John Eldridge says that every man “wants a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.” It’s part of who we are as men, even the quiet ones. We dream of being heroes; making the last touchdown to win the season, rescuing a family from a burning building, discovering the cure for cancer…
When we were first preparing to go to
I found myself saying that I had always wanted to do something worthwhile, something that would make a difference in the world; ever since I had been a little boy, playing Superman or building Thunderbirds out of Lego.
Joseph was a dreamer.
[We’re in the middle of a series called Celebrities from the Hall of Fame. We’ve been taking a bird’s eye view of some of the big stories of the Old Testament. We started off with Abraham. Last week we looked at Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, and this week it’s the turn of Joseph, Jacob’s son and the great grandson of Abraham. I would encourage you to read the complete stories. I can’t really do them justice in 25-30 minutes. Get a copy of The Message, or some other contemporary translation of the Bible, sit down in a comfy chair with a cup of hot chocolate and read these stories in their entirety. They’re great reading.]
Joseph was a dreamer. Unfortunately he was also his father’s favourite. You might remember the sub-plot from last week about Isaac and Rebecca playing favourites with Esau and Jacob. One of the topics that came up in talk-back after the service was the way in which we live out the family scripts that we learn in our childhood. Rebecca seems to have grown up in a deceitful home (Laban was her brother, remember) and passed that on to Jacob. Isaac had played favourites with his kids, and Jacob, in his turn, lives out the script he had learned from his father. He made Joseph his favourite, even though he was almost the youngest of his sons.
That didn’t make Joseph too popular with his brothers. And then, to make matters worse, he started having these dreams. There’s no question that he understands what they mean, that his brothers will bow down to him. Remember that Joseph was 17. His oldest brothers would have been at least in their early to mid 30s. It didn’t go down too well. So they decide to get rid of him.
[Just as an aside, you may ask how they
could do that. After all, weren’t they
brothers? In English we speak of brothers and half-brothers. In
Polygamy has a number of negative aspects to it. One is the way that it forms little sub-households with internal tensions between the different wives and groups of half-siblings. The Old Testament has a number of stories that point out that kind of mixed loyalty within a family. This is one of them.
But what has that to do with us? Polygamy
is hardly a common problem in
One day Jacob sent
Joseph to check up on his brothers and they saw their chance to get rid of him.
37:19 “Here comes that
dreamer!” they said to each other. 20 “Come now, let’s kill him and
throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured
him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” 21 When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their
hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. 22 “Don’t shed any blood.
Throw him into this cistern here in the desert, but don’t lay a hand on him.”
Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father.
23 So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the
richly ornamented robe he was wearing— 24 and they took him and
threw him into the cistern. Now the cistern was empty; there was no water in
it.
Reuben was able to save Joseph’s life but, while he was off doing something else, his brothers sold Joseph to some passing slave traders and covered their tracks by ripping his robe, putting goat’s blood on it and taking it to their father with the story that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. Jacob was heart broken.
Meanwhile, Joseph is taken down to
It says in 39:2 that, “The
Lord was with Joseph and he prospered” in
I said last week
that some parts of the Old Testament read a bit like daytime television.
Genesis 39 is one of those parts. Joseph spends all day working around the
house and verse 6 says that, “Now Joseph was well-built and
handsome, 7 and after a while his master’s wife took notice of
Joseph and said, “Come to bed with me!”
Joseph is a young man in his twenties at this point and it looks like he inherited his mother Rachel’s good looks. When his father, Jacob, was the same age he was busy deceiving everyone in sight. It’s hard to imagine Jacob turning down an offer like this. But Joseph turns out to be a young man of integrity who doesn’t take advantage of the situation. What was different? Could it be that he simply wasn’t home any more and no longer under that influence?
Jacob had changed. God had changed him and he was now a humbler man. But he had a whole family of kids who had been raised in a household where lying and deceit were the norm. You see that in the way his sons deceived him about Joseph. But Joseph turned out differently. We don’t have to repeat the mistakes of our parents. It is possible to break out of the family scripts that we saw being repeated last week.
Joseph is a man of integrity and refuses to sin against God and his master. However, "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." And so Potiphar’s wife frames Joseph for sexual harassment, the very thing she was doing to him, and gets him thrown in prison.
39:20 But while Joseph was there in the prison, 21 the Lord was with him; he showed him
kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. 22 So
the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was
made responsible for all that was done there. 23 The warden paid no
attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.
It isn’t clear whether Joseph was convicted, or whether he was remanded in custody and just forgotten. But, while he lost his freedom, prison became a training ground for him as he was given responsibility for the internal operations. He had been in charge of a household. Now he was in charge of an entire institution.
He was sold as a slave and quickly became the administrator of his master’s entire household. He was framed and sent to prison and quickly became the internal administrator of the prison. Joseph was a gifted administrator, but he had another gift too. God had given Joseph the gift of interpretation.
Dreams are important in the Bible, and
they’re still important in most places around the world today. Not in the way
they are in the West, though. In the West, because we so often live as if there
is no spiritual world, we have come to see dreams as only a reflection of our
own inner processes. We don’t think of dreams as messages from God so much as
messages from ourselves – which, for some people, may amount to the same thing.
When two of Joseph’s cell mates have similar dreams they take them very
seriously. They’re also upset because as they say in 40:8, 8 “We both had dreams,” … “but there is no one to interpret them.”
Dream interpretations were usually carried out by experts. They had “dream books,” which contained sample dreams along with the key to their interpretation. Since dreams often depended on symbolism, for an interpretation you needed two things, the interpreter and his reference manuals. We have the same kinds of people today, only we call them psychoanalysts. So, Joseph’s cell mates were upset because there weren’t any psychoanalysts in jail with them. (They probably couldn’t have afforded to pay them anyway.)
Joseph’s point of view was a bit different.
It didn’t matter to him that there weren’t any professionals or “scientific”
dream books in the jail. Then Joseph said to them, “Do
not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.” (Gen 40:8)
9 So the chief cupbearer told
Joseph his dream. He said to him, “In my
dream I saw a vine in front of me, 10 and on the vine were three
branches. As soon as it budded, it blossomed, and its clusters ripened into
grapes. 11 Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes,
squeezed them into Pharaoh’s cup and put the cup in his hand.”
Then the baker did the same thing.
16 … he said to Joseph, “I too had a dream: On my head were three baskets
of bread. 17 In the top basket were all kinds of baked goods
for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head.”
So Jacob interpreted their dreams for them
and the interpretations came true. The cup-bearer was restored to his position.
The baker was executed.
The cup-bearer promised to mention Joseph to Pharaoh when he saw him, but of course he forgot, so Joseph spent another two years in jail… until Pharaoh had a dream.
In fact he had two dreams (just like Joseph at the beginning and his two cell mates in the middle of the story) about skinny cows eating fat ones and thin heads of grain eating good ones. His chief cup-bearer goes, “Hang on a minute. There was this guy I knew in jail...” and so Joseph finally comes before Pharaoh and interprets his dreams. There will be seven years of bumper harvests, followed by seven years of famine and Joseph gives the Pharaoh some advice about how to respond.
41:33 “And now let
Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of
Egypt. 34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a
fifth of the harvest of
37 The plan seemed good to Pharaoh and to all his officials. 38 So
Pharaoh asked them, “Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the
spirit of God?”
39 Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Since God has made all this known to you,
there is no one so discerning and wise as you. 40 You shall be in
charge of my palace, and all my people are to submit to your orders. Only with
respect to the throne will I be greater than you.”
The two streams of the story – Joseph’s gift with dreams and his gift of administration – come together. Pharoah recognises Joseph’s wisdom and puts him in charge of running the response to the famine. He’s probably in his early 30s at this point. It had taken his dad 40 years to get to the point of just turning his life over to God. You get the impression that Joseph’s crisis of faith might have taken place in his late teens when his brothers stuck him in a well and sold him to slave traders.
A lot happens in
the next 10 chapters, including a family reunion, but Joseph himself has the
last word on the meaning of this story. At the end of Genesis, in chapter 50,
after his father, Jacob, has died, Joseph’s brothers were afraid that he might finally
take revenge on them. Joseph’s response is striking, 19 But Joseph said
to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? 20 You intended
to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done,
the saving of many lives.”
God can take any story, including yours, and turn it around for good. It doesn’t matter what your family did to you. (Joseph knew real rejection.) What kind of abuse you’ve experienced. (Being a slave is not a nice way to live.) What kind of injustice you’ve suffered. (Being thrown in jail because you did the right thing.) God can still take your story, your life, and turn it around for good.
A few other things from Joseph’s story.
God is in the business of saving lives.
You can join him in that. I started off talking
about dreams of being a hero, of making a difference. Those aren’t bad dreams
to have. God is still in the business of saving people, whole people, not just
their souls. He used Joseph to keep not only his own family alive, but huge
numbers of people in the ancient
I received information this week about a
new movie that’s coming to theatres on February 23, the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the
We may not be called to something of that scale, but we are called to make a difference in the lives of the people around us.
One way you can do that is, You can speak for God in your own context. In the prison Joseph was able to bring God’s presence into the lives of his fellow prisoners. Although the cup-bearer got better news, you could argue that the baker got more important news. He heard that he would die the next day and he had some time to come to terms with it before it happened.
We can be the window that lets God speak into the lives of those around us; in the workplace, the classroom, the prison cell. It doesn’t have to be anything earth shattering; just a word of blessing, an offer to pray, offering a different perspective. Any of those can be a word of life into someone else’s situation.
God has gifted you to serve others. Like Joseph we can serve faithfully with whatever skills and gifts God has given us. He was an administrator. You might be a mechanic, or a teacher, or an engineer. Whatever you are, use your abilities to serve others and God will be with you as he was with Joseph.