-14:39; Hebrews
3:8-19).
Those very Israelites never entered the Promised Land. They failed to
keep their side of the bargain struck at the foot of Matthew Sinai. God
promised Israel: “... If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant,
then you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people...” (Exodus
19:5-8). The assertion “If you will indeed obey My voice” (verse 5) is better
understood when considered against the “blessings and curses” specified in
Leviticus, chapter 26 and Deuteronomy, chapter 28.
God suspended the inheritance of the Promised Land for one generation
after the Israelites rebelled in faithlessness and unbelief. On a larger scale,
He employed the same type of principle in withholding the blessings promised to
Joseph, only extending it over several dozen generations after the chosen
people were taken into their in the 8th century B.C.E. captivity. The duration
of that withholding was 2,520 years.
Without a doubt 2,520 is an unusual and remarkable figure. The
Companion Bible observes: “The four perfect numbers, 3, 7, 10, and 12, have
for their product the remarkable number 2,520. It is the Least Common Multiple
of the 10 digits governing all numeration; and can, therefore, be divided by
each of the nine digits without remainder. It is the number of chronological
perfection (7 x 360)” (Appendix 10, “The Spiritual Significance of Numbers,” p.
14).
The number 2,520 is also important in respect to an understanding of
biblical prophecy. This is especially true concerning a passage in Leviticus
26:18-21.
The “seven times” punishment
“And after all this, if you do not obey Me, then I will punish you
seven times more for your sins. I will break the pride of your power; I will
make your heavens like iron and your earth like bronze [a kind of temporary
rescinding of the blessings promised to Joseph in Genesis 49:25 — “and by the Almighty
who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that
lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb”]: “And your strength
shall be spent in vain; for your land shall not yield its produce, nor shall
the trees of the land yield their fruit. Then, if you walk contrary to Me, and
are not willing to obey Me, I will bring on you seven times more plagues,
according to your sins” (Leviticus 26:18-21).
Reference is made in this passage to “seven times” punishment that
will fall on Israel for disobedience to God. In context and based on the Hebrew
grammatical structure, the “seven times” spoken of in verse 18 is in fact a
measurement of “prophetic times” equaling 2,520 years. Conversely in context
the “seven times” of verse 21 is referring to intensity.
In withholding the land of Canaan from ancient Israel, God required
that the Israelites remain in the wilderness one year for every day that the
faithless Israelites scouts spied out the Promised Land (Numbers 14:34). In the
language of prophecy, a “time” represents the length of a year (360 days-- 12
months of 30 days).
Using this principle of a “day for a year” (cf. Ezekiel 4:4-6, and
Daniel 4:32), it can be calculated that “seven times”=7 x 360 days (the ancient
Israelites considered 30 days the length of a month) = 2,520 days or prophetic
years. Two thousand five hundred and twenty years from Israel’s captivity
brings us to about 1800 C.E. This is when God began to restore the Birthright
to the modern descendants of Israel. In fact, God was honor bound to extend
these blessings.
As we saw in Chapter 1, after the events described in Genesis 22
regarding the sacrifice of Isaac, the Abrahamic Covenant became unconditional.
The northern kingdom was invaded and became the Lost 10 Tribes, but God
remained responsible to fulfill the unconditional promises to Abraham’s
descendants (Genesis 22:12, 16). God restored the Birthright promises to the
progeny of those 8th century B.C.E. Israelites taken into captivity. He
undoubtedly was involved as well in the setting of the stage for propelling the
Anglo-Saxon people to unparalleled national greatness. This was a process that
extended at least back to the mid-17th century. The next chapter will enlarge
our understanding of this little known process.