Clough Genesis Lesson 83

Jacob hated by brothers, cast into pit, sold into Egypt – Genesis 37:3-36

If you turn to Genesis 37 we’ll go back to the new section that we’ve just begun, which is called the generations of Jacob, Genesis 37:2. As I said last week there’s a reason why we call this the generations of Jacob or the tolédotes of Jacob. You might wonder, when you read verse 2 why that’s there because it looks to me, when you just look at the prima facie value of the text, there’s just this sentence, “These are the generations of Jacob,” and then the story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jacob, it’s all about Joseph. The answer to that is as we said last week, the tolédotes play out the dominion of the family. In other words, Genesis 1 depicted man to be created to have dominion, to subdue the earth. God said to man be fruitful, multiply, and then subdue the earth.” Well, as the seduction of the earth takes place, it takes place through the family unit. Therefore the Bible is written to reflect this mentality. So we have the tolédote of Jacob begins after the death of Isaac. First you have Isaac, and then after he dies, now Jacob, even though Jacob existed prior to the death of Isaac, even though he was married, even though he became the father of a pretty healthy sized family, it still wasn’t called “these are the days of Jacob” yet. It was called “the days of Jacob” only after the grandfather died; then the next son in line took over the credit for being the one who is ruling. So this is why those are called the tolédote, the tolédote means this is the rule of Jacob and his family.

As we go into this area of the rule of Jacob and his family it behooves us to remember that from Genesis 37, particularly on down through the end of the book, you have emphasis over and over again on the family. The striking thing about this is that Genesis is the ground document for the rest of the Old Testament, obviously; since the rest of the Old Testament deals with the kingdom of God and the salvation of God toward man in history, and since it deals with the kingdom of God, then it follows that the foundation for the kingdom of God is not the state but the family. And this is where, if you’re going to be a Bible-believing Christian, you have to part company with the thinking of your generation, right here. Our generation says that the way to handle problems is by the state; that if the state doesn’t do it, nobody else could possibly do it, and thus the state becomes the modern substitute for Christ. The state, in most people’s, is a substitute Messiah, whether it’s a full-fledged communist, whether it’s a welfarist, or what have you, or socialist, the same principle follows, that the state is becoming God walking on earth from whom all blessings flow.

Now the reason that takes place, the reason why your neighbor or the person you work with or somebody else that you may talk with, the reason they think this way is because of a certain starting point, a certain way of believing about the way history goes on. If we were to diagram these two ways of thinking, starting with human viewpoint and then going to divine viewpoint, here would be the difference: in human viewpoint, which is the kind of thinking the non-Christian does, or the poorly informed Christian, in this kind of thinking history is looked upon as a complete chaos. Chance reigns, there is no inherent order; all is just flux. This is why evolutionists are popular; it provides an interesting way of trying to explain structures in the biological world on the basis of sheer chance. This is why other philosophies, like statism, Marxism, communism and socialism are so popular, because if you grant… and you have to grant that once this is so, then it must follow that any order that is going to occur must be imposed order, that is, order that is imposed upon the chaos. If we have a tray full of loose marbles, the only way we are going to get those marbles in any kind of a pattern is for you to put your hands down there and shape them into a pattern; you have to interfere into the chaos to bring order into it. And that’s the philosophy of our day, that the way of bringing order into chaos in history is for the state to do this.

Well, the Christian can’t be that way. We argue that there isn’t any chaos there to start with. First of all, we have all of the divine institutions. Number one is the institution of human responsibility, that is there, that’s not chaotic. Every child is born with a conscience, he isn’t given his conscience by his mother or his father; he comes equipped with a conscience just like he comes equipped with a nose and a mouth. Luther had one humorous point in his sermons when he’s talking about whether somebody was part of the world or not, he says take hold of your nose and see if you’re there. And the point is that we have this responsibility; it’s built into the system. We say the second divine institution is the institution of marriage. The institution of marriages isn’t thought up by somebody, it’s not the hottest solution going in history; it’s something that is inherent and all societies have come to that conclusion. Now why have all societies come to that conclusion? Because they’re made that way. The third thing is the family, and basically the family has been always the mainstream. How’s that happen? Because all is fluid, all is chaos? No, because there is design and there is order. We have the fourth divine institution, the institution of government or the state. And then we’ve said the fifth is the tribal diversity of men.

So there is an order to history, so we have to disagree with our non-Christian neighbors; I’m sorry, your reasoning may be very, very good, you logic may be perfect, there’s only one problem, I can’t accept your starting point, and your starting point is that all is chaos. The Christian believes that’s not true, there’s this inherent structure and one particular, as well as these other two institutions, and number three is the institution where the action is. When God goes to establish His kingdom He doesn’t start with the state. Now orthodox communism always insists that the whole problem is that the economic system is all screwed up and all we need is a good revolution, shattering the bourgeoisie and breaking it down, getting rid of all private capital and then we will have one mighty heaven on earth. Well, that presumes there is no structure.

So now in Genesis 37 and following you are going to see God take the first family of history of His kingdom and work just with that family. He does not start with the government of Israel; He does not start with the Law. He does not start with the nation; He starts with a family. In looking at this family we watch how God works and the reason we want to know, if we’re Christians, is we want to know since all of us are in some family, we want to know at least this, how has God worked on me while I’ve been in my family; how has God used my father, how has God used my mother; how is God using my brothers and sisters on me. If I’m a Christian parent I’m also asking additional questions; how does God work on my son, how does God work on my daughter. I want to know; if there’s a structure there and if the Bible is God’s instruction then I ought to be able to sit down and reasonably infer what is going on around me.

Now we can do this and we have seen through the Joseph story because we’ve studied the first 11 verses of chapter 37, we’ve seen some characteristics about this boy. And we’ve mentioned there are two kinds of things that can happen to a child like this. We have all this talk about child abuse and it’s a growing concern in our country, let’s take a unique trip this morning and start defining things, just temporarily for the sake of argument, in terms of abuse. Let’s talk about two kinds of abuse of children: good abuse and bad abuse. God has a good way of abusing children; He also condemns a bad way. And the reason I am using the word “abuse” for these two categories is because in normal conversations in the newspaper, in the media that I’ve watched, these two kinds of abuse are not being distinguished. In other words, it’s all categorized as abuse and that’s a clever little ploy for doing away with Christian child rearing, because if we can brand the Christian way of abusing children as bad, under the guise that it’s abuse, then you can rid of all of it. So taking the cue from the other side I’ll use the word “abuse” and then I’ll turn it around against them.

So we’re going to talk about good abuse and bad abuse. The first way of good abuse is what we call breaking a child’s spirit, and this happens to everyone who is sanctified. The Psalm that we read, Psalm 51:17 says, “A broken and contrite spirit, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Now what is David talking about? He’s talking about a broken human spirit. The word in the Hebrew, shabar, there’s two different words in the Hebrew language for this, the Hebrew language even if modern commentators don’t, does distinguish between the two kinds of abuse. The first is shabar abuse and this means that God is going to break autonomous pride; all persons of the human race since Adam have been born as brats. And all members of the human race have to have their spirit broken. This is why we have so much trouble in the family in home with adults is because we haven’t had people who have had their spirit finally broken.

Now what do we mean by this good kind of abuse or this good kind of breaking. It means that the person finally, basically in the core of their heart, becomes oriented to grace. It means that the person finally says all right, I see that the only way my basic needs are ever going to be met is by God meeting them, His way, not my way. Now once this titanic conclusion dawns on somebody, and sometimes it takes years of suffering before it does, once this conclusion dawns then you have hope and then the child is ready for growth. That is what has not happened to Joseph in Genesis 37. All right, that’s the good kind of abuse.

Now let’s look at the bad kind of abuse. There’s another Hebrew word called nakah; this word means a broken spirit, it occurs in the book of Proverbs. And if you want some references it would be Proverbs 15:13; Proverbs 17:22, and this word means a whipped spirit, it really means a beaten whipped spirit. Now that is bad abuse. But even here we have to disagree with those who are shouting child abuse, child abuse, child abuse. What they say happens is that here you have this big overpowering parent or big overpowering person in the environment and they say kid, you do this wrong, you do that wrong, you do this wrong and all that does, it increases or overworks their conscience and so the problem, they say, is an overgrown conscience. That is precisely the opposite of the problem, that isn’t the problem. On the basis of Scripture the problem is that their conscience is too weak, not too strong. Here’s what’s happened.

The child comes equipped with God-consciousness; the child comes equipped, therefore, already from birth with an innate sense that he’s worthwhile in God’s sight. He has two conflicting inner claims; one from birth that he is a creature in God’s image and he intuitively knows this. The second thing that he comes equipped with is the sense that he’s a sinner. No child has to be told he’s a sinner, he knows it. All right, if that’s the case, we’ve got that intuitively embedded in the soul. Now what happens? Under an environment of abuse, where you have overbearing adults in the vicinity, who are unwise in the way they bring up the child, in that situation you’ve got the child saying okay, I’m bad, I’m a clod, I can’t do anything and so on, a lousy sense of self-worth. And what’s happening? Here’s the child’s conscience. The conscience says hey kid, you’re a sinner, but you’re also made in God’s image, you’ve got inherent dignity. Here’s the parent, aw, you’re a clod, you’re a clod, you’re a clod, you’re a clod, and being overly harsh and overbearing on him. Now what happens to the kid? Is that an overworked conscience? Not on your life. What the problem is that the kid is listening now to what the adults are saying, what his environment is saying, and not to what his own heart says, and he’s been seduced away from his conscience, so now he takes all his cues from what people think. And he grows up in life not only listening to what people say but he grows up in life thinking that I must be judged by their standards. That is a whipped child; that is an abused child, his conscience has been shattered. And I would suggest to you, for those who are perceptive, that you will notice it’s the humanist forms of education that do the second kind of abuse, systematically.

So we have good abuse and bad abuse; good child abuse is breaking the spirit in the sense of breaking pride. The second abuse is breaking the child period. Now when God goes to sanctify you and me, He engages in the good kind of abuse; if we want to define sanctification as abuse and I’m sure if you’ve been a Christian more than five minutes you’ve been in a situation where you feel like God is personally abusing you, picking on you, and so forth. All right, let’s call sanctification some kind of abuse. Now watch Joseph’s situation.

Joseph, as we said last week, is a brilliant brat. And we deliberately picked those two words to show you where the abuse occurs and where it doesn’t occur. Joseph has brilliance; Joseph is going to be used by God in a vital way to save his people. Joseph is being groomed for a mighty act; he is going to be God’s man on the scene at one of those neat crisis points of history. He’s going to be the man with the goods in the right place at the right time. Joseph is going to be brilliant and he’s born brilliant and at 17 he’s a brilliant boy. The problem with it is he can’t exercise his brilliance because his bratiness gets in the way. So now this has got to be sheered off and that’s the place where God begins His divine plan of abusing Joseph to get rid of that bratiness, to break his spirit. And when his spirit is broken, then his brilliance can shine, but not until. See, that’s the tragedy, if you don’t have this good kind of abuse you are really being unfair to a child because he can never develop the gift that God has put in his soul. And he goes through life perpetually knowing I’ve failed, I’ve failed, I’ve never been what I could have been, and just walks around just kind of in a zombie state, no sense of pride or dignity simply because he’s never produced anything worthwhile, he is a clod.

In Genesis 37:3 we see explicitly how Joseph was groomed, both in his brilliance and in his bratiness. Two things about verse 3; watch his father’s attitude toward this boy. First it says: “Israel loved Joseph more than all his children,” one of the hardest things for a parent, particularly dad not to do and that is to favor one or the other child. There are some kids in your family that you just naturally like, their personality meshes with you, usually they’re the children that don’t have your sin nature, the children that you have who are carbon copies of you sin nature you can’t stand, they irritate you all the time and you can’t figure out what it is about that kid that bugs me… well, take a mirror and look at it for a long time because what you’re seeing is your own sin nature; naturally you don’t like it because you’ve been fighting it and so you see it reappear in your kid and then you have the same attitude to the kid you do to your own sin nature. The pattern is that way.

Now Joseph is being favored by his dad. The external evidence of his favoredness is also given in verse 3 by the coat, as the King James says, “a coat of many colors.” We know it isn’t many colors, we suspect from what I said it was last time is a royal garment style. In other words, every time the old man got out to buy clothes for this kid he fitted him out in the clothes of a prince.

Now the lesson today is to watch how God works and if you can watch how God works here in this situation it’ll give you a powerful, hopeful mechanism so you can work in your family, no matter what the circumstance is, no matter what the pressure is. There’s a neat piece of wisdom in this story as we go on. Now to get the background for the story, let’s draw a little stick figure of Joseph; here Joseph is, he’s brilliant and he’s a brat. Now God has got to stimulate his brilliance and get rid of his bratiness, but He can’t leave it up to just his parents because his parents aren’t that wise, just as God can’t leave your child’s sanctification up to you, thank God, because if He did, the child would be permanently crippled. And all of us as parents do that because we just aren’t that wise enough; all we can do is follow the mandates of Scripture the best we can and trust God to work through us.

Now watch what goes on in Joseph’s life. Here Joseph is and what is one of the early forces in his life? A father. Is that father wise or unwise? Unwise, because verse 3 tells that he is partial; that father is not being a good father to his son in verse 3, definitely not. But what is the father doing in spite of his foolishness. Again look at verse 3; he’s still grooming his son to be a brilliant prince, is he not? What is Joseph going to be before the stories are all over? He’s going to sit at Pharaoh’s right hand. What was the stimulus in that little boy’s soul? From early childhood he was treated like a prince and later childhood or adulthood he becomes a prince. So now here is an interesting thing; his father, being an unwise father still is able to bring out the brilliance in his son. He brings out the bratiness in his son while he’s doing it, but he does bring out the brilliance of his son and he, so to speak, if we want to use the word and I think we can here if you understand how I use it, he “conditions” his son. The answer the Bible throws at us, the reason this isn’t bad is who’s over the unwise father. You see, if you’re here and you’re not a Christian, and you don’t have a sense of the reality of God in your life, then you’re going to say hey, I don’t see that, that’s just his unwise father conditioning him but the Christian has eyes to see above that, who’s above the unwise father? The sovereign God is. So in spite of the fact that the parent doesn’t really know what they’re doing, who is all the time working through the unwise parent? God is.

So Joseph’s brilliance is now being developed.

Let’s look at some of his bratiness just to remind ourselves. In verse 2 all those actions described are iterative actions, that is, they occur time and time and time again, and one of the things that made Joseph a brat was that he was a tale-bearer. Notice what it says, “Joseph kept bringing to his father their evil report.” Everything that went wrong he said, hey Jacob, or probably Abba, my father, Abba, do you know what Levi and Simeon are doing? Do you know they did this and they did this and they did this and they did this, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they couldn’t do anything without Joseph running to daddy and telling him about it. Well now how is that supposed to be handled? You can use the same technique of Matthew 18:15-18 in the New Testament. First he ought to have, if Joseph sat there and he saw Levi doing something wrong, or he saw Simeon doing something wrong, he should have said [something] and confronted them as a brother—that is wrong. All right, if that didn’t work then he maybe could get another brother and could come with two or three witnesses and deal with the problem, and then go to the father. After all, the kid is 17 in verse 2. You’d think by the time he was 17 he’d learn something.

Now in this situation not only does he show his bratiness by his tail-bearing but in verse 5 and verse 9, when he dreams the two dreams, one of the sheaves in the field and the other one in verse 9 of the sun, the moon and the stars, the dream we believe was conditionally produced; his father kept treating him as somebody special. Joseph was somebody special, wasn’t he, in God’s sight. But the father is only imperfectly developing him into someone special. So he dreams a dream now and he always has these dreams in pairs, showing that God is the author of the dream. But the dream, from the human point of view is stimulated by his father. But since he’s a brat, now in verse 5 and verse 9 he goes around and says ha-ha, ha-ha, this kind of attitude, look what I’m going to do, I’m going to be ruler over you. In fact he is going to become the ruler over them; he’s going to become the ruler of all Egypt. And that’s a true fact but you can see from verse 9 and verse 5 that he doesn’t go about it very wisely inside the home. So what does he now incur? The hatred and animosity of his brothers. So now what’s the second shaping force in this boy? Brothers and teachers.

I’m just showing you all this because I want you to see how the Bible attacks the idea that is so popular today that children and all of us are victims of our surroundings. We are but we’re not. Look at this. Two primary forces on this little boy, “little”—17, a father who’s a fool, brothers who hate him, real positive child-like influence, isn’t it; a great home to bring up a king in. But the Bible is real. What is this family we’re looking at? It’s the “first family” of the Old Testament. It is a family from which the kingdom of God will be built and God continues to work with it. God doesn’t look down and say well, the institution of family is all gone, see that failure, that failure, that failure and that failure, I guess the state will have to take over. No, that’s not what God’s attitude is. God says I’m going to work through the family any way, even when it’s this decrepit.

Let’s go on and pick up the story where we left it in Genesis 37:12. He’s going to go see his brother, verses 12-14, “And his brothers went to feed their father’s flock in Shechem. [13] And Israel said unto Joseph, Do not thy brethren feed the flock in Shechem? Come, and I will send thee unto them. And he said to him, Here am I. [14] And he said to him, Go, I pray thee, see whether it be well with thy brethren, and well with the flocks; and bring me word again. So he sent him out of the vale of Hebron, and he came to Shechem.”

Now I said last week that when you read this part of your Bible if you want to get the most out of it for yourself, remember this; God is not going to show up His fire and smoke on Mount Sinai, God is not going to resurrect from the dead, God is not going to pull off His spectacular deals. The way to see God’s action in these stories of Genesis is to look at providence; look at circumstances. That’s how God’s communicating. And for you to see some of those circumstances and how God communicates we must look at the terrain and the timing and the geography of this little episode. So to prepare you to see some of the details of the story we’re going to look at some of the terrain in which this story occurs.

[He shows slides] Looking once again at a general overview of the map so you have an idea of some of the details, we have a ridge line that runs north/south in the mountainous areas of Israel. Along that line all the major action of Genesis occurs. It occurs starting down here with the city of Beersheba, Hebron, what is the area around Jerusalem though there wasn’t Jerusalem there then, up here those twin mountain areas, Shechem, and there’s going to be a place called Dothan. Now here’s the scheme; remember Abraham and Isaac spent there son down here at Beersheba and Hebron. However, when Isaac comes in the land he comes in from the northeast side, crosses in over here to a place called Shechem; later he comes on down and sets up a sanctuary at Bethel. At the time of this story, however, he is down in Hebron because verse 14 talks about the fact Joseph, leave the vale of Hebron. So Joseph starts here at Hebron and goes all the way up this major road, all the way up to Shechem. Now you remember what happened at Shechem; there was a massacre in chapter 34. Remember the brothers got mad because some of the boys in the town raped their sister so they went in there and they killed them all, obviously not too friendly to the hosts in the country. And in that situation you can imagine that around here there’s going to be some problems. So here Jacob is down in Hebron, wondering what’s going on with his business assets up here around Shechem where all that volatile social situation exists.

Well, Jacob wants to send an informant up there and find out, what’s going on with my business. So who do you suppose he’s going to pick in the family? Old tattle-tale himself, Joseph, because he knows if he sends him up there if anything’s screwed up, Joseph will surely come down and tell daddy, do you know what Levi’s doing, and so on. So therefore Joseph is a pretty safe bet to send on up and see what’s going on. Now as the story unfolds Joseph arrives in this area of Shechem. We have Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, these twin mountains that play prominent roles in the Bible. He comes up the road here and starts to wander around this valley. You’ll watch the verb of timing because remember, we’re looking at providence; we’re looking at a sense of how God conditions us through circumstances. And so it’s no accident that the author will spend lots and lots of time with this in this chapter on watching and tracing Joseph; he comes up here, he doesn’t find his brothers right away, he wanders around and wanders around and wanders around until finally just at the right moment he sees a man. And the man just happens to be a man who was in turn wandering around, wandering around, who happened to hear his brother say they were going to go to a place up north called Dothan. Dothan is up in this area right near this little Arab village of Jinin, that’s where, incidentally, on the West Bank all the riots are occurring, around Jinin. So we have this Dothan area and you’ll see in the slide why the men moved their flocks from this area and moved them up north to Dothan.

To catch why the story is the way it is there’s one other feature; you must understand this black line that cuts through the land is called the Via Maris; the Via Maris was one of the most famous highways in the ancient world and the author of Genesis presumes that we know about it, so he doesn’t mention it, unfortunately, but if we were there in the land we would have seen it. Here’s the deal: what is God’s ultimate call for this boy Joseph? What does God ultimately want to do with that boy? He wants to get him down into Egypt, doesn’t He? Now how do you suppose God’s going to get him down to Egypt? He’s got to create a situation, the circumstances of which are just perfectly timed to get the boy to hook up with the right people who will take him down here without getting him killed by his brothers, yet He’s got to get him wrenched away from Jacob his father and down here into the house of Pharaoh. That’s the object of God; He’s going to use this Via Maris to do it and that’s why, going back to this map, had the event of Genesis 37 occurred here, the Via Maris cuts through the valley of Dothan down here and down the coast. Well, if God wants to get Joseph from here over to Egypt, He can’t do it from this area; the incident has to take place up here right next to the highway, because how was Joseph going to get to Egypt? By the caravan of the Ishmaelites.

This is the land area around the two mountains, Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim; Shechem was in between this area, and you can see the land would be somewhat suitable for grazing, until, that is, I show you the land around Dothan. This is the city of Jinin today. This is a field out near the area, and this is the place where they were grazing their flocks. You can easily see that the grazing there was a lot better than it was at the other place. And this is the highway of the Via Maris. And that little hill is the city of Dothan; there’s the tel where all the ruins of the city now exist. There’s the background geographically for this story, now let’s look at some of the details of it.

Remember, we’re watching God work in a life that’s just like yours. Genesis 37:15, “And a certain man found him,” see, he comes up from Hebron to Shechem, and “a certain man finds him, and, behold, he was wandering [in the field: and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou?]” and the word “wander” here is a Hebrew participle which means it’s the motion picture tense and the author is drawing your attention to the fact that Joseph is momentarily confused, so now let’s take our little stick figure of Joseph and add another thing that’s always frustrating to every one of us, and that is delays, those frustrating delays, you wish something would happen and it doesn’t, and you get delayed, and you get delayed, and you get delayed, and you get delayed. Here is a delay in Joseph’s life. Now just think, if the delay wasn’t there then he eventually, probably, would have lost where his brothers were because he didn’t know where they were. He had to delay long enough to get hold of the guy that knew where his brothers were, because they certainly didn’t leave a message.

Verse 16, “And he said, I seek my brethren: tell me, I pray thee, where they feed their flocks. [17] And the man said, They are departed hence; for I heard them say, Let us go to Dothan. And Joseph went after his brethren, and found them in Dothan.” So the timing is perfect. Suppose he got there too early, what would his brothers have done to Joseph? They would have killed him. The timing can’t be too late because if he gets there too late then the convoy of Ishmaelites that had come down the Via Maris to take him down to Egypt aren’t going to come. So God’s timing has to be perfect. This explains why sometimes when you want to do something and you get frustrated with the delay, that’s actually of God. That’s for your good.

Verse 18, the brothers see him coming and they say oh-oh, here comes trouble. “And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto them, they conspired against him to slay him.” And they said oh, here comes the dreamer. Come, let’s kill him and throw him into some pit then we can say an evil beast devoured him, and we’re going to see what becomes of his dreams. [19, “And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. [20] Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.]

So now we have the attitude of bitterness; note the little stick figure of Joseph now; three things working in his life, a foolish father, hateful brothers, and delays. Aren’t those wonderful? See, that’s the way God abuses us is the good sense of the word, to chip away that dross that needs to be chipped away. Well, in this hatred, this attitude, they positively hate, in verse 20 at the end, “we’ll see,” see, it’s sarcasm, “we’ll see what becomes of the dreams.” In other words, they hate God’s calling on his life and they’re going to lie about it and talk about an evil beast, then they can upset their father that way too.

Verse 21-22, the oldest son, Reuben comes to the rescue. Now here’s an amusing thing that should give you great, great appreciation for the finesse with which God abuses us. Reuben tries to help him; notice what happens. Reuben is the oldest son in all this. Reuben hears it, “[And Reuben heard it,] and he delivered him out of their hands; and said, Let us not kill him. [22] …Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand upon him; that he might rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again.” So now look at the forces in Joseph’s life. Where does God want Joseph? Egypt. Why? Because He wants him to be the forerunner of the deliverance to the nation. But where does Jacob want Joseph? At home. Where does Reuben want Joseph? At home. Where do the brothers want Joseph? Dead. So now God can’t yield to the good guys or the bad guys because then God’s plan won’t be right. If He yields to the good guys, Jacob and Reuben, then little Joseph goes back home and doesn’t perform the will of God. But on the other hand, God can’t yield to the bad guys because if he does then they’d kill him. Now watch the solution of God.

Verse 23, “And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stripped Joseph out of his coat, [his coat of many colors that was on him;] now why do you suppose they did that first? I suggest to you, based on verse 3 and this verse, that it was the coat that infuriated them; that coat was the incarnation of everything despiteful about Joseph; the fact is that daddy always would buy the best clothes for that little brat. And every place that little brat went he wore this… you know, he probably strutted around with it, just to rub it in a little. And so the brothers said that is coming off right now.

[Verse 24, “And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it.”]
Now to give you an idea of what the pit was, that this wasn’t some manhole cover that they found out in the middle of the desert, let me show you what cisterns were really like in the ancient world, because that’s what it is, he gets thrown in a cistern. This little incident is interesting because this is part of grooming him for another little episode in his life; he’s going to be thrown into jail. Poor Joseph spent half his life underground. In the ancient world they had a little problem with water. Contrary to your history teachers, ancient people weren’t stupid; they were quite ingenious. Before the age of plastic pipe they had irrigation channels and they had gutters on their homes and the gutters would collect the rain water and it’d wash down into these channels and it would be collected in cisterns. Here’s one cistern covered up, if you were in the streets you didn’t see it. I put a little notebook down there, it’s about eight inches tall so it gives you an idea of how deep that little trough is, it’s just a little trough covered over with rocks, and that was how they collected their rain water, it would drain down into these cisterns. And the women would go out with their pots and pick up the rain water and that’s how… this particular city I took was in the Negev and it existed there centuries before diesel pumps and centuries before plastic pipes. And they existed quite comfortably out there and raised quite a good society.

But lest you think that that particular cistern is representative, let me take you to the granddaddy of all cisterns. This is Masada, this is the famous place where, after the death of Christ and the Jews were invaded in 68 AD by Vespasian, Vespasian marched his armies into Jerusalem and some of the Jews fled to the top of this mountain, and they fled there and they did a bad thing, they got on the top of this mountain, the Roman soldiers were down at the base and they spit at them. And the Roman armies were the kind of armies you don’t spit at a Roman legionnaire without a little repercussion. They didn’t have Congressmen writing home about cruelty to people and animals and so on. And so we had the Roman army begin a siege of Masada. The evidence of that siege is seen on the right side of the picture, that inclined plain. Do you know what the Romans did? They borrowed 10,000 Jewish slaves and for three years built that plain bucket by bucket. And they said we are going to slaughter those Jews for spitting at us from the top of that mountain, we’re going to go up there and take our legions and break them. And so with 10,000 slaves over two to three years they built this incline all the way up there until one morning the Roman commander gave the order to go in.

Only one problem, the Jews knew that he was going to come across that plain that morning and so they carefully put all their belongings out here at this little place, all their food lined up to show the Romans you didn’t starve us out; all the water, you didn’t keep us from being thirsty, we had plenty of food, they grew their own crops up there, they lay it all out there and then each man had to go home, kill his children, then kill his wife and then each man would kill each other man until they got down to the commander who committed suicide. They lined all the bodies up as each person died they’d die right there and they left them all lined up in a neat little line and said okay Romans, we spit at you, and we defy you to the last; you can spend 10,000 slaves lives building a Roman ramp for two to three years and we still are not going to give you the right of defeating us. The only reason we know the story is that one man chickened out of killing his wife and he hid her down here, and she came out and the Roman commander found her and she told the story of the slaughter of Masada. But they lived up there for two or three years without any supplies. How they did it was they collected rain water in this [shows picture]. This is the cistern. When archeologists first found this after World War II they said it was impossible to fill this thing up, it would never have worked. An Israeli archeologist was up there one day and there was a thunderstorm and it filled three-quarters up. To give you a size, there’s a man. That was carved out of rock by people, primitive, who didn’t have power tools. Now this gives you an idea of what a cistern is.

Now Joseph wasn’t cast into quite as big a one as that, but the point remains, just think of that one, get this in your mind’s eye to visualize the loneliness, the stark terror, the absolute defeat of this 17 year old as he’s dumped into the cistern. And so they dump him. Now an interesting thing happens out along the way. I think God has to engineer this pretty coolly so that every detail works together for good. Now you notice in verse 22 it’s talking about Reuben. The strange thing about this text is that Reuben disappears after verse 22; the text doesn’t say where he goes, he just disappears, because had he been there, Joseph would have been brought back to Hebron. So God has to get Reuben out of the way, so Reuben just takes off somewhere, and he momentarily leaves Joseph in the cistern. Meanwhile, back at the ranch what happens?

Verse 25, “And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmaelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.” Well, now here’s the other element in God’s plan. So we’re going to take our little stick figure and we’ll put convoy because here’s a convoy of merchants that are coming up here and we’ll some would-be rescuers, Reuben tries, so these are some factors operating in the life of Joseph, and it says as they looked the company comes, perfect timing. [26] “And Judah said unto his brethren, What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood? [27] Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content.”

Now in verse 28 they sell him for a particular price; note the price. The price of twenty pieces of silver is the price of a young male slave under 20. Over 20 slaves got thirty pieces of silver, which shows you incidentally, they were sold for pretty healthy prices; this amounts to thousands of dollars; they made quite a bit of money on Joseph. [“Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt.”]

So he’s sold off as a slave; Jesus was betrayed for thirty pieces of silver and the significance of that is that thirty pieces was the going price for a slave. It’s ironic and you don’t get the humor of it until you actually go to Israel and Jerusalem, but you know the place where Jesus betrayed is the place where the U.N. picked for their administrative headquarters. It’s on the Mount of Treason; I leave that to your unsanctified imagination to reason out the connection.

So we have the Midianites picking him and verse 28 terminates, where of all places do they just happen to be going? Egypt. Now you see how God’s working in this boy’s life? Now verse 29, the good guy comes galloping in to find out where’s Joseph. So verse 29, “Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his clothes. [30] And he returned unto his brethren, and said, The child is not; and I, whither shall I go? [31] And they took Joseph’s coat,” they’ve got to cover the whole thing up, “and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood; [32] And they sent the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father; [and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no. [33] And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces.]”

And verse 34, “And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days. [35] And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.” Isn’t this a tragedy in the story? Here is a father who wanted more than anything else to hold on to his young son, and which of all the sons does God take? Exactly the son that the father wants. And how does this first family that God is going to build His kingdom out of wind up? Oh, it’s in glorious shape now. The one son is now a slave in a foreign country; the other sons are guilty of meditated murder, though not executed, guilty of engaging in slavery, the father is internal depression. Isn’t that a great start to the kingdom of God in the Old Testament? It should encourage all of you. See what God works with? See the kind of family difficulties God works with and He stays working with them year after year?

Verse 36, notice the end, “And the Midianites sold him into Egypt [unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, and captain of the guard.]” That’s the other little cute thing about the story. Suppose God gets him down to Egypt; suppose God calls you into His planning room; say, so and so, I’ve got a little problem in history I’d like you to solve for me, I want you to write the script, okay. I’ve got a little Jewish boy, 17, and I’ve got to get him down to be Pharaoh’s right hand. How do I get him down there? Egyptians don’t like Jews. Could you have thought a neater way of doing this, getting him down in the right place and all sanctified by the time he gets in the right place. Beautiful timing, because He’s got to get him not into Egypt but He’s got to get him into the house of Pharaoh. That’s why he’s sold as a slave because if he went down on a visa, as a tourist, he wouldn’t be admitted to Pharaoh’s presence. Pharaoh doesn’t visit with Semites dropping in for coffee or something; that’s not how you get to meet Pharaoh. He can’t be part of the Egyptian army, really, because he’s a foreigner and he wouldn’t be respected. So that’s not the way, he can’t climb the social ladder. So there’s only one way it can work and that is he’s going to sneak Joseph into Pharaoh’s house as a slave and it starts in verse 36. He gets him into Poitiphar’s house, who just happened to be the officer of Pharaoh’s, and happens to be the C.O. of Pharaoh’s body guards.

Now who’s the unseen invisible hand in this entire story? Just look at this. Here’s a boy who was a brilliant brat. God has a plan and purpose for his life, like He does for yours. He comes out of a home that is, at best, a truce. There’s no real peace in this home; he has a father that is not really acute in thinking through his skills as a father; he has brothers who hate him so much that they’re ready to kill him. He experiences delays, he experiences frustrations; foreigners who are businessmen who don’t care personally for the kid, they get involved in his life, probably don’t treat him too well. He has some people try to rescue him and they’re cut off and prevented from rescuing him. Look at all these factors. Who controls this environment? Who is conditioning this boy to be the kind of boy that He wants him to be. God is. Who’s abusing this child? God is, the nice way.

When Joseph gets down through this abuse he’s not a beaten whipped spirit; he becomes so powerful in history, and I hope to show you who he is in history, he becomes so powerful that he becomes one of the two men in all of the Bible who ascend to the most powerful political office outside the land of Israel. That’s not the result of a kid that’s broken spirited; that’s the result of a fantastic leader.

We’ll conclude by coming over to the New Testament and showing… while we’re on our way over to the New Testament let’s stop at Genesis 50:20. Genesis 50:20 gives you the theology of every one of these stories we’re about to study from Genesis 37, Genesis 38, Genesis 39, blah, blah, blah, all these stories have this same principle. Now you look at this principle and you start thinking of how this plays a role in your life. When you think of the obstacles, when you think of animosity, when you think of your personal enemies, when you think of people in your family that are having problems, and it seems like all you have is frustration after frustration, these people don’t care for you and many of them probably don’t care for you, that’s right, don’t! You remember verse 20. “But as for you,” this is Joseph talking as he’s older now, he’s got a lot of years to think this thing over and don’t you think he hasn’t thought about it, “as for you,” he’s talking to his brothers finally, “you all thought it evil against me, but God meant it to good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.” Do you know what Joseph is saying? You guys really did hate me; I know you hated me and I know you didn’t have my best interests at heart, but let me tell you something. God is sovereign over you and He’s the one I worship. So Joseph sees his brothers here, but Joseph has learned to look over the head of his opponents, over the head of the person giving him a hard time, over the head of his relatives that are causing pressure, and to see in back of that person God and His plan. And because he can do this, because he has the capability of looking over the person’s head and seeing God behind the person, he can take the person.

Now let’s come into the New Testament to show you that that principle is picked up time and time again, but probably most skillfully in a way no more skillfully than that of Peter in 1 Peter 2. Here’s an application of the same principle; it doesn’t differ a particle, from the old to the new. 1 Peter 2:18, here it’s talking about slaves and servants, we could apply this today to employers/employees, any place where you have an authority structure.

Read 1 Peter 2:18-19 slowly and carefully. “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle but also to the forward and the harsh. [19] For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. [20] For what glory is it if, when you are buffeted for your faults, you shall take it patiently? But if, when you do well and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.”

Now just look at that. Joseph has all of this stuff going on. He isn’t suffering because of something he did wrong, really. Yeah, he has his bratiness but that doesn’t merit all this. He is taking it patiently and the result is Joseph ascends to be the prince of his dreams. That’s fantastic the way God works; you think by doing it God’s way it’s the slowest way; you think it’s the abusive way. It turns out it isn’t, it is the most peaceful way and the most productive way.

Now the ironic thing about 1 Peter 2:18 is if you keep following, verse after verse with your eye, and you keep tracking his argument, look what you get to in 1 Peter 3:1, there’s the famous passage that deals with the woman’s role. And now you see the context for it. See, before you could see 3:1 and it says, “Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands that, if any obey not the word, they also may be without the word won by the behavior of the wives,” and the wives bristle and say well, you don’t understand Peter, my husband is a clod and all the rest of it, and really you know, this is idealism, this is just sentimentalism of the Bible. And it could be read this way if you started reading the Bible at 3:1. The only problem is, the chapter divisions weren’t in there when this letter was originally written and the thought started back in 2:18.

So now let’s go backwards to verse 18 and substitute words and see if you… the women will appreciate the humor in this but verse 18; in place of servants put wives; in place of masters put husbands and then read it and see how it comes out. “Wives, be subject to your husbands in all fear; not only to the good and gentle ones, but also the harsh ones.” Now does that application grab you? How can a woman put herself in that kind of a position? Because she’s being asked to do nothing else than what Joseph was asked to do—trust God to work not only in your heart but to trust God to work on your environment. Not only letting God work inside but outside; that’s biblical faith and if you don’t have that biblical faith you’ve got a problem, because you’re viewing your husband, you’re viewing your home, you’re viewing your circumstances in a non-biblical way; basically in your thought life you differ from no difference than the communists who says all history is totally random, we don’t need to trust in God, we can’t trust in God, He’s not going to do anything so what we need to do is we’ve got to initiate, we’ve got to do it, why, if my husband doesn’t pay the bills they won’t get paid. Well fine, let him crater, if he doesn’t know how to manage money it’ll be good to get bounced on the sidewalk once or twice. Yeah, that’s painful to go through but what’s more painful, you nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, nagging and going through that game or just letting the guy who’s maybe foolish in this area, let him just bounce off the bottom a couple of times and then he realizes, hey, she was right. But that’s the way sometimes it has to happen.

Now this is strong stuff; you don’t have to be too mature to see the applications of this are quite radical, but it’s all grounded in this principle: is God sovereign over circumstances of isn’t He? Now that’s a basic question. When Joseph was in that pit, 17 years old, thrown in there by a group of guys that wanted to kill him, I showed you the Masada cistern, you think of yourself walking around that deep hole in the ground and realizing that everything you have is gone, you are totally dependent on whatever comes through that hole, whether it’s a rope or a sword or an arrow, it’s whatever because you’re totally rendered passive at that point. The only way Joseph could hack this, and we know from Genesis 50 he did, was to realize those guys up there, they mean it for evil, but You, oh God, who are above them, mean it for good. The emphasis shifts from the hatred and an animosity to his brother, he could get extremely bitter at Levi, Simeon and Judah for pulling this stunt off, but he doesn’t. What in practice keeps this boy from getting bitterness? Because he looks over them to the God who is acting behind them and he begins to see the truth of Romans 8:28, that “All things,” including this, “work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”

We’re going to close