Clough Genesis Lesson 92

Joseph’s cup put in Benjamin’s bag – Genesis 44

As we continue our study in the Joseph series we’re watching again God work with an elect family, and one of the things 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 again. See, in the fallen world it’s that we have a sort of spiritual entropy, a sort of downhill, that everything left to itself goes down. And that’s the point that the Scriptures make about the necessity of God’s interference. It’s very easy to let a family crater. All you have to do is nothing. All you have to do is neglect routing family prayer. All you have to do is neglect periodic memory of specific verses of Scripture. All you have to do is not have something like the family training program to constantly go after day after day after day. In fact, if you want to get a big picture on your own family an exercise you might try is to look back in your family for about three generations and see what has happened spiritually to your family background in the past hundred years. Take information from your grandparents if they’re still living and just ask them very candidly, what did go on in our family past and see whether your family is going down or whether it’s coming up spiritually, what general trends are there.

Genesis 37 to 50, this whole section, is a general model on how God works in a family situation and we’ve seen already that there’s a certain structure. Here’s the third divine institution, the home, and we have Jacob as the head of that family unit, we have the brothers and then the next youngest brother is Joseph. Joseph being down on the totem pole of authority in his family is at a disadvantage. God has picked him to be the catalyst to straighten that family out because you understand that what has to happen is that this entire family unit has to be rebuilt in order to become the core family of the kingdom of God. God cannot construct what he plans to construct in the Old Testament unless these people get their stuff together.

Now the question: how do they get their stuff together? And that’s the remarkable series of lessons that we’re learning in Joseph because with Joseph we watch wisdom at work, God’s wisdom at work. We watch a boy that is down on the low end of the totem pole in his home, who cannot, because of his position in the family unit, come directly and compel any kind of a change in his father, he can’t come to his older brothers and compel any kind of a change in them. So now the question is, how do you suppose God will use somebody at the low end of the totem pole? This is not a theoretical problem left to church services on Sunday morning. This is a problem that everyone who isn’t the head of their home faces in their own family. Thousands and thousands of wives face exactly this situation; thousands and thousands of Christian children face this in trying to help their parents get some sort of order in their home. It’s the same kind of thing.

Joseph had to face it, and one of the things that God does is that He does not have Joseph directly nag; He does not have Joseph directly confront as the younger son. What God does is first he works on Joseph, so in the step by step procedures we have Joseph being worked on. For 13 years God works to get rid of the bratiness out of his soul; as a 17 year old he has great gifts but he also has a very lousy mental attitude and because of this autonomy and because he thinks he can run the show himself, he has to have this purged out of him. He has to be put in a position where he can withstand the prosperity test; where he can have great power, he can have great authority, and he won’t let that go to his head because he’s working with his own family. You see, if God didn’t take 13 years what Joseph could have done, had he been given the power he actually was given, is when he finally got that power he could have said okay, now I’ve got you slobs under my thumb and I’m just going to squash you. And that would have been a vengeful tactic and you can how he would understand how he would react this way, having been kind of pushed around by his older brothers and now he can do the pushing around. It’s that kind of thing. Well, God didn’t want that to happen so now we have the quality of mercy and grace in Joseph’s soul, the first step, because this has to be the prerequisite for straightening out anything.

The second step, what does God do? He transfers Joseph over to divine institution four and makes him a legal ruler. Now from this point forward Joseph acts on his family with the cap of the fourth divine institution, not the third. He is not coming to his father as a sort of rebellious son; he’s coming to his father and he’s coming to his older brothers as the ruler of Egypt. So this is a little ploy, a little maneuver that God works out to get something working in straightening out this family. He puts him as legal ruler; combined with his character now we go into watching God work with the brothers.

These brothers go through two crises; these crises are listed in Genesis 42, Genesis 44, and they’re crises that cause them to focus on their mental attitude of hatred, envy and indifference and their very bad attitude toward their father; because of their hatred for Joseph they could care less for their father’s interest because of their animosity to how their father treated Joseph versus how they treated him; they basically have indifference to Joseph; envy of Joseph you might say and indifference to their father would be probably the more accurate way of saying it. Those are their problems and God begins to sow the seeds of very careful circumstances to grab that problem and deal with it.

And then the father; the father is being worked on to get him in a position where he will lead. So here’s the amazing thing and this is the significance of all these stories, before we get any further. If you tie all the stories together they fit as a unit and the unit is this: it is a model of how God glues a family back together again. You want to watch how it’s done because there are certain elements here missing from modern approaches to this kind of thing. One of the great Christian counselors of our time, who happens to very vilified because of his strongly biblical position, is Dr. Jay Adams. Dr. Jay Adams and Bill Gothard, and men like them are currently being derided in the professional journals of Christian counselors; there’s an entire movement aboard to discredit both Gothard and Adams because they don’t have their doctorates in psychology and so on from all the eclectic universities and so therefore they’re not credible. They are (quote) “too simple” (end quote) in their approach, to which I have replied to some of my friends in the professional counseling field that if you get me other tools than what Dr. Adams and Gothard have provided I will gladly use them, but until you do I prefer to have his tools to your lack thereof. But this is the position and this is why, because currently in dealing with broken homes, currently in dealing with these chaotic family situations, all sorts of human viewpoint gimmicks are being substituted.

A while ago Dr. Adams wrote a very famous essay called, The Spade, the Mirror, and the Dog Biscuit. And in this essay Dr. Adams characterized the three major approaches that you will learn, if you go into the ministry to do any kind of counseling, if you happen to be in education courses, if you happen to be in family courses, you’ll encounter one of these three methodologies. Now they’re broken up today into thousands of different methodologies but they’re characterized by these and just to show you how not to do things we want to go through these three approaches because they’re very, very current, people are spending $40 an hour to get the benefit of these kinds of things.

Let’s take the spade, the shovel. This is the approach of the Freudian; this is the approach of the depth psychiatrist. This is the idea that I am what I am because of my past and here I am, poor victim, and I’m surrounded by all these pressures; here’s mother, here’s father, here’s brothers, here’s sisters, here’s all kinds of circumstances and I am just the poor innocent victim of all these horrible things in my environment. Now this is a sort of self-fulfilling thing because all of us come out of homes where there were sinners. Suddenly a big amazing find is made as we probe the patient’s past and we work backward we discover all sorts of sin; we discover injustices being done. Why of course. Do you know a quicker way of doing it? Reading Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”

In other words, depth psychiatry has just simply discovering what the Bible says; you don’t have to go through a painful 8 year process of psychotherapy to discover that injustices were done to you in the past. Of course they were done to you; they were done to you and everybody else that walks the face of the earth; it’s not your excuse, that’s not my excuse. All of us have been wronged; all of us came out of a sinful background. All of us came out of homes where mother and father did make mistakes and sometimes very bad ones. But, the Freudian would argue, here’s our solution, what we really want to do to you now is the problem is that when you see these things here and you’re tempted to go out and live the way you want to, but the problem is in the past you had a conscience, he calls is super ego, that was programmed to condemn you, to condemn you, to condemn you and you see, you have a problem today because you want to go out and do what you want to do and you have all these bad feelings. So what we’ll do in psychotherapy for an extra $55 and hour we’ll show you how to short-circuit your conscience. And then you won’t have these bad feelings any more and you can go out and do what you want to do all by yourself. That’s the spade approach; that’s on its way out, not too many people follow that religiously today.

The more popular one, particularly among clergymen, and Christian counselors is the mirror. This follows the approach of Carl Rogers and his disciples, which argues that you can’t be directive in your counseling, don’t ever tell anybody anything specific to do because after all, your opinions are no better than theirs; you can’t impose your opinions on their opinions because your opinions are the same value as their opinions. And so since that’s the case, what can you do to help somebody in problems? Just be a mirror to them. And so we might imagine a dialogue that goes like this; the patient sits there and asks what do you think my problem might be, to the counselor. And the counselor responds, oh, you’d like me to interpret the situation for you? Yes, what do you think I should do, says the patient back. And the counselor says hmmm. And then the patient says you can help me with this decision, asking for direct guidance. But no, the counselor is basically following his methodology never to give any directive counseling, says oh, you feel you need to make a decision. And so it goes on, hour after hour, this little game where the patient is literally crying out for someone to give him guidance and the counselor very professionally and sterilely is reflecting back this sort of thing. And this is a little game; supposedly this is supposed to help people. This is a very, very popular approach, the mirror approach.

The final approach is the dog biscuit; the dog biscuit approach is coming more and more into education; it’s the behaviorist model, the idea that we can control how people respond by proper rewards and adversative controls. And so we manipulate the environment. It’s call the dog biscuit approach because that’s the way you do for an animal, and that’s how the [can’t understand word] and the educators are treating people; not as though their conscience, not as though they’re people made in God’s image before the absolute laws of God, but as animals, to be rewarded and to be punished. I was interested in talking to one of our architecture students that in one of the major thinkers of architecture today, you know what they do before they release the design of a building; they build a model of it. Do you know what they do with the model? They run mice through it. Do you know why they do that? Because they’re deliberately designing the building to manipulate the people that walk through it and they think that by running mice through the models of these buildings that they can design the buildings to actually act as a manipulator of the people that are in those buildings. And this is seriously done. So there is behaviorism in architecture.

You find it in a lot of the school programs; you find it in a lot of the modern educational media packages, all the kind of thing, behavior modification. Those of you who are Christians, you’d better be prepared for a long hard struggle in the field of education because if you’re a Christian you’d better purge out all the dog biscuit approaches, if you want to be a real Bible-believing and Christ honoring teacher you can’t do it with the dog biscuit approach. I don’t care what educator told you, it is profoundly anti-Christian because it’s based on the premise that no man has a conscience; it’s based on the premise that man can’t be what the Bible says he is and based on the premise that God does not convict and that there are no absolutes. These are the sorts of things that people are using to straighten people out.

But maybe one of the more controversial things, in the film last night, Scared Straight, and people asked me about the methods that they saw in that film; it was an excellent film, done on the treating of juveniles, a very forceful one and one that apparently is getting very good results. One of the Christian objections that I heard to this film, it was a good question, was: doesn’t this mean that we approach these people pragmatically? Doesn’t it mean that when we have the punk and the dropout and the debris on this 12 to 18 year old bracket, and where we have these tough kids, isn’t it true that basically what we’re doing is that we’re appealing to them nor morally but pragmatically, namely be good because if you’re not good then you’re going to get clobbered. And therefore, can a Christian really go along with a pragmatic amoral approach? At the time I was thinking about a lot of things and didn’t have a chance to reflect on it and think it through, but as I was watching the film I was trying to think where in the Scripture do I have any models of God using exactly this scared “straight approach,” and He does.

I want to show you passages where this is part of a divinely authorized system of coping with these kinds of people. God uses that approach when you face a situation of people who are amoral in their behavior. I asked myself, where in the Bible can I go to get situations in life where God basically physically confronted His people and crushed them. No moral issue, nothing except fear, absolute terror and fear of physical destruction. And I started thinking through the divine viewpoint framework and I said where in the history of the Bible does this peak, this kind of tactic of being scared straight? Do you know where it peaked? Right here; in the days of the decline of the kingdom, prior to 586, the exile, for those of you new to this chart, this is a series of events from the conquest and settlement which was under Joshua to David, to Solomon, to all the kings of the Old Testament, to the fact that Israel went into exile and later she came back into the land prior to the first coming of Christ. During this time of the kingdom decline and fall, you see, the nation had been spoken to morally; the prophets had made their pitch morally, just like the punks you saw in the film had had people try to sit down and talk to them and so on. But it doesn’t work because their conscience is seared.

One of my boys watching the program made the observation at the beginning, when they were interviewing the kids coming into the institution, how they were asking about their victims, what do you think about the victim; oh, I don’t care about the victim, he just happened to be in my way, that’s all, no problem, this kind of cruel blasé attitude and one of my boys remarked, I wonder if they have a conscience. That was a very good question; yes, they have a conscience but it’s seared over, and when the conscience is seared over you’ve got a compound carnal situation and no longer can God address it morally, so God now begins an indirect approach and the indirect approach is that God is going to go back to more elementary things. If He can’t come to us on the basis of moral law, then he will come to us on the basis of physical force.

Now this kind of philosophy, I’m sure, is foreign to many of you who have been raised in Christian homes. I am sure some of the things that I’m going to point out from the Bible you have never seen before and I am sure that emotionally, particularly some of the women here aren’t going to like it, but when it comes right back down to it, might does make right, because God is omnipotent and however he wishes to run the universe, that is the way the universe is going to be run, period. And after we get through dealing with the sovereign omnipotent God then we can discuss how to please or displease him. But basically God is power. And from that power we obtain law. This is why God has made the man physically stronger than the woman, because ultimately in the home the man is the head and he is physically strong enough to assert his authority, if he has to, against everybody else in that home. This is the way God has made it. He has made it! Why does He make men stronger than women? For the reason that they’re the leaders and finally, when it comes right down to it, they are going to be the leaders, period. Now this is the chain of authority and it works in every area.

As I was watching the film, I recall the earlier days in the military when that kind of thing you saw was done in this country. Back in the days when there was a draft it always used to be said, at least in my neighborhood, boy, I can’t wait till so and so gets in the army. And old caricature of the good old 250 pound 6’2” D.I. was true; in many parts of the United States army, particularly in some of the training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and particularly with some of the marine training it was true, up until recently. And that is that the sergeants did basically to the recruits what you saw being done to those punks. Now if you’ve never had to sit under that kind of a situation, with a guy yelling at the top of his voice, big enough to make mincemeat out of you, and he was about two inches away from your nose, you could just feel the words right on the side of your face, if you’ve never had to go through that kind of experience you basically haven’t lived. And the reason is because at that point something happens to you. It’s very interesting psychologically what happens to you. After you’ve gone through that kind of an experience, you have come face to face with power that you can’t do anything about, that compelled you to say “yes sir.” Now everyone, this is why I keep majoring on this theme about the young men in our generation; the service doesn’t do this much any more, it can’t because ever since the Marine episode back 5 or 10 years ago, some D.I. led six or seven guys out at night in a punishment patrol and drowned them out in the bog, they were probably so stupid they didn’t know how to swim, but the point was that this occurred and so now all of a sudden we had brutality in the service and therefore now nobody can touch anybody in the service. But the more effective instructors still have devices, they don’t really touch you but they get very similar results.

Now why does this have to happen? Why is it that we have to face that kind of a situation? Because we’re naturally rebellious creatures and authority is only so good as the power in back of the authority; the two go together. Those of you who watched the film, remember at the end they interviewed one of the kids and they said what did you think when that big guy came up to you and started chewing you out? And he said, come on, go ahead and hit me. And they were all locked up in the innards of this shell and they realized that the guards couldn’t get there in time and after all, here’s a guy in for double life, he’s already killed four or five people, so you know, one more little kid, eat him up, isn’t going to make much of a difference. And so the kid really realized that hey, you know what, if I dare say anything to this guy he’s going to kill me and those guards are 50 feet away through two steel doors and they’re not going to get here in time to save my soul. So I guess I’d better do something.

Now you see what happens, the bottom line to all this is that you are compelled to obey. Now that’s just the bottom line. Now it’s that kind of situation that God brings about in history and He has various, sometimes horrifying ways of bringing this about. Let’s look at him using the “scared straight” approach. Start with Deuteronomy 28. God had a system built into history for His own people and these are the people He loved. And this is the other thing about it; it’s hard for our generation to understand this because you see, the people who yell brutality, I believe on the basis of Scripture, are the most cruel people today. It is the people who are fussing against corporeal punishment and beating and whipping if that is necessary to produce, I don’t mean uncontrolled violence, I mean very controlled discipline force, not uncontrolled force, disciplined use of force, the kind you’re going to see here in Deuteronomy 28. People who argue against this, and I imagine there are many here this morning, people who argue against this kind of approach, you’re the ones that are the cruel people because you know what you’re saying? You’re saying that values in life are not worth getting this involved about. You’re like the person described by [sounds like: Mills] whose writings are utilitarian, but nevertheless once in a while he comes up with a gem, and he came out with this statement, that war is not the cruelest of things; the saddest and most cruel situation in life is when you don’t have any values worth fighting for, that’s the worst situation.

In Deuteronomy 28:15 God outlines his “scared straight” program. “And it shall come to p ass, if you will not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes which I command you this day, all these curses shall come upon you.” Now, by the time they got to verse 15 and the disobedience you’ve already had moral appeals; these have already been made but the people have said no, no, no, no. And so their consciences have been seared, just like the punk that you saw, the smart aleck that walked into that prison in the film. And here are the people who think well, I disobeyed that and I disobeyed that and I’m the autonomous person, I think I can do what I want to. Well that is an illusion; you can’t as a creature do what you want to in God’s universe so if He can’t reach you directly by moral appeal He will show you your creaturehood another way. And watch how He does it.

Deuteronomy 28:20, “The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that you set your hand to do, until you be destroyed, until you perish quickly, [because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby you have forsaken Me.]” Now these kinds of things, these curses, gradually increase. Verse 22, “The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, [and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blight, and with mildew, and they shall pursue thee] until you perish.” Verse 24, God “shall make the rain of the land powder and dust; form heaven shall it come down upon you, until you be destroyed. [25] The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before your enemies; you will go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them, and you will be removed [into all the kingdoms of the earth.] [26] And thy carcass shall be food to the fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall drive them away. [27] The LORD will smite thee with the boil of Egypt, [and with the tumors, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof] you cannot be healed.” Verse 29, “You will grope at noon as the blind gropes in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways…. [30] You shall betroth a wife, and another man shall seize her; you will build a house, and you shall not dwell therein; you will plant a vineyard, and you will not gather the grapes.” Verse 32, “Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people,” this happened.

This is not theoretical Bible stories, this happened three times in the history of Israel: 721, the northern kingdom, Samaria, invaded by the Assyrians, the Assyrians were feared in the ancient world because of their particular form of torture; when they didn’t like something you had done, they would spread eagle you, strip you, and stake you down to the ground and start peeling your skin off while you were still alive, with blades. And these are the kind of fierce people God brought against His people.

In 586 He brought the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, the Neo-Babylonians into Jerusalem; surrounded the city, the people began to die of starvation and the women became so desperate that even the women with small children, and some of you women with small children this may strike you, instead of when I did the Deuteronomy series and before when you were single in Tech, these women would take their own children because they were so hungry, kill them and eat them. And not only that it would go on, as Josephus describes, and I’m not exaggerating, you can check the book of Josephus yourself. They would go down the street and gangs would reach in the mouth of people who were eating their children and pull it out so they could eat it. This is the condition of 586 BC, to God’s own people. These aren’t pagans that this is happening to; these are God’s own chosen people.

In 70 AD, the third time it happened, and this time 3,000,000 Jews died in the city of Jerusalem and most of those Jews died of starvation; most of those Jews died of disease, all because of this plan, Deuteronomy 28 is God’s control of history.

Verse 33, “The fruit of thy land, and all thy labors, shall a nation whom you know not eat up, and you shall be only oppressed [and crushed always]. [34] You will be mad for the sight of your eyes,” in other words, you will get to the point where you will go crazy because of the pressure that is involved in this kind of thing.

Now why does God do that? Deuteronomy 28:55, “So that he will not give to any of them of the flesh of his children whom he shall eat, because he shall have nothing left him in the siege, and in the distress,” just look at those passages, this is not a sweet Sunday School story, this is the grim blood of history and when it comes down to the bottom line, if God has to go this way because we force His hand then that’s the way God goes. He is going to have compliance. And if it means death, fine, then that’s the way it’ll be. But we are going to have compliance to God’s laws.

Now let’s come into further history of the Jews, let’s come down to 1 Kings 18:21, the days of Elijah; one of the great confrontations, days of the declining of the kingdom. The people have had moral appeals made to them and it doesn’t make any difference. So along comes Elijah, and Elijah was known as a very… he and Elisha both were known as very much ascetics; they’re the kind of men you didn’t like to be around, they had very obnoxious kind of personalities. They were the kind of people that specialized in insulting you, they were the kind of people that did to the nation Israel what you saw those convicts doing to those kids; getting three inches in front of them and just chewing them up one side and down the other, and so Elijah comes in verse 21 and he says, “How long are you going to hold between two opinions? If the LORD be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. And the people didn’t answer him a word.” They’re dumbfounded, that a prophet of Israel is this abusive, this verbally abusive towards them. Oh, this isn’t acting like a believer. Do you know what Elijah would have said? What do you care about acting like a believer, we’ve been going through the Scriptures and you don’t respond to it so who cares now; now we get beyond all that, now we come in for the artillery, you didn’t listen before. So we don’t care about being a nice believer any more, we believe in getting down to the authority of the Word. And so Elijah says, verse 22, “I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal’s prophets are four hundred and fifty men.” And you know the contest, and look at the sarcasm in verse 27; that’s not acting like a nice believer, is it? “And it came to pass” while they’re praying, he interrupts their praying, to get the context of that how would you think if some person were praying out in the middle of the stadium or something and off on the side all of a sudden you have a bunch of these people start ridiculing the prayer while it’s going on, with loud speakers and everything else, this kind of thing. Certainly you’d conclude that boy, those people really aren’t Christians, and yet here’s Elijah interrupting somebody else’s praying; that’s not a very ecumenical spirit on the part of the prophet. Just look what he says: Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud;” literally he means why don’t you shout a little louder, “for he is a god. Maybe he’s out talking some place, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey,” and this is the King James that glosses it over, the modern translation, maybe he’s on the toilet; this is what he says about their god: yell a little louder, he’s got the bathroom door locked. Now you can imagine this kind of thing in a very serious religious ceremony and you have this guy that’s just this total dissident that is just aggravating, irritating and deliberately upsetting people and using language of the streets to do it. Gosh, he wouldn’t be accepted in most pulpits I know. [28]“And they cried aloud, and cut themselves,” imagine the feedback cards Elijah must have got, “and it came to pass, when midday was past,” and they started cutting themselves, and now Elijah in verse 30 comes along and he gives his alternate message.

That’s Elijah, let’s go to another guy, a real weirdo, Ezekiel; we’ve never done anything in Ezekiel, someday I’ll do that, it takes about a year and a half study before you can preach any one, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and I’m trying to start this fall preparation for Isaiah. These prophets are very difficult to do a good thorough job on. But Ezekiel was asked by God to do many things. The first thing that God did to Ezekiel is He caused him to become dumb; that is, he stopped Ezekiel’s ability to talk, and so therefore Ezekiel had to role play things, and in Ezekiel 4:1-8 you have one of the bizarre things that he was asked to do. “Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile,” and it’s the idea of a model, “and lay it before you and portray upon it the city, Jerusalem. [2] And lay siege against it, and build a fort against it, and case a mount against it; set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round about.” Then verse 4, how’d you like to do this. See, he can’t tell anybody because he can’t talk; now imagine, building a model of the city and having this model mock battle right smack dab out in the middle of the street and everybody’s walking by and here’s this old man, down on all fours playing toys in the middle of the street. And you know the guy’s a prophet because you’ve heard him preach before. And you try to talk to Ezekiel, what are you doing, and he doesn’t say anything; you think hey, let’s call the guys from the seventh floor over here, I think we’ve got a patient.

Verse 4, “Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it;” this is literal, “according to the number of days that thou shalt lie upon it, thou shalt bear their iniquity. [5] For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days; so shalt thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. [6] And when you have accomplished them, lie on your right side, and you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days.” How would you like to lie on one side in the street, not being able to explain your actions and go on day after day, 40 days, people walk by, and you’re lying there on your right side. Now why does God have Ezekiel go through all these bizarre maneuvers? Because they’re not people that can be morally approached; they are people who are beyond moral approach and you have to use shock to get to them.

Turn to Ezekiel 5:1-4, “And thou, son of man, take a sharp knife, take a barber’s razor, and cause it to pass upon your hear, and upon your beard, and then take three balances weigh and divide the hair in the balance. [2] You will burn with fire a third part in the midst of the city,” so here everybody is buying and selling the groceries and here comes some guy that has a Yul Brenner style haircut after you know he’s had a relative thick head of hair, and a beard and he’s all shaven and he has this big pile of hair and he’s talking through the street with scales and his hair, and he sits down, without talking, and he sits there and he burns his hair in the middle of the street. Can you imagine being asked by God to do all these crazy things? Ezekiel was, and he had to faithfully do this; make a complete jerk out of himself.

Turn to Ezekiel 12:2, you think the others were bad, how’d you like to do this one. “Son of man, you dwell in the middle of a rebellious house, who have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not; for they are a rebellious house.” See, they’re beyond moral appeal. [3] “Therefore, thou son o f man, prepare thee baggage for moving, and move by day in their sight; and thy shalt move from thy place to another place in their sighs; it may be that they will consider, though they be a rebellious house.” You see that last purpose clause in verse 3, “it may be that they will consider,” in other words, when somebody is beyond moral appeal because you’ve pitched it to them, time and time and time again, then something physical has got to take place. [4] Then you will bring forth thy baggage by day in their sight, as baggage for removing; and you shall go forth at evening in their sight, as they that go forth into captivity. [5] Dig through the wall in their sighs, and carry out through it. [6] In their sight shall thou bear it upon thy shoulders, and carry it forth in the twilight; thou shalt cover thy face, that thou see not the ground; for I have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel.”

Later on God gave Ezekiel the power of speech. Turn to Ezekiel 16:22 for one of the most gross assaults on believers that has ever been made in the canon of Scripture. Here Ezekiel uses every piece of the language of the street to communicate to these people. The analogy is the analogy of Israel and a whore. “In all thy abominations and thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when thou wast naked and bare, and were polluted in thy blood. [23] And it came to pass after all thy wickedness (Woe, woe unto thee! Saith the Lord God), [24] That thou has built unto thee an eminent place, and hast made thee an high place in every street. [25] Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and has opened your legs to everyone that passes by, and multiplied thy whoredoms,” and so on and so on and so on, very frank language. It’s not the kind of thing that would be read for the Scripture reading in the high cathedral.

But if it wasn’t, then why is Ezekiel using this? Now this is the question we have to honestly answer; people don’t like to see these kinds of… and I assure you, by the way, as a student of the original languages, that this translation is very mild… very mild. And you have to vent as a believer, sit back and say who authored Ezekiel? Is this guy nuts, or is he a bona fide prophet of God, and if I’m a Bible-believing Christian I have to accept this as part of the canon of Scripture. Well, if it’s part of the canon of Scripture, now I have to ask myself God, why are You using this kind of threatening approach, verbally abusing and physically abusing the people that you’ve elected and that you supposedly love.

Now here’s the conclusion and here’s where we go 180 degrees away from our generation. The only way we can reconcile this kind of approach to God and His character and the rest of theology is that it is not bad; that brutality controlled is not bad. Now what has happened in our day is that there has come into existence a massive number of people in the field of education and social work who argue that all corporeal punishment is evil; all brutality is evil. Now they have a bona fide point because where a parent is uncontrolled and just simply beats a kid because he’s mad at the kid, that’s right, that is evil. But then we throw the baby out with the bathwater and we castigate all corporeal punishment.

One of the most memorable times in my early life was when my father took me over to a meeting in New Jersey which was kind of like an alumni meeting of men who by that time had grown up and were in business for themselves who were his students at a reform school in the state of Maine. When my father was a young man he taught in that reform school. And I can remember because my mother went there, that’s where they met, and she used to say how my father ran the classroom. He used to have a stick about this long, and from September 1 through October 1 he’d whip every kid in the class that got out of line. These are kids taken off the streets of Harlem, and they came up to Maine and they thought they were going to run the show. So for thirty days my father beat their butts and showed everyone in the class that he was the one that’s going to be teacher around here. And finally about October 6 or thereabout was the annual start of his math class, because it took him 30 days to decide who’s going to be king of the mountain in this operation; it was going to be him and that’s the way he ran his show. And I can remember as a young boy these big guys coming up and saying “thank you Mr. Clough for whipping it out of me,” and they were successful men in their time. And My father wasn’t that big a guy and it used to impress me to see these big hulks who had the New Jersey accent, the Brooklyn accent still, and it’s just a very tough sounding type of accent, and even when the guy’s reformed and going straight he still sounds like he’d beat you over the head if you turned your back. And to see these kind of men who the only language that spoke to them was a language of force, not undisciplined chaotic force, very methodical, very strategically applied force.

Those of you who teach in the school classroom today, I’m sure you understand that you cannot teach if you do not have authority, and if you’re going to have half the class running to the bathroom every five minutes and you’ve got the rest of the class sitting there looking at the ceiling and so on, there’s got to be some control of you’re just wasting your time… just absolutely wasting your time. All right, God has the same approach. This isn’t foreign; this is a universal rule of life.

Let’s turn to Genesis 44 and we’ll see very quickly the last step in how God glues the family together and now we’ll be ready to draw a major conclusion about how God operates in a chaotic situation. When God goes to bring order out of chaos, whether it’s in a home or whether it’s in a society, His first step always is to impose authority, and that authority equals physical force, if that’s what it takes. Not only that but in the whole motif of the Joseph stories do you know who the Pharaoh stands for theologically in the Bible? Satan. Now how about that one? In other words, God will take his own elect people, Jacob, the family He loves, the family He’s called out of Ur of the Chaldeas and they’re all fouled up and they’re all chaotic and God says in effect this: listen, you people are never going to solve your problem until you are under some authority and I will put you under Satan’s authority if I have to. And so He brings them under Pharaoh’s authority, it’s not a godly authority but it is an authority, and then under this framework of authority, now we’ll work out our problems. So you watch, this is exactly what’s happened and I’ll prove it to you by the passage on Judah’s plea.

The story in the first 17 verses I can quickly summarize. [1, “And he commanded the steward of his house, saying, Fill the men’s sacks with food, as much as they can carry, and put every man’s money in his sack’s mouth. [2] And put my cup, the silver cup, in the sack’s mouth of the youngest, and his corn money. And he did according to the word that Joseph had spoken. [3] As soon as the morning was light, the men were sent away, they and their asses. [4] And when they were gone out of the city, and not yet far off, Joseph said unto his steward, Up, follow after the men; and when thou dost overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good? [5] Is not this it in which my lord drinks, and whereby indeed he divineth? Ye have done evil in so doing. [6] And he overtook them, and he spoke unto them these same words. [7] And they said unto him, Wherefore saith my lord these words? God forbid that thy servants should do according to this thing: [8] Behold, the money, which we found in our sacks’ mouths, we brought again unto thee out of the land of Canaan: how then should we steal out of thy lord’s house silver or gold? [9] With whomsoever of thy servants it be found, both let him die, and we also will be my lord’s bondmen. [10] And he said, Now also let it be according unto your words; he with whom it is found shall be my servant; and ye shall be blameless. [11] Then they speedily took down every man his sack to the ground, and opened every man his sack. [12] And he searched, and began at the eldest, and left at the youngest; and the cup was found in Benjamin’s sack. [13] Then they rent their clothes, and laded every man his ass, and returned to the city. [14] And Judah and his brethren came to Joseph’s house; for he was yet there: and they fell before him on the ground. [15] And Joseph said unto them, What deed is this that ye have done? Know ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine? [16] And Judah said, What shall we say unto my lord? What shall we speak? Or how shall we clear ourselves? God hath found out the iniquity of thy servants: behold, we are my lord’s servants, both we, and he also with whom the cup is found. [17] And he said, God forbid that I should do so: but the man in whose hand the cup is found, he shall be my servant; and as for you, get you up in peace unto your father.”]

The problem has been, if you notice Genesis 43:34, the last verse of the previous chapter, remember the scene, they had that long table and all the brothers were sitting there, and nice little Benjamin is sitting there at the end of the table and all the dishes are served and Benjamin’s dish was like that and everybody else’s dish is like this. And Joseph’s sitting over here at the main table and he wants to see what his brothers are going to do when Benjamin down there gets five times the helping. Do you know what Joseph is doing? He’s testing them for the sin of envy because he remembers when he was a boy and he got treated that way; the rest of these brothers were always on his case, all the time. So Joseph sits there and little do the brothers know that he understands the Semitic language and he listens and he watches and he sees, at the conclusion of verse 34, “And they drank, and they were merry with him.” That means that they had been cured, at that point, of the attitude of envy.

But Joseph isn’t yet satisfied; he must apply, in Genesis 44:1-17 a second test. He has tested to see whether they are envious of their little brother, Benjamin, but now he’s got to correct one further problem. If you were Joseph and you were sitting at the table and you saw this take place and you thought well, you know, they are pretty nice to our youngest brother and they really aren’t envious, what would be another alternate explanation, besides the fact that they loved him? Another alternate explanation was that they were simply indifferent. So the test of verses 1-17 is to check to make sure that they love their brother and they haven’t lost their envy simply by disinterest, but they have lost their envy, positively they’ve lost their envy because positively they love him and so he plants the silver goblet in Benjamin’s sack; Benjamin is accused of stealing it, and now they come back and in verse 18 Judah makes his plea.

And it’s a model plea of an inferior to a superior and it follows all the outline that we have of prayer, F-I-G-G-R, acrostic that you can remember the different parts of prayer or the different doctrines of prayer; “F” stands for no fatalism; you can’t pray… you cannot pray if you think what’s going to happen is going to happen, that just wipes you out and you never even get to first base in prayer; you’ve got to understand that things are going to happen if you pray and things are not going to happen if you don’t pray. “You have not,” James says, “because you ask not.” So Judah comes near in verse 18 [“Then Judah came near unto him, and said, O my lord, let thy servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord’s ears, and let not thine anger burn against thy servant; for thou art even as Pharaoh,”] and says… now notice what’s happened in this family as it slowly gets glued back person by person, relationship by relationship, who is acting as the family spokesman? The Messianic seed, Judah. So now we have the leadership restored in the proper person. So he comes and he begins to make his appeal.

Notice at the end, in verse 33-34, as he concludes his appeal he says, “Now therefore, I pray you, let thy servant abide instead of the lad” in other words he offers to take Benjamin’s place as a hostage. What is the point of doing something like that? Do you know what it does? It tells the person that you’re appealing to that you really mean business. It’s not a rebellious way of doing it, it’s saying look, this petition means so much to me that I am willing to sacrifice this, this, this, this and this for it. Will you answer my petition? It’s the seriousness with which you take your appeal. So that’s the first element in good praying, that you don’t go making petitions if you don’t mean seriously that God’s going to answer. And this is one way of showing the person that you’re appealing to, and it can be God or man, because the word prayer can mean either way, that you mean business.

The second element of prayer, “I”, that we’ve called it is immutability and what we mean by this is that prayer has got to be based on God’s overall principles and will. “…if My word abides in you, ask what you will and shall be done unto you.” Now what of Joseph’s will do you think that Judah appeals to? It’s very clever, look at verse 18, the last part of it. See, he appeals to his authority but then he says, “My lord asked his servants, saying, Have ye a father, or a brother? [20] And we said unto my lord, We have a father, an old man, and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him.” Verse 21, “And you said unto thy servants, Bring him down unto me, that I may set mine eyes upon him. [22] And we said unto my lord, The lad cannot leave his father: for if he should leave his father, his father would die.]” Verse 23, “And thou said unto thy servants, Except your youngest brother come down with you, ye shall see my face no more.”

The appeal is Joseph you took an active interest in our father, in our youngest brother; now Joseph, if you really are interested in our father and our younger brother, won’t you do this? So his second element appeals to Joseph’s manifest concert and love for the old man. They see that, and so Judah, seeing that says okay, when I pitch my appeal to my superior I’ll appeal to something central to his concern.

The third principle is grace orientation, I must be acceptable to my superior to make may appeal credible. This is a problem with half the criticism that goes on today. People will criticize but they have no credibility in their criticism. They don’t take time to develop credibility and therefore they’re not heart, they’re not going to be heard, that’s just the way it is. This goes for the man on the job, you can sit there and witness from now until you’re blue in the face and there will be people around your job and your profession that won’t even give you the time of day, not because they’re rejecting the message but because you don’t have credibility with them. Maybe you’re not doing the kind of craftsmanship that you ought to be doing for your particular skill and they say look, if the guy’s this sloppy in his religion as he is sloppy that I can see here, here and here, why should I listen to him. So if there’s no credibility with your colleagues there can’t be any credible appeal for witness or anything else that takes place.

Now watch what Judah does; the only thing he can do to get credibility with Joseph is to place himself under Joseph’s authority. Now look what he does, the end of verse 18 again, he acknowledges Joseph’s authority, he says, “you are as Pharaoh.” All right, verse 24, “And it came to pass when we came up unto thy servant my father, [we told him the words of my lord.]” What does he do in verse 24? He places Jacob under Joseph’s authority. What does he do in verse 26, “Thy servant, my father said….” Again he places Jacob as a servant of Joseph. Verse 30, “When I came to thy servant my father, and the lad be not with us,” and so on and so on. Verse 32, “Thy servant became surety for the lad,” and here’s “thy servant” means not Jacob but Judah. Now, at this point the whole family is under the authority of Joseph. And interestingly if you look ahead in chapter 45, now he reveals himself.

[25, “And our father said, Go again, and buy us a little food. [26] And we said, We cannot go down: if our youngest brother be with us, then will we go down: for we may not see the man’s face, except our youngest brother be with us. [27] “And thy servant my father said unto us, Ye know that my wife bare me two sons; [28] And the one went out from me, and I said, Surely he is torn in pieces; and I saw him not since. [29] And if ye take this also from me, and mischief befall him, ye shall bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. [30] Now therefore when I come to thy servant my father, and the lad be not with us; seeing that his life is bound up in the lad’s life; [31] It shall come to pass, when he sees that the lad is not with us, that he will die: and thy servants shall bring down the gray hairs of thy servant our father with sorrow to the grave. [32] For thy servant became surety for the lad unto my father, saying, If I bring him not unto thee, then I shall bear the blame to my father for ever. [33] Now therefore, I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the lad a bondman to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren. [34] For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me? Lest peradventure I see the evil that shall come on my father.

You see, Joseph couldn’t let all the cards down on the table until this had been accomplished, until the family finally got under his divine institution four authority. Remember the dream? All the sheaves will bow down to me, the sun, the moon and the stars will bow down to me. It was a prophecy that the whole family had to come under some authority. We won’t bother with the fourth element of the prayer here but we’ve gone through this enough to show you the importance that the first restoration that God will work in somebody’s life is He will put you under some authority; it may be in your business, it may be in your marriage, it may be in circumstances. For example, if you’re a rebellious person, you’re not under anybody’s home and you’re not under a family structure and there’s not natural authority it may be that He’ll just use the laws of physiology, medically, to crush you down and to realize I am a prisoner of my body and if I’m going to live I’ve got to follow His laws of how He designed me. That may be the starting point, but you watch; when God goes to work, the first step will be bringing people under the authority and it will be in a concrete way.

We have people talk, talk, talk, talk today, I believe the Bible, I believe the Bible, I believe the Bible, yet when you talk about specific application, what about Genesis 1, well I interpret that this way. What about the woman’s role? Well, that was culturally conditioned. What about the idea that Jesus believed in an inerrant Scripture? Well, that was just Jesus’ time, you see, we’ve got another interpretation and so on. So you can dilute the Bible by simply endlessly reinterpreting it, pretending that language doesn’t have meaning, that dictionaries are useless, that words can’t be defined and you can play the game like many of the denominations do. Oh, we believer the Bible, errors and all; that can be a statement of a proposition. But what good is that? It’s only when we get under particular authority where it hurts, then we begin to learn. In back of that is the Lord God omnipotent.

So let’s conclude by singing….