Clough Genesis Lesson 91
Jacob’s
sons return to
Today in studying Genesis 43 we see one
more incremental advance in the working of God with an elect family. We said earlier in Genesis that the issue was
between one elect son, an individual, and another reprobate son, an
individual. Now, as we advance in the
book of Genesis we’re no longer dealing with individuals, we’re dealing with
entire families and nations. And so now
the issue becomes how God treats
We’re studying the doctrine of election and
how this doctrine shows itself in history.
The doctrine of election, we have said, can be summarized under five
points. We won’t look at all those
points because I want to get down to the last one which is: I observe election
when Christ-like relationships sprout and grow… when Christ-like relationships
sprout and grow. In other words, when
God really works in history there’s some tangible, visible results. In these stories, where is the center of the
action; where are we supposed to look to see the tangible, visible
results? What we’re looking at is a
cratering family; we’re looking at Jacob who is not very much of a leader over
his twelve sons. We’re getting to a very
critical point because the family has absorbed Baalite, Baalist religions or
the religions of
Now God is the God who is going to put that family back together again. What you want to notice is how he does it, because if you’ll notice how He does it, then you can more accurately pray, you can accurately analyze false ways people have of attempting to put things back together. In our own time, of course, one of the great tools to put broken families back together again is supposedly the state. So we want to review a little bit something else before we go too much further and that is the divine institutions. These are social structures that God has created; they did not evolve into existence but they are there by God’s decree. One is responsibility, one is marriage, one is family. We’ve indicated on the chart those three divine institutions because they are the real wealth producing institutions. All production of dominion man is centered in his personal responsibility, in his marriage and in his family; going out and subduing the earth with those.
The other institutions are of a different nature. The fourth divine institution is that of the state, judicial power. The fifth divine institution is international relations, tribal diversity and so on. We color those blue because those come after the fall. And as institutions that follow the fall they are not… repeat, they are not wealth producing institutions, they are another kind, they are preserving institutions. That means their function, rightly considered under God’s Word, is to preserve a reasonable amount of order in the world so that wealth can be produced by the other institutions. I have often used the illustration agriculturally of a farmer with herbicides; if the state is the herbicide, you can cover a field with herbicide from one hedge row to the other and produce absolutely nothing. The herbicide doesn’t produce anything, all it does is get rid of that which competes with production, and if you want to produce then you use a herbicide to quell and to stymie and to restrain that which thwarts your production. And then you allow the crop itself to produce.
In our society what people want to do is
they want to make wealth with the fourth divine institution, and so we have
people that fiddle with the currency, printing press money that has caused much
of our inflation in our present day and as any person who studies coins will
tell you, you just have to look at the coinage of a nation, at any period in
history, and you can almost read from the coinage the history of that national
entity. When a nation goes up the coins have great art design to them; they are
made with great craft and great skill.
And when a nation goes down their coinage looks like it. And if you want an example take one of the
new Susan B. Anthony dollars that are worth four cents and compare them with a
silver dollar of, say 30 years ago, and there you have a graphic illustration
of where this country is. You can
measure the
But then we color the Church in red on this chart because the Church is the only place where salvation occurs; that is where God is being gracious to the world in a saving way. And so that is an institution of a third order. So now we have three orders of institutions. We have those institutions that are physically wealth producing; we have those institutions which are wealth preserving and we have those institutions which are saving or Messianic. Another vast deformation of the state in our day is not only do people want to make the state a wealth producer, but they also want to make the state the savior, thus we have certain Baptist bureaucrats in the state of Texas who are attacking [?] along with the state department of human resources because they are convinced that the church ought to be licensed by Caesar so wherever you go you find this tremendous confusion on the role of the state and what it is to do.
So now we find that when God goes to work
with Joseph, God’s divine viewpoint way is to work not through the state;
Joseph functions in the state but basically God, in order to get His kingdom
straightened around, has to work in these institutions. The center of the action is what takes place
in Jacob’s family; that’s the center of the action. The center of the story is not what’s taking
place in Egyptian political and bureaucratic circles. Watch this because this is the biblical way
of viewing things. This is why we have,
even evangelicals today who still insist that God works through the state. I encountered a person the other day who’d
been to
Let’s look at Joseph further and watch how God simply will not leave him, his father, or his brothers alone; God never leaves his elect alone. It’s like the frustration expressed in the film, The Fiddler on the Roof, God, can’t you choose somebody else once in a while. That’s exactly the response of a person who really understands Biblical election. God, I wish you would choose someone else once in a while because the elect God will never leave alone. And if you don’t have evidences in your life of God butting in, God interfering in different areas of your life, the Bible calls you a bastard because it means that you are not part and parcel of His family and He shows you are not part and parcel of His family by refusing to butt into your life. So in Hebrews 12:8 we have that exact term used.
All right, it begins in verse 1 with the famine, and the famine, it says, and this is a circumstantial clause in the Hebrew language, “And the famine kept on being severe in the land.” Now to see why the story begins with a conditional clause one has to go to the verse before that, Genesis 42:38 because in that case we have a lineup of what is going on in this home. Here’s Jacob and here are all the sons, ranging from Reuben to Joseph down to Benjamin. God has to straighten this family up. So far there are advances being made. Joseph, for example, God is working through Joseph on the family, and as God works through Joseph on the home we have seen the repentance over the mental attitude sin of hatred and attempted murder; we have seen some attempt to work the mental attitude sins leading to theft and so on. In other words, we are observing some work of repentance, some work of the Holy Spirit in that home situation.
However, we said in Genesis 42:38 you’ve got a case where the old man himself now becomes one of the impediments to the sanctification and the straightening up of the home situation, because Jacob, like so many of us, when it comes down to that last thing we clutch, he simply does not want to let go. Those of you, the young couples and their increasing numbers who have small children, if you’ve noticed the reflex action of the baby’s wrist, particularly when he grabs something it’s almost impossible to get it out of his hand. Sometime at the very beginning it’s because the baby simply can’t release; he’s not used to releasing things from his hands and so you sit there and you pry finger by finger the little item out of his grubby hand. Now there’s a picture of the believer who clutches something and God comes along and says give it to Me; don’t want to; give it to Me; no, I’m not going to. And so verse 38 is Jacob clutching his youngest son, Benjamin, he will not turn Benjamin over to the Lord; he will not trust God with Benjamin’s safety because Jacob was just clutching at this point. By the time we get to Genesis 43:14 we have Jacob straightened out; we have a repentant attitude, we have great changes in his life. To go from 42:38 to 43:15 is to take a tour of the process of repentance.
So that’s what we’re going to look at in these 14 verses, how in a step by step way does God work an in depth repentance in somebody’s mind when they work, particularly starting with a thing like verse 38, I will not release this thing to God. And God says oh yes you will, just watch. That’s why chapter 43 begins with a circumstantial clause. Genesis 43:1 gives us the famine or the pressure situation that God brings into our lives to make us give up. So here’s Jacob now and he’s got famine; that’s one of the pressures God is using to change him. Now he doesn’t see it that way, like most of the time we don’t, but that’s in fact what he’s doing. And so he says, [2] “And it came to pass, when they had eaten up the grain which they had brought out of Egypt, their father said unto them, Go again, buy us a little food.” And notice the word “little,” why a little, why not a lot? You know why? Because he really doesn’t want to confront the situation he’s got to confront down in Egypt and he hopes that if the boys go down there and just buy a little food at the roadside stand they won’t have to confront Joseph because if we have to confront Joseph then we have to bring Benjamin down and if we bring Benjamin down I have to confront my own unbelief and I don’t like to do that, that’s painful to my pride. And so therefore not wanting to face my real problem I’ll try to oouch around the problem.
Now doesn’t that strike us all as very familiar, that basically we hope that the pressure that God puts in our life, the famine, will just somehow end early enough so that we can oouch around with a kind of makeshift solution and get around it and go on our merry way without ever having confronted what it was that God wanted us to confront. Sorry, the famine will go on for years more; Jacob, a “little” food isn’t going to do you too much good because you are the elect and therefore you are going to be conformed to what God wants you to be.
So now Genesis 43:3-5 present the nest step
in the sequence of steps used to cause repentance in this man. “And
So he said that’s the authority, so now we’re stuck. Ah, but that’s exactly what God wants. God wants the authority structure because you see, it’s only as you have authority that you can get rid of chaos. Every group has got to have some authority and it starts with the home situation. And our generation has a great problem with authority. This is why I emphasize, as I do so often the service, the military service, because it’s easy to see authority, it’s just sort of a role playing visual demonstration of it. And this is why we have so many young men from Tech that think it’s just Charlie Clough’s eccentricity that cause it. No it isn’t; it’s because this is the one left part of our society where there’s a visible authority structure and so therefore Charlie Clough will continue to emphasize the military for young men because they must understand what Judah is understanding here, that when there is an authority there is an authority and that’s it and we have to work our solutions underneath that authority structure. So as we look at this we now find the second great chapter, an external pressure and some sort of authority; this time the authority is divine institution four because divine institution three, family authority is so weak it’s nonexistent so God has to bring the fourth divine institution in as a pseudo authority in this situation to compel them to get under authority.
Now in Genesis 43:6 notice Jacob’s
name. Jacob has two names and one of his
names, very familiar to you because you often use it as the name of a nation
but it’s not, it’s the name of a man, God’s name of a man and it’s God’s chosen
and preferred name of this man,
So in verse 6, “And Israel said, Wherefore dealt ye so ill with me, as to tell the man whether ye had yet a brother?” Notice he’s still trying to avoid admitting that he’s got to change. And this is part and parcel of repentance, and that is resistance; we fight that kind of thing, internally. All of us do, there’s that in us that just does not want to give up and does not want God to pry it loose from our palm. And so Jacob fights it and he wants to believe that it’s their fault that this whole thing happened, and why have you dealt ill with me; that sort of thing. Notice too from verses 3-6 the language that is used to describe Joseph, the man… the man, over and over again in Hebrew it’s deliberately emphasized because it has the article before the noun, The man, The man, The man. If you were to properly translate it you’d translate it capital T, capital M, that ought to be the way it’s translated here to draw emphasis to the original language, The Man, and they don’t know who The Man is, it’s their own brother. But this is what heightens and makes so dramatic this story.
In verse 7, “The man asked” and they define and they justify the fact that he has this information and why, Jacob, it’s not our fault that he knows we have a younger brother; he interrogated us, he accused us of being a spy and so we had to replay. [“And they said, the man asked us carefully of our state, and of our kindred, saying, Is your father yet alive? have ye another brother? And we told him according to the tenor of these words. Could we certainly know that he would say, Bring your brother down?”]
Now in verse 8, “And Judah said unto
Let’s look at this family once again; here’s the old man, he has his oldest son, Reuben, his next youngest son is Simeon, his next son is Levi, and then Judah. Now let’s just look at that list of names carefully for a moment. Reuben, the oldest. Who biblically ought to be the leader in the home among the children? The oldest and the first born, hence the firstborn got double inheritance rights. Our present inheritance laws in our state are wrong by giving children equal inheritance; it’s anti biblical; the biblical way of giving inheritance is your oldest child has twice as much as any other child in the family because the oldest child is charged with the responsibility of taking care of his parents in old age, the others aren’t, and because the oldest child has twice the responsibility the oldest child has twice the inheritance to assume the responsibility. And so we have this situation in the Scriptures. And Reuben has disqualified himself; he’s been partially obedient, remember, he said well, let’s not really kill Joseph, but then he kind of flaked out and disappeared and they sold him to the Midianites and he came back and wandered around trying to figure out what happened. Well, that’s the trouble with Reuben, he’s one of those boys that can never figure out what’s going on and therefore he’s never a leader and so he’s disqualified.
So in the course of events he is simply
discarded, he’s going to be a good boy and he’ll go on and form a tribe but
basically he’s disqualified as being the
leader of the home. Next we get to
Simeon and Levi, those two guys, their weaknesses as leaders was that they had
a tremendous temper and when their sister got raped, you remember back a few
chapters, they went in and got everybody circumcised and killed them. So Simeon and Levi tend to have a
belligerency about them that makes them unstable; one of them is down in
Now we come to number four and guess who
now begins to assume the responsibility in the home?
First of all, in verse 8, one of his characteristics is that he recognizes what the issue is. Now you can’t lead if you don’t see where the issue is and the issue is they’re going to die, never mind Jacob about Benjamin, you won’t have to worry about Benjamin if we don’t get grain because we’re all going to die of famine. So in verse 8 the first characteristic of a leader is he cuts all the excuses down to the basic issue and the issue is death. Now viewed against that, now we’ll talk solution. Verse 9, another characteristic is he proposes a decisive move; he says I am going to assume responsibility and I’m going to act. He probably had four or five people saying hey, do you think it ought to be done that way, we’ll that’s too dangerous, let’s sit and pray about it for 8 weeks, this sort of thing. Well no, he is going to act in a very decisive way to solve the problem, and verse 10, he wants action now! And verse 10 is kind of very piously translated, really it’s sarcasm; he’s saying you know, if we’d stop goofing around we could have been down there and back twice by now, so he sees the issue.
Now verses 11-14, all these factors and the circumstances and the surrounding under the sovereign but invisible hand of God attain their goal; the old man repents, the old man gets to that point in his life and it must have been hard for him to do this, in his last days, to give up the precious son of his beloved wife, Rachel, because he lost one son, he thinks, and this is his last son, the last thing he can clutch to, and God says Jacob, give it to Me; but You’ve taken this, You’ve taken this, You’ve taken this, You’ve taken everything out of my life, I want this! Give it to Me, now! And so by verse 14 Jacob gives it to him.
Look what he does. In verse 11 he recognizes it’s all over, his foolish unbelief has just stalled the program long enough, so he says, “[And their father Israel said unto them,] If it must be so now, do this;” and he gives them wisdom, [“take of the best fruits in the land in your vessels, and carry down the man a present, a little balm, and a little honey, spices, and myrrh, nuts, and almonds.” Verse 12, “And take double money in your hand;” because you guys came back with your money before and they’re going t ask you why when you get down there so take double the money, [“and the money that was brought again in the mouth of your sacks, carry it again in your hand; peradventure it was an oversight. [13] Take also your brother, and arise, go again unto the man:.” ”]
How interesting, how many men are going
down? Ten; if they carry two bags apiece
that’s 20 bags, 20! How many pieces was
Joseph sold for? Twenty, the price of a
male slave, twenty pieces of silver. And
now because the brothers, as it were, kind of give restitution, as it were,
they are forced to restitute a whole bag for each piece of silver that they
sold Joseph for. And so they take their
20 bags of silver down and Jacob tells them in verse 14, and this shows you his
real repentance and show you what he was able to do, and this ought to give
some of you encouragement; when you get in this kind of a jam in your life pay
attention to what’s happening here in verse 24.
This is the trick of being able to release something that God demands of
you that you don’t want to. It may be a
wife, it may be a husband, it may be a job, it may be an investment
opportunity, it may be some cherish possession, it may be any kind of thing,
something that you want very much, and you understand that God is making a
contest over that issue right now in your life, and He’s asking you to trust
Him with it, but you don’t really feel like it, it’s kind of one foot on the
wharf and one foot on the boat kind of deal, and you can’t really bring yourself
to trust him with it because you’re afraid if you do it he’s going to short
change you. If you really dedicate to
the Lord you’re going to wind up in
Verse 14, “May God Almighty give you mercy before the man,” see, former title, The Man, and the word “God Almighty” is the key to what must have happened in Jacob’s mentality; the word is a special term for God, El Shaddai, it means and it means two things, Shaddai, on the one hand it means God who is strong, so it shows you the attribute of God’s omnipotence played a heavy role in finally as he thought and the thought and he thought and he thought, do I dare… do I dare let Benjamin go down there exposed to this danger; will he ever come back? So he had to resolve in his mind, oh yeah, he could spell the word omnipotence, I’m sure, but could he resolve in his mind when the rubber met the road that he could really trust God to handle Benjamin’s problem of security. He did, and that’s why he says “El Shaddai, He will give you mercy.” And then the second thing he does, the word “Shaddai” by some scholars of the language is also connected with a woman’s breast and it means the word for nourishment and tender care, which then exposes something else. It tells you that the second quality of God that meant a lot to Jacob in this trial was that God not only is fantastically powerful but He is very tender in His care of me and therefore I’m going to trust this situation to Him so that observation is just about how he saw God.
When you’re in these kinds of trials if you’ll do a little spiritual test you’ll see how this helps. If you’ll think to yourself, with my present mental attitude what do I really see God to be? What do I really see Him for, and when you start to be honest with yourself and you write out your real picture of God you’ll discover it’s very sub-biblical. You’ll discover it’s very much less than the God of the Bible. Well, Jacob went through the struggle and so, “El Shaddai give you mercy before the man, that he may send away your other brother, and Benjamin.” Little does Jacob know that he’s going to get three sons, not two sons sin this deal, but he doesn’t know that yet. God’s just making an issue to see if he’s going to trust Him, and then after he trusts Him we’ll see what other goodies God will add to the package.
But then at the end of verse 14 you have
another element that figures prominently and this may help some of you pass
through these kinds of trials: “If I be bereaved of my children, I am
bereaved.” Now watch that last sentence
in verse 14, now re-read verse 38 of the previous chapter. Compare those two verses; in verse 38 before
the repentance process set in what was his attitude. “If mischief befall him by the way in the
which ye go, then you’re going to bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the
grave.” What is he threatening? Suicidal depression! He says if Benjamin goes then that’s the way
I’m going to react to it. Now the
destruction of Benjamin isn’t going to send him to the looney farm; what’s
going to send him to the looney farm is his own response to Benjamin’s death
and in his own carnality and his own rebellion, he says I am bitter and I am
hateful and I don’t like this and I’m going to express it with a mood or a
pouting, and an adult pouting winds up in a depression and (quote) “mental
illness,” which really doesn’t exist.
And this is threat in verse 38; isn’t that a beautiful way to check out;
check out as a schizo on a funny farm, a great way of life, versus verse 14 and
in verse 14 he’s finally got to the point well, if He takes him He takes
him. [15, “And the men took that present, and they took double money
in their hand, and Benjamin; and rose up, and went down to
What I’m saying is that in verse 14 you’ve got a believer with his back against the wall clutching an object and God wants the object and God’s peeling it back, right there. But before the believer can release it to God he’s go to do one basic thing; he’s got to face the worst case that he can imagine. Take your famine, take whatever your trial is; now think to yourself, what is the worst possible thing that can go wrong in this situation. Now if you can get yourself, with your conscience, with the Word of God all together, on the worst case scenario and trust at that point the nature of God and faith-rest it, you’ve got it because no matter what happens it’ll be better than the worst case scenario; it will be equal or better than what you anticipate. So if you always play the worse case and cope with that worst case in your life and if you have to spend three hundred hours in the Bible studying a verse to get at a tool to handle the worst case, then you do it and I’ll help you do it, call me, ask me, I’ll be willing to help you with it, go through that worst case and then you can cope with it.
Well, I want you to see another
illustration that came to my attention recently. This is the case of an old man who’s the head
of a home and that the trauma of an old man struggling with his sons. Now let me give you, for the benefit of some
of the women here a counterpoint illustration of a very famous woman Christian
in American history, Abigail Adams. As
some of you know, John and Abigail Adams was an outstanding Christian couple at
the founding of our country and John Adams, her husband, had spent a lot of
time in their marriage, they were married 13 years when this event occurs, and
he’d already spent many years away from their home because he had to ride back
and forth to Washington; back and forth to the capitals of the colonies to get
things straightened out, to get the various deals done so the revolution could
take place, at least the organization could take place. I remind you that we’re not saying the
So John Adams was away from home many, many weeks. After all this he comes home and he spends time, about two weeks at home and they get a letter. She goes out and she reads the letter and it’s from the President of the congress of the colonies to her husband, and the letter says: Dear John Adams, so and so and so and so, the Congress has appointed you to be the ambassador to France; you must go to Paris and you must negotiate with the French over getting material for the revolutionary war effort. Now we pick up the case of this woman, faced with this kind of a situation, having to give up, not her son as in Jacob’s case but her husband. It’s very difficult and here’s how the author pictures it. I want you to see this because it shows you the tremendous stature of the great Christians. We have the little twerps today in the classrooms, Christians included, who love to tear down the founding fathers of the country but they do so because they are fundamentally little people and little people always like to tear down great people, it makes them feel better that way. So here is a great person of our past; listen how she deals with it.
“As the long hours of the sleepless night spun themselves out, she found this to be the most excruciating conflict she had ever endured. The Congress was far enough away, two weeks of hard riding, and there had been the danger of the delegates being taken by General Howe’s army but Paris, France, more than 3,000 miles away, two to four months for any completed trip or answering of letters…” two to four months, that’s the closest you’d ever hear from anybody. “Treaty making was slow tedious business, John would be gone for years. Wretched, already feeling abandoned, she wept until she felt the soaked pillow beneath her. The still hours of the night and one’s lonely bed were a merciless battlefield where one could hope for no succor. Then, exhausted, deep in the dark forest, she began the long hard climb out of the quagmire of despair to the open, albeit rock strewn road in the sunlight. It had never been her role to put restraints on her husband. She had, instead, worked to leave him free to act for himself. The honor of this important embassy was the surest possible sign of the high regard in which Congress held John Adams. It would be both humiliating and destructive to her pride to allow it to be said that John Adams had refused an important post because his wife would not let him accept, as well as a mockery to the self-government which he had spent the last three years helping to create.”
“How could she nullify the years of suffering and sacrifice she’d already endured? Indeed, her major capital, she smiled ruefully, seemed to be her vested interest in her sacrifice. She rose; she lit the candles in the double-jointed candleholder over her desk and she lowered the bottom half so the light showed more directly on the pages of her Bible. She picked up her magnifying glass, she quickly found the passage she was searching for in Judges 5:24-27 which reads as this: Blessed above women shall Jael, the wife of Heber, the Kenite, be; blessed shall she be above women in the tent. [25] He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish. [26] She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote of f his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples. [27] At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.” She was Jael but she was also Sisera. With a carpenter’s mallet in her right hand she must find the place for the mortal blow to everything within her that would be the enemy of her husband; she must pierce her own forehead so that everything weak and selfish would lie at her feet, helpless in death. Then and only then could it be said of her: Blessed above women shall Abigail, the wife of John, be; blessed shall she be above women in the tent. In her gathering strength she realized there was no end on the road to which she had set their feet on a conjugal partnership thirteen years before.”
Now there’s an example of the kind of tough
Christians that it took to make this country.
I dare say that in most families that kind of an agonizing decision
could not be made today, even among Christians.
And this gives you an idea of what real spiritually mature people are
like and what the real Christian life is; it is not one basket of ease, it is
these kinds of trials… you see, that’s how greatness comes. Now you can be comfortable and be mediocre,
or you can be uncomfortable and be great, and that’s the choice, and Abigail
Adams, thank God for
And the story comes to a very rapid
conclusion as the men go down to
But watch the humor of God; God is going to give them three clear indicators that He’s about to bless them and you watch these guys. They walk right smack dab by all three of them and never open their closed eyes. The first one occurs in verse 23. They talk to the servant and say we didn’t mean it, we didn’t mean it, we didn’t mean it, and the servant gives their money, just relax fellows. And then what does he say? Verse 23, “And he said, Peace be to you, fear not: your Elohim,” and he uses the Semitic word for God, “your Elohim and the Elohim of your father, has given you treasure in your sacks; I had your money. And he brought Simeon out unto them.”
Now there’s a lot of complexities in verse
23 and you want to watch it; don’t read it too fast. Who put the money in their sacks on the first
trip? Wasn’t it a servant of Joseph; didn’t he order it to be done? Yes.
Apparently it was this man because he says in verse 23 I had your
money. All right, if this man and yet he
tells them that Elohim did it, what does that tell you? It tells you that something like this must
have happened. Joseph must have come
down to him one day and said hey, see those guys, every one of those fellows
tried to murder me once, but because of Elohim, He tells me that I’m to forgive
my brothers; Elohim has called me to a destiny to rule over my home and get it
all straightened out, so I’m going to do this.
And you can imagine this young Egyptian looking back at him and saying
hey, you know, in
So they go in and they begin to arrange the
presents that they’re going to give to Joseph.
[24, “And the man
brought the men into Joseph’s house, and gave them water, and they washed their
feet; and he gave their asses provender. [25] And they made ready the present against Joseph came at
Now verse 27, he asks for his father’s welfare, [“And he asked them of their welfare, and said, Is your father well, the old man of whom ye spoke? Is he yet alive?”] Verse 28, they answer and they respond, they bow down again, see the repetition. [28, “And they answered, Thy servant our father is in good health, he is yet alive. And they bowed down their heads, and made obeisance.”] Verse 29, “And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin,” notice how Benjamin is described in verse 29, “his mother’s son,” because in a polygamous marriage the boys or the children would be grouped, sort of like our divorced marriages today, ethereal polygamy we have and we have sons of her and sons of him sons of both and they’re all grouped. Well, this is what’s happening in this family and they feel naturally closest. So he feels naturally closest to Benjamin and this comes out here.
But now he pulls a second stunt. Now if the brothers missed the cue in verse 23, they surely ought not to have missed this cue because here’s this three way conversation going on, remember, Joseph is talking through an interpreter and he’ll say something in Egyptian, and then the interpreter will turn around and say it in Semitic to his brothers, and his brothers say something in Semitic and the interpreter comes back and speaks in Egyptian and Joseph is sitting there silent, except here and he breaks it, he blows his cover because he suddenly turns to Benjamin, whom he loves very much and he says, [“and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye spoke unto me?] And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.” The implication is that here he’s speaking a direct address and we would infer, not dogmatically but we would infer from just the tenor of the text that he is starting to address his brothers in Hebrew. Now you would think that these eleven clods sitting there, who have already been told that Elohim is behind this and Elohim has done this, and then this guy in Egyptian headgear talks to him in Hebrew and he talks to Benjamin, “my son,” you think somewhere there’d be a faint recognition. But you see, God’s sanctification hasn’t done its work enough yet in their life to open their eyes. So they’re just like we are, Jesus Christ could be standing in the lobby and half of you would walk right by him and never notice because that’s just the way we are.
So it goes on, that’s hint number two but you haven’t seen all yet, wait till you see the third stunt pulled. Verse 30 is like the previous verse that we saw in chapter 42, it’s to show that Joseph isn’t doing this out of vengeance. It has hurt Joseph to have to put his own family through this wringer but he’s going to anyway because God wants him to do it. “And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there. [31] And he washed his face, and went out, and refrained himself, and said, Set on bread.” Now the table setting; this is a scene that has to be pictured because there’s all sorts of etiquette that flow in this scene and you’re going to lose it if you don’t see the picture.
Verse 32 is put in there to show you the
dining situation so you’ll get the force of the third trick. “And they set on for him by himself, and for
them by themselves, and for the Egyptians, which did eat with him, by
themselves: because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for
that is an abomination unto the Egyptians.”
So what you’ve got is a segregationist society and in the dining room
that day, however it was shaped, if you visualize the head table, here’s
Joseph, his wife, and his sons; the servants come in the room and serve the
food off of the head table. Over here is
a big long table with all the Egyptians, servants, handmaids and so on of the
house and some of the entourage of the official bureaucracy that hang around
with Joseph; table E, the Egyptians. Over
here, table H, the Hebrews, sitting here and the food is going to be served to
both tables from Joseph’s table; that was just the etiquette of the time. And as they sit there Joseph is going to do a
little test, because remember he wants to build his family but he’s got to do
it incognito because he’s the youngest person in the family other than
Benjamin. Verse 32 reminds you that
Verse 33, “And they sat before him, the firstborn,” here’s the mindblower, right here, “they” means the brothers, “sat before him, the firstborn according to his birthright, and the youngest according to his youth: and the men marveled one at another.” What that is an idiom of is that when you go to a party or something, you look around, you see where all the little slips are, you get your name, you’re supposed to sit here and your girlfriend is sitting 8 chairs down because somebody’s playing games with the name tags and so on, you know how that works. So they have everybody seated around the table by name tag and they sit down at their name tag and they get to looking at each other and they say hey, wait a minute, look at this, we’re sitting in the order of our age.
Henry Morris has just done a little statistical study; do you know what the chances are of him doing that if he were just an Egyptian? One in forty million of getting eleven numbers in the proper sequences by sheer chance; one in forty million, and these brothers sit down at the table and how the heck did he know this. And so that’s why it says “the men marveled at one another,” but apparently not too long. So they passed by the third test that something indeed strange is going on but they can’t guess it.
Now he pulls another stunt, verse 34, “And he took and sent messes unto them from before him,” now “mess” isn’t the mess hall, it’s not a mess that you think, if you don’t know what the mess hall is then I feel for you, it sometimes is well named because oftentimes mess halls do serve mess, but this “mess” is the formal word for mess. “… but Benjamin’s mess was five times so much as any of theirs. And they drank, and were merry with him.” Now you read that verse quickly it doesn’t look like much is said but something is said there. You see, what has happened, you visualize the scene, here’s Joseph sitting there and he watching; still he hasn’t caught on that he knows the Semitic language. And he’s sitting there, he’s listening to the conversation take place and he’s going to test them. He’s going to say when you serve the dishes I want Benjamin’s dish five times bigger and then all the other dishes like this. So here’s Benjamin at one end of the table with big fat servings and everybody else got this little weenie serving. And Joseph wants to watch to see what kind of a response he gets out of this. Why? Because he’s testing to test the moral integrity of that family unit compared to 13 years ago when he got the biggest serving. Remember, his dad brought him all the extra clothes, his dad gave him all the extra privileges and what did it precipitate in that family unit? Envy, hatred!
So Joseph is testing, I wonder if my family has learned, let’s try it again. So he puts Benjamin in his former role and then stands back to watch, and that’s why chapter 43 ends with that seemingly innocuous verse, “And they drank, and they were merry with him.” What that means is they passed the test; they didn’t get bent out of shape, they didn’t say hey, how come he got a cake five times bigger than me. No reaction, everybody was relaxed. So Joseph understands now that things are going on. We’ll see how they go on further next week in chapter 44.
What are some applications? As believers we too are elect, and we too
have those famines, and we too are often like Jacob who would oouch by the test
of God with a little grain to see if we could just get by on our own gimmicks,
but God always seems to have the doggone famine just last long enough so that
we override our gimmicks and finally crash and finally have to come back and
face the music before Him and get the problem dealt with. Why? Because He loves us, because He’s going to
conform us to Him image. We might
analyze our famine is, and thus we’re going to sing a hymn…..
Message 92
As we continue our study in the Joseph sseries we’re watfdhing again God work with an elect family, and one of the things tht you always want to notice about Scripture is that when God chooses to do something then he necessarily interferes…
Message 93
So far in the Joseph series we’ve noticed all the correcting work of God in the chosen family, and in this section we proably have one of the most in all of literature.
Message 94
So far in the Gnesis series we’ve looked at Joseph, we’ve looked at the family of Jacob, we’ve looked at….
Things that you always want to notice about Scripture is that when God chooses to do something then he necessarily interferes and interferes and interferes until that something is accomplished, and this election of the family is an example of his interference, over and over and over again.
On of the most famous scenes in all of literature of the reconciliation of a family. The thing you want to remember or some of the key things you want to remember about this set of stories….