Acts 7:9-16

(b) Acts 7:9-16. Joseph. Passing from the first appearance of the visible glory to the great ancestor, and the promise made by the Eternal to him, a wanderer without land and without a home, after glancing at the fortunes of his immediate descendants, who still enjoyed the special protection of the Highest, but always wanderers and strangers in the countries where they dwelt, he comes to the times of Joseph, who, as minister of Pharaoh and responsible ruler over Egypt, inaugurated what may be termed the second period in the history of the children of Israel. The first, the age of the wanderings, was closed by the permanent settlement of the people in Egypt under the auspices of Joseph. During this period of great prosperity, and later, of bitter adversity, the small tribe of wanderers becomes a mighty people; but Stephen only uses the history of these times as a background for the great figure of Joseph, the Egyptian ruler. He dwells on the betrayal of the innocent by his jealous brothers, the famous ancestors of the twelve tribes, and then shows how God delivered the betrayed one, and then raised him to a position of glory and power undreamed of by any child of Abraham, and placed him so high that he was enabled to come to the succour of his father's children and their families, and to be at once their preserver and benefactor. [Did not this sketch of the well-known fortunes of one of the most distinguished of the Hebrews in a remarkable manner suggest to every one of those Jewish priests and doctors a strange parallel between Joseph and Another who had been betrayed too by His brother Jews, and who (as Stephen and his fellow-believers maintained), after the betrayal, had been crowned too with glory and power?]