Good Shepherd Lutheran Church
State College, PA
One Sunday after worship, in the church I pastored near Philadelphia, I found a note on my desk from a church member. Donna and her husband attended most Sundays but I really didn’t know either of them well (except I knew that she loved our black lab). The note told me that she had received a very frightening diagnosis that week and asked for prayer. So that week a few of us from church went to her home and prayed with her. Then, in the following months I saw her regularly, first in her home and later in the hospital.
After many weeks in the hospital, she told me that she had never been baptized. She had grown up in the church, but this denomination only saw baptism as a public testimony and nothing more; so it had never seemed terribly important. But now she found herself wanting to be baptized, so we had a baptismal service in her hospital room. That night, knowing that she had been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, she went to sleep and never regained consciousness; she was kept on life support for some time at her husband’s insistence, but really this was the end for her; once the life support was removed, her heart stopped. But knowing that she had been baptized enabled her to stop fighting and let go.
When she first received the news of her cancer diagnosis she was terrified. But God was with her and was preparing her for the end of her life. God was present with her in ways she didn’t expect, in ways she never would have chosen for herself. This is the thing we can see clearly in the story of Joseph: God is at work in ways we can’t see, even in the midst of difficult and overwhelming experiences, things we would never choose to go through.
The first thing we can see in this passage is that Joseph shows mercy and grace to those who have wronged him. Joseph had plenty of reason to take vengeance on his brothers and was in a position to do anything he wanted to them. But he didn’t.
His brothers had hated him growing up, first because he was his father’s favorite (and his father made no attempt to disguise this). Genesis 37:4 says “when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.” Then, to make matters worse, Joseph had a series of dreams in which the other members of his family bowed down to him (and for some reason he thought it was a good idea to report these dreams to them). His brothers respond, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?” And the author says “So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words” (37:8).
He was the favorite, and his father sent him into the fields to check on them and bring a report back to their father. But when his brothers saw him coming they conspired to kill him. They said, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams” (37:19-20). So they grab him, take away the special robe his father gave him and throw him into a well. Later a band of Ishmaelites comes by and they decide to sell him to them as a slave and then dip his robe in blood to convince their father that he has been killed.
Joseph is taken to Egypt, where a rich man named Potiphar buys him. And the author says “The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man” (39:2). He ends up running the household until Potiphar’s wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce him and then lies about it, telling her husband that he tried to rape her. So, even though the Lord is with him, Joseph is thrown into prison, where the author reports again, “But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer” (39:21).
This story doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we expect when we hear that God is with someone. Joseph certainly wouldn’t have chosen for his life to go in this way. But later, through his ability to interpret dreams, he ends up being taken out of prison and becomes second only to Pharaoh, and in our passage his brothers have come to him for help, not yet having any idea who he really is. And then, when he makes himself known to them they are, with very good reason, terrified. It’s been years now since they sold him into slavery, and they have no reason to expect anything other than vengeance.
How could Joseph forgive his brothers after all they’ve done to him? If he, in all the intervening years, had been cultivating a spirit of resentment and hopes for vengeance, this is what he would be reaping now. Instead, he’s been cultivating an awareness of God’s presence and blessing in his life despite all the things that have happened to him. So when the moment arrives when he could take vengeance, he does just the opposite and shows them mercy. Caesarius of Arles, writing in the early 6th century, says this: “When he saw his brothers, or rather enemies in his brothers, he gave evidence of the affection of his love by his pious grief when he wanted to be recognized by them…. He did not recall that pit into which he had been thrown to be murdered; he did not think of himself, a brother, sold for a price. Instead, by returning good for evil, even then he fulfilled the precepts of the apostles that were not yet given. Therefore, by considering the sweetness of true charity, blessed Joseph, with God’s help, was eager to repel from his heart the poison of envy with which he knew his brothers had been struck” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament volume 2, p. 292).
The second thing in this passage is that Joseph recognizes the importance of the community of faith, the people of Israel. He’s not only thinking of himself and his own plans and priorities. His concern about the community of faith affects the way orders his life and makes decisions. He recognizes that God is using him in his present position to preserve his people. He says “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors” (v. 7).
It’s easy, in a story like this where we’re only given an outline of events, to think things were easier for Joseph than they were, to think that his godliness and awareness of God’s presence in his life somehow kept him from feeling the pain we’d expect if these things happened to us. But we’re given a few glimpses that help us see he has not had an easy time, that he hasn’t just sailed through, smiling and rejoicing in God’s constant care. When his brothers are talking among themselves, before he makes himself known to them, they say “Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen” (42:21). They saw his anguish; he pleaded with them not to do what they were doing.
While he’s in prison he tells a fellow prisoner “I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews; and here also I have done nothing that they should have put me into the dungeon” 40:15). Then, even after he’s been released from prison and is second in power to Pharaoh, he names his first child Manasseh, “’For’, he said, ‘God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house’” (41:51). His second child he names Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction” (41:52). Joseph has experienced overwhelming loss and sorrow in the years since his brothers sold him into slavery, and even now as one of the most powerful people in the world he sees Egypt as the land of his affliction.
But even so, through all these years of suffering, he’s been cultivating an awareness of God’s priorities and of His love for His people. That’s why, in this moment with his brothers he is able to say “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth.”
The third thing here is that Joseph knows that God is at work even when he can’t see it. “So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (v. 8). Those dreams Joseph had been given when he was young, still living with his family in Canaan, were fulfilled despite years when it looked like the exact opposite was happening. His brothers had said, “let us see what becomes of his dreams,” but they were powerless to prevent God’s purposes from being fulfilled. John Calvin says this, commenting on these verses: “This is a remarkable passage, in which we are taught that the right course of events is never so disturbed by the depravity and wickedness of men, but that God can direct them to a good end” (Commentary, vol. 1, p. 377).
This is commonly called the doctrine of providence, the idea that God is sovereignly working out His purposes in the world despite the intentions of His creatures. Paul has a clear statement of God’s providence in Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Not that all things are good, but that God, our great King, is able to so overrule and work in all things that He is able to bring good even out of evil things. Joseph’s brothers were guilty of a great crime in selling him into slavery, and yet Joseph is able to see God overruling their evil intentions and bringing good out of what they did to him. Joseph is able to forgive them, but they are still guilty before God unless they turn to Him in repentance, crying out for mercy.
I once heard George Verwer, the founder of the mission Anne and I worked with in the late 70’s and early 80’s, preaching about God’s providence. He said he had been reading The Mystery of Providence by the 17th century Puritan John Flavel when he tried to enter the train station and found the door was locked. His response was “oh great, some jerk isn’t doing his job and now I have to walk all the way around the station and I’ll probably miss my train.” So he started walking and encountered a young man who saw a book he was carrying and said “hey, I know that book.” Well, the book he saw happened to be one written by George himself and it turned out that they ended up having a very good and profitable conversation. But they wouldn’t have had that conversation if some jerk hadn’t forgotten to unlock the door; God was at work providing that young man with a conversation that he needed at that point. But George pointed out that his first reaction was to completely forget what he had been reading in John Flavel’s book. Joseph had been cultivating an awareness of God’s providence, and because of this was able to say to his brothers, “do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life…. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”
So how can we respond to all this? First, know that God calls us to show mercy and grace to those who’ve wronged us. We see Jesus doing this even as He’s being crucified, when he says “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.” We see the same thing with Stephen when he is being stoned. Knowing all that God has done in forgiving us, we’re called to forgive others in the same way. This doesn’t come naturally and we can’t do it by an effort of our will. But what we can do is be aware of what kinds of seeds we’re sowing, what we are cultivating. If we cultivate resentment and bitterness, we won’t be able to forgive when the time comes. I knew a man several years ago who exemplified this. He was angry at life. He had been obsessed with Elvis and then Elvis had died. Later he had been obsessed with Dale Earnhart, who was killed in a racecar accident. I actually heard him say once, “they took Elvis and now they’ve taken Dale away from me.” I didn’t ask who “they” were, but during the time I knew him he was shriveled and turned in on himself. The things he had been cultivating had diminished him as a person; if he had been in Joseph’s place I don’t think forgiveness would have even occurred to him. He’d been sowing bad seeds all his life and was reaping the fruits of them. We need to be aware of what we’re cultivating in our lives.
Next, God wants us to recognize the importance of the community of faith. We live in a very individualistic society, and this kind of thinking doesn’t come natural. We read instructions in the New Testament as if they were written to us individually, but most of the things written in the Epistles are written in the second-person plural, addressed to groups of believers. We need to remind ourselves that God is at work in the Church preparing a bride for His Son.
And lastly, we need to cultivate an awareness that God is at work in ways we can’t see, that He is even doing things we could never imagine. The things that happened in Joseph’s life were horrible, and when he was going through them there’s no way he could have seen how it would all turn out. We need to remind ourselves of this often, that God is doing things we can’t see and that His purposes are good.
All these things, showing mercy and grace to those who’ve wronged us, recognizing the importance of the community of faith, and knowing that God is at work in ways we can’t see, flow from a living encounter with Jesus Christ. In Him we find mercy for our failures and grace to grow and become the people He has called us to be. And in the presence of Jesus, we’re enabled to believe and trust that He is working in all things to fulfil His purposes.
One Sunday after worship, in the church I pastored near Philadelphia, I found a note on my desk from a church member. Donna and her husband attended most Sundays but I really didn’t know either of them well (except I knew that she loved our black lab). The note told me that she had received a very frightening diagnosis that week and asked for prayer. So that week a few of us from church went to her home and prayed with her. Then, in the following months I saw her regularly, first in her home and later in the hospital.
After many weeks in the hospital, she told me that she had never been baptized. She had grown up in the church, but this denomination only saw baptism as a public testimony and nothing more; so it had never seemed terribly important. But now she found herself wanting to be baptized, so we had a baptismal service in her hospital room. That night, knowing that she had been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, she went to sleep and never regained consciousness; she was kept on life support for some time at her husband’s insistence, but really this was the end for her; once the life support was removed, her heart stopped. But knowing that she had been baptized enabled her to stop fighting and let go.
When she first received the news of her cancer diagnosis she was terrified. But God was with her and was preparing her for the end of her life. God was present with her in ways she didn’t expect, in ways she never would have chosen for herself. This is the thing we can see clearly in the story of Joseph: God is at work in ways we can’t see, even in the midst of difficult and overwhelming experiences, things we would never choose to go through.
The first thing we can see in this passage is that Joseph shows mercy and grace to those who have wronged him. Joseph had plenty of reason to take vengeance on his brothers and was in a position to do anything he wanted to them. But he didn’t.
His brothers had hated him growing up, first because he was his father’s favorite (and his father made no attempt to disguise this). Genesis 37:4 says “when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.” Then, to make matters worse, Joseph had a series of dreams in which the other members of his family bowed down to him (and for some reason he thought it was a good idea to report these dreams to them). His brothers respond, “Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to have dominion over us?” And the author says “So they hated him even more because of his dreams and his words” (37:8).
He was the favorite, and his father sent him into the fields to check on them and bring a report back to their father. But when his brothers saw him coming they conspired to kill him. They said, “Here comes this dreamer. Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits; then we shall say that a wild animal has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams” (37:19-20). So they grab him, take away the special robe his father gave him and throw him into a well. Later a band of Ishmaelites comes by and they decide to sell him to them as a slave and then dip his robe in blood to convince their father that he has been killed.
Joseph is taken to Egypt, where a rich man named Potiphar buys him. And the author says “The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man” (39:2). He ends up running the household until Potiphar’s wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce him and then lies about it, telling her husband that he tried to rape her. So, even though the Lord is with him, Joseph is thrown into prison, where the author reports again, “But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love; he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer” (39:21).
This story doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we expect when we hear that God is with someone. Joseph certainly wouldn’t have chosen for his life to go in this way. But later, through his ability to interpret dreams, he ends up being taken out of prison and becomes second only to Pharaoh, and in our passage his brothers have come to him for help, not yet having any idea who he really is. And then, when he makes himself known to them they are, with very good reason, terrified. It’s been years now since they sold him into slavery, and they have no reason to expect anything other than vengeance.
How could Joseph forgive his brothers after all they’ve done to him? If he, in all the intervening years, had been cultivating a spirit of resentment and hopes for vengeance, this is what he would be reaping now. Instead, he’s been cultivating an awareness of God’s presence and blessing in his life despite all the things that have happened to him. So when the moment arrives when he could take vengeance, he does just the opposite and shows them mercy. Caesarius of Arles, writing in the early 6th century, says this: “When he saw his brothers, or rather enemies in his brothers, he gave evidence of the affection of his love by his pious grief when he wanted to be recognized by them…. He did not recall that pit into which he had been thrown to be murdered; he did not think of himself, a brother, sold for a price. Instead, by returning good for evil, even then he fulfilled the precepts of the apostles that were not yet given. Therefore, by considering the sweetness of true charity, blessed Joseph, with God’s help, was eager to repel from his heart the poison of envy with which he knew his brothers had been struck” (Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Old Testament volume 2, p. 292).
The second thing in this passage is that Joseph recognizes the importance of the community of faith, the people of Israel. He’s not only thinking of himself and his own plans and priorities. His concern about the community of faith affects the way orders his life and makes decisions. He recognizes that God is using him in his present position to preserve his people. He says “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors” (v. 7).
It’s easy, in a story like this where we’re only given an outline of events, to think things were easier for Joseph than they were, to think that his godliness and awareness of God’s presence in his life somehow kept him from feeling the pain we’d expect if these things happened to us. But we’re given a few glimpses that help us see he has not had an easy time, that he hasn’t just sailed through, smiling and rejoicing in God’s constant care. When his brothers are talking among themselves, before he makes himself known to them, they say “Alas, we are paying the penalty for what we did to our brother; we saw his anguish when he pleaded with us, but we would not listen” (42:21). They saw his anguish; he pleaded with them not to do what they were doing.
While he’s in prison he tells a fellow prisoner “I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews; and here also I have done nothing that they should have put me into the dungeon” 40:15). Then, even after he’s been released from prison and is second in power to Pharaoh, he names his first child Manasseh, “’For’, he said, ‘God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house’” (41:51). His second child he names Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction” (41:52). Joseph has experienced overwhelming loss and sorrow in the years since his brothers sold him into slavery, and even now as one of the most powerful people in the world he sees Egypt as the land of his affliction.
But even so, through all these years of suffering, he’s been cultivating an awareness of God’s priorities and of His love for His people. That’s why, in this moment with his brothers he is able to say “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth.”
The third thing here is that Joseph knows that God is at work even when he can’t see it. “So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (v. 8). Those dreams Joseph had been given when he was young, still living with his family in Canaan, were fulfilled despite years when it looked like the exact opposite was happening. His brothers had said, “let us see what becomes of his dreams,” but they were powerless to prevent God’s purposes from being fulfilled. John Calvin says this, commenting on these verses: “This is a remarkable passage, in which we are taught that the right course of events is never so disturbed by the depravity and wickedness of men, but that God can direct them to a good end” (Commentary, vol. 1, p. 377).
This is commonly called the doctrine of providence, the idea that God is sovereignly working out His purposes in the world despite the intentions of His creatures. Paul has a clear statement of God’s providence in Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Not that all things are good, but that God, our great King, is able to so overrule and work in all things that He is able to bring good even out of evil things. Joseph’s brothers were guilty of a great crime in selling him into slavery, and yet Joseph is able to see God overruling their evil intentions and bringing good out of what they did to him. Joseph is able to forgive them, but they are still guilty before God unless they turn to Him in repentance, crying out for mercy.
I once heard George Verwer, the founder of the mission Anne and I worked with in the late 70’s and early 80’s, preaching about God’s providence. He said he had been reading The Mystery of Providence by the 17th century Puritan John Flavel when he tried to enter the train station and found the door was locked. His response was “oh great, some jerk isn’t doing his job and now I have to walk all the way around the station and I’ll probably miss my train.” So he started walking and encountered a young man who saw a book he was carrying and said “hey, I know that book.” Well, the book he saw happened to be one written by George himself and it turned out that they ended up having a very good and profitable conversation. But they wouldn’t have had that conversation if some jerk hadn’t forgotten to unlock the door; God was at work providing that young man with a conversation that he needed at that point. But George pointed out that his first reaction was to completely forget what he had been reading in John Flavel’s book. Joseph had been cultivating an awareness of God’s providence, and because of this was able to say to his brothers, “do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life…. So it was not you who sent me here, but God.”
So how can we respond to all this? First, know that God calls us to show mercy and grace to those who’ve wronged us. We see Jesus doing this even as He’s being crucified, when he says “Father forgive them because they don’t know what they’re doing.” We see the same thing with Stephen when he is being stoned. Knowing all that God has done in forgiving us, we’re called to forgive others in the same way. This doesn’t come naturally and we can’t do it by an effort of our will. But what we can do is be aware of what kinds of seeds we’re sowing, what we are cultivating. If we cultivate resentment and bitterness, we won’t be able to forgive when the time comes. I knew a man several years ago who exemplified this. He was angry at life. He had been obsessed with Elvis and then Elvis had died. Later he had been obsessed with Dale Earnhart, who was killed in a racecar accident. I actually heard him say once, “they took Elvis and now they’ve taken Dale away from me.” I didn’t ask who “they” were, but during the time I knew him he was shriveled and turned in on himself. The things he had been cultivating had diminished him as a person; if he had been in Joseph’s place I don’t think forgiveness would have even occurred to him. He’d been sowing bad seeds all his life and was reaping the fruits of them. We need to be aware of what we’re cultivating in our lives.
Next, God wants us to recognize the importance of the community of faith. We live in a very individualistic society, and this kind of thinking doesn’t come natural. We read instructions in the New Testament as if they were written to us individually, but most of the things written in the Epistles are written in the second-person plural, addressed to groups of believers. We need to remind ourselves that God is at work in the Church preparing a bride for His Son.
And lastly, we need to cultivate an awareness that God is at work in ways we can’t see, that He is even doing things we could never imagine. The things that happened in Joseph’s life were horrible, and when he was going through them there’s no way he could have seen how it would all turn out. We need to remind ourselves of this often, that God is doing things we can’t see and that His purposes are good.
All these things, showing mercy and grace to those who’ve wronged us, recognizing the importance of the community of faith, and knowing that God is at work in ways we can’t see, flow from a living encounter with Jesus Christ. In Him we find mercy for our failures and grace to grow and become the people He has called us to be. And in the presence of Jesus, we’re enabled to believe and trust that He is working in all things to fulfil His purposes.
