Chapters 42 to 45 of Genesis are fascinating chapters. Joseph's actions achieve in his brothers what their father's tears never did - the awakening of their conscience. There are insights in this story into the way God moves in our lives to awaken in us the conviction of sin which is the necessary prelude to forgiveness and reconciliation with Him, for forgiveness can never be conveyed to any but repentant hearts.
First a swift outline of events:
1. Famine in Canaan brings the brothers down to Egypt to buy grain. They have to buy from Joseph, for he is now governor of Egypt. He recognises them at once, but they fail to recognise him. Twenty-five years have passed: he is grown from youth to middle-aged man, an Egyptian Government Official in full regalia.2. He treats them like strangers and speaks roughly to them, accusing them falsely by a stratagem, and imprisoning them for three days.
3. Keeping Simeon as a hostage to ensure that next time they come they bring Benjamin with them, he sends them off, having put back in their sacks all the money they had paid him for the grain.
4. Continued famine fetches them back to Egypt a second time. Much against Jacob's wishes, and with Judah standing surety for his safety, they take Benjamin with them, together with the money that was found in their sacks.
5. This time, although Joseph is overwhelmed by the sight of his brother Benjamin and has to turn aside to weep, he receives them kindly, feasts them and sends them on their way. But he has arranged for his silver cup to be hidden in Benjamin's sack, and then sends the police after them to recover it. Joseph threatens to enslave Benjamin, and this prompts the brothers to risk everything for the lad's safety. They care for Benjamin as 25 years earlier they should have cared for Joseph.
6. Now at last Joseph makes himself known to them, assures them of forgiveness, and they are reconciled to him. The story ends with the whole family reunited, in peace and plenty.
It is a tale, with its twists and turns, in the best traditions of oriental story-telling. But it is more than that. One is bound to ask, "Why didn't Joseph, the first time they met, either have his revenge on them at once, or at once assure them of his forgiveness?"
The reason Joseph did not take his revenge is to be found in his character. That was not like him, and in this he reflects the character of God - God is not like that either, and we misunderstand His judgments if we think of them as vengeful.
The reason why Joseph does not forgive them at once is to be found in the brothers' character. Had forgiveness been offered them before they had become repentant, it would have miscarried. These men had been covering their sin by sheer deceit (and self-deceit) for 25 years. Their consciences had to be awakened. They had to be convicted of their sin before it could be forgiven.
Joseph had had years in which to ponder what he would do when this moment came. The first step to be taken, surely, must be to establish how things really stood between them. By their actions years ago they had made themselves strangers and enemies to him; had anything happened in the intervening years to change that? Before he reveals himself he must know what is in their hearts. So he puts them in the same situation in which they once had once put him, in the pit; and by his insistence that he bring back Benjamin with them, he resurrects old memories and awakens a due sense of responsibility, and with it a pressure on them to repent.
Now this is a principle central to all God's dealings with us. The Bible never speaks of forgiveness without speaking in the same breath of repentance. Unless we repent, unless we are first made smartingly aware of the offence of which we are guilty, the premature offer of forgiveness fails to relieve us of our guilt. It only encourages in us the mistaken notion that our sin is of little consequence, since it can be passed over so lightly.
Note Psalm 32:1-2: "Blessed is the man to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity ... in whose spirit there is no deceit." The self-deceit by which we seek to smother conscience has to be broken up, ploughed, before the fruitful seed of forgiveness can be sown in our hearts. And God is faithful in His dealings with us in this matter - "He disciplines every son whom He receives." (Hebrews 12:6) Let none of us fancy ourselves exempt from this painful pressure toward self-honesty. There is no-one mature in faith, nor has any person really grown in grace, who has not been taught by God to say with the psalmist (119:67) "Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now I have kept Thy word."
Joseph's way of preparing his brothers to recognise him and be reconciled to him throws light on the ways by which God prepares us to recognise Him and be reconciled to Him. He awakens our slumbering consciences by similar methods to prepare us for the forgiveness of our sins and our reconciliation to Him in joyous fellowship. Always remember that that is the end to which God is working when He seems (sometimes cruelly) to be disturbing our lives.
We would of course be interpreting the story too woodenly to say that God awakens us by pursuing the same programme of pressures on us, step for step, as though the story of Joseph and his brothers supplied an inflexible agenda God works through with us, and which we could tick of item by item in orderly progression. Rather the story simply suggests some of the ways by which God brings us to the state of mind and heart in which we learn to say, as the brothers said of Joseph: "In truth, we are guilty concerning our brother, Jesus Christ, who was made bone of our bone for us, and flesh of our flesh."
Famine was the first thing that drove the brothers to seek help. Distress drove them to him, as God often uses it to drive us to seek Him. It was the pressure of want, remember, that drove the prodigal son to turn his steps toward home. It was the Father's purpose that the famine served in the far country.
Not that the famine was in either story a punishment, inflicted on the brothers or the prodigal for their sins. Famine is evidence rather that the world God has given us to live in offers us no security. God alone is our real security - not anything in this world; and God has so made the world that it bears witness to this truth. It is God's purpose which is served when we suffer the collapse of our earthly security. He means it to drive us to Him.
God will use economic recession in this way, as He uses unemployment and many other social ills. He does not Himself bring them on - we do by our own greed and folly; but He uses them.
Is that happening to us just now? Is much that we had set our heart on being snatched from us ... much that this world gives ... youth, beauty, health, success and wealth? And while we enjoyed those good gifts of the Heavenly Father, did we have Him in our thoughts, prizing the Giver above His gifts? Did we set our affection the while on things above, or only on these things below? Have we lived for the world beyond the horizon of these visible things, or have we lived for this world only? And now God is calling a famine on our land, and breaking our staff of bread on which we leaned? When will we say "Come, let us return to the Lord: for He has torn and He will heal us: He has smitten, and He will bind us up"?
The second thing was that Joseph treated his brothers like strangers and spoke roughly to them.
God, too, does that.
We have cried to the Lord, and He does not hear us? We have come to Him with our bitter need, and prayed to Him, and He has not listened? Our distress continues, and our prayer is not answered We beat at Heaven's door, but it is as brass, and it does not open to us? It is as though there is no-one behind it? Why does God not hear us? Why is all the testimony His saints have borne to Him that He is a God who hears and answers prayer not true for us?
Remember what the Psalmist wrote (Psalm 18): "With the loyal Thou dost show Thyself loyal: with the blameless Thou dost show Thyself blameless; with the pure Thou dost show Thyself pure: and with the crooked Thou dost show Thyself perverse."
We are strangers to God, alienated from Him by our self-will. It may be said of Him as it was said of Joseph (v. 8), "He knows us, but we do not know Him." We are His enemies (Romans 5:10), and He must alert us to the truth of how things really stand between us. So He treats us like strangers, speaking roughly to us in wrath and condemnation until we learn to say, "In truth, we are guilty concerning our brother (Jesus Christ) in that we saw the distress of His soul (upon the cross) when He besought us, and we would not listen."
God shows a hard, impassive face to us till we are driven to such self-questioning that our fault begins at last to appear before our eyes - that we have presumed all our life that even God Himself is there, along with all else, only to minister to our convenience. How else shall we learn, in our bones, that it is His requirements the world was built to meet, not ours - that we were given life to satisfy Him? The question must be settled who is to be God in our life.
It seems hard, this? ... "a hard saying - who can bear it?" It is a saying only the proud cannot bear.
We do not see, while God presents so harsh a face to us, that like Joseph He must turn His face away to hide His weeping. Like Joseph watching his brothers' conscience awaking, He weeps to see the hurt it does us. His heart yearns the while, as Joseph's did, to gather us to Him; but He must restrain Himself until the work of conviction be fully done. He desires only to bring us to the point where, like Hezekiah, we say: "Lo, it was for my welfare that I had great bitterness; for now Thou hast cast all my sins behind Thy back." (Isaiah 38:17)
As Joseph did his brothers, God puts us in a prison - a prison of felt condemnation - "for three days." But the end He has in view is the healing of our estrangement.
The third thing was that for a little while, Joseph put his brothers in the wrong with him, just as they had once put him falsely in the wrong with them. They had a taste of their own bitter medicine.
Note ch. 44:16: "Judah said, 'What shall we say to my lord? What shall we speak? Or how can we clear ourselves? God has found out the guilt of your servants; behold, we are my lord's slaves, both we and he also in whose hand the cup has been found.'"
Said F. B. Meyer:
"God sometimes allows us to be treated as we have treated Him, that we may see our offence in its true character, and be obliged to turn to Him with words of true contrition.
"Your child has turned out badly. You did everything for him; now he refuses to do what you wish, and even scorns you. Do you feel it? Perhaps this will reveal to you what God feels in that, though He has nourished you and brought you up, yet you have rebelled against him.
"Your neighbour, when in trouble, sought your help, and you gave it to him. Now he prospers and you ask him to repay you, but he laughs at you, or tells you brusquely to wait. Do you feel it? Now you know how God feels, who helped you in your distress, and you made vows to Him which you have long declined to honour.
"You know what it is to wait at a door which, though you knock on it, never opens; listening for a footfall which never comes? Do you feel it? Now you know what He feels who has knocked at your door, it may be for years; and still He waits ... and it has not dawned on you yet that when you open to Him at last, it will be to find Him waiting there, His arms loaded with benefits with which He would enrich you - as, soon, Joseph will his brothers." (F. B. Meyer, "Joseph", Morgan & Scott, p. 97)
The fourth means by which Joseph - not broke up, but melted his brothers' hearts was by touches of tenderness and displays of generosity.
Even while events bewildered them, even while their hearts were distressed by a bad conscience, even while they wondered in their helplessness what they could do, he feasted them at his own table, so they drank and were merry with him. Their sacks were filled, and their money put back in them, not once but twice.
Interpret God's mercies aright. Not only by the pressure of want, not only by the discipline of unanswered prayer, not only by a taste of our own medicine, but also by His kindness God would bring us to repentance. "Would you," asks Paul, "presume upon the wealth of His kindness to you, upon His forbearance and patience with you? Do you not know that God's kindness has for its purpose to lead you to repentance?" (Romans 2:4)
God will often bless us with joys, with pleasures, with delights, so that gleams of His love may strike into our hearts and draw us to desire Him. He cannot pour the full tide of His affection upon us until He can do so without harm to ourselves or injury to others, but He would have us know, even while He restrains His yearning, that these things await us.
Sometimes good fortune makes us cry, as it did the brothers, "What has God done to us?" - and our heart is filled with a strange fear when in point of fact, God's dealings with us brim with blessings, and are working out a purpose of mercy that shall make us rejoice all our days ... but in Him. And our joy no man then shall be able ever to take from us. God's purpose, in all His ways with us, grave or gay, is to tune us to Him - to Him - so we be truly blessed and at ease in the Father's House.
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