Genesis 37:12-36

01/18/12 Genesis 37:12-36 GUMC Youth

We've been spending the last few weeks looking at some of the major and crucial stories in the book of Genesis in order to help us understand who God is and what it means for God to interact with us. What we find is that these early stories help shape the way we see and understand the world and they help us to realize that there are some ways of looking at the world and at the Bible that are simply not all that helpful. With that in mind, I want to turn your attention to the story of Joseph's brothers selling him into slavery.

But before we can get into the story and what it means for our understanding of God and life in general, we need to do a little bit of background work. Jacob, Joseph's father, had twelve sons and he had daughters above and beyond that. Lots of kids. He had a total of four wives who were the mothers of his children. Joseph was the first of only two sons that were born to his favorite wife, Rachel. As you may or may not know, the firstborn child, especially the firstborn son, was really important in those days. Now, Joseph wasn't exactly the firstborn. In fact, he had ten brothers, or more exactly half-brothers, who were all older than him. So here was this kid who was basically the youngest, but his father treated him differently than he did his other children. He gave him a special coat that seems to have been incredibly elaborate and expensive. Nothing makes siblings more jealous than having just one of them get a special gift.

But that isn't all. We read earlier in chapter thirty-seven that Joseph once told on some of his father's other wives, the mothers of his brothers, which probably didn't make them, or their sons, happy with him. Beyond that, Joseph started having dreams, which isn't so bad, but he started telling everyone about them, which may or may not have been a mistake. Listen to the dreams he had. He said, "There we were, binding sheaves in the field. Suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright; then your sheaves gathered around it, and bowed down to my sheaf." As you might imagine, a dream that basically had his brothers bowing down to him and treating him like a king probably didn't make them very happy. How about this other one? "The sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me." Now, the dream doesn't just have his brothers bowing down to him, but his father and mother, too. I don't know if you have ever been jealous of your brothers or sisters or if they have ever been jealous of you, but this is one surefire way to make them mad.

That brings us up to the start of the story as we just read it. Jacob sends Joseph to Shechem to visit his brothers who are shepherding there to bring back a report about how they are doing. When they see him coming, though, his brothers decide that they are going to kill him. After all, the only certain way to ensure that all those dreams he had aren't going to come true is to take him out. Now, conspiring together to murder your half-brother is not a good thing to do, as you might well imagine. Reuben, the oldest brother knew this and he wanted to do what he could to prevent his brothers from actually killing Joseph. He convinces them to just throw Joseph into a pit, planning to go back later and rescue him, but before he can save his brother, the others have sold him to a group of Ishmaelites (who would be like modern day Arabs, though this is long before the rise of Islam), who take him to Egypt.

Now, you all know the rest of the story, right? Joseph is sold to be the servant of Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's guard. Eventually, Potiphar's wife tries to sleep with him and he runs away, only to have her put him in jail. While he is in jail, he is trusted enough to help and be the right-hand man of the jailer. He becomes famous in prison as someone who is able to interpret dreams so he is called for when Pharaoh has his dreams about the fat and skinny cows and the healthy and withered ears of corn. He so amazes Pharaoh that he is made to be the second most powerful person in the whole kingdom of Egypt. He then almost singlehandedly saves the nation from famine and makes Pharaoh incredibly powerful at the same time. Because of that, Joseph isn't just the second most powerful man in Egypt, he was probably just about the second most powerful man in the whole world at the time.

Anyway, the famine that the Pharaoh's dream predicted that Joseph interpreted does actually come and it has tragic consequences for people all over the region, including where Joseph's father and brothers are. They come to Egypt to get food twice and end up face to face with their brother, the brother they sold into slavery all those years ago, the brother they told their father was dead, as the only one who can save them. Joseph actually does save them and gives them a place to live and takes care of them so they can last out the rest of the famine.

But here is the problem. So long as his brothers never had to see Joseph again, so long as they kept him out of sight and out of mind, they could pretend that they really hadn't done anything all that bad. But when God brought Joseph back into their lives again as their savior, they realize that they could be in some serious trouble. They can relax a little because they are pretty sure that Joseph won't get back at them while their father Jacob is still alive, but what happens when he dies? At the very end of the book of Genesis, this is what we read. "Realizing that their father was dead, Joseph's brothers said, 'What if Joseph still bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong that we did to him?' So they approached Joseph, saying, 'Your father gave this instruction before he died, "Say to Joseph: I beg you, forgive the crime of your brothers and the wrong they did in harming you."'"

Do you see what they did there? They made up a story (Jacob didn't actually tell them to say what they said) in order to get off the hook, in order to save their own skins, so they don't get the punishment they so completely deserve. What is amazing is what Joseph does in response. "But Joseph said to them, 'Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear; I myself will provide for you and your little ones.'"

The question that I want to ask in light of this story, where it really plays itself out in our lives today is, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery by his brothers good or was it evil?" This might seem like a silly question, because you probably already have an idea of whether it is good or evil which may or may not be based on what the Bible says, but it is incredibly important; so important that, once you know where to look, you find the answer people give to this question and those like it shows up all over the place.

Now, it seems to me that the most commonsense answer to the question, "Was the selling of Joseph into slavery good or evil," is "It is evil, of course." After all, it is the dominant opinion in our modern American world that slavery is evil and if selling someone into slavery is evil in general, surely it must be even more evil (if that is possible) to sell your brother into slavery. But that is not the only way people answer the question. There are some people who look at the end of the story where it says, "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good," and say, "regardless of the fact that we want to say that Joseph's brothers did something that was evil, God was intending something good to come out of it. It is true that we could never encourage someone to sell their brother into slavery, but if God used it for good, we must conclude that it was actually a good thing. After all, if Joseph was not sold into slavery, he would never have interpreted the Pharaoh's dream and would have never been put into a position where he could save his family. Lots of things that are undeniably good came from it and we can see God's hand at work in it, so it must be good."

I should mention at this point that this is not my position. I disagree at some really important points with this view. You need to understand that if we actually take this view seriously, it eliminates any concept of real tragedy and ends up driving us to pure fatalism and determinism, the idea that things only happen the way they do because they are planned to happen that way, that they could not have happened in any other way. It also completely destroys any concept of good and evil because we can never say if anything is evil because we don't know what good God might be causing to come of it. It is not much of a step between saying that, because God saved the Israelites through Joseph being in Egypt, his brothers were right to sell him into slavery to saying that, because many people grow a lot as human beings through battling hard against cancer, cancer must be good. Even if people die from it, this view can't acknowledge that cancer might actually be an evil that is in violation of God's good purposes for humanity because we never know but God might bring something good out of it.

The real question that we need to deal with here is whether things are ever really evil. The view that says that Joseph's brothers did good by selling their brother into slavery is saying that things really aren't ever truly evil, or even if they were, we would have no way of knowing whether they are really evil until the end of time. At the moment that Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, it seems clear that they are doing something evil, but once we see that it was through Joseph being in Egypt that God brought about the deliverance of his family, this view says that we have to go back and say that we were wrong when we said that the selling of Joseph into slavery was evil.

Do you see the problem with this? It completely robs us of any ability to judge whether things are good or evil, even based on a standard given to us by God himself. How do we know but that every tragedy in our lives might someday be revealed to be the key piece in the puzzle for something far better to happen that we can't imagine would have happened without it? Think of all your personal tragedies, and I'm not talking about times when you didn't get to do something you wanted to do, but times when your or people you love were broken by sickness and tragedy, when someone you knew died unexpectedly or tragically. Think of all the tragedies you have heard about, about the people who, in spite of all the growth they had while fighting their cancer, ended up dying because of it, of all the fatal car crashes and sudden heart attacks that have taken people. Think of all the national tragedies, of the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, of the senseless attacks in schools or military bases, or anywhere by crazy people with guns. Think of all the tragedies that occur on the international scale, of the Holocaust, of various genocidal movements, of angry wars that get waged. There is evil and tragedy everywhere we look, it seems sometimes. Is it really possible that somehow, in some way, God will bring some kind of good out of all of those tragedies that will somehow make them all better?

I want to share one more thing from a famous book I read that is interesting. There is a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky called Crime and Punishment. In the book, the main character has written an article where he argues that extraordinary people, people who have made incredibly important contributions to our knowledge and lives, would have been justified in doing whatever it takes to do those things, even if it meant breaking our laws. Specifically, he says, "I maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity." This same main character has, at the time we find out about this article, killed two people. The question is raised whether this man considers himself to be one of the extraordinary men that is exempt from the law and also it asks how we are to tell, ahead of time, whether someone is that kind of person. The moment we decide that good and evil can't be decided at the time but need to be determined in light of what happens later, we have gotten ourselves into all kinds of problems.

My point is that tragedy happens; evil happens, and the solution to the problem is not to pretend that it doesn't, it isn't to pretend that somehow, when enough time has passed and we see the big picture, it isn't really tragic and evil. We don't do justice to the tragedies that people experience if we pretend that, someday, they will come to realize that they were never tragic, but just seemed like they were. Further, I think we do a tremendous disservice to the gospel, if we pretend that there really aren't any problems, that evil really isn't real. The amazing lesson we learn from the story of Joseph being sold into slavery is not that God causes things that we think are evil but that are really good if we just really understood them. The amazing thing that we learn from the story of Joseph is that our God is a God who can work good out of the most astonishing evil. There is no denying that selling their brother into slavery was wrong, that it should not have happened, that it is a crime against God's will for us, but God was not stopped by that evil act, but used it and made good come out of something that seemed like good couldn't have come out of it. When Jesus was crucified, it wasn't an act of goodness by human beings, it was the evil rising up of people like you and me against the God who loved them. And yet, God was not defeated or stopped because of that evil, but used it as the very place where we are joined to him forever. That doesn't show us that the crucifixion was actually good, but it shows us that God is really amazing and is not stopped by evil.

So when your life is attacked by evil, when you experience tragedies, when things that shouldn't happen actually do happen, know the power of God is a power that takes these tragic, sometimes even stupid events, and does not abandon you in the midst of them. When you feel overwhelmed and ready to bust out into tears, don't let anyone tell you that the tragedy is for the best, that it was somehow meant to happen, because when tragedy strikes, when real evil happens, there is good reason to cry, because it is a sign of the brokenness of the world in which we live. When Jesus' friend Lazarus died, he wept, even though he knew he was going to raise him from the dead. However, even though tragic things happen, and the things are really tragic, do not give up hope that the God who has been able to use the evil of Joseph's brothers to save a whole nation, and the God who took the cross where Christ was murdered and transformed it into the salvation of the world, can use the tragedy in your life and bring good out of it. Let the good that comes out of tragedy teach you, not that tragedy or evil is good, but that God is better than we could ever imagine. Let us pray.

AMEN