The story of Joseph, familiar from Sunday School days, merits attention with more experienced eyes. The book of Genesis, where it is told, is the Book of Beginnings; and it is salutary that after a prologue occupying the first eleven chapters, the rest of this book of beginnings should be occupied with a family saga that covers four generations: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. It takes four generations to spell out something big enough to say about the way life works out under God.
i. Wisdom grows slow
As the story unfolds we find ourselves occupied with big themes - of providence, predestination, guilt and forgiveness, judgment and grace. These are themes that cannot be unfolded fully in the span of only one man's life. The meaning of life in this world is too big for that.
It is worth reflecting on. We live in what we might call an 'instant age.' We cannot wait - not even for our coffee to percolate, or our tea to brew: we must have instant coffee and instant tea, and instant meals, and instant transport. If we go to California for a holiday, we want to leave after breakfast and be there for tea. We even try to achieve instant education with sleep-teaching techniques, and we have geared our education system to turn out 'experts' before they are growing proper stubble on their chins. The disease infects almost every part of our lives - even our Christian lives. We want instant evangelism with revival in full swing by tomorrow at the latest, and we want to become complete Christians overnight.
But in all this eagerness for swift results, we grow blind to the slow and patient ways of God. It is to our grievous loss. The redemption of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ was not accomplished overnight. It required centuries of pre-history, and apart from that long preparation the Cross and the Resurrection would have been all but incomprehensible. It is no accident that God's Book is a history book. Until we are still enough and patient enough to reflect at leisure on the long, long ways of God, there is a whole dimension of truth to which we shall never awaken. The past is not to be despised; even God needs it to teach us. Wisdom grows slow. Alas for the world if it should come to be governed by the young who have no regard for truth which only reflection on a long past can disclose. Said Pitt the Prime Minister of England, when asked what he most coveted for his son, "I would have him learn a little history." It is worth remembering that Jesus said of Mary who sat at His feet and listened, that she had chosen a better part than Martha whose only concern was with the demands of the present moment. Dinner can wait.
We have need of patience, as the Scriptures tell us.
And not least in the matter of our own progress as a Christian. I cannot remember who it was who said, "When you are young, every defeat seems final." We suffer needless despair, often, it seems to me. Dr. Campbell Morgan it was who said "I meet so many people who are impatient with themselves when God is patient with them. Not on a sudden is all God's work accomplished in a human soul." We should give God time. Experiences He has planned for us, as yet in the future, will be necessary before the things He is doing in our life now can yield their full fruit, or even be understood.
That first, by way of general introduction.
ii. A Secular tale
The second observation to make by way of introduction (it took me by surprise when I first prepared these studies) is what a very secular tale it is. There is not a 'churchy' bit in it anywhere. From beginning to end, no religious ceremonies occur; nor, as I recall, is there even a mention of prayer. To be sure, God's hand is seen in events, but those events take place out in the wide world, not in cloistered cathedral precincts. The open pastures of Dothan, the public roads, a wealthy pagan home, prisons, warehouses and palaces - these are the scenes in which the action takes place. Nor are there any recognisably religious characters in the story; agricultural workers, travelling merchants, court officials (and their idle wives), mounted police, prison governors, political overlords - these are the 'dramatis personae.' Only Joseph moves among these people and places with any awareness that human life is lived out before God's face. But at the end of the story, God is seen to have been at work, weaving all these worldly people and secular affairs into a pattern of His choosing. The hustle and bustle of worldly life is the scene of God's activity, and His purpose goes forward through all its rough and tumble by means of one man's faith and obedience.
Joseph's obedience more than once puts him at a disadvantage. Because he will not compromise, his own life looks a mess at times. Far from progressing smoothly, his career is interrupted by setbacks and reverses that plunge him into obscurity. It must have seemed at times like sheer waste, and a flat denial of God's plan for his life as it had been told him in his teenage dreams.
In a little book called "God on Monday" Simon Phipps, an industrial chaplain in the U.K., made an impassioned plea for Christians to recognise the 'world' as the arena of Christian obedience, and its secular affairs as the raw material for that obedience. "The world," he wrote, "the secular world, is man's means of response of God." (Simon Phipps, "God on Monday" Hodder & Stoughton, p. 15) The world where God is not seen is the place where He is heard ... and busy. Where real-life situations call for justice and righteousness and compassion, there God is calling for our obedience.
There is more to life than meets the eye, and in any of its everyday affairs, the Christian may suddenly find himself alerted to that 'something more.' But all too often, we fail to respond as we should because the challenge that disturbs us does not look 'religious.' It concerns the interests of folk in worldly pursuits who are not motivated by faith, and there is no recognisable way in which 'the church' as an institution can be involved.
How, for example, can 'the church' influence a dispute between trades union and management? The short answer is that it cannot. But in the person of a Christian in that trade union or on that management staff it can, as he obeys God in the way he behaves in that dispute - even though his obedience may lose him his job, as it did Joseph more than once. Joseph was just such an 'alerted' man. Whether in the fields of Dothan, or the house of Potiphar, or the prisons and palaces of Pharaoh, Joseph lived with his mind and heart alert to what God required of him in each of those situations.
And the interesting thing is that he did so by serving the best interests of those whom one might call his employers. He served his father Jacob well by 'going the second mile' from Shechem to Dothan; he served Potiphar well as a servant in his house; he served the prison governor well as a 'trusty;' he served Pharaoh's interests by annexing land, strengthening the monarchy rather than his own position. None of these people whose interests Joseph served (save his father Jacob) had any interest in Joseph's God; none of these situations was at all religious on the surface. But Joseph simply served the best interests of those to whom he was responsible, regardless of the cost to his own career ... and found at the end of the day that he had served God! Whether he was promoted or made redundant, his career furthered the purposes of God. Those purposes were far bigger than his own career; but even so, his career did not suffer ... not in the end. (50:20)
It is worth reflecting on the formative years of Joseph's life. When he is introduced into the Biblical narrative he is a seventeen year old youth. Look at some of the high points of those seventeen years.
i. His mothering
Joseph was Rachel's first-born. Jacob had suffered fourteen years of hard labour to his father-in-law Laban to get Rachel to wife, and "they seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her," we are told. But it was another long span of years before she bore him a child. By the sloe-eyed Leah and other women in his house, Jacob had son after son after son ... ten of them no less. But then at last Joseph was born to Rachel, the beautiful and the beloved. And with Joseph's birth, all the other ten lads became in Jacob's eyes as nothing. Joseph grew up his father's blue-eyed boy, in a household riddled with intrigues, conspiracies and jealousies. If ever a family brew was mixed to produce a problem child, it was brewed in Jacob's household. Joseph should have been the original mixed-up kid.
But there were other influences that helped shape him. Different from his brothers he may have been - like a fair Saxon child in a brood of swarthy gypsies; but what a history was his through his childhood!
While small still, he was hastily caught up by his mother, and carried in her arms on the back of a swift camel in flight across the desert. He could just remember the panic that swept through the camp when tidings came that his dreaded uncle Esau was marching on them with a private army.
And after that panic, peace, because his father prayed!
ii. His father
Nor would he ever forget the morning when his father limped back into the camp after a strange and troubled night, maimed in body, but with the look of a prince upon his face. How much of all that Joseph understood as a child is open to question. But it surely left him with a clear impression that no man who survived a personal encounter with the living God could afterwards be anything but profoundly changed - a humbler, wiser, meeker man.
Later still, he was to experience those solemn hours at Bethel where his father showed him the very spot where the foot of the mystic ladder had seemed to him in his dream to rest, and where the whole family solemnly entered into covenant with Jacob's God. It may be that that was a turning point in his life. Such occasions make a deep impression on young hearts. As they stood together on that hallowed earth and heard again the story of Jacob's dream, and clasped each other's hands in the solemn making of a life-long vow, the other sons of Jacob may have been unmoved by it; but there was a moving response deep in the heart of young Joseph. That may well have been a night when he vowed in his heart, "This God shall be my God, for ever and for ever. He shall be my guide, even unto death." (Psalm 48:14)
If ever we have had such experiences in our childhood or early youth, we should cherish the memory of them, and pray God that no sophistication may ever lead us in later life to despise them. Those early responses in our young hearts are motions kindled in us by God that make us free spirits open to His own. They are precious - unspeakably precious. Let yourself be bound by them, for no man is ever so noble, or so free, as when he is binding himself by a vow. Everything in Joseph's later life suggests he was granted them early.
iii. Deaths that affected him
As you move on in Joseph's young life you learn that these early impressions were deepened by three deaths.
First his old nurse Deborah. She was the last link with the old bright days of Isaac's love for Rebekah.
The next Joseph would never forget, for it was his mother Rachel who died, as their caravan moved along the ridge where Bethlehem lay. This must have been the greatest loss the young Joseph knew.
And afterwards they were to lay his grandfather Isaac to rest in Machpelah's venerable grave where Abraham already lay buried.
Three times Joseph in his youth stood before the mystery of death, and each time it took from him a gentle, kindly and beloved spirit, each of whom in their way had nourished in him the springs of faith, and for whom his affection must have been deep and strong.
Has our own experience been like that? We have lost sainted kith or kin so we have felt alone, bereft, desolate in the presence of immensities that baffled understanding and left the heart sore? And if we have, can we bear to face the question - asked gently: "Have we also entered into covenant with the God who has robbed death of its sting and the grave of its victory? Have such experiences turned our heart to seek Him, Whose love it was He once conveyed to us through those He has taken home? Have we understood that the good we knew, reaching us through them, was His, and that in losing them we have not lost Him by Whose Spirit it was they nourished us? Are we trusting in the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Rebekah ... and of our mother, or that old family friend?" Death has many meanings, but one of the meanings God intends it should have for us is that in the face of it we have none to lean on but Him, and it is to draw us to repose a deeper trust in Him that He permits it.
If we learn to strike our roots deeper into God by every life-experience that dismays us, we will draw from Him an inner strength that makes us stronger than the power of these things to embitter or waste away our spirit.
These then were the experiences, or at least the more significant ones, that had shaped this teenage boy, and made him what he was.
Now he was to taste life's roughness. This fledgling, reared by refined spirits like Deborah's and Rachel's, a youth whose sheltered nurture had stimulated high ideals in his nature, was thrust into the company of coarse, rough, insensitive men whose manner of life shocked and offended him. He was sent into the fields as a shepherd with the four of his brothers who were the sons of his father's serving women - not of his mother Rachel or his step-mother Leah. Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher were a brutish bunch. So Joseph, the cotton-wool child, has his first taste of life in the raw.
How he reacted we shall think about later. We may think he reacted very badly by carrying back an evil report of them to his father Jacob - that he pimped. Or we may form a different judgment, and see in it a raw courage in one so young. It is no easy business for a young apprentice to speak out against the abuses of his established workmates when they are already a gang who have got sewn up between them all that goes on on the factory floor.
However we adjudge Joseph's reaction, the point to reflect on is that this experience, dismaying - frightening, indeed - as it was, was permitted to him in the providence of God. Joseph must learn to fight to keep hold on the convictions his childhood and youth had bred in him. He must learn to do so through suffering for them. He must learn to be faithful to them when everything in life conspired to persuade him that there was no future for him unless he abandoned them. He must learn to cling to them when they bring him no comfort, but only abuse and scorn, and even hatred.
A young man's departure from home and his immersion in a world that ridicules all he holds dear is a critical time. Wounds can be suffered whose scars remain for life. But not even God will spare us them. For it is His purpose that His children - all His children - shall have some iron in their souls.
Faith in God is something we have to fight for in the teeth of opposition from those who would tear it from us. Every one of us has to face this crisis of acceptance: whether we will sacrifice our inner integrity to win the approval - the fickle approval - of men, or keep it to keep the approval - the abiding approval - of God.
It is not a fight any man wins without wounds. But it is a better thing to sustain those wounds fighting with the Captain of the Lord's army than to avoid them, in the only way they can be avoided, by going over to the enemy. It is a better thing to sit in company with the Lord on the distressful eve of His final conflict and have Him say, as He said to the disciples in the Upper Room, "You are they who have continued with me in my troubles," than to stand in the company of those who mock Him, feeling safe with the masses, but wake in the morning to find that Christ is risen, and we are in the company of those who rejected Him - alienated from each other by the guilty secret they dare not confess - that in the hour of their visitation they would not yield allegiance to the King.
Their house is left unto them desolate.
Note 1:
Background episodes ...
i. Jacob's two wives, Leah and Rachel. Problems, problems ...
ii. Genesis 30:22 ... at last!
iii. Episodes in Joseph's childhood: (30:43 suggests some time passed before Jacob left Laban)1. The parting from Laban 31:49: the blessing meant "Watch it!"
2. The encounter with the angel 32:22-32 - the effect on Joseph?
3. The encounter with Esau, chs. 32-33 : fear and relief
4. The episode with Shechem, Dinah and the family, ch. 34 : strife
5. Bethel, ch. 35 : God's covenant with Jacob there. Effect on Joseph?
6. Rachel dies, Benjamin born, 35:16. He lost his mother.
Three deaths in fact : Deborah, Rachel, Isaac, each of them gentle, kindly souls who nurtured whatever faith was in him.iv. Ch. 36 obviously marks a division in Genesis ... the Joseph saga is intended as a new section of the book.
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