Dr. Ron Sumners
September 20, 2009
There is probably no greater single illustration of God’s providence at work in a life than what we have been discovering in the drama of Joseph’s life. Joseph is coming to visit his brothers as they tend their father’s sheep. Joseph comes on behalf of his father. He doesn’t know the depth of their hatred for him nor their intent.
But Joseph was not at the mercy of fate or chance. He was not being driven by a blind, impersonal force. He was under the eye and watchful care of his sovereign, loving God.
Verse 18 of Genesis 37 says that Joseph’s brothers saw him from a distance. How did they know it was him? The coat! They recognized the hated coat. It was the symbol of their father’s favoritism for their younger brother. “Here comes the dreamer! Let’s kill him and throw him into a dry well and say that an animal killed him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” (Vv. 19-20)
Joseph’s brothers had sown the seeds of hatred in their hearts, and those seeds had found fertile soil. The brothers had watered the seeds with jealousy and cultivated them with selfishness. Now the seeds began to bear their bitter fruit. Their hatred toward Joseph was out of proportion to any of his offenses toward them. Their determination to kill him is a reminder that hatred doesn’t need a reason. All it needs is a corner of a selfish heart in which to germinate.
When the oldest brother, Reuben, heard that the plan was to kill Joseph and hide his body in a well, he intervened with another plan. He said, “Let’s not take his life. Throw him into this well here in the desert, but don’t lay a hand on him” (Vv. 21-22). His plan was to come back later and rescue Joseph from the well and take him home to Jacob.
The other brothers went along with Reuben’s suggestion, not knowing that he was planning to rescue Joseph later. They tore Joseph’s coat off and threw him into the dry well. This may seem mildly compassionate on their part, but there was nothing compassionate about that act. Killing Joseph and tossing his body into the well would have been more humane than throwing him into the well alive and leaving him in the desert to die a slow agonizing death of dehydration and starvation.
It is interesting that Reuben was the one who tried to save Joseph. Do you remember when the Word of God last focused on Reuben? It is recorded in Genesis 35:22. Reuben dishonored God, his father and his father’s concubine Bilhah, and himself by sleeping with her.
Reuben fell prey to sin, so instinctively we assume that he was a bad apple. Anyone who sinned in that manner against his father and his family couldn’t be particularly nice.
But was Reuben incapable of genuine compassion and sympathy? In seeking to save Joseph, was he motivated by something other than genuine concern? Some Bible commentators suggest that Reuben acted in this way because he saw a chance to balance out his sin and get back in Jacob’s good graces.
But as George Lawson says, “Let not the worst of men be found worse than they really are.” All of us have our particular areas of weakness and sin. It doesn’t mean we are incapable of compassion and noble action. I think Reuben had true compassion for his younger brother. His later responses prove that to me.
When we are all alone with nobody watching, do we gravitate toward despair and discouragement? Lust and impurity? Or perhaps we are prone to jealousy and bitterness. We need to be honest in identifying where we are vulnerable. The apostle James says we succumb to temptation when we are enticed and led away by our own evil desire (James 1:14). All of us face temptation, but not all of us are tempted by the same things.
Reuben may have been broken by the earlier events in his life and was crying out for an opportunity to do something that would express his repentance to his father. Combined with Reuben’s genuine concern for Joseph, it is understandable why he was so upset when he came back later and found Joseph gone (37:29-30). Yet in all this spiritual darkness, jealousy and cruelty, God’s hand of providence remained on Joseph’s life.
It is incredible that brothers in the same family could treat one of their own the way these brothers treated Joseph. It is even more incredible that they could sit down and eat a meal after doing their dirty deed. But that is exactly what they did (v. 25).
This is an ugly, cruel picture. They stripped Joseph of his coat, threw him into the pit and had every intention of letting their brother die there. Then they sat next to the well and had a meal, probably listening to Joseph’s cries for mercy.
What does it take to spoil your appetite? Some people can eat like a horse anytime. But most people have faced occasions when their emotions were so overwrought that they just could not eat.
You stand outside your loved one’s room at the hospital or you walk up and down the hall while the surgery is in progress, and as you wait someone offers you something to eat, and you say, “Thanks, but I can’t eat right now.”
Those meals after a funeral are so helpful for the people who have come from a distance, and they are an opportunity for fellowship. But I have observed something. The widow or widower seldom eats, and if they do they only nibble a little.
But when we see men who can tear the clothes off their seventeen-year-old brother’s back, throw him in a hole in the ground, and leave him there to die, and then turn around and say, “Hey, has anyone got ketchup for these fries?” It is clear that we are at the depths of callousness and insensitivity.
Judah’s intervention resulted in Joseph’s sentence being commuted from death to slavery. When the brothers looked up and saw some foreign traders coming their way, Judah saw an opportunity.
He asked the others, “What will we gain if we kill our brother?” (v. 26). The others were at least sensible enough to realize that Judah was right. They weren’t going to gain anything by killing Joseph. Judah followed up with a suggestion. “Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood” (v. 27). Judah was having a little twinge of conscience himself.
So, they pulled Joseph out of the cistern and sold him to the traders on the caravan for twenty pieces of silver. The price didn’t amount to much, just a couple of shekels each for the brother’s dirty work. It is hard to imagine that they enjoyed whatever it was they bought with their ill-gotten gain.
So, that was it. The deed was done. Joseph was gone by the time Reuben returned, and now the brothers had to go home and face their father. So, they came up with the deceitful idea of dipping Joseph’s coat in animal blood, presenting it to Jacob, and letting him draw the obvious conclusion (Vv. 31-33). It was a deception that the brothers would maintain for some twenty years.
There is an important lesson here. It is virtually impossible to commit just one sin. One sin leads to another to guard it from detection. How many more lies do you think the brothers had to tell over the next twenty years to cover their sin? Jacob must have asked them about the accident.
How did they keep their stories straight? Probably much time was spent on the trip from Dothan back home, fabricating their lie. Surely their family members and friends asked them to share what happened. The lie had to be retold many times.
You can mark it down that when you sin, you will sin again, especially in the area of lying. When a person is prepared to kill, don’t be surprised if he will tell a thousand lies to protest his innocence. It is to be expected.
Once, on a youth retreat, I had two teen-agers who were caught shoplifting a pair of flip-flops. Both girls came from affluent families and could have bought the store and both had several hundreds of dollars in their purse. Yet they were stealing a two-dollar pair of flip-flops. I had to report it to the parents and they had a discussion with their daughters. The parents became angry with me because their daughters told them, that they were falsely accused and did not steal. They said, “Our daughters would not lie to us!” If they were prepared to steal, they were prepared to lie!
It is no surprise that these brothers, who were capable of great cruelty to Joseph, were also guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy and insensitivity toward their father. They watched him plunge so deep into grief that it almost put him in his own grave. Yet they kept on lying.
We dare not miss the challenge to become men and women marked by integrity and honesty. God’s word makes clear that if we start trading in lies, our sin will destroy our lives. Become a liar and you will weave a web for yourself that will strangle you in the end and be a stumbling block to countless others in the process.
People who lie in their business dealings are in the worst of positions. Their integrity is shot and their conscience is defiled and ruined. They drive themselves crazy trying to figure out what other people are thinking, saying and doing, because they assume everyone else is lying too.
Lies are like a strand of sewing thread wrapped around your fingers. One strand is so easy to break that you don’t think anything of it. You say to yourself, “That wasn’t so bad. I got away with it. I told a lie and nobody found out.”
So, you lie again, only this time there are two strands of thread around your fingers. Then you add a third and a fourth, and before long, your fingers are so tied up you can’t use your hand any more.
We must beware of developing such a pattern in our lives. It will keep us from usefulness in God’s kingdom, and it may even keep us from the kingdom itself. Joseph’s brothers remind us that there is no well deep enough and no amount of time long enough to hide our sin from the eyes of an all-seeing God.
There is only one way to deal with sin that weaves its web of destruction around your soul: repent of it, be done with it, and ask God’s help to liberate ourselves from it.
When Joseph was sold into slavery, he felt horror at what was happening to him. We can’t let our familiarity with the story dull our human sensibilities. This is a seventeen-year-old boy who was brutalized by his brothers, ripped from his family by force, and then sold to foreign slave traders.
When we were seventeen, most of us were trying to figure out who we were and what we were going to become. But it was also an exciting time. We had our driver’s license and the world was at our feet. You teen-agers today may feel burdened and under the thumb of adult authority, but you just don’t realize how good you have it. And you may think I am an old “geezer” with no understanding at all, but one day you will look back and understand exactly what I am talking about.
Ask Joseph, “What stands out about your seventeenth year?”
“That’s easy,” he would answer. “That’s the year my father sent me to Shechem for what was supposed to be a few days to check on my brothers. But I didn’t see my family again for twenty years. In my wildest dreams, and I had some pretty wild dreams, I couldn’t have imagined I would end up like that. I couldn’t believe my brothers hated me that much. They threw me into a deep pit. I cried in that pit. I cried for mercy; I begged for my life. They pulled me out of that pit, but sold me to strangers who put me on the back of a mangy camel and took me off to Egypt. I cried for many days. And every day I turned and looked back down the dusty path and I wondered if dad and his men would come to rescue me and take me back home. All I wanted was to go home. But nobody came, and I was gone.”
That’s what Joseph might say. Was he really that distressed? Yes, according to Genesis 42:21. As that verse records, his brothers were talking to one another in a different setting, recalling what it was like when they threw their brother into the pit. “Surely we are being punished because of our brother. We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded for his life with us, but we would not listen; that’s why this distress has come upon us.”
Joseph was sold and sad. But that is not the final word.
Joseph probably didn’t feel very safe, tied up as a piece of property to be bought and sold.
But Joseph was safe, because even though his earthly father stayed behind in Canaan, his Heavenly father came with him into Egypt. Sometimes the will of God is found on the back of a smelly camel going down to a far country.
I wonder what Joseph thought about on that trip. What sustained him during those days of fear and uncertainty? This is pure conjecture by me, but I have an idea. Isn’t it possible that one of the means God used to sustain Joseph in this time of deep trial was the memory of his grandfather’s stories? Part of the privilege of being a grandparent lies in having access to the expanding minds of our children’s children.
Any child, who loves his grandpa, loves his grandpa’s stories. A grandfather’s knee may prove to be far more influential than the school classroom.
Remember that Joseph’s grandfather was Isaac. As the old man sorted through his memories, he would have recounted the story told in Genesis 22 of how his father, Abraham, had been commanded by God to offer him as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah.
Isaac must have told Joseph about his feelings as Abraham raised the knife, the miraculous provision of the ram caught in the thicket, and how it was that he, who was to be the sacrifice, walked free because of God’s provision.
Is it not reasonable to assume Isaac said to Joseph, “My son, if you will trust in the God of your great-grandfather Abraham, your grandfather Isaac, and your father Jacob, you will discover that no matter what happens to you, no matter where you go, no matter how difficult life becomes, God himself will provide for you.”
Now whether or not it happened like that, there has to be an explanation for the way this boy went through his troubles and turned out as he did. Somehow, despite his extreme distress, Joseph must have been aware that God was still in control of his life. He was learning to say with the psalmist, “I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13).
Joseph understood that even in the exercise of his brother’s hatred, God was working. Perhaps on his ride to Egypt he recognized that God had already provided for him through the intervention of Reuben that saved his life and through Judah’s suggestion that he be brought up alive out of the pit.
Perhaps Joseph realized it was only by the hand of God that his brothers had complied with these proposals. Nor was it by chance that a caravan of Ishmaelite merchants had arrived at just the right time for Judah to see them and suggest an alternative to the cruel plot the brothers had in mind initially. Those traders had been there by divine appointment, and God had determined they would make the decision to buy the boy.
If we had asked Joseph’s brothers, “Why did you sell him into slavery?” they would have said, “To be rid of him and his lousy dreams.”
If we had asked the Ishmaelite traders, “Why did you buy Joseph?” they would have said, “To turn a profit.”
And yet as they served their own ends, the brothers and the traders did a great service to Joseph. Their selfish interests became, in God’s providence, instrumental in saving Joseph’s life and, ultimately, the lives of the brothers themselves.
So, we are beginning to see that even when the world appears to be aimlessly walking about, the Lord is everywhere at work.
The center of God’s will may take us to the eye of the storm. For Joseph the storm was the back of a smelly camel going down to Egypt. We should not seek to confirm God’s will by the absence of adversity. Consider the staggering words written about Jesus in Isaiah 53:10, “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer.”
We take heart by recalling, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). Ten bad-apple brothers and a whole caravan full of desert traders were no match for the teenage boy who appeared to be the helpless victim in the story. God was with him!
God will accomplish His purposes, even though for the time it might appear that everything has gone wrong. There is no denying Joseph’s distress at being sold and at anticipating the years of slavery and suffering that lay ahead of him. Those events are a reminder to us that, as A.W. Tozer once said, “It is doubtful that God ever used anybody without first hurting him deeply.”
It takes the test of trials to make us useful to God. Some of us are not as useful as we might be, for in shunning the trials we have missed the blessings. We do not have the tender hearts that come from nights of tears! We don’t seek the tears, but often they will come from the Father’s hand. And they will come so that we might be prepared to accomplish His will in our lives and in the lives of others.
Look now at the scene as Jacob weeps for his son. Grief was not new to him, but this was a bitter blow. Joseph, the ray of sunshine in his life, gone! And Jacob was the one that sent him on the errand. As we leave him in tears, we remember that with God, joy comes in the morning. “Under the shadow of God’s hand, His saints may dwell secure. Sufficient is His arm alone and our defense is sure.”
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