God's Providential Tapestry

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““Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “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.”” Genesis 37:19-20

Main Readings: Acts 2:14-41 & Genesis 37

Supporting Readings: Acts 7 & Genesis 45

I want to begin, this morning, a short series - just five messages long - on the life of Joseph which I trust will bless us in this moment we’re in, and through the summer too.

Apart from the fact that the account divides nicely into five parts, I’m drawn to this story because of how vividly it illustrates a truth many of us love and yet struggle to believe when life gets perplexing. To put it in Romans 8:28 terms: ‘all things work together for good unto them that love God’.

What could be better in a season of perplexity and trouble than to watch a real-life encounter between God and one of his servants in which you can taste Romans 8:28?

And that’s what the Joseph story does. At the end of the story, it’s so clear to Joseph what God had been doing in all the details of his life.

He didn’t say, ‘I figured it all out along the way’ - he didn’t know whyGod chose to do things the way He did. But he came to understand this much: God was at work in it all, and that God's ways are always good.

That’s not an explanation that solves all our questions I know, but it is a solid foundation on which we can make our stand.

Now, this story is not just about one man and his family. It’s about the preservation of an entire people that God had taken for his own.

Within just twenty years of where this story begins, Jacob’s whole household will be staring death in the face - a famine so severe it could have wiped them out completely.

Of course, that would be a tragedy for any family - think of those in Gaza or Haiti right now suffering acute famine for example. But Jacob’s family was no ordinary family.

This was the family line of Abraham. His was the only family God made special promises to. God had said to Abraham, “Through your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”

It’s really very simple: if this family perishes, then God’s promises go with them. And that’s massive for us because this family is Jesus’ family.

You see, it’s right out of Israel, that God calls his special messiah - not to rescue his people from famine, but to rescue us from our sins - the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

And so it is in recognition of the fact that God used the whole 20-year saga of Joseph’s life to save Jacob’s family, that Joseph can say at the end of it all, ‘God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance’.

The story of Joseph only really makes any sense in light of this big picture that God was weaving like a tapestry of detailed threads. A tapestry that features our lives in it too!

So, as we walk through the Joseph story over the next few weeks, I will try to remind us of the big picture – the providence of God that ties all the details together.

Because, when we see God’s hand in Joseph’s life, we are reminded, we can trust him in our very own lives too.

The story starts with a young Joseph - just 17 years old it says. Which means by the time it’s over, he will still only be 40 years old! Yet, by then he will be second only to Pharaoh in the whole land of Egypt!

He’s a young man, but he has ten older brothers. And all ten have different mothers to his own. Which, from the get-go puts something of wedge between them.

Joseph’s mother was Rachel whom Jacob loved best of all his wives, and she had been barren. But the Lord had opened her womb and enabled her to conceive in later life.

And that’s why verse 3 says that Jacob loved Joseph more than his other sons - because he had been born to him in his old age.

Therefore, as an expression of his favour towards Joseph, Jacob made him and beautiful and rich coat - a coat I imagine cost him a lot.

And it was that favour that Jacob showed Joseph over the others that really got their backs up. In fact, they ‘hated him’ for it ‘and could not speak a kind word to him’ it says.

Now, as much as every parent should know not to favour any of their children over any other, nevertheless it is not a Godly or brotherly attitude that these brothers have towards Joseph, is it?

It reminds us in fact, that even when we have been sinned against, that is no occasion for sinning back – even though that temptation rises within us.

Fueling the hatred further, is what the coat represents to the brothers, namely family superiority. And as is so often the case in families, jealousies take root in the hearts of these brothers.

It’s a testimony to the terrible grip that jealousy can get of our hearts that the favour of their father can cause such hatred in them.

It’s no wonder the Proverbs say, ‘Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before Jealousy?’

And as if that wasn’t enough provocation, not only is it true that Jacob loved Joseph more; not only did he give him a coat that showed the fact outwardly; not only was the coat a sign to them of ambition; but it was also the fact that Joseph had snitched on his brothers that gave them all the more reason to hate him. Verse 2 says ‘he brought their father a bad report about them’.

I don’t think there’s any reason to think that Joseph’s report was untrue, but no one ever liked a tell-tale did they? I can’t remember it going well for kids that snitched at school. And I presume nothing’s changed there.

That’s what Joseph has gone and done here. And it certainly doesn’t endear him to his brothers – far from it.

But this is the first glimpse that we get that Joseph is a man – even at this tender age – of integrity and who loves the truth.

Even if it serves to get him into bother with his brothers, Joseph is going to stand for what is right. And we’ll see that this kind of integrity will get him into trouble again in future episodes too.

So, with Joseph’s brothers seething with bitterness and jealousy, nothing is more needed than a cold bucket of water on the situation.

But what happens next is the opposite of that. And yet the source of the fuel on the fire this time is not Joseph himself but God.

Apparently, science has made some strides into understanding how we dream but has virtually no idea why we dream.

It’s a strange thing to me – that I can have rational thought processes with movie-like clarity and yet have no voluntary input whatsoever. It baffles me. And yet it happens.

Joseph wasn’t the creator of his dreams. But just as Joseph will tell Pharaoh king of Egypt in a future episode, ‘God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do’ so it is clear that God is the one who gives dreams.

God is the first cause of dreams. But not all dreams are communications from God. That’s important distinction to make. Jude says, ‘on the strength of their dreams these ungodly people pollute their own bodies, reject authority, and heap abuse on celestial beings’.

Dreams, then, are subject to God’s revealed will. And so, it is with Joseph’s dreams. Which is why telling them to his brothers and parents might not have been the wisest thing to do.

But the fact is, God’s revealed will, as it unfolds in the story does show that Joseph’s dreams are indeed true.

Just as Pharaoh’s two dreams later on reveal the same truth. So, these two dreams of Joseph reveal the same truth.

The truth is that Joseph will become the head over his family, and all the others will bow down to him.

Now there’s no doubt that the brothers and Jacob understood the meaning of his dreams. The brothers ask him, ‘do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?’

And they must have thought of the royal coat their dad had given him and said to themselves, ‘hey lads this is adding insult to injury here - who does this upstart think he is’.

Even, Jacob rebuked his special son: ‘Joseph do you really think we will all - even me and your mum - come and bow down to you? Surely notJoseph. Even your old dad thinks you’ve gone too far this time!’

So, the brothers hated him all the more. And verse 11 now says it clearly, they were ‘jealous of him’.

But it says of Jacob, that he ‘kept the matter in mind’.

Which reminds me of Mary the mother of Jesus, how Matthew says she pondered everything the angel had said about Jesus in her heart.

Godly people do this kind of thing don’t they? They don’t perhaps see the whole picture, but they sense there is a bigger picture.

So now as we move on in the story, remember how full of hatred and jealousy the hearts of Joseph’s brothers are.

It could be tempting to think that time passes, and hatred and jealousy subside. Not so – these are powerful sinful impulses that are not easily forgotten.

It's a fateful day then, when Jacob says to Joseph ‘go and see if all is well with your brothers and the flocks and bring word back to me’.

In fact, it puts Joseph on a collision course with his brothers. He’s outside the family home; outside the protection of his father; and entirely at their mercy.

All seems well though, because when he gets to the place where his father sent him - to Shechem - his brothers aren’t there – they’ve moved on.

And so, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief for Joseph - he’s not going to fall prey to his brother’s hatred after all.

Except that is, until seemingly out of nowhere a random man finds him wandering and asks him what he’s looking for.

And when Joseph tells him, he knows exactly where his brothers are! ‘I heard them say’, he tells Joseph, ‘Let’s go to Dothan’.

Now the odds of this happening seem so low to me as to be quite unfathomable. Someone happens to ask him why he’s wandering around, and that very person knows the very people Joseph is looking for. Not only that but they overheard them saying where they were going next!

I’m no betting man, but I wouldn’t be betting much on the odds of that happening!

But it does happen. Because just like Jacob thought, there is something bigger happening here. God is moving the actors in this story around into the places where he wants them to be.

Places like Dothan for example. Because it’s Dothan, and not Shechem, that the major trade route from Syria to Egypt passes through.

God is moving Joseph to a place where he will be sold into Egypt. That couldn’t happen in Shechem. Acts 7 says ‘because the patriarchs [that’s Joseph’s brothers] were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him’.

So, now as Joseph approaches Dothan in the distance, his brothers see him coming and they spot an opportunity. Verse 18 just says, ‘before he reached them, they plotted to kill him’.

They remembered his dreams (verse 19) and they thought that by killing him they would show his dreams worthless (verse 20).

They still didn’t see that there might be something more in the dreams than they had given credit for. Hatred and jealousy blinded them to reality.

And that is what those sins do. There is so much good that God is working in the lives of other people, both through his special grace and his common grace.

But jealousy and hatred prevent us from seeing it and loving it and praising God for it. All jealousy and hatred can do is tear others down and seek to undo them.

You know what the antidote to jealousy and hatred is? It’s the same as the antidote to all sin: it is to rivet our attention on a big God with big grace.

When we do that, we find that we are not as big and good as we thought we were.

In other words, there is no standing that we have by ourselves whereby God, who is bigger and better, would not seek to undo us.

There is nothing good in us in comparison with him. We have treated him as badly as anybody can be treated. We have set ourselves above him. We have tried to steal the limelight from him. And so, God has every right to be jealous for his own name and to count us his enemies.

Yet, it is the grace of God, sent forth in Jesus that meets us where we are. We are not met with a God who is trying to undo us, but a God who wants to rescue us from his own righteous anger.

That kind of view of God and his grace puts us in our place. It’s very hard to hate and envy others when we know the truth about ourselves before God.

Joseph’s brothers didn’t have a big view of God or his grace. But they had a big view of themselves.

Now, what they planned to do was to kill Joseph and throw him into one of the large water cisterns that were dug into the ground there. And their cover story to their dad was going to be that ferocious animals had eaten him.

We don’t know whose idea it was, but we do know that Reuben, who was the oldest brother, didn’t like it. ‘Let’s not take his life’ he said to his co-conspirators. ‘But let’s throw him into the cistern alive’ – the result will be the same, but we will not have ‘shed blood’ he says.

His intention was to rescue Joseph from the cistern later on and take him back to his father.

Now this might seem noble of Reuben. But I doubt it. Deep down there’s an ulterior motive.

Imagine what it would mean to his old dad if he could return his beloved Joseph to him alive and well.

Would that not be enough to restore Reuben to firstborn status in his father’s eyes? And would it not serve to undo the consequences of his sin in which he recently slept with his Rachel’s maid?

So, in all likelihood Reuben was looking for a way to compensate for his sexual sin against his father. Not out of deep remorse, but to gain that which he had once had and now was lost forever - his firstborn blessing.

People look on the outward, but God looks on the heart. And Reuben’s plan is thwarted before it even gets off the ground.

For whatever reason, Reuben disappeared somewhere after they stripped Joseph of his coat and thrown him in the cistern. The others simply sat down to eat their lunch – such was the hardness of their hearts.

And it’s at this very moment that traders come along with camels loaded for Egypt. The caravan of traders didn’t come when Reuben was there. It didn’t come when all the brothers had gone. It came just as they had completed their plan and Reuben had disappeared to who knows where.

Now, if Reuben had an axe to grind, then Judah too. He was fourth in line. But brother number 2 – Simeon and brother number 3 – Levi had also disqualified themselves when they slaughtered all the males in the town of Shechem to avenge their sister Dinah.

And chapter 49 therefore describes them as ‘weapons of violence…who will be scattered’.

So, effectively Judah has pole position in the family right now. But then there’s the young upstart Joseph with his ambitious dreams to contend with.

And seeing the opportunity to get rid of him and make some money, he and his brothers pull Joseph up out of the cistern and sell him to the traders for twenty shekels of silver.

Reuben returns and he can’t believe what they’ve done, because now his plans are in tatters. There’s nothing for it now but to run with the story they’d invented and take it back to Jacob that his favourite son has been devoured by animals.

With the ornate coat dipped in blood, Jacob is convinced and verse 34 says Jacob mourned Joseph for many days. In fact, Jacob expects to mourn him all the days of his life, Joseph meant so much to him.

But Joseph wasn’t dead of course, he was on his way to Egypt where he’ll be sold by the traders as a slave to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials.

Stepping back from it all then, what a terrible whirlwind of disaster has landed on poor Joseph! From dreams of success one moment, to slavery in Egypt in the blink of an eye.

He must have reflected on the cascade of events that had taken him from the comfort of his own house in Hebron and his beloved father, to the house of a foreigner in Egypt.

He finds himself in a foreign land, under foreign rule, with a foreign language and foreign customs to learn. Not free, but a slave.

He must have wondered how it was all possible. If only his dad hadn’t sent him to his brothers.

If only he hadn’t shared his dreams that made his brothers hate him.

If only he hadn’t bumped into the man in Shechem who knew where his brothers were.

If only Reuben hadn’t disappeared when he had been lowered into the cistern.

If only the traders hadn’t come by at just that moment.

If only all these misfortunes hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t now find himself all alone and hopeless in Egypt.

And yet, we know that God will make it known to him that it was God who sent him ahead of his family into Egypt. Joseph’s disaster is God’s great plan to rescue his people.

So, if we find ourselves going through perplexing trials and wonder: where is God in all of this? Then know this: Joseph’s life is proof that God is in control of every detail of our lives.

And he is working something so much bigger than we can conceive, even in the trials he’s calling us to go through. Everything for our good and his glory!

Next time we’ll see if it gets better or worse for Joseph.