What You Meant for Evil, God Meant for Good

What You Meant for Evil, God Meant for Good

Chet Phillips

Transcript

It's good to see you all this morning. Grab your Bibles, go to Genesis chapter 50. I don't know if you know this, that is the last chapter in the book of Genesis. So starting next week, we will begin back in the book of Genesis because we felt there was a few things we missed. No, I'm just messing with y'all. We will be moving on to other things.

I think it's been good for us to walk through Genesis and I'm glad we're going to be wrapping it up. When my wife and I first got married, we rented a little house in Clinton, South Carolina. I don't know if you're from Clinton. You have to pronounce it Clinton, but I'm not from Clinton, so I will say it correctly. We rented a house in Clinton, South Carolina and we lived on a road called Teakwood Drive, I think. I know it was Teakwood.

And the lady who we were renting the house from had a man that would come by. It was an older gentleman who would come by and help do some work around the house. And he was there repairing something and he had whittled a, I believe it was a dog. I don't exactly remember what it was, but it was a small little figure. And he handed it to me and he was saying, I whittled this. And I was like, man, that's, this is neat.

Like, this is a cool whittled thing. And he started telling me it was made out of teakwood. And he said, now teakwood is one of the strongest woods that exists. And I was like, cool. And I'm holding it. And so when he told me it was really strong wood, all I did was just kind of test that.

And I snapped it in half. And so I broke it and then just stuck it back together real quick. And just stood there like that. Now I'm having a hard time paying attention to the conversation because I'm having to think through, this is terrible. I've made a huge mistake. When someone hands you something they've whittled, you don't break it.

This is like a, you know, feels like a social norm has just been broken, you know. So I'm sitting there holding it. And he's just going on and on about how strong teakwood is, how they use it to build ships, how, you know, it's practically indestructible. I think he was saying stuff like if Superman fought a teakwood tree, the teakwood tree would win. He didn't. But it just seemed like he went for a really long time about how strong teakwood was.

And then when he finished, I said, well, that is really cool. I'm sorry I broke this. And I just handed it back to him in two pieces. You know, I had the option of like pretending he had offended me and throwing it on the ground or just like fumbling the hand off. But I think it was just I just had to own it.

So I just was like, this is broken. And he was like, oh. And I was like, I'm so sorry. I'm apparently an idiot and should not have done what I did. And so I just, you know, he took it well. So that in general is how the book of Genesis starts.

That's how the Bible starts. That's the way it feels. God in chapters one and two creates this beautiful world. And it repeatedly says, it's good. It's good. It's good.

It's good. It's very good. And in chapter three, he makes the, in chapter one and two, he makes the pinnacle of his creation, humanity. And he hands it over to humanity, puts them in a garden. And in chapter three, they walk over and go, yeah, we broke it. We, I don't know.

We were here for, it seems like 45 seconds. And now all the stuff you made is going to be terrible. That's really the way it feels. We start off the book of Genesis and they, it feels like immediately rebel against God. They decide that their wisdom is greater than his. They decide that they cherish something more than him.

So that when it comes down to, do we want to obey or disobey? They, they so lower the value of God that they choose something else and they rebel. And when they do, sin enters the world and everything gets messed up. If we'll remember at the beginning of Genesis, when we were reading this, everything was good. Everything was beautiful. They were in a garden.

The world was going to respond well to them. They were going to have a good relationship with creation. They were going to have a good relationship with each other. Genesis two says they were naked and not ashamed. We have a hard time being naked by ourselves and not ashamed. They were naked together.

This was just the thing that was going to happen. They weren't going to feel shame. They weren't going to feel guilt. And as soon as they sin, they noticed they're naked. They feel shame. They hide, they cover themselves.

And from that point on, everything is broken. And it turns very badly, very quickly. We, and the question that we have from the, from the onset of Genesis is what is God going to do? How is God going to respond? What is he going to do with sin? What is he going to do with this creation now that is marvelous in?

What is he going to do with sinners? How does he remain holy? How does he remain good? How does he, how does he respond? Is he just going to start over? Is he just going to destroy humanity and let animals have a messed up planet?

Is he just, what's he going to do? That's the kind of the question we have is how's, how's he going to respond to sin? How's he going to respond to sinners? What's he going to do? We see in Noah, the Noah story, we see that it says Noah was righteous. The New Testament is later going to tell us that that was through faith, that he inherited righteousness through faith.

But Noah was righteous and so God kills everybody on earth who had gotten extremely evil extremely quickly. Like we jumped some generations to get to Noah, but it says the world just spiraled. We suddenly have murder, hatred. As we read through Genesis, it's like a highlight reel of human sin and debauchery, incest, lust, sexual assault. It, I mean, I felt like multiple times as we were walking through the book of Genesis, we would just have to be like, turn to Genesis chapter 30. It's bad again.

Y'all are used to being sad, right? Because that's what we're going to talk more about. Like that's kind of what Genesis has been. And so he, he kills all of humanity and you go, okay, here's our answer. He's going to get rid of all the bad people, but we'll have the righteous people. He's reset it.

Noah gets off the boat, immediately gets drunk, gets naked. His son sees it, doesn't honor his father, ends up getting cursed. And then God actually says, basically when they're walking off the boat, I'm not going to kill everybody again, even though they're still evil. And you want to be like, wait, wait, wait, I thought you kept the good guy. He's like, yeah, even our good guys are the worst. It seems like the book of Genesis goes out of its way to highlight how terrible the heroes are.

We're like, we got Abraham. Okay. Like the first thing we see Abraham do is walk into a city and he pauses. He's walking in with his wife and she's like, oh, this is a nice city. He's like, yeah, hold up. We get in there.

I'm going to need you to tell them you're my sister. She's like, why? And he's like, because you're cute and I'm a coward. So say you're my sister. And then I will actually just help you marry people when we get in here. That goes terribly.

God helps them. And then the next time they go to another city, Abraham's like, you remember my bad plan from before? And she's like, yeah. And he's like, all right, round two. It moves from Abraham to Isaac. And we think, okay, well, maybe Isaac will have some sense.

No, does some of the same things. It moves from Isaac to Jacob. And Jacob starts off the first half of his story. He just seems like a scoundrel. He does some things okay. But it's like the book of Genesis is going out of its way to highlight these people are sinful.

Even this legacy, this line, this promise of maybe this will work out. That's one of the things we see in the garden is as soon as it goes bad, God steps in and basically says, I promise sin won't win. The serpent had come in, had lied to Eve, had deceived her. Adam had willfully gone along with it, passively at first and willfully afterwards. And God comes in, he curses them, tells them what's going to happen, how the world's going to be messed up now. He kicks them out of the garden.

And he says, though, there's going to be one who comes. Eventually, the serpent won't win, sin won't win. We read through Genesis. It looks like sin's winning. Because every time it steps in, everything gets marred, everything gets broken. Every time someone whittles a beautiful dog, sin snaps it in half.

It's the way it feels. And we can try to glue it back together, we can try to piece it back together, but it's not going to be the same. And that's what we've been walking through. When we get to Genesis 50, we've seen some of the promises fulfilled. We've seen this family line continue. We've seen all the world be blessed.

That's one of the things he told Abraham. I'll make you into a great nation, and through you I'll bless all the world. We've seen a little bit of that. His nation's getting bigger. The 12 tribes are beginning to grow. And through Joseph, the world, the local world there, is blessed.

And you might would say, well, that's the finalized version of this. You read on, and we're going to see that that's not the finalized version, but it is a small picture. But in Genesis chapter 50, we're going to get the answer we've been asking. The answer to the question we've been asking. What is God going to do with sin? How is he going to fix this problem?

Is he going to have to get rid of sinners to do it? And he gives an answer for the book of Genesis that ultimately we'll find is an answer for the entire Bible and for the entire world. For his answer to sin. So we're going to read that in Genesis, and that's where we'll finish out. As Genesis finishes out, kind of letting us see how this works and what God is going to do. So let's pray.

God, we thank you for your word. We thank you for how good you are to us. And we pray that we would see the beauty in the reality of how you respond to sin and to sinners. As we finish up the book of Genesis. We love you and we praise you in Jesus name. Amen.

Genesis 49 ends with the death of Jacob. Chapter 50, verse 1. Then Joseph fell on his father's face and wept over him and kissed him. And Joseph commanded his servants, the physicians, to embalm his father. So the physicians embalmed Israel.

Forty days were required for it. For that is how many are required for embalming. And the Egyptians wept for him seventy days. Okay, so you would... That rivals, this is almost how long you would weep and mourn for a pharaoh. So Jacob gets a lot of respect and honor because his son is second in command over Egypt.

And so they mourn for him for seventy days. And we're going to see that this mourning continues. It says, When the days of weeping for him were past, Joseph spoke to the household of Pharaoh saying, If now I have found favor in your eyes, please speak in the ears of Pharaoh saying, My father made me swear, saying, I am about to die in my tomb that I hewed out for myself in the land of Canaan. There shall you bury me. Now therefore, let me please go up and bury my father.

Then I will return. And Pharaoh answered, Go up and bury your father as he made you swear. So Joseph went up to bury his father. And with him went all the servants of Pharaoh, So the elders of the household and all the elders of the land of Egypt, as well as all the household of Joseph, his brothers and his father's household, only their children and their flocks and their herds were left in the land of Goshen. And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen. It was a very great company.

When they came to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond the Jordan, they lamented there with a very great and grievous lamentation. And he made a mourning for his father seven days. When the inhabitants of the land of the Canaanites saw the mourning of the threshing floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians. Therefore, the place was named Abel-Misraim. It is beyond the Jordan. Thus his sons did for him as he had commanded them.

For his sons carried him to the land of Canaan and buried him in the cave of the field of Machpelah to the east of Mamre, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess as a burying place. After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt with his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father. So they go, they travel, and they bury Jacob in the cave that they bought from Ephron the Hittite. They say this every time it's mentioned because they want to make it really clear why they own the land, where it is, who has it. And they mourn for him with a great mourning.

And this is one of the things that culturally I think we have lost. That we don't know how to mourn well. That we try to kind of move on quickly from mourning and we feel like we ought to be past things that honestly we cannot move quickly past. And so a lot of times people will feel like they're still in mourning but everybody else has moved on. But this actually was 70 days where the whole nation mourned.

And then even when they got there they did another 7 days of it. That there is time for and seasons for us to just be sad. And that's okay. And that's what they do. And they greatly honor Jacob. And I'm sorry I've been losing my voice all week.

So I will preach as long as the Lord lets me. And then we may just end in the middle of this sermon. We'll have to see. I'm just kidding. I'll jump to the end. We're going to talk about Jesus.

Surprise. Alright. When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead. They said it may be that Joseph will hate us. And pay us back for the evil that we did to him. Okay so this moment in the lives of Joseph's brothers triggers for them their guilt.

Everything had been going fine. They'd been there for 17 years. Things seemed okay. Their dad dies. And suddenly they're like uh huh. I don't know who brought it up.

But at some point in the brother meeting that Joseph wasn't in. And I'm guessing Benjamin wasn't in. They were like hey. Think back. Remember that time. That we threw Joseph in a pit.

Told our dad he was dead. And then decided not to murder him. I think that was the highlight of this. But we did sell him into slavery into Egypt. And then do you remember how we were all shocked when he's in charge of Egypt now? Because that's not how usually the route to being in charge of Egypt doesn't usually go foreign slave to second in command.

Yeah. So you think he's still mad about that? They get together and they're basically like. It feels like maybe he was just being nice to us because dad was here. Because he remembered how upset dad was when we killed him technically. Maybe he thought dad would be upset with him if he killed all of us.

But now that dad's not here. Maybe. Do you think maybe he's going to do that? But don't worry guys. They have a plan. So verse 16.

They sent a message to Joseph saying. Your father gave this command before he died. Say to Joseph. Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin. Because they did evil to you. And now.

Please forgive the transgressions of the servants of God. Of the God of your father. All right. Before dad died. He told us. To tell you.

To forgive us. We don't know why he didn't tell you. I think it's because he thought it would mean more. Coming from him to us to you. Than just from him to you. And he totally said this.

This is real. Benjamin knows about it. But I wouldn't ask Benjamin about it. Because he'd be his feelings would be hurt if it was brought up. Even if this was just because you know he's sad. So just just know dad said this.

And for you to go ahead and forgive us. And also. Will you will you go ahead and forgive us? Yours truly. Your 12 brothers. Check.

Yes or no. Waiting patiently in Goshen. Like I don't. This. This is the note they send. Says this.

Joseph. Wept. When they spoke to him. He just. He just cries. And he says.

His brothers also came. So this is the messengers brought this. And he just. He just weeps. Because of the brokenness still in this relationship. And his.

Brothers also came to him. And fell down before him. And said. Behold. We are your servants. But Joseph said to them.

Do not fear. For am I in the place of God? He's basically saying. Like. I. I don't get to judge y'all.

It is not my job. To judge. And to condemn. And to decide what your fate is. It is not my job. To.

To weigh your hearts. To know whether you're repentant. It is not my job. I got. It's not. Not my role.

Don't fear. I don't. I don't get to do that. I don't get to bring the hammer down on you. It's not my position. It's a very humble spot.

For the second in command of Egypt. Who absolutely could do what he wanted to. With his brothers. And who had absolutely been wrong. He just says. That's not.

It's not my role. As for you. You meant evil against me. But God meant it for good. To bring it about. That many people should be kept alive.

As they are. Today. So do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones. Thus he comforted them. And spoke kindly to them.

Verse 22. So Joseph remained in Egypt. He and his father's house. Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim's children. Of the third generation.

The children also of Machir. The son of Manasseh. Were counted as Joseph's own. And Joseph said to his brothers. I'm about to die. But God will visit you.

And bring you up out of the land. Out of this land. Into the land that he swore to Abraham. And Isaac. And Jacob. Then Joseph made the sons of Israel.

Swear saying. God will surely visit you. And you shall carry up my bones from here. So Joseph died. Being 110 years old. They embalmed him.

And he was put in a coffin. In Egypt. That is the end of the book of Genesis. It will move on from there. 400 years. And we will have the Exodus.

That would walk through. We're not going into that book next. But that is what would happen. If you read this. In the order it comes in the text. So Joseph dies.

And he ends by making them promise. Making basically the nation of Israel promise. When y'all leave. You're taking me with you. And he believes in the promises. That have been made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

And he says. My bones will be here. I need y'all to grab those. And tow them on out. Which had to be fun at the Exodus. When they were like.

Alright we're leaving. Also. There was a guy who was super in charge here. About 400 years ago. He's buried in one of these really fancy crypts. We're going to need you to go get that for us.

Because we have to take him with us. And guess what? The Egyptians said. Sure. Because at that point. God had put Egypt in a headlock.

And been doing what he wanted to with him. They do take his bones with him when they leave. So. Go back though. Because this is the answer given in Genesis. The key kind of climactic point here.

Was in verse 20. We'll have it on the screen as well. Says this. As for you. You meant evil against me. But God meant it for good.

To bring it about that many people should be kept alive. As they are today. That's the answer in Genesis. Jesus. Now. Just understanding how to read your Bible.

That is a thing. That Joseph says. It's not. Prophetic word. Word of the Lord. There are certain places in the prophets.

Where it says. Thus says the Lord. And we take that as something God says. When you're reading these stories. You just have to understand. This is a thing Joseph says.

And so. You have to then look and see. It's actually the way the book of Genesis runs. It's kind of this point. As the summation of what's going on. We're also.

Joseph is a trusted source. To speak on behalf of God. And. The rest of the Bible carries this out. So you cannot always go to a place.

Where someone just says a thing in the Bible. And go boom. Let's build some amazing theology off of this. But you can here. Because it's carried out and displayed. This is what God does.

So. What you meant for evil. God meant for good. That word meant means a lot here. Joseph's brothers meant. To harm Joseph.

They meant to destroy him. They meant to get rid of him. They meant to make some sweet cash. Off of him. And to never see him again. They meant evil.

They purposed it. They willed it. That was their desire. And then he says. But God.

Meant. Purposed it. Willed it. Desired it. For. Good.

We would be inclined. To think. That when everything. Turned to evil. And when everything. Gets bad.

And when everything. Is broken. Our question is. How is God. Going to respond. As if he's having to wait.

To see what happens. And then make a plan. But that is not what that says. What they meant. That the exact moment. That human actors.

Who are free. And choosing evil. When they were exactly. That moment. Were at work. To do harm.

God was in that moment. Through their evil. Flipping it. And meaning it. Purposing it. Willing it.

For good. Are they responsible. For what they did. Yes. Is God bigger. And more capable.

Than them. Yes. And did he control it. And work it out. For something good. Yes.

Did he respond. Nope. He was in it. At the beginning. Psalm 105. Says this as well.

It says. When he summoned. A famine. On the land. And broke. All supply of bread.

Meaning that God. Brought about a calamity. He. Had sent a man. Ahead of them. Joseph.

Who was sold. As a slave. All right. Was the selling. Joseph. As a slave.

Evil. Yes. Should they have done that. No. Was God. At work.

In that. To bring something. About. That he had planned. To bring about. Good.

That was actually. Better. Than what would have happened. Otherwise. Yes. How does that work?

God is amazing. And humans are evil. But God's. Amazingness. And goodness. Outweighs that.

Outshines that. And he works in the middle of this. What it doesn't say was. When a famine. Came on the land. God looked around.

And said. Oh. I need to do something. Egypt's in trouble. Hebrew slave. I talked to the Hebrews.

I used to talk to this guy's daddy. Found one. I'll talk to him. Now let me figure out. How to get him. Into the palace.

It's not what he did. It's not what he did. Potiphar's wife. Lies about Joseph. Gets him arrested. She accuses him.

Sexual assault. She is believed. Joseph is not. He gets arrested. Should she have done that. No.

Was it evil. Yes. But the next line. In the scriptures was. But God was with him.

And that God was working in this. The whole time. To eventually. Elevate him to the palace. So that Joseph could say.

Hey. Y'all took your best shot. And you meant it for evil. And God in the midst of that. Meant it for good. And he saved a bunch of lives.

Through it. And it's not my job. To bring. Be judgment on y'all. It's my job. To do what God wants me to.

And we're okay. Now. The immediate response to that. As we think through that. Is. I.

I want to go. Time out. Time out. Time out. Time out. Time out.

Time out. Time out. Time out. Part of me is much more okay. With God hanging back. People do some evil stuff.

Like we. Shatter the glass. And then God goes. Right. Pause. Shattered glass.

I'm going to make a mosaic. It's going to be beautiful. Like he takes what's already broken. And he fixes it. And he makes something nice out of it. Part of me is a little bit more okay with that.

But as soon as you say. No. No. No. When you were swinging the hammer. To shatter the glass.

God was also with you. Swinging the hammer. Because he had this plan. For this beautiful mosaic. As soon as they're like. Lined up together.

And you're meaning something. And he's meaning something. In the same act. And the act is evil. I suddenly have some questions. Pause.

Hold on. Does God sin? Biblical. Biblical answer. No. Does God cause people to sin?

Biblical answer. No. He doesn't cause or tempt people to sin. He's not. In the midst of sin. Does he mean and purpose.

And will it for something else? Yes. Yes. And those are some fine lines. The other question I have is. Hold on a second.

How can God will. In something evil. And in something broken. How can he will sin? Like doesn't. I thought God's will was always good things.

Like when we pray. May your will be done. Aren't we praying. May good things happen. Not. May evil things happen.

That'll ultimately be better. That's not really. Is that what we're. Like what is going on there? C.S. Lewis helped me a little bit.

With this conceptually. And I'm going to give you the. My paraphrased version of that. That you can have two wills. At the same time. One being.

Kind of a generic will. One being your greater will. The way he explains this is. If you have children. And they have a room. It is your will.

That that room be clean. But you may at some point. Look at your children and say. I am no longer cleaning your room. You are in charge of cleaning your room. And he said.

The moment. That it is dark. And you walk in the room. And you step on a Lego. He didn't say Lego. He said something else.

But Lego is a better example. Because it's excruciatingly painful. The moment you step on a Lego. That was both inside. And outside of your will. It was outside of your will.

In that you will the room to be clean. You desire for the room to be clean. But it was inside your will. As your greater will. Had actually allowed that to happen. Because you are no longer.

Stepping in. You have willed it. That your children would clean the room. Now. You can't push that super far. Into theological things.

But it gives us an example. Of how you can have two wills. One greater than the other. That you can have. At one moment. Your desire.

Is not. That your children would grow up in a house. Where their room was always clean. Your desire is that your children. Would grow up. So that they could have their own house one day.

And keep it clean. Or. Step on all the Legos they want. You don't care at that point. But you want them to get out of your house.

And so you got to take some steps. That's what he's saying. That you can have two wills. So it is God's will that we not sin. But it's also his will.

That we be moral agents. That have some choice. And so he. Allows sin. And he allows evil. And some of us want to go.

Okay well that's where it stops. But no. God does something more beautiful on top of that. Even in the midst of our evil and sin. He's walking right along. And just turn it into something good.

So at first. This sounds not comforting at all. When you are facing evil. Because you want God to be on your team. And somehow. Responding with you to the evil that's going on.

You want him to be sympathetic. But the problem is. Now as soon as you say this. You go wait wait wait wait wait. He's somehow ordained. He's somehow worked in this calamity.

The reality is. The human actors are still. Culpable for what they did. And will be held accountable for it. But the beauty is now.

That we know. That has not left God's control. And that he will work things towards good. And towards an ultimate more beautiful will. And all the fine details of that. The Bible doesn't give us.

But what we understand is that God is good. And so you immediately then. Now the question becomes. Okay well maybe he's not good. Because if you've heard this. This people have posed this.

As kind of a thing for a long time. They'll say. Either God is in control. Or he's good. But he can't be both.

And the reason he can't be both. Is because there's a lot of evil. Terrible wicked things that happen. So either he's in control. And he works in all these terrible things. But then he's not good.

Because he lets terrible things happen. Or he's good. He's just not in control. He's just hurting right alongside of us. He's just weeping with us. But he has no control over.

He can't stop evil. The answer is. He is in control. And he is good. And he has something better. That he's actually bigger than that conceptual framework.

He's big enough to be in control. Big enough to be good. And big enough to have a beautiful reason. For all the evil that we face. Even when we can't see it. And the reason we know that.

The linchpin for that. Is the cross. That he does love us. And that his plan is bigger. Because none of us would have come up with the cross. We can come up with a system.

Where God's big. And in control. But then he'd have to make everything nice. That's our system. Or God's loving. He's really nice.

But he's not in control. But he's with us. And he cares about us. When bad things happen. He's in your corner. He's with you.

But no. God is in control. And he is big. And so now we have a huge problem. And none of us would have come up with the cross. But that's his answer.

That what we meant for evil. He means for good. Acts 2 says almost that. Just lays this out. It shows us this picture. This is Peter preaching the very first sermon.

It says this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up. Loosing the pains of death. Because it was not possible for him to be held by it. This is not a main point of this sermon.

But I love the back half of that verse. Y'all can kill him if you want. But death cannot hold him. It's not possible. So he rose back up.

Because it was not possible for him to be held by death. When Jesus died, death suddenly became very overwhelmed. And was like, I just... Nah. It's a bit too much. And so, again, not a main point.

Look back at the first part. It says, this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan. Plan. Meaning, we're going to do this. Definite. Meaning, only going to do this.

Not doing something else. Those are pretty simple words. They've been over-explained to you now. And foreknowledge of God. Foreknowledge means knowledge you had beforehand. God being the one who was working out this definite plan that he had a plan for beforehand.

You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. Now, immediately, my brain can't hold that. They're lawless. Out of control. This is complete and utter chaos. Yes?

Yes. They are actively defying God. Yes? Yes. It is humans killing God. That is not inside of his will.

This is not his desire for people. That we would rebel against him. That we would hate him. John says that we hated the light. That God, Jesus shows up as the light, but the darkness does not love the light. The darkness hates the light.

You know how you feel when you are asleep and someone comes in and turns the light on. That is how humanity responds to Jesus. We hate it. It is, it does not sit well with us. You remember how to lay in your bed and try to not want to like assault your mom for doing that or whatever. That was the response of humanity to Jesus.

Jesus showed up and he just walked around shining in everybody's faces and we're sinful and sick. And we said, quit. Go home. So much so that eventually we got together, we plotted and we killed him. Lawlessly hatred, murder. Definitive foreknowledge of God.

His plan all along. Are they culpable for what they did? Yes. Should they repent? Was that sin? Yes.

Was God going to let sin win? No. God had no desire to destroy the whole world and just eliminate what he had done. He had the desire to step into the world and through evil means to bring about something so much more beautiful and so much better that could have never happened had this not happened. That it's at that exact moment that Jesus is redeeming and working on our behalf. That he is most gloriously displayed.

And that God's plan is most beautifully shown. And so what happened in the Joseph story? He goes to the palace. All of a sudden we have a guy who can interpret dreams. He goes through. He saves this whole place.

His brothers show up. And if you've been reading it, you're like, oh, oh, oh. This were the dreams he had when he was a kid. See, his brother's bowing to him. And you're like, oh, God knew the whole time? We in movies, one of the things that we can kind of contrive is we can contrive a character, a person who would do a lot of good things for an evil purpose.

You watch a movie and there's one of the good guys. And then finally at the end, you find out they're the bad guy. And if they've done it really well, you're shocked and hurt and mad. Because he's like, I trusted you. I thought you were the good guy. And then you see, oh, that's why they were generous.

Oh, that's why they were being a good friend. They weren't being a good friend. It just seemed like it. Like that's, you walk back through the story. And God's a level up above that because he's actually able to, in the free actions of other humans, bring about his sovereign will. How does that work?

I don't know. But it's beautiful and encouraging and hope-filled that in the middle of this mess where people are harming us, because they are. In the middle of the sin, in the middle of the worst brokenness we ever face, God in his sovereignty is walking it towards something that is so much more beautiful, so much more glorious, so much more hope-filled. Than we could have ever imagined. And sin won't win. That's the gospel.

That's the story that's told to us in Genesis where we get this little peek at it in the story of Joseph. And ultimately that's the story that unfolds in Christ. It's the same thing the disciples pray in Acts 4. They say, they quote an Old Testament passage. They say, why did the Gentiles rage? Meaning, internally have hatred.

And the people's plot in vain. That means not just like this emotional response, but mentally they were at work to cause harm. It says, the kings of the earth set themselves against the rulers, were gathered together against the Lord and against his anointed. And they say, for truly in this city they were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. Both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the people of Israel. Basically everybody.

Everybody who could have been involved was involved. To do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. In the midst of human depravity and sin, God was at work for something more beautiful. That we are sinners and we will be held accountable and culpable for the things that we do. But God has not handed over the course of events and the course of human history to humans.

So he said, okay, there's going to be sin, there's going to be brokenness, there's going to be murder, and there's going to be hatred. And I'm going to step into the timeline and I'm going to take it all on myself. Sin and hatred, rebellion, murder, brokenness, all of it. I'm going to take it, I'm going to die for it, and I'm going to bring hope in it. And I'm going to turn everything they mean for evil, I'm going to mean it for good. And that's what he does on the cross.

That's what Romans 8, 28 says. We know that for those who love God, all things work together for good. For those who are called according to his purpose. All things. And immediately we want to say, even this? The answer is yes.

If you belong to Christ, then he will turn it good. And good isn't even the word better. Better than it could have ever been. And this is beyond human reckoning. All we can think is, can he fix the problem? And his answer is, I'm going to do more than that.

Is he just a first responder? No. He's more sovereign and more in control than that. Should they have done what they did? No. Was it sin?

Yes. Was that in God's will? No. But his ultimate will and his purpose will override that and bring about something good and glorious. And that brings hope to us in our brokenness. If we embrace that, we're embracing Christ.

Who did not just respond to sin, but before the world began, chose those in him whom he would save. Because he knew that sin was coming and he predetermined to pay for it. He predetermined to have it met out on him in the cross. So at the moment of man's most self-glorification, God gets the most glory. That when we've rallied together to crucify God, he ultimately turns it on its head. He means good for it.

In our utter brokenness and despair, he brings about unending hope. When death seems like it wins, resurrection walks out of the grave. That Jesus, the author of life, could not be held by death. When hatred looks like it is at its peak, God is displaying his most gracious love. That in all the things that look the most chaotic, God's definitive plan was at work. That when everything seemed to be broken beyond repair, God was creating and building something so much more beautiful than could have ever been.

This is the hope of the gospel and this is the reality of the life for a Christian. That when things seem out of control because of sin, they are not. That our hope is held sure because Jesus Christ has proven to us that all that was meant for evil, he will mean for good and he will bring about something good. And that he can be trusted. We want to say, well does that mean he doesn't love us? Jesus Christ loves us so much that he joins us.

That he takes the brunt of it on himself. I would be inclined to say that it would mean God is not loving were it not for the cross. But he loved us so much he gave his own life and he gave his own son that we might know that we are loved. That he joins us in the middle of this. He chooses in his wisdom not to just keep us from it or to keep it from us. He chooses in his wisdom to work what was meant for evil, for him to mean it for good, and for him to prove to us that he can do this and that he does love us in the cross.

And that is our hope. That is the answer in Genesis and that is the hope given to us in the gospel. That he does love us because he joins us and he takes the brunt of this on himself. That in our rejection of God he was adopting us. That in our pride he was displaying overwhelming humility. The very last book of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

There is a hobbit named Sam and the hobbit is just like a half a person with furry feet. I mean like a whole person but like half size. So not just like a little legs down. That would be weird. Has arms and a face and stuff. There is a hobbit named Sam.

In the first book they are all together on this journey and then the team gets broken up. The way the team gets broken up is Gandalf who is a wizard dies fighting a big fire monster thing. It is kind of a sad ending to the book. But good for Gandalf. He was defending his team. Then they break up and Sam and Frodo who is another hobbit go off.

They have to get rid of this ring. Throw in a fire. To stop evil. Everything is getting worse. Everything is broken. Everything is terrible.

And they eventually do it. They stop evil. They come back. And Sam sees Gandalf. And he is excited. Because the last time he saw Gandalf, Gandalf was dead.

So Sam says to him, this is the quote from the book, he says, I thought you were dead. But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? So he sees the risen Gandalf and he says, I thought you were dead. Of course, I thought it was over for me. Does this mean everything that's sad?

Now that everything's gone good again. Now that everything's, all the curse has been broken. The evil has been broken. Does that mean that everything sad is going to become untrue? And Tim Keller, who's a pastor in New York and who loves the Lord of the Rings trilogy, quotes this in one of his books. And he says, the answer of Christianity to that question is yes.

Everything sad is going to come untrue. And it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost. He says, embracing the doctrine that Jesus Christ joined us in humanity and died for us on the cross. He says, this doctrine, embracing this idea, brings a profound consolation in the face of suffering. The doctrine of the resurrection can instill in us with a powerful hope, can instill us with a powerful hope. It promises that we will get the life we most long for, but it will be an infinitely more glorious world than if there had never been the need for bravery, endurance, sacrifice, and salvation.

That when sin entered the world and when sin entered your story, because Jesus also entered the world and also entered our story, he becomes more glorious, more beautiful, and the hope of what he does for us through the cross becomes infinitely more precious and is held secure in the sovereign hand of God, who is not in response to sin doing anything, but who is, by his definite plan, bringing about a most glorious good for his glorious name. The band's going to come back up. We are going to, as a church family, take communion, which is where we celebrate, where we remember that Jesus Christ took on human form, joined us in our weakness, and died in our place. That his body was broken, that his blood was shed, that the most heinous of things happened to our Savior, and that he, like Joseph, says to us, do not fear.

What you meant for evil, in all your sin, in all your rebellion, and what you meant for evil, in murdering and crucifying me, God, I, meant for good. To bring about that many might be saved, as they are at this day. That Jesus, through the cross, brings redemption, so that God does not just destroy sin and sinners, but he joins us, becomes our sin, and gives us hope. And that all along the way, he's taking what others mean for evil, and it is evil, but he's not letting that win the day. That he's meaning it for good, and that he'll bring about something more glorious than could have ever been.

And in the moments of our weakness and brokenness, and when we stand staring face to face with our own evil, and staring face to face with the evil of others, lean into the cross. Trust in Jesus. That evil should not have happened. It was not his desire that we would face all this sin, but he will not let it win. He has a greater will that rises above it, that he might redeem sinners, and that he might bring life and hope. And that he's going to do something more glorious in it.

He loves us so much that he died for us. We can walk with him through anything. That's the answer in Genesis. That's the answer in the gospel. And that's the hope for our souls, our weary souls right now, as we stare into the face of evil. That we get to repent of our own sin, and that he says, do not fear, and he offers grace and forgiveness to us, and that we get to face the sin of others with hope that he is in control, and that he brings about good.

Bow your heads as we begin to pray. I want us to consider the cross prior to taking communion, that we might remember that Jesus suffered for us, that he has joined us, and that he has a definite plan to bring about good, so that we can trust him when everything seems most lawless, and most chaotic, when evil seems like it's winning. So God, we pray that right now, that you would nourish our souls, that you would offer your strength, in place of our weakness, that we would offer your hope, in place of our fear, and that we might trust, your good, sovereign control, and that we might feel, the warmth of your love, shining from the cross, in the face of your son. May we walk away from our sin, may we be quick to repent, knowing at what cost, our forgiveness comes.

And may we take communion, remembering, your glory, and the unending hope, and steadfast love, given to us, in the glorious person, and work of Jesus. Amen.

Blessing

Blessing

Chet Phillips

Transcript

It's good to see y'all this morning. Grab your Bibles and go to Genesis chapter 48. We're on chapter 48 and 49 today. There are 50 chapters in Genesis. We have been walking through the book of Genesis. I believe this is our 30th week in Genesis.

Next week will be our 31st and then we will be done. When I was learning, studying, looking into church planting and, you know, you go to conferences, you hear people. One of the things they tell you is to not do really long sermon series. You keep it short. You keep it punchy. You keep people interested.

And we were like, what if we just read the Bible and talked about how good Jesus was? And that's been our plan. And so that's what we're going to do today. We're picking back up in chapter 48. I think we've done pretty well if we did 50 chapters in about 30 weeks. I think we were moving, but we're trying to learn our Bibles and grow together.

And so I've been studying through this. I, when I was growing up, my dad used to every morning, he would go out on our front porch and he would chain smoke. And he would smoke a pack or two in the morning, depending on how much time he had. And he would drink a two liter Diet Mountain Dew. And I don't know if he drank the whole thing, but that's what he did. He walked out with a two liter Diet Mountain Dew and packs of cigarettes.

And he would smoke and pace and talk on the phone and drink Mountain Dew, Diet Mountain Dew. So I grew up doing what he did, drinking non-refrigerated Diet Mountain Dew. I would just, I was like three or four, would be pouring it into a big thing and just drink Diet Mountain Dew all the time. But he would pay us $2 per solo cup of cigarette butts. So you could go out around our front porch and if you'd fill up a solo cup with cigarette butts, he would pay you $2 for that.

Now I know when I tell stories to our church family, there are some people here who, you grew up a little bit fancier maybe. And I know that sometimes you judge me when I tell stories like this. And I just wanted to begin by saying, I forgive you. And I also know the rest of our church family. And remember how your dad used to chain smoke on the front porch? Well, I used to make money off of it.

My dad paid us and it actually worked out pretty well because when we were in like elementary school, you know, you'd want something. And he would say, well, you know how to make money. And he had two ways that were always there for us was picking up cigarette butts or picking up rocks in the backyard in a big bucket. Cigarette butts was usually easier. So that's what we went with.

And so we would fill up solo cups with cigarette butts. We would earn money. And then what I would do with that when I was in elementary school is we had a magazine. We have these Lego catalogs. And I would flip through and pick in a catalog what we wanted. I would show it to my mom.

I would hand her money. She would pick up a phone that had a cord that attached it to our wall. She would pick it up. She would call them. She would, during business hours, on a work day, she would call them, tell them what we wanted, tell them the number, tell them her credit card over the phone. And then she would hang up the phone and she would say, okay, it'll be here in 7 to 14 business days.

And I'd be like, sweet. And I'd be like, kind of here. And she'd say, no, business days. And I'd be like, what on earth? What are these extra days added in here? This isn't 7 to 14 days.

If I ran the Lego company, every day would be business day. You know what I'm saying? But so the first seven days were hard on an eight-year-old. It was difficult to wait seven days. The next seven business days were excruciating. Because it could show up any day.

And it wouldn't. And so you had waited all this time. You had picked up countless cigarette butts. You had worked, enslaved, waited for this. And then it would come. It would finally come.

And it would be the most amazing thing that ever happened. You would be on this, like, Lego high. I would go up. We had a room that we had all these Legos built in. And you would build your Lego stuff. And it would be so exciting.

And then eventually that would kind of fade. And you'd have to do this whole process again where you'd work really hard. And then you'd just kind of hope and wait. And eventually my younger brother came into our Lego room and destroyed everything. And that was the end of Legos for us. He just ruined everything.

And that actually was a good picture of what life would feel like for me. It'd work really hard. Hoping and longing for something. Looking forward to something. And then, you know, someone would come along and ruin it. Sometimes it was me.

Sometimes it was just circumstances. But something eventually would make it kind of fade or not last or be terrible. Or you'd move on to something else. And for most of us, that's what life looks like. We work and we hope and we dream for something. And we're kind of always kind of setting our sights on something in the future.

And if I could just get to that, then I'll be okay. If I could just get past this, then I'll be okay. One of the things that we wouldn't necessarily put these words to it. But we are searching for blessing or blessedness. Now, like I said, you wouldn't put those words to it. You wouldn't say, I'm just waiting for my blessedness.

But that's in some ways what we're doing is we're hoping to be in the good life. To have the good stuff. To have it work out the way we want to. Now, we would define that differently. But that's what we're longing for.

And what we're going to look at in this chapter is Jacob is actually going to bless his grandsons and his sons. He's going to say, here's what God's going to do. And he's going to call blessing on them. And the truth is we're going to see that they hope for these blessings. And some of them last and some of them don't. We would argue some are better or worse than the others.

And the truth is this, unless God blesses us, we are not blessed. Unless he does it for us, our work will only be striving, chasing after the wind. We will only be trying to accomplish something we cannot accomplish. And so we need God to bless us. And the question is, what is his blessing? How do we get it?

And how do we keep it? So we're going to look at this story and then we're going to ask that question. And we're going to try to see where true blessedness is. So let's pray and then we'll read this together. God, you are a God who blesses. And who gives and who is generous and who cares and who loves.

And we pray, Lord, that as we study this word, we would see your blessing. And we would know your blessing. And we would place our hope in the right blessing. In Jesus' name, amen. Chapter 48. It's on page 24 if you have one of the Blue Bibles.

It starts this way. It says, After this, Joseph was told, Behold, your father is ill. Now, we covered a handful of chapters last week. And what the after this is, is that all of Joseph's family moved to Egypt. He put them in Goshen. He's taking care of them.

They've been there for about 17 years. Which Jacob calls Joseph to him. And I'm going to give you the paraphrased Chet version. And Jacob says, Look here, boy. When I die, don't bury me here. You carry me back to Canaan.

And you bury me where I'm supposed to be buried in the promised land. You hear me? And Joseph says, Yes, sir. And so that's where we pick up. After this, sometime after, Jacob made Joseph promise that. Joseph was told, Behold, your father is ill.

So he took with him his two sons, Manasseh, that's the oldest, and Ephraim. And it was told to Jacob, Your son Joseph has come to you. And then Israel, that's the other name for Jacob, summoned his strength and sat up in his bed. And Jacob said to Joseph, God Almighty appeared to me at Luz in the land of Canaan and blessed me. And said to me, Behold, I will make you fruitful and multiply you. And I will make of you a company of peoples and will give this land to your offspring after you for an everlasting possession.

So he says, I was blessed. God blessed me. And now in a second, we're going to see that he's going to bless his grandsons and his sons. And there's this idea that God has poured this out on them. But Jacob has only looked at it from a distance.

He hasn't actually attained it. He just knows this is happening. God's promised this. And we're waiting for it. And now your two sons, this is verse five, who were born to you in the land of Egypt, before I came to you in Egypt, are mine. Ephraim and Manasseh shall be mine, as Reuben and Simeon are.

And the children that you fathered after them shall be yours. They shall be called by the name of their brothers in their inheritance. As for me, when I came from Paddan to my sorrow, Rachel died in the land of Canaan on the way, when there was still some distance to go to Ephrath. And I buried her there on the way to Ephrath. That is Bethlehem. So he says, your two sons will be my sons.

Now, he's old. He's the daddy. He's the patriarch. He's to do what he wants. He says, those boys that are yours. Nope.

Mine. Ephraim and Manasseh are now my sons. And they are, there'll be tribes of Israel listed when they, when they move into the promised land. And from now on, when Israel saw Joseph's sons, he said, who are these? And Joseph said to his father, they are my sons whom God has given me here. And he said, bring them to me, please, that I may bless them.

Now the eyes of Israel were dim with age so that he could not see. So Joseph brought them near and he kissed them and he embraced them. And Israel said to Joseph, I never expected to see your face and behold, God has let me see your offspring also. Then Joseph removed them from his knees and bowed himself with his face to the earth. And Joseph took them both Ephraim and his right hand toward Israel's left and Manasseh in his left hand towards Israel's right hand and brought them near him. So Jacob's going to bless them.

And Joseph does something intentional here. And it's kind of a written in a little bit of a confusing way, but Joseph has his sons and he's walking them towards Jacob, his father. And he puts Ephraim on his right hand so that he would be on Jacob's left hand. And he takes Manasseh, who's the oldest, and puts him in his left hand so that he would be on Jacob's right hand. Because he's going to bless them. And the assumption that Joseph's making is that Jacob is going to lay his hands on them to bless him.

And he wants his oldest boy to get a right-handed blessing. It's his dominant hand. I don't know if y'all knew that. There's a right-handed, left-hand blessing. One's more powerful. That's what he's doing.

That's his hope. So he brings him up. That way to his father. And Israel stretched out his right hand and laid it on the head of Ephraim, who was the younger, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, crossing his hands. For Manasseh was the firstborn. And he blessed Joseph and said, So he okie-dokied him.

When he got him up there, Jacob goes like this. Which, what? Why would he do that? Joseph had to be like, what on earth just happened here? So it says this.

The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked. The God who has been my shepherd all my life long to this day. The angel who has redeemed me from all evil. Bless the boys. And in them let my name be carried on in the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac. And let them grow in a multitude in the midst of the earth.

I want to point something out here. The blessing does not come from Jacob. It comes from God. Jacob is not blessing them. He is asking God to bless them. So in some ways, Jacob is joining in this blessing.

He is giving this blessing verbally. But the blessing comes from God. You are not blessed unless God blesses you. You can have all the money in the world. You can have all the things that we would say would be great. The Ecclesiastes says that sometimes God lets people have stuff, but not the ability.

He does not bless them with the ability to enjoy it. And that there are other people who have hardly anything. And he blesses them with the ability to enjoy it. And they're happier and better off. You're not blessed unless God blesses you. And that's what's happening here.

He's calling on God to bless these boys. He swapped his hands. When Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand on the hand of Ephraim, it displeased him. And he took his father's hand to move it from Ephraim's head to Manasseh's head. Joseph said to his father, Not this way, my father, since this one is the firstborn. Put your right hand on his head.

He interrupts the blessing to swap his daddy's hands. But his father refused and said, I know, my son. I know. He also shall become a people and he also shall be great. Nevertheless, his younger brother shall be greater than he. And his offspring shall become a multitude of nations.

So he blessed them that day. So Jacob says, No, no, no, no, no, no. I did this on purpose. I know which one's which. Ephraim is now the older brother. Ephraim is now the greater one.

He will be named before his brother. He will be blessed beyond him. He did it on purpose. And that's such a Jacob-y thing to do. If you remember his story with his brother Esau. Jacob is like, Nope, younger brother.

They're awesome. Here we go. So he blesses them that way. I want to show you all something. I want to take a pause for just a second. That's not fully in line with what we're talking about today.

But I want us to see this together as a church family. They took this so seriously. That both Joseph and Jacob believed. And it actually functions this way. That this blessing mattered. And that the right and left hand mattered.

They see a weight in the words that they use to ask God to be at work. In the words that they use to call on God's blessing. And I think we ought to learn from that. Especially as we walk in church family together. And community groups as people who are filled by the spirit of God. And someone comes to our group.

And starts talking about decisions they're making in their lives. And we just respond. With some neat American opinions. And for some of our church family. Neat South American opinions. And we don't weigh out.

And consider. That we are empowered by the Holy Spirit. That we ought to listen to him. That we ought to speak in a way. That is weighty. And understand the power of our words.

To bless. And to move. And to have some authority. The Bible says that when two or more are gathered in my name. And they agree on something. I'm in their midst.

It's sealed. Like he. We sometimes in our groups. Just huddle up. And give each other some opinions and stuff. And we don't.

We don't consider the weight of our words. I was having a conversation with someone this past week. And I went to say something. And I felt like maybe the Holy Spirit was telling me not to. So I just had to sit.

I was like. Hold on. They were like. You okay? And I was like. I don't know.

I'm trying to listen. I said. Hold on. Be quiet. No. I didn't say that.

But anyway. I just sat and was like. Lord. Am I not supposed to say this? Is this not okay? Because I was just going to give him an opinion.

But I thought maybe it was a little bit weightier than that. And I needed to listen. And there's something to that. We ought to understand the authority given to us as church family. As we walk with the spirit of the Lord. And that's what Jacob does here.

And that's what Joseph understands here. And I think we ought to grow in that. Take a second. Pray. Ask the Lord for help. I think our groups ought to get better at asking the Lord questions.

And sitting and listening together. To see if there's unity in the spirit. So that we don't just pop off with our own little thing. But we actually ask the Lord. Is there something you want to say to us? Is there something you want to do here?

Is there some clarity that we can have here for this person in this situation? Rather than just trusting everybody's little opinion. But asking the Lord to help. And realizing the weight that's in our words. Alright? I will descend from my soapbox.

Back to the pulpit. Alright. Here we go. So he blessed them that day saying. This is verse 20. By you Israel will pronounce blessings.

Saying God make you as Ephraim in Manasseh. Thus he put Ephraim before Manasseh. Then Israel said to Joseph. Behold I am about to die. But God will be with you.

And will bring you again to the land of your fathers. Moreover I have given to you. Rather than to your brothers. One mountain slope. That I took from the hand of the Amorites. With my sword and with my bow.

We don't know what story that is. We don't know what mountain slope that is. But cool. He gets an extra mountain slope. Alright. Chapter 49.

Then Jacob called his sons and said. Gather yourselves together. That I may tell you. What shall happen to you in the days to come. So he calls and says.

I'm going to prophesy over you. At the end of this it says. So he blessed them with blessings. So they understood. He's ending his life. He's going to bless us.

He's going to speak truth and reality to us. As he is empowered. As one who follows the Lord. As the kind of connection to God on earth at this point. As this lineage is played out in the book of Genesis. Where we were told there's going to be a promised seed.

Who's going to come. Who's going to bless the nations. And we're still trying to follow that. He's got 12 sons. We're trying to see. They're actually now being made into a great nation.

But we still have to kind of ask the question of who's. Who's the one who's going to come and fix everything. We see that in a small way fulfilled in Joseph. That Joseph was sent. In Genesis he's sent. He actually blesses the nations.

Because God put him in a place to suffer on behalf of others. So that there might be life given to others. That's what we see. And that's actually a small picture of the full blessing. That's going to come through Jesus. So we're still kind of waiting to see what's happening here.

They know there's still some stuff to be spread around. And some blessing to be proclaimed. And somebody who might actually be like. I know you're the continued line. You're the. So that's what we're looking at.

Now if you are. If you are. Jacob's sons. This is a moment of anticipation. This is a moment of trepidation. This is a moment where this matters greatly.

We're going to read some of this and go. Okay. But in some ways they're coming to see. What's my life going to be like. What's. What's my blessing going to be like.

It matters greatly. This is why Esau. When the blessing was stolen from him. Ripped his. His clothes and wept. Because it matters what happens here.

And this blessing will last. Okay. Assemble. And listen. Oh sons of Jacob. Listen to Israel your father.

Now. It was assumed. Last time. That he was going to lay hands on their heads. So I am assuming that happens here as well.

The text does not say. He's going to say his son's name. He's going to give a blessing. He's going to say another son's name. But I'm assuming.

Maybe they lined up. And he just was. Putting his hands on their head. And blessing them. Reuben. Reuben.

You are my firstborn. My might. And the first fruits of my strength. Preeminent in dignity. And preeminent in power. Unstable as water.

You shall not have preeminence. Because you went up to your father's bed. Then you defiled it. He went up to my couch. Reuben. Slept with one of Jacob's.

Wives. Not his mom. But one of Jacob's wives. So when Jacob goes to blessing. It starts off really nice. And then it takes a turn you guys.

And now if you're the other brothers in this room. The tone of the room just changed. Because you were like. Oh no. I didn't know. I didn't know that could happen.

I thought maybe you could get like a lesser blessing. I didn't know it could. Oh man. I didn't know. So. You might at this point.

Be running through your head. What did I do? And the truth is. Reuben is. Is receiving some judgment. For his actions.

For his sin. For his wickedness. For his lack of repentance of it. There's no. It just says earlier in. In Genesis.

That Jacob heard about it. We didn't hear. He didn't do anything. Caught up to Reuben here. That's it. That's Reuben's blessing.

You were. You're going to be great. Now. You are not. And that plays out in the tribe of Reuben. In the 12 tribes of Israel.

As they move into the promised land. Simeon and Levi are brothers. So these are the next two. Weapons of violence are their swords. Let my soul come not into their counsel. Oh my glory.

Be not joined to their company. For in their anger they killed men. And in their willfulness they hamstrung oxen. Cursed be their anger. For it is fierce. And their wrath.

For it is cruel. I will divide them in Jacob. And scatter them in Israel. Simeon and Levi are the guys who tricked Shechem. That entire city. Into getting circumcised.

So that they could go in and kill everyone. After they had defiled their sister Dinah. Jacob did not seem real pleased with it then. And now he says. Wasn't. Wasn't.

Holy. Wasn't appropriate. Was wrathful. You are cruel. And may my soul not dwell with you. And he says.

I'll scatter you in Israel. And actually when they move into the promised land. Simeon is in the middle of Judah. Judah surrounds Simeon. Simeon's not really allowed to do much. And the Levites are completely spread out all over the place.

Because they serve as the priest. Now it's an interesting thing. The Levites here. Get cursed. For their wrath and anger. And then later get blessed.

For zealous. Appropriate violence. So it's not just that all violence is bad. But the intentions of our heart. And the call of God on it matters. And so they later get blessed for it.

Even though they're still scattered. There's some redemption in it. But he just says. Y'all's was. Hateful. And wicked.

Your wrath is evil. Alright now. Judah. He moves on. Now if you're Judah.

We've read about Judah you guys. Remember Judah and Tamar. Tamar. Judah. Sold his brother into slavery. He was the one who kind of.

Came up with that idea. He did not do. What he was supposed to do. With his daughter-in-law Tamar. He was hanging out with the Canaanites. He did a lot of.

Of bad things. If. If. If I was Judah. When he said Judah. I'd have said.

Like you know. For a second. Like can you run away from a blessing. Would that make it worse. He could probably still reach you. It would.

He would make it worse. So you just got to go take. What you're going to get. Judah comes up. Judah. Your brothers.

Shall praise you. Your hand. Shall be on the neck. Of your enemies. Your father's son. Shall bow down.

Before you. Judah. Is a lion's cub. From the prey. My son. You have gone up.

He stooped down. He couched. As a lion. And as a lioness. Who dares. Rouse him.

The scepter. That's a. What a king holds. Shall not depart. From Judah. Nor the ruler's staff.

From between his feet. Until tribute. Comes to him. And to him. Shall be the obedience. Of the peoples.

Binding. His foal. To the vine. And his donkey's. Cult. To the choice vine.

He has washed. His garments. And wine. And his vesture. In the blood of grapes. His eyes.

Are darker than wine. And his teeth. Whiter. Than milk. That's it. That's what he says to Judah.

It didn't turn. It didn't start off nice. And then go. Like he did to Reuben. I bet Judah was like. He said Zebulun.

And Judah was like. That's just. Beautiful. He just says. You're going to. Be praised by your brothers.

They're going to bow down to you. Everybody's going to bow down to you. There's going to be obedience to you. You're going to be. A king. Like he.

He pours all this on Judah. And we're going to come back to this. Because it matters greatly. What just happened there. But we're going to read the rest of the blessings.

And give them to the brothers. But Judah gets a beautiful one. Zebulun. Shall dwell at the shore of the sea. He shall become a haven for ships. And his border shall be at Sidon.

So that has mostly to do with where Zebulun. Eventually the tribe is going to be. And he moves on. Issachar is a strong donkey. Crouching between the sheep folds. He saw that a resting place was good.

And that the land was pleasant. So he bowed his shoulder to bear. And became a servant at forced labor. So he says Issachar is a strong donkey. But then he basically just says.

He wants good stuff. So he works really hard. And eventually that's kind of his undoing. That's what he puts on Issachar. Dan shall judge his people. As one of the tribes of Israel.

Dan shall be a serpent in the way. A viper by the path. That bites the horse's heels. So that his rider falls backwards. I wait for your salvation oh Lord. So he says Dan will be a judge.

But then he kind of says that Dan will be a bit tricky. And harm people. And we don't know if that's bad people or good people. But he just kind of says. And then he ends by saying. I wait for your salvation oh Lord.

Basically if the Lord doesn't show up and help. This is going to all be a mess. But he moves on from Dan to Gad. He says raiders shall raid Gad. But he shall raid at their heels.

So this is a blessing. And I'm not trying to take away from the blessing here. But it's also a dad joke. Because Gad sounds like the Hebrew word for raiders. So his whole blessing is a big pun.

It would be like if his name was Raid. So he said Raiders will raid raid. But Raid will raid Raiders back. Like it's a tongue twister thing. And then he just moves on to Asher. So it's a real blessing.

But it just shows you the potency of dad jokes. Sorry. It doesn't. Asher's food shall be rich. And he shall yield royal delicacies. And he moves on to Naphtali.

Now if you're Asher. I think I'd just be like sweet. Could have been better. Could have been a lot worse though. Asher. You're going to eat well.

I'll take it. Cakes and stuff. I got it. I'm down. So he says.

Your food should be rich. And you'll eat royal delicacies. Naphtali. Naphtali. Naphtali. Naphtali.

Naphtali. Is a doe let loose. Is a doe let loose. That bears beautiful fawns. That bears beautiful fawns. A doe would have been understood as sleek.

And healthy. And healthy. And beautiful. And he says that bears beautiful fawns. Would be. It's going to be fruitful.

Going to be blessed. Going to grow. Then he just moves on to Joseph. Now. Naphtali's blessing is a good one. I have two brothers.

I don't have eleven. And maybe they treated this with a whole lot of respect. And they didn't do what I think might would have happened. But he called Naphtali a doe. A pregnant doe. And I just feel like if you had eleven brothers.

Who've been called lions and vipers and strong donkeys. They might give you a hard time about that. I mean when they saw Naphtali. They might just be like doe. A deer. A female deer.

Like they might have just rubbed it in a little bit. Maybe not. Probably wouldn't have known that song. But. Anyway. Naphtali gets that blessing.

Joseph. So this would be to Joseph. He's already blessed. Ephraim and Manasseh. This would go to Joseph. This would go to his two sons.

Joseph. Is a fruitful bough. A fruitful bough by a spring. His branches run over the wall. The archers bitterly attacked him. Shot at him.

Harassed him severely. Yet his bow remained unmoved. His arms were made agile by the hands of the mighty one of Jacob. From there is the shepherd. The stone of Israel. By the God of your father who will help you.

By the almighty who will bless you. With the blessings of heaven above. And the blessings of the deep that crouches beneath. Blessings of the breast and of the womb. The blessings of your father are mighty. Beyond the blessings of my parents.

Up to the bounties of the everlasting hills. May they be on the head of Joseph. And on the brow of him who was set apart from his brothers. And what happened here is very interesting. The two brothers who get the longest and the best blessings are Joseph and Judah. And Joseph's blessing is not really very specific.

It's poetic. It's beautiful. But it's not really specific. And a lot of it seems to be highlighting Joseph's personal life. Actually what happened in his life. That he was set apart from his brothers.

That he was greatly attacked. But the Lord had blessed him. And he just calls on all these blessings to be on Joseph. That Joseph would be blessed. Heavens above. Crouching in the deep.

All the blessings of fertility. All the blessings. Like he just asks for all that and blesses him with that. But there's nothing really all that specific. And the truth is the blessing given to Ephraim and Manasseh is good. And the way that things play out with them in the history of Israel is good.

But it does not compare to Judah. And so we'll look at that in a second as we finish up this chapter. Benjamin is a ravenous wolf. This is his youngest son. In the morning devouring the prey. And at the evening dividing the spoil.

He just says they will be ferocious. He doesn't say good or bad or whatever. He just says Benjamin is a ravenous wolf. In the morning devouring the prey. And as of the evening dividing the spoil. And I really hope one day Benjamin went to Naphtali.

And said hey. Me and some of our other brothers are planning on getting tattoos. Judah was going to get a lion. I was going to get a wolf. Issachar is going to get like a swole donkey. Dan is going to get a viper.

Did you want to come and get like a pregnant deer? Like maybe on your belly or like your lower back or something? No? Sure? Okay. I just want to give you the option.

We drew up some little designs for you. 28. All these are the 12 tribes of Israel. This is what their father said to them as he blessed them. Blessing each with a blessing suitable to them. So we would not categorize Reuben's and Simeon and Levi's as a blessing.

But that's what it was. He was calling forth what was appropriate for them. That's interesting. Because what was appropriate for Reuben and Simeon and Levi seemed different than what was appropriate for Judah. Although we've seen Judah make a lot of mistakes and not handle things well. He did seem to be repentant when he came back and when he worked everything out with Joseph in the last text that we looked at last week.

But he does not seem to have anything fall on him for the other things that he had done that were evil. Then he commanded them and said to them, verse 29, I am to be gathered to my people. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite. In the cave that is in the field of Machpelah. To the east of Mamre. In the land of Canaan.

Which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite. To possess as a burying place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife. There they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife. And there I buried Leah. The field and the cave that is in it were bought from the Hittites.

When Jacob finished commanding his sons, he drew up his feet into the bed, breathed his last, and was gathered to his people. And my hope for myself and for you is that we get a similar story where we're trusting and hoping in the Lord. Speaking about his goodness. Speaking about his promises. Proclaiming that he will continue to work in the coming days. And then we draw our feet up, breathe our last, and we're done.

We are faithful to the end. Okay. All of these blessings play out in some form. And all of these blessings eventually stop. Except for Judah's. Here's what happened with Judah's blessing.

Judah's blessing that there would be a king. That the scepter would not leave from him. The ruler's staff from in between his feet. This blessing ultimately goes to David. Judah is the great, great, great granddad of David the king. And God, when David is king, says, I'm going to make a covenant with you, an everlasting covenant.

And that goes from Judah to David to Jesus. And what happened here is that when Jacob went to bless Judah, all he could see was Jesus. And when he went to bless Judah, all he could see was Jesus. All he could see was this king who would reign eternally. All he could see was this lion who would conquer his enemies. All he could see was the beauty carried out in Christ.

And ultimately, here's the truth. If your blessing is not carried out in Christ, it will not last. As we look at this, we might would say, honestly, if I was going to lay out my life here, I'm with Naphtali. I just want to have some beautiful fawns. That's what I think blessedness is. Healthy kids, healthy family.

Some of you are like, I think I'm in on that Asher blessing. Cakes and stuff. Like, I just want that. Like, if I could just eat. Like, if you looked at the portion of my budget that went to eating out. We don't eat out nice, but we eat out a lot.

Like, I just like being able to talk about you guys. Like, I... Some of us would say that's kind of where I line up. Some of us look and go, no, no, no, no, no, no. I want to be like Benjamin. I just want to be tough and mean.

I want to be feared. I want to be powerful. Some of you are looking at the Issachar blessing and say, I just want to work hard and enjoy good comfort. Is that too much to ask? To work hard and be comfortable? And the reality is, some of those things, you'll get some nice stuff out of them.

They won't last unless they're carried out in Jesus. Unless you're blessed in Christ, you are not blessed. If you are blessed in Christ, you are forever blessed. So let's look at this blessing that goes to Christ. Look back at Judah. Judah, your brothers shall praise you.

That word praise is used a couple of times mockingly for humans. Every other time in Scripture, it is used for God. May all the people praise Him. This is a praise that is owing only to God. So he says, Judah, you will be praised.

And he's talking about Christ, that all of the praises of men will fall to Judah. Your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies. Isn't that a beautiful picture? Think of the enemies of Christ. Sin and death and hell. And think of how fearful they are to us.

Think of Satan, the ultimate enemy, and how fearful he is. And that Jesus gets to walk in and grab him by the back of the neck. Turn his head where he wants it. When I was growing up, my dad, every once in a while, he would grab you by the back of the neck. And it was ultimate like, it's like in that Batman movie where Bane puts his hand on that guy's shoulder and says, Do you feel in charge? Is that kind of move?

Did you just put your hand on the back of the neck of your enemies and they would just be like, I do not, I do not feel in charge. And that's Christ to our ultimate enemies. That He is so glorious and so powerful that He just walks over and He grabs them and says, Okay, your time's done. And this is what Jacob is seeing as he proclaims this over him. He says, Your father's son shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion's cub.

From the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down. He crouched as a lion and as a lioness. Who dares rouse him? You go to the zoo and you see lions. They're fun to watch because there's a giant cavern in between you and them.

If there wasn't, you wouldn't just be like, Oh, that lion's not dangerous. It's laying down. It's like, bro, they can hop right up. That's what he's saying. He's saying, you can rest at ease because nobody goes and wakes up a lion. Nobody's messing with them.

They're fearful. And the reality is, as the Bible plays out, we are told that Jesus is the lion of the tribe of Judah. In Revelation, it says, Look, the lion of the tribe of Judah is worthy to open the scrolls and he's worthy to receive praise. And then John, who's seeing all this, says, I looked and I saw a lamb who was slain. That Jesus Christ is a lion who became a lamb on our behalf and then is seated as the lion of the tribe of Judah forever, having slain his enemies and having been slain for our sin. The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until the tribute comes to him.

To him shall be the obedience of the peoples. Earlier it said, Your brothers will bow down to you. That would be the nation of Israel. Now it says, To him belong the obedience of the peoples, meaning all nations everywhere, that Jesus will rule as a king eternally. The scepter will never depart from his hand. You ever feel like things are out of control?

Do you know there's a ruler's staff sitting in between the feet of Jesus? And it is not going to move. You ever feel like you're drowning? Do you know that there's a king who sits on a throne who rules over this world and over our lives and it will not be taken from his hand? Binding his foal to the vine and his donkey's colt to the choice vine. That means very little to us.

That is actually a very silly thing to do. If you were parking your donkey, you would tie it to something so it would not run off. You do not tie it to a grapevine. It will eat your grapes. That is what it is saying. Nobody ties a donkey to a grapevine unless everything is a grapevine and they are unendingly wealthy.

Do you know what's so beautiful and exciting? This is a better picture of this same passage for us. You know what the streets are paved with in heaven? Gold. Do you know why? Because gold isn't that beautiful and important anymore.

And it's everywhere. Jesus is glorious and important in heaven. You can tie your donkey to the choice vine and you can drive your Ram 1500 across some gold. It's unending wealth in Christ that he is beyond glorious. That he is beyond wealthy. That he holds everything in his hands.

Do you see what he holds in his hands? He holds his enemies. He holds a ruling staff. And he holds unending wealth. And then it says this. He has washed his garments in wine and his vesture in the blood of grapes.

Taken at face value. That means that wine is so prevalent they use it to do the washing. But as we see this played out in scripture there are other places where wine is used very poetically and very picturesque of what else Jesus is going to do. So I think it does point to his wealth. I also think it points to his death where he takes a cup and he says this is my body. This is my blood poured out for you.

The blood of the new covenant. That you might have an eternal salvation and an eternal hope. That he is covered in blood. But the other two times that the Bible is going to talk about Jesus Christ being coated in the wine. Coated in the pressing of grapes. It's going to be Isaiah 63 and Revelation 19 where he treads the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God.

That Jesus Christ is coated in the blood of his enemies. That's graphic and true. That Jesus Christ will conquer all of his enemies and will reign and stand supreme and that he will walk through the wrath of God. He does that for us on the cross. And he does that for us in judgment. So if he's seeing Jesus and he sees him and his clothes have been washed in wine.

That's the blood of the covenant. That's the blood of his enemies. And only Jesus can do that. His eyes are darker than wine. His teeth whiter than milk. That Jesus is beautiful and glorious above all else.

That he is to be beheld and be captivated in his glory. Jacob could have had a lot of mean things to say about Judah but when he puts his hand on his head all he can see is Christ. And because all he can see is Christ Judah's blessing lasts and is carried out in Christ and is an eternal blessing. Charles Spurgeon I read this quote this week and he's talking about Jesus. He says Jesus is the most magnanimous of captains which means generous and forgiving. There never was his like among the choicest of princes.

He is always to be found in the thickest part of the battle. When the wind blows cold he always takes the bleak side of the hill. The heaviest end of the cross lies ever on his shoulders. If he bids us carry a burden he carries it also. If there is anything that is gracious generous kind and tender yes lavish and super abundant in love you will always find it in him. That when Jacob went to bless Judah all he could see was Christ and Christ in all of his glory and the hope for us is that we would not be blessed in our hard work and that we would not be blessed in earthly possessions but that we would be blessed in Christ through faith in Jesus and his work on the cross.

This is actually what is true for Christians who have been filled with the spirit that we are blessed in Christ. Ephesians 1 says this Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We constantly are running around asking the Lord to bless us with the blessing of Issachar or the blessing of Asher or the blessing of one of these smaller blessings. Can I just have the blessing of Benjamin? If you just give me that blessing I'd be happy and in reality we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. If you are in Christ your blessing is carried out in him and you have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places and they cannot be taken away because they are held there by Jesus.

When Christ when God looks at us he sees Christ and therefore we are blessed. And if you are not in Christ and you have not placed your faith in Jesus I don't care how much money you have I don't care how healthy you are I don't care how stunningly handsome you are you are not blessed. I don't care if you have the richest delicacies you are not blessed. So I want you if you are a Christian today I want you to hear me for just a second. If you have placed your faith in Jesus his spirit dwells in you I don't care what's going on in your life I want you to know something. If Jacob laid his hands on your head and blessed you you would be blessed in Christ.

If you are not a Christian I want you to know that this is offered to you through Christ and his work that he can bless you in him. I want to read for you what Jacob could say to you that is true for you to be blessed in Christ. I want you to hear this if you are in Christ this is reality for you. That Jacob could put his hand on you and say something along these lines. Through the sufficiency that is in Christ may you be blessed. Through the power of the Holy Spirit and the love of the Father may you be blessed.

You are forgiven. Your sins are no more. They are buried at the bottom of the ocean. They are as far away as the east is from the west. There is no condemnation for you. You receive grace upon grace.

You have been made new. You have a new identity. You are no longer who you were. You are now who Christ says you are. You have been cleansed, washed in pure water, bright and clean. You are without blemish or spot, wrinkle or stain, altogether lovely and pure.

All the sins that have been committed against you are no more. You bear their Mark no longer. You are holy and blameless and above reproach. You are saved. You have been rescued. The Lord will defend you and keep you.

His blood has paid your debt and ransomed you. You have been delivered from the domain of darkness and brought into the kingdom of His beloved Son. You are loved and cherished and adored. You have been adopted into the household of God. You are His cherished possession. You have an eternal Father who will not leave you or forsake you.

You have an eternal family that cannot be taken from you. You belong to Christ. You cannot be snatched out of His hand. He will keep you. He will keep you and bring you to Himself. You will make it.

You are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ. We don't know what all of those are but we know what some of those are. That we are forgiven and that we are free and that we are ransomed and that we are adopted and that we are loved. And that cannot be taken away from you because it is carried out in Christ. It is not carried out by you. You do not have to be strong enough.

You do not have to be smart enough. You do not have to be moral enough. You do not have to keep it together. Christ keeps it together on your behalf. Our hope is in Him. 1 Peter 1.24 says, All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass.

The grass withers and the flower falls. But the word of the Lord remains forever. And this word is the good news that was preached to you. The band is going to come back up and I want you to know that. I want us to remember that. The gospel has been proclaimed and if you have placed your faith in Jesus it stands forever.

You will not be taken away. You will not be destroyed. Your blessing will not be removed. That because Jesus Christ earns it and keeps it and it is carried out in Him then we have it in Him eternally. That our hope is in Christ and in Christ alone. Not your ability.

Not your wisdom. Everything else fails. Everything else fades. But what's carried out in Christ is forever. In just a moment Bianca will begin to play and we'll have a minute to just sit and to think and to pray and then we'll take communion together. And communion is where we remember that Jesus' body was broken and His blood was shed for us and that our hope is in Him.

Do not come to this table today trying to gain your own blessing outside of Christ. Leave that in your chair. Don't come here hoping for a smaller blessing or just longing for something simple and missing out on the beauty of every spiritual blessing carried out in Christ. Don't come weary and exhausted because you've been trying to strive to earn something. Leave that there and come to the one who's earned it for us. Who keeps it for us.

Who our hope is in. Don't come timidly. Come boldly. Do not think small of His mercy as if it is not big enough for you. Do not think small of His grip as if He somehow might drop the scepter or might lose His hand on you. Do not think for one second that His hand has relinquished from the back of His enemy as if they might can run free and do whatever they want.

He is glorious and beautiful. He is beyond all reckoning and our hope is in Him so that we might trust in Him and Him alone and that we might walk forward and be in Him set free to be small and to be weak and to be ugly and to be messy and to be free. To be confident. To be hope filled. Because when the Father looks at us all He sees is Christ. if you are not in Christ I want you to know the blessing you are chasing after is too small. It is silly.

It will fail. It will fade. And you will be exhausted. Place your faith in Jesus. Receive all spiritual blessings in heavenly places. Have it carried out by Him.

Place your hope in Him and be free. Let's pray. God help us not to think small of you but to know that when you look at us you see Christ. That we are wealthy beyond all reckoning. That we are healthy and hope filled beyond all reckoning. That in you all our blessing is carried out.

They do not all come here. Some of them are only viewed from afar but they are held tight in heavenly places. Some of us are sick and will remain so. Some of us are poor and will remain so. Some of us will not get what we have longed for here but what you hold for us is better and we will wait patiently. Because we are blessed because our blessing is carried out in Christ not us.

It is carried out by the one who died. It is carried out by the one who holds our hope and our eternity and our very souls in his hand and who has not relinquished the ruling scepter. May our hope be forever in you. Lord you are beautiful and glorious. All sufficient. And your blessing and your love and your blood is enough.

Thank you Lord that through the cross we receive the blessing of Judah that we get to be ushered in to the blessing carried out by you. Give us faith to trust in your sufficiency. In Jesus name. Amen. When you feel ready take communion and then we will sing together as a church family.

Joseph and His Brothers

Joseph and His Brothers

Chet Phillips

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Transcript

It's good to see you all this morning. My name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. Grab a Bible and go to Genesis chapter 42. If you grab one of our blue Bibles, that'll be on page 21. We've been walking through the book of Genesis.

We are now in the section on Joseph, and so we are talking specifically about Joseph. We've been following along with his story. We have, today we're going to kind of finish this story up. So usually it says a number and then like a colon and then a few other Numbers. And that's chapters 42 through 47. So today we've got a lot of work to do, but we won't read all of it.

Some of it will be summarized. I would encourage you to read all of it. But we are going to be kind of finishing up, in large part, the Joseph story. And then next week we will look at Jacob blessing his sons. And then the following week we will kind of end Genesis, see the kind of the summary idea of Genesis and how that's not just the summary idea of Genesis, but in some ways it summarizes the entire Bible. And then we will close Genesis, not to open it again for quite a while.

And thankful for the time we've spent in it and thankful to be talking about something else. So we've been walking through it. I think it's been really good, but we are walking in Joseph and his story right now. And we're going to see that Joseph's, a lot of his storyline, a lot of what we've seen God at work in is kind of coming to a head. It's kind of coming to the intense part of his story is going to kind of play out today. And so we're going to get to look at that together.

So let's pray and then we'll start reading. God, we thank you for your word. Lord, we thank you through how you have revealed yourself. That your word and what we have is that we might see you and know you. To know what you're like and to know how you respond and how you act and what you desire from us and for us. And so we pray that we would grow in that today.

That through your Holy Spirit we would see more clearly who you are and what you're doing and what you have done. We love you and we praise you in Jesus' name. Amen. So if you look at chapter 42, we're actually going to read the two verses right before that. 41, 56 and 57. So it says, So when the famine had spread over all the land, Joseph opened all the storehouses and sold to the Egyptians.

For the famine was severe in the land of Egypt. Moreover, all the earth came to Egypt to Joseph to buy grain because the famine was severe over all the earth. And so we start off with Joseph in this position of leadership, in this position of power. But that's not how his story began. That's not how it played out. He has, he's Jacob's son.

He was the second youngest. He was the firstborn son of Rachel, Jacob's favorite wife. And he has a one younger brother named Benjamin and he has 10 older brothers. And so because he was the firstborn of Jacob's favorite wife, he was treated differently. He was given a magnificent set of clothes. And it's a big deal.

If you read throughout the Bible, it'll say things like, and then they gave them gold and a change of clothes. And we, we take for granted having a lot of clothes, but they didn't. They had the same clothes and they would wash them and they would clean them. They wear them all the time. And so he gets nicer clothes than the rest of his brothers. And he then has these dreams that his brothers are going to bow down to him.

And he announces them to his brothers and his brothers dislike him. They're not happy with him. And so his 10 older brothers, at some point he goes out to, to see them in the field and they decide, let's kill him. So his 10 older brothers grab him. He's 17 years old. They throw him in a pit because the oldest brother, Reuben says, let's not kill him.

And his plan was just put him in the pit. And Reuben was thinking, I'll come save him later. Reuben's looking for an opportunity to do that. He doesn't get that opportunity because another one of the older brothers, Judah says, let's not kill him and have his blood on our hands. Let's sell him as a slave and have cash on our hands.

And so that's Judah's plan is let's make some money out of this. Let's not just get guilt, but let's get money. And so they pull Joseph out of the pit. They sell him into slavery. And so he is taken down to Egypt. They take his coat of many colors.

They kill a goat. They pour blood on it. They take it to his dad and they say, isn't this Joseph's? Can you identify this coat? His dad says, surely he's been torn to pieces by some wild animal. That was their plan.

Then we follow Joseph. He goes to be a slave in Egypt and he is an excellent slave. He has a good attitude. God's with him. He works hard. He's diligent.

He becomes second in charge over this entire household. And this is going well for him as well as being a slave can go as well as his life. Who's gone from the pit to slavery has been turned upside down as well as it can go. But his master's wife lays eyes on him and then begins to attempt to seduce him. She begins to pursue him. And Joseph spurns her advances.

He does not have he doesn't want to have anything to do with that. He tells her explicitly no. He listens to her daily. Try this. And he says no. And eventually she just had enough.

She grabs him and he just dips out of his clothes and feats don't fail me now takes off. And so she takes his clothes and she tells her husband she lays up next to him and says, this is Joseph's and he tried to assault me. He tried to rape me. And so her husband is captain of the guard takes him right then and throws him in jail. So he goes from most beloved son to pit to slavery and now to prison.

And in prison he could be angry. He could be bitter. He's not. He works hard. He the Lord is still with him. The Lord blesses him.

He becomes second in charge of the prison. And so as as high a ranking position as a prisoner can have, he has it. He cares for the people well underneath under him. And there comes a time when there's the cup bearer and the baker from the king are both in prison and they both have basically nightmares, really vivid dreams that stress them out. He sees them in the morning. They're in prison.

And he sees them and says, why do y'all look sad? Notices their facial expression and cares about them. They tell him his dreams. He interprets them because he's already had dreams and seen that his brothers are going to bow down to him. He interprets these dreams. He says to one of them, you will be lifted up back to your place.

And he says to the other one, you will be lifted up and hanged. And he tells the one who's going back to his position, just don't forget me. And that guy says, I sure won't. And then promptly does. Until several years later, the pharaoh has a dream and he says, oh, you remember when I was in prison? There's a little Hebrew guy who can interpret dreams.

Let's go get him. So they go get him. And in a day, he goes from prisoner to second in charge of Egypt, from prison to palace overnight. And that's where we pick up with him now. Second in charge over Egypt. He was able to interpret the dream that there was going to be five years of plenty, seven years of plenty, seven years of plenty.

Seven years of famine. And they're now into the famine. And so everybody's coming to Egypt because they were able to prepare. And because Joseph led well, they were able to prepare. Everybody's coming to Egypt. And now we're going to see where the story gets interesting.

Chapter 42, as if it hadn't been interesting so far. When Jacob learned, so that's his daddy, that there was grain for sale in Egypt, he said to his sons, why do you look at one another? And he said, behold, I have heard that there is grain for sale in Egypt. Go down and buy grain for us there that we may live and not die. So 10 of Joseph's brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt.

But Jacob did not send Benjamin, Joseph's brother. So that's his younger brother, the youngest one of the family. And Joseph's only full brother. All the other ones are half brothers with his brothers. For he feared that harm might happen to him. Thus, the sons of Israel came to buy among the others who came for the famine in the was in the land of Canaan.

I love how this starts. Jacob says a really good dad phrase. Why are you all sitting around looking at each other? Don't just sit and stare at your brother's face like y'all somehow going to, that ain't going to accomplish anything. Get up and go to Egypt and get us some food. Don't just sit here.

Go get us some food. But he doesn't send Benjamin. He sends his 10 older sons. These are the 10 sons who threw Joseph into the pit. So Joseph is now about to get to stare face to face with those who harmed him.

And Joseph is no longer in the pit. Joseph is the one they have to come get food from. Joseph is in a position of absolute power in Egypt. So let's see what happens. Now, Joseph was governor over the land. He was the one who sold to all the people of the land.

And Joseph's brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them. But he treated them like strangers and spoke roughly to them. Where do you come from? He said. They said, from the land of Canaan to buy food.

And Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them. And he said to them, you are spies. You have come to see the nakedness of the land. And they said to him, no, my Lord, your servants have come to buy food. We are all the sons of one man.

We are honest men. Your servants have never been spies. Okay, so he sees them and he recognizes them. Now, this makes sense because he gets some context. First of all, they showed up. They were older, so they would have already looked a little similar.

He said he was 17. At this point, he's 32. So he's made a big jump from 17 to 32. You can look considerably different. But his brothers were all older than him.

They're just that same distance, and I can't do math quick. So that amount of older. And he sees them all together, though. He gets some context. So maybe if it was just one, it might have been harder to recognize.

But when all 10 of them walk in, he's like, oh, Gad, Asher, Naphtali, Zebulun, Reuben. I know these people. They don't recognize him, but also he is now in a position of authority in Egypt. He has an Egyptian name. He is speaking Egyptian. And there's a good chance he no longer looked like a Hebrew.

They would have changed his hairstyle. He would look Egyptian, most likely. So they walk in. He recognizes them. They don't recognize him. They all bow to the ground, and I bet a cold chill shot through Joseph because he was like, oh, the dream.

Oh, I knew it. So they all bow down, and he recognizes them, but he speaks roughly to them. And you want, we'll see in a second why. There's 10 brothers. Joseph has 11 brothers. And so he doesn't make himself known.

He speaks roughly to them. He calls them spies. And he said to them, no, this is verse 12. It is the nakedness of the land that you have come to see. A weird phrase for us. It just means you've come to spy out how defenseless we are.

And they said, we, your servants, are 12 brothers, the son of one man in the land of Canaan. And behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is no more. But Joseph said to them, surprise! No, he didn't. But Joseph said to them, it is as I said to you, you are spies.

By this you shall be tested. By the life of Pharaoh, you shall not go from this place unless your youngest brother comes here. Send one of you and let him bring your brother while you, the rest of you, remain confined. That your words may be tested whether there is truth in you or else by the life of Pharaoh. Surely you are spies. And he put them all together in custody for three days.

So he immediately just, they're arrested. And he says, I want to see your younger brother. Because in Joseph's reckoning, it seems logical that he's thinking through, okay, I was favorited. I was treated differently among my brothers and they hated me for it. And when I was removed from the picture, there is a really good chance that my father began to dote on Benjamin above and beyond anything he ever did with me. And if my brothers were willing to sell me into slavery or kill me, then there's a good chance, potentially, they've killed Benjamin.

He wants to see Benjamin. He doesn't show up with the ten. He wants to see him. They say he's alive. They say his dad's alive. He says, all right, I want to see him.

Also, he is displaying his absolute authority over them. These are ten men that he just, throw them in jail. Now, this is the moment that some of us have been dreaming of in our own lives. To stand face to face with those who have harmed us. With those who have done more in our lives to destroy our lives than anybody else. That his brothers were able to just take him and in a moment, from being a 17-year-old with a lot of life in front of him, were able to just snatch that away from him and send him off to be enslaved in Egypt.

They derailed his life. As much as anybody can derail a life, they did it. And now he's in a position of power. And this is what some of you rehearse in your mind. Ooh, one day. One day they'll see.

One day I'll get to show them. One day I'm going to show up to my high school reunion. One day she's going to come crawling back to me. One day I'll be in the position. I'll have the job. They'll see that this will work out.

And then I'll be able to tell that guy, I'm going to open my own business. I'm going to put them out like this. We rehearse this in our minds. And so if Joseph had been doing that, now it is. Here it is. Laid out in front of him, teed up.

One day I'll be in a position. One day God will let that dream come true. You will bow down to me. And I will have absolute authority. He could have been holding on to this vision that God had given him as a tool for striking his brothers down. He arrests them.

And let's see how this story continues. It says, So he swaps it. A minute ago it was one of y'all can leave. Nine of you have to stay. Now it's nine of you can leave.

One of you has to stay. And we'll verify that this is true. It says, And they did so. Then they said to one another. So they said, Okay, we'll do that.

Then they said to one another. In truth, we are guilty concerning our brother. In that we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us. And we did not listen. This is why this distress has come upon us. And Reuben answered them.

Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood. They did not know that Joseph understood them. For there was an interpreter between them. Then he turned away from them and wept.

So he hears his brothers begin to speak to each other in Hebrew. And what they say is, No, we deserve this. It's caught up to us. The guilt of our brother has found us out. Meaning that they understood and carried for this amount of time this guilt towards their brother. This sin that they had committed.

And they look at each other and go, No, it's caught up to us. And it's this idea of like God ordained karma. That they've done this and eventually it will catch them and that God will make it catch them. And they said, Because we listened to the distress of his soul and didn't listen to it. We heard it, but we didn't listen. And you can imagine Joseph standing there looking at his brothers and hearing them speak in Hebrew to one another about him and how they were wrong and how they were guilty for what they had done.

And remembering the moment when they were pulling him out of the pit and he had been pleading, calling out them each by name. Naphtali, don't do this. Naphtali, do you hear me? Gad, don't do this. Reuben, is Reuben there? Don't do this.

Reuben, you can lead them. You can change this. Judah, Judah, is it you? Can you? Just crying out to him and being pulled out and seeing enslavers that they're now going to sell him to and actually searching the face of his brothers and seeing which ones would make eye contact and look cold towards him. And which of them wouldn't even look at him and which of them has he pleaded with them?

Don't do this. And his soul was in distress and they didn't listen. And here's him speaking about it and it says he weeps. Now we don't know at this point. Why? Is he weeping because he's angry?

Is he weeping because he remembers the hurt of that moment? Is he weeping because he longs for his brothers and he's glad to see that they at least feel guilt? Is he weeping because it's just all the emotions tied up in seeing them and seeing that they've carried this with them? Because this is part of what we want when we want to exact revenge on somebody is we want them to see what they've done wrong. We want them to know it prior to bringing the hammer down. They did not know that Joseph understood them for there was an interpreter between them.

And then he turned away from them and wept and he returned to them and spoke to them. And he took Simeon from them and bound him before their eyes. And Joseph gave orders to fill their bags with grain and to replace every man's money in his sack and to give them provisions for the journey. This was done for them. Then they loaded their donkeys with their grain and departed.

So he not only gives them the grain they paid for, he gives them their money back and he gives them provisions on top of it. They just load them down. He sends them off. At this point, we're like, what is he doing? Is he just being kind to them? Is this part of his plan?

What's happening? Then they loaded their donkeys with their grain and departed. And as one of them opened his sack to give his donkey fodder at the lodging place, he saw his money in the mouth of his sack. And he said to his brothers, my money has been put back here in the mouth of my sack. At this, their hearts failed them. And they turned trembling to one another saying, what is this that God has done to us?

So they're leaving thinking, let's go get Benjamin and we'll come back. And then on the way, they realize, wait, wait, my money's here. Meaning the Egyptians are going to think we stole. How did this happen? How did we get in a situation where now he thought we were spies and now we've proven dishonest? It says their hearts failed them and they think God did it.

God is orchestrating this to harm us. They go home. They find out that everybody's money. This is the rest of the chapter. I'm just going to explain it. They find out everybody's money is back in their sack.

And they stress out about it. And they tell their father, Jacob, we have to go back with Benjamin. Because we've got to get Simeon set free. And Jacob says, no. Now he loves Benjamin.

It's possible he doesn't fully trust his other sons. We don't know. But he just says, no, like I can't give up Benjamin. Reuben, the oldest, actually looks at him and says, kill both of my sons if I don't bring Benjamin back. And Jacob says, no, if anything happens to Benjamin, my gray hairs will go down to Sheol in sorrow. He just says, it'll kill me.

If he dies, I'll die. So move to chapter 43. Now the famine was severe in the land. And when they had eaten the grain that they had brought from Egypt, their father said to them, go again and buy us a little food. But Judah said to him, the man solemnly warned us, saying, you shall not see my face unless your brother is with you.

That again, I love Jacob in the story. It feels like a very fatherly thing to do, to be like, no, we ain't doing that again. I ain't ever having that. Maybe this is just how my house worked. And then they go on. They run out of food.

He comes back and says, go back there and get me some food again. And they're like, what? Well, you don't remember? You don't remember the conversation we had? And so that's what Judah says. He says, the man told us, you're not going to see me.

You're not seeing my face. This is verse three. Unless your brother is with us. If you will send our brother with us, we'll go down and buy food. But if you won't send him, we will not go down.

For the man said to us, you shall not see my face unless your brother is with you. And Israel said, why do you treat me so badly as to tell the man that you had another brother? And they, he says, why on earth would you have told him that Benjamin exists? Why has that even come up? Go buy grain, hand them money, come back with grain. Why is this difficult?

Why are you showing up and telling them your life story? What, what on earth? Have you ever even been to a store before? Y'all are 10 grown men. What are y'all doing? That's kind of what he's saying.

And they're like, he asked us a bunch of questions. That's their answer. He said, do you have a father? How old is he? Is he still alive? That he asked, do you have a younger brother?

How are we supposed to know as soon as we said we had a younger brother, he was going to say, well, I want to see him. We thought it was weird. And then it turned out bad for us. So turn, turn, I'm sorry. If you have a blue Bible, turn the page. If not, just keep following along.

We're 43 still. So he says, Judah tells his father, hang it on my head. If Benjamin doesn't come back, I'll be held responsible and I'll bear the guilt forever. Now, a couple of things have happened since last time. Last time, it was Reuben, who Jacob does not have the best relationship with because Reuben actually slept with one of Jacob's wives. We're going to see that show up more and when he blesses him, which the word bless sounds nice.

It's not much of a blessing. Reuben says, hang it on my sons, not on me, which is an interesting thing for him to say. And maybe he thought that was weightier, but he says, you can kill my sons. Judah says, hang it on me. And the other thing is now they don't have any grain. So they're out of food.

So he says, let the guilt fall to me if Benjamin doesn't come back. And if we had not delayed, we'd have already gone and come back twice. So verse 11, their father Israel said to them, if it must be so, then do this. Take some of the choice fruits of the land in your bags and carry a present down to the man and a little balm and a little honey and gum and myrrh and pistachio nuts and almonds. Take double the money with you. Carry back with you the money that was returned in the mouth of your sacks.

Perhaps it was an oversight. Take also your brother and arise. Go again to the man. May God almighty grant you mercy before the man. And may he send back your other brother and Benjamin. And as for me, if I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.

So he says, we got to have food. Take the food that we do have, the nice things that we do have, some of the, at least some of the stuff that we have. They need grain, but at least some of the stuff that we have. They need a staple crop and none of that was growing. So they said, take some of this as a gift and may God bless you in it.

So the men took this present and they took double the money with them and Benjamin and they arose and went down to Egypt and stood before Joseph. When Joseph saw Benjamin with them, he said to the steward of his house, bring the men into the house and slaughter an animal and make ready for the men are to dine with me at noon. The man did as Joseph told him and brought the men to Joseph's house. And the men were afraid because they were brought to Joseph's house. And they said, it is because of the money which was replaced in the sacks the first time that he's brought us in so that he might assault us and fall upon us and make us servants and seize our donkeys.

So they went up to the steward of Joseph's house and spoke with him at the door of the house and said, oh, my Lord, we came down the first time to buy food. And when we came to the lodging place, we opened our sacks and there was each man's money in the mouth of a sack, our money in full weight. So we have brought it again with us and we have brought other money down with us to buy food. We do not know who put our money in our sacks. So the steward, it says he replied, peace to you.

Do not be afraid. Your God and the God of your father has put treasure in the sacks for you. I received your money. And then he brought Simeon out to them. So, OK, so what happens is they show up. They think, OK, we got Benjamin.

We'll show him Benjamin. We'll get Simeon. We'll buy some grain. We'll pay them back if they want us to pay them back. And we'll get out of here. They show up and a guy comes over and says, the Lord of the place, which whatever his Egyptian name was, Zeph, Hefoph, Muflef, Muflef.

From last week, he wants you to come to his home. And so they're like, uh, so they show up at the house and they're like, this isn't this can't this isn't good. Right. Like, why does he want us to go to his house? They're standing there talking. They're like, it's got to be the money.

He wants to get us in his house. Then he's going to attack us. They're going to enslave us and keep our donkeys. And so they said, let's go tell him. So they walk up to the door.

They don't go inside. And they're like, we brought the money back. You guys don't even we don't need to go in there. We have all the money. And the guy says, I had your money last time. Which means a couple of really cool things about Joseph.

One, he just paid for their grain. He gave them their grain back and blessed them by giving them their money back. He wasn't going to charge them. They're his brothers. He does that. He also didn't just be like, well, I'm the I'm in charge of this.

So here's some free grain. He paid for it. So he pays for it. The guy who's handling it gets the money and he sends their money back. And they say, just come on in. And then it says, Simeon was brought out to them.

So Simeon comes out. I'm sure he's excited because it's been the amount of time it took them to completely run out of grain and decide we're all going to starve to death. Simeon's been there a while. I assume he was really happy. But part of me thinks he walked out like this.

And they were like, yeah, your dad didn't want to send Benjamin. He was like, yeah, OK, that makes sense. It's good to see y'all. Thanks for coming back. Nice to see you, too, Benjamin. Took your sweet time.

So it says they brought Simeon out to them. Then he brought Simeon out to them, 24. And when the man had brought the men into Joseph's house and given them water, and they had washed their feet. And when he had given their donkeys fodder, they prepared the present for Joseph's coming at noon, for they heard that he should eat bread there. So they're taken care of.

They're tending to their donkeys. They're letting them wash their feet. They're hanging out. And all of a sudden, they hear that Joseph's coming. And so they pile up all the little pistachio nuts and, you know, 10 men trying to make something look real nice. We don't know how nice it looked, but not that nice.

And they piled it up. And they were like, yeah, put some gum and some balm there. That'll be sweet. And then we'll be like, here's our present. It's good to see you. And so they pile it up.

So then when he comes home, they could give him his present. When Joseph came home, they brought into the house to him the present that they had with them and bowed down to him to the ground. He inquired about their welfare and said, is your father well? The old man of whom you spoke, is he still alive? They said, your servant, our father is well, and he is still alive. And they bowed their heads and prostrated themselves.

And he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother, Benjamin, his mother's son. And he said, is this your youngest brother of whom you spoke to me? And then he said, God, be gracious to you, my son. Then Joseph hurried out for his compassion, grew warm for his brother, and he sought a place to weep. And he entered his chamber and wept there. So that had to be weird for them.

He says, is this your brother? May God be gracious to you, son. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen somebody start to cry and try to stop it. But their face looked weird. I don't cry very often, but when I am going to cry, I try to stop it and it does not go well. I've done this before.

I start getting like the yips. I'll be like, like, I just, I can't. My face starts doing like this. I remember my brother on his wedding day, he would like look around people and then he would turn and go like he was just trying to tighten his face and do a little knot. So I'm assuming he looks at me and says, is this your brother?

May God bless you. And just took off. They were like, this man's on something. I don't know what, what this is. And also, if you go weep somewhere, that takes a little bit. I don't know how long it takes you to weep.

A couple minutes. I don't know. I don't know how long, you know, he goes and weeps. He then it says he washes his face and he comes back. He looked different. You don't weep and just bounce back from that.

So when he walked back, they were like, something's going on here. I'm sure when he took off, they thought, oh, this is the time they jump out and get us. You know, he confirmed that he was here and now we're trapped. He comes back. He's wept and cleaned his face. So then verse 31, then he washed his face and came out and controlling himself.

He said, serve the food. They served him by himself and them by themselves and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves because the Egyptians could not eat with the Hebrews. But that is an abomination to the Egyptians. And they sat before him, the firstborn according to his birthright and the youngest according to his youth. And the men looked at one another in amazement. Portions were taken to them from Joseph's table.

And Benjamin's portion was five times as much as any of theirs. And they drank and were married with him. That means they got tipsy. All right. Picture this for a second. The Egyptians know that Joseph is Hebrew.

So they're not going to eat with him. He eats by himself. So the Egyptians eat by themselves. Joseph eats by himself at multiple tables at this place. This is apparently pretty extravagant set up. And all of his brothers get to eat by themselves and they sit in birth order.

And Joseph has all this food brought out. First of all, these men are starving. They came to the place where they thought, if we don't go, everyone dies. So is it okay if we risk Benjamin because he's going to die here or there? Like, can we go? Everybody's going to die if we don't.

So they go. They're starving. All this food is brought out because Egypt is doing well because God ordained that it would be through Joseph and the planning that was going into this. And then, this is my favorite part, he piles up food for all of them that they're amazed. And he gives Benjamin five times as much. Which, if you've ever eaten and you're thinking, like, I think your piece of chicken is bigger than my piece of chicken.

Like, KFC did it to you on purpose. Like, you know, you open yours up and you're like, all right, I'll eat this. And then you see somebody else, they ordered the same thing. But it's like, no, that chicken was healthier. It worked out. I don't know why they gave me the sad chicken.

I think we accidentally got our boxes swapped. Like, you ever had that? Five times as much. It'd be like, if you sat down, I don't know what they had, like Egyptian chicken. And so, like, this guy's got a chicken leg. And then they just keep piling stuff.

Like, you got a piece of cake, they give him a cake. They give you a drumstick, they give him a whole chicken. Five times as much. So they're piling this up and they're like, did they think we sat in reverse order? Obviously, I look older than him, right? Like, Ruben's on the other end going, why are they, what is happening here?

And you know, they probably look at him like, everybody's got to just eat what they were given and be respectful. But I wonder if they were like, Benjamin, can I have some of that? And Benjamin was like, I don't want to be rude. I think I'm going to have to eat this whole cake. You know, I haven't eaten in like a year. I think I'm going to have to just eat this whole chicken.

I don't want to offend anybody. I hate to end up in prison. All right, so they do that. Chapter 44. Then he commanded the steward of his house, fill the men's sacks with food as much as they can carry.

Put each man's money in the mouth of his sack and put my cup, the silver cup, in the mouth of the sack of the youngest with his money for the grain. And he did as Joseph told him. As soon as the morning was light, the men were sent away with their donkeys. They had gone only a short distance from the city. Now, Joseph said to his servant, up, follow after the men. When you overtake them, say to them, why have you repaid evil for good?

Is it not from this that my Lord drinks and by this that he practices divination? You have done evil in doing this. So he gave him his cup that they're going to accuse. They're going to say he practices divination with. Now, we don't know if that was just the accusation, if it was made to seem even more powerful, if he actually did practice divination, he lived in Egypt and had taken on some Egyptian practices. You're not supposed to practice divination.

But we don't know. But that's part of the story. So it's a way to kind of fortune tell or whatever. When he overtook them, he spoke to them these words. And they said to him, why does my Lord speak such words as these? Far be it from your servants to do such a thing.

Behold, the money that we found in the mouths of our sacks, we brought back to you from the land of Canaan. And how then could we steal silver or gold from your Lord's house? Whichever of your servants is found with it shall die. And we also will be my Lord's servants. And he said, let it be as you say, who is he who is found with it shall be my servant and the rest of you shall be innocent. So he goes.

And can you imagine the integrity they have that they just say, no, no, no, no. We didn't take anything. And if you find it, kill that one and we'll all be slaves. They just were like, we didn't do this. And he says, fine, but we'll, we'll be a little more fair about it. We'll just make him a slave, whoever it's found with.

Then each man quickly, this is verse 11, 44, 11. Then each man quickly lowered his sack to the ground and each man opened his sack and he searched beginning with the eldest and ending with the youngest. And the cup was found in Benjamin's sack. Then they tore their clothes and every man loaded his donkey and they returned to the city. They didn't just say, well, Benjamin, sorry, buddy. They all said, oh no, it can't be Benjamin.

They tear their clothes and they just get back on their donkeys and they all go back. When Judah and his brothers came to Joseph's house, he was still there. They fell before him to the ground and Joseph said to them, what deed is this that you have done? Do you not know that a man like me can indeed practice divination? And Judah, and this was all through a translator. So he would have said really aggressive things.

They looked at him and they looked at the translator and the translator would say it. And then he would look at him and aggressively say things again. They would look at the translator like that and then say, oh, that sounded worse than the first one. And so they would listen to it. Practice divination. Verse 16.

And Judah said, what shall we say to my Lord? What shall we speak or how can we clear ourselves? God has found out the guilt of your servants. Behold, we are my Lord's servants, both we and he also in whose hand the cup has been found. But he said, far be it from me that I should do so.

That's Joseph responding. Only the man in whose cup and whose hand the cup was found shall be my servant. But as for you, go up in peace to your father. Do you see what's happened? Joseph. Took the same 10 brothers.

Put him in a situation where they can sell Benjamin into slavery and walk away. They can get rid of Benjamin. He can be a slave in Egypt and they can walk away. So Joseph just says, no, he'll stay and be a slave. Y'all are free to go. Then Judah went up to him and said, oh, my Lord, please let your servant speak a word in my Lord's ears and let not your anger burn against your servant.

For you are like Pharaoh himself. My Lord asked his servant saying, have you a father or a brother? And we said to my Lord, we have a father, an old man and a young brother, the child of his old age. His brother is dead and he alone is left of his mother's children and his father loves him. Then you said to your servants, bring him down to me that I may set my eyes on him.

And we said to my Lord, the boy cannot leave his father. For if he should leave his father, his father would die. Then you said to your servants, unless your youngest brother comes down with you, you shall not see my face again. When we went back to your servant, my father, we told him the words of the Lord. And when our father said, go again and buy us a little food, we said we can't go down unless our youngest brother goes with us. And then we will go down for we cannot see the man's face unless our younger brother is with us.

Then your servant, my father said to us, you know that my wife bore me two sons, one left me. And I said, surely he's been torn to pieces and I have never seen him since. If you take this one also from me and harm happens to him, you will bring down my gray hairs in evil to shield. He says, now, therefore, as soon as I came to your servant, my father and the boy is not with me. As soon as I come to your servant, my father, the boy is not with me. Then as his life is bound up in the boy's life, as soon as he sees that the boy is not with us, he will die.

And your servants will bring down the gray hairs of your servant, our father, with sorrow to shield. For your servant became a pledge of safety for the boy to my father, saying, if I do not bring him back to you, then I shall bear the blame before my father all my life. Now, therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my Lord and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father. Joseph tees it up for the older brothers to be able to walk away and leave Benjamin there to have him be a slave in Egypt.

And Judah comes and says, I can't, I can't go back. I can't go back without Benjamin. I'll take his place. I'll be a slave in Egypt. Benjamin's got to go home. I'll be a slave in Egypt.

Benjamin's got to go home. I'll take his place. I've already made a pledge. I'm not doing it. I'm not going back. I'm not going back again and telling my father that his son is dead.

I've seen that once. I don't want to see it again. I'm not doing it. Chapter 45. Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him.

And he cried, make everyone go out from me. So he yelled this in Egyptian. His brothers don't understand. He just yells, get out of here. And all the Egyptians leave. So no one stayed with him.

And when Joseph made himself known to his brothers and he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it. And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? But his brothers could not answer him for they were dismayed at his presence. Judah says what he should have said so many years ago. He swaps places with Benjamin.

Judah fights for Benjamin's life. He fights for what is right. He does what he should have done. He's the one earlier who was saying we're guilty. And they all agreed. And then Judah, all the brothers walked back broken hearted.

And Judah just says, you can't. We can't lose Benjamin. And when he says it, Joseph just can't control it. And so he yells, get out of here. Everybody runs out but the Hebrews and the Hebrews are looking at him. And then in Hebrew, he says, I am Joseph.

And they didn't know what to do. He starts weeping. And he says, is my dad alive? They didn't answer. They just stare at him. So Joseph said to his brothers, come near to me, please.

And they came near. And he said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here. For God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years. And there are yet five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest.

And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here but God. And he has made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt. Go, hurry up and go up to my father and say to him, thus says your son Joseph. God has made me Lord of all Egypt. Come down to me.

Do not tarry. You shall dwell in the land of Goshen and you shall be near me. You and your children and your children's children and your flocks and your herds and all that you have. There I will provide for you. And there are yet five years of famine to come. So that you and your household and all that you have do not come to poverty.

He said, now your eyes see and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my mouth that speaks to you. You speak in Hebrew. That is my mouth that speaks to you. Hurry up and bring my father down here. Verse 34. Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept.

And Benjamin wept upon his neck and he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them. After this his brothers talked with him. He has them in the palm of his hand to do them harm. And he just wants to hug them and welcome them and draw them near and care for them and provide for them. And he says, I'm your brother who you sold into slavery. And we would want to.

You would want to think that what would follow that sentence is I'm the one you sold into slavery. And now you'll pay. I'm the one that was in the pit and I've waited for this moment my entire life. But he says, I'm the one who you sold into slavery. Do not be distressed. God has worked in this to bring about provision for you.

You didn't send me. God sent me. And there's hope for you because of it. Now, what happens is they go get his father. His father comes back. They weep.

They hug. He settles them in the land of Goshen. He cares for them. His father actually gets to meet Pharaoh. They bless them. They put him in a nice land but not where the Egyptians are.

And then all of Egypt becomes extremely wealthy because they're the only people that have food for the next five years. And the nation of Israel is cared for, protected, and lives in Goshen. God even tells Jacob, don't be afraid. Go down there. I'm at work in this. Now, when we read stories in the Bible, so often we want to see what are we supposed to learn from them?

How are we supposed to act? What did they do wrong that we shouldn't do? What did they do right that we should do? We want to read this story and you could say, when you have the opportunity for revenge, don't take it. When you have the opportunity for revenge, don't. We could put you in the place of Joseph and we could talk through that.

But the problem is with this story is that we're not Joseph. We're his brothers. And Jesus is Joseph. We're the ones who did not want a king, did not want someone we had to bow down to, who actively opposed him. Jesus comes and proclaims a kingdom and humanity rises up against him to destroy him, to cast him out, to kill him. And then he rises, not from a prison, but from a tomb, not to an earthly palace, but to an eternal throne.

And one day everyone will stand before him and have that moment where he says what Peter said about Jesus in Acts chapter 2, which is, Jesus whom you crucified, God has made him both Lord and Christ. Everybody will have someday when they stand before Jesus and see the king who has absolute power over everything. And we'll be like the brothers that our hearts fail us because we know our sin and we know what we've done. But Jesus is better than Joseph. He says the same thing. Wasn't just your sin that sent me here.

It was the father who sent me here so that he might make provision for you. Wasn't just your sin that sent me here, but I came here to pay for sin so that you might have life, that you might have forgiveness, that you might have freedom, that that's the hope found in Jesus. That he is the one who dies, that he might welcome and love his brothers, that he wants to wrap his arms around us, welcome us. That when he looks at his brothers and they're standing back from him and he says, come near to me. It's me. It's me.

He weeps and he hugs them. And that's what Jesus does for us. That Jesus wants you to know your sin. He wants you to see it. He wants you to feel it. He wants you to know your guilt.

But not for condemnation. Not so that you might feel terrible. Not so that you might be crushed by it. But so that you might be free from it. Matt's going to come back up here. As we close out our time, I want you to see this.

He wants you to see your sin. Not for vindictiveness. This is one of the things that people go with the Bible, you know, it just says, it comes out and just says I'm a terrible person. It's like, yes. Yes, it does. It cosigns that you're terrible.

But for your redemption not to crush you. So that you might see it and then it might not weigh on you. That your guilt might not find you out. That he wants you to see your sin and he wants you to turn from it. Just like Judah and them. They changed how they were.

They wanted to turn from this. They knew that they had been guilty and they weren't going to repeat it. He wants you to turn from it and he wants you to come to him so that he can forgive you. So that you can find grace. And reconciliation. That he can welcome you.

Do you know that that's Jesus' response? That he can't control himself. But he overwhelmingly wants to wrap us up. Have us close. Draw us near. Forgive us.

Reconcile us. And he says the same thing. God sent me before you to prepare a place. He sent me before you for provision. Not for harm. For good.

Not for destruction. I'm the one whom you destroyed. But not so that you might be crushed by. But so that you might be saved. That's Jesus. And that's our hope.

That's the only hope we have. That we might see our sin. That we might repent of our sin. And that we might in Jesus find the one who paid for our sin. And who welcomes us back. And prepares a place for us.

That we might have life. And protection. And provision. The goal in this story is not just to be like Joseph. But to be the brothers.

Others who don't deserve anything but condemnation. And who receive everything because of the grace of someone else. Because someone else was willing to suffer. And someone else was willing to carry the penalty on themselves. That Joseph with joy can look at his brothers and say, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. God did this.

God put me in the pit. God sent me to prison. God elevated me out of slavery and out of prison to here. So that he might bless you. And that Jesus looks at us and says the same thing. So many of us think that we come to Jesus.

And he's like, Alright. Alright. It's about time you saw how terrible you are. Now go sit in the corner and think about it. And if you keep it together, then maybe. We feel like maybe he saves me.

But I'm kind of in the back of the group. And I'm not really as welcome as the other ones. Or maybe he saves me. But he's still holding this sin against me. Or maybe he would save me. Or he did save me.

But I've continued to sin. I've continued to be broken. And so now he's going to take it back. And that's not what he does. He says, No, I went to the cross for you. God sent me there that you might be welcomed.

And you might be loved. And you might be grabbed. And hugged. And wept over. And cared for. If you have never placed your faith in Jesus.

I want you to see your sin. And know how terrible it is. I want you to feel the guilt of it. But I want you to turn from it. And take it to Jesus. Who forgives the worst of sinners.

And brings hope in the darkest of places. And joyously welcomes those who've harmed him. In a moment, we are going to take communion together as a church family. Which is where we celebrate and remember that Jesus' body was broken for us. And that his blood was shed for us. And we take bread.

And we're going to dip it in juice. To remind ourselves of his body and his blood. And to remember what Jesus has done. And that we need the gospel. And that our hope is in him. And when you do that today, I want you to remember that, yes, our sin sent him to the cross.

But God sent him to the cross. So that we might be provided for. And that is his provision. His body and his blood shed for you. That you could be welcomed. That our hope is in him.

And our life is in him. If you are not a believer, we would encourage you to place your faith in Jesus. And then take communion. And if you are not a believer. And have not placed your faith in Jesus. We would ask you to not take communion.

Because that is something for believers. Let's pray. God, we thank you for your grace. That you save sinners. And that our hope is in you. The one who suffered and died in our place.

That we might be welcomed when we don't deserve it. And that you go to great lengths to orchestrate. Us seeing our sin. And being able to repent. And being able to be welcomed. And that you have prepared a place for us.

That you have gone ahead of us to bring about life. And may we place our faith in you. And find our hope in you. As you redeem and you reconcile broken situations. We love you and we praise you in Jesus name. Amen.

From the Prison to the Palace

From the Prison to the Palace

Spencer Cary

Transcript

Good morning. My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here. We are going to be in Genesis 40 and 41 today. So go ahead and grab a Bible, follow along with us.

If you don't have a Bible, there's a blue Bible on the road. It'll be on page 20. I love stories that are told in a way where everything comes full circle. Movies that do this well are really good. I remember Slumdog Millionaire, which is kind of a movie that celebrates Indian culture. It's told in a way where everything comes full circle.

The beginning starts where this guy, he's a contestant on the Indian version of who wants to be a millionaire. He's getting ready to answer the final question, the 20 million rupee dollar question. And they're like wondering, how does this guy who comes from like the lower parts of Mumbai, how has this guy gotten all this way? And they think that he's cheating. So they walk through all the questions with him to see how he answered these.

And the way the story is told is that each question is a point that points back to a different part of his life, a different memory, a different experience. And the story is told where it's all of it comes together at the end. It all points and converges to him being able to answer a question that's going to change his life forever. I love seeing this in stories that we get to watch, we get to read. I love seeing this when it happens in your own life. I got to see this recently.

I was in seminary. And in seminary, I started taking extra counseling classes. I started taking extra counseling coursework of the church I was a part of. I started shadowing different counseling pastors and learning. And at the time, I could not have told you why I wanted to take all this extra work. It wasn't a part of my degree program.

It wasn't something I was thinking I was going to be doing a whole lot of when I got into ministry. But there was something that drew me to it. As I think back now, I think part of that was that so much of my life has been connected to suffering, to loss, to death, to all different kinds of experiences. And I think part of it maybe was me wanting to have an answer, to me being able to want to walk people through the Bible and walk them through suffering. What I didn't realize is that stepping into my leadership here in this church, the two things that I would help oversee are teaching and counseling.

And I just love in my office now, I see this whole bookshelf, and there's a whole bunch of books that are a reflection of that, that everything has come full circle for me and how God is using me in our church. I love stories that come full circle, and I love this story of Joseph, because it's going to start coming full circle as we walk through the last parts of this story. We've been walking through the story of Joseph and seeing at the very beginning that he is gifted in dreams, that he's gifted in helping interpret dreams, that that's something that God has gifted him in, and when he uses it the first time that we see it, it does not end well for him. His brothers end up selling him into slavery, which leads to the situation we walked through last week, where he is falsely accused of rape, and now he is in prison.

He is in the pit, and he is suffering. But we're going to see his story start to come full circle with the giftings that God has given him. And as we see this come full circle, there's a question that still remains. Is he going to continue to be faithful to God? Is he going to, in the midst of everything that he has suffered, still going to trust God? We're going to see that answer today as we walk through his story, and we're going to see a picture of faithfulness, a faithfulness that we are all called to as God's people in spite of circumstance.

That in the mess and suffering of life that we face, God still calls us to faithfulness. That because God is sovereign, he still calls us to be faithful, trusting him with our lives, and ultimately trusting him with the reward. So we're going to see that as we walk through this. Let me pray, and then we'll jump into the story. God, I'm thankful that through the trials of life, we are not alone. That through suffering, you do not abandon us.

God, I pray you would help us see that faithfulness to you is better than anything else in this world. I pray that you would make that clear to us this morning as we walk through this story. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so, Joseph, as we walked through the end of last week, is in prison, but he's, like his other work, has been blessed in his work in the prison, so he's kind of become this honorary warden who's helping take care of the prison. So he's in prison, he's helping take care of the prisoners, of the prisoners, and then he gets two new prisoners, which is where we pick up today in Genesis 40, verse 1.

So it says, sometime after this. Now, that's a commentary note from Moses. We don't know how long he's been in prison, but if it's going to say sometime after this, it's probably been years. So he's years in prison, looking over the prisoners, sometime after this. The cupbearer of the king of Egypt and his baker committed an offense against the Lord, the king of Egypt. All right, so we've got two positions, two high-ranking positions in Pharaoh's government.

They're now in prison. We've got the cupbearer and the baker. All right, so the cupbearer in ancient Near East government was a very important position. If you were going to assassinate a king, you did it by poisoning. That was the way to get away with it. So they had cupbearers who would drink the wine, who would drink the drink to make sure it wasn't poison.

So they would take a bullet for them. So that was part of their job. Because they were such a trusted official, they had other responsibilities that were important as well. And then we have the chief baker, also a very important position in the kingdom. He makes the food, which also needs to not be poisoned. It also needs to taste good.

Because if it doesn't, it will end up like an episode of Chopped, and his head will be on the chopping block at the end. And that is where we are at. Both of them are in prison. Both of them have committed offense. We don't know what they did. It doesn't tell us.

Maybe Joseph came to them and said, hey, what did you do to get here? And they just said, unspoken. Like, we don't know. But they've committed offense. They're in prison. And it picks up in verse 2, when Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard in the prison where Joseph was confined.

The captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be with them, and he attended them, and they continued for some time in custody. So again, Joseph is overseeing these guys. These guys are part of his watch. And it picks up in verse 5. And one night, they both dreamed, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined to prison, each his own dream, and each dream with its own interpretation. All right, so they have some dreams that need some interpreting.

Now, we take a step back for a second. We talked about this a few weeks back. I just want to reiterate it. Dreams have value. All right, they have importance.

There's about three different categories we walked through a few weeks back of dreams. Some of them are just random and weird. Just what they are. Like, if in your dream, your dog becomes a person and starts talking to you about your favorite TV show and then turns back into a dog. That's weird. You don't have to read any more into it.

That's just our brain processing things. It's just odd. There's a second category of dreams that has value because it's the working out of different anxieties, fears, experiences, memories. This is what psychology likes to deal in. This is what Froy, one of the fathers of psychology, liked to help interpret, to figure out what our dreams are telling us. And that has value because that is part of what happens in dreams.

We are working through anxieties, fears, all of that. When I was a kid, I had a reoccurring nightmare of these. We were, I remember I was at my house and there was a party going on and then I look up and everyone's gone. And then all of a sudden, these demons start coming down the street to get me. And you may be thinking, wait, that seems a little more spiritual. It wasn't.

It wasn't spiritual because those demons were from the movie Ghost. Ghost. Because my parents thought it was a good idea at five years old to let me watch Ghost. And I don't know if you've ever seen Ghost. That is not an appropriate movie in any form or fashion for a five-year-old. But there are these little demons that are in the movie that would come up and take people to hell.

And it scared the mess out of me. And I had this reoccurring nightmare that those demons from the movie Ghost were coming to get me. So we have nightmares, dreams like that that are sorting out memories, sorting out fears. And there's a third category where dreams can be very spiritual. That God gives them to us and that He's speaking through them. And what we said a few weeks back is as Christians, whatever dreams we have that trouble us, we bring them into community.

We bring them into the church. We have the Holy Spirit as the church and we help sort them out together to see what's going on there. That's how we respond. That is not how they would respond. In their culture, they had specific people who were gifted in dream interpretation. And these men were troubled because they didn't think they had access to anybody like that in prison.

It picks up in verse 6. When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they were troubled. So he asked Pharaoh's officers who were with him in custody in his master's house, why are your faces downcast today? So he sees them and he sees that they're troubled and he could have just kept walking. He didn't have to ask. In the same way that if you're in the office and you see a co-worker who is obviously upset, whose eyes are, you can tell they've been crying, they're red, you could walk past them because you know if you ask them how they're doing, it may turn into a 20 or 30 minute conversation.

Or, you can be a Christian. You can respond in grace and ask them, hey, how are you doing? And that's what Joseph does. He sees that they're dismayed. He asks them how they are doing. Why are you troubled?

And in verse 8 it says, they said to him, we have had dreams and there's no one to interpret them. And Joseph said to them, do not interpretations belong to God. Please, tell them to me. So Joseph has trusted God with this gift. With this gift of interpreting dreams and it has earned him suffering. He had a dream that his family one day would bow down to him, he shares it, he ends up in slavery.

He eventually ends up in prison. That his life has been suffering because of his dreams. So it would be understandable if they said that and he went, hmm, I wish you had somebody who could help. Like hard pass, like I don't want any part of this. It would be understandable because all of his experiences thus far of trusting the gift that God has given him has earned him suffering. But that's not what he does.

He has faith. Throughout all the suffering, throughout all the mess, he still trusts God with the gift that he has been giving. He still has a healthy relationship with God. So he asks them. He offers help. And it picks up in verse 9.

So the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, in my dream, there was a vine before me. And on the vine, there were three branches. So in dreams and in the Bible, Numbers are significant. So this three sticks out. It has significance. And as soon as it budded, it blossoms, as soon as it budded, it blossoms, its blossoms shot forth and the clusters ripened into grapes.

So this is a dream that he can understand. This is wine, grapes language for a cupbearer. Pharaoh's cup was in my hand and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand. All right, so that was his dream. Now Joseph jumps in with the interpretation.

Then Joseph said to him, this is his interpretation. The three branches are three days. In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office. And you shall place Pharaoh's cup in his hand as formerly when you were his cupbearer. So he had to have, I'd like to think, a huge sigh of relief at this point.

He's been troubled, which means he's been trying to sort out what this dream is. What does three mean? It's going to be cut into three pieces. It's going to be pressed out like wine. There's all kinds of fears and in that moment, Joseph steps in and helps relieve him. No, no, no.

You will be restored. You are going to be restored to where you were. But this is what Joseph adds. He says, only remember me when it is well with you and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh and so get me out of this house for I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews and here also I've done nothing that they should put me in the pit. So he makes a plea.

He understands that this is one of the high-ranking officials that serves under Pharaoh. He says, remember me. When you are restored, please remember me because my whole life I've been snatched out of my own land, sold into slavery. I'm in this prison, in this pit for doing nothing wrong. And how many of us feel that? How many of us, that's your story?

That so much of your life has been trying to honor God, has been doing the right thing and you've been passed over. Whether it was a job promotion, you get passed over. Whether it was a sale, whether it was an opportunity, you did what was right and those who were faithless pursued and cheated and did all kinds of things to get ahead of you and you are left behind. We can feel how Joseph feels in the pit, hoping to be remembered, hoping that faithfulness might actually be rewarded. So this is Joseph.

He makes the plea. And while the cupbearer is getting good news, the baker hears it and he's like, oh, how about me? He says, when the chief baker saw the interpretation was favorable, he said to Joseph, I also had a dream. There were three cake baskets on my head. And the utmost basket, there were all sorts of baked food. There was all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.

And Joseph answered and said, this is his interpretation. The three baskets are three days. He's got some good news. And in three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head. Seemingly good news. From you.

And hang you on a tree. And the birds will eat the flesh from you. And that's his interpretation. The chief baker was so excited. He's like, man, the cupbearer got good news. I've got to get in on this action.

Tell me, dreamer, what you got? I have number three. That's good news, right? I've got three baskets on my head. And I've baked goods. And there's birds eating it.

And they're flying. Am I going to fly up out of here? How is this going to end for me? Tell me, dreamer, what do you have for me? Now, Joseph is good at a lot of things. He helped build a business empire.

He's obviously a good warden. He's taking care of the prison. He is gifted in dream interpretation. He is not good at giving bad news. Because he says it just like you did the cupbearer. In three days, your head will be lifted up.

And it's like, oh, yes. No, no, no. Lift it up from your head. You will be hung. This ends badly for you. And he gives the bad news and it goes down exactly how he interpreted.

On the third day, verse 20, which was Pharaoh's birthday, he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants. He restored the chief cupbearer to his position and he placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand. But he hanged the chief baker as Joseph had interpreted to them. Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph but forgot him. So it goes down like he said it would and another disappointment happens for Joseph.

Hoping that maybe he might be remembered. That his faithfulness here might pay off. How many days you think he was waiting for someone to come through the prison to come and get him? How many days was he hoping to maybe see the cupbearer maybe see someone that the cupbearer would send hoping that he might be lifted up out of the pit? And at what point did he finally just say I don't know if someone is coming. This is my life.

I am used. I am discarded. I am forgotten. Flip over to chapter 41. After two whole years. He has been in prison for years and two more years of waiting.

That just shows that our timing is not God's timing. It is not God's timing at all. After two whole years Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile and behold there came up out of the Nile seven cows attractive and plump and they fed in the reed grass. And behold seven other cows ugly and thin came up out of the Nile after them and stood by the other cows on the bank of the Nile and the ugly thin cows ate up the seven attractive plump cows and Pharaoh awoke. Alright so by dream that's a nightmare.

That's fairly terrifying. My dreams don't ever get that graphic. My typical nightmares are I show up on a Sunday and I don't think I'm preaching and somebody says hey you're preaching today and I'm like no I'm not preaching. And it's like no you are and my reoccurring nightmare is I show up and I am unprepared and I have to preach. That is my naked in the office dream that happens regularly and that pales in comparison to the horrors of what he just saw. I don't know if you heard that.

There were seven fat cows eating, drinking, just being cows and seven thin mangy looking cows came up and ate them. Cows don't eat. The only thing they eat is grass and corn. That's terrifying to see these thin cows attack these fat cows and there's blood and it's horrifying and it's a nightmare and Pharaoh awakes and he somehow gets back to sleep. And in verse 5 he has a second dream that says he fell asleep and dreamed a second time and behold seven ears of grain plump and good were growing on one stalk. So again Numbers are significant the seven matters here. and behold after them sprouted seven ears thin and blighted by the east wind and the thin ears swallowed up the thin ears swallowed up the seven plump full ears and Pharaoh awoke and behold it was a dream.

So in the morning his spirit was troubled and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men. Pharaoh told them his dreams but there was none who could interpret them to Pharaoh. Some of you all felt this. You have nightmares night terrors things that disturb you and when that happens the appropriate response is you need to find somebody. You need to sort it out. You need to figure out what happened and that is what happens with Pharaoh.

He has this nightmare these back to back dreams and they're significant and he needs help. So he reaches out to his magicians he reaches out to his wise men and there's no one who can help him until finally somebody remembers. Verse 9 it says Then the chief cupbearer said to Pharaoh I remember my offenses today. When Pharaoh was angry with his servants and put me and the chief baker in the custody of the house of the captain of the guard we dreamed on the same night he and I each having a dream with its own interpretation. A young Hebrew was there with us a servant of the captain of the guard.

When we told him he interpreted our dreams to us giving an interpretation to each man according to his dream. And as he interpreted to us so it came about. I was restored to my office and the baker was hanged. Two years later finally the cupbearer remembers. He tells what happened to Pharaoh how he interpreted the dream correctly and we're starting to see that everything in Joseph's life is starting to converge that all that God has prepared him for is for this moment that dreams for the majority of his life have been his downfall have been his suffering but now they're actually going to be his redemption.

That God is orchestrating it all for this moment and Joseph through it all has not given up on hope has not given up on faith in God that he has been given this gift for a reason. In verse 14 it says then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph and they quickly brought him out of the pit and when he had shaved himself and changed his clothes he came in before Pharaoh. So after years in prison Joseph he's got nasty prison garments he's got to be cleaned up. He goes and he changes out his clothes he gets shaved he gets cleaned up he's being brought before Pharaoh and when he's being brought before Pharaoh he gets it.

He has got one shot at this. He's seen what happens to people in the kingdom that do not please Pharaoh. He has one shot one opportunity to seize everything he ever wanted. Will he capture it? Or will he let it slip? You're welcome to everyone under 40 who listen to hip hop.

Verse 15 And Pharaoh said to Joseph I've had a dream and there's no one who can interpret it. I've heard it said of you when you hear a dream you can interpret it. Joseph answered Pharaoh It is not in me God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer. Joseph hear this he is standing before one of the most powerful men in the world. He is a slave a prisoner I mean there's a lot on the line here and Joseph looks at a man who is worshipped like a God amongst his people and says no you're mistaken no it is God my God that is going to give the favorable news. He looks at this king and he doesn't waver.

He still wholeheartedly believes in God trusts in him but through all the suffering his hope is still secure in him. He stares down this powerful man declares who is actually going to give the news here. So then Pharaoh recounts the dream he tells it again we're not going to read it. Joseph gives the interpretation skip down to verse 25 Then Joseph said to Pharaoh the dreams of Pharaoh are one God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven cows are seven years and the seven good ears are seven years the dreams are one the seven lean and ugly cows that came up after them are seven years and the seven empty ears blighted by the east wind are also seven years of famine.

It is as I told Pharaoh God has shown Pharaoh what he's about to do there will come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt but after them there will arise seven years of famine and all the plenty will be forgotten in the land of Egypt the famine will consume the land and plenty will be unknown in the land by reason of the famine that will follow for it will be very severe and the doubling of Pharaoh's dream means this thing is fixed by God and God will shortly bring it about.

Temptation, Suffering, and the Greater Will of God

Temptation, Suffering, and the Greater Will of God

Spencer Cary

Transcript

Good morning. Y'all, that was some worship. That was good. My name is Spencer. I'm one of the pastors here. We are in Genesis 39 today.

We are in the Joseph narrative. We're in the back stretch, the home stretch of Genesis. And we are following the story of Joseph. We're going to be on page 19 in our Blue Bibles. If you don't have a Bible at home, please take that. We want you to have a Bible that you can read at home, but it will be on page 19.

All right, so we've been in Joseph for the past couple of weeks. We started off the Joseph story, and we're introduced to Joseph. He's one of the 12 sons of Jacob. Joseph, he was the favorite. He was loved by his father so much so that he gets this technicolor, this rainbow coat that probably would have looked really tacky to us, but back in the ancient Near East, probably would have killed it. He gets this coat, kind of shows that he is the favorite, and then God starts giving him dreams.

And these dreams are prophetic, and he's explaining them to his brothers and his dad that these dreams are one day they're all going to bow down to him. And that doesn't go well for him. His brothers get jealous. They beat him up, throw him in a pit, plan to kill him, but his brother Judah steps in and says, no, let's sell him into slavery. We can make some money off this. So Joseph went away, and while he was away last week, we walked through Genesis 38, which is the story of Judah, that God, out of all the brothers, chooses the most broken one, the most messed up one, to bring about his line.

That's ultimately what we see, is that Jesus comes through the line of Judah, and now we're back to Joseph. And we're following Joseph down to rock bottom. His story builds you up, or breaks you down to build you up later. It's a classic rags to riches story. One of the earliest ones I remember, as far as rags to riches stories goes, was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I remember in middle school being assigned to read it, and I was like, man, that book is that thick.

So I did what every other kid did back in middle school. I went to Books A Million, and I got the Cliff Notes. And I read the Cliff Notes. And y'all, the Cliff Notes is a good story. Like, it's a really good story. It only needs to be that long.

But it's like a classic rags to riches. Pip is this little orphan, and he gets some good luck. He gets a benefactor. He rises through the ranks of English society. And he lives happily ever after. He gets the girl of his dreams.

We love stories like that. If you were like me, and you didn't like to read stories like that, but you'd like to watch all of the movie. I got to watch all of The Pursuit of Happiness. And that's another classic rags to riches story. It's a true story. Will Smith, he plays this guy that in the 80s lost everything.

Him and his son had to live homeless on the street as he was doing an internship at a brokerage. And it's like 90 minutes of Will Smith getting his teeth kicked in. And five minutes of he made it. Yay. And it just kind of breaks you down and builds you up. Joseph is a little bit better.

We get some more chapters with some more length of how he's going to rise. But today we're going to follow him to rock bottom. So we're in Genesis 39. And in this story today specifically, we're going to see that he undergoes sexual temptation. And I want to spend some time in this today because we're in an overly sexualized culture. And the Bible has some stuff to say about it.

So we're going to spend some time in that. When we take a step back from it, we're going to see that all the suffering, all the trials that Joseph is undergoing is part of a bigger plan that is in play. So let me pray. And then we will jump into the text. God, thank you so much that you've given us your word, that we get to open it every Sunday. Be exposed to the gospel.

Be exposed to you. God, I pray that you would speak to us in this story. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right.

Verse 1. Now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, had bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there. The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master. So let me pause for a moment. I want to point out something the text clearly highlights. Joseph is about to, he's in suffering, he's about to suffer.

He is in a whole bunch of mess, and it makes it clear the Lord is with him. The Lord does not abandon his people, no matter the situation. So whatever mess that you may be in life, God is with us, for those of us who have trusted in Christ. He is with Joseph. Verse 3. It picks up.

His master saw that the Lord was with him, and the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands. So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him. And he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had. From the time that he had made him overseer in his house over all that he had, the Lord blessed the Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake. The blessing of the Lord was on all that he had in house and field. So he left all he had in Joseph's charge, and because of him, he had no concern about anything but the food that he ate.

All right, so Potiphar is the one that purchases him ultimately. Potiphar is an officer of Pharaoh. Pharaoh is the king. He's the ruler of Egypt. And he's not just an officer. He's a captain of the guard.

So he is a high-ranking official in the Egyptian government. So we're already starting to see here that God has a plan for Joseph. He doesn't get sold to just anyone. He gets sold to this high-ranking official. And he starts to make Potiphar rich. And Potiphar realizes this.

He's like, your God is making us successful. And every bit of success that Joseph had rolls over into Potiphar. Potiphar becomes so successful that he hands over the keys to his business empire to Joseph. So that the only thing he has to worry about is his next meal. And y'all, that is crazy successful. Because you asked me, hey, man, how are things going?

How's real estate? How's the church? And I said, man, deals are going well. These sermons preach themselves. Let me tell you what I'm concerned about. Breakfast.

Duck donuts in the morning. Cafe strudel for brunch. I don't know. Like, real Mexico for lunch. I mean, Libby's. I mean, dinner.

I got options for days. And I don't really, I mean, if I start rolling into that, you'd be like, okay, this is weird. You must have some success. The only thing that you worry about is your next meal. And that's Potiphar. He is growing successful.

He's handed it all over to Joseph. Everything is going well until it's not. Verse 6. Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance. And after a time, his master's wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, lie with me. But he refused and said to his master's wife, behold, because of me, my master has no concern about anything in the house.

And he has put everything he has in my charge. He is not greater in the house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her to lie beside her or to be with her. So Joseph, Joseph is starting to make lemonade out of this situation.

Things are starting to go well. And then his handsome form catches the eye of Potiphar's wife. And it's about to get messy. There's a couple layers to how messy the situation is. The first deals with sexual temptation. Potiphar's wife repeatedly solicits herself, repeatedly offers herself.

It is direct at the start. She says, lie with me. And we get messages like that all the time in our culture, that sexual temptation can be direct. That it shows up on the internet. You are only a click away from being solicited into sexual immorality, into a whole world of broken sinfulness and sexual temptation that leads to sexual sin. We're a click away.

And with smartphones, there are apps for days. There are like 8 billion dating apps that are designed to invite you into this casual hookup culture where sex has been so detached from the way that God created it that it was deeply spiritual, meant for a husband and a wife, for the procreation of children, for the enjoyment of one another and intimacy. It's been so detached from that that there's all kinds of tech companies that are trying to profit off of it. I mean, Facebook. Facebook used to be like, oh man, look at his family. Look at that guy I went to high school with.

What a beautiful family. Look at his kids. Man, it's great. So like old flings soliciting you, like sending messages in your inbox, porn bots reaching out to you. There's no safe space anywhere on the internet. And it's gotten so casual that it's not uncommon to hear stories, even in office environments where someone is just asking, soliciting themselves for casual sex.

It is direct. We see it all over our culture. Over and over again, we see direct messages. And when it's not direct, it's subtle. It's subtle temptation. That's what Joseph also got.

It says, and she spoke to Joseph day after day and he would not listen to her. To lie beside her or to be with her. So she makes the appeal, lie with me. And then she says, no, just lie beside me. Just come join the bed. Lie beside me.

It's subtle. It lures you in. It's just coffee. It's just lunch. It's just text messaging. It's just messaging back and forth.

Lie beside me. We will justify ourselves that it's just coffee, that it's just a drink, that it's just a meal. It's just messages. Yeah, there's some sexual jokes that got thrown in. It's not that big of a deal. It lures you in like a frog on a slow boil.

The old wives tale, for those of you that like cooking frogs, was that if you want to cook a frog, you don't just throw it in boiling water. That you put it in a normal pot of water and you slowly turn up the heat. And it won't do that. The frog will just stay in and it slowly turns up the heat until finally it doesn't realize that it's been boiled. And that is us. As coffee rolls over into someone's place, as lunch turns into more intimate meetings, as messages turn more intimate, it lures you in slowly.

Slowly, until you have slowly boiled over from sexual temptation into sexual sin. The reality is that no one is immune to it in this culture. It is all over the place. That's why we need to take the Proverbs seriously. The Proverbs has a lot to say on this. There's one passage I love in 721-22 that says, Whether direct or subtle, sexual temptation lures us into impurity, into sexual immorality, into adultery.

And what that can ultimately do is for those of us who say we love Jesus, it lures you down a road that you may never return from. And if you reject Jesus all together on that road, that ultimately leads you to death in hell. Like an ox to the slaughter. That is what Joseph was facing day in, day out. But that's not the only layer that makes this messy.

You see, the second layer that makes this worse is that Joseph is a slave. There is an imbalance. There is a power imbalance here. She is a free woman and she's not just any free woman. She's the free woman wife of a powerful official. And Joseph doesn't have certain rights.

This is so picturesque of what we discovered a couple of years ago that was at the heart of the Me Too movement. That a couple of years ago, our nation's eyes were open to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories that came out that showed the brokenness of this world and how it has been for thousands of years. That there are those in power and authority who objectify, who harass, who assault. And some of you have seen this and some of you have been through this. And I am sorry. I'm sorry that we live in a broken world where this is the reality.

I'm sorry for some of you that we're not able to escape this. But we're stuck in this. Let me say very clearly. God is judge. And that one day Jesus will sit on the throne. And every single wrong will be answered for.

You can take that to the bank. The Bible gives us the picture that Jesus is a judge who will judge all of these wrongs. But the Bible also gives us people that we can empathize with. Joseph being one of them. Joseph knows what it's like every day to go to work thinking, I'd just like to do my job and being harassed over and over and over again. Wondering if you say the wrong thing, what is that going to do to your standing?

Wondering who you can talk to. Wondering if anyone is going to believe you. Feeling powerless. Let me also say clearly, if that is you, if you are currently in that situation, we want you to come and talk to us as pastors. Because you do not need to be in that. We want to be able to help you out of that situation.

This is the situation of many. This is the situation of Joseph. So how does he respond to the sexual temptation? How does he respond to this abuse of power? He responds by declaring truth. He has three points of truth.

He says that this would be an abuse of trust with Potiphar. He says he has put everything in my charge. He's like, I'm not going to abuse the trust that I have. He's given me everything. I'm not going there. Then he says, you are his wife.

He makes the point, this would be an offense against Potiphar. I'm not going to sin against him. And then he makes a third point. He says, how am I going to sin against God? He says, how then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? He ultimately sees what is true about the Bible, that all sins ultimately and primarily are a sin against God, and he's not going to do it.

He responds with truth. He speaks truth into the situation. And I want to expand this category for us. I actually want to take a moment to step away from the story and as a pastor talk to you guys because every season I see different people in our church that are wrestling with this, that are fighting sexual temptation. So I want to expand Joseph's categories that he gives of truth, and I want to give five ways that we can battle sexual temptation, that it might not roll over into sexual sin.

And the first one being, cultivate a deep love for Jesus. Cultivate a deep love for Jesus. If we are so in love with God, if we are worshiping Him, if we are delighting in Him and enjoying Him, if we are doing that well, seeking Him in worship, in word, in prayer, if we're doing that, when sexual temptation comes, we'll see it for what it is, that it's gross, that it leads to death, that it does not satisfy. That's why we say over and over again in our church that we believe that Jesus is better than everything else is because we want to believe that, even in the midst of temptation, that we might see that He is better.

That is your primary way. If you're enjoying God, you can absolutely take sexual temptation and push it to the side. But there are going to be seasons where we are not doing that well. Let me give you a second way to fight this. The second way is to memorize and quote Scripture. Memorize and quote Scripture.

Psalm 119.11 says, I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. That's the hope, that we might know God's word, that we might hide it deeply in our hearts, that we might be able to use it to combat sexual sin in all temptation. That's what Jesus does when He's being tempted in the wilderness by Satan. He quotes the Old Testament, fires back, uses the Bible as a weapon. That's what Paul is getting at in Ephesians 6 when he says, put on the full armor of God that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. He gets to the sword of the Spirit, which is imagery for God's word.

That you might use it as a weapon, that you might use it as a weapon to defend yourself against evil. Store up the word in your heart. Have some fighter verses memorized that you might be able to repeat them in a moment's notice. Third, pray for an escape. Pray for an escape. 1 Corinthians 10.13 says, No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.

God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. But with temptation, He will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. That's been taken out of context. And people will say, God doesn't give you any more than you can handle. Sometimes He does. So that's not what the passage is getting at.

What He's saying is, is that when you are being tempted, if you pray, God will give an escape. That needs to be our heart. That we would pray, as Jesus prays, lead me not into temptation. That we might not engage in sin. That we might find an escape. 4.

Invite church family in. Invite church family in. We are not meant to walk in this alone. The reality is, is in an over-sexualized culture, where all of us have faced this, and all of us have fallen in some form or fashion. You are not alone. If you have stuff hidden, the Bible calls you to bring it to the light.

As 1 John 1, 5-10 teaches, that we might walk in the light together. That brings true fellowship with the body, and also helps expose light to darkness. There are times, there are seasons in my life, where I'm asking the people in my life, whether it's Chet in the office, or the guys in my group, hey, this is what's going on. Can you pray about this? Can you also ask me about this in three weeks? We are not meant to walk in this alone.

Invite church family in. Fifth, fear God. Fear of God is important in battling sexual temptation. Now that is not popular in our culture. It is not popular to uphold the fear of God, to uphold the wrath of God, but it is vital in your fight against sexual temptation. That's what Joseph ultimately does.

He says, I'm not going to sin against God. That's what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5, when he's teaching specifically on this. He says, If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out, throw it away from you, for it's better for you that one of the parts of your body perish, then your whole body be thrown into hell. And the reason why that's important is because in seasons where you're not cultivating a deep love for Jesus, when you're not remembering his word to use it, when you're not praying well, when you're not inviting people in, you know what will help? Fear of God. Because flames are hot.

It is deeply helpful for me in those seasons to remember that eternal flames are hot, and I don't want any part of that. I want Jesus. So we are called to use fear of God as a means to battle this. And then Joseph gives us a bonus one in how he responds. Verse 11. But one day, when he went into the house to do his work, and none of the men of the house was there in the house, she caught him by his garment saying, Lie with me.

But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house. So Joseph's working, gets in a situation where he is alone. It says she caught him by his garment. That isn't just, oh, she grabbed his garment. The idea in the Hebrew is that she grabbed and seized his garment, and she pulled him in and said, Lie with me. Now there's no amount of declaring truth in this moment.

It's going to help. She's got him by his outer garments. They would have had outer robes with a sash, and then there have been inner garments that have been more like long underwear, like a long gown. She has his outer garments in hand. And he does one of the more biblical responses to sexual temptation. He books it.

He flees. He runs from the situation, so much so that she's got his garment. He like wiggles his way out, just has the inner garment on, and books it, and leaves with his garment left in her hand. That's what Paul is getting at in 1 Corinthians 6, 18, when he says, Flee sexual immorality. When everything else fails, when all defenses have been exhausted, run. That's the biblical picture.

Run. If you are single, if you are not in a covenant marriage, and you are dating someone, and you put yourself in a compromising situation, run. If you're on the couch, if you're in the car, get out. Flee. That's the command. Run from sexual temptation.

When the culture is wooing you, and saying, Explore your sexuality. Explore sexual freedom. I want to plead with you. There are millions of people who have gone down that road, and have never come back. Run. Flee.

When your phone is tempting, and you are scrolling, drop it. Run. Flee. Whatever situation you are in, or you are feeling this, the last line of defense is to run. Get out. Flee.

We have got to start taking sexual temptation, and sexual sin seriously, because it will kill us. I have a son who's two. We do fires in the backyard. We have this fire pit, and my daughter, she knows when the fire is going, and she's kind of a timid person in general. She stays far enough back, but my son is like a bug, led to a bug zapper. I mean, he just, he sees the flames, and it's not like he just runs into it.

He just slowly, you know, gets closer and closer, and I've got to pull him out. I've got to yell at him, because he doesn't realize, that if he gets close enough, it will mar him. It will kill him. And that is the same with us. If we are not careful, we will get lured in, and we will not survive. And we need to treat it with the seriousness that the Bible treats it, and respond like Joseph.

Joseph responds righteously, but as we're going to see next, his righteous response leads to more suffering. Verse 13. And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and had fled out of the house, she called to the men of her household, and said, see, he has brought among us a Hebrew to laugh at us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice, and as soon as he heard that, I lifted up my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me, and fled, and got out of the house. Now she has made up a rape allegation.

And what's worse is, is she's got evidence. This false allegation, she's got his garment. And this is a big deal. It's a big deal, period. It's a big deal for him, because Joseph is a slave. He does not have certain rights.

She is a free woman, and she's accusing him. And in his culture, he can be put to death for this. And she adds to it. It wasn't just the attempted rape. It was, he's making a mockery of our family, and a shame on our culture. That's a big deal.

And there's a little bit of a racist tinge there. This Hebrew, who is going to make a mockery of us. All of the goodwill that Joseph has stored up is about to be exhausted as soon as Potiphar gets home. Verse 16. Then she laid up his garment by her until his master came home.

And she told him the same story, saying, The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to laugh at me. But as soon as I lifted up my voice and cried, he left his garment beside me and fled out of the house. As soon as his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, This is the way your servant treated me. His anger was kindled. And Joseph's master took him and put him into prison, the place where the king's prisoners were confined. And he was there in prison.

So Potiphar hears this, and justifiably, he gets angry. But he doesn't kill him. He throws him into the king's prison. And I want us to imagine how Joseph would have felt. I mean, he was sold into slavery by his brothers. He worked his tail off for years to work his way up in this household, only to do the right thing and end up suffering regardless.

Sometimes suffering is so unfair. Sometimes you do the right thing and you still suffer. Sometimes we suffer because of our own mistakes. But there are situations when you respond the way you're supposed to and you still suffer the consequences. I love movies that do this. I love stories that bring out this feeling because there's a feeling in all of us when we see unjust suffering that just makes us mad, that makes us upset.

I love stories that do this. There are two movies that we watched all the time growing up, my stepdad and I. We watched them when they come on TNT. My mom would literally get out of the chair and leave because we watched them so many times she was tired of seeing them. We watched Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Two Stephen King novels made into awesome powerhouse movies.

Both capture the same thing. The Green Mile is about a man that, it's about prison guards that are on death row. They're supervising death row. There's a new prisoner that comes in. He's accused of killing two little girls in a pretty horrific manner. And he's big and he's scary at first, but the more they get to know him, they see that he's softer.

And then they start to see there's actually something miraculous about him, something angelic almost. He starts performing these miracles and they slowly begin to realize there's no way he committed these murders. And towards the end of the movie, you realize there's somebody else on death row that's actually guilty who did commit the murders. But there's no way to prove it and he still goes to the electric chair. And there's this scene when all the prison guards are in tears and they're angry and they're upset that he is going to be put to death. And what's great about stories like that is they bring you in to the same feeling that you're upset, that you are mad, that it's not right that he would suffer for something he did not do.

I love that because it brings out what's written into us as being made in the image of God. There's a part of us that hates to see unjust suffering. But God operates within that fallen story and he uses suffering for greater purposes, which is what is ultimately going to happen here with Joseph. Verse 21, But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. And the keeper of the prison put Joseph in charge all of the prisoners who were in prison. Whatever was done there, he was the one who did it.

The keeper of the prison paid no attention to anything that was in Joseph's charge because the Lord was with him. And whatever he did, the Lord made it succeed. So the chapter ends with a foretaste of where this story is going. But for now, we're at rock bottom in the prison. He is suffering. And as Americans, this is difficult for us.

We don't have a really strong theology of suffering. We don't grasp why God would use situations like this. But God makes it clear he is with him. This is not purpose. He is behind him. He shows him steadfast love.

But he does the same thing he did with Potiphar. God is with him. He blesses his work. He actually basically becomes a little bit of the sub kind of warden of the prison. That God is with him. He's not going to abandon him.

His suffering is aimed at a bigger purpose in this story. And we're going to walk through that in the coming weeks. But this is how our God works. God works within the broken story to bring about suffering for greater purposes. And suffering often is the way that God accomplishes his greater purposes. And God knows that that's not fair.

That is why he came. That is why Jesus came. That is why God took on flesh and entered the story himself. And when he took on flesh and he entered into our story he took on human suffering. He experienced suffering. He experienced temptation.

That's what Hebrews 4 is getting at when it says for we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. We have a God who can sympathize. Who knows what Joseph went through. Who knows what we went through. Who subjected himself to temptation in the wilderness from the devil himself. This is what C.S.

Lewis has to say about this. He says we never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it. And Christ because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means. The only complete realist. You have moments in your walk where you are so tired of fighting sin and you are so weary. Jesus gets it.

He's the only complete realist and what he is getting at what C.S. Lewis is picturing for us is that he's the only one. All of us have fallen in temptation at some point. Jesus is the only one who's gone through the full extent of temptation and did not sin. He is the only complete realist. He knows what it's like to be Joseph day in, day out being tempted and he also knows what it's like to respond like Joseph to persevere in righteousness only to suffer in the end.

The greater purpose of Joseph leads to the greater purpose of Jesus and that was Christ going to the cross to suffer for all of us that have fallen. For all of us that did not respond like Joseph that have fallen to temptation. So that by faith in believing in his death and resurrection we might actually experience what it looks like to have the God the universe in us inside us the Holy Spirit helping us fight that we might not fall to temptation anymore. All of Joseph's story eventually leads to Christ on the cross for us. And that is good news for everyone in this room that did not run like Joseph.

For all of us that gave in to temptation for all of us that were swept up by lust. For all of us that have fallen and sometimes over and over and over again. For everyone in this room who has felt the crushing weight of shame and guilt the hope is that Jesus came that he might die for us that we might get his perfect standing and he might take our shame and our guilt that he might cover us those that have fallen. That is the hope of the gospel and the response for us is to run to Jesus to repent and run from sin and be made new. And we're going to celebrate as the band comes up.

Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat

Joseph and the Technicolor Dream Coat

Chet Phillips

Transcript

It's good to see you all this morning. My name is Chet. I am one of the pastors of Mill City Church. If this is your first time with us, we're glad you're here. We gather together on Sundays. We have groups that meet throughout the week.

We gather on Sundays. We sing to Jesus and about Jesus. And then we open the Bible and we read it and study it together. If you'll grab a Bible and go to Genesis chapter 37. We've been walking through the book of Genesis. If you have one of these blue Bibles, it'll be on page 18.

If you don't own a Bible, take this one with you when you leave. That's our gift to you. We want you to have a Bible. We've been walking through this story. We've been following this family. And we are now going to begin looking at the life of Joseph.

We're going to be following his story for the next little while as Genesis kind of rounds its way out. So we are in the home stretch. We have turned. We've touched third base and we are headed home. We're going to be able to finish this book up within the next year or two. And the next several weeks we'll be finishing up and studying through Joseph.

I, when I was in 10th grade. Oh, sorry. First of all, let me say I'm glad. But I'm always excited when the elementary students are in here. It's good to see you all this morning. I love having the elementary students in here.

I learn things. Like today, I learned that your soul is located right here. Which makes so much sense as to how I feel after I've eaten. Like I've just fed my soul. And so it's good to see you all this morning. When I was in 10th grade, I was playing quarterback for our JV football team.

And I was not a very good quarterback because I was what my driver's ed instructor called impetuous. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that word, it means when you need to make a decision quickly, you just go for it, which is a problem when you're at yellow lights or when you're throwing a pass into double coverage. So I threw a lot of interceptions. And we were only a few games in. I went to, I faked a handoff. I was rolling out this way.

Somebody grabbed my right shoulder. My left foot got out in front of me and buckled like that. Oh, I actually just did there because it's got problems. And my kneecap shot out of place, which it does. Well, it started around then. And I would have one knee injury every football season for the next six years.

And I learned a lot of things. I was introduced to LCLs and PCLs and ACLs and meniscus and sublexed patellas. I dislocated my kneecap a lot. And if you've never done that, if you've never dislocated like your left kneecap, just imagine what it would feel like to dislocate your right kneecap and then pretend it was over here and you'll have a good idea of what that feels like. And so I did that a lot. And what I was really introduced to was having plans for the way things were going to work out and then having that just knocked out from under you.

That ended my quarterbacking career. I didn't go pro. You know, I just never, it just knocked it out. And I did this every football season. I would get injured again. And so the progress I had made and the way things were working would just get reset.

And I would just have my plans, my future just wiped out from under me. And that was kind of how it began. And this happens in life consistently and on a much greater scale. That we will have plans for our future and just have them snatched away. We'll have plans for our future and how things are going to look and just have our legs knocked out from under us. We'll lose a job.

Somebody will have been drinking and will drive left of center. We will have a parent leave or a spouse leave. We will have plans. We'll have a vision for what future is going to look like and just have it derailed. And that's what happens in this story. That's what happens in the life of Joseph.

And so we're going to ask that question today is what do we do in those times when we just get kind of stuck where we had a plan, we had a future, we had an idea of what things were going to look like and that just gets taken away from us and now we're just kind of stuck in a holding pattern. And so that's what we're going to be looking at this morning. So I'm going to pray and then we'll start reading this text together. God, we come here today from all different places. There are some people who have had a joyous, life-giving week. And there are some people who have had the life beat out of them this week.

There are some who feel much the way Joseph is going to feel like the future was snatched away, like they're stuck in kind of a holding pattern. And we just ask for your help as we study this and we ask for your Holy Spirit to minister to us, to comfort us, to teach us that we might grow to look more like you and that we might grow in our love for Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen. Chapter 37, verse 1. Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings in the land of Canaan.

These are the generations of Jacob. Now whenever it says that, it means we're kind of starting a new chapter, a new set of stories. And it says, Joseph being 17 years old. So let's pause for a second and let's remember who Joseph is. At this point, now we left off in chapter 35. For the few of you that maybe remembered that and you're going, wait a second, did we just skip some stuff?

I'm going to read back and find out what we skipped. I'll tell you real quick. We left off in chapter 35. They move towards Bethel. God protects them. Then they live in Bethel for a little while.

They move from Bethel. Rachel dies in childbirth. Rachel is one of Jacob's four wives. You really should only have one. He has four. She's his favorite.

If you have multiple wives in the Bible, you're not supposed to have a favorite. So he's messed this up in multiple ways. But he has multiple wives. He has a favorite. She passes in giving birth to what she names, her son, who she names Ben-Oni, which means son of my strength or son of my sorrow. And his dad changes his name to Benjamin, which means son of my right hand.

And he's honoring his wife and acknowledging that he's lost a part of himself. That is Joseph's little brother. So his favorite wife has two sons, Joseph and Benjamin, who are the second to last and last of his children. And so he's got 10 older sons from his other wives. He's got these two sons. That's who Joseph is.

He's second youngest and first son of Rachel. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. All right.

So Bilhah and Zilpah had four sons, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And when it says he was a boy with them, it does not mean that they were all, they were friends and all the same age. It means he was their boy. He was their small boy. He was their lad. He was their runner.

So they were teaching him how to tend the flock. And he was running back and forth and having to do all the things they said and working for them. And he brings a bad report. He goes and tells his father that they're not doing right. Now we don't know what they were doing.

It just says he brought a bad report. He tells them that either they're sinning or they're not treating him well. I remember when we were little, I have an older brother and a younger brother. And my older brother kept demanding that me and my younger brother do things. He would send us to do things. He would send us on errands.

We were his small boys because he was older than us. And my mom and dad fussed at him and told him to stop doing this. And then one day we were down playing in the woods. We had a little camp and we said our, I can still remember vividly, he was like three or four at this point, him dragging a two liter Mountain Dew down to us from our house. It was almost as big as he was but we had sent him to get us a drink so he brought a two liter Mountain Dew which is a brilliant choice on the part of a four year old. My parents fussed at us and said, y'all have got to quit telling Vince, making him run all your errands and do all this stuff for you.

And my older brother looks at him and says, Mama, you gotta fuss at Chet. Don't fuss at me, you gotta fuss at Chet because every single time I tell Chet to do something he turns right around and tells Vince to do it. But there's this dynamic here where these four have this small boy Joseph and Joseph goes to his father and he gives a bad report and we don't know, we don't know, there's two kind of ways to give a bad report. There's a way that you tell on someone that is for your own benefit. You're telling on them just to make yourself look good, just to puff yourself up. I remember going to my dad one time and I was doing a service for the family because every time my older brother did something wrong, I would let my parents know.

They needed to know these things. They needed to stay on top of his behavior and his actions. And so I went to tell on him one time and I remember my dad looking at me and going, he just looked disgusted. He just stood there looking at me for a while and I was like, this is not the right response. Maybe I was thinking, yeah, that's right, we should be disgusted at Logan's behavior. I don't know.

He just, but I could tell it was like aimed at me and it was just like, okay. And then he said, you're just a little snitch, aren't you? Just a little rat fink, which y'all should use in real life from now on. Rat fink is an amazing term to call people. And he called me a rat fink and he said, you're just a little tattletale. He said, look, I don't want to hear it anymore.

It's you and your brother against me. It's not me and you against your brother. That'd be messed up. I'm not on your team. Quit, quit narking on your brother all the time. And I just remember thinking, but the whole reason he was doing that was because the only reason I was telling on him was to make myself look good.

It wasn't that I was actually genuinely worried about my brother and his character and his life and his health. I just wanted him to get in trouble because it made me look good and I enjoyed watching him be in trouble. There's also a genuine, heartfelt what they're doing is wrong and giving a bad report. We don't know which one he did. Best guess though is that he did this in integrity, in honesty, just because as you watch this play out, his brothers aren't very good people and he seems to genuinely handle things well. So as best we can watch, they don't seem to have a lot of integrity.

Joseph seems to, so it seems as if he's given a genuine report of they're not doing some things right and he's not a rat fink, if you will. He does tell on them. It says this, it says he brings a bad report which is a good way to make your brothers not like you, whether they're wrong or not. That's a really good way to make them not like you. So they're already reading into this.

They would be frustrated with him. Now Israel, that's his daddy, loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, which is a problem. That's the same thing that Jacob, who's also Israel, that's the same thing his dad did. It caused him a lot of problems. He's turned right around and done the same thing. Because he was the son of his old age.

And he made him a robe of many colors. We don't, that robe, that thing could be a robe of many colors. It could be a robe that was like sparkly or shiny. It could be a robe that had long sleeves. We don't really know. The only other place this is used in the Old Testament is to describe an outfit that a princess is wearing.

So what we do know is that Joseph looked fabulous. He was shiny and colorful and sparkly in his princess outfit. It was amazing. I'm sure his brothers envied him and mocked him because that's how brothers would work. And so he gets this fancy outfit. His dad shows great honor to him, privilege to him.

And in some ways it's treating him the way he ought to treat the firstborn son. And he's messing up the birth order from Reuben down to Joseph. But Joseph is the firstborn of Rachel. So there's this weird favoritism that's plaguing this family. And it says, but when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Some of you who have siblings know what that is like.

You go through these stages where it's like your siblings cannot talk nicely to you, cannot speak nicely to you. You come in and you're like, hey, what's going on? They're like, shut up, get out of here, Steve. Like, whatever. Like, you just have this kind of, this animosity that grows and this happens. And I want you to know this.

Parents, you have a role to play in how your children get along with one another. Seems as if Israel is further fueling this the same way his dad did, but you have a role to play. There's a family in our church family that has a get-along shirt that they make their two children wear at once so that they'll get along. My dad used to make us hug. You have, after we had fought, you have a role to play in trying to help them get along, and he's not, and it's further dividing, and they cannot even speak to him without being cruel to him. So Joseph, this is verse 5, now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.

He said to them, hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright, and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. So he says, we were binding grain, my sheaf stood up, looking good, and all y'all's little sheaves that y'all put together just came right around and bowed down to mine. What y'all think about that dream? His brothers said to him, are you indeed to reign over us, or are you indeed to rule over us? So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words.

Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me. But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come and bow ourselves to the ground before you? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind. All right, we've got to talk a second about dreams.

Immediately, they understood when he tells them this dream, they understood that this ought to be understood in a prophetic way. That there's meaning behind it and so they're saying, oh, are you prophesying to us? Are you telling us that your dream tells the future and that we're going to bow to you? And that's why his dad fusses at him and says, oh, me and your mama are going to bow to you. They were the sun and the moon and your brothers are going to bow to you. Really?

So they understood it to be prophetic. Now, let's talk about dreams for just a second. There's kind of three ways to think about dreams. There's a group in here probably that just believes dreams are just dreams. They don't mean anything. They're your brain keeping itself occupied while you're asleep.

Like if you dream that you had to build a golf cart with your old PE teacher, probably just a dream. You're not waking up thinking, oh, wow, in the future I'm going to have to build a golf cart with my, like it just seems like it's a dream. Like dreams are just dreams. They're just random things. Some people would say, well, no, dreams tell you a lot about yourself. You can study them for psychology.

You can study them to know more about yourself. Like I have a dream periodically where I get up to preach and I, for some reason, have folded my notes into a tiny little thing and then I'm immediately trying to unfold them up here and I can't get them unfolded. The truth is that's exactly what I did the first time I ever preached. I had written all my notes on a yellow sheet of memo pad, had it wadded up in my pocket and got up and it was one of those lecterns with the microphone right here and then just like sweatingly unfolded it while I was sitting here and I don't do that anymore. Crisp, clean sheets of paper.

But I have that dream. I have dreams sometimes where I can't read the Bible or y'all keep moving so like I'll find it, I'll get ready, I'll look up and I'm facing the wrong way. There's that middle zone. I think it means I'm stressed out when I have that dream. Sometimes you have dreams where you're having to give a presentation at work and suddenly, you know, my wife periodically have dreams where her teeth fall out and that kind of stuff. It's just like I have dreams where my contacts are as big as dinner plates.

I can't put them in my eye. Now some of you who study this are going, oh no, I've just learned seven things about you. We can talk later. And then there's other people who are going, no, dreams are prophetic. They're from God. They're dreams that will tell you things that you need to know, reality that's around, things that are coming.

And the answer to this, yeah, okay, some dreams are just dreams. You wake up, you're like, that was weird. You move on with your day. Or, you know, you wake up and you're like, that was weird. I'll be mad at my husband for the rest of the day. Whatever, however you choose to do that.

Then there's the middle zone of like, yeah, maybe it does tell you about something you've been thinking about, something you've been worried about, something you're stressed about. I wouldn't put too much weight there trying to figure out all the secrets of your soul from dreams, but okay. And then yeah, biblically, some dreams are prophetic. We're going to see that throughout the story of Joseph. We're going to get to see that more. The New Testament carries that out.

There are prophetic dreams in the New Testament. When Peter stands up and preaches at Pentecost, he says, your young men, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. It's this prophecy about coming true through the Holy Spirit. That happens. So what do we do?

In general, you don't want to place too much weight on dreams. You want to place some weight. There's room for them to be prophetic, for them to be from the Holy Spirit. But the New Testament also gives warning. It says that people can be puffed up by visions. They can be led astray by dreams.

So we don't want to give them all the weight in the world. We would share them in community under the weight of Scripture. We would discuss them. You could let other people in on them. You can keep them to yourself and just wait and see what happens. Wouldn't make all my life decisions off of dreams.

And we can do what Jacob does here and keep it in mind. Try to pay attention to it. Ask the Lord about it. Talk about it in community. Let Scripture bear weight on it. Make sure you don't run off after them.

Maybe you feel like you need to pray for somebody. Trust that. Walk with people in it. But we don't place too much weight on them. If you want to talk more about that would be interested too. We will talk more about it as well in upcoming sermons.

That's all we can give it right now. He has dreams. They understood him to be prophetic. He understood him to be prophetic. And so they move forward in the story. His father keeps this in mind.

Pick up 12. Now his brothers went to pasture their flock near Shechem. And Israel said to Joseph, Are not your brothers pasturing the flock at Shechem? Come, I will send them to you. And he said to him, Here am I. So he said to him, Go now, see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock and bring me word.

So he sent him from the valley of Hebron and he came to Shechem. All right, let's pause for just a second. He's no longer their small boy. He's not with them anymore. We don't know if that just means sometimes he did this, sometimes he didn't. When they travel off, maybe he just stays closer to home.

He is 17, which means he's in between being an adult and being a boy. They would not count you in a census as prepared for war until you were 20. And so there is some room here, especially for those of you who are in that 15, 16, 17, 18 range. There are some times where it's perfectly fine to be in your parents' household, to be leaning into them for wisdom, to be asking them for help, to be living under that roof. And there are other times where you need to be capable, like he is, to be doing some work. His dad's sending him three or four days away on his own to go find out about his brothers and to give a report.

If you're 16, 17 years old, can you be at home by yourself for three or four days? Are you incapable of doing that? Are you capable of doing that? There's time to be willing to grow and to carry some weight and also to be understanding that I'm still able to lean into my parents and walking that out and trying to work towards health. And that's where he is. So he's sent out on his own 60 or so miles away to find his brothers.

Verse 15, And a man found him wandering in the fields and the man asked him, What are you seeking? And he said, I'm seeking my brothers. He said to him, Tell me, please, where have they been pasturing? Where they are pasturing the flock? And the man said to him, They have gone away for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan.

That's another 20 miles. That's another day or so journey. So Joseph's just walking around fields like this. They walk over a hill. Somebody sees him and says, What are you looking for? He says, My brothers and our stuff, do you know where they went?

And they said, Yeah, I heard them say they were going on to Dothan. And then he heads on to Dothan. He doesn't head home and say, I didn't find them. He finishes the job and he heads on to Dothan. They saw him from afar. Before he came near to them, they conspired against him to kill him.

Okay, so his brothers see him headed towards him. Now, if you know someone and you're familiar with them, a lot of times you can recognize them from a distance. You can tell how they walk. You can kind of tell, Okay, this is this person. I know this person. I don't know this person.

If that person that you know is wearing a splendid rhinestone coat that they wear all the time, you can tell them from a distance easier. And he's wearing his splendid coat. They see him and they go, Okay, here's colorful. Joseph headed our way and they decide, When he gets here, let's kill him. They said to one another, Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of these pits.

Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him and we will see what will become of his dreams. So his brothers hated him. Then they hated him more. Then they hated him even more. Then they see him and they decide, Let's kill him.

Some of you have been betrayed, harmed by family. And it is some of the most harmful thing that can happen. And his brothers, his ten older brothers decide, Let's kill him. And they go about this the way that we go about things. They slowly let it grow and fester in their souls so that eventually it seems like a really good idea to do something absolutely evil and wicked. Some of you right now, if we said, Would you ever do this?

Would you ever do this? You'd say, No. But the truth is, you've already planted the seed and you're already letting it grow. An oak tree doesn't seem like it would come from an acorn, but if you plant it in the ground and it has the right circumstances, it can grow. And some of us right now are fostering bitterness, are fostering lust, are fostering hatred. We're watering it and we're letting it grow and eventually it leads to really heinous action so that we do things we never would have thought we would have done.

And that's what his brothers decide, Let's just kill him. And then, and then we'll see about his little special dreams. When he's dead, we'll see who bows down to him. Verse 21, But when Reuben, that's the oldest brother, the firstborn, he'd had some weight in the family, heard it, he rescued him out of their hands, saying, Let us not take his life. And Reuben said to them, Shed no blood, throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him. And he said this, that he might rescue him out of their hand to restore him to his father.

So Reuben tries to protect him. Now, he's not in the strongest position. He's the firstborn, but he can't just tell him, No, we're not going to do that. Y'all are wrong. I think he probably fears they might turn on him. If they'll kill Joseph, who's Jacob's favorite, they might just kill Reuben as well.

So he just says, No, don't kill him. Just throw him in the pit, in the wilderness. Kind of saying, We'll just let him starve and die, but that way we won't have his blood on our hands. But Reuben's plan was to go get him out. So when Joseph came to his brothers, verse 23, they stripped him of his robe, the robe of many colors that he wore, and they took him and threw him into a pit.

The pit was empty. There was no water in it. He finally sees his brothers. He's been on this trip for days. He's probably like, Oh, here we go. Good.

He may even have some things he was supposed to bring him. We know he was supposed to find out how it was going and give a report. He shows up to his brothers, probably felt like something's a little off here. His brothers gather around him. They rip his robe off of him and they throw him in a pit. Now, he had 10 older brothers.

This probably was a bit of a struggle, but not exceedingly difficult. We can guess that maybe Ruben wasn't really hands-on here, so maybe nine. I don't know if you've ever fought nine people. Unless your name is Jackie Chan, you lost. That's usually how that goes. Because, you know, they don't do the one-at-a-time thing like they do in movies.

And so he is thrown in a pit fairly easily, and I think probably very confused, very hurt. He's the youngest. He's not actually seeking this relationship to be bad. He probably is hurt over how this has all gone down anyway. And now he sees his brothers and they harm him. And they throw him in this pit.

And it's a man-made pit. It would have been used as like a cistern. He can't get out of it. It's probably steep-walled. Kind of like a well. They threw him in a well.

That's kind of how that works. So he fell in at the pit. All right. And then, 25, then they sat down to eat. So they don't even care.

They're not worried about him. And they just throw him in there. And they sit down and start eating. And looking up, they see, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with their camels, bearing gum and balm and myrrh on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, he's one of the older ones, what profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?

Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him. For he is our brother, our own flesh. So he says, it's probably bad if we kill him. Let's just sell him and make some money off of this deal. His brothers listened to him. Then the Midianite traders passed by and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 shekels of silver.

They took Joseph to Egypt. So Joseph had been in Hebron. He'd headed to Shechem, then to Dothan. These guys are coming around from Gilead down to Egypt. They sell him. He heads all the way down over here to Egypt.

He's now very far from where he started. It says, when Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes and returned to his brothers and said, the boy is gone and I, where shall I go? So what he's saying is I'm going to have to pay life for life on this that we lost our brother, that this is under my leadership as the firstborn. He tears his clothes and he says, what have y'all done and where shall I go? Doesn't seem like he's super worried about Joseph. He doesn't say, where did he go?

He says, where shall I go? Then they took Joseph's robe, this is verse 31, and slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood and they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, this we have found. Please identify whether it is your son's robe or not. And he identified it and said, it is my son's robe. A fierce animal has devoured him. Joseph is without a doubt torn to pieces.

In this countryside, they would have had lions, they would have had bears. It was not out of the question that someone would be attacked and killed. And his sons do the same thing to him that he did to his father. They slaughter a goat in order to trick their father away from his favorite son. It's the same thing Jacob did when he pretended to be Esau. And it's the same thing they do to Jacob here.

And Jacob and his family are living out patterns. So he sees it and he says, yes, this is my son and they've, he's obviously been killed by a wild animal. Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, no, I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning. He just says, I'm going to be sad until I die. Thus, his father wept for him.

Meanwhile, the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of the Pharaoh, the captain of the guard. Now, if you've ever been watching a show and something terrible happens and then it just ends and you're like, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no. And then you wait till, okay, I can't wait till the next episode and the next episode picks up and tells you nothing about what just happened in the last episode. That's what happens here. Next week, we're just going to read about Judah and Tamar. The text intentionally says, meanwhile, he's a slave and then just moves on to something else.

It's a Old Testament cliffhanger that we don't know what's going to happen with Joseph. We're just kind of stuck here. And the truth is, Joseph is just kind of stuck. His life was going well. He has 11 brothers. He's the favorite.

They have regular coats. He has a magnificent coat. His dad loves him more than his brothers. Now, we don't know how he handled that. We don't know if he was gracious with it, but he also has these dreams that he, maybe in his youth and naïveness, naivety, tells them what his dream is. And maybe he was bragging a little bit.

We don't know, but he has these dreams from God that say, they're going to bow down to me. He's going to have this position of power. He's going to, in the future, things are going to go really well for him, not only as his brothers, but his dad and his mom. Like, he goes and tells them these dreams. Like, what do y'all think this means? I think it means it's going to be awesome in the future.

He goes, he's working hard. He goes and sees his brothers and immediately thrown into a pit. They save his life, barely, sold into slavery, and everything that was going to happen in his future is taken away. As best he can tell, his whole future, his whole plans, his whole idea of how things were going to work, the way he had marked it out, the way he had mapped it out is just gone. And he's just stuck. I love the word meanwhile there.

Meanwhile, while everything else is going on, he's a slave. And I think sometimes we feel like that. Like, that's how our life works. Like, you, while everybody else was having a good time, while everybody else was advancing at work, while everybody else was having things go well for them, meanwhile, I lost my job. Meanwhile, my family fell apart. Meanwhile, my health deteriorated.

For some of you who are older, maybe you felt this very distinctly when you went to high school reunions, that sometimes you felt like you were showing up and you had the meanwhile story. Oh, you became a doctor. Well, meanwhile, I gained 30 pounds. And, you know, I'm really kind of between things right now. You just feel this on you and that's where he is. He feels, he's stuck.

And we don't get any extra part of the story here. And so what do you do in those moments? What do you do when you're stuck? What did he do? Well, we'll find out later that one of the things he does is he trusts the dreams that he had. He trusts what God had already told him.

He understood that those were prophetic and he trusts them. He believes in them. He would hold on to those, lean back into those, know that this is something that God had said so that regardless of how the situation seemed to be working right now, he could lean back into that. And some of you were like, neat. That sounds nice. I have had zero special dreams.

I've had some weird ones, but none that I'm like, when I get sad, I'll think about that dream and feel good again. That's not how they work. And you're going, I don't have anything special from God that he's told me that I can hold on to in the middle of this crisis, in the middle of this pain. And I would tell you that you're wrong, you have something better. Hebrews chapter one says this, and we'll have it on the screen. It says, long ago, at many times, and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

That means that God specifically spoke to people to give a message that this dream is prophetic, that he speaks in a way to declare what his will was, what he was doing, what he was about, what was going to happen. And then it says, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed to the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. That through Jesus, he has spoken definitively and clearly that he loves us, that he's good, that he's the heir of all things, that he's the creator of the world and that there's hope fully and forever in Jesus, that he has spoken through Christ to us, that you have something better than a dream, you have the person and work of Jesus who has gone before us and who our hope is in forever. There was a story written in the middle of the 1800s called The Princess and the Goblin.

There's this princess, her name's Irene. She lives in a castle. She dresses very similarly to Joseph. It doesn't say that, but I'm just helping you picture it here. She lives in a castle. She's kind of by herself and she doesn't know, but there's a goblin kingdom that's near her castle and they've decided that they're going to try to rule again.

She's very lonely. She's wandering around the castle. She enters into this room and she finds her great-great-grandmother who is actually a fairy, as some great-great-grandmothers are. And she starts to talk with her and she gets to building this relationship with her great-great-grandmother. She goes and visits her often. And one of the things that happens is there's some bad things that happen.

Eventually, her great-great-grandmother gives her a ring and it's a magic ring and it has a thread on it that only Irene can see. It's a very thin thread and the grandmother says, if you ever are in danger, put this under your pillow and then grab the thread and follow the thread and it'll lead you to safety and it'll lead you to me. There's this time that comes where the goblins attack the castle. She puts the ring under her pillow. She grabs it and she starts following the thread. And as she heads out of the castle, she comes around and she sees that the thread leads her directly into the goblin's lair.

She just keeps following the thread in her fear and then finally the thread winds and it turns into a giant pile of rocks. She's terrified and heartbroken. This is awful. And she tries to follow the thread back to get out of the cave, but that's not how the thread works. It only goes forward. So after being sad for a while and being confused for a while, she decides, well, I might as well just follow the thread.

That's my best option. So she starts digging the rocks out. She's soon bleeding, soon crying as she tries to get these rocks out. Her fingers are hurt and as she digs them out, she finds hidden in the rocks was a prison and she finds her best friend, Kurti, who was trapped by the goblins. And Kurti's like, how on earth did you know I was here? She said, I'm just following the thread and now I see why it brought me here.

And she says, let's keep following the thread and Kurti says, no, we got to get out. That thread doesn't lead the right way and she says, all I can do is follow the thread. And she follows it and she follows it and she follows it and sometimes it leads to places that seem like there would be utter despair and destruction there, but she follows the thread and eventually she makes it to her great-great-grandmother and she makes it to safety and the thread was trustworthy because her great-great-grandmother was trustworthy. Pastor Tim Keller was writing about that story and he says this, he says, if you asked a seven-year-old, I'd like you to write me an essay on what it's like to fall in love and get married.

He says, when you read the essay, you'll say it isn't very close to the reality. We've got some parts right, but in general, doesn't really understand the process. He says, a seven-year-old can't really imagine what love and marriage will be like and he says, when you start to follow Jesus, you're at least that far away. You're at least that far away from understanding what this is going to look like. You have no idea how far you'll have to go. Jesus just says, follow me and sometimes you'll be following him and you'll be asking, why on earth are you bringing me here?

That's Joseph's story. God has a plan. God's made a promise, but it doesn't look like it's going to work out, but God is sovereign over all of it. Joseph's brothers haven't overpowered God. They haven't outwitted him. And for us, as we follow Jesus, a lot of times we just have a thread and all we can do is go forward.

It only goes that way. And sometimes we're going to hit places that we think, why on earth am I here? How on earth are you going to bring good out of this? But we have good and beautiful promises that are sealed. All the promises of God find their yes in Jesus. And they're sealed in him that he will take all things and turn them to good.

That he will make our suffering matter. That he'll bring glory out of it. That he brings hope in darkness and that we can trust and follow him. And we're not to turn back. We're just to hold on. We're to hold on to the fact that we know that Jesus has gone before us.

That he's suffered more than we have. That he's loved more than we have. That he's been tempted more than we have. And that he's walked it out in faithfulness and we can trust him. And that's our hope. So in those moments of just being stuck, trust that he's good.

That he knows what he's doing. And that you can follow him forward even though it doesn't look like it'll work out. Because he's gone before us. The band's going to come back up. We're going to take communion. If you're a follower of Jesus, one of the ways that we remind ourselves that he is good, that he has gone before us, that our hope is in him, that his promises come true, is that we remember his death in our place, on our behalf.

And so we'll take bread and we'll dip it in the cup to remind us of his body that was broken for us and his blood that was shed for us and to remind us that he has gone before us and our hope is in him. So we'll take a moment if you need to confess and repent of sin, if you need to go to Jesus with your anxiety and your fear and then we'll take communion together. If you are not a Christian, we would ask that you do not take communion because it is something that is for Christians. And in a moment after you've taken communion, we'll stand, we'll sing together one final song. So let's pray.

God, we thank you that you're good and that you go before us and that our hope is in you. We love you and praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.