IT WOULD BE HARD TO IMAGINE any earthly father loving his son more than Jacob loved Joseph, yet one of Jacob’s final acts could make you wonder. Joseph was special to him, coming from the womb of Rachel, the wife he adored. Jacob’s special treatment of Joseph led his sons to sell Joseph in hopes of being rid of him once for all. Jacob was devastated. The sons miscalculated the sovereignty of God and learned the hard way that Joseph had become a key leader over the land of Egypt. As part of God’s plan, the family ended up moving to Egypt where Joseph could care for them. The reunion of Jacob and Joseph is a touching story. Joseph spent the first 17 years of his life with Jacob, and Jacob spent the last 17 years of his life with Joseph. They were thrilled to be back together.

While you would think that Jacob would make every decision in light of being with his son, he made a surprising departure in the end. When the day came that Jacob knew he was going to die, he called in Joseph and explained his parting wishes. Instead of choosing to be buried in Egypt where Joseph was, Jacob demanded that Joseph take him back to Hebron and bury him there with his fathers. The demand was so critical to Jacob that rather than simply accepting Joseph’s promise of obedience he extracted a serious pledge that the promise would be fulfilled. As much as Jacob loved his beloved son, when it came to his final resting place, he chose his fathers’ over his son’s. Joseph had achieved greatness in Egypt and his reputation and riches were renowned. Jacob would enjoy the security that Joseph offered him during the last days, but he would be dead longer than he would be alive and he chose to spend that vast stretch of time aligned with his fathers.

Jacob choosing his fathers over his son certainly didn’t seem to offend Joseph, as the famous son eventually made the same decision his father did—when I die, carry my bones back with you. He must have been emphatic about this because future generations went to considerable trouble to fulfill his request.

While the men Jacob chose to be buried with were important in their own right, what became just as important was the position they held as “the fathers.” Throughout the remaining portion of the Old Testament “the fathers” became a special group of people, even though the personalities were constantly changing. They were generational in that they were predecessors, not just the immediate father. Many times, rather than describing Himself directly, God brought clarity to who He was by referring to Himself as “the God of your fathers,” a term that carried a whole view of God with it. The fathers possessed a prized inheritance that could be handed down to another generation. Their ranks could be expanded, such as in Judges 2 where that generation was added to their fathers. The guilt of future generations was brought to light by stating that they forsook the Lord God of their fathers.

One more characteristic bears mentioning. They were all dead. They weren’t there anymore. They had no voice. Doesn’t that seem like a lot of potential influence for dead men? Probably, but that’s how God wanted it. More times than not He wanted their voice to be heard in the generations that succeeded them.

This is not an entirely Old Testament concept. The New Testament seems to echo similar sentiments. Jude, for example, in contention for the faith challenged us with demands that we allow the generation past to help us understand the faith.

Should the fathers have any bearing on our decisions today? Yes. While there has always been change, the rate has been accelerated like never before. The hearts of men have always been like they are now, but modernity has handed our culture a smorgasbord of choice that gives those same hearts more ways to escape the boundaries of the past than ever before.

We secure at least three benefits by always giving our fathers a vote. First, it serves as a counterbalance to the idol of change that weighs so heavily on today’s Christians. The vast majority of ideas promoted today make one think that nothing great can be accomplished without change. While our fathers went through change, their history records how much they accomplished without the changes we think will produce the next great awakening.

Second, it grounds us to the fact that our confidence and power come from timeless truth, not trendy methods. A review of our fathers reveals a divine power that few have duplicated today, along with the testament that this power did not come from innovation. It was always a dependence upon that which has been available to every generation.

Last, it brings clarity to the impact these changes have on our all-important work, lest we regret our experiments and hand the next generation a hollow mess. The church is not a laboratory for testing the latest theories of men. We have the benefit of generations of fathers who can tell us more than the 10 bestsellers on church growth.

I do not propose that we abstain from change. I simply suggest that if we place more weight on the theoretical upstart than the proven fathers, we do so at our own peril. Certainly our fathers had their own failures that we should not ignore and neither should we lift up their traditions as the holy grail. Yet, somehow I am confident that the biographies of today’s “successful ecclesiastical entrepreneurs” are not going to move us the way those classic biographies of old have. Today’s bestsellers often move us to our feet in applause, while the fathers’ lives tend to drive us to our knees in humility.

My roots were in the Baptist Bible Fellowship and I had the privilege of meeting some of the giants of the faith, even being instructed by them in the classroom. But my study reveals that the best of them were those who accepted the timeless baton from their fathers. The men we admire most in 30 years will be those who are giants today, not because of their ecclesiastical innovation, but because they, too, gave their own fathers a vote.

I have two wonderful sons and a godly father, as well as a whole category of fathers who have influenced me. I pray that my sons remain focused on the timeless more than the trendy, but the best way to make that happen might be by taking a page out of the relationship between Jacob and Joseph. If I choose to identify with my fathers in the end, my sons, Daniel and Samuel, just might be wise enough to do the same, as well.