200105 Sermon on Genesis 46:1-7 (Christmas 2) January 5, 2020 I think one of the attributes of the Scriptures that indicate its truthfulness is the way that the history of God’s people has not been edited to “clean it up.” There is a natural compulsion in all of us to want to be liked and highly esteemed. Toward that end, we put our best foot forward. If company is coming, then we clean the house. The posts that we put on Facebook are not about our failures. We only put the good and respectable stuff on there—the stuff that will make people think highly of us.We might do the same thing about our family history. We, understandably, might be embarrassed about someone in our family being shamefully exposed. We might not want to admit that our family has been poor or poorly educated. This is a matter of self-interest. There is truth in the saying, “The apple does not fall far from the tree.” If our family is a bunch of losers, then there’s a good chance that we are too. This is something that everybody naturally hides, and so we might leave out certain details about our lineage.The vast majority of the Bible is the history of one family that eventually grew to be a nation. From Genesis 12 onward the Bible is the story of Abraham and his descendants. Abraham’s grandson was originally named Jacob. God would eventually give him a new name—Israel—and that would be the name of the nation. Jacob’s twelve sons would be the founding fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. The Bible chronicles the history of this people.If the Israelites saw the Scriptures merely as their own family record—if they looked at it like their own genealogy book—then I can’t imagine how the embarrassing things that we find in the Scriptures could remain. The sins and foibles of even their most important people are right there, black on white. There was that one time, for example, where Noah got drunk and was passed out, naked. His son Ham laughed at him, but Japheth and Shem covered him with a blanket, walking backwards so that they would not see his nakedness. Or have a look at what the Bible says about Jacob’s four oldest sons. You will find sexual sins. You will see wrath and cruelty. These are not the kinds of things that normally go into the family album.In fact, even though we are not blood relatives of the Israelites, our Christian publishing houses tend to be embarrassed about what is in the Bible. A lot of Christians don’t know what is in the Bible because all that they know about the Bible is what they learned in Sunday School. They’ve never read it themselves. The materials that are used in Sunday School are almost always edited to take out anything that is distasteful. If there is too much violence or seediness or if anything is too frightening, then it gets cut by the publishers. This is no good! The Israelites managed to pass down what God gave them without editing it for thousands of years and those were stories about their very own people. Why are we so embarrassed that we cannot own and embrace the Scriptures that God has given to us?The Scriptures speak the way they do because it is the truth. The Scriptures also speak the way they do so that we could know what’s what. The Bible tells the story of God’s people. It is the story of the relationship between God and those people. God’s people are sinners—real, bona fide sinners—not fake ones. The Bible, over and over again, shows that the sinner’s fantasy—that they will get away with all their sins without being punished—cannot come true. Over and over again the Bible shows that God is angered by our sin and punishes sinners. The Bible also shows that God has mercy on those who have been humbled and who ask him to have mercy.So what happens when the Bible is falsified by our publishing houses? A great deal of what I have just told you is left out. The people in the Bible are not thought of as sinners—or at least not as poor, miserable sinners who have done appalling things. God’s anger against sinn