"Why This? Why That?"

Genesis 37:12-36

August 22, 1999

Text Comment

v.12 A distance of about 50 miles. From 20 miles south of Jerusalem to 30 miles north. Far enough, in any case, for Joseph to be beyond the range of his father's protection.

v.14 Jacob had reason, of course, to be concerned about his sons, for Shechem is where they had made themselves odious to the Canaanites when they massacred the sons of Hamor. It is surprising that they returned there. They must have really needed the pasture.

Clearly Jacob, dull-witted in family matters as we have found him to be, was worried about dangers from without, not about the lack of peace and love within the family.

But, fact is, Joseph was safer in the hands of a Canaanite stranger than he would be the hands of his own brothers.

v.17 That is, another 14 miles further north and further from Jacob and the prying eyes of family acquaintances.

v.18 They can recognize him at a distance because he is wearing the distinctive robe his father had given him (v. 23). It was probably a reminder of their hatred of the brash young man who had dreamed of his brothers bowing down to him. They hated that robe!

v.19 "dreamer" was said sarcastically, no doubt. They will prove his dreams wrong by killing him. In fact they are intending to kill the future, but you can't kill the future when it is God's plan! Remember, Esau planned to kill his brother Jacob as well.

v.22 Reuben apparently showed up after the plot to kill Joseph had already been hatched. Whatever Reuben's motive in seeking to rescue Joseph, Reuben's plan is overtaken by events. He does not seem to be an effectual leader, even though he is the eldest brother. After all, if Reuben had taken Joseph back home to Jacob, what would Joseph have said to his father about his brothers and their treatment of him?

v.24 We are left to imagine what Joseph's response to all of this must have been. But, later, in 42:21, when the brothers recollect the scene, they remember how distressed he was when he pleaded for his life.

v.25 With their brother stripped and imprisoned in the cistern, they callously sat down to eat. Now it happens that Dothan lies close to the main trade route through Palestine.

These Ishmaelites are also called Midianites (v.28).

v.27 Perhaps Judah really is bothered by the prospect of murdering his brother; and, in any case, he seizes on the way both to soothe his conscience and make some money on the side.

v.28 They have disposed of Joseph and his dreams, so they thought.

v.30 Reuben apparently wasn't present when the plot to sell Joseph into slavery was proposed by Judah.

v.31 Real irony here. For Jacob had deceived his father by taking his brother's clothes and with the use of kid. Jacob's youthful sins have found him out now in his old age.

v.35 Titanic hypocrisy. Seeking to comfort their father in the death of Joseph when they knew very well he wasn't dead and that what had happened to him had been their own doing. But Jacob's grief is so intense, he cannot be comforted and continues to mourn long after the accepted period had concluded.

v.36 The narrator reminds us that while Jacob struggled to adjust to the tragedy, Joseph was beginning a new life in Egypt.

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Joseph has through the centuries been taken by Christian readers of the Old Testament to be a Christ figure; a type; a prophecy in flesh and blood. He too was a witness to the will and purpose of God and was rejected by his brethren for it. By his innocent -- or largely innocent -- sufferings at the hands of his brethren, Joseph reconciled his brothers to himself and to one another. He is an example for us as well as the Savior would later be, in that he is one who must die to himself to make peace with his neighbors. All of that is true, I think, one more way in which the great meaning of the biblical history, the great, final purpose of it all, was woven into the very fabric of that history as it unfolded. We have seen that already at different times in our study in Genesis.

But, of course, all of that is still to come, for in chapter 37, the outcome of Joseph's suffering has not been revealed. Though, what makes the story so powerful and so revealing is precisely that, as we read it, we do know how the story ends and what will come of all of this hatred and murderous cruelty.

We said last Lord's Day that one of the great themes of all of this material from chapter 37 to the end of Genesis was the providence of God, his superintendence of all things, down to the least detail, to ensure that his divine purpose comes to pass. And all through this material, the knowledgeable reader sees that divine hand, controlling, ruling, orchestrating events to ensure that we arrive safely at the end of the story in Genesis 50. The brothers at the time could not see the divine hand; nor could Joseph. That is part of the lesson. But we can see it; we are intended to see it; because we read the story already knowing its outcome. And when the story is read that way, even what would seem to be the most inconsequential or the most baffling or the most discouraging developments, prove to be the working of God's wisdom and power, and important steps in the outworking of God's purpose.

Now, the fact of the matter is that we could illustrate this lesson at a great many points along the way in these 14 chapters. We could, in effect, preach the same sermon on any number of texts throughout the Joseph/Judah story. If Joseph hadn't been sold to Potiphar he wouldn't have been beset with the temptations of Potiphar's wife, he wouldn't have been thrown into prison, he wouldn't have met the baker and the cupbearer of the King (who, had they not offended Pharaoh when they did would not have been thrown into the prison at a time when Joseph had, effectively, become the warden of the prison, though a prisoner himself, and on and on.

As Pascal says in the Pensees, "If Cleopatra had only had a shorter nose, the entire history of the world would have been changed." Mark Antony wouldn't have thought her so beautiful (she was noted for her beautiful nose) and been so smitten by her, wouldn't have divorced Octavia (Augustus' sister, you may remember) to devote his full attentions to the Egyptian queen, there would never have been the final break with Augustus, no battle of Actium, and Augustus would not have become the Emperor of all of the Roman world; there would have been no pax Romana that made it so easy for the gospel to spread in the days of the apostles and thereafter, and on and on. "If only Cleopatra had had a shorter nose!"

Everything is connected to everything else; even the smallest and seemingly unimportant details. But it is God who sees, who orders, who makes those connections, precisely to ensure that everything turns out according to the counsel of his will, as Paul would later say. He sees, as we cannot, perhaps as we never could, the infinite complexity of connections between everything and everything else, stretching both backward and forward in time.

We have a particularly interesting and important illustration of that already here, at the very outset of the story, in what seems, at first glance to be a very inconsequential detail. You find it in v. 15.

"When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, 'What are you looking for?'"

Here too is the hidden hand of divine providence that the careful reader is to note and ponder. If Joseph hadn't "wasted" the time looking for his brothers at Shechem, that is what he would have thought -- he had "wasted" time and what we might have thought had we thought about it -- but if Joseph hadn't "wasted" that time, he wouldn't have reached his brothers in Dothan just when the Ishmaelite caravan was coming by, providing his brothers with a way of disposing of him, without killing him, and, unbeknownst to them, sending Joseph ahead of them to Egypt.

To get Joseph to Egypt, there was needed a means that would surface at the very moment his brothers were, in their murderous frenzy ready to kill him, and that means was a caravan of Ishmaelite traders. But, had the traders' caravan arrived too early or too late by the place where the brothers were, Joseph would have not yet arrived or had been already dead. So, Joseph wandered around for a time in the fields near Shechem looking for his brothers, so he thought, but, in reality, in the plan and purpose of God, waiting for the right time to make his way toward Dothan.

That is the providence of God as it works itself out in the daily life of human beings. In your daily life. I imagine there have been any number of times when you have found yourself "wandering around" and "wasting time", not realizing, not conscious of the fact that what seemed to you to be aimless, wasteful wandering in life was also God's plan and purpose for you, even if, as is a large point here, even if that wandering, that aimlessness, that period that seemed so pointless and so wasteful to you, was also shaped, even brought about, by sins, yours and those of others.

The whole biblical doctrine of divine providence, of God's absolute control of everything so as to bring everything to pass according to his will, is slipping away from the consciousness of the church in our day. You have so-called evangelical theologians and pastors now publicly doubting that God even knows the future, much less is in absolute control of it. This diminishment of God's sovereign rule over human life is part of what David Wells has called the "weightlessness of God" in modern life, even modern Christian life. The exaltation of man in a secular society, together with the growing sense of purposelessness and emptiness in the world, have crowded out of mind the conviction of a God who is over all and in all and through all. We find it hard to believe that God could in any sense be responsible for the mayhem and the futility of modern life on the one hand, and find it difficult even to think about God in a day when human achievement crowds into our lives so constantly and so noisily as to drown out all other thoughts. Modernity, so says David Wells, has robbed us of our faith or the conviction of our faith, if we still theoretically believe in the sovereignty of God. [God in the Wasteland, 154-162]

But the same problem has always existed. In fact, there is nothing particularly new in this problem. All through the Joseph/Judah story you will find people overwhelmed by events and completely unnerved by them, unable to find God in them or really to believe that God lies behind and above them. But he was there, his hand was guiding everything, his will was being done even through human sin and even in the midst of human tragedy.

You and I only see that hand from time to time. We only recognize it now and then. The divine providence is to our life what the granite formations are to the other strata of the earth. They underlie and sustain them, but they only crop out, so as to be seen, here and there.

I have any number of recollections of such a providence as we have read here in Genesis 37:15. I'm married to Florence as the consequence of one of them. She was thinking of going to seminary for a year following her graduation in music from Drake University. She applied to Covenant Seminary because it was closer to home and an Orthodox Presbyterian minister the family knew, George Knight, taught there. Florence had been raised in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and so it was natural to think first of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia to which the OPC had a special connection historically. She sent her application to Philadelphia too, and because Edmund Clowney, then the president of Westminster, knew the Roskamp family, he put it on his desk to respond to personally. Well, Dr. Clowney was a busy man, and, I tell you, he is a great scholar. I know him and admire him without reservation. But, perhaps he wasn't as good at administration as he is at biblical theology! In any case, by the time he got round to writing to the Roskamps in Iowa, Florence was on her way to St. Louis. If Dr. Clowney hadn't wandered in the fields as long as he did, I would be a bachelor today and Florence would be married to a Westminster grad. Whew!

Or take a much smaller detail of life, more easily forgotten as time passes. Wednesday, Florence and I flew to Chattanooga. In the providence of God it had worked out wonderfully that I had to go at just that time for a meeting of the executive committee of the College Board, that Bryonie and Vangie would be arriving in Chattanooga with Nicky Pribyl at the same time, that there was a very cheap fare to Nashville that made it possible for Florence to go with me, and, so, we could take the girls luggage with us, for as it turned out, they never could have got all we carried into or on the top of the car they drove across the country. We checked eight heavy bags in Seattle Wednesday morning and boarded the plane. And there we sat for an hour in the fog.

We were an hour late into Minneapolis and were sure that we had missed our connection and now what? What about all that luggage? Nashville is two hours' drive from Chattanooga. But, our connecting flight, of all flights, happened to be an hour late itself in leaving Minneapolis and we made it easily and so did the baggage. "The Lord is good," we said to one another. And then realized that the Lord would not have been less good if it had been his plan to cause us to miss that flight or for the luggage not to arrive in Nashville when we did. But we saw his hand when otherwise we would not have noticed it.

I read recently a short biography of T.C. Hammond. Some of you who were in Inter Varsity in college days will know that name. Hammond wrote an excellent introduction to theology for college students entitled In Understanding Be Men. He was Irish, a minister of the Church of Ireland, and was famous in Ireland for his evangelism in that Roman Catholic and often, in his day, rabidly anti-Protestant country. He wrote a famous book of Protestant replies to Roman Catholic theology entitled The Hundred Texts which was a classic in its day. Hammond was born in 1877 and died in 1961 and was at the height of his powers in the 1920s and 30s.

While a young preacher in Ireland in the late 19th century, Hammond fearlessly took the gospel to the streets, though heckling, abuse and even violence against Protestant preachers was very common in the Ireland of that day. One day Hammond was preaching in the streets of Cork. The crowd was in an ugly mood and the police were there to prevent a riot. One young man broke through the crowd and snatching Hammond's Douay New Testament from him -- Hammond always used the English version of the Bible approved for Roman Catholic use when preaching to Catholics -- and began to set the book on fire. Before being pushed away from the young man by the crowd Hammond had time only to shout, "that is the Word of God you are burning and what's more it is your own version." It was one incident among hundreds like it from those days of Hammond's ministry.

Years later, however, Hammond was in Dublin and was approached by a Christian worker from a mission Hammond knew well. John O'Keefe had been told by his doctor that he needed a warmer, drier climate and he asked Hammond if he would be willing to recommend him to an Australian bishop. Hammond said he would.

"There was, however, a further complication, as O'Keefe then went on to explain. He had been brought up a Roman Catholic and had been converted; but he had never really joined any church since. Would Hammond officially 'receive' him into the Church? Hammond agreed, but explained that as a matter of policy he never 'received' people without hearing their own explanation of why they wished to become church members.

"Only then was an amazing coincidence unveiled as O'Keefe described how he had once tried to break up a meeting [in Cork] by burning's the speaker's book, and how the speaker had said it was the Word of God he was burning. The words had burned into his soul, and he had been driven to read the Scriptures for himself, leading to his conversion. Preacher and erstwhile heckler realized they were meeting again."

The story continues, however. O'Keefe emigrated to Australia before the First World War, and died there while still a young man, but not before he had been instrumental in giving spiritual help to many in his work as a catechist in the Church of Australia (the Australian Anglican Church, that is). He is buried in a grave in Victoria among fellow Irishmen and Chinese immigrants who had gone to Australia during the gold rush days. When in Australia on his first visit Hammond visited the grave. On that same visit to Australia,

"Hammond also spoke at a meeting [after which he was] approached by a man with a remarkable story. The man had lived in Bendigo and had been addicted to drink. Again and again O'Keefe had spoken to him about it, but to no avail. Then the man moved up into the bush in search of gold and lived out a lonely life in a shack; he slid further into [the world of perpetual drunkenness], punctuated only by occasional visits from O'Keefe in his horse-drawn buggy. One day as he lay in his shack suffering from a bad bout of delirium tremens this man became dimly conscious of O'Keefe by his bed pleading with God for his soul. That settled the matter for him. He said to Hammond, 'and that's why I'm her today a sober man and a Christian.'" [Warren Nelson, T.C. Hammond, 38-41]

A remark snapped off at a young man in a Cork street who had snatched his New Testament from him saves a drunk years later in the Australian wilderness. That is the providence of God. And it is a reminder to us that if that is the providence of God, it is because everything else in our lives is God's providence as well. Even the things we think and say and do out of the freedom of our own wills; even, mysteriously, and without in any way diminishing their evil or our guilt, the sins we commit against God and man. Everything, in the infinitely capacious mind of God, is connected to everything else; and those connections are ensured by the rule and control God exercises over all things.

Which means, of course, that one could, if he only had the knowledge, start from anywhere and end up anywhere else. Or, as Alexander Whyte put it,

"...accordingly each individual life, had we courage to feel it, is the centre of the whole providential scheme. Had you, had I, lent to us the gift of divine intelligence, we would see all life radiating from our own souls. Every life is the centre and key of the great whole." [Sermons 1881-1882, 38]

It matters not where you find yourself today: wandering aimlessly in the fields of this world, trying to find what you have not found, or in an Egyptian prison, or seated at the right hand of Pharaoh, or starving in a famine in Canaan, or, even, at the last, plotting some evil against your brother. You have not escaped, you will not escape, the hand, the rule, the plan, and the purpose of Almighty God.

And no fact should bring greater comfort to the children of God, just as no fact ought more to send a shiver through the enemies of God, and set them seeking God's mercy for themselves. See how kind he was to his son Joseph, making him wander in order to save his life. And so he is and always shall be for all who trust in him!