Clough Manhood Series Lesson 14

Joseph: Production and Promotion – Genesis 40, 41, 47

We’re going to continue with our study in manhood and we’ll finish the career of Joseph. Joseph was the responsible man in the irresponsible world. Joseph should speak to the heart of Christian men because a man’s chief frustration, according to Genesis, according to the way God applied the curse, a man’s chief frustration is his job, the things that go wrong in his job, the things that go wrong in his business. For working women it’s precisely the same sort of thing; it’s the things that go wrong on the job. And these center into the real experiential fallout from the curse, leveled against us because of our sin. Joseph is a man who coped with this kind of frustration on the job; he copes in a very, very superior way. We want to review some principles last time for our Joseph model, to add to our repertoire of principles. We studied Abraham as a model, Isaac as a model, Jacob as a model, now Joseph, the model of Joseph.

Joseph was used by his irresponsible pragmatic master for efficient production. There’s no ifs, ands or buts, Joseph was not used because he was a Christian; Joseph was not used because he knew the Lord; Joseph was not used because of his religious views; Joseph was not used because he was a member of a particular race or he wasn’t a member of another race. Joseph was used for only one purpose and that is he was a superior worker. His boss recognized he was a superior worker and therefore he was hired. Now that’s a very simple principle in the business world that seems beyond the grasp of some people in our day. But the problem is not race and discrimination in hiring; the problem is just getting someone to do a good job; that’s the problem. And if someone can do a good job they will have plenty of work; there’s no problem, there are plenty of jobs available. There is not enough workers that do work, that’s the problem. And so don’t ever be afraid as a Christian, at least the way things are going right now, of unemployment. If you get the skills, if you know how to use them, and you know how to use them responsibly you may not have the job you like but you’ll have a job and it’ll put food on the table and it’ll put a roof over your head and then you can go from there.

There’s no reason why Christians can’t out perform their non-Christian contemporaries at every point in the job market. There’s no excuse; Christians ought to. We have far better resources available, the indwelling Holy Spirit, we’ve got the whole framework of the Word of God, we’ve got training in sanctification, we know the doctrine of perseverance, we have in the mind a future goal, thinks make sense in the short-term, things make sense in the long-term, we know the doctrine of suffering, we’ve got tools to handle these kinds of situations so why not? Why not have Christians who are superior laborers and get the best jobs? Christians ought to compete and compete vigorously.

All right, Joseph was that kind of a person. He was a productive person. Here’s what made Joseph the superior producer though; all the Egyptians saw was his superior production but Joseph had some things going for him; he recognized that the meaning of existence was to carry out the Genesis mandate, even if he was in prison, even if he was a slave boy. Nevertheless, he knew and had been trained from father Jacob that Genesis 1:28 was true; that man was made to subdue the earth, that man was made to produce. And he also learned from his father that your good self-image comes from doing a good job. You don’t sit around taking psychotherapy to get a good self-image. Self-image is a product of performance, as Genesis 4 says, “if you do well,” God said to Cain, then you’ll be encouraged and have a good self-image. People have bad self-images because they’re people; it’s that simple. Now Joseph began to get a good self-image and he got a good self-image because he produced well, not arrogantly but he was confident in his production. He knew what he was doing and he did it.

I was talking with one of our men in our congregation who has a business and he was telling the shocking situation that happened to him recently in his business where the welfare group sent out some workers, which they have to do to maintain welfare payments to them and the worker would come and interview for the job and do everything he could to irritate him so he wouldn’t get hired. And then he had the nerve as he walked out the door to say be sure to call the unemployment office and tell them you wouldn’t hire me. And that way he can maintain welfare payments. Now here’s a guy that has a business, he needs workers, the job is sitting there, anybody who wants to do it, it’s sitting there. But we have these nincompoops on the welfare rolls, run by bigger ones who manage the system, and they don’t want the work. Now that’s obviously anti-Scriptural and the sad thing is that in this town of Lubbock we have evangelical Christians that are in deep sympathy with this sort of operation it runs, it’s somehow an act of Christian love to extend payments to lazy bums. You’re doing them a favor to put them out until they work. Paul said, and I remind you, this is in the Scripture that if you don’t work you don’t eat.

Now Joseph was not that kind of an individual; he recognized that a job was a job and it was meant to subdue the earth. Then the second thing that Joseph knew besides the cultural mandate is he had the proper mental attitude expressed in Ephesians 6:5-7 of doing his job as unto the Lord, independently of what men saw. He knew that God was omniscient and if he was going to do the job he did the job well. If no one recognized it, all right, God sees it, and God sees that I’m doing a good job and He’s the one I’m trying to please in the first place, regardless of whether there’s someone around, looking over my shoulder to check to see whether I’ve really done a good job or not. You just do your job period, whether there’s anyone around watching or not, because God is watching.

Now Joseph, we found, was a man who operated productively; there’s other reasons why he productively. As a result of this, responsibility flowed to him. Responsibility always flows to responsible people. It’s sort of like the poles of a magnet; responsibility never flows toward people who are irresponsible. Responsibility flows only to those who can manage it and Joseph managed it well. And the responsibility flowed in Potiphar’s home until he became the manager entirely of all of Potiphar’s property. We saw how Joseph was then placed in prison and we’ll see tonight Joseph’s rise in prison.

But there’s a principle we want to note before we get to the prison episode. This little matter or responsibility is interesting to watch how this works. Now track this little principle in Joseph’s life and it will show you the key to what a Christian witness looks like on the job. It will also take this enigmatic relationship of witnessing verbally, witnessing with your hands and doing a good job, and tie the two very neatly together. Joseph’s model gives us a format for visualizing how you witness by your life and how that leads to a witness by the lips. Joseph, in his responsibility rises. He gains in responsibility.

This is a graph of his responsibility; he starts off doing a good job and he increases; he gets promoted. So greater and greater amounts of responsibility flow into his hands and then we can say that there exists this line; this we will call the critical point. The critical point is a point at which when the responsibility reaches this point, then the testimony of his life begins to dominate others with whom he works or begins to rub off on the organization that he works for. And therefore an issue is reached at the critical point of his Christian testimony, in this case… he’s not technically a Christian, he’s not in the church age, but at this point Joseph’s standards, in this case he managed Potiphar’s home, first it was the property and so on, then the household, and then along came Mrs. Potiphar. And Mrs. Potiphar had a set of standards that differed from Joseph’s. Mrs. Potiphar had as her highest standard a sexual partner over against a productive one and this was opposite, obviously, to Joseph.

And so we have a situation develop where there’s a collision of standards. That’s the critical point, when the Christian is promoted to the point where he must, in order to remain loyal to his Lord he must impose his standards. Now before that it wasn’t right for Joseph to impose his standards, but he was promoted up to a position where to remain loyal to the Lord required remaining loyal to the Lord by exercising the Word of God over his environment, in this case over Mrs. Potiphar. And that was the critical point. And when that point is reached, that’s when the verbal testimony is necessary. That’s when it has full power into the organization and the organization itself must make a choice about this new rising Christian employee, for the higher-up people in the organization now have to make a choice. We like this man, he’s very productive, but if we promote him any further he begins to impose his Christian lifestyle on our organization and we’re not so sure we like that. Or maybe we do.

So the critical point is when management has to decide to accept the Christian position and lifestyle or reject it. And that’s the point most crucial; yes, there can be verbal witnessing before that, but that is the area of the witness, when a critical point is reached and the organization decides one way or the other. And you know what happened in Joseph’s case; the organization said no, our standards are going to prevail and we will sacrifice a productive employee to maintain our non-Christian standards. Fine, but that organization, then, has made its choice. The Christian has worked his way up very legally, very lawfully, has relied upon the Holy Spirit, and crunch, a word has been said, an act has been done and judgment falls on that organization. Now the organization is responsible for officially rejecting the Word of God or accepting its domain and control in the sphere of its Christian employee. So Joseph reached this critical point and he was kicked out. All right, that’s okay; he maintained his testimony, he did nothing wrong, and he had an impact on his organization.

So there’s an interesting situation that calls for some application, some simple principles that Joseph used in his climb to the critical point. The first thing he did, he probably learned the details of his job, just the sheer daily routine. There’s no excuse for not doing this, and this is where the Christian employee watches the older men, watches the more skilled employees. He doesn’t have to in his heart say well, I can’t learn anything from this non-Christian; of course you can. The fact that you can learn a piece of truth from a non-Christian doesn’t invalidate the truth you learn from a non-Christian.

Let’s suppose an atheist teaches you the rules of arithmetic. Are you humbling yourself, are you compromising your position to accept the principles of arithmetic because they were taught to you by an atheist? Not at all. Why? Because the atheist didn’t make those principles; he’s simply transmitting them to you. And so it is with the craftsman, or so it is with an accountant, or so it is with any other skilled employee in your organization. Just because he’s the most blatant gross non-Christian imaginable does not mean you can’t learn from him. What you are learning from him that is worthwhile he didn’t originate anyway; he’s just reflecting his creaturehood, whatever there is good in that creaturehood he’s reflecting it out in the form of skills. And so you can give thanks to God for the skills, wisdom, knowledge and insights of non-Christians, even violently non-Christian people, simply because in all their violence against the Christian position they still have to give testimony to the fact they’re created in God’s image and they perform skillfully. So God is the author of this. Remember, it doesn’t matter who you learned two plus two is four from; that doesn’t affect the outcome of the calculation.

Another thing that Joseph must have done all during when this was going on. Not only did he pick up the details and skills from whoever he could learn from, but he also picked up skills because he relied upon the Holy Spirit; the James 1:5 principle, “if you lack wisdom,” and there we’re using the word “wisdom” as it ought to be used because wisdom means skill. “If you lack skill, let him ask of God,” and this means we have the right as creatures made in God’s image to ask the Holy Spirit to help us, teach us and give us skill, even the mundane skill of a job, over against, say the (quote) pious skill of Christian work. We’re talking now not about Christian work, we’re talking about everyday jobs. The Holy Spirit knows that job better than you do, He knows the job better than I do. He’s omniscient, why not ask him for some help. He’s omnipotent, why not ask Him for some of that power to help you in the situation. The Holy Spirit created the world and He knows the order of things; he knows how machines work, He knows how organizations and people function. Why not ask Him to show you some insights into the created order so you’ll be a superior creature in His sight and operate more skillfully in His creation. And Joseph must have asked God for promotion along the way, and this was a legitimate prayer. It’s fine to pray for promotion; ask God for it. And ask Him to give it to you when you can maximize your subduing the earth with that promotion.

So Joseph did all this and we want to go back to Genesis 40:6 for a specific reference where he was doing this. Let’s see what it looks like when it operates rightly. Here he is in jail, we’ll get more on the jail scene in a moment, we’re not interested in the jail scene right now, I’m just kind of dipping into the text at one point to show you an illustration of something. Joseph’s on the job down in prison, and his fellow employees, if you want to call inmates employees, they have a problem. Now notice this. In verse 5, “they dreamed a dream,” both of them, and they’re very sad. Verse 6, “And Joseph came in unto them in the morning, and he looked upon them, and, behold, they were depressed [sad].” So what’s the situation for Joseph? Ah, here’s somebody on the job who’s depressed, they want a solution to their problem…witnessing opportunity, and Joseph doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of the situation. He looks at his fellow employee, his fellow employee has a need. Verse 7, “And so he asked Pharaoh’s officers who were with him in the prison of his lord’s house, saying, Why do you look so sad today?” He’s interested in them personally; they’re creatures made in God’s image for whom Christ died, so be interested in them personally. They’re not just numbers in the prison, not somebody that occupies cell 206 and the next guy 207. They’re two individual people and so Joseph treats them as people; revolutionary view of life!

[8] “And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it.” Now here’s the verbal witness, “And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me….” Now we could go on and on and explain what he’s saying there, basically what he’s arguing is that we have to go back to first principles; who is omniscient? We have to go back to God, and we could summarize Joseph’s witnessing approach to these people on the job by just taking them back to the basics. Who made you? Who made your mind? Who is capable alone of understanding how we think? An excellent opportunity, he’s got two ready-made people that want an answer to their problem; he’s got the Word, they’ve got the problem, and he’s got the time and the opportunity to talk to them. A perfect match for a witnessing encounter. And so there’s a situation on the job that Joseph carries the Word of God to his fellow employees. He has no hesitancy whatsoever.

Notice, he doesn’t buttonhole them, he doesn’t say “are you saved brother?” None of that stuff. He doesn’t say open your mouth wide and I’ll jam a tract down it. Nothing like that. He waits until the proper situation. God is a skillful chess player; just open your eyes to the moves he’s making all around you and then take advantage of that move, that move, that move, and that move. So Joseph takes advantages of the moves, and there is part of the portrait we studied so far of Joseph as the man who is responsible in an irresponsible world.

Now the prison experience of this chapter. We’re going to study two sections of Joseph’s life tonight, Genesis 40 which is his prison experience; then we’re going to study Genesis 41 and 47, his ascendancy to power; so two parts to his life. Now the prison experience is almost solely contained to Genesis 40. Remember that sometime, write it down somewhere, Genesis 40—prison experience. Do you know why it’s so good? How often have you heard a person say, you know, I’m trapped in my career, I can’t go anywhere, I’m trapped in my job. Do you want to see a guy who’s really trapped on the job? Genesis 40. Wasn’t he trapped on his job? You bet. His career had no future, did it? So there’s a marvelous physical picture of what everybody refers to when they refer to themselves as frustrated on the job and trapped. Great, let’s go to a guy that’s really trapped, Joseph, and watch how he gets out of the trap. There’s no box built that God can’t break down. You are never going to be in a box as far as God is concerned. God can shred boxes; God is in the prison-breaking business. You are never in a box that is absolute. God can break you out of that box. And God will break you out of that box in due time. And that’s the trick in Joseph’s case.

Now let’s look at what Joseph did; we already have seen something he did, he was loyal and faithful on the job, he witnessed. Notice in Genesis 39:23, “The keeper of the prison looked not to anything that was under his hand; because Jehovah was with him, and that which he did, Jehovah made it to prosper.” What’s that say? Joseph was promoted within his box. Yeah, his career kind of went in a dead end streak but at least he was right at the last foot on the dead end street; that’s what that verse is saying; he promoted himself up through the box to the top of the box. All right, verse 23 is his maximum promotion, he can’t go anywhere. And now he could literally moan and groan and go to a job counselor and say I’ve got a problem with my career, can’t go anywhere! Well, he tried to do two things; he must have prayed to the Lord and he also [can’t understand words].

In Genesis 40:14, after he managed to witness to these two guys and they were going to go to Pharaoh in three or four days, in verse 14 he says after you get there, “think on me when it shall be well with thee, and show kindness, I pray unto me, and make mention of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house.” Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; that’s just utilizing the resources available; he’s putting in line for a promotion, he wants to get out of this career box; he wants to get out of the job that walls him in and so he asks, I’d like a promotion; I’m making my needs known, I’m making my desires known.

But the chapter ends in a very poignant verse, Genesis 40:23, after the men get out of prison and the situations clarifies, “Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph,” the other guy was killed, he couldn’t remember him, the one who lived failed to remember, and he “forgot him.” Now why do you suppose the Holy Spirit has that little text added in there? If Jesus were to sit down and reason with us in the Scriptures, just as though he were writing them and surely the Holy Spirit’s in the same situation here, why do you suppose that if Jesus told us a tale this way He’d conclude it with that verse? And so the butler forgot. Well, it’s to aggravate, it’s to increase your tension, your sympathy with this poor guy, Joseph and his career, boxed in, going nowhere, tries to put out, he does all the faith-doing he can… nothing! Jammed in, frustrated at every point. Everybody rejects his resume; it doesn’t do any good. So he’s done all that he can and all that he can is insufficient to break the box.

And so he stays in his box and he stays in his box, it says in Genesis 41:1 two more years; two full years, two long years, and again, apparently from all we know of Joseph, Joseph doesn’t get depressed; he keeps on doing what he can inside his little boxed in career. Now God is about to intervene. It’s a rather complicated story that begins in Genesis 41 and continues through Genesis 50, the last chapter of the book of Genesis. It’s complicated and I don’t pretend tonight I’m going to cover ten chapters of the text of Genesis and go through and solve all the problems. So I’ve got to be selective. So here’s what we’re going to do. What I’ll do is I’ll survey only key texts that relate directly to Joseph in chapter 41 and chapter 47, because those two deal strictly with Joseph’s career. The rest of the material is talking about bringing Jacob down and so on, which we will mention but we don’t have time tonight to cover that. That will be in the Genesis series that’s coming up in the morning service to replace Acts. So the Genesis series will cover the details and the flow of the story. Right now, in the manhood series we’re only interested in topics that directly relate to Christian men.

So Genesis 41 and 47 I’ll go through now and look at some key texts. This is so that everyone’s clear on the story, the incidents and some of the key points the Holy Spirit is making. Then we have to pause and go to secular history. We want to find out a little bit about is Joseph really visible; in fact, can the biblical man, Joseph, be identified in history. Did he have another name that scholars know but have never identified him with the biblical Joseph, and we’ll show that indeed he has; he’s a man who is mentioned several times in Egyptian documents, but under another name. And then after tying this to secular history we will come back and solve the problem of what, after all, did Joseph do, because by the time we get through these two texts you’re going to be wondering, what kind of a promotion was this? Why did God promote and have Joseph do what Joseph actually accomplished in history, which seems to be a very evil thing. Joseph set up the world’s greatest bureaucracy; he set up the most powerful centralized planning, anti free enterprise system there ever was. Joseph did that and he did so as a promotion from God. He did so as a diligent worker and that’s surely is a puzzle, why the freedom loving God assigns his number one man to induce an entire nation to slavery and destroy private property. We have got to solve that one for sure.

So let’s look at some of the texts, first get acquainted with what’s going on. In Genesis 41:24-28, Pharaoh had a dream; seven good cattle, seven lean cattle; seven ears of grain, seven lean ears of grain. Nobody in the palace among the soothsayers could interpret the dream. And Pharaoh had a little test to make sure it was really hard, he said I’m not going to tell you guys because I think you’re phonies. I’m not going to tell you guys my dream, you’re going to tell me my dream and its interpretation. Well, needless to say that threw a little wish for unemployment into the ranks of the soothsayers because if they couldn’t do it they were decapitated—high casualty rate. So somebody desperately searched the personnel files to see if we could find somebody that was equal to the situation. And lo and behold, somebody finally remembered this little kid down in prison. By this time Joseph is 30 years old; come on, bring him up, otherwise we’re all going to lose our head over this matter.

So Joseph comes up and he interprets the dream and that’s where we pick the text up in verses 25-28. “And Joseph said unto Pharaoh, the Dream of Pharaoh is one:” you notice the two parts of the dream fit together, “God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do,” that is what God is about to do. [26] “The seven good cattle are seven years; and the seven good ears of grain are seven years; the dream is one.” The parts, in other words, fit all together, one coherent plan. [27] “The seven thin and ill favored cattle that came up after them are seven y ears; and the seventy empty ears of grain blasted with the hot east wind shall be seven years of famine. [28] This is the thing which I have spoken unto Pharaoh: Which God is about to do he shows unto Pharaoh.” Joseph is now at the point where his career is about to take off, right up, like a rocket.

Now this is why God had him in his box for two years. You see, had he really gotten out of his box, his career box and jumped the track, so to speak, and gone into another field, had he done that at the wrong time he never would have been promoted like this. Joseph is going to wind up as few men in history ever wound up, number two, as one scholar I’m going to quote, says the altar ego of Pharaoh himself. Now surely that was a promotion even Joseph never dreamed of—a little Hebrew slave boy becoming assistant Pharaoh of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. That was beyond his wildest dream of a career. But God kept him in his frustrating box, never even gave him a hint that He was ever going to promote him out of his box and out of his career, until the right time and the right time came at this point.

Now let’s notice what Joseph is doing. Let’s notice that Joseph does something here that shows you, during those two years in prison he trained for this promotion. When the promotion came he was ready for it. Notice what he says in verse 25, the dream of Pharaoh has a rational unity to it; Joseph is perceptive and more than that he does what we were talking about this morning, about the problem of the enclosing frame. Here’s Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s dream; Joseph takes that dream and surrounds it with a divine viewpoint; in other words, Joseph by this time has had so much practice in applying the word to one problem after another problem after another problem, that he is not intimidated. Remember the scene, to realize the kind of attention…this guy is only thirty years old. In those days, before a man could approach Pharaoh he had to shave all hair from his body from head to toe; you could not appear in Pharaoh’s presence without purification. Here’s a boy who had never seen Pharaoh before; the Pharaoh wasn’t even his own countryman, and here he comes up and you’d think he’d be really nervous about this deal, coming into the presence of Pharaoh; if you didn’t behave right, chop his head off. So let’s say there was a little tension on the interview.

And so Joseph walks into his presence and in spite of all the tension on the interview he is able to say, Sir, your problem is this, and Sir, your solution is this. And he gives him the solution from the standpoint of the Word. He frames and he brackets Pharaoh’s trouble with the Scriptures, the equivalency of the Scriptures because he’s getting revelation from God here. And notice he places Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s problem underneath the sovereign reign of God. He says God has shown Pharaoh what He is about to do; that’s reference to God’s sovereign plan. And so does Joseph subdue the earth? You bet he subdues the earth; he takes the greatest man, the strongest man of his generation and he takes a frustrating problem that would have broken the back of the greatest country on the face of the earth at that day and he takes the Word of God and he puts it over both of them. The Word of God is more powerful than the most powerful man and the worst problem. And Joseph, without hesitancy, he simply walks into this; not arrogantly, not in a cocky way, but basically this is what he’s done. He’s put the problem under the dominion of law, God’s law.

And notice he repeats it in verse 28 as he concludes his briefing for Pharaoh. “What God is about to do he has shown Pharaoh,” the claim is for sovereignty and revealed sovereignty at that. So that’s one thing we learn from Joseph and learn from those two years of being boxed in that prison. That prison experience for two years and no promotion, and constant frustration, knowing these guys outside knew of him and they kept forgetting, forgetting, forgetting, forgetting, forgetting to put in the good word, all during that time what was Joseph’s comfort? What God is about to do. Joseph knew experientially the sovereignty of God; it wasn’t just a little word in the attribute box for Joseph. He knew very well what it meant to cast yourself on the sovereignty of God, knowing not what’s going tomorrow, but at least you know that nothing will happen tomorrow except what God wills. And so it was only natural, this boy walking into Pharaoh’s presence, simply articulates the thing that was closest to his heart, God’s sovereignty.

But there’s something else here, and this is a problem that often comes out of Genesis 41 because in the plan, in Genesis 41:34-46 Joseph promotes central planning. Basically he does what the communists have done; he confiscates all private property, he destroys private enterprise, he does everything he can to ruin the free market. Now this is often used as an argument; I have heard this used, in fact, as an argument by Christians saying see, Joseph did his job as unto the Lord, he administered a socialist plan; he administered a socialist program. Well, if Joseph can do it, can’t we? Is it really wrong for a Christian to be in this kind of a program when you take freedom away from people? Of course it’s not wrong, these people would say; Joseph is our model.

Be careful; this particular narrative does not support central planning for very obvious reasons and here’s why. The very presence of Joseph means what? Let’s draw a diagram. Here’s Egyptian government under Pharaoh; Joseph is above that in the sense that Joseph gives the Word of God to that government concerning its future. And so now centralized planning is possible. Why is it possible? Because that government has an omniscient input and that’s precisely the counter argument against centralized planning today. No government on the face of this earth has a Joseph; no government on the face of this earth has omniscience available to it, and that’s why centralized socialist planning is anti Scriptural. Communism is a Christian heresy; Christians that go along with it are like them for the reason that they are saying that the government is omniscient; anyone who promotes central planning the corollary of his faith is that government is absolutely and totally omniscient as well as sovereign.

In this case it was because in this case they did know the future. Normally that is not true and so this is why central planning always fails; for this simple reason. Whenever you have a central plan of, say the Russian’s five year plan or something, all the planners get together with their slide rules and they have to have some idea of what is the future. And so they think okay, all of us together, we say the future is this, and then they say let’s devise a plan to get to the future. And so they devise a big hairy plan to get to the future. Only one big problem; how do we know this is the future. How do we know something else isn’t going to happen, and then if something else over here is the future and I’ve put all my eggs in one basket, and I go screeching down the road to my target, and all of a sudden, lo and behold, when I get there the future isn’t there, five years down the road the situation has totally change, now what happens to my plan? I wash out completely and that’s precisely the experience of socialist nations. Central planning washes out because you cannot cope with the future.

Now contrast that to a capitalist system; in a capitalist system you’ve got many, many individuals. Here’s businessman one, businessman two, businessman three and so on, a whole series of them. Businessman one says the future is going to be type one; businessman two says future one, I believe that; businessman three says no, future is going to be a different kind of future. And so businessman on, businessman two organize their businesses for future one; businessman three organizes his business for future two. Now we’ve got the future options covered. Some of those men are going to go broke because they built their business for a future that will never come to pass, but some of them will prosper and thank God they will because products will be available for that future because they planned for it.

So this way, where you have a mix and where you have a diverse planning you always have at least somebody covering the future. You’ll be the wealthy person took because you’re smart enough to see the future and all the other people didn’t. But when you lock all of the plans into one massive plan and it blows it, it blows it wildly. Here, yes, you’ve got failure; yes, maybe a business will go out and these two guys will fail and they will go into bankruptcy, but you’ve got one man who made it and you’ve got products available for the future. So you bust but you don’t bust so badly, like you would have if everybody’s assets were channeled into a program for this thing and all of a sudden oh-oh, different future, now what do we do? So Genesis 41 is one of the most crucial chapters to argue for free enterprise you can find in the Scripture. Central planning is refuted by this chapter because no government has a Joseph; it’s that simple. If the government did have a Joseph, okay, central plans great, the most efficient one possible.

Now let’s go to the plan itself, Genesis 41:34-46. “Let Pharaoh do this,” now watch what Joseph is doing here; I want you to get a little uncomfortable with this guy. “Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land, and take up twenty percent [the fifth part] of the land of Egypt,” every year. Do you know what he’s arguing for? What this 30 year old kid is telling Pharaoh? Pharaoh, I know what the future says and I’ll tell you something; I want twenty percent of all private property confiscated every year. You what? Yup, twenty percent of the property confiscated each year. That’s what it says, a fifth part of the land, take it.

Genesis 41:35, “And let them gather all the food of those good years that come, and lay up the grain under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. [36] And the food shall be for storage in the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through famine. [37] And the thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of all his servants. [38] And Pharaoh said unto his servants, can we find such an one as this,” and notice, though Pharaoh may not become a Christian, a believer here, you see the impact of Joseph’s testimony. Look at it. “an we find a man like this, in whom the Spirit of God is?” He recognizes it, he got the point.

[39] “And Pharaoh said to Joseph, Forasmuch as,” and look at this, he’s even using Joseph’s language now, “Forasmuch as God has showed thee all this, there is none so discreet and wise as you are. [40] You shall be over my house, and according to thy word shall all my people be ruled,” look at that, “according to thy word,” wide open, “only in the throne will I be greater than you. [41] And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. [42] And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph’s hand,’” and this is, by the way, unprecedented in Egyptian history, to go this far; “Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and he put it upon Joseph’s hand, and he arrayed him in vestures of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. [43] He made him to ride in the second chariot which he had; and they cried before him, Bow the knee: and he made him ruler over the land of Egypt.”

Genesis 41:44, “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without thee shall no man life up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt,” an idiom for total control. [45] “And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphenath-paneah; and he gave him as his wife Asenath, the daughter of Potiphera, the priest of On.” By the way, notice, he unites Joseph with a daughter of pagan religion, and Joseph marries here. “And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.”

There are some highly questionable things going on there. Now two of them, verse 34, is the twenty percent confiscation of private property, and the other thing is the first part of verse 34, and this gives us a hint as to who the historical Joseph really was, it says Joseph is the man who divided the rule of Egypt into districts. Notice what it says, “Let them appoint officers over the land,” as though there weren’t offices before Joseph. So it was Joseph who historically was the one who organized Egyptian bureaucracy; it was he who divided the state into the mass of federal state into sub states. That’s a little thing to chew on for a while.

Now let’s turn to Genesis 47:5, the other side of the coin. In Genesis 41 we saw a confiscatory policy, centralized planning, slavery. And now in Genesis 47:5, what about Joseph’s brothers and his father. “And Pharaoh spoke unto Joseph, saying, Thy father and thy brethren are come with to you. [6] The land of Egypt is before thee; in the best of the land make your father and brethren to dwell; in the land of Goshen let them dwell: and if you know any men of activity among them, make them rulers over my cattle.” What a testimony this guy had, look at this. Pharaoh is saying hey, are your brothers like you? Boy, I can use a few more of you guys, come on.

Genesis 47:7, “And Joseph brought in Jacob, his father, and set him before Pharaoh, and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.” Blessing, remember, conveys God’s will in the matter. “…and Jacob blessed Pharaoh, [8] And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old are you? [9] And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty years:” this was close to the flood, longevity of men had not yet declined to the normative 70. “… few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” See there’s testimony to the declining lifespan after the flood. [10] “And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from before Pharaoh.”

And so we have the Hebrew people now giving their blessing to this centralized government. Notice something else. Genesis 47:11, “And Joseph placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a possession in the land of Egypt,” now watch that one, that’s the key observation, what’s happening to everyone else at this time? They’re getting their property confiscated. Now isn’t this a wonder to behold; who’s getting property and freedom with it? The Jews. And so who do they get it from? Pharaoh. And look at it; “a possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded. [14] And Joseph nourished his father, and his brethren, and all his father’s household, with bread, according to their families. [13] But there was no bread in all the land;” see the contrast the Holy Spirit is drawing there. Look at the economic prosperity of the Hebrews; they have land and they have food; they are given food so they don’t have to use the land to sell it, to buy money to get the food. And so they retain their freedom. Now this is a key, it becomes a key to the solution to this problem, what is going on with Joseph.

Genesis 47:13-20, the progressive enslavement of the nation. “And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine. [14] And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the grain which they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house.” In other words, what’s happened here is that Joseph, through his tap on God’s omniscience has planned for a future situation that now comes to pass and he becomes the sole businessman with the only product people need—food. And has total monopoly on the food industry in a time of famine. And now there’s only one thing people can do; if I’ve got food and you need it, give me your money. And so now there’s a money flow in towards Pharaoh. Now watch what happens; in verse 15 the money failed.

Now there’s an important notice because there’s some conservatives who are conservative economists who argue that money has inherent value; money does not have inherent value. Again, if you’re shipwrecked on a desert island and you have no food, all the gold coins in the world aren’t going to help you; you need some food, not gold. So money has no inherent value; it just simply usually has value. In this case when it says the money failed, the money lost its value; even gold and silver lost its value. What they needed was food, not gold and silver. And they had nothing left.

Genesis 47:15, “And [when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan,] all of Egypt came to Joseph, and they said, Give us bread; for why should we die in thy presence? For the money fails. [16] And Joseph said, Give your cattle,” I’ll take other assets; if you don’t have any cash, I’ll start confiscating your property, “and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail. [17] So they brought their cattle to Joseph; and Joseph gave them food in exchange for their horses, and for their flocks, and for the cattle of their herds, and for the asses; and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year.” So he confiscates an entire year’s production out of the people.

[18] “And when that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how that our money is spent. My lord also has taken our herds of cattle; there is nothing left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands.” Fine, says Joseph, give me your bodies and your lands, sell yourselves to me and I’ll give you food. [19] Why shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread,” it’s an offer, we’ll sell ourselves into slavery, Joseph, it’s sort of voluntary you might say, Joseph didn’t compel it, did he? He just simply had a monopoly in the food market but he didn’t compel anyone to sell away their freedom. By the way, notice what happens when you have centralized government, finally what happened. And so, we and our land will be servants, slaves to Pharaoh, “and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land be not desolate. [20] And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh’s.”

There is centralized planning and centralized government with a vengeance. Pharaoh, in history, if this story is correct, Pharaoh became the greatest dictator the world ever saw because of a believer who had wisdom, who helped him become the greatest dictator the world has ever seen. Now this is a strange story. Let’s look at Genesis 47:21-26, even more things to be offensive to the conservative heart. “And as for the people, he removed them to the cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.” He’s massive relocation, urban planning. He shifts entire populations around, rips them off of their homesteads, and forces them into the cities; he designs the cities and makes people live in them.

Genesis 47:22, “Only the land of the priests bought he not; for the priests had a portion assigned to them by Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which Pharaoh gave them: [wherefore they sold not their lands]. [23] Then Joseph said unto the people, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh; lo, here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land. [24] And it shall come to pass in the harvest, that ye shall give twenty percent to Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for the seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households, and for the food for your little ones. [25] And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh’s slaves. [26] And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day,” this day is the day of the writing of Genesis, apparently back in the days of Moses’ generation 400 years later, or depending on the chronology, “that the land,” the tax structure of Egypt remained the same for centuries; see the notice here in verse 26, “Joseph made it a law … unto this day that Pharaoh” taxed twenty percent, that twenty percent confiscation tax was Joseph’s creation. And finally, the last little key text in these two chapters, Genesis 47:27, “Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possessions therein, and they grew, and they multiplied exceedingly.” So that’s the story of Joseph and those are some of the texts.

Now I said the second thing we’ve got to do besides look at these texts is that we’ve got to come over to the area of history for a moment to get a little more perspective on the text. Now there are certain chronological problems, too complicated to mention tonight, I hint at these and go through some of them in the third framework pamphlet, I think it’s Appendix C, for those of you who are history bugs and you like to watch these problems and get an idea of what’s going on and why I’m going to make some statements, I refer you to that; we don’t mess with right now.

All right, what do we do about this famine; surely in a case where we have the Nile Valley, and you know why Egypt became the bread basket of the world, right? Because the Nile annually flooded everything, that is, until the communists had a brilliant idea the sold Nasser, called the Aswan Dam and now the Nile doesn’t flood like it used to, and the Nile was bringing tons of fertilizer down, so Egypt never had a problem with her food. Every spring, farmers didn’t have to apply fertilizer, they just took all their possessions and worked off the land and waited for the Nile, free transportation. The fertilizer was free and it was delivered free, and when the Nile went back into its bed, there it was, silt, rich silt from upstream. And that’s how they could grow their crops year after year after year; free fertilizer. And then the Aswan Dam and now they’re starving to death. But that’s what man does to the situation.

So before the days of the Aswan Dam the Nile was reliable. Now if we could find in history a time when there was a famine this long, seven years it means; for seven years the Nile failed consistently each year. Can we find a tradition of that in history, and ignore the date of it for a while because the people may be wrong on the date. There is in the library this book, some of you who are more serious in history must know of this source, Ancient Near Eastern Text by Dr. Pritchard, of Princeton University. This text has a translation in it of key documents out of the Ancient Near East. In here you have the Code of Hammurabi and a lot of your legal texts; very good material in here. When I worked with the abortion issue, for example, you can study what the other law codes said about Exodus 21:21-23.

But anyway on page 31 of Dr. Pritchard’s volume, lo and behold we have the tradition of the seven lean years in Egypt. And Dr. Pritchard mentions in his note, “It is a question whether it is a priestly forgery of some later period justifying their claim to territorial privileges or whether it correctly recounts an actual grant of land more than two thousand years earlier. The question cannot be answered today; we can only affirm that Egypt had a tradition of seven lean years and another point that went with the tradition was there was a contractual agreement between Pharaoh and a god of which we do not know, and they were to be followed by years of plenty.” Now Dr. Pritchard is not trying to confirm Scripture, he’s just reporting to us what we see in the Egyptian material, and as Christians we expect this. And this particular document goes on to describe the famine.

But there are other documents that are available that substantiate what we’re reading here. Dr. Courville has single-handedly reconstructed the history of Egypt. It’s called The Exodus Problem. Dr. Courville is an older man now, he spent most of his life on just one problem: how do we reconstruct history. He’s aided somewhat by Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, those of you who know of Dr. Velikovsky know this series of books which he holds that ancient history is totally distorted as you learn it in school; there are 600 years that you are taught that never existed. There are entire civilizations that you have been taught that never existed. The Hittite civilization simply never existed, it’s another name of a subdivision of the Assyrian Empire. The people of the sea were not people of the sea of the Philistines, they were simply another code name for the Persians. There was no 600 years dark age in Greece between the classic age of Homer and the modern era of Aristotle and Plato, those were back to back. They were simply nonexistent years, and that’s a big long story but I’m just mentioning that to you so you’ll be aware that chronology, that is when we date a document, be careful, that may be wrong. What we’re interested in is not dates at the moment; what we’re interested in is these records of this famine.

And sure enough, in the reign of Sesotris I and if this is correct we now know who this Pharaoh is. He’s known in history as Sesotris I of the twelfth dynasty. And during his dynasty there was a vast famine. And we have this document by one of the princes who administered under Pharaoh Sesotris I. “No child of the poor did I afflict; no widow did I oppress; no land owner did I displace; no herdsman did I drive away; no small farmer did I take away his man for my own works. No one was unhappy in my days, not even in the days of the famine, for I till all the fields of the nome of Mah up to its southern and northern frontiers. Thus I prolong the life of its inhabitants and preserved the food which it produced,” and the word to save or preserve here is the word to put it in the storehouse, it’s exactly the word in Genesis. “No hungry man was in it. I distributed equally to the widow as to the married person. I did not prefer the great to the humble in all that I gave away.” And he describes how he collected the grain and so on.

Another one from the 17^th dynasty which Dr. Courville says is just a simple parallel dynasty with the 12^th. “I collected grain as a friend of the harvest god. I was watchful at the time of sowing and when the famine arose, lasting many years, I distributed grain to the city each year of the famine.”

So there’s plenty of confirmatory evidence if its dated properly. And finally, Dr. Courville discovers who might possibly be Joseph. Can we solve the mystery, that the man we know as Joseph did exist in history, that he has a name and most scholars his name but they’ve never recognized him because the dates were wrong. And sure enough, the vizier of Sesotris I was a man who acted in history as the alter ego to Sesotris, and his name, this is Joseph’s secular name, Mentuhotep. Here’s what we know of ancient history of this man, Mentuhotep. Now don’t get bent out of shape because he has a different name. The point is that many of these people in ancient history had many names. Remember the tutelary list of Isaiah 9, you sing it in Handel’s Messiah, “He shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,” that’s just a list of names and so the kings of the ancient worlds had many names.

What about this Mentuhotep. The vizier of Sesotris I, who occupied this position, second only to the king, is the most familiar figure in Egyptian records of the many who held this office through the era of the Pharaoh’s. And this fact makes possible a rather critical scrutiny of this identification which is demanded by this construction. The vizier of Sesotris I was known to the Egyptians as Mentuhotep. The extraordinary powers which were granted to Mentuhotep are clearly those granted by the Scriptures to Joseph. The vizier to the King of Egypt had powers which were great, but the powers granted specifically to Mentuhotep were strikingly great. Breasted, who was one of the great Egyptologists of the turn of the century said: “When Mentuhotep also held the office of chief treasurer, as did the power of vizier under Sesotris, the account which he could give himself read like the declaration of the king’s powers. In a word, Mentuhotep was also invested with several priestly dignities; he was Pharaoh’s treasurer, and he appears in the documents as the altar ego of the king himself. When he arrived, great personages,” and by the way, this is Breasted, this is not the Christian, “when Mentuhotep arrived in the palace, great personages bowed down before him at the outer door of the royal palace.” And what did we read something about in Genesis 41? You will ride with me in my chariot, I give you my ring and you shall be as I am. And every man in Egypt shall respect you.

Here are the titles known in history to Mentuhotep, just some of them; it gives you an idea that if this really is our Joseph, what an amazing thing. He is called Vizier, Chief Judge, Overseer of the Double Granary, Chief Treasurer, Governor of the Royal Castle, Wearer of the Royal Seal,” what did Genesis say about the royal seal, which was the ring? He is The Wearer of the Royal Seal, Chief of all the works of the King, Hereditary Prince, Polit of the People, Giver of Good Sustaining Life to the People, The Count, The Sole Companion, The Favorite of the King. Not before, nor after, since the time of Sesotris I. In all of Egyptian history was there ever a man occupying this position who could claim this list of titles.

Other things that now if Mentuhotep is really Joseph, he built a canal, and the canal was built during the reigns of Sesotris to save some of the waters that came down the canal, he boxed them into gigantic reservoirs. Now because the date’s wrong people don’t accept this. But those canals you will find in a large map of Egypt are called the canals of Joseph. They were during the same reign of Pharaoh Sesotris I. Not only that, but in the same area there’s a pyramid called the prison pyramid, because local Egyptian peasant tradition says it is built near the ruins of the prison where Joseph, the patriarch, was confined. The pyramid is located near Saqqara, just south of the delta, in a likely area for such imprisonment.

And so we can say that Joseph did exist in history; he is known in history. What did he produce? Here’s what he produced. Here’s an Egyptian artist and the theology of that artist. Here’s Pharaoh, and here are the gods of Egypt. Notice, they are drawn by this artist at the same height because the Egyptian artists draw not by perspective and depth in their drawings; they draw by height of their figures and they value the value of a figure by its height. What is that artist telling us? That Pharaoh is one with the gods; Pharaoh says I am the State. This is the product of Joseph.

Here’s some other things of the theology of Egypt. This is an enlargement of a woman’s comb; this Egyptian woman wore this comb in her hair, and this particular edge of the comb was describing the theology, obviously this woman believed. We have a symbol down here, this is the name of a particular Pharaoh, here and here we have the serpent; over here we have a cross and a circle. That’s the symbol in Egyptian art of eternal life. Up here we have the falcon and this is an inscription of deity and the fact that Pharaoh gives eternal life.

And finally, one other interesting thing, a column in one of the temples and in this column there’s a symbol for heaven at the top, earth beneath and two lines are drawn along the edge of this column, and along this hieroglyphics, and those columns are the sign of welfare and harmony. And the Pharaoh’s name is written between them, and what they’re saying is that Pharaoh is the mediator between heaven and earth. So this is the signal for the tremendous power ascribed to Pharaoh in Egyptian thought. And as one man said who had studied this, Dr. Max Webber in 1909 wrote this; he said, “To this day there has never existed a bureaucracy which could compare to that of Egypt.”

Now the final solution; what do we do with all this? Here we’ve got a story of a responsible man and in an irresponsible world; we’ve got the obvious historic face he existed. Apparently now we have to admit as Christians that Joseph is the architect for the greatest and most oppressive government the world has ever seen. Why is this? How can we explain this as Joseph’s promotion. The answer is found in the theological argument of the book of Genesis.

The argument is this: That when Israel went down to Egypt it was to be a time of tribulation and affliction. God had to accomplish something in the Jews. He had to purge their character. Remember Jacob, he was aggressive but he lacked respect for the future. Jacob couldn’t plan for the future. It was obvious the way he treated his wife. He had no concept of his children, training them for the next generation. And so Jacob had to be renewed in his respect for his covenant family. He had to be taught this. And so it was a time of testing. But it was also going to be a time of difference; there would have to be a difference made between the pagan Egyptians and the believing Hebrews. There had to be a cultural bifurcation of the two and so God, in effect, raging through Joseph’s hand, judgment/salvation. Joseph’s job is to rule in the country, to bring it into subordination and send it into the slavery it justly deserves in order that the Hebrews can be free people, and can be prepared to become the great nation they will become.

Joseph is a divine saboteur who’s appointed mission is to give the humanist what they want; they want survival at the price of freedom so Joseph, give them the best survival, give it to them in a Cadillac, and take away all their freedom, take away all their land from them and let them work out the logical results of their system. Joseph, in other words, was a man who gives the world-believing person the world system with a vengeance. He lets the humanist have his state, like the humanist never had his state. You like survival at all costs of freedom, unlike Patrick Henry, you want “give me security or give me death,” fine, I’ll give you security, you just hand over all your property to me; be glad to!

And that’s the message of Joseph. He performed a divine sabotage of a land of Egypt in Jehovah’s hand, and he did so most efficiently, most effectively. We’re not saying Joseph realized all of this while he was doing it, but in the long term and in the theology of Genesis it’s quite clear, Joseph did two things: he saved his people, and he doomed the Egyptians. He judged and He saved.

Well, if that’s the solution to the problem, how do we apply the lesson of Joseph? All right, Joseph was given a sentence of God. Remember how it all started; Joseph didn’t come up with the plan, did he, out of his own finitetitude {?}, God gave Pharaoh the dream. What had Joseph said to Pharaoh at the beginning of the story? Pharaoh, God has shown what He is going to do with you. Pharaoh said oh, well, Joseph, then do your thing, let’s got on with it. Joseph helped him, he greased the slides with him. Joseph let them; God was going to judge Egypt, so Joseph carried out the judgment. Strange way it worked but that’s the way it worked.

Now we do not have that sentence that Joseph had. The Christian in the church age between the cross and the Second Advent has no message of doom for the world. When Christ returns, that will be the message of doom. We don’t have to execute judgment so there’s no justification for us in an organization dooming it. There’s no justification for us to repeat, in other words, the sabotage of Joseph. That is not our calling. God has told us to keep the world open to the gospel as long as you can; hold on until I come back; when I come back I’ll take care of that. So we only have one side of Joseph’s career, the saving side but not the judging side. So we can cast away all of Joseph’s schemes for government in our desire to apply these principles and preserve for our application Joseph’s skills in saving people. Joseph was a future oriented man, he saw ahead. He saw ahead because he had the tools of the Scriptures and we have the principle that the Christian, therefore, with the Word of God, is superior in his ability to survive disasters.

The Christian with the Word of God looks forward and faces disaster and doesn’t flinch at any [can’t understand word] plans for it. Every Christian can do this. One of the things that’s true in our country today, it’s just widespread and it explains all sorts of frustrations that everyone voices, why we do this silly thing, why do we do that silly ting, why are we voting away our freedoms daily in the United Nations, why do we give up our national sovereignty. What’s all this about? It’s very simple; because the world is afraid to face death and nuclear holocaust. Everybody’s got the bomb, and so we are being blackmailed slowly and systematically give up your freedoms because you are afraid to face the holocaust.

The Christian ought not to think this way. Our eternal security is forever, so what if there’s a nuclear holocaust, and so what, if for example, a five megaton egg drops in our reef and we lose 80% of the people of the city of Lubbock. So what, there’s 20% left, isn’t there, let’s roll on. When Noah left there was only 8 people and he built the whole population of the world out of 8 people, we can do it again. It really only takes two. So the point is that the Christian with the Word of God can ace the worst scene and plan coolly for it, and not flinch and survive. That’s the message and application of Joseph. Joseph saw disaster in his day; seven years there would be disaster for his country. And Joseph said let’s take steps to prevent it. We don’t mimic exactly the steps he took to enslave people, but the idea of taking steps to what we perceive to be a disaster is fairly biblical. And it’s a sign of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.