Clough Genesis Lesson 93

Joseph reveals himself to his brothers – Genesis 45

So far in the Joseph series we’ve noticed all the correcting work of God in this chosen family, and in this section, in chapter 45, we probably have one 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 that you want to remember about this set of stories, this set of Scriptures, is that it’s teaching, very clearly and very simply that our life is not the product of blind impersonal forces. It’s not the result of economic forces as the Marxists insist; it’s not the result of some super conspiracy as certain right-wingers insist; it is not the result of fate as the horoscope people insist, it is the result of the personal sovereign reign of God. And in history wherever Christians have grasped this truth we have always had a very, very strong influence on the environment, and where the Christian church has been weak and very inarticulate in putting forward this truth, Christianity has always suffered.

When I was in seminary studying I had a professor of missions who was an escapee from Soviet Russia and Dr. Peters often told the class that had there been an evangelical church in Russia in 1917 there would never have been an October revolution and the reason was is because the people in the October revolution were hunting for a faith. Russian Orthodoxy had been very strong in tradition but very weak on doctrine and so therefore the average Russian believer in 1917 knew very, very little. The gospel had not been preached very much and so the communists came in and they filled the vacuum, as incidentally they are filling the vacuum in country after country, though of course today we don’t call them communists, we call them socialists and radicals and so on. But the label still is valid, they are communists and as such they are people who believe a very abbreviated version of a faith that comes from Christianity in a very aberrant way.

The story of Joseph is one of the most famous examples of God working in history. Let’s review a few things that we have noticed by way of principles and we can use these to apply what we’re learning in the text of God’s Word. We’re looking at a family situation, a family that is in chaos, and like Humpty Dumpty it’s all in pieces but God is putting all the pieces back together again. And He’s doing it through a very orderly, lawful and progressive approach. God knows that this family, and He’s designed this family to have a certain destiny; in order to get in that destiny God has got to intervene. It cannot be due to the initiative of individuals in that family because all you need for your family, or for society larger, is to disintegrate is to do nothing because we live in a fallen universe. There has been the origin of evil and if you’ll open your Bibles to a passage in the New Testament that shows this principle very clearly, Romans 7, Paul says, in personal terms, what depravity means. When we use the word “depravity,” it’s a good Reformation term, we refer to the fact that all men are depraved, that is all men, believers and unbelievers who have ever lived since Adam and Eve are people who are in profound rebellion. It does not mean that every person is as bad as they could be were it not for God’s restraining grace. Depravity means that all men are afflicted with systematic rebellion.

In Romans 7:15 we have a classic statement of what it means to be a depraved person. “For that which I do I allow [understand] not; for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do it. [16] If, then, I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. [17] Now, then, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me. [18] For I know that in me,” now verse 18 begins as a conclusion, it’s a conclusion, a melancholic conclusion but it’s a conclusion that any honest person must come to after being confronted with the Word of God. “For I know that in me, (that is, in my flesh) dwells no good thing; for to will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. [19] For the good which I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.” And Paul, the apostle, we might say the infallible, inerrant apostle, concludes this about himself and I dare say if that’s true of Paul it’s true of all of us.

So we now have the practical results of depravity. Now observe what we have; very elementary but very, very necessary. God maps out a destiny for every believer. If you are one who has believed in the Lord Jesus Christ it means that God has a destiny for you to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, because after all, we are going to live in His presence for all eternity so we might as well be in spiritual shape to take that kind of living. This being the case and this being the calling or the destiny, then the question comes up, how do I get there, because I have “no good thing in me.” And if I have no resources to get here the question is, how do I get there. And it’s precisely the recognition of those twin elements that leads to Christian growth; there’s never a counseling problem, there is never going to be any kind of pressure in your life for which this isn’t an issue somewhere involved, and that is on the one hand you have God’s standards, on the other hand you have your absolute inability to meet those standards. Now that is what Martin Luther called the recognition of the law before the gospel.

And so the resolution of that tension comes by becoming oriented to God’s grace, that, we look to God to be oriented to His grace. God is going to supply out of His grace the means to go from this status to this status. The fuel necessary to move cannot come from our own being because no matter how we dress ourselves up, no matter how we congratulate ourselves on what we have done, there still is nothing that is not tainted with sin. And that is the biblical message; and anything that is tainted with sin is unacceptable with God, therefore everything we do is unacceptable to God. This would leave us in a bad state of affairs, were it not for God’s initiative; that is, He intervenes graciously into our lives, He interrupts our lives, He interferes. And the story of that interference is the story of Joseph. This is what all these stories have been about. A family left to itself has total inability to fulfill its destiny before God. It does what you do, what I would do, what any family represented here this morning would do. Left to ourselves we are the Judah’s and the Simeon’s, and the Levi’s, that’s us because we necessarily come into that situation because of our sin. That’s what depravity is all about.

Now the Bible answer is faith and faith is defined, not as working up a feeling, not sitting contemplating myself, going into a trance with transcendental meditation or other 57 varieties of substitutes for the Christian faith. Faith in the Scripture is defined as being oriented to God’s grace; that is, I look out and I see my reference point and in order to build anything I need a reference point. Some of you will be very interested in the special speaker we have Wednesday, August 8; it’s not that I endorse everything he will say but I’m sure many of you will find him challenging because he is a computer specialist who is with NASA computing trajectories in space and he comes to the conclusion that the earth, in his position, is not rotating around the sun; the sun is rotating around the earth, that the heliocentric position of Copernicus, which made such revolutionary changes in the west, is not confirmed by any known scientific experiment. Now whether this is true or not is another issue; my main reason for bringing him here is to demonstrate a little principle; namely all of us profess to be educated in the finest education institutions in the west, the American public schools, supposedly. And yet how many of us can come out of here this morning and tell why do you believe the earth revolves around the sun? Give me a reason. And we can look, college student’s degrees all over the room, and yet do we have anyone, and I ask this rhetorically, but do we have anyone that can give real reason why you are certain that the earth revolves around the sun. So I’ve asked this man to come and challenge the whole assumption, just to see how good our education is, just to see if we can stand with our own against the person who is very intelligent, very well-educated, has worked with the math and physics and [can’t understand words].

Now this kind of shaking of the foundation is necessary in order that we realize where it is that we place our faith. And this hour by hour is the story of the Christian life. If you were to take a growth curve and diagram your pilgrimage spiritually you’d get some upward curve like this, and if you were to take a magnifying glass and look at that growth curve it would look like this; it’d be filled with rises and then falls and then rises and falls and then rises and falls, rises and falls, because constantly you would go through the blessings of life, the adversities and you’d go down into the canyon here and that’s the Romans 7 experience of realizing once again, I’ve run out of gas, I don’t have it, I can’t live this way, every time I set myself against God’s standards I come out on the short end of the stick and so on. And you wonder why it is year after year after year after year as a Christian you go through this experience dozens and dozens of times, and the answer is that itself is a trigger for the next rise. We can’t rise unless we’re oriented to God’s grace and we’re not going to be oriented to God’s grace if we’re not first assured that we, apart from Him, will fail.

Back in Genesis 45 we see the end result of God working on one family to make it grace oriented. We have a simple definition of the orientation of grace: it is anticipating God meeting my needs as a sinner. It is anticipating God meeting my needs as a sinner! Now notice what I did not say; I did not say it is the anticipation of God meeting my wants as a sinner; I said it is God meeting my needs as a sinner. Needs and wants are very radically different.

Now, how do you, in practice, distinguish between needs and wants? A very practical problem. Let’s take a simple thing like diet, how do you determine what your body needs verses what it wants. Let’s take nutrition, you do tests and you try to find out what is the body’s need nutritionally, and we list, apparently from some work that’s being done in the field I’m told by nutritionists every person really doesn’t have a minimum dietary allotment or requirement because it’s going to vary from person to person. Some people require a lot of, say, the B vitamins or something and somebody else doesn’t, but basically everyone has some sort of a minimum daily requirement for nutritional purposes; it may vary from time to time but basically we can say there’s a need nutritionally. Now who determines want from need in eating of food? Your body does by the way it’s designed and who designed your body? God did, so then ultimately who is that determines need from want? God does by His laws. Now us, and our body can be very deceptive this way; we can think, oh we need this. We don’t have to have it, maybe that was just a want. But finally, when measured by God’s laws we do have certain needs and God says that he will supply our needs but He never says He will supply all our wants.

Let’s apply this before we go any further in the Joseph stories. Let’s think of Joseph himself; here we have a fractured family; the family has gone steadily downhill, Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldeas, and Abraham was sound. The next generation of Isaac goes a little lower; the next generation of Jacob goes a little lower and by the time you get to Joseph they’re almost back to where they started from in Abraham’s generation; a very swift accomplishment, it only took them three generations to do that. And what does it show? Depravity; any family left to itself will go downhill. Test your own, it’d be a good spiritual exercise. Go talk to the oldest living member of your family tree; maybe it’s your grandmother; maybe it’s your great-grandmother, and just ask questions of the older people in your family about what they believed and what they did. Go back to your grandmother, go back to your grandfather, go back as far as you can in your family tree and start mapping your personal spiritual growth or decline as a family and see what has been going on for the past one hundred years. Every person ought to have enough information that this would be possible, and I think that in better than 50% of the cases you will see in the last hundred years of your home there has been a progressive decline in the knowledge of Bible doctrine and there’s been a progressive rebellion, just because that’s what our generation is, it’s made that way and it is going down spiritually.

So Joseph’s case was in the same situation. Now it’s a rule in history that after three to four generations God does something. We know this because when God spoke on Mount Sinai He said I am God and I visit the iniquities of the fathers unto the children to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me. In other words, what God says is I take action on family units after three and four generations. History is filled with illustrations of this. You can study the Herod’s, for example, old man Herod the Great, the guy that killed all the babies in Bethlehem, his grandson is the Herod that dies in later church history and there’s a judgment on the whole family of Herod. It comes out through granddaddy, his son, and his son’s son. And how is it true? Because they rebel against God and God is going to wipe out families that don’t get with the program after three or four generations. He figures three or four generations is enough to figure out what you’re going to do and if you haven’t decided by then, well, it’s your problem. So after three and four generations now God acts on His chosen family.

What are the needs, not the wants, the needs? Let’s list; here’s Joseph, a 17 year old brilliant brat and he needs to have the bratiness removed without destroying his brilliance. Joseph needs attention in the area of his attitude because as a teenager arrogant, brilliant genius, he is not fit for the power that God has destined for him. And since he is not fit, then God must do something to him or change his destiny. Well, God isn’t going to change the destiny of Joseph because God has already determined the destiny of Joseph, so that means the slack has to come out somewhere and the slack is going to come out with a change of Joseph’s mental attitude, hence 13 years in cisterns and prisons; that’s God’s treatment for Joseph, that’s what he needs, not what he wants. Then his brothers; his brothers tried to murder him, they had a very envious mental attitude in their home against daddy treating children differently and so therefore they needed to get straightened out so they go through two years of added problems, confronting Joseph and so on, and under authority.

Then the old man himself, Jacob; Jacob had to go through a very painful thing, that’s very hard, particularly for a person who suffered as much as Jacob did, and that is he’s lost family treasures, namely what he thinks is one of the two sons of Rachel, Joseph. So he grabs onto Benjamin, the only other son of one of his wives that he loved very much, Rachel. And he refuses to let go of Benjamin, and God says Jacob, let go. Jacob says no, I’m not going to, this is the last thing, You’ve taken everything else away from me, God, and You’re not going to take this away. And God says let go Jacob? No! Let go, and finally you see this man let go. And that’s what Jacob needed. None of these men wanted this but that’s what they needed. And so God is one who meets all my needs as a sinner.

Now let’s watch this family reunion that takes place in Genesis 45. “Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him; and he cried, [Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him],” and he had everybody get out of the room, and then the powerful words at the end of the verse, then he “made himself known unto his brethren.” This picture of Joseph making himself known to his brothers has elements that some of you, if you look very, very carefully will turn out to be elements of something else that you know in history. Let’s list these elements and see if you can guess. Here’s Joseph, and here’s the house of Israel. Remember Israel is not the name of a nation, it is the name of a man from whom the nation is named and we have the family of Israel. There is one member, blood line out of that family who acts as a Savior. He has been saving them without their knowledge to this point. Remember what they said, the last couple of stories we’ve read; every time they go down to Egypt they report “The Man,” ha ish in the Hebrew, The Man is down there, The Man says this, The Man says that, but they don’t know who The Man is. But somehow this mysterious “The Man” seems to be maneuvering them into this position and so unknown to them this savior who is related to them sets up the conditions for their salvation. And he works on them and he works on them and he works on them and he works on them until this chapter; in this chapter repentance has taken place and now he reveals himself to them. I needn’t list all the elements; you can see very clearly that that is a most remarkable portrayal of the return of the Lord Jesus Christ to this earth. Jesus Christ is blood related to the Jews; He, by virtue of His background is an Israelite and He has been working to bring that nation to repentance. For 1900 years, Israel hasn’t noticed it but that’s The Man that’s doing the work, Jesus behind the scene, working here, working there, working here to regather His people and He will regather them.

Let’s look at some passages that show this grand theme, then we’ll come back to this passage before us and see it as a simple family reunion. Before we can appreciate this simple family, however, we have to see the historic implications of this. This is a little microcosm of the entire plan of God between the Savior Christ and the nation Israel; let’s watch.

Turn first to Isaiah 6:3, we’ll look at about four passages quickly. You’ll recognize verse 3; it’s the source of one of our great hymns, known down through the history of the Christian church, “Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts.” All right, it’s the famous scene when Isaiah observed God’s throne. Isaiah is allowed to view something that no man, up to that point apparently, has ever seen, God Himself sitting on His throne. And you notice the angels repeat in triplet form the designation of blessing; they bless God three times. Do you know why? Because God is a Trinity and here even in the Old Testament you find the Trinity coming out.

But the strange thing about this passage is verse 10, here God speaks to the prophet Isaiah and you would think that He would give Isaiah encouragement; you would think that He’s telling Isaiah, go, preach to My people, feed them, nourish them, be a good shepherd, be a good pastor. That’s what you’d think God would say, but in verse 10 that’s not what God says. In Isaiah 6:10 what God says instead is go, teach the Word repeatedly and “Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted,” in other words, Israel, and this is one of the strange things about verse 10, God makes it impossible for this people to repent. That’s what the word “convert” means. God says to Isaiah, I want you to teach the Word in such a way that you turn these people off. And I want you to do it again and again and again and again because I don’t want them to repent; I don’t want them to repent until it’s My time in history for them to repent. So Isaiah says yes sir, sounds like a funny order but the commander gave the order so we carry it out, and he did. And in the preaching of Isaiah we begin to have the blindness of Israel. Why is Israel being blinded? Because they heard the Word, they heard the Word, they heard the Word, over and over again, it didn’t make any difference to them so why bother with it? And so God says all right, blind them. Now that blindness continued on and on and on and on until the time the Lord Jesus Christ walked the face of this earth.

Turn to Romans 11:25, the blindness is still there. Here the blindness is used by the apostle Paul to explain why the Jewish nation rejected Jesus Christ. You’ll have to understand that the early Christians faced an awesome problem and here’s the problem. Imagine if you were a first century Christian. The problem was, here you’re going around, you’re claiming you believe in Jesus the Messiah, and Jesus the Messiah that, and Jesus the Messiah this, and you’re contemporaries say hey, you a Christian? Yeah. I think you’re crazy. Why? Because you believe that Jesus is the Messiah and look at the Jews; the whole Jewish nation didn’t buy Him and aren’t they the better judge, and here you are a Gentile and you profess to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and His own people don’t even believe in Him, what kind of a prophet have you got. So the Christians had to explain this and the explanation is this blindness that was begun by Isaiah, extended now into the apostolic era and in Romans 11:25 Paul says, “I would not, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you shall be wise in your own conceits: that blindness sin part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. [26] And so it is written, Israel shall be saved, as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob; [27] For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins.”

Now Paul obviously in the first century is looking forward in time to a place when, in verse 26, “there shall come out of Zion,” that means He is Jewish, “out of Zion” who? “the Deliverer.” Now where did Joseph come out of? Out of the family of Jacob and what is Joseph? The deliverer. “…and he shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob,” and who was it that in the family of Joseph during these stories have we seen turn ungodliness away from the brothers? Who was it that manipulated the fear of the law in his own brothers? Who was it that put the goblet in their sacks and their money in the sacks just to embarrass them and to create a sense of sin so they’re repent of it? It was Joseph.

Now what are we going to see in this family reunion? Something analogous to verse 27, “I shall take away their sin.” In the future here’s what’s going to happen. The Lord Jesus Christ, who has been largely to the Jew as a nation, unknown, but yet who has worked behind the scenes as Joseph worked behind the scenes, will bring and regather the Jews from all the lands of the earth to one place. Already you’ve seen it, 1948 was a significant year because that was the year that the Jews gained legal existence in the land of Palestine. And so the stages are already set, Jews are flowing back to Israel; they’re coming out of the Soviet Union and they’re going to Israel; so one by one as the country’s become anti-Semitic and drive their Jews out, they’re coming out of Iran now, thanks to Khomeini and his Islamic anti-Semites. And so wherever the revolutions occur the Jews leave because the Jews are the great capitalists of the world; the free enterprise people, and they’re driven out by totalitarians who hate progress. And so therefore as the Jews are driven out and they gather slowly you are seeing the unseen hand of God right today in your front page newspaper. The next step will be that Christ will gather them in the land and then they’re going to start thinking back on their history and then someday they’re going to recite a particular psalm.

Now let’s turn to Matthew and then start going into the Old Testament very gradually and stop at Zechariah 12. Here’s the prophecy of the future destiny of the nation Israel. Remember, they are physically related to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in Zechariah 12:10, “And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem,” it doesn’t say the inhabitants of Washington DC, it doesn’t say the inhabitants of Paris or Berlin, or London, it says “the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplications; and they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced,” now just hold it right there, “they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced.” Now think a moment, in Old Testament terms how could the Jews pierce God? He wasn’t there in a material way, was He? How could you pierce God, He only showed up on Mount Sinai, He’s invisible, right. In the Old Testament there’s no way you could pierce God. Now isn’t that a striking prophecy; from what we know of the Old Testament that can’t be fulfilled because you can’t pierce an immaterial God. Or can you? Suppose the immaterial God incarnates Himself in a human body and walks the face of the earth, and then suppose He gets crucified and He gets pierced. And so the prophecy of verse 10 comes to pass, “and they will look on Me whom they have pierced,” all of a sudden they will recognize, “Me, whom they have pierced, and they will mourn for Him, as one mourns for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born.” There will come a day when the Jew will recognize, at long last, after centuries of time, who this mysterious carpenter from Nazareth really was. And when they do that there’s already the song that they’re going to sing that has been written in the Scriptures.

Turn further into the Old Testament to the book of Isaiah and stop at Isaiah 53, the passage we often read as a prophecy of the Lord Jesus Christ, written about seven to eight hundred years before the crucifixion, yet a perfect prophecy of the crucifixion. And yet now this morning I want you to think of Isaiah 53 just a little bit differently than we’re used to thinking about it. I want you to look at verse 4 and 5 and envision in your mind a future day when all of the Jews have regathered in the land of Israel and out of this regathering a majority, at least, now believes that Jesus Christ, the Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, was Jehovah incarnate Himself, and when they do this, this is their meditation. Now read verses 4-6 in that light. “Surely He has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” Did it ever dawn on you what verse 4 is saying at the end? This is a recitation of the Jewish historical position; they’re going to reflect yes, He did bear our griefs, yes, He did carry our sorrows, and what did we do? Stupid blind people we are, we “esteemed him stricken, smitten of God,” smitten of God here means in a judicial sense; we thought he was damned of God, not he was bearing our sins. See the “yet” in verse 4, the “yet” shifts the thought from the first part of the verse to the last part of the verse. It is dawning on them as they recite Isaiah 53, [5] “But he was wounded for transgressions,” is what they’re saying, “He was bruised for our iniquities,” and verse 6, for 1900-2000 years, “we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way, and the LORD laid on him the iniquity of us all. [7] He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter…. [8] He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? … [9] And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death….”

That’s the hymn or the psalm of repentance and that will take place on a day we know; we don’t know the year it will take place because the Bible doesn’t set dates and this is where Bible prophecy has gotten into very ill repute in our day because we’ve had these fanatics that always are trying to set a date and men have been trying to set dates ever since Christ ascended into heaven. We don’t set dates but we know what day it’s going to occur, but here’s why—because if you look at Israel they have a spring and they have a fall calendar. Now observe the spring calendar. Three holidays in the Jewish spring; one is Passover, one is the day of Firstfruits, and one is Pentecost. Now look at the fulfillment; when was Christ crucified? Exactly the day—Passover! When did Jesus rise from the dead? Exactly the day of Firstfruits! And when did the Holy Spirit come from heaven? Exactly the day of Pentecost! So the spring cycle of Israel’s calendar was fulfilled literally to the day; only one problem. Israel has a second half of her calendar and that’s gone unfulfilled. There’s nothing in history that corresponds to the three great events in the fall calendar of Israel, and that is the Feast of Trumpets; Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Those are parts of her calendar that have never been fulfilled by anything extravagant. The only thing extravagant that’s happened is the battle of Yom Kippur in 1973. But on Yom Kippur, which is the word which means the Day of Atonement, it is believed by students of Bible prophecy some year in the future the whole nation will collectively recite Isaiah 53 and suddenly Jesus will make Himself known to His brethren.

Exactly the historic fulfillment of this little family reunion we’re reading about back here in Genesis 45. Joseph now becomes Jesus and the brothers now become the nation, and Joseph yells to the Egyptians in the room, get out of here, this is a private family affair, I want to make myself known to my family. And he does. Jesus will make himself nationally known to one nation first, Israel; then the other nations. The Jewish people will be in a position of great honor at the return of Jesus Christ.

Now let’s go back to Genesis 45 and watch this family reunion and watch the intriguing things that happen on that day, things which now you know to look for the deeper picture, the bigger picture. Observe the emotions of Joseph in verse 1, “Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them who stood by him; and he cried, Get out of here, I want to make myself know to my brothers.” Did you ever think of God as having emotions; did you ever think of Jesus Christ as having emotions? If we are serious and we say we believe in the true humanity of Christ He’s got to have emotions. If we are serious when we say man is made in God’s image then God has emotions, or do you think of God as sort of a Greek god that sits like a stone statue on His throne, sort of impermeable to the ebb and the flow of history. Wrong! The God of the Scripture gets angry and He gets happy. Did you ever think of God laughing? Psalm 2 tells you He does. God laughs and he cries, and the emotions displayed in Genesis 45:1 picture, in a very tiny way, the emotions of God toward His own people, Israel.

And it’s going to turn to pass that on that fall day, some time at some year in the future, that Israel will have gone on and she’s been regathered now, she’s gone through her ups and her downs and gradually, just prior to that Yom Kippur Israel suddenly, just like the brothers in Jacob’s family, begin to repent, maybe a rabbi here and a rabbi there, and the Jewish leader here and a politician there, and a businessman over there, suddenly they begin to say we’d better read this New Testament more carefully; maybe that Yeshua, maybe that Jesus really is what His name says He is, because that’s what His name means in the Hebrew, Deliverer. Maybe He was our Deliverer. Oh, if He was our Deliverer what did we do to Him? We killed Him. And then there’s going to be this spirit of sorrow work its way into the nation, just like here in Genesis 44, just prior to this verse, the brothers have been sorrowful over what they’ve done, and finally Joseph can stand it no longer, just as finally in history Jesus can stand it no longer; He’s put His people through the wringer. If you don’t think so, think of what it must be to look down from heaven and see Buchenwald; there are a lot of Jews that concluded the God of the Old Testament died in 1944. He doesn’t exist any longer, says the atheist Jew; if God existed He would have got us out, but He didn’t. He sat in heaven and He watched them fry by the thousands, by the millions, and sat there and did nothing about it. The only theology we have to meet that objection is that somehow in some way strange to us this is working out the repentance in history, just as the repentance was worked out by putting the screws on Jacob and his sons; finally he can stand it no longer and Christ comes back to the earth and He makes Himself known to his brothers, just as here Joseph can stand it no longer.

Verse 2, The Egyptians leave the house, [“And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard.”] And now the process of revelation begins. He said, [3] “[And Joseph said unto his brethren,” I am Joseph;” and you imagine the scene; here for two years they played games; for two years this guy’s put them on and they’ve been fearful of what this man, “The Man” would do. And suddenly they look a little closer; I would imagine if I were to portray this dramatically on the screen or on the stage I’d have Joseph take his headgear off, and show them that in fact it’s Joseph, so they could really see what he looked like. And I would imagine at this point I would stage it so the actors would be speaking in Egyptian through an interpreter, just like the text said and then at this point what I would have, I’d have Joseph say suddenly, in Egyptian to them get out of here, get out of here, and then he’d walk over to his brothers, and in the Hebrew tongue, without his interpreter, he said I am Joseph. I want to take this very literally; I expect that when Jesus Christ comes back and He addresses Israel He will do it in the Hebrew language. Is there any other reason why the Hebrew language has been resurrected? Do you realize that since 1920 the only ancient language that has ever been resurrected from its death is the Hebrew language? Do you realize that a little kid on a kibbutz in Israel could converse with Moses? You show me that parallel anywhere else in history, where I can take somebody out of the 20^th century and somebody out of the 20^th century before Christ and I can have those two people, separated by 4,000 years, sit them down in a chair by each other and have them carry on a conversation in the same language. Show me that in another example. It won’t work in Chinese, it won’t work in any western language, it won’t work with Sanskrit, it won’t work with Latin, it won’t work with Greek. Show me a language where it works. You can’t; it’s unique in history, the resurrection of the Hebrew language, and when Christ comes back He won’t talk in English to them; He’s going to talk in their own language to them, Hebrew.

So Joseph reveals himself. [3, “And Joseph said unto his brethren, doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him; for they were troubled at his presence. [4] And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt.”]

Now verses 5-8 gives us another principle, a great principle for the Christian life. How do you cope with injustices done to you without getting bitter? How do you cope with the slams of life without walking away vindictive? Joseph did, and in these verses we’re going to read how he did it, a very practical thing that every one of you who is a Christian here this morning can walk out and begin to apply immediately. [5] “Now therefore be not grieved,” he’s talking to his brothers now, by the way, notice at the end of verse 4, “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold to Egypt,” there’s the injustice, and “Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. [6] For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be plowing nor harvest. [7] And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. [8] So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.”

Do you notice if you read that carefully, the last part of verse 4 on through the end of verse 8, something happened to Joseph, and something happened to Joseph that made him able to take injustice graciously? Now notice some things that did not happen because these things that did not happen are all things that you read on the corner newsstand, how to do this and how to do that. He did not go into self hypnosis saying it didn’t happen to me, it really didn’t happen to me, it really didn’t happen to me and psych himself up. Why do that, that destroys your memory; that’s fake. He didn’t go to TM and contemplate his navel. He didn’t try all the other thousand and one gimmicks that are being offered the American public for $40 a lesson. You see, the solution goes back to God Himself in orienting to grace. Notice what he did, verse 4, “I am Joseph, your brother, and you sole me to Egypt.” He does not forget the injustice, it is part of history and history is eradicable, and here’s the thing.

You know, you hear the expression “forgive and forget.” Well, there is a way which you forget but not absolutely because everything is stored away. If somebody’s mean to you and somebody’s crossed you, you’re not going to forget it and the Bible says you’re not going to forget it. But yet there’s a way you can handle it, without forgetting it, that will make it as though you forget it. Let’s watch further. Joseph doesn’t forget, we know that from verse 4. Verse 5 he’s being very gracious to the people in this confrontation because at this point, and notice the mercy of God in verse 5, “don’t be grieved or angry with your elves, that you sole me here,” at the point of conviction of sin toward those who are the unjust, when they realize their injustice and the conviction is the result of the Spirit of God, not emotional manipulation but really a heartfelt conscience-centered repentance, when that takes place the effect is so powerful it can lead to suicide.

And I’m sure here in verse 5, one of the reasons of Joseph being very merciful here is he’s saying hold it, I want the grief process to go only so far, to work repentance, but I don’t want the grief process to eat you out to the point where you feel like destroying yourself because you feel so bad about what has happened; that is satanic grief; it is not of the Spirit of God to go into a total depression about guilt. People who go into total depressions about guilt, who therefore appear to be mentally ill, I’m not denying there’s that kind of thing, but we’re just denying the cause of it, that kind of thing is not caused by the Spirit of God. That is caused by something else but not the Spirit of God. Here’s the Spirit of God; the Spirit of God will work repentance or sorrow down to the point of repentance and no further, He cuts it off right there, stop it; this process of grief has gone on long enough, I just wanted you to experience enough grief so you’d change, and once you start changing no more grief.

But what does Joseph do? How is he able to sit there and be merciful to people, and you know the tendency; had Joseph been what he was years ago he would have said go ahead and stew in your own prunes; that would have been exactly Joseph’s attitude, but it isn’t. He’s merciful. How can he be merciful and yet not forget what the brothers did to him. Here’s the secret. At the end of verse 5 he announces something that he has learned. In verse 7 he repeats it and in verse 8 he repeats it for the third time. So something is repeated three times that is the key to absorbing persecution in your life.

Verse 5 at the end, “God did send me before you to preserve life.” Verse 7, “God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity … and to save your lives.” Verse 8, “It wasn’t you who sent me here,” it was God who sent me here.” All right, let’s draw a picture. Visualize this in your life so this will be real. Take something that’s happened to you in the last 2 or 3 years, some real humongous thing that just doesn’t ever set right with you and you’re thinking of somebody that stepped all over you, embarrassed you, just drove you, humiliated you or did something to you. Let this box be the picture of that; here you are, and you are the victim of all this bad thing that happened to you.

Now God says you can’t erase that, I built you with a memory, so don’t try to cope with it by trying to forget it. Here’s what you do, do what Joseph did. Joseph knew his brothers did that; here are the brothers, all around him. He knows they did it, but what does he do? He encompasses the little picture with a bigger picture. You see, he doesn’t blot anything out, he just overloads the picture with other data, and where does he get the other data? From the Scripture. And what is the other data? It’s God and His plan for Joseph’s life. And Joseph says you know, for 13 years I sat down in that prison, for 13 years I thought and I thought and I thought and I thought about what you guys did to me, and for 7 years we’ve had prosperity in this land and I’ve had power, and I’ve thought boy, wait till they come down but yet, the more I thought about it the more I began to connect it until suddenly it all made sense. Why did you guys throw me in that cistern? Because it was the way God had of getting me away from my father, who favored me, who would never let me out of his sight, get me out of that home, down here where I could be a pioneer and a vanguard for you, get everything set up so that I can save you now physically, I can be your savior. It was all God’s hand, and not only did God save me and help me and work with me but God is now putting meaning in my life because I’m saving you.

So out of this picture he got meaning and purpose as a result of the persecution. Now I’m trying to think of an illustration what would communicate quickly this mental attitude and the only one I can think of right now is think of a football game. Fall is coming and you know what happens, the great god football does its grand entrance, but as the football season approaches visualize yourself as a football player, you’re out there in the last quarter, and say you’re a linesman and somebody just goes right through you and lays you flat, a real dirty kind of play. And somehow the ball gets fumbled and everything goes wrong and the ref never sees it. So here you are, no whistle, no flag on the play and you’ve just got squashed really good, just as dirty a play as you can conceive. Now think of that for a moment. Now think of it this way; on the next play because the ball got in the wrong position, somehow another play works out and your team scores. Now how would you feel walking off the field after that game; could you really be very angry about that wrong play when it would be very obvious to you that that wrong play, that bad thing that had happened to you was exactly the means of your team winning? Now you can’t, if you visualize and walk in that emotionally yourself you can’t get angry with it. What you do is you tend to laugh at it and say yeah, those guys, isn’t that interesting how they just got faked out; they tried to rip the ball off and we wound up getting the score, isn’t that neat? And that’s the sense that you would walk off the field with, isn’t it.

Now that’s what God tells you to do with persecution like this; the kind of things that happened with Jacob, when you begin to see the neat things that come out of that you’re too absorbed with the neat things to worry about it and you can kind of chuckle at it all; yeah, they did that, isn’t that funny. That kind of a relaxed attitude toward injustices is the kind of thing Joseph had and it’s the kind of thing any believer can have using exactly the same principles.

The story concludes very quickly, Joseph in verse 10 puts his family down in Goshen which is in the Nile delta area, the richest farmland of all, here’s all the provisions. Verse 11 it says I “nourish” you, notice “nourish,” that’s what the savior does, he literally saves, “I will nourish you yet five years,” which tells you that the famine is just starting in its badness, “lest you come to poverty.” Verse 13 another concept; before we go any further, do notice a little term in verse 8, I am “a father to Pharaoh,” now for about the sixth time in the Sunday morning series I’m going to make this point and I make it practically alone. I don’t know of anybody who’s writing in the evangelical field of literature and family relations that makes this point. I have looked and I have searched and I have consulted all kinds of people, I have asked around and I can’t find anybody that makes this point, yet it seems to be so obvious from Scripture, and that is how God reaches men. Now the Christian book stores have finally caught up with us in one thing and that is we’re discovering we have lots of family problems inside evangelical Christianity, so we’ve got these books on how a guy can lead family devotions; how he can be a better husband, how he can be a better father, and how he can do this in the family and how he can do that in the family and how he can do something else in the family and it’s all these things.

I’ll tell you the way it comes across to me as a man; it comes across to me as a man as: and here are 500 other responsibilities, you clod, that you haven’t faced. And then they wonder why the men don’t respond to this approach. Well, obviously any man that has a conscience knows he can improve in these areas, of course. So coming to him just with that misses something the Scriptures don’t do. I have watched in this Genesis series, how does God deal with Joseph, how does He deal with the brothers and how does he deal with Jacob, and here’s a good example. Joseph is “a father to Pharaoh,” how did he get that way? How did Joseph get where he was? Did he get where he was because he had a family? He didn’t have any family; he was in jail all alone by himself. How did he qualify to be his father? Of course, it’s a metaphorical use of the term, but what do we mean “father to Pharaoh?” We mean the guy that gives the guidance, the guy who does the leading, the man who has the insights, the man who holds the holds the whole thing together.

Now how does the man get in a position where he holds the home together? Oddly, I say, he doesn’t get that way by trying to do it. He gets that way by getting his own calling straight and that’s Joseph. All during this series what has Joseph been trying to do? Joseph, what is your purpose in life. Can you imagine this kid for 13 years down in the dungeon; yeah, I’m having a real roaring plan for my life. Every day I count the crickets that crawl up the wall, marvelous plan for my life. But finally Joseph got it together and when he got it together, isn’t it strange, now he’s called a father; his role functions once he gets it together as to what he is trying to do in life. And this is why so many Christian men are frustrated; yes they have family problems but I still say that’s not where it’s at; where it’s at is they don’t know what the heck it is they’re supposed to be doing with the rest of their life and until a man gets that straight he is not going to be the husband or the father that he ought to be because he’s no rest, there’s no rest inside.

How can a man be restful when he really doesn’t think that his life counts; when he goes through every single day discouraged and doesn’t have an idea that this all fits together in some grand scheme, that God is doing something with him. How can a guy by reached by saying yeah, and here’s five other failures, you want to hear about these. See what kind of a silly approach, and yet all the evangelical literature that you buy in the bookstores orient to the family but not to the man. And then we turn around and we look to surveys of the population of evangelical churches and we find out the women outnumber the men three to one, on the mission field, incidentally, three to one. Why do we get that? Where are the men? Well the men haven’t got their stuff together and they’re not going to get it together with the kind of literature that’s being generated in Christian work. You can walk in the bookstore and you can find out how to pray, how to give, how to do this and how to do that, everything from making paper dolls in the nursery to making love with your wife, but we can’t have how to go out and make money in the world, I mean in the godly sense of the term, how to be productive. Where are those books in the Christian bookstore; you can’t find them.

All right, here’s a man who finally got it together and he says now I’m father of Pharaoh, I’ve got my calling together and now because I got my stuff together I can help you guys, and so he does. And it goes on, Pharaoh helps him in verse 17-18, he commission the father’s transport. Verse 22 Benjamin is given five changes of raiment and his brothers only one, there’s the favoritism and yet still the brothers take this because they’re repentant now, they’re not jealous, not full of envy, and the last verses of the chapter close with the old man. Here’s Jacob; verse 25, they went up out of Egypt and they came to Jacob, [26] “And they told him, saying Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt. And Jacob’s heart fainted,” and there’s the Hebrew word for depression, the idea of his heart stopped, just a shocking depressed state, “for he did not believe them.” You see belief and how vitally it’s related to your mental attitude’s of life. Depression and unbelief go together. [27] “And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said to them; and when saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob, their father, revived: [28] And Israel said, It is enough: Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die.”

Did you notice the name shift from verse 27 to verse 28? First the old man is known as Yakob and now he’s known as Yisrael. Why the shift? Because now in verse 28 he shows you his faith and therefore it’s that name that has been taken to be the label for the nation that comes forth out of his loins. Israel now says I have faith, he’s revived, and he too comes and from this point on, chapters 46, 47, 48, the last five chapters of the book of Genesis, we’ve been working on this for two years, these last five chapters we’re going to deal with just the remaining details of putting this family together so they can be the launching pad for the nation Israel in the rest of the Old Testament. The strife now ends, but notice how it ends. It ends after there’s been a changed heart by the people involved.

We’ll conclude by singing…..

[9, “Haste ye, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Thus saith thy son Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down unto me, tarry not: [10] And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me, thou, and thy children, and thy children’s children, and thy flocks, and thy herds, and all that thou hast: [11] And there will I nourish thee; for yet there are five years of famine; lest thou, and thy household, and all that thou hast, come to poverty. [12] And, behold, your eyes see, and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaks unto you. [13] And ye shall tell my father of all my glory in Egypt, and of all that ye have seen; and ye shall haste and bring down my father hither. [14] And he fell upon his brother Benjamin’s neck, and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his neck.

[15] Moreover he kissed all his brethren, and wept upon them: and after that his brethren talked with him.
[16] And the fame thereof was heard in Pharaoh’s house, saying, Joseph’s brethren are come: and it pleased Pharaoh well, and his servants. [17] And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Say unto thy brethren, This do ye; lade your beasts, and go, get you unto the land of Canaan; [18] And take your father and your households, and come unto me: and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land. [19] Now thou art commanded, this do ye; take you wagons out of the land of Egypt for your little ones, and for your wives, and bring your father, and come. [20] Also regard not your stuff; for the good of all the land of Egypt is yours. [21] And the children of Israel did so: and Joseph gave them wagons, according to the commandment of Pharaoh, and gave them provision for the way. [22] To all of them he gave each man changes of raiment; but to Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver, and five changes of raiment. [23[ And to his father he sent after this manner; ten asses laden with the good things of Egypt, and ten she asses laden with corn and bread and meat for his father by the way. [24] So he sent his brethren away, and they departed: and he said unto them, See that ye fall not out by the way.
[25] And they went up out of Egypt, and came into the land of Canaan unto Jacob their father, [26] And told him, saying, Joseph is yet alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt. And Jacob’s heart fainted, for he believed them not. [27] And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said unto them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived: [28] And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before I die.”