All right, well,
welcome back as we hit Wednesday of this week and we move into the 45th chapter
of the book of Genesis.
And I think in some ways this is really the culmination of the story that we have been
working on for a few chapters.
You know,
Michael, it’s not the end.
It’s not the end of Joseph’s story,
but I do think today and tomorrow are in some ways the mountaintop.
We see this part of the story that we’ve been building on for a while.
Would Joseph tell his brothers who he was?
Would he punish them?
What would happen?
Would he keep his brother?
Would he imprison them?
Would he get revenge?
What’s going to happen to Jacob in light of the famine and all of his family being away
from him?
You know, there’s just lots of questions and today a lot of those sort of come to fruition.
It kind of, I would say as we try to get through the first half of this chapter,
really pretty dense.
The other thing I just,
I’ll give you a heads up as we move in,
there’s some very interesting
and I would argue very deep theology here today.
And we will do our best to unpack it if we need to.
We’ll circle back to it tomorrow.
But let’s go into the story and see where that takes us.
Chapter 45,
“Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all those who stood by him.
And he cried out,
‘Send everyone away from me.’
So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers.
And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it.
Joseph said to his brothers,
‘I am Joseph.
Is my father still alive?’
But his brothers could not answer him.
So dismayed were they at his presence.”
And let’s go ahead and stop there, Michael.
So this is the big reveal.
This is the moment Joseph is overwhelmed,
whether he intended to do it now or not.
We’re not told.
But in the aftermath of Judah’s words yesterday,
remember Judah offered to trade himself for Benjamin.
It appears as though Joseph is so moved by that and so struck by that,
either for better or worse.
Again, we’re not told that he becomes overwhelmed.
He cries so loudly that others hear it.
And he reveals himself,
‘I am Joseph.
Is my father still alive?’”
And then there’s,
the Bible does this once in a while,
there’s this beautifully understated,
but his brothers couldn’t answer him,
answer him for they were dismayed by his presence,
which is, you know, I mean,
about as soft-spoken as you could probably put what’s in their
mind at that point.
But this is that moment where Joseph gives voice to what is not only a secret for the brothers,
but is for Joseph.
I don’t want to over-spiritualize this, Michael, but
if we were going to put a
Christian word label on this, I think it might be confession.
He
takes that thing that is inside of him,
and he gives it voice.
And it is a profound moment in the story.
It’s a moment where we see all of these threads finally resolve.
Think of the number of times in Genesis already we’ve had
the theme of deception and then revelation come up.
We’ve had that particularly,
we saw it with Jacob as he deceived his father,
Isaac.
We see it now again as Joseph has deceived his brothers multiple times on multiple trips.
He’s deceived them, and now in this confession or this telling of the truth of who he is,
you know,
the response to that is really striking,
Clint. They are dismayed.
That is an understatement.
Certainly,
the dismay comes in shock,
the revelation that their brother is alive,
no doubt at this point they’ve come to believe that he’s either dead or as good as dead.
But then
also the dismay of now realizing the predicament that they’re actually in,
and if we’re honest up to this point in the story,
Joseph really has given them some reason
to continue to fear for their lives.
I mean, the deception he’s played has involved some
really kind of dangerous tit-for-tat
kind of stuff where, you know,
Benjamin is literally in a dangerous position because
of this thing that was planted in his sack.
So, you know, Clint, the dismay might not only be the revelation that this brother that
they thought was dead is alive,
but it’s also the awareness that their predicament may be
far more precarious than they were even aware of up to this point.
Yeah,
now the person,
what they learn is that the person with power over them has a name
and has a story and has a reason for vengeance.
I mean, you know, you would think maybe the natural question for the brother would be,
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
They can’t ask him that.
They don’t have that authority.
They’re not in a place where they can have that conversation.
As we move there,
so we just want to enter this part of the story sort of acknowledging
how emotional it is,
particularly for Joseph, but for the brothers as well.
There’s a lot going on here,
and we don’t want to minimize that.
But very quickly, we move to some other ground.
So verse 4,
“Joseph said to his brothers,
‘Come closer to me,’
and they came closer.
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 five more years that
there will be neither plowing or harvest.
God sent me before you,
to preserve a remnant on earth,
and to keep alive for you many years and many survivors.
So it was not you who sent me here, but God.
He’s made me a father to Pharaoh,
and Lord of all the house,
and ruler over all of Egypt.
Hurry, go up to my father,
and say to him,
‘Thus says your son Joseph.
God has made me Lord of Egypt.
Come down to me,
and do not delay.
You shall settle in the land of Goshen,
and you shall be near me.
You and your children,
and your children’s children,
as well as your flocks, your herds,
and all that you have.’” So
why don’t we stop here?
There is a famous line at the end of Genesis,
at the end of the Joseph story that we’ll get to,
but it has precursors,
and we see it twice in this.
And it’s this idea that Joseph says to his brothers,
“Do not be distressed or angry with
yourselves, because God sent me here before you.” And
notice,
if you think back on the last couple chapters,
we’ve had very little mention of God.
God has sort of been tangentially involved.
People have said things about God did this or God did that,
but it was actually part of the ruse.
If you’ll remember, it was the steward saying that it must have been God who put the money in their sacks.
God as an actor in this whole situation has been kind of quiet,
and Joseph now voices
a kind of faith that the situation they find themselves in is what we might say foreordained,
that it was intended,
that it was the work of God as difficult and as ugly as it may have been,
that it was gone working to preserve life.
And here we tap into some very profound and very common biblical themes,
that God is at
work sometimes behind the scenes to preserve his people.
This is going to become a very popular kind of narrative as we go through the Israel story.
But even here, as we presuppose the Israel story,
we have Joseph able to say,
“Don’t be angry with yourselves.
Don’t be upset.
This is not your doing.
This is God’s doing.”
And the fact that Joseph can get there,
and I do think in the context of this text,
I think he really believes that.
I think we get the most clear example of that
down the road, a couple chapters.
But I think, Michael, that he deeply believes that.
And because he does,
he is able to,
I think in this moment,
act with grace,
with generosity,
and truly with joy.
And if there is resentment and bitterness,
it seems to have mostly been worked out,
or at least the story doesn’t tell us that it’s still there.
Yeah, Clay, I want to point out here,
and I’ve highlighted verse 7,
“God sent me before
you to preserve for you a remnant on the earth and to keep alive for you many survivors.”
And I ask the question,
those of you who’ve been with us throughout this entire study,
what stories does this bring to mind?
Because if you’re willing to,
for a moment, reflect back,
remember Noah.
Remember God, who chose one man and his family to be the remnant.
Now this is a very different circumstance,
but it’s another example in the story where God,
by God’s grace, chose one for the sake of many.
And in this case,
he chose Joseph with great peril.
I mean, Joseph has had
series after series of misfortune,
or misfortunes, and that would be putting it lightly.
And yet now he finds himself in position to provide for his brothers and his families.
And he says that explicitly.
That is, Clint, to your point,
I think a really powerful understanding of grace and reconciliation
and recognition that, fundamentally,
God is able to work in even the darkest and most
difficult seasons of life,
that when you’re willing to look with eyes of faith,
you can see that God has worked.
On the flip side of this,
it isn’t necessarily a departure from the larger narrative we’ve
seen in the book of Genesis,
and that is that God is preserving remnants.
So that theme that we’re going to see carry forward with Israel,
who comes into some substantially
difficult circumstances as a nation in the Old Testament stories to come,
God is going to be yet faithful to them.
And so we see in Genesis this critical starting point for the story of who the nation of Israel
is and how they started and how God has been faithful to them.
We see built into the story that someone like Joseph represents to a person, certainly hundreds
and thousands of years later,
caught up in exile.
This story for them reminds them that even in the midst of the darkness of captivity, which Joseph was,
he could be preparing,
God could be using him to prepare for this rescue
effort for the other people,
that there can be meaning in these circumstances.
It doesn’t in any way take away from the difficulty of it.
And I don’t think necessarily, Clint,
that it should soften our reading here of the difficult
position Joseph has put his brothers in.
I mean,
everything we’ve said previous about how challenging Joseph’s actions have been,
I think that all stands.
But in this moment,
we do see a theological proclamation,
really a statement of faith.
And in that, I think we can affirm this larger narrative we’ve seen that God has been doing
throughout Genesis and will do beyond.
We’ve said things like this before,
you have to be very careful reading the scripture through
a kind of modern psychological lens.
But it is interesting that we now hear Joseph saying these things.
We’ve not heard this before.
The text has said nothing about this happened in order that or this happened.
So this kind of evaluation of why things happen has not been a part of the story until now.
The
earlier explanation would have been his brothers were jealous,
his brothers were mean,
his brothers were greedy,
whatever that might have been.
But it was a human explanation.
Now Joseph inserts some theology.
And when that happens,
it’s interesting that just like in our own life,
it doesn’t clear everything up.
And it seems to happen after this moment in which he’s seen his brother plead genuinely
on behalf of his younger brother in order to preserve the father.
And that genuine act of sort of sacrificial love seems to be the connecting point,
which now brings Joseph to that point of saying, look,
don’t be angry.
It’s almost as if he has now let that go.
Now again,
I think you want to be careful with that because the story doesn’t explicitly tell us that.
But there’s something that seems to happen at the end of chapter 44 in which Joseph hears
Judah plead for Benjamin and Jacob,
and it overwhelms him.
And at that point,
because if he knew he was going to get here,
it doesn’t say good things
about him messing with his brothers.
If he knew he had already forgiven them, if he believed,
don’t be angry with yourselves,
then it’s unclear why he would mess with him.
I do think this is character development.
I think Joseph has had a real moment.
And he’s now able to say,
it’s okay,
this is,
in the long run,
this is a good thing.
There may be real pain in it,
there may be real struggle in it.
But I see behind that, God at work,
and because of that,
I’m with you and you need not be
afraid.
And I think that’s a real moment,
Michael.
I think the text does a beautiful job of delivering it for us.
Yeah, and let’s not miss,
I don’t think we pointed this out,
Clint.
I’m looking here,
it’s in verse three.
“I am Joseph,” is the first thing he says to his brothers as he reveals the truth.
The very next thing,
“Is my father still alive?”
Let me ask you,
how many times has Joseph already been told by his brothers,
we have a younger brother,
we have a father who we need to care for,
Judah in his speech just
eloquently said, “If we don’t bring this boy back,
our father’s going to die.”
So it’s not as if Joseph is hearing this information for the first time.
I think we have to recognize there’s
maybe a sense in which he wants to hear the truth.
Yes, he’s alive, but there may also be some mistrust in this.
He may literally not know if his brothers have told him the whole truth yet.
This story has been so laden with deception and twists and turns that almost even in the confession
there’s a request for the truth,
you know, tell me what is the case.
And that’s really where the brother who was the one sold becomes the one who saves.
He becomes the one who goes from being a liability to the family with all of these crazy dreams
and snitching on people.
And he’s now become the one who not only is able to save the brothers,
but he’s able to save their father and all of their families.
And fundamentally,
he makes the way forward for the nation of Israel.
I mean, he becomes the one who God uses to be the gateway to all of the blessings that lie
beyond.
And that
is, Clint, I think maybe where this story is most encouraging is because you can
find yourself on so many different levels in this story connecting to it.
You can at one point in life be like the brothers are caught between a rock and a hard place.
And then this revelation happens.
You can be like Joseph,
go through difficult seasons and God blesses you.
I think this is one of those stories in Genesis where it almost lends to the devotional and
maybe even to a meditation or preaching so quickly,
Clint, because this is the kind of
story where you can easily enter and you can have empathetic connection to the character.
You can see God working.
This is a beautiful story.
It comes at the end of Jewish speech.
And for us, I think it should inspire us to be mindful of the fact that God is with us
from all of these characters,
vantages, and none of them are simple.
And that’s that Genesis throws that all together in the pot.
It stirs it all up and it lets it be that way.
And I think I appreciate that about it.
Yeah. And I think of all the places that would be seen,
Michael, I think maybe most clearly
in the kind of theological elephant in the room,
Joseph is making a faith statement.
We read that as if that’s the scripture telling us that thing,
that God was doing that thing.
Notice the text has never told us that.
The text has never said that about God,
that this happened so that.
This is Joseph reflecting on his experience.
And what I think is beautiful about that and what I think is so masterful about the scripture
telling us that in that manner is that we encounter the same questions.
Why couldn’t have God just not made the famine?
Why couldn’t have God just helped Joseph?
Of the thousands of other ways God could have addressed this situation that didn’t involve
two years in prison and being in a pit and being sold and Jacob going through the grief
of believing he lost his son and the sons watching that with the guilty conscience of
knowing that they caused that.
Of all the ways that this could have been addressed,
why would God do it this way?
And it brings us to the same question mark it brings Joseph who is able to say,
“I believe I see the hand of God in this.
I believe that these things,
though very real and painful,
were in fact God moving us to
a good place instead of a bad place.
I believe there is a moment here in which the work of God can be trusted,
not only over the past,
but in the future.”
And ultimately, we have to say the same thing.
We can’t answer all the questions that go with it.
So the text asks us to make that same declaration of faith that this is God at work in a very strange way perhaps.
But I think it’s fantastic that the text has never told us that.
The character tells us that because that’s where the character has to get.
In the character’s own faith journey,
that’s where they have to end up.
They have to arrive there in order to say it.
And the text,
it doesn’t do the text any good to tell us that.
We need to hear it from Joseph who needs to believe it himself.
And I don’t want to beat that in the ground,
but let me just finish the reading here.
He says, “I’ll provide for you.”
And then I just want to,
as we close today,
verse 14, “Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck,
and he wept while Benjamin wept upon his neck.
And he kissed all his brothers
and wept upon them.
And after that, his brothers talked with him.”
Those are beautiful verses.
When you think about verses that speak to reconciliation,
of weeping,
of reconnection,
and they talked with him,
that there is this moment where finally these 12 brothers are
in the same place,
not just physically,
but emotionally,
relationally.
And
I think Joseph only gets there by that confession.
It was God who brought me here.
Otherwise there’s a grudge to be held.
Otherwise there’s anger and bitterness that remains.
And I think in being able to say,
“I believe God is at work,” he gets past that.
Yeah, and realizing that we have more story to come,
it’s worth recognizing here that
the brothers only speak to him after he weeps over each one of them.
The threat of what Joseph represents doesn’t just go away.
In fact, it’s the prolonged recognition,
“Oh, wait, this is real.” I think wave upon wave is the thing that happens to the brothers.
So the same for us,
the reader, it’s wave upon wave of realizing,
“Oh, wait, God has been faithful.” And, you know, Clint,
to your point,
Genesis doesn’t need a narrator to tell us this is
the way it is.
It doesn’t need to tell us that there’s some simple formula that maps out this story for us.
Genesis merely needs for us to hear what the characters have to say and to recognize that
in their discussions and sort of moment together,
that they are discovering what God is doing
as well.
And that’s fundamentally the best of our narrative encounter with these people,
because that’s how God encounters our own or how we encounter God in our own lives.
And so, yeah, this is beautiful.
Join us tomorrow.
It continues as we see the next wave of how God’s blessing has been prepared for this family.
It’s amazing.
Yeah, and I don’t want to overdo it.
I know time-wise we’re going a little long,
but I do think it’s significant that it tells
us that the weeping in two places,
the weeping over Benjamin is a different weeping than
it is with the other brothers.
If you’ve ever reconciled with someone,
if you’ve ever held a grudge and then dropped it,
the weeping with Benjamin is joyful and hopeful.
The weeping with the brothers goes back to those moments of being in the pit.
That is a cathartic kind of weeping.
And I think it’s very interesting that the Bible doesn’t just say he wept with all his
brothers, but that he wept with Benjamin and then with the brothers who had been cruel
to him.
I think that matters.
Well, friends, thanks for being with us here today.
We look forward to continuing on the rest of this chapter tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us.