Yeah.
Hey, welcome back, everybody.
Thanks for being with us Wednesday of this week as we continue
through Genesis.
And actually, as we see some light at the end of the tunnel here,
we move,
beginning today, we really move into kind of the
penultimate, maybe even ultimate
wrap-up story of the book of Genesis as Joseph transitions,
though I’m sure by his experience slowly.
So again, just to recap,
he’s been in prison.
He interpreted the dreams of two other
prisoners, both of which came through as he predicted.
And then he had hoped that one of them
would recommend him or remember him to the Pharaoh.
And we pick up the story there today
in the opening verse of
chapter 41.
“After two whole years,” so that’s not very far,
Michael, but let’s just stop and let that sink in.
“After two whole years,
Joseph remains in prison
for at least two years.” We really don’t know how long he was there before the dream happened,
but this is not a temporary arrangement.
This is, you know,
730 days of counting,
of being stuck,
of wondering if you were forgotten,
of wondering if the rest of your life is going to be spent in this place.
And we get the perception that maybe it wasn’t hard on him physically,
but certainly emotionally this had to be a drain.
And I think, you know,
it is a very heavy way to start this,
the Bible does this intentionally,
after two whole years,
not even two years,
whole years to emphasize
that they must have been long.
Anything there, Michael?
Okay, so after two whole years,
“Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile,
and there came out of the Nile seven sleek and fat
cows, and they gazed in the reeds and the grass.
Then seven other cows, ugly and thin,
came out of the Nile after them,
and stood by the other cows on the bank.
And the ugly thin cows ate up the
seven sleek fat cows,
and Pharaoh awoke.
Then he fell asleep,
and the second time dreamed.
Seven years of grain,
plump and good, were growing on one stalk.
Then seven years thin and blighted by
the east wind sprouted after them.
The thin ears swallowed up the seven plump and full ears.
Pharaoh awoke,
and it was a dream.
In the morning his spirit was troubled,
so he sent and called
for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men.
Pharaoh told them his dreams,
but there was no one who could interpret them to the pharaoh.” So just to set the stage here,
we have talked about dreams and the importance of dreams through this whole narrative.
Pharaoh has these dreams,
and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience.
I suspect most of us have,
but maybe it’s not universal.
The moment you wake up from a dream and it feels like it sticks with you, it feels like
your sleep was trying to tell you something.
You feel like there’s some meaning in it,
that it wasn’t just a weird dream or a bad dream,
that there’s something true in it that you can’t quite
wrap your head around,
and you can’t quite discern the meaning,
though you believe there is one.
And that happens to the pharaoh,
and he seeks out those who he believes might be able to interpret for him,
and not surprisingly,
they all fail. So what we know of Egypt and its religion is that there was a very advanced form of kind of spiritualism culturally,
and because of our awareness of how robust the religious order was
and how much meaning there was attached to different symbols and rituals and rites,
we can look back through that into a text like this and see that in some way,
this text is showing us a thing as it was.
In other words, the idea that the pharaoh would have a
dream and would believe that it had a meaning,
it would have individuals in his council who he would
ask to interpret it for him,
does not seem like a stretch outside of what we know historically.
This seems like this was the kind of thing that actively happened in the upper echelon of Egypt.
What is interesting here,
though, as this story is framed,
is that these wise counselors,
these wise men as they’re called,
are unable to adequately interpret the dream.
So the very best
people that pharaoh has access to are actually incapable of providing the very answer that the pharaoh is seeking.
And so that sets us up for this very interesting spin where it leaves open the question,
well, then who could bring the interpretation?
And we’ll get to that as we go.
But we’re already seeing how as we interpret the Egyptian religious order,
it has been unable to
fulfill this task.
It’s not been good enough to live up to the interpretation, which sets up
the God of Israel,
the God of Joseph,
to be the one who can do it.
That’s about to come.
But the point I want to make here is just that while this may seem like a mundane detail on one hand,
on the other hand,
it’s already inverting this world power Egypt,
and it’s flipping it over to
say that they don’t have the resources in-house to solve this problem.
And so in the interest of time,
we’re going to move forward in the story a little bit.
You probably know what’s coming.
The cup bearer,
who was the one that was supposed to remember,
he says, “Oh, I forgot there was this guy in prison, a Hebrew,
and he knew about dreams.”
So Pharaoh calls for Joseph.
So verse 14,
“Pharaoh sent for Joseph,
and he was hurriedly brought out
of the dungeons.
When he had shaved himself and changed clothes,
he came before the Pharaoh.
And the Pharaoh said,
‘I’ve had a dream,
and there is no one who can interpret it.
I’ve heard it said of you that when you hear a dream, you can interpret
it.’ Joseph said to Pharaoh,
‘It is not I.
God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.’ And Pharaoh then said to Joseph,
‘These are my dreams.’” And so we’ve already said what the dreams were.
But here, to your point, Michael,
Joseph repeats that verbatim.
“It is not I that I don’t interpret the dreams.
God will give me the interpretation.” And so Joseph,
in the presence of the Pharaoh,
who is understood by the people of Egypt to be divine,
says,
“The Lord, the Hebrew God,
is the one.
No one else can do this.
This is his purview.
This is his,
what he can do.
And I will tell you what it means,
but I will do so because God has given me the information.”
Pharaoh here is in a really interesting predicament.
He’s clearly committed to getting
an interpretation from this dream.
So when the text says that he was troubled,
it means that.
I mean, he was severely disturbed by it and required an answer.
So he does this strange
thing.
He calls up a foreigner out of the jail and he brings him in.
This is a
ridiculous reversal if we’re honest about it.
I mean,
no one expects even a commoner,
a free person, to be pulled in off the street.
Somebody who, you know, is good at parlor games,
yet alone pulling a person who is not even of your own kin and you pull them out of the prisons.
They’ve got to clean him up and they’ve got to bring him in.
This is almost a ridiculous
scene when you think of the height of the world’s power,
when you think of the Pharaoh, right?
And so here Joseph comes and then he makes this bold proclamation that Clint points us to.
It’s not I,
but it’s God.
And then he says this really interesting thing that sticks out to me,
“God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer.” Now,
do you remember the first two dreams he
interpreted?
The first answer,
it was favorable,
right?
It worked out well.
The second was not a
favorable interpretation.
When the baker met an untimely end,
he died and that was what the
dream was interpreted to mean.
Here,
Joseph comes to say,
“There will be a favorable answer.” Is
that a statement of faith?
Of hope?
Right?
Like, I hope God gives a favorable answer.
He’s not heard the dream yet.
Or is that a kind of confidence and foreknowledge that he has in intuiting that
this is part of God’s plan?
That the text is not particularly interested.
The story is not going
to tell us why he phrases it this way.
But Clint, it sticks out to me that in the previous story,
we had the favorable and we certainly had an unfavorable translation.
But here,
Joseph just comes right out at the front and says,
“Yeah, we’ll give you a favorable translation.”
Yeah, we will get to the bottom of it.
We’ll get to the meaning of it.
Just to recap as we move forward,
the dreams.
The first is that there are seven beautiful,
good-looking,
fat, wonderful cows,
and seven nasty-looking skinny cows come and eat them.
And after having eaten them,
they look just as skinny and just as nasty as they did.
The same is true of ears of grain.
Seven wonderful-looking,
healthy,
full ears of grain and seven that are blighted,
and they take over the other seven.
And then Pharaoh ends telling the dreams with this,
“I told it to the magicians,
but there was no one who could explain it to me.”
Verse 25, “Then Joseph said to Pharaoh,
‘Pharaoh’s dreams are one and the same.
God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do.
The seven good cows are seven years,
and the seven good ears are seven years.
The dreams are one.
The seven lean and ugly cows
that came after are seven years,
and are the seven empty blighted ones.
There are seven years of famine.
It is, as I told Pharaoh,
God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do.
There will be seven years
of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt.
After that, 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.
The plenty will no longer be known in the land because of the famine,
and that will follow,
for it will be very grievous.
And the doubling of Pharaoh’s dreams means that the thing is fixed by God.
God will shortly bring it about.” Let’s stop there, Michael.
So here we have Joseph’s interpretation.
He says, “Yep,
Pharaoh, both of those dreams,
they mean the same thing,
seven good years,
seven bad years.” But again,
notice the language.
To Michael’s point earlier,
God has shown the Pharaoh what God is about to do.
If the Pharaoh has any doubt of who has agency,
of who is at the top of the ladder,
Joseph sort of disabuses of it.
And he says, “Because you’ve had the same dream twice,
essentially the same dream,
you’ve dreamt the same reality twice,
that is fixed,
and it is soon.
God is showing the Pharaoh.” And so,
it’s very interesting there
again that this man who begins the day as a prisoner in the dungeon now stands before the
Pharaoh and tells the Pharaoh,
“Yeah, you had a dream,
but it’s what God is going to do.
God gave you the dream, and God has set it in motion,
and it’s really out of your hands.”
What Genesis doesn’t do is really give us back story or people’s emotions or feelings or how
they’re responding to the situation.
That’s our natural empathy as readers when we come to a text
like this, and surely we can all understand how concerned Joseph must be in giving an interpretation
like this.
Because fundamentally, the seven good years is a positive,
the idea that there will be
a blessing is followed by a very hard interpretation that there will be seven years of difficulty.
And here he stands,
that man who’s been brought up from the prison standing in front of the most
powerful person in the room,
possibly the most powerful person in the world.
And as he says this
thing, it really opens a moment in the text here where I think all of us naturally ask the question,
“What will come next?
How will the Pharaoh respond?
What is going to happen to this man who’s
claimed that God is the one who is both able to interpret the dream,
but now has explicitly said
that God is the one who will make the dream itself come to pass?” That is a kind of oppositional
reality
between all of the gods of Egypt and the god of the Hebrew people.
And we might miss that,
but there is a kind of national religious dichotomy happening here.
These two are sounding
up.
There’s no sort of synchronous reality between these two.
The Egyptian gods and magicians and
wise people, they make a claim for themselves.
Joseph has made this claim,
“This is what God
will do.” That’s an affront to the one he’s speaking to.
So what will Pharaoh do?
This is a real and I would suggest a life transformational question for Joseph because it’s just as easy
that Pharaoh would take this interpretation positively as he would take it as a direct
attack and assault on the religious morals of Egypt and that he would do away with Joseph.
Well, when you bring up a really good point,
Michael, when the text says “magicians,”
it might as well say “priests,” right?
These are the holy people.
There’s a plethora of gods in
Egypt.
If there’s going to be a famine,
they can offer sacrifices
to the god of the fields.
If there’s going to be a problem,
they can address that by appealing to their own gods.
And Joseph essentially negates all of that and says, “No,
God has put this in motion and God has decided
there’s no wiggle room.
This is how it’s going to be,” essentially discounting the entire spiritual
pantheon of all the Egyptian gods as if they’re unimportant,
which of course to Joseph they are.
What’s interesting here in verse 33,
Joseph just continues,
“This is his moment,” and Joseph
can be remembered as a guy who takes advantage of the moment.
So let me read this,
then we can talk about that.
“Now therefore, let the Pharaoh select a man who is discerning and wise.
Let him set over
the land of Egypt.
Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the
produce of the land of Egypt during the seven good years.
Let them gather all the food of these good
years that are coming and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities.
Let them keep it.
That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to
befall the land of Egypt,
so that the land may not perish through
the famine.” Very interesting
how quickly Joseph goes from interpretation to planning, to implementing.
Here’s what the dreams mean, Pharaoh.
So here’s what I think you should do.
If it was me,
I’d pick a guy,
a guy who’s pretty smart,
maybe even a guy who interprets dreams.
You know, I’d pick somebody with some
skills, hint, hint, and I’d put that person in charge and I’d let them prepare for this eventual
challenge that is coming,
because if you’re not ready for it,
it threatens the whole land of
Egypt and its people.
But if we prepare,
there’s a way through.
Yeah, Clint,
this is, I would say, audacious if I had to pick a word,
because not only does he make this claim about God’s
interpretive right in this situation,
but he now, as you say, moves quickly to giving instruction
to a person who’s not accustomed to receiving that unasked.
And so, as Joseph makes this statement,
I think what we discover here is really,
I think, another aspect of his character,
if you’re going to let me say that,
because when we first met him,
he was very much portrayed as young,
potentially vain,
certainly lacked some wisdom in his relationship.
As the stories progressed,
he’s done well in Potiphar’s house.
He’s done well under the charge of the jailer.
In fact, it says that these individuals continue to give him more and more responsibility.
There’s a sense in which now we see that Joseph is a man of action,
and he seems to be the kind of
man who has a track record in these very strange places of success.
He’s been able to create order
and he’s been able to manage people.
And so,
somehow,
he came in this moment to the realization
that this was the right thing to say.
And yeah, it would be impossible to read this text without
seeing the fingers pointing back at Joseph.
Someone should be appointed to do these things.
Well,
who’s that going to be, Joseph?
Obviously, the implication is that Joseph might be the very
one to do that.
It’s an interesting moment to see that the Joseph who had all of these things in
the past is now a Joseph who stands before the pharaoh offering very challenging words,
and he does so without any sort of
wavering.
He doesn’t do so without any lapse in courage.
And I think that speaks soundly to his character and to his growth.
We have not seen this…
This hadn’t been a strong theme of Genesis,
but we do see it in the rest of the Old Testament.
We see it scattered throughout the New Testament.
This idea that God chooses what is earthy and
simple to confound the wise,
that’s language out of the Scripture,
that here we have this
young man who’s been in trouble,
he’s been in prison,
presumably because he’s guilty.
They don’t know he’s not guilty.
He’s there because of the assumption of guilt.
And yet, he stands in front of the pharaoh wiser than the pharaoh or any of the counselors in Egypt,
and secures for Egypt a possible future.
He’s essentially indicating that if they’re not careful,
if they don’t heed this interpretation,
if they don’t heed this advice,
if they don’t do something,
their future is at risk.
And this is an important theme of the Bible,
that God
doesn’t fish in the pond of the wealthy and the learned and the impressive.
God has a way of
elevating those at the bottom and putting them front and center.
And Joseph is,
I think, an extraordinary example of that.
Maybe David is going to be a pretty significant example
of that as well.
But Joseph, I think we see that theme strongly in Joseph.
So, I just want to end our time here today with maybe what will be the bridge to tomorrow,
and that is, these words have been spoken,
this suggestion has been made,
and much like what we
see in the book of Ruth,
how is the king or how’s the pharaoh going to respond?
Is it positively or
is it negatively?
There’s a lot at stake for Joseph,
and even if you know what’s to come,
don’t miss us tomorrow as I think there’s some really interesting and some powerful turns in
Joseph’s story that we’re going to explore together.
Yeah, I hope you can be with us to finish it.