PRAYER: If at times, O Lord, I am disappointed in life and in people, grant me the faith to hold steady; to your glory. Amen.
Joseph’s integrity in his conduct with his employer’s wife brings demotion and imprisonment. Recall some incidents, from history or from personal knowledge, where right conduct brought pain or loss.
| GENESIS 41–42; PSALMS 23, 24 | Week 3, Day 6 |
“After two whole years” (41:1)! I imagine Joseph waiting almost momentarily after the cupbearer has left the prison; then, slowly, hope dies. But there is a time and a tide. If the cupbearer had told Pharaoh of Joseph immediately upon his return to his office, Joseph’s name would have been filed under “applications received.” But now Pharaoh is in need of just the talents Joseph has, and now the cupbearer remembers.
Joseph credits God with his gift of insight, as well he should and as well all of us should. Pharaoh sees more in Joseph than simply a diviner of dreams; he also has obvious administrative skills. The bright teenager who alienated his brothers with his dreams has now been matured by life’s buffeting. He is prepared. And he has prospered. Rightly he names his second son, “God has made me fruitful in the land of my misfortunes” (41:52).
But the best evidence of Joseph’s maturity is yet to be seen. It is sometimes easier to run an empire than to make peace with one’s own family, and easier to execute orders than to forgive injuries. In the course of time Joseph is visited by his brothers. The teenager is now a grown man, dressed in the regal garb of an Egyptian ruler so his brothers don’t recognize him. But he knows them. The situation is dramatically reversed from that dark day when they sold him into slavery. Now they are the suppliants and he is in command.
PRAYER: When I have moments of power, O Lord, help me use my strength with kindness and wisdom; in Jesus’ name. Amen.
When Joseph interprets Pharaoh’s dream, he gives credit to God. How does this compare with his attitude as a boy, reporting his dreams to his family?
| GENESIS 43–45 | Week 3, Day 7 |
When you read these chapters, you realize why the Nobel-prize winning German author Thomas Mann felt driven to expand the story into a four-volume novel. What a plot: Brothers sell their brother into slavery, then are dependent on him years later when he is in a position of absolute power. His father thinks his son long dead but now gets the unbelievable news that the boy is not only alive but as successful as only that boy could have dreamed.
And what a tangle of emotions! Follow the brothers, from resentment to revenge to deception to fear. Or the father, from despair and grief, to fear of losing his other “special” son, to a fantasy of reunion. And Joseph, of course. Surely during his slave and prison days, and perhaps even more in his position of power, he must have contemplated revenge.
But the issue to the writer of Genesis is more than plot or human psychology. He sees God at work. Even through the ugliness of human jealousy and brutality, even in a motley course of heartbreaks and delay, God is working out the divine will. Joseph is so sure of it that he makes the point three times in one paragraph. The brothers are not to “be distressed” for what they did, because “God sent me before you to preserve life” (45:5), “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth” (45:7), “So it was not you who sent me here, but God” (45:8). Joseph sees a far larger plot than his brothers ever dreamed.
PRAYER: May I have the faith, dear Savior, to see your hand at work in all the fortunes of my life! In the name of your Son. Amen.
List the emotions experienced by Joseph and by his brothers in their crucial meetings.
Prayer Time
I will pray daily for these persons who need God’s guidance or intervention in their lives:
How the Drama Develops GENESIS 28–45
The drama continues to unfold in its own complicated, uneven way. Complicated, not because God is difficult but because we humans are so often erratic in the way we handle God’s gifts and opportunities. And complicated too because we live in a world where evil is a factor. We may try earnestly to pursue God’s purposes with pure hearts, but we have to do so in a setting where others seek to thwart those purposes and where the very forces of history and culture are against us.
Jacob obeys his parents’ wishes, and also the plan for a special, separate people, when he seeks a wife from the land of Haran. But then the story gets complicated, and it is not an entirely pretty story; but this is where the story will have to unfold, in a setting where women are often treated as property and where people deceive even as they negotiate, a culture of multiple wives and concubines. It will be interesting to see what good can be brought out of such a world as this.
The development of our drama proceeds mainly, in these chapters, on two matters. The first is Jacob’s confrontation with God (and with himself) in the wrestling with the divine messenger before the reunion with his brother Esau. It is here that Jacob is in some special ways transformed; he loses, and yet he prevails. So it is with every conversion. It is also here that Jacob’s name is changed to Israel, the name that will become historic and to our very day identify his descendants.
Before going on, let me insert a parenthesis. I’m referring to the strange story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38. It’s a soap-opera kind of thing. But it has unique significance to us because the descendant of the unseemly union between Judah and Tamar becomes an ancestor of our Lord (Matthew 1:3).
But the second major matter for this period is the story of Joseph—and also, of course, of Joseph and his brothers. It would be a fascinating tale even if we saw no eternal significance in it. Here is a boy who is his father’s favorite, and the father unfeelingly flaunts that favoritism. The boy is also extraordinarily talented, and he keeps that no secret either. So we’re not surprised his brothers want to be rid of him.
Then, a roller coaster of events: quick success, victimization, imprisonment, faithfulness in a hard place, years of waiting, then—suddenly, it seems—he is dramatically elevated to the second place in the land. In the process, of course, Joseph is the administrative savior of the Egyptian people in a time of famine and the preserver of his own family as well.
How does Joseph fit into our continuing drama? First, in this (as he himself declares) he was God’s instrument to keep his family alive: “God sent me before you to preserve life” (Genesis 45:5). This is the first instance of God’s intervening on behalf of the family of Israel. The Jewish feast days of Passover and Purim celebrate the continuing story of preservation—and many would say that it has continued through the holocaust of the twentieth century.
Joseph also has a special role as the father of Ephraim and Manasseh. These two sons are “adopted” into Jacob’s family, and Ephraim becomes the symbol of the ten northern tribes so that the prophets often refer to those tribes simply as Ephraim.
Seeing Life Through Scripture
How does God work in our lives? To what degree is God involved in either personal or national history? The Hebrew Scriptures would not hesitate in answering that question. Indeed, for the Scriptures, it is not a question. God’s involvement