Clough Genesis Lesson 82

History of Jacob resumed – Genesis 37:1-11

In the study of the book of Genesis we have looked at the series of stories of the three patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And during this period of time I have tried to review each Sunday morning the large theme so you wouldn’t lose the forest for the trees and get concentrating on just one story and miss the big point. All through this call of Abraham period in the history of the Bible we have the set of mechanics that God is using to bring in the kingdom of God. The set of mechanics that God uses to do this we ought to appreciate, reflect upon, think about; the reason being that man sinfully, from the dawn of time, has always wanted to create his own perfect society on earth. This has been the dream of men dating back to the time of Pharaoh, going on up to more late ancient times, Plato wrote the standard book, The Republic, and then following Plato we have all the other schemers of history including Karl Marx and the modern communists, the western socialists, the Fabians and others have all had their schemes and plans for bettering humanity, but all the schemes and plans whether communist platonic or from Pharaoh, have at their base one central assumption and that is that the state is the place to start. The Bible has an opposite assumption and that is the family is the place to start. Both positions can’t be right and either one is false, the other is false or they’re both false but they both can’t be true. And the kingdom of God in the Old Testament is developing during this call of Abraham period because by the time of the Exodus there you have the first national political entity.

Now all these stories are not just entertaining Sunday School stories; these stories are to teach that all such changes in society start with the family unit. And the reason that it starts with the family unit is because it’s in the family that authority is learned. The family is always the first place God works to do His thing. Not only is authority learned but that’s the first place where we have any kind of real mature social experience.

Now we have a modern application of this that’s very glaringly present and it’ll be present increasingly to the average person, and that is the thinking of some, or most, modern educators who claim that it’s the state involved in education that is the Messiah; it is education that saves instead of just teaching truth, and it is the state as the sovereign over education that is the lord. And the excuse that educators always like to use is that the parents simply aren’t doing their job; that we have to do their job. Now that’s an interesting argument. Yes, you can always find some parents that don’t do their job but you can always find some marriages that end in divorce. Is the argument therefore because some marriages end in divorce we ought to do away with all marriages. We don’t follow the argument there, how do we follow it in the other place; just because some parents don’t do their job is that to question that therefore all parents not to do their job. But this logic follows and it’s used again and again.

I was reminded of it this week as my wife was talking to a teacher in our local elementary school who was one of the better teaches and she was bemoaning the fact that the kids were parading into the cafeteria, look at the footwear that some of these kids are wearing, some of the most expensive shoes or jogging shoes or whatever they wear, and these are the kids who come from homes that are apparently are so poor that they can’t afford lunch but must be fed off Lubbock taxpayer’s money. These are the same children that are so poor that their parents can’t get them breakfast in the morning. I rather suspect it’s not because their parents are poor at all, it’s because their parents (1) have false priorities in the way they spend their funds, and (2) are too lazy to get up in the morning to get their breakfast. And so with that parental failure we have the schools taking your money and mine to make up for incompetence and irresponsibility, this done, of course, in the name of bettering society.

It’s this assumption that goes in back of all these things; this assumption that it’s always the state that saves. This assumption is directly challenged if you’ll think about all the stories we’ve seen, the stories we’ve seen, the stories that we’re looking at right now, at this period of history, 2000 BC and thereafter, are all on the third divine institution, the home. Now doesn’t that strike you as odd, if it’s really true that the state saves? Why aren’t the stories centered on the state? Why are they all centered in the family.

Let’s look at Genesis 25, to go back and see some of the details of this family unit. You see, this is all one family and at the time that we start, the period of history we’re about to begin at this point in Genesis, we’re going to end with just one family and go to many families. So before we leave that one family unit we’d better be clear as to what’s been happening. This one family is made up of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These are the patriarchs, it represents three generations: grandfather, father and son. And we’ve watched these stories unfold and I’ve said that the main theme that you want to watch for in every story you read in Genesis, ask this question: What does this story tell me about the decay of God’s family, because you see, that’s the whole theme. How can God prevent this family from decaying before He, out of that family, produces the kingdom? He’s got to do something to keep it from cratering and this is the story from chapter to chapter.

In Genesis 25:27 we have one of the early signs of weakness in this family unit, because remember, God always begins His program with sinners, not with saints. Saints come out the end of the pipe, they don’t go in the beginning and this is the error some make, and that is when they look at these stories they say what a woeful beginning with such a high and lofty document called the Bible. Of course, because God begins with people like you and like me, we are members of the fallen race and it’s not very attractive, frankly. And so in Genesis 25:27 we see the weaknesses of this family. “And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning [skillful] hunter, a man of the field; and Jacob was a plain [quiet] man, dwelling in tents. [28] And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but Rebekah loved Jacob.” Now right there you have the seeds of a problem. Here you have the father who is being extremely partial to his son; the result of that family unit is that one son, Esau, goes to hell; one son is not properly taught spiritual things because his father so admires his natural physical abilities, he enjoys and he relaxes with that aspect with his son and never apparently bothers to admonish Esau in the things of the Word of God.

But then conversely the other son, as it says at the end of verse 28, is mamma’s boy; he grows up under a split authority; rejected by his father he seeks authority in his mother. So now we have mother divided against father and brother against brother so we have a very, very deep cleavage that’s developing in that home. We saw that in the generation of Isaac.

Then we came in Genesis 34 and we saw the same cleavage begin to develop in Jacob’s home. In Jacob’s time, in Genesis 34, he abdicated his fathers’ responsibility and when a leader abdicates you always get civil war down with the Indians. And this is the situation that happened here; we have Levi and Simeon and they were strong, they had the moral aggressiveness of their father, minus their father’s accumulated wisdom, and went out and massacred a village, a great thing to do when you’re trying to plant a new society on friendly terms with everybody else in the land. And so we had a failure there, again showing weakness, a progressively developing weakness.

Today we come to another weakness of Jacob and this weakness, as you saw in Genesis 37 when the Scriptures were read this morning, it quite frankly acknowledges it for all to see, that Jacob is a partial father. He, frankly does love Joseph more than all of his other sons, and not only that, but verse 4 tells us the bitterness that his other sons feel toward their father because they know very well their dad loves him more than me.

So it was this material that God used to bring forth His kingdom. It should be encouraging to all of us. See, God doesn’t start with success; He starts with failure because in that way He reminds us that it’s His grace that does it. So don’t think because in your home, in your family unit, because you have all these cleaves, disharmony and maybe after effects of irresponsible acts in the past that that disqualifies you from a great work of God because if it does I ask you why isn’t this family disqualified. This family has its deep cleavages also.

To get the structure of Genesis, as you see from Genesis 37:2 this morning we’re beginning a new section called the tolédote of Joseph or the generations of Joseph. We’ve already said that Genesis is divided into certain sections. One section ended in Genesis 35 and that was the section called the tolédote or the generations of Isaac. Then in Genesis 36 we have the tolédote of Esau, and this means that this is the production of Esau. And then in Genesis 37-50 we have the tolédote of Jacob. What are these tolédotes again? They are simply sections which we believe must have been initial documents that were then compiled together to form the book of Genesis. And each document or each book depicts, not the life of the man whose named there, but it depicts his production after the death of his father. So, for example, while Jacob has children they’re described in the tolédote of Isaac, not in the tolédote of Jacob. Why? Because when Jacob and his wife had their children the grandfather was still living and as long as the grandfather is still living, he is considered to be the ruler of that clan. So it is not until Isaac dies and is removed from the scene that you have the Bible independently looking upon this as a production of Jacob.

Another thing: the Bible here expresses its asymmetry. Remember we studied Wednesday nights how God has an asymmetric type of sovereignty, that is He’s sovereign over both good and evil but over both in a different way, and this is classic reformed thought, it’s classic Protestant thought; there ought to be no discussion about it, there are fine differences but basically that’s the scheme. Esau is looked upon as the non-elect; Esau is not going to produce a divine viewpoint culture. Esau, in fact, is going to be simply discarded in history. Now if you look at the number of chapters, you don’t have to get involved in all the depth, just look at the scheme in which Genesis is written, the very scheme of Genesis teaches you this, for here we have great, great attention devoted to Isaac, then it skips over Esau and his production in one chapter, the next chapter boom, we’re off to Jacob and his production. And then not one chapter, but chapter after chapter after chapter, fourteen chapters. Now how do we explain a 14 to 1 ration? Obviously the Holy Spirit is more interested in Jacob and his production than He is in Esau and his. So we have an asymmetric emphasis in God’s attention.

Something else; all during this story, from Genesis 37-50, we will encounter various subsections of this. Now since we’re beginning this, let me look ahead a moment and show you some of the schemes. Genesis 37, which we’ll see today, is a chapter that introduces all the actors. It introduces all the main forces that are going to be operative in the family and in history down to the time that the nation becomes established in Egypt. Then we go to Genesis 39 and it follows as one smooth story. The mystery is why, after starting in Genesis 37, after dealing with Joseph, telling about the tensions in the home and doing all that, then why does Genesis 38 start, and it’s completely different, it’s off with Judah on another incident. Now why is this? Why do we have this kind of excerpted and wrong? The answer is that Genesis 38 is an apology in the full sense, not an apology in our normal every day use of the word; it’s an apologetic to explain why it is the Jews have to go to Egypt, because Genesis 38 deals with the Messianic son; it doesn’t deal with Joseph. Joseph is not the Messianic seed. It’s Judah that’s the Messianic seed, and Genesis 38 shows you what’s happened to Judah, he’s cratering, he’s degenerating; basically the theme of Genesis is working; this family that God has picked out to be the core nucleus family for His kingdom is already in such a bad state, has been so absorbed by the culture around it that the Messianic son is one of the most degenerate members of the whole family. And that’s the argument of Genesis 38.

So what I’m telling you is to watch in these stories, after you get through the story, stop, think, plug the story back into the big scheme. Don’t just stop with the story for you to kind of have a pile of discordant marbles. The argument of Genesis is subtle; it is not directly stated like it is, for example, in 2 Kings where the editor of the book will say and so and so, what did he do? Well, he’s committed the sins of Jeroboam. Or so and so, what did he do, he cut down the high places. In other words, there’s an editorial remark there to tell you this is good, this is bad, this is good, this is bad. The book of Genesis is not written that way because the Mosaic Law wasn’t yet given and these moral judgments aren’t made clear. So the author of Genesis is presenting you the same scheme but he’s going to do it differently. The author of Genesis is going to tell you story after story after story after story and he expects you to keep the big picture in mind. He’s arguing with you on the basis of these stories.

And so Genesis 38 is an argument why something has got to happen to save this family from destruction; it is cratering under the forces of depravity. And how, therefore, is God going to maintain it? God is going to maintain it because later on in the 40’s, by the time we get down here in the 40’s you will see the family is put in quarantine and He picks out a place for quarantine. What society near Israel could be found that was segregationist? It’s very interesting. In the 40’s segregation comes up and it’s going to be taught that Egypt was segregationist and God took advantage of that segregationist society to pick up Israel, drop them down where they would be discriminated against and then all this intrusion from the outside would be cut off because the society was be segregationist and they wouldn’t sit down to eat, the Egyptians when they had dinner they refused to eat with Semites and so you have this segregationist element that God turns around and uses for good to quarantine that family, keep them tight, keep them together and keep them going so that later He can deal with them and have an instrument for the start of His kingdom. So all these chapters depict the sovereign grace of God as it intervenes in history to do His thing.

Let’s look at Genesis 37:2-4. Verses 2-4 deal with all the introduction elements. Today we’re going to be concerned with the first 11 verses. Verses 2-4 are sort of a program note before the drama begins and they fill, like all program notes the readers or the observers to the details that you want to watch in the story to come. Verses 1-11 is an introduction but verses 2-4 are sort of like program notes and they have to be read as program notes. Verses 2-4 depict constant actions; we call that in grammar as gnomic, the gnomic use of verbs which means iterative, something that happens again and again and again and again; these are characteristics.

Word of God where it says, [2] “These are the tolédotes [generations] of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brethren;” one observation; the second observation, the people that he’s feeding them with are not his true blood brothers, they’re only half-brothers, [“and the lad was with the sons of Bilhah, and with the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives….”] The third observation is that he brings his father an evil report of these half-brothers, [“And Joseph brought unto his father their evil report.”] And the fourth observation, Jacob is partial and shows it by the coat. Now all of these are devices to alert you to the fact that this family has some severe problems here and as Christians we want to look at these things because Genesis in one way is one of the great wisdom books of the Bible, even though it’s part of the Pentateuch, and it contains vast things that you can see work in your family, and work in the families of friends who live around you. And you wonder why this home is stronger than this home. Just watch and you’ll see these things play out, it’s very interesting.

The first one, Joseph was seventeen. Now this is not discriminating against seventeen year olds but it is going to make a point. Whenever the Bible gives age, other than in a straight chronology, there is usually a very good reason for it and it has not to do with age, it has to do with the moral character of the person at that age. So since Genesis is a very sparsely written book, when you see it dropping a detail in like this a bell ought to go off and you ought to say wait a minute, this is trying to tell me something because I know this author doesn’t go overboard on giving me lots and lots of details, so when he gives me one he’s giving it to me for a very definite purpose.

He’s seventeen; now what’s true of Joseph at age 17? He’s already beginning to dream. It says in verse 5, “And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brothers.” Then it talks about the sheaves in verse 7. The brothers react in verse 8 and then in verse 9 he dreams yet another dream, and it says “the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance” or they bowed down “to me.” Then he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren come to bow down ourselves to you to the earth? [11] And his brethren envied him;” or hated him, “and his father kept the saying.” Two dreams; what does that tell you about Joseph at 17? Well, again, looking at the big scheme of Genesis, from this time forward you’re not… repeat, you are not going to see God spectacularly reveal Himself again; that’s all over with Isaac. From this point forward, the wrestling match of Jacob and so on, it’s just God withdraws and you won’t see any spectacular kind of revelation until the time of the burning bush with Moses some four centuries later. For a while God is turning off His spectacular revelatory processes and He’s backing off and the only way revelation is now communicated is through dreams. It’s a period almost of the silence of God; dreams and providence are the two ways God now communicates to man during these 400 years.

Now it’s interesting, when we examine the dreams in all these chapters they always occur in pairs; never one dream, always two dreams, and the dreams are always linked similarly in content. You can check it for yourself, whether the dreams are occurring in the jail later on where Joseph is going to be, whether they occur in Pharaoh’s place, where the Pharaoh is in the palace, it doesn’t make any difference, the dreams are always in pairs. Why pairs? By the mouth of two or three witnesses shall it be established. In other words, since God is speaking actively in the spectacular sense all these dreams must be paired, that is, to produce the evidence that they are indeed from God.

Now the fact is that we have two dreams and they’re about the same thing. Verse 7 and verse 9 basically are teaching the same thing. The dreams have a peculiar similarity. And it so peculiar that you can’t help but realize it must be from God. Now if that’s the case and at 17 we have a boy already receiving revelation from God, which he will later in his life, here’s our first conclusion about this observation of 17, and that is that at this age he basically has all the potential skill he needs for the rest of his life. Later on Joseph will go and take the place of probably one of the two top men in the Bible as far as government workers; both of these men were Jews, both of these men ruled outside of their land over Gentiles; their names: Joseph and Daniel. Both of these men are known in history as the wise men, and both of these men started off their careers in a foreign culture as prisoners. Both of them started off as very young prisoners of teenage time, they were young teenagers when they were in prison. Both of them grew up away from their own culture and both of them exercised phenomenal influence over their countries.

Now Joseph is going to become the worlds greatest administer. I’m going to try, when we get into the 40’s if I have time to do the proper research, I’m going to try to show you some suggestions about who Joseph was in history; he’s known by another name to secular historians, usually unrecognized because of chronological difficulty, but Joseph has many names and he is known in history for his administration of Egypt. In fact, I think the case can be argued that it was Joseph that set up the structures that led to most of the great monuments of Egypt. This was how powerful this man was. But here he’s a 17 year old and a 17 year old with all of his potential, all of his natural and spiritual gifts but… and here’s the other 17 year old observation. At 17 he does not have the wisdom to produce with the talent that he has.

So let’s look at this for a moment and see how this gives, in principle, some things that children need and why we have the home function as it does. Joseph’s story can be looked at from an natural point of view or a spiritual point of view. We’ll diagram these side by side so you can track with us. Let’s diagram the natural needs of any child in any home, believer and unbeliever; then parallel to that let’s diagram the needs of a young Christian. Let’s look first at natural talent, natural gift, and then spiritual gift and watch the remarkable parallels.

In children, one of the first things that they need to do is to learn the concept of authority and discipline: authority, obedience and discipline. They’re not going to go anywhere in life apart from authority and discipline. Joseph, while he has the capacity to dream great things, he always has diarrhea of the mouth in verse 8 and verse 10, and that is not the way to take the things that God gives and spray people with them. The thing that they are supposed to do is exercise some sort of diplomacy; they are to exercise some sort of skill and Joseph doesn’t, and the result of this is tremendous antagonism.

You see this with young Christians; you might see it with yourself, and that is, they will have, say the gift of exhortation, and yet in their local Christian group they will be the biggest pain in the neck of anybody in that group. Now why is it that they’re such an irritant to everybody around them? Good night, you were a better person before you became a Christian; why is it that this has happened? Well I think there’s a reason for it. The reason is that they’ve got the gift of exhortation and they’re starting to use it but unwisely. And so it’s producing irritation, so the answer is not quell it, the answer is train it and redirect it and they will be a strong positive factor in the Christian group; right now they’re an irritant but that’s not because they mean to be an irritant; it’s just that they have this capacity given them by God and it’s simply not being wisely used. Like Joseph and his dreams; you could argue that Joseph, basically at this point was a brilliant brat. He was given tremendous talents by God but frankly he was just a brat when he came to exercising this. This is very important because it shows you where God is going to work on him.

First, obedience to authority and discipline; every child has got to know this point and every new Christian has to go through the same problem, there’s always a tremendous problem in obedience to Scripture. The idea of the Word of God being the authority, the idea of the local church, the idea of a pastor-teacher, the idea of these things, these authority structures just crush some people when they’re new Christians. All I can say is better be crushed when you’re a new Christian than when you’re an older one. But if you look in the natural scale you’ll see this time and again. What artist, what athlete is there, who is really, really the top of their field, that you don’t go and watch and come away saying they made it look so easy.

I remember a man in this congregation was on a business trip to Denver years ago and he was saying how at the hotel where he was staying with the business associates there was an ice rink out in the back and he went out there and he saw this ice skater, this girl being exercised by her coach, and this coach was after her for an hour, it was during the lunch hour, and she’d be skating and no, sharper, sharper, sharper, and just yell at her all the time, hour after hour after hour this thing went on as he watched, he couldn’t figure out what is it with this girl. Two or three years later it turned out to be Peggy Fleming who won the Olympics in skating. Well, the point is, somebody could watch her skate after she got her Olympic status and say gee, she makes it look so easy, oh, Peggy Fleming has such great talent, wonderful. No, it’s not just great talent; it was the thousands of hours of practice under an authority structure that made her great.

And this can go on in any other field; you can listen to someone play the piano, listen to someone play the organ and say oh, they’ve got great talent, I wish I had that talent. Now wait a minute, some people do have that talent, that’s the tragedy, we have lots of talent walking around the face of this earth; God did not create the human race to be vanilla, to be just kind of gray, existing in a twilight zone month after month, year after year and generation after generation. There is far more talent in the human race by many times, many factors, than we ever even notice. And the reason is because people will not knuckle under, discipline themselves to do the training necessary to develop it. And talent is not given to you in its final form; it is only given to you in a nascent form or beginning potential form, and then later on it’s up to you to do with it.

All right, Joseph is in that situation and it applies to Joseph and it’s going to apply to the nation Israel because the nation Israel in some sense can be seen just as Joseph. Israel has a spiritual aggressiveness but she doesn’t know what to do with it; she’s always acting like the brat that Joseph is. You can think of it in terms of entire nations and groups in our own time. In the office the other day we were talking about the German invasion of Europe and how the German army was such a highly skilled thing and we can sit back and say oh yeah, the German army was a wonderful thing, but you know, really Satan used Hitler or something like this, and that’s how they to be good. That’s not how they got to be good; they got to be good because for 20 years that’s nothing but what they did; the German office corps back before the treaties were all dismantled from World War I had a little scheme, and that is the officers took many, many ranks under their real… for example, you take a Major and he’d wind up as a Master Sergeant, and they did that to hold to the disarmament treaties. And meanwhile the German officer corps was training, training, training, training, training; the German Air Force trained masquerading as a civilian airline, and for years and years all they were doing were training in passenger planes; we don’t have any war planes here, show us where the war planes are, nonsense, no war planes here, but constantly they were training and training and training, all their men were training, oh this is just security forces here, this is all, sergeants, there are no generals, no majors, no colonels here. Oh yes they were, they just weren’t wearing their ranks, because they trained and the trained and they trained; they figured out everything they had to do to invade Russia and then in the early 40’s on the eastern front, a front so long that we’ve never seen this again in modern history, 1800 miles long, with hundred division, boom, going in on something like this. An operation the modern world has never seen; we like to talk about World War II and what the Americans did but let’s not forget, as a friend of mine in the army tells me, let’s not forget that by the time the Americans entered the war we were facing second string teams; the first string had already fought on the eastern front and that’s why it’s called the unknown war, because historians don’t recognize it. The largest tank battles in the history of the human race were fought there, over thousands and thousands of square miles. Men by the scores died, thousands and thousands of men. We have nothing comparable on the western front to that kind of thing.

How did that army get to the way it was? It wasn’t that the Germans were better; it was that they were better trained and had a better concept of discipline and a better concept of authority. And you take a group that has authority and they’ll whip any other group any time. If you want another historical illustration, the Roman army. The Roman army was not the most brilliant army that ever lived; the Greeks had better generals with more innovative strategy than the Romans ever had. But you know why the Romans always used to whip them? Because the Romans had discipline. The Romans would lose men by immature decisions, they would lose men by stubbornness, but they always finally whipped their opponents because they could take the pressure and they would just keep on grinding like a machine, no stopping them. And that’s the same with teams, team sports, football, soccer, whatever it, where the team is not a team and t hey don’t work together, you could have eight prima donnas on the field and they can’t even walk without tripping over themselves. Why? No discipline, they don’t pull together. You see, this is why it’s a basic lesson and it applies to the church the same way. You can’t have ten spiritual gifts untrained, spastically deployed and expect to have some sort of nice warm peaceful Christian fellowship. The gift has to be trained and that’s not what’s happening today because we live in an instant society, just add water and serve.

Now the second lesson that children have to learn, and Joseph had to learn, is besides authority they have to learn the opposite; they have to learn the fact that they exist in a lawful world in which there is such a thing as appeal to law. If you want to look in the Bible for lessons and verses and principles on the first point, look in the book of Proverbs. If you want to look in the Bible for lessons and principles and verses on the second point, look at the books of Esther and Daniel; both of them are filled with the concept of appeal. Now what do we mean by this? Well, here’s what we mean and it’s something that child advocates, particularly this year, are addressing, and that’s the problem of the child that may not necessarily be physically beaten, but emotionally and spiritually he is beaten and he’s whipped, and you can see these children, the way they walk around, slouching around, no sense of purpose, no sense of value, they just look whipped. You can look at them in a classroom; they can’t even sin skillfully, there’s nothing about them that functions. They can’t be bad in a great way and they can’t be good in a great way, they’re just kind of zeroes; they’re going to sit there and look at the clock until the end of the period; this kind of group.

Now what happens; how do people get this way? Well, the modern theory is that’s being promoted all over the place is that it’s because these children are getting over-developed consciences because they have a mother or they have a father, oh, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, and this goes on day after day after day after day, overly severe and tyrannical discipline. And what this does, it engenders an overgrown conscience. I argue exactly the opposite; the tyrannical overbearing parent isn’t strengthening the conscience, they are weakening the conscience. As proof of my point I cite 1 Corinthians 8 where Paul simply states that for a person, a believer to be whipped and pressured into doing something against his conscience weakens him and wounds him. What happens in these children isn’t that they develop too much conscience, see that uses an argument we’ve got to get rid of religion, we’ve got to get rid of the Bible and all the rest. That’s not what the problem is; the problem is the child has God-consciousness on the inside, world-consciousness and self-consciousness. This is given to him by God. Every baby comes equipped with this like he does with a set of lungs, which he shortly lets you know he has. All this is automatic.

But here’s what happens. Under tyrannical discipline, under constant disapproval, under tremendous outside pressure what happens is the child has to make a choice and the choice is this: do I follow what I know, that I am a creature worthwhile, I am not just a brat, in Joseph’s case he was a brilliant brat, he had something good about him, he had value before God’s eyes and so therefore Joseph could say, if he was in this situation, it turns out with such a weak father as Jacob he didn’t have any problem there, but had Jacob been a domineering parent Joseph would have had the problem of just being considered a brat, a brat, a brat, a brat, a brat, a brat, a brat, but inside what would the God-consciousness tell him? No, I am not a brat, I am made in God’s image and I don’t care what my father and what my mother and what my teachers say, I have value. Now that’s not being proud, and that’s not being arrogant; that is simply expressing the child’s deepest inner soul, that he is in fact worth something in God’s sight.

Now what happens when the pressure is applied? The child either goes this way and rebels against his parents, saying my parents are wrong, they are totally wrong and I’m not following them, or, and this is the case of a beaten child, he turns around and says all right, all that inner prompting that tells me that I do have value, that I am not wholly a brat, I’ll disregard that, that’s wrong; what my mother and what my father and what my teachers are saying must be right; maybe I am worthless, maybe I am a brat. Now what has happened? Is that a result of over-conscience? No, that’s the result of a capitulation to society outside of the conscience; that is a wholesale negation of the conscience, not an over development of the conscience. And so we have the so-called beaten child is actually a child that’s had his conscience violated; the same principle as in 1 Corinthians 8.

Well, Joseph didn’t have that problem; Joseph had the first problem and he had a third problem and this is the third lesson that we need to review as far as Joseph being 17 and that is he had talent but he needed skill. The skill is gotten by discipline but it finally has to exist, it has to function, and Joseph did not have this and so when we read… and please notice people, “seventeen” is the age that is picked out for the story. He is old enough to function and have all these basic capacities but he’s not old enough to have had the years of being knocked around and learning the skills.

Now notice what happens; Genesis 37:3, “Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age,” so here we have the partiality of Isaac now transmitted in to the third generation and now it’s worse. There’s a reason for this; you notice the sons mentioned in verse 2? They’re sons of handmaids, not sons of his real wives, and who was his favorite wife? Remember, we have partiality there in a polygamous marriage. He had his favorite wife was Rachel and who was the son of Rachel? Joseph. And what has recently happened to Rachel? She’s died, so what do you suppose this old man is going to do, the last living thing he’s got around in his daily experience to remind him of the woman that he loved so much as his real, chief, chief wife is her son, Joseph. See the strong physical reasons why Israel loves Joseph more than all his children. And then it says, “and he made him a coat” and it says in the King James, “of many colors.” Now if you have a modern translation you’ll notice that they’ve shifted this. Some of them I think translate it a long-sleeved garment, other modern translations translate it as an ornamental or expensive coat.

Now I said that verse 2, 3 and 4 were all gnomic or repetitive verbs; that is, we are to understand that Joseph being 17 years old would constantly, or repeatedly would feed the flocks with his half-brothers; it’s not just one feeding, in fact we know by verse 12 that by this time he wasn’t there, he wasn’t within 50 miles of the place. So verse 2 has to be understood as repetitive; he would, that was his job in the family structure with his half-brothers; that was his chore. But then notice, part of his chore and it’s packed into verse 2 rather than verse 3 is that he would bring bad reports about his brothers. Now as the first verb is gnomic, that is, if it repeats, if it’s not just a point act but a general principle of his life, what do you suppose that means at the end of verse 2. Translated into modern terminology it means that Joseph was a tattle-tale. What it means is that he realized his position in the family, he’d go and Jacob, Jacob, do you know what big brother Levi did today, etc. etc. etc. this would go on day after day after day after day: tattle-tale. This really helped the family relations, and of course his father should have seen this and instructed Joseph, look, if your brothers do something wrong, you see them there, he should have instructed him on the principle of Matthew 18, go to your brother before you come to me, don’t just skip from where you see the wrong doing to your parent, go and tell him that’s wrong. And if he doesn’t listen to you, then we’ll take some action, but give them a chance to respond to some peer correction before you run it up the chain of authority.

Let’s watch what happens. In verse 3 to show that Israel loved Joseph he gave him this garment. Now the question is, what is this garment? Well, if you look at the Hebrew here’s all it says; it says “a tunic of hand palms,” the palms of your hand, and it’s used in the plural, “a tunic of hand palms.” Well, that really doesn’t tell us anything swift, so how do we find out the meaning of this? Well, we guess, based on other occurrences; the best guess is that it was a tunic that showed only the palms of his hands and hence this is why you who have the modern translations will notice the translators are calling it a long-sleeved robe because the actual working robe of the boys that age was short-sleeved.

Now the question is, if this is a gnomic verb it would mean that his father kept giving him a robe. Do we have biblical precedent for this? Yes we do. Turn to 1 Samuel 2, this is the story of Hannah and Samuel. Remember the woman had this child and she gave the child over to the priests and she would come and she would visit her son periodically. And in 1 Samuel 2:19 it describes how Hannah, each time she would come to visit her son, once a year, would bring him a new coat, a new set of clothes. “Moreover, his mother,” and it’s to be understood, “would make him a little coat and would bring it to him year to year when she came up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.” There is a repetitive clothing that occurs.

All right, this gives you some idea of what was happening. Repeatedly who would get the best clothes? Joseph. Now living myself in a family with four sons you know who usually gets the worst clothes is number four because he gets it passed down after it’s been rag-tailed from the first, second and third. They’ve rolled around the lot and it’s been worn out five times and patched, then number four comes along and he gets it. But in this family the… whatever he was, he must have been number 11 or number 12, he was the one that got the best clothes. But that’s not all; that still doesn’t explain the anger that this robe caused the brothers. So let’s look at another reference in Samuel. 2 Samuel 13:18, this suggests the importance of that particular robe and it doesn’t have anything to do with the color of it. Here is an occurrence of that expression; look at the context. “And she had a garment of various colors” in the King James, but it’s again a tunic of palms, “upon her; for with such robes were the king’s daughters who were virgins, appareled.” So it carried a connotation of royalty. You remember that, a connotation of royalty.

Now turn back to Genesis 37 for the surprise. Back in Genesis 37, after the author has introduced all these things, verse 2, verse 3, then in verse 4 he says “And when his brethren saw that their father loved them more than all his brethren, they hated him,” and then you have the word “hate” and they increased their hate, and they increased their hate more, it’s a growing hatred within this family, brother set against brother. But now here’s the ironic thing; here’s the father preferring Joseph, being blind to what it’s doing to his own family, turns around and gets his son, apparently repeatedly, garments worthy of a prince, because remember, Jacob had the money, Jacob was well worth any other prince in Canaan at the time. He could afford the clothes of royalty. What does his son do in the two dreams?

Let’s look at verse 7 and verse 9? The first dream in verse 7, “we were binding sheaves in the filed, and lo, my sheaf arose, and stood up, and your sheaves made obeisance to my sheaf.” The word is used of worship and it’s also used of people in a court bowing down to a prince or a king. Then look at verse 9 for dream number two, and what does it say: “Behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.” Now here you have this strange, strange, strange mixture of good and evil, sovereignty and human responsibility, watch. Here’s Joseph; in the human situation he’s got a doting father; he’s treated as somebody special, so he’s got all these shaping forces; he’s got a tunic of a prince, he’s got a dad who favors him, and what psychologically touch off in his mind? A tremendous ego, this guy sees himself as a king over all of them. And so from the human sinful side there is a trigger for that dream. But here’s the ironic thing; from God’s point of view the dream is going to come true because before these stories are over every single one of those brothers who hate him will bow down to Joseph; every one of them. Not only that, but his own father will acknowledge and be under his authority. So the dream, while stimulated in an evil connotation, yet God is so sovereign, even over evil, that He’s teaching something true through it.

You saw this earlier when we had a less spectacular example of Jacob’s dream with the rock. Remember I made a big point he made a rock pillow; he had rocks on his mind, and after that he began to dream of rocks. You see, there is that simple cause/effect, dreams are related to what happened to you in the last 24 hours or the things that are pressing in upon you. The Bible acknowledges that and the thing the Bible says is that in these situations, not all situations but these situations God reached into the dream process and so superintended it that the dream became revelation of the future.

So now what about those two dreams. First, notice they are in a pair; they both teach the same thing; we’ll see this repeatedly as from Sunday to Sunday we go through these stories. Binding sheaves in the field and my sheaf bowed down to your sheaf; we see that Joseph is the prince and they’re all bowing down as they would to a king. You see the same quality in dream number 2:9 but now do you notice the difference. If you were to categorize, if I had an exam right now and asked you, show me what is different between verse 7 and verse 9, as you look at those two dreams, what do you notice about the center of gravity of them? What do you notice about the central nature of them? One of them, verse 7, is a dream about things in the earth; verse 9 is a dream about the things in heaven. And here you have the comprehensiveness of the arrogance of Joseph’s dream. In other words, both in the earthly and the heavenly realms he shall be king. Do you see the power of this? When you have heaven and earth together in the Old Testament we call that a word pair, like Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created” what? It doesn’t say the universe because the Hebrew really didn’t have a good word for it so it says “heaven and earth,” it’s an antonymic word pair; that is, it’s two words hooked together that mean a big one. And so when you have the concept of heaven and earth coming together you’ve Joseph dreaming of he’s king over every area, using earthly metaphors and using heavenly metaphors, or we would say in a natural and a spiritual way he will reign over his family.

Now in verse 9, something else, we don’t have to follow all the details of Karl Gustav Jung to understand that there is such a thing that he observed when he called it the collective unconscious of the human race, that is, we seem to have stored inside us standard symbols, because these standard symbols occur in dreams, I have seen them occur under extreme pressures in counseling case, I have seen people dream dreams elements of which are found only in ancient myths. Now how do you explain the fact that a person living in 20^th century Lubbock can sit here, dream a dream, never having had contact with the ancient myth and dream in those symbols. I say Karl Gustav Jung was looking at something true; there is something that we are made, we have this sort of built in symbolism and these symbols in verse 9, the sun, the moon and the stars are picked up in the Bible and used repeatedly all the way to the book of Revelation. If some of you want to peek at this later, check me in Revelation 12. The sun is depicting universally in the Bible the Father or the bridegroom; the moon is the woman; now isn’t this interesting; why is the woman the moon. For example, the lunar gods are all female, goddesses. Now why is this? The moon reflects the light of the sun; we’ll see the divine design in this metaphor; it’s not a random symbol, it’s not a statistical chance act. It shows something revelatory about the nature of man and woman and it comes out in 1 Corinthians 11 about the nature of woman. So the woman often appears in the Bible as the moon and that is a female symbol. The stars are the smaller lights in the sky from our earthly perspective, hence the little suns, or the little s-o-n-s, the little sons, and this is why that is… immediately verse 10 you can tell there’s no discussion in verse 10 about those symbols. So the fact is that when he tells the dream to his father, not giving him the interpretation, they implicitly react to it.

Notice what his father says, “Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to you?” Now how does his father know that? Because those dream symbols were a common corpus that circulated in the society; everybody knew what the sun meant, everybody knew what the moon meant, and when you dreamed it naturally spoke that way; there’s no question about it.

Genesis 37:11, “And his brethren envied him;” and the story in verse 11 ends with a significant note, it’s like the whole story is written to a certain tune and then bang, the last measure, suddenly a new tune injects itself as a warning, “but his father [observed the saying]” and the Hebrew means his father kept these, the picture is his father remembered them. Later on his father would have reason to remember him.

All right, we are going to see, as these stories go on, a very interesting thing begin to happen. Here’s the brilliance of Joseph and here’s his bratiness; he is going to get this bratiness, this dross, all of this dross is going to be melted off of him. When he emerges from an Egyptian prison after years of living down there and being forgotten, Joseph is a picture, incidentally, he’s always getting thrown in a cistern, he goes down to Egypt and he gets cast in prison, he becomes almost a Christ type of Christ’s descent into hell in this way, and he goes there and all of this going down is to purge this stuff off so when it’s all taken care of he’s no longer a brilliant brat, he’s a brilliant man, so brilliant that he becomes the architect of the economy of Egypt. That’s the story of sanctification as it’s going to take place and I think we can, as we go on through it see many applications in our lives.

We’re going to sing a new hymn today….