Clough Genesis Lesson 87

Joseph in prison – Genesis 40

As we have been going through the Genesis stories we’ve mentioned again and again that the emphasis of these stories is upon God’s sovereign providence in developing one family that will be the nucleus of the Old Testament kingdom of God. And the importance of these stories is that they are snapshots that forever picture the workings of God in bringing this kingdom about; the methods that God uses give insight into the methods he still uses, the methods that we ought to remember and be compatible with. We see how God builds his kingdom not by starting with the state but by starting with the family. He didn’t know that He couldn’t do it by governmental departments, so therefore He did it through the natural created ordinances of mother and father and home. We see also in these stories how God emphasizes the time that it takes.

All throughout the Genesis series we’ve looked at the family of the patriarchs, we’ve looked at Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and now Joseph, and we’ve said that these stories teach various doctrinal themes and one of the great doctrinal themes is the doctrine of election. And because the doctrine of election often is taken as very abstruse, very theoretical, totally disconnected from every day living, I think maybe we’ve seen enough of the historical content of Jacob, of Isaac, of Joseph, so this morning it would be befitting to introduce chapter 40 by applying the doctrine, or illustrating the doctrine of election through the person of Joseph. Now all of these doctrines in the Bible are connected with certain periods of history, or at least can be very easily connected with these periods of history. And if you do that you’ll avoid becoming just a scholastic type person but one who actually lives and breathes the history of the real revelation when it occurs.

The doctrine of election we have summarized under five propositions. One of them is that to understand election I must know the effects of creation and the fall. If I don’t understand that the universe was created, that the universe at one point in time fell, then I have no idea what God is going to do in my life. Let’s turn to Psalm 139 to show how the knowledge of creation and the fall is vital to look back on my position in Christ if I am a Christian. Of course, if I am here and I am not a Christian then this is all foreign, I’m just left with theoretical potential to be developed but I don’t have anything actual, any actual personal relationship with God and I don’t have any actual spiritual growth because I’m dead. But to those who have trusted in Christ, they can look at Psalm 139:13-16 and see that God reached all the way back into one of those two great factors that modern man is so fond of talking about and that is heredity, to build me how I am today. We said that modern man always looks at heredity and environment as the cure-alls and the forces that develop what you are. Of course, the modern man refuses to acknowledge that behind even heredity and environment is the sovereign God who controls those.

Psalm 139 is the classic Bible reference to pregnancy and the work of God providentially in the human fetus. That’s why this is a central passage in discussing many, many points of life. Verse 13, this is an autobiography of David, going all the way back to when he was in his mother’s womb. “For thou hast possessed my reins [inward parts]” or my kidneys, “thou hast woven me together in my mother’s womb.” In other words, the heredity workings that were going on there, the environmental conditioning, if you will, were all part of the unseen hand of God. “I will praise thee” David says, meaning that he has a sense of his worth. There’s thousands and thousands of people in this city that do not have any sense of their own worth because they’re living out the results of their inherent paganism, the paganism they were taught since childhood, that says that they are just products of chance and if God is there He’s just kind of a weak character or influence. But David says because I know that You supervised my mother’s pregnancy, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knows right well.” In other words, David had a healthy self appreciation, not in the sense that he didn’t know he was a sinner, but in the sense that he knew that he entered this life with the just right body that God wanted him to enter with. David, by saying what he does in verse 14, is not saying what some of you may be saying: well, I wish I could change and be like so and so, or I wish I could be taller, or I wish I could be shorter or I wish I looked differently, or I wished I did this or something else. David says, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” He has come to terms with his own physical birth.

Then he says [15] “My substance was not hidden from You, when I was made in secret,” and the word here is “embroidered in the lowest parts of the earth,” a metaphor for the mother’s womb. “Thine eyes did see my substance yet being unperfect [unformed]; and in Thy book all,” and I translate it “all the preordained” or “preformed days were fashioned when there was as yet none of them.” In other words, the point that David is making is that all during his mother’s pregnancy, when his body was being woven together the potential was put in that body to do just exactly what God wanted him to do. It was a body that would one day be king of Israel. And David could not look back and see what so many Christians often do, that God’s work in me today is over here and my birth, my background, my physical environment and so on is over here and these two really don’t line up. Here I start my life and then God calls me and this is totally disjunctive from this over here. David has no disjunction; to him there’s a smooth flowing continuity between his heredity, environment and God’s calling.

So we look at the doctrine of election and we say that we were born as creatures made in God’s image but fallen creatures. There really isn’t a baby that’s ever been born this side of the fall that wasn’t born deformed in some way; at least morally deformed because everyone’s born with a sin nature. So everyone has some deformity, it’s just a question of degree, not of kind. We are all fallen beings, and one has to start there if one is to see as a Christian in Christ what God is doing in his life. You can’t start out life by arguing with God over your very constitution; that’s not getting off in the Christian life on the right foot at all.

The second point that we’ve emphasized in the doctrine of election is our incentive to face adversities; if you’ll turn back to Genesis 50 you’ll see that Joseph had a way of summarizing this principle. In the first principle, to understand the election I must know the effects of creation and the fall, Joseph understood his physical birth. Joseph understood, as we understand, reading the story, Joseph came to see all right, I was created as a Hebrew, not as a Gentile; I was created with my father Jacob’s personality which was an aggressive type of personality, and I could say O God, O God, why did you make me like this? Because God had a role for him like that. And we also know that besides having the heredity inheritance of his father, Joseph also inherited a sin nature. He was a brat, a very conceited young person, very gifted but very much of a brat and this is his fallenness. Now coming into life this way, the question now is what is God going to do.

In Genesis 50:20 he applies the doctrine of election to his situation, on a personal individual level. He says, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day to save many people alive.” You see, the philosophy of verse 20 is the same as the philosophy of Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.” Joseph knew that he was a member of an elect family, Jacob’s family. He knew that God had a calling for that family. He knew that there was a purpose in all of this suffering that went on. He recognizes… and verse 20, by the way, is not idealism; verse 20 is not unrealistic because if you look at verse 20 carefully you notice he’s very, very cognizant of the force of evil; he says I have no illusions, don’t think I’m walking around with blinders on. It’s the non-Christian and the Christians who think like non-Christian that have blinders on. The Christian who is a Bible-believing Christian has all the blinders ripped off because in verse 20 Joseph is arguing that I recognize evil; I recognize the reality of the fact that my brothers can’t stand my guts. They hate me, they always have, and they plotted and they schemed and did all this. I recognize that, I’m not blind to that, it’s that I’ve got eyes to see other things that other people don’t see and that is I’ve got this special extra extended vision that sees through all that and sees God’s invisible hand, and therefore “God meant it unto God.”

So we say that the second point of the doctrine of election is that it’s an incentive to face adversities in faith. If you know that you are on the winning team and you’re interested in the game, doesn’t it keep you from getting disappointed and depressed to the point where you give up? See, people who give up in life are people who have already accepted defeat. But if the Christian, who believes in the doctrine of election, is really believing in the doctrine of election, he can’t give up and the reason he can’t give up is because he’s convinced he’s going to win. People who are convinced they are going to win never give up.

This is why the most powerful group of people in western civilization that has ever been observed was the Puritans. They’re the people that all the wimpies in the classrooms like to knock because little people always like to take down big people; it makes them feel better. But all the critics of the Puritans, now the Puritans had their problems, at least they’ve never refuted what one person wrote who said yes, yes, you can laugh at the Puritans, you can laugh at the way they dressed, you can laugh at their whiney little hymns and you can laugh at some of their customs but I’ll tell you something; whoever has met a Puritan on the field of battle with a sword in his hand or whoever has met a Puritan in the halls of debate stops laughing because he sees how tough these people were. Do you know why they were tough; I hope we can have the film on Cromwell here sometime this year to show some of you who haven’t seen that and you’ll see them as the Puritans go into battle with one of the finest armies the world has ever seen, singing hymns to the fact that God has already predestinated their victory. Now when you have an army of skilled soldiers that believes that God has already predestinated them to victory, I’d say you face a very formidable foe, and there were people who laughed and then stopped laughing after they met the Puritans on the field of battle.

This is what election will do to you personally; you will never give up because you know that you are going to win “in Christ.” And that’s Joseph’s philosophy in Genesis 50:20.

A third point in the doctrine of election has to do with the practical aims on an individual level of where you look for criticism. The third principle of election says it is God’s revelation of His irresistible will, meaning that when I evaluate where I’m going what really counts is not what mother thinks of me or not what father thinks of me, or not what society thinks of me or not what my best friend thinks of me, it is what God thinks of me because in the final analysis it’s going to be His will anyway. Now this doesn’t mean that a young person is to dishonor their parents, that’s part of the commands of Scripture. But it is to say that many people have been sorely injured to the depths of their heart by listening to a barrage of criticism, or a barrage of you should do this, you should do that, you should do this, you should do that, and that’s all right, that’s part of life and you have to learn to live with that, that’s all right, but what happens in too many people, and people that later on in life wind up with very severe counseling problems, problems that sometimes require a trip to the funny farm before it’s over, what happens to these people is that they accept this constant stream of programming as their conscience and they actually replace their own conscience that God has given them with this stream of preprogrammed advice of what you ought to do; you ought to be like this, you ought to be like that, you ought not to be like that, you ought to do this and so on. That’s all human advice and it may or may not be followed but you can never permit, and particularly you parents, never permit your advice to replace conscience because in the final analysis the child has to accept the conscience of the Word of God as his final authority.

If my father, for example, to get this point across, if my father teaches me that two plus two is five I honor my father but finally I come to the conclusion at that point my father is wrong, and I don’t collapse because of it. All my authority doesn’t dissolve at the first time I notice my father was wrong on a point. Why? Because I don’t make my father my God. I have a God in back of my father and that’s my platform, and so therefore I can deal with those over me who are wrong, without falling apart, because I have followed my conscience, all the way back to God, behind all the peer pressures, behind all the flack and static. So the third principle of the doctrine of election is again very potent for mental health reasons if no other reasons, that it is God’s will and not people’s, groups or something else that count. Too many of us have habits of listening to the wrong voices.

The fourth principle in the doctrine of election is that it is God’s free choice. God was not arm-twisted when He designed the plan of salvation. He didn’t sit, for example, in front of a big TV screen where he leaned around the throne room and got his instructions off of this superior screen. God was not under any compulsion whatsoever to design history the way he wanted it to go. You say well that’s an interesting thought but what’s that got to do with me personally. It’s a very important point personally. If God designed you in Christ to do a certain thing, do you know what that means? You can relax as far as it coming out all right because if it doesn’t come out all right God has defamed his nature. You see, if God made the choice all by Himself then He wasn’t compelled to do it. If God wasn’t compelled, for example, to give you the gift of helps or the gift of mercy as a Christian, if God wasn’t compelled to do this, but he freely chose to do it, that makes it all His plan and if it’s all His plan and it goes wrong, who’s reputation is at stake? God’s reputation is at stake.

You see, the fourth principle of the doctrine of election also has pretty powerful application because it means in the final analysis you look at your own soul and you see everywhere where you failed and you can get depressed looking at this, but then you say wait a minute, God called me in Christ, and if I, at the final analysis, am not conformed to His Son after, perhaps many more years of sanctification, but nevertheless, and I get down to the final end point and I’m not conformed to the image of His Son, me with all my faults, with all my sin, with all my garbage, if I am not clean and conformed to Christ’s image at the end, it’s God’s reputation and His name that has been defamed, because it was His choice to do it that way in the first place.

Finally, I observe election when I see a Christ-like character functioning in history. If I don’t see this I have all the reason to doubt that I’m looking at election. Election cannot be conceived apart from Christ. What does this mean personally? What does this mean, as far as, say a man like Joseph, was concerned. It means that the center of gravity of the work in the Holy Spirit was not to develop Joseph’s intellect; it was not to develop his ability as a soccer player or whatever other games they had in that day. It was his moral spiritual character that was central. And so right here the fifth point of the doctrine of election gives you as a Christian an idea of where the center of focus ought to be in your struggle. Yes, God wants to be all that you should be; yes, He does want to develop you intellectually; yes He wants to develop you physically but the point is those two things, the beauty and the brains syndrome, come largely from Greece, it’s a heritage that we’ve picked up somewhere along the way that makes beauty and brains the key cardinal things and if I lack brains and I lack beauty then I’m a nothing. Is that so?

Turn to Isaiah 53. Tremendous amounts of pressure are brought to bear on people because they think they don’t rate when it comes to being smart and they don’t rate when it comes to being attractive. If I observe election only in connection with the moral character of Christ, then let’s go back to this suffering servant passage and look at Isaiah 53:2, there you’ve got a picture of Jesus Christ’s physical appearance. What do you think He looked like? “…he has no form nor comeliness, and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him.” Shocked? That’s a portrait of Jesus Christ. Now what does that do to all this vaunted emphasis on beauty and brains? Christ, apparently, wouldn’t have qualified under the norms and standards of pagan Greek; He qualified under the norms and standards of Israel which emphasize moral character, not beauty and not brains. It doesn’t mean people were stupid and let themselves go but it does mean the center of gravity was not there, it was on moral character.

That’s what God is going to do with Joseph and we see it graphically if you turn to Genesis 40. Joseph is going to be developed in his character; he already has the looks, we know that. We know that from the seduction scene of Potiphar’s wife. And we know that he’s got the brains because we see what He did in his early family. So with beauty and brains Joseph is not promoted in God’s program; and he’s not going to be promoted in God’s program until he attains the moral character God wants him to have. Now this should be a source of encouragement to those of you, particularly those of you who right now are going through kind of a Nader in your life, a low point spiritually. Maybe you’ve been in that low point for week after week or even month after month and some of you may be going through a trial that’s lasted for years. The trial you are looking at right here lasted for 13 years in this boy’s life. Joseph was 17 when he was sold as a slave and it wasn’t until 30 when he was free. For 13 years this boy went through training of the most awful kind. He went through training, heartache, pressure, suffering, sorrow and everything went against him. We would say he went through 13 disadvantaged years, except they weren’t because God was working with Him. Let’s watch the process and then see if we can take some of these things and apply them in our lives.

Genesis 40:1, “And it came to pass after these things, that the butler of the king of Egypt and his baker had offended their lord the king of Egypt. [2] And Pharaoh was wroth against two of his officers, against the chief of the butlers, and against the chief of the bakers. [3] And he put them in ward in the house of the captain of the guard, into the prison, [the place where Joseph was bound].” Now we’ve said that the grand theme of this portion of Genesis is God’s delightful maneuvering of Joseph into just the right position, so to appreciate those first three verses we’ve got to diagram these officers and their relationship to each other. Pharaoh, presumably, we’re just speculating here, but presumably he had some sort of organizational structure, like some of you men have in some of your companies, pyramidal type: Pharaoh is at the top, then you have a staff here; one of the members of his staff was his security chief who was Potiphar; that’s the man mentioned in verse 3. See, we haven’t lost Potiphar, “the captain of the guard,” he’s still there. Now we know because we’ve read the last chapter in the story, most of us already know how the story is going to wind up. You know that God’s election purpose is to take this little Hebrew shepherd boy and maneuver things around so that when the story is over he’s up here with Pharaoh.

Now here is the interesting story. How does God take a Hebrew shepherd boy and get Him up into the system. The reason this is important is because if you’re a Christian today your effectiveness for Christ in society around you is going to be a function of your position. And you want to be sensitive as to how God will maneuver you to have greater witnessing opportunities. Now some Christians, if they were advising God and God had a conference, a planning conference and God says okay, I’m going to ask you guys, I’ve got this little problem with this boy over here, he’s 17 and I want him up here with the king; can anybody suggest a way of doing it. And so all the modern evangelicals raised their hand, God we’ve got the answer, you get a flaming chariot, pick him up and bring him down to Egypt and drop him in Pharaoh’s lap, instantly; in other words, short-circuiting of all the social processes and cultural form.

God doesn’t do that; when God the Holy Spirit works, even with Joseph, the pathfinder, now, of the family that will come down to Egypt and be the nucleus for His own kingdom, even with this man He doesn’t just pick him up and drop him over here; he maneuvers, he makes the contact, he puts him through circumstances, and in touch with this person and then in touch with this person and then He develops an incident that puts him in touch with another person. And so Joseph climbs up through the system and that’s how God… it’s the Bible telling us that’s how God the Holy Spirit works. Yeah, sometimes He brings a flaming chariot along but don’t hold your breath. The main way God works is through the system, not against the system. And so Joseph starts out, he’s sold as a slave; who did he get sold as a slave to? He didn’t have any control over who he was sold as a slave to. It just (quote) “happened” that he was sold to the security chief, Potiphar. And it just so happens that he gets a little reversal, we saw that last Sunday in chapter 39, he gets thrown into prison.

But now while he’s in prison he’s going to meet two other characters that on the organizational chart will look like that; they’re very close to Pharaoh and here’s why. In verse 1 I says “the butler” and the “baker” in the King James and you’d think it’s part of a nursery rhyme with the candlestick maker but the word “butler” means cupbearer; he had to do with is liquor cabinet, with all due apologies to some of the teetotalers here; Pharaoh was an extravagant king and he had a fantasatic liquor cabinet. He had all kinds of drinks from all over the world, and of course the central kind of drink at that time was wine; he had hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of wine. And he had a very expensive collection and this was the administrator of his collection. So one man in the character is going to be the cupbearer.

The next man is the baker. Now why are these two officials picked out, do you suppose, by God. What do you notice that’s peculiar about both of these officers in this kind of an organization, where the man who is the leader of the organization is making god-claims. Well, quite obviously gods don’t die and there’s a big cult of immortality in Egypt and you don’t want Pharaoh poisoned. These two men are the food handlers, his food and his drink; they are very critical in the organization because if there’s any assassination attempt and we know from reading ancient history how many assassinations were done, they were done on a leader through food. And so therefore something has happened, with a crime, in verse 2 is never specified. We guess from the end of the story that it must have had something to do with a possible assassination threat. It apparently wasn’t attempted because they couldn’t pin it down to which of these men did it; obviously if the baker had done it and they would eventually find out he’s the one that did it, but the point is that at the first they don’t. So apparently if poison was used it wasn’t obviously in either a glass or a dish.

But something caused a little investigation to take place and here’s what happened. There was a security threat to Pharaoh and any security threat immediately alerts his security chief, Potiphar. So Potiphar comes and he takes both of these guys to Potiphar’s house which is the jail for VIPs. And he sticks them there until he can finish his investigation as to who is the person involved in this threat on Pharaoh’s life. So chapter 40 takes place all during the investigation and you don’t read about the end of the investigation until the end of the chapter. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, Joseph is getting the contacts he needs.

Application: Society has an infrastructure to it. If you turn in your bulletin and take out the prayer worksheet, on area 3 you’ll notice how some modern designers of missions used this concept. It was previously thought that evangelization of the world had to be kind of like on a one to one basis and with three billion people in the world it gets kind of depressing to think of witnessing one by one and winning the world to Christ. So here’s the result of some good research that has been done. I will read area 3, praise item, and follow with me so you can get the idea and then we’re going to apply it back to Joseph’s story, and then to each of us personally.

“It is estimated that there are three billion people in the world who do not claim Jesus as Lord and Savior. Over two billion of these live in people groups within which there are no Christians. In other words, they will only be reached for the gospel across the barrier of cross-culture communication. Every country of the world is made up of a vast mosaic of people groups, tribe, casts, occupational groups, language groups, religious groups, combinations of all these. One rough estimate identifies 15,000 such groups within 21 countries of the world. Within each of these groups the gospel has the potential for traveling along relationship lines very easily.” Notice the first word of that sentence, “Within each of these groups the gospel has the potential for traveling very easily. People are most likely to understand the gospel the message and accept the offer of salvation through Christ when it is presented by someone they know, someone just like them. But it takes more than just one or two people in a group in order to establish a beachhead for the gospel; experience around the world has indicated that when somewhere between ten and twenty percent of the people in a group become Christians, then the resulting church has all the potential it needs to evangelize its group. In other words, before this number is reached, that is the ten or twenty percent figure, the new church must require outside help. Once this number is exceeded the church has the potential ability to reach the entire group. Now the point is, how can we save money and resources in missionary work; the point is if we watch our ten or twenty percent cutoff, when that is reached we pull back and shut off the missionary machine and move the resources on to another people group and that way we can evangelize the maximum, we build the church up and it goes in its own group.

Application to Joseph: Joseph comes from an entirely different people group, Hebrews. Pharaoh comes from the Egyptian people group. More than that, Joseph comes from the common rank; Pharaoh comes from the nobility. Now how is Pharaoh going to get the gospel? Joseph can’t just say hey Pharaoh, I’ve got a tract for you. That isn’t the way it’s going to work. How is Pharaoh going to get a credible witness? Well, God has got to bridge it and what you are observing in these chapters is God the Holy Spirit bridging carefully from one people group to the other and look what happened. The thrust of chapter 40 is to take these two guys, who again would be part of Egyptian nobility and He takes this Jewish slave boy and he invents a people group for the prison then becomes a common people group. So he takes these two guys up here that He needs, He takes a little boy that He needs here and he plugs them together and they function in a new people group and in that group we have a transmission of information which then is broadcast up in the other people group. This is why churches like Lubbock Bible Church and other Bible-believing fundamental churches have got a long, long arduous road ahead. We are not reaching into many people groups in our own society.

Fundamentalists have been traditionally provincial. This is due to a number of reasons. This is why in Lubbock Bible Church we have thought, over against the objections of many, to develop a music program worthy of the name. Why? For the reason that that communicates to people groups. Now there are some, oh, we don’t believe in music. Well I don’t know what you’re going to praise God with in eternity but music is going to be involved. The point is, that there are people who have cultural and ascetic values and they form people groups in our community and they are not going to be reached by some rinky-dink typical fundy foot stomping type operation. Now if you want to go to your local hick group then fine, but there are people who are concerned enough for other groups in town, who are not so selfish who want to keep the Word of God all by themselves, who want to rather instead share the Word with other groups who want to do these kinds of things. And we still have this residue of opposition in our own congregation to this, on various, all this pious grounds; it’s not pious grounds, it’s just selfish grounds. We have other things that have to happen, this is why when we have our new facilities we want it to look something, not like a bigger box; we’re already in one, we don’t trade one for another for the reason that it says something; it says something very profound to a lot of very sensitive people about what you are. And this is why again we have to overcome this massive momentum of resistance against any suggestion that ascetics might possibly play a role in some people’s viewpoint. And why? Because it’s a failure to see that God works not against people groups, He works with people groups. That’s what Paul met when he said I am all things to all men. You’ve got to be, you cannot reach all people acting like some bizarre nitwit, and this is the way it’s got to go in Christian circles if the message of fundamentalism is ever to have an impact in our society.

So God is going to use this in Joseph’s life and let’s watch how He does. Genesis 40:4, Joseph’s boss, the chief of security, even though he is in jail he recognizes Joseph’s skills and verse 4 is a promotion again. For the third time we’ve seen this young boy promoted on the basis of merit, that he does a good job, he’s a responsible kid, you tell him to do a job it’s always done, no slack, he just assumes responsibility and does it. So who gets promoted? He does. And this time in verse 4 he gets promoted over the two VIPs. Here he’s their personal, so to speak, their officer, their servant, their attaché, their person that goes with them all the time. [“And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he served them: and they continued a season in ward.”]

Then in verse 5 we have the two dreams introduced. Now I told you last week and we’ve said this before, that the author of Genesis does a delightful thing. The author of Genesis has to solve a problem and here’s the problem. This book is not written in the style of Kings, or not written in the style of other Bible books where it says so and so sinned and did this wrong in the sight of God; or so and so did this and he obeyed God here and God blessed him. The author of Genesis isn’t that explicit; he’s more subtle when he describes what’s happening. So the author of Genesis, therefore, has to cue you, the reader, that a work of God is happening. Now he can’t point to some fireworks because the fireworks are reserved for, say the book of Exodus, I mean if you happen to see the Red Sea part you kind of get the idea God’s involved some place, either that or change your glasses, something’s wrong. And if you see water coming out of rocks you suggest again, there’s a work of God. But the author of Genesis, because he doesn’t deal with such a spectacular thing has to use another device, so his device is to cue you to something peculiar in the environment that’s always there and that’s a doublet.

You can see this back in Abraham; first he endangers his wife’s life with Pharaoh; then he goes through the same thing, endangers her life with the king, Abimelech. Then you come down to Jacob and he gets into situations that seemingly are doublets. You get into Joseph’s life and he gets his garment ripped off and he gets thrown into a cistern. Potiphar’s wife takes his garment off and he gets thrown into jail. Again the doublet theme. And now lo and behold in verse 5 what do we see? Another doublet. Now there are two dreams by two men on the same occasion. That’s the author pointing…, you see here’s the hand of God. You’ve got to get eyes to see that which you don’t normally see, and that’s part of living the Christian life. You’ve got be sensitive to see God working on you, in you and around you. And I don’t know how you get these eyes except exposure to the Scriptures where you just finally come to see and grasp the mentality of God.

So we have two dreams. Joseph comes in and the first man, the cupbearer tells him the dream. [5] And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream, the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, which were bound in the prison. [6] And Joseph came in unto them in the morning, and looked upon them, and, behold, they were sad. [7] And he asked Pharaoh’s officers that were with him in the ward of his lord’s house, saying, Wherefore look ye so sadly to day?]”

But in verse 8 Joseph challenges him. Joseph 8 shows you that the boy, who was 17 and he may be very close to 30 by the time of verse 8, by now this boy has gotten his spiritual gear together, notice the time element please, ten years perhaps, so don’t be impatient with yourself. Joseph witnesses to him, because the people are asking an interpretation of the dream and we now from Egyptian literature, I will try, when we get over to Pharaoh’s dream to read you some dreams and their interpretations direct from the Egyptian literature of this time so you get an idea what was going on in the culture. He comes to the dream, and it was customary that you just go to your local corner magician and give him a few coins and he’d interpret your dream for you. This would be a sign of God’s blessing or his cursing; these people were supposed to discern God.

Well, Joseph says I am not a magician and that’s what verse 8 is. It’s a disclaimer that he is a magician, he’s saying I will interpret your dreams but gentlemen, I want you to understand one thing, I am not a magician, I am not trying to do this in my own power, I am not claiming that I have the power to interpret your dreams; I want you to understand that what I am about to do for you is a gift that is through me to you from my God. And that’s why he says, [8, “And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them,] Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me them, I pray you.” You’d think that he said interpretations belong to God, he’d say well then ask God, not me. The only way you get those two sentences together is to say it’s a disclaimer and he’s claiming he’ll interpret the dream but he wants them to recognize the source.

So the dream is given and you’ll notice the elements of the dream, verses 10-11. [9, “And the chief butler told his dream to Joseph, and said to him, In my dream, behold, a vine was before me; [10] And in the vine were three branches: and it was as though it budded, and her blossoms shot forth; and the clusters thereof brought forth ripe grapes: [11] And Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh’s hand.”] It has three branches on the vine, the blossoms produce grapes, the grapes were pressed into Pharaoh’s cup, now that doesn’t mean he made grape juice, that’s an idiom for wine making and the giving of wine to Pharaoh. Well, as Pharaoh takes this cup what you’ve got presented in the cupbearer in his calling, don’t you? Isn’t the dream, if the guy’s a cupbearer, in charge of the liquor cabinet, isn’t it then the dream having to do with his function? Yes. And who is he benefiting? Pharaoh.

So that’s why Joseph, in verses 12-13, given the insight of God says in 72 hours you are going to have your head lifted up, and that was kind of an odd idiom, think of somebody grabbing somebody’s hair and lifting them up, but the idiom means you’ll be promoted out of jail. In 72 hours you’ll be promoted out of jail, you’ll be put in your office and you’re back to your calling. [12, “And Joseph said unto him, This is the interpretation of it: The three branches are three days: [13] Yet within three days shall Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore thee unto thy place: and thou shalt deliver Pharaoh’s cup into his hand, after the former manner when thou was his butler.”]

Now verse 14-15 is an interjection. Verses 14-15 is going to give you the clue as to what God’s doing in Joseph’s life. You see, Joseph is under pressure; Joseph in verse 8 has gotten his gift working; Joseph has been born with this skill, he’s been given this gift, you conceive of it as sort of a pearl or a diamond or a precious stone, and it’s capable of shining out. The trouble with Joseph is it’s all covered over with this sin, the sin patterns in his life, one of which is conceit. And so God is shaving this off through one adversity after another but He hasn’t quite got it all. Verse 8 shows you the gift is now really beginning to function, it’s really doing it in a God-honoring way but verse 14-15 tells you Joseph still has got a problem here. He says, “But think on me when it shall be well with thee, and show kindness, I pray thee, unto me, and make mention of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house: [15] For indeed I was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews: and here also have I done nothing that they should put me into the dungeon,” and the Hebrew word for dungeon is hole. So it communicates an attitude; Joseph is still vexed by his surroundings. Now it wasn’t a hole, that was a thing used for cheap dungeons; this wasn’t a cheap dungeon. This was a dungeon that for a minimum security thing for VIP prisoners. And so Joseph’s attitude in verse 15 is this is a hole and I want out of it, and I wish you could do something about it. Now I’ve done something for you, you do something for me, quid pro quo. But that’s not the way God works; God will get Joseph out when Joseph is ready to get out.

So we have the second interpretation beginning in verse 16 and it has to do with the baker, but the baker is the guilty man in whatever the assassination plot was. These two men were suspects and it turns out this guy is the guilty one and we get a hint of it in the way verse 16 occurs. [16] “When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good,” only then did he ask for an interpretation. Now why do you think he did that? Because he had this ominous sense of conscience that no good thing was coming his way and so he hesitated, he didn’t volunteer his dream because he didn’t really want to hear the interpretation of his dream. So he looked over there and he saw this Hebrew boy doing the dream of the other guy and he said hey, that’s good, maybe I can get a good one out of this, so he relaxes his guard and tells him the dream. [“…he said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three white baskets on my head. [17] And in the uppermost basket there was of all manner of foods for Pharaoh;] and the birds did eat them out of the basket upon my head.”

Now when you see birds eating something like this in the Bible it refers to scavenger birds and it is a metaphor used often in the Bible for death. For example, in the book of Proverbs there’s a place, it’s talking about a boy who just dishonors his parents and he says, in the section it says so and so that dishonors his parents will be like he that gets his eyes eaten by birds. Now you wonder, who goes around getting their eyes eaten by a bird, that doesn’t really teach too much. But in that time and in that culture here’s what the picture was: people would die often out on the road, thirsty or through robbery and assault and their bodies would just lie there in the sand there would be these vultures and the vultures would have a custom of detecting whether the person was dead or not and they’d come down and peck at the eye and if there was no reaction they knew the person was dead and that’s where they’d start eating. I knew that would help you for Sunday dinner so I brought it up. So the pecking would begin and that became the symbol for death and so that’s the death symbol; the birds are eating these things on his head.

So now in verse 19 Joseph turns around and says, taking the same idiom, [18] And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation thereof: The three baskets are three days.] [19] “Yet within three days” or 72 hours, “shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee,” but it won’t be in the metaphorical sense, it will be real, he will lift it up from off of you “and shall hang thee on a tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee.”

And so the chapter in verses 20, 21 and 22 concludes with the result of the investigation. Seventy-two hours later it’s Pharaoh’s birthday party. Pharaoh invites the two key officials to the banquet; they are called up to the head table; he made a feast to them. [20, “And it came to pass the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday, that he made a feast unto all his servants: and he lifted up the head of the chief butler and of the chief baker among his servants.”] And in verse 21 the pardon is extended to one official, the result of the security chief’s investigation is that he’s free to go. [21, “And he restored the chief butler unto his butlership again; and he gave the cup into Pharaoh’s hand.”] Verse 22, the result of the security chief’s investigation is that the baker is guilty and he’s executed. [22, “But he hanged the chief baker: as Joseph had interpreted to them.]

But the story doesn’t end with verse 22. It ends in verse 23, “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgot him.” See these stories, how they always wind up; they don’t wind up where you think they would wind up if they were just independent stories. Look back at the previous chapter, Genesis 39:21-23, those last three verses of that previous chapter did the same thing; it told the story, Joseph was cast into prison and you’d think that would be the close of the story, but no, the author tacks on these last three verses, “But the Lord was with Joseph, and showed him mercy, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.” Going back to chapter 37:36, look at the last verse of that chapter. This is the chapter where he was thrown into the cistern by his brothers and you’d think that’s where the story would end but no, the author adds the verse, “And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar,” why does the author do this? Because he wants us to see the grand scheme of the working of the invisible hand of God. See how powerful it is? All during the author says but look what’s slowly happening; here’s the pathfinder for the chosen family; each step of the story he gets higher and higher to his objective.

We could diagram the career of Joseph with a curve that I’ve shown you in connection with the resurrection of Christ. It’s a curve that I think can be generalized to almost every trial in the Christian life. Master this curve, look at it, saturate yourself with its philosophy. It can diagram the human race, it starts off in innocence with Adam and Eve, it plunges into the fall and despair, then through Christ is resurrected, and its resurrection is at a higher plain than it was at first. So while you always go through this three-step procedure, it’s true of the human race corporately; it is true of Jesus Christ, He was born in a mortal body, sinless but mortal; He died, ascended into hell, He rose the third day and now sits at the right hand of the Father Almighty; He sits at a higher place with an immortal body. Now you can generalize this. Look at Joseph, same thing isn’t it? He starts out as a shepherd boy, he starts out brilliant but a brat; he gets cast into a cistern, cast into a prison, he stays here 13 years because he’s 17 when he starts the trial and he’s 30 when he comes out of the trial and what happens at the other end of the trial? He gets promoted to the vice-regent of the mightiest kingdom on the face of the earth, Egypt. So his latter end was better than his first; he endured the testing, he endured the pressure.

You see, every time you go through this kind of a thing in your life look upon it as a minor crucifixion and a minor resurrection and if you were to diagram your growth curve as a Christian, from a large point of view, if you had a big blackboard, going back to the time you became a Christian you’d have some growth curve that looked like this, but then if you got right up close to the board and you had an accurate graph and you took a magnifying glass and looked at one point of the curve it would probably look like this. Trial, elevation, trial, elevation, trial, elevation and this is just an inherent philosophy, sort of a curve of glory that occurs during sanctification and we see it most graphically illustrated with Joseph.

We’re going to conclude by singing