This morning, we begin to look at the story of Joseph, and continue to see God work through his mysterious providence to work his will.
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His kingdom is forever. Is that good news? Amen, it is. Remain standing a bit longer, if you would, and let’s take our Bibles out and turn this morning to Genesis chapter 37. Genesis 37, and we will read this morning just the first 11 verses of that passage. And I encourage each and every one to give a good attention as we read God’s word this morning. Young people, the youngest and the oldest. I hope that’s not me. Oh no, Jim’s here. So let’s all listen and hear God speak to us in his word.
“Jacob lived in the land of his father’s sojournings in the land of Canaan. These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pasturing the flock with his fathers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons because he was the son of his old age and he made him a robe of many colors. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.
He said to them, hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. His brothers said to him, are you indeed to reign over us or are you indeed to rule over us?
So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and 11 stars were bowing down to me. But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him. and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the saying in mind.”
Let’s pray. Father, God in heaven, we thank you for your word. We ask now that you would bless the one who preaches and bless us who hear, Father, that we may Learn that we may seek to be obedient to what you teach us in this passage, Lord, and may we rejoice in seeing you as you’ve continued to work throughout the history of this creation that you have made. In all of this we pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
And you may be seated. So in our song that we sang just before our reading this morning. We spoke quite a bit of our ancient foe. And so I want to begin this morning and offer this as an opening. This is really a little conversation. It started as a short exchange between two characters in a book called Ender’s Shadow. I’ve edited it a little bit to make it a little more theologically accurate and turned the conversation into a simple question and answer.
The question is this, do you know why Satan is so angry all the time? Well, the answer is because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief, he eventually comes to find that God intended it all along to serve HIS purposes, his righteous purposes. So in the long run, God always wins. But in the short term, it can be uncomfortable.
And that is an apt introduction, I think, this morning, to the story of Joseph, the story on which we embark this morning. Every Sunday school student in here, anyone who has ever been a Sunday school student, knows the story of Joseph. And every student of the Bible of any age can profit from studying it.
And I pray that we will profit from it as we look here at it in this last long section of Genesis. Last week we looked at chapter 36 and looked at the generations of Esau, which was restricted to just that one chapter. Now verse 2 of chapter 37 tells us that these are the generations of Jacob. introducing a new section, they say the last section in the book of Genesis, and this focuses on Jacob’s family. But as the section on the generations of Terah, way back, was mostly about Abraham, and the section in Genesis about the generations of Isaac was mostly about Jacob, So, with the exception of a couple of chapters here, short excursions in this passage, the generations of Jacob is about Joseph.
And it’s one of the great stories of the Bible. A story all the more wonderful amid all of the stories of the world. One of the most wonderful stories because this really happened. The story of how God takes Joseph through some very uncomfortable times in the short run in order to do good in spite of several attempts by others to work some pretty serious mischief. Of course, his brothers will figure prominently in the story, as does his father, Jacob, more towards the end of the story particularly. As we’ve noticed on more than one occasion as we’ve gone through Genesis so far, especially here recently in the story of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, that Jacob’s family is a fallen family, far from perfect. In fact, very far from perfect.
And we’ve made note of the fact that the Bible is very upfront about that. It emphasizes that to emphasize how great the grace of God is in working through these flawed people. Well, the imperfection of the family Jacob is something that we are going to continue to see, and the adjective dysfunctional continues to describe Jacob and his sons. But as we have also focused on, and as I just mentioned, the dysfunction of God’s people, the sin of God’s people is the background against which God’s magnificent grace shines all the more brightly, which, of course, continues through history in God’s dealings with all of the other sinful people that He has dealt with, even down to today. We’ll continue to see here the fact of God’s grace raised again and again in this record of Joseph and his very unbrotherly brothers. It also shows to us what we have seen so much in the book of Genesis and seen so much in the patriarchal history as we’ve looked at it over the past months, and that is the providence of God.
And that’s what really we were talking about here at the beginning with this question about why Satan is so angry because in all of the works of everything, even the work of the devil, God is working providentially through time to bring His will about perfectly. He is sovereign and His providence works out His sovereign will flawlessly throughout history. A particular point of interest here, again as we get started on this, is that while we read a lot of detail about Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the preceding chapters, we followed them and seen so much about them because they are the chosen covenant line through whom the covenant passes. Moving through those particular men, God has made that covenant with them and works through them.
But the story of Joseph is different in that particular, because Joseph is not in the covenant line, in the sense that it will not continue through his offspring, but through his older but not oldest brother, Judah. But God is going to do some wonderful, important covenant work in this story as we work through it. I’ve called the sermon this morning, A Boy, His Coat, and His Dreams, and let’s sort of just make that our outline.
We’ll first look at a boy in his coat. Jacob and his family have now, as we come to chapter 37, have been back in the land of Canaan for about 10 years or so. And in verse 2, we immediately get introduced here to Joseph, the second youngest of Jacob’s son. He is said here in verse 2 to be 17 years old. And when we meet him at the beginning of the story, this young man is pasturing the flocks with his brothers.
He is specifically said to be with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives, and so technically these were his concubine wives. The sons in question there would be Dan and Naphtali and Gad and Asher. And so Joseph is out with them and we’re quickly told and sort of pushed into the story here by hearing at the end of the verse that Joseph brought a bad report of them, of those four young men, brought a bad report of them to their father. Now we immediately run into some things that would be maybe perhaps interesting to us to know that we’re not told, some unanswered questions here.
But we are told that Joseph is a boy here. The word boy can also mean helper. So it’s probable that Joseph has been sent out to be with these older brothers of his to perhaps learn the ropes of shepherding. He might just be part of their group. We’re not told specifically.
It could be that he was told by his father to to go and see what’s up with these guys. Maybe there was some problem, so he sent Joseph to check on them. Or it could be that Joseph is just playing kind of the bratty younger brother and causing trouble among his brothers. As an oldest son in the house, I know how bratty younger brothers can be. And it could be that that is just what it is. But we don’t know. We’re not told.
All we do know is that the report that he brings back to his father, to Jacob, or Israel, is bad. We’re told it’s a bad report. The word bad means evil or harmful. So this is not a good report that he brings. This term, the bad report, in the original same term that’s used of the report of the spies who are sent up into the promised land later in Israel’s history to spy out the land. They, most of them, come back and gave what’s called a bad report in Numbers chapter 13. We’re also not told exactly what it is about the report that’s bad. We’re not given a copy of the report. We’re not told what it is. We’re just told that it’s bad.
And the story then sort of moves on from that to give a little more backstory on the introduction here of Joseph in verses 3 and 4. You’ll perhaps remember that Joseph was born up in northern Mesopotamia in Paddan Aram. He was the last son who was born there.
And you’ll remember that Joseph was born to Rachel. Jacob’s beloved wife, the one that he loved, the one that he had worked for, worked for the privilege of marrying with Laban before Laban tricked him. But Rachel was Jacob’s beloved wife, and we have that mentioned many times. And Joseph was the first of the sons born to Rachel.
And we noted that in the story of Jacob and Esau being reunited, we sort of got this foreshadowing of the importance of Joseph in the fact that Joseph was the only one mentioned by name. Remember that? The others were just his sons or his children. But Joseph was mentioned by name on several occasions there.
And now in verse 3, we are told this, that Israel loved Joseph. We’ll stop there for just a second and say, that’s good, nothing wrong with that, but we read on in the sentence and see that Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons. And why?
Well, we’re told that it was because he was the son of his old age, probably referring to the fact that he, Joseph, was born of Rachel, who was barren until the later years of her life, then the later, the older time of Jacob’s life before he left. It was the last son to be born in Paddan Aram before they headed out of Laban’s territory and headed south. And though it is not said here, it’s said that he loved Joseph because he was the son of his old age, but I can’t help but think that part of his favoritism towards Joseph was because he was the firstborn son of Rachel. We know that Rachel is now gone, which may have endeared Joseph even more to Jacob. The fact that Jacob is said to have loved Joseph more than his other brothers may also have been exacerbated somewhat by the behavior of the brothers, some of them that we’ve seen already.
His three oldest sons have behaved badly. These were the sons of Leah. Remember, two of them have gotten him, Jacob, in potentially deadly trouble. with the neighbors up in Shechem because of what they did. And then Reuben, the next, tried to usurp his father’s position by sleeping with one of Jacob’s concubine wives.
But whatever the reason, there is clear, explicit favoritism at play here with Jacob favoring Joseph over all of his other sons. We’re told straight out that Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons. And if you’re not familiar with the story of Joseph, let me tell you that that is going to be a problem, to say the least. And we might think that Jacob would know better, that he would no better than or he would at least be aware of the problems with parental favoritism because many of his problems arose because of the fact that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob.
He knows what favoritism can do in a family. It was foundational in Jacob and Esau’s strained relationships. So we learned that, and that because of that, that is going to be a problem. But as Ron Popeil, you remember him on television? As he used to say, but wait, there’s more. Jacob, to show his love, his favoritism really, of Joseph, Jacob, at the end of verse 3, made him a robe of many colors.
Now, all of our young people perk up at that, certainly. Everyone knows this story. It’s one of the best-known Sunday school lessons that I can remember. I remember my Sunday school teachers when I was little with their flannel graph showing us, teaching us the story of Joseph and his robe of many colors.
It also works out providentially that, as we just learned a week ago, as in this past week, I think, of the passing of Dolly Parton, one of her earliest and most popular songs was about a coat of many colors. A coat of many colors that mama made for me, she said.
Now, I hate to be that guy. I hate to be that guy that would ruin any of the joys of anyone’s childhood or recollections, but the picture that we have of Joseph’s coat of many colors that Jacob made for him comes to us through a King James Version translation of a Latin translation of the passage. Better translations, more recent scholarship, show us that the coat of many colors that Jacob made for Joseph was probably a robe that had long sleeves. That was not common. Or that went all the way to the ground. That was also not quite common. So the coat of many colors was really a robe with long sleeves that may have gone all the way to the ground. But it was distinctive.
And that’s the point, is that it was distinctive and projected something about Joseph, who received this when the other brothers didn’t. It shows and projects a sense of not only favor Not only that dad likes him best, but also it projects status. It raised Joseph up, the youngest, save one, of the brothers. It put him above them. It would show that Joseph had the status of management as opposed to worker. or like a shirt that says, number one son that Jacob gave to him.
And as such an ostentatious symbol, even without the colors, it had a very easily anticipated effect on the brothers. If I could go back to Dolly Parton for just a moment, I’d have to say that her mama, who in the lyrics of the song says, as she sewed, she told a story from the Bible she had read about a coat of many colors Joseph wore. And then she said, perhaps this coat will bring you good luck and happiness. Well, Dolly’s mother obviously either didn’t know the story or didn’t know it in the near term because that is not what happened. That was not the result of the robe that Jacob gave to Joseph. Verse 4 tells us the result.
But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him. and could not speak peacefully to him. When his brothers put all of this together that we’ve seen so far, even, they hated their brother. They hated him and could not speak peacefully to him. Hated is a very strong word in the original. They loathed him. They abhorred him. They have feelings of open hostility toward him, so much so that they couldn’t even get it together to put on a mask of civility when they spoke to him. They could not speak peacefully to him. And this, of course, if you know the story, you know that this is just the beginning. Just the beginning of the hatred of his brothers, which will very soon turn to physical maltreatment of their younger brother, Joseph. Now, of course, competition among siblings did not start with them, think of Cain and Abel, and it didn’t end with them.
Think of your own family. Competition among siblings is a common situation, and unfortunately it’s even more pronounced today in what we call blended families. which is somewhat the situation here with six children from Leah, two children from Rachel, two children from Bilhah, and two children from Zilpah all living together. Two from the intended loved, favored wife, Rachel. Six from the surreptitiously inserted unloved wife, Leah. And four from their respective maidservants that they really used, if you think back, really used in the battle of the babies that we talked about, too, in their competition with one another. So they’re already starting out here in a difficult place, and now one is clearly set apart by dad, set apart by the one of everyone whose opinion would matter most of all, Jacob, their father.
And we can see, and we’ll see, how this is going to work out. So the boy in his coat start us off and give us, take us a little bit down the road of sort of this opening which gives us a lot of foreshadowing of what’s going to happen really even in the next part of the chapter.
But the second thing that we want to look at this morning is a boy and his dreams. And by that I don’t mean a boy, a young man, and his aspirations for the future, his dreams of what he will do when he grows up. Oh, will he have a wife and a family, a good job, a good church, to be a namesake for not only a Dolly Parton song, but a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. That’s not what I’m talking about by his dreams. I mean literal dreams that are in the text that we read of this morning.
Dreams that God gave to Joseph and that Joseph, I think as we read it, somewhat foolishly, perhaps, shared with his brothers and with his father. The dreams of Joseph here are recorded in chapter 37. They are the first of several dreams that, as we go through this story in the rest of the book of Genesis here, dreams that will take place at important turning points in the story of Joseph. And Joseph’s dreams here serve as a revelation from God to him and his family of what is going to transpire in the course of the story. That was very often the case, especially in the Old Testament. Dreams were avenues of divine revelation in the Old Testament. And these two dreams that Joseph has is given really set the stage for the story of Joseph that’s just now beginning to unfold. and beginning here the providential outworking of it. And by the time we reach the end of the story, we will see that it also shows that what is to follow is God sovereignly working out His will in this situation.
Two dreams are given to him here, which will be the pattern, by the way, for other dreams that we’ll see later in the story. Two dreams of Pharaoh and then two dreams of the servants in Pharaoh’s house. Coming in pairs like that serve to authenticate the dreams, not just one coming, might be a fluke, might be discarded, but to, in fact, Joseph himself, when we get to chapter 41, when Pharaoh has his dreams, Joseph says this very thing. He says, in verse 32 of chapter 41, Joseph says to Pharaoh, And so we see the same thing here, God emphasizing authorizing in a sense, giving his stamp that this is really from him in these two dreams of Joseph. There are similarities and differences between Joseph’s two dreams that we see here in the second part of our passage.
The first dream comes with the introduction here in verse 5, and with three facts that are given there in verse 5. It says, So three things. Joseph has a dream, Joseph tells the dream to his brothers, and his brothers hate him because of the dream. In verses six and seven, we read of it, the dream, the first dream. He said to them, hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, behold, look, listen, we were binding sheaves in the field and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright and behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. You know, many people have made a very good living by writing books and doing seminars and stuff and such on finding meaning in and interpreting people’s dreams and by selling the books about it.
There are literally hundreds of them on Amazon to choose from. Don’t buy any. I’m a skeptic, of course, about those kinds of things. I think they’re hokum. And the interpretations and the methods of interpretations are as varied as you might think they would be. There’s psychoanalytic approaches to interpreting dreams, and cognitive approaches, and cultural approaches, and sort of spiritual approaches.
But in this dream that we have of Joseph here, no one would need a book to interpret this dream. He told his brothers, we were binding sheaves in the field. That in itself is interesting because they’re shepherds, they’re not farmers. And the binding sheaves is part of harvesting wheat or other grain, so that is interesting. That little detail will hook this to later dreams and later, yeah, the later dreams that happened, Pharaoh’s dream, remember, of seven full ears of grain, of wheat, and seven withered ones up in chapter 41.
And remember that it will be wheat that is so important in the later story that is stored up because of the wisdom of Joseph later in the story. But the overall meaning of the dream was very clear to Joseph’s brothers. And if Joseph was concerned about how his brothers were relating to him, He made then absolutely the wrong choice in telling his dream to them. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here and see Joseph as recognizing that this was a message from God and was thus needful to share with them. He doesn’t state that in the retelling of the dream, but that is often the way that dreams functioned, as we’ve mentioned. And as I say, his brothers don’t have to consult the Encyclopedia of Dream Interpretation to see what his dream was saying.
And they understandably reply in verse 8 Are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to rule over us? That’s what they took from the dream. Makes absolute sense. They recognize, they interpret it as Joseph saying, that they’re all going to end up being subservient to Joseph. That he is going to be, or thinks he is going to be, one to reign over them and to rule over them. And he appears confident. Notice here, and we see it also in the second dream, he keeps using the word, behold.
Behold, behold, behold. Look at this. It means give attention to this. Pay attention. This is important. This is not like just waking up and saying, hey, I had a dream last night, and it was about this or that. He’s emphasizing this in the way that he presents it. Is he bragging about it?
We don’t know. But, and by the way, not to give away the farm here, but the answer to their question, are you indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to rule over us? The answer, of course, is yes. Now, of course, the only one who knows that right now at this point is he who knows the end from the beginning and brings all things to pass through the counsel of his will. But we know it because we have the story. by God’s grace given to us. And we know that that’s exactly what will happen.
But the reaction of the brothers is very predictable, verse end of verse 8, so they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then God confirms the message by a second dream given to Joseph in verse 9, then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers.
In this dream, there’s a little shift in the imagery, not sheaves of grain here. Behold, the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars were bowing down to me. If anything, a bigger picture. The image now is heavenly. The point is that earthly things bear witness to this in the first dream, and now heavenly things are bearing witness to the same. This is pointing out, pointing to the authority, the authority in heaven and on earth is attesting to the truth of this.
The eleven stars obviously, his eleven brothers, The sun and the moon would refer to his father and mother, his whole family really. Yes, his mother Rachel, his blood mother Rachel, is dead, but it could be referring to Leah, his stepmother remaining. It could also just be a way of generically referencing that the whole family unit will give obeisance to Joseph. And so because of this dream, because this dream has reference to his father as well, he also tells Jacob about it.
That wasn’t true in the first one. And again, especially in the context of the ancient Near East family structure that we’ve had opportunity to talk about, the centrality of the father and such a usual attention and focus on birth order, this is absurd. Absurd enough to think that he would reign over or thinks that he would reign over his older siblings, his older brothers, but to think that he would reign over his father? That just did not happen.
And they are all appalled by this. And even, verse 10, his father rebukes him. But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you? I can sort of picture all the other brothers standing behind the father as he does that and going, yeah, yeah.
Verse 11 records two reactions. The brothers were jealous of him. Makes sense, we’ve seen that. As the story will bear out, if we think back to how Simeon and Levi reacted a couple of chapters ago, Joseph probably should have been very careful about giving this dream, telling this dream to them. We know that they are the At least they are the hot-headed members of the family. We saw that they, because of the admittedly horrid attack on their sister, that they wiped out a whole city, a whole city of men, and then took all of the rest of the people captive and all the stuff captive. So there I would speak gingerly around them. That’s the first thing.
The second thing, and here’s the most interesting reaction, And that is that his father, he rebukes him, but at least internally he defers judgment on this, doesn’t he? At the very end of the passage, in verse 11, it says, but his father kept this saying in mind. You know, maybe Joseph’s out of line here, but maybe this dream, or these dreams, two of them, do come from God. But the brothers are jealous.
Very often happens when someone, a person has moved into leadership position that the ones who aren’t will often become jealous and that’s what takes place here. Again, emphasized because of the family structure back in that time. So now the important parts of the story here are in place. The situation is set up for us for what is going to happen. The natural tension that exists between half-siblings in a family that were in fact evident in Isaac and Ishmael and in Jacob and Esau are now in place between Joseph and his brothers. We have set up for us and established this favored status of Joseph in the eyes of his father. It’s been evidenced.
It’s been made clear to Joseph and, more importantly, to the other brothers by this special coat that Joseph was given by Jacob. And we have now these two dreams that have even more emphasized the setting apart of Joseph and elevating him. These two dreams have symbolically foretold Joseph’s ultimate rule over Jacob’s household. But the immediate result of these events is that Joseph’s brothers have an intense jealousy in regard to Joseph, a distrust of him, a loathing, a hatred of him that has just been building and building and building. And even his father, Jacob, Israel, is incredulous that Joseph seems to be implying by his dream that not only his brothers, but the father, Jacob himself, will bow down to him.
Again, a fairly absurd possibility. But Jacob, as we saw, keeps this in mind. He kept the saying in mind. Very similar kind of idea and similar phraseology to Jesus’ mother, Mary, in regard to the things that were told to her about the future suffering and glory of her son. We read a couple of times in the Gospels that she pondered or treasured these things up in her heart. That seems to be what Jacob is doing as well.
So I made the point earlier that it is interesting in this story that in this last big chunk of Genesis that Joseph is being made front and center here since Joseph and his descendants or his descendants are not the covenant line that will go Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and then eventually to David and eventually to Jesus. But Joseph is, and his story is commonly understood as prefiguring in many ways the story of Christ and of his ministry.
Joseph is very often seen as a type of Christ. Now a type, if you’re not familiar with that, a type in scripture is a real historical person or object that functions as a pattern to foreshadow something in this particular aspect of Christ. Very often messianic, very often referenced to salvation. And there are many of these types of Christ that we have in the Old Testament.
And it is generally understood that Joseph, in many of the aspects of his life and of his story, functions as a type of Christ. Now, we do have to be a little careful and add a bit of a caveat to saying that. And almost everyone who studies the story says that. But we have to be a little careful in assigning him that lofty role in the biblical record. And that is because the Bible never points to Joseph as a type of Christ.
And true, certified, if you will, types are given that certification in the Scripture. Just one example I’ll give is we talk about the, remember, the children of Israel in the wilderness, the serpent that Moses was told by God to put on the staff and to put it up. The people that were bitten by the snakes would look at it, and if they looked at it in belief, that they would be cured. And we understand that as a type of Christ, and we are given good confidence to do that. We are on solid footing there because Jesus himself said, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. So you see, we kind of have that stamp of authority in talking about the serpent in the wilderness as a type of Christ.
But that’s never done for Joseph. But biblical scholars still identify Joseph as a type of Christ based on life parallels. So though he may not be a verifiable type, many aspects of his life are theologically meaningful as illustrations of redemptive themes and foreshadowings, at least, of many of the things that happen in the life of Christ. We’ll talk about them more later, won’t go into it this morning, but in his status of being beloved and favored by his Father, that’s one.
His divine mission to his brothers, we’ll see that next week. His betrayal and his subsequent exaltation, his stalwart resistance to temptation, the provision of sustenance through him, the reconciliation of enemies through him. are all examples of these things that we look at Joseph’s life and we see in him a lot of what we see in Christ.
There are others, we’ll meet with some as we go through the rest of the book. But what we will see in the rest of the book, again, very clearly is this. We will see God once again working in and through circumstances that seem unworkable through circumstances that we cannot see how God would work through these to bring the result that he does.
But it is he who sends the messages through the dreams that on one hand, even here in our passage here, on one hand arouse in the brothers this ember of this intense hatred toward Joseph that will be used by God to move the story in the exact direction that It needs to go and does go.
A direction, by the way, in the short run, which the devil would be quite happy to see. Disrupted families, the anger, the hatred, the retribution, those actions of the brothers. Those are the things that would make our enemy very happy to see those things happening. But that takes us back to the quote at the beginning of the sermon today. because Satan’s joy will always be short-lived because he will eventually come to find out that God intended these things all along to serve his own righteous purposes. Now, we’d be careful. God did not cause the brothers to hate Joseph. They hated him of their own accord.
But God not just used that because God doesn’t just react to things and say, okay, how can I make this work out? God intends, he works through, he decrees all of these things to move in a certain way to serve his own righteous purposes. So we will see here that in the long run, God always wins. God always achieves his good and perfect purposes.
But in the short run, there’s going to be discomfort for Joseph, for his family, for the world through this story. But through the hatred of Joseph’s brothers, God will send Joseph ahead to prepare for the salvation of God’s people. Just as he did, by the way, in the sending of his own son, Jesus Christ. God sent him in the midst of his enemies in order that through the very evil and hateful actions of his Jesus brothers, the Jews, that he would provide salvation for all of his people. That’s how the idea of this Joseph as a type of Christ and the situation as a type works.
So while Satan’s joy here will be short-lived, beloved, ours will be everlasting. as we are recipients of God’s saving grace through Jesus Christ and by the God who causes all of his good and perfect will, including your salvation, Christian, to come to pass.
And to that, let us say amen. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you, Lord, for For Your Word, we thank You for the opening of this story. We look forward, Father, to continuing to see how You will work all of these things out. We thank You that Even here we are given the indication, Lord, and the assurance that you are sovereign over all things, that you work through your providence that is many times mysterious, that is many times to us dark and unknowable. But when we look back, Lord, we thank you that we are able to see that through it all you work, and we thank you for that. And we pray this all in Christ’s name, amen.