"Knowing What God Knows"
Genesis 39:21-40:23
September 26, 1999
v. 23 The Lord was with Joseph, not to protect him from distress but in the midst of his distress. You will notice how closely the language here parallels that of 39:2-6. That similarity emphasizes that, despite all appearances, God was on Joseph’s side as much in the prison as before in the comfort and prosperity of Potiphar’s house.
v. 4 The cup-bearer was not only the wine-taster of the king – who in those days always feared being poisoned – but was often, for that reason, a trusted adviser and confidant. Nehemiah – the cup-bearers were often foreigners in the ANE, precisely because they were less likely to be involved in intrigues against the king — held a similar position, if you remember. What they did that offended the king is not said, for it doesn’t matter to the narrative. It is also not said whether the Captain of the Guard, at this time, was still Potiphar. We don’t know how much time is indicated by the "some time later" in v. 1.
v. 7 Human sympathy opens the way for all that follows.
v. 8 These dreams were unsettling precisely because, unlike most dreams, they came with a character, a vividness that set them apart and left the unmistakable impression that they meant something. But what? Joseph rejects the occult practices of the ancient world, but he knows very well that God knows the meaning of these dreams and could reveal it if he chose. Interpretation of such dreams was not a human art, it was a divine gift!
v. 14 Joseph had no doubt he had interpreted the dream correctly and that events would transpire as he had said.
v. 17 The dictionary of Egyptian from this period lists 38 different kinds of cake and 57 varieties of bread. The Egyptians were first-class gourmets.
v. 19 That is, the baker will be executed and his body exposed afterward. This treatment was designed to prevent his spirit from resting in the afterlife.
v. 23 And, we read in v. 1 of the next chapter, that Joseph remained in the prison, with his disappointed hopes, for two long years after the cup-bearer was restored to his office.
As a human story of hopes raised, then dashed, this account is as universal as the story of the scorned woman seeking revenge in the last chapter. We are also given some more insight into Joseph’s own character: his sympathy for and interest in the two fellow prisoners under his charge and his faith in God. Not only do we find him interpreting dreams by looking to the Lord for the meaning of them, but the statement in 39:21 – literally, "the Lord was with Joseph and was loyal to him" -- suggests, in the terminology itself, in a way that would take too long to explain, that Joseph was a man of prayer. He was a man whose success in life – whether in Potiphar’s house or in the prison itself – resulted from his walking with God and trusting in God.
It is a universal story also in this, that Joseph’s prayer for deliverance from prison is not answered, at least for a long time. And we can imagine him in that prison, as the days pass and, as must certainly have been the case, and after the story of the cup-bearer’s restoration to the court circulated to the prison itself. The days became weeks, the weeks months, the months a year. Joseph now knew that the cup-bearer had forgotten him; no deliverance would come from that direction. His prayers had gone unanswered. How like the experience of God’s people that is! "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" [Psalm 13:1]
But, there is a larger truth looming over this very human experience, this entirely human anxiety and longing, yet unfulfilled. The fact is, Joseph, because he knew the living God, knew the truth about life and about the world and about man and salvation, while those who prospered, as the world counted prosperity, did not.
In the ANE world dreams were thought to come from the gods and to reveal the divine will. But the interpretation of dreams was thought to be a science and was placed in the hands of learned specialists. This is everywhere the case in the ANE and there are examples of it not only in the Bible – as here and in the Book of Daniel, for example – but in the materials of the ANE world as archaeology has brought them to light. The majority of the texts in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, were devoted to the subject of divination, the discovery by occult means of the will of the gods. The interpretation of dreams was but one of these means. Heptoscopy, or the examination of livers taken from the bodies of animals was an important method. The excavations at Mari produced dozens of clay models that served as guides to the prognosticators. They showed livers of particular shapes and appearances and bore inscriptions detailing the sort of events that had occurred after the inspection of a liver that looked like that. The horoscope did not appear as a means of divination until much later, during the Persian period. All of this was of great importance in the ancient world, for success and prosperity were thought to depend upon a king aligning his plans with the will of the gods. Hence discovering that divine will was a political, national necessity.
Divination was, of course, thought particularly important in time of war and the armies of the ANE world had diviners as part of their general staff. If the omens were unfavorable, only the foolhardy would disregard them. One tablet at Mari reads:
"I and Ibbi-Amurru have been preparing for the campaign of Warad-Ilishu at Agdamatum, but our omens are not favorable. These omens I have sent my lord. May my lord pay very close attention to these omens." [This and much of the above two paragraphs from Harrison, Old Testament Times, 64, 71]
It is eerie, in a way, to see how small a distance we have traveled from the second millennium B.C. In our world too it is thought essential for business and government to know the future. We don’t speak of divination, but much of what we do has the same object and the practice of predicting the future is, also in our day, entrusted to so-called experts. What is more, the likelihood that the experts will have prognosticated correctly is probably no greater today than it was in the Egypt of Joseph’s day. Those people were no fools. They rarely let a liver keep an army from attacking an enemy anyone could tell was no match, or from making a treaty with a king everyone knew was too powerful to resist. I read, not long ago, that banks had let go many of their economists because the economists’ track-record suggested that they weren’t any better able to predict the future of the markets and the economy than anyone else.
What is also an interesting intersection between that world and our own is the effort to interpret dreams. There has been more attention to the interpretation of dreams in our century than in any century since the ancient world. This practice of divination by the interpretation of dreams was nonsense, of course, as has been a great deal of dream interpretation in modern psychiatry. Whether it is ads on TV for psychic readings or Freudian dream-interpretation, it is amazing how similar our world is to that of ancient Egypt!
And that puts the lesson of the chapter in still sharper focus. For what you have clearly, what is obviously the narrator’s intention here, especially in v. 8, is the contrast that is drawn between the so-called "interpretations" of the Egyptian diviners and the sure knowledge of the future that God has imparted to Joseph. God knows what the dreams mean, and he alone knows.
This contrast is going to be made again, in even greater detail, in the next chapter, where Pharaoh’s magicians and wise men are revealed as having no real knowledge of the plans and purposes of God that Joseph knows precisely because God had revealed it to him.
See and feel the irony of it. The Egyptian experts with their livers and their theories of the meaning of dreams pontificating in the splendor of the court; everyone hanging on their every word. But the truth, the real meaning of things, and how the future would unfold, only God’s man knew that. And where was he? In jail, unknown, unrecognized, and soon completely forgotten again, even by the man who had heard him predict the future with perfect accuracy.
But such things as dreams and predicting the deliverance of the cup-bearer and the execution of the baker are merely demonstrations of a far wider, deeper, knowledge, the knowledge that Christians know because God has revealed it to them in his Word and convinced them of its truth by his Spirit. Joseph knew the living God, the Egyptians did not. They worship Amun. They built an immense temple to him at Karnak on the Nile. It was 300 acres in size. You could put the greatest cathedrals of Europe into a corner of it. It takes eleven adult men holding hands to get round one of its columns. They called it heaven on earth. But no one worships Amun any more! Joseph knew of God’s covenant with man and how sinful men could have fellowship with God; the Egyptians did not. Joseph knew the will of God, his law and commandments, as we saw last week, the Egyptians did not.
He was in jail, not the court where the "experts" could be found, but he knew the truth and they hadn’t a clue! And so it is throughout Holy Scripture: the natural mind, Paul says, cannot understand the things of the Spirit, for they are spiritually discerned. He says that the world, through its wisdom, does not know God; the way of peace they do not know.
You know, of course, that we live in a time when the largest number of people find that claim simply outrageous. Many of them are deeply offended by the suggestion that Christians know the truth about human life, about God, man, and salvation, truth that the rest of the world does not have.
You may have seen the column by William Raspberry in the newspaper last week. He was commenting on the offense taken by some Jews and Jewish organizations at the Southern Baptist Mission Board’s urging its members to pray and work for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, to love them as a Christian might love an unsaved relative. Jewish leaders responded by saying such things as "We’d like a little less love and little more respect."
Actually Raspberry at least had the sagacity to admit that if one believed in Christianity, he had to take that position regarding Jews, it was the inevitable consequence of his principles. After all, he pointed out, the message of the Southern Baptists was no more exclusive than the message of the Jewish prophet, Jeremiah. Raspberry doesn’t agree with the Christian position, but at least he sees the logic of it.
Most people today do not see even that. They no longer reckon with logic or truth itself, at least not in regard to religious claims. Even the postmodernists accept absolute truth at many other points. They don’t want relativists, for example, people who believe that all viewpoints are equally valid, and any road as good as any other, in charge of Air Traffic Control! They give away their case as well with their ethical absolutism. Richard Rorty, the post-modernist Professor of Philosphy at the University of Virginia, who denies such a thing as truth, can be very severe in criticizing the ethics of those who disagree with him. He thinks he knows what people ought to do and what opinions they ought to hold. But, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, "When men say, ‘I ought,’ they certainly think they are saying something, and something true about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. But if naturalism is true, ‘I ought’ is the same sort of statement as ‘I itch’ or ‘I’m going to be sick.’" [Miracles, 36]
But, nevertheless, in regard to religious claims, in regard to God and in regard to the ultimate outcome of human life, multitudes of people in our culture, even within Christendom, now maintain that every opinion is as good as any other, except that opinion that claims an exclusive and absolute truth, valid for everyone, against which all other human ideas and theories are found wanting. Why should Christians not see this as simply another form of the age old rebellion against God that has explained the thinking of human beings from the Tower of Babel to the Origin of the Species? What is really being rejected here, of course, is the idea that men must submit to God, that his truth is truth for everyone at all times, and that there will be a judgment according to that truth. Christianity would not be so offensive if there wasn’t bad news in it as well. No one objects to absolutist claims to universally good news. But in Christianity there is not only the deliverance of the cup-bearer, but there is the execution of the baker. There is the rub! Christianity without the bad news of sin and divine judgement is as acceptable to this culture as any other view. But Christianity as we find it in the Bible and the teaching of Jesus Christ is another story altogether. And to silence that voice, the loss of the idea of truth itself is not too small a price to pay.
It was to counter this very tendency to deny the knowledge of absolute truth, that Francis Schaeffer in the 1960s and 70s used to speak of "true truth," precisely to emphasize, both to Christian and non-Christian alike, what Christianity in fact asserted: that there was truth, truth that was valid for all men at all times, truth that God had revealed and that could be known. There was nothing new in that claim, of course, but it was in danger of being overwhelmed by the relativism of modern thought.
It is precisely the claim we make – can cannot do otherwise and be faithful to Jesus Christ, who said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no man comes to the Father but by me." To deny that there is a Truth in the world, a truth that has been revealed to men by God, a truth by which alone men can be saved and by which all other opinions of men must be measured, to deny that, is to deny the Bible, deny Jesus Christ, deny the prophets and the apostles, deny the entire history of Christianity in the world, and deny the experience of vast multitudes of Christians who have found that truth and been set free by it, even though, in order to embrace it, they had to abandon long held, and long cherished, opinions.
This is why, in the NT, the apostles were so adamant about the preservation, appropriation, and propagation of Christian teaching – it was the Truth! And only by coming to know and embrace this truth can one come to know God. And they made those claims in a world that was as religiously diverse as our own. Many people seem to imagine that it is only modern man’s flinty honesty in the face of dreadful dilemmas that the apostles knew nothing about that makes us unable to follow them in their unqualified and unabashed commitment to a single Truth. But they knew exactly what they were saying. Indeed, there were far fewer Christians – in absolute numbers, of course, but also in percentage of the world’s population -- in their day than there are in ours. It is outrageous to claim it is this new experience of religious pluralism, that forces people in our day to hand over the very concept of truth, and along with it, the Christian faith in the form in which it has come down to us.
The Bible will have none of this. It has known from the outset that the truth may be known by a young man in prison and escape all the experts in an Egyptian court. And it was never surprised that human beings, in their sinful rebellion against God, would rather read livers or consult the stars, than bow down to the living God and hear Him. And so today, whether outside or inside Christendom, almost anything, however absurd, is taken seriously except the truth of God.
The Times of London reported two weeks ago the production of a booklet by various denominations in Britain entitled, Worship Resources for the Millennium. The book purports to suggest ways in which the Millennium should be celebrated. These are putatively Christian churches who produced this book, remember. "Everyone makes a noise by blowing something, toy or real trumpets, recorders, whistles, kazoos. After a reading from Deuteronomy once again everybody makes a noise. The service then has a few more readings and then everyone sings, ‘Kum by yah, my Lord,’ three times. The general secretary of "Churches Together" urges all churches to use these resources saying, "Tremendous effort, thought, and prayer and consultation has been put into assembling these resources…. A great deal of creative energy has been expended."
That prompted this parody of Isaiah 6 and the prophet’s vision of the Lord in the temple, high and lifted up, from a Christian observer.
I saw the lord low, at about my level, and seated on an easy chair. Balloons, banners, bands, and bubbles filled his temple. Surrounding him were clowns, drama groups, comedians, coffee nooks, storytellers, crowds shuffling and waving. The people all called out to one another and said, ‘Noise, noise, noise, fills the place. The whole earth must hear what a rave is going on here.’ And as the floor reverberated with the sound of the drums, the merriment, and the dancing, the temple was filled with applause. Then I stood straight and tall. I laughed and shouted, ‘I’m okay. You’re okay. …it was then that three puppets appeared, and the first cried, ‘Bloom where you are.’ And the second cried, ‘Losers can be winners.’ And the third cried, ‘Attitude has no latitude.’ Then I heard a sweet voice from the easy chair, ‘Who will go share these messages with others?’ And I felt cool and lovable and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go. No sweat. Everybody’s aching for this word. Send me!’ The voice said to me, ‘Guard each man’s self-worth, and save each man’s pride.’ And I said, ‘For how long?’ It said, ‘Until they’ve decided how to live their own lives, until they have chosen their own values, until they have found the gloss… Good luck to you!’ And I went out feeling great.’
I don’t repeat that in order to mock modern thinking and sentiments – although such sentiments almost beg to be mocked in so many ways. I say it to remind you that the situation we face is no different really than the situation Joseph faced. The world has gone after nonsense – in the truest sense of the word – while the truth that sets men free would be kept in a dungeon if the world had its way.
Still today one will never get to the Truth by counting noses – just as one couldn’t in Egypt, for all the vaunted sophistication of its magicians and fortune tellers. One will find it by turning to the living God and listening to him.
And just as then, so now, the truth will rise up and show itself to many people, now and again, like it did to Pharaoh’s cup-bearer, but struck by it as they may be at the moment, they will forget it in due time.
But no one consults livers anymore, though millions upon millions consult the Bible; and Freud and his dreams are already passing away, while the truth as it is in Jesus Christ stand and will stand forever. In the 17th century, Voltaire said that in a hundred years the Bible would be a forgotten book. His home in Paris today belongs to the French Bible Society.
And, finally, even if one didn’t know how the history of Joseph would turn out, it is not hard to see that it is better to know the truth and the God of truth in prison, than to live according to falsehoods, however impressive, in the luxury and splendor of the Pharaoh’s court.
For the fact is, my friends, things happened just as Joseph said they would. He did know the truth. And, ever since, events have unfolded just as God said they would. And the truth, as God has given it to us, has been put to the test by Christian people over thousands of years and has not been found to fail, as one after another contrary opinion has come and gone. For, it is the Truth and the Truth will always have its day. As Theodore Beza said in a letter to King Henry of France: "Sire, it belongs in truth to the Church of God, in the name of which I speak, to receive blows and to give them, but it will please your Majesty to take notice that it is an anvil which has worn out many hammers!"
Nothing is more certain than that at the very end God’s truth will still be standing, when all efforts to replace it lie in the dust.