Secret kindness

Good morning. We are continuing in our study of Genesis here, and actually we anticipate completing the book. I know some of you thought this day would never come. Completing the book a month from today. And so we'll finish chapter 50, the end of Genesis, about a month out here. We're here in chapter 45. And this is this critical moment.

Joseph has been through a period of time where he's been kind of testing his brothers after not having seen them basically for two decades. Two decades since they sold him off to slave traders. And as Joseph is kind of getting through his test sequence of his brothers to test out, have they truly changed? Can I trust them? Can I trust them enough to reveal who I am to them?

And in that process, he's finally come to the critical moment. And so right here at the beginning of chapter 45, the very first verse, What we see is Joseph is saying, everybody get out. And what he means by that is all the Egyptians get out. He is now at his emotional limit. One of the things that we see expressed here in the first verse is he can just barely contain himself anymore.

You've got this tension You imagine Joseph is in, where on the one hand, here he is with the chance of being reunited with his family that he's been shockingly severed from for two decades and a little bit more. And now the opportunity to get reunited with his entire family, for his father to discover Joseph really is alive, because in fact, Joseph isn't quite sure how this all came about, or he hasn't been. What does his father think? He's finally at this critical emotional moment where he can just barely contain himself to actually reveal who he is because he's actually been doing a pretty good job of keeping himself disguised.

First of all, there was no way that anybody would have anticipated that Joseph, the one they sold off to the slave traders, was now going to be second in command in all of Egypt. There's no way they would have anticipated that Joseph, this 17-year-old boy with a special coat from his father, is now wearing all this Hebrew garb, excuse me, Egyptian garb, and You know, the Egyptians would, they would shave the hair off the head, that's to keep the lice down, put on these, you know, wig or some kind of headdress, and they'd also put on various kinds of things.

We would call them cosmetics, not only for cosmetic purposes, but also to portray royalty, and also for just protection from the sun. It was kind of a sunscreen as well. Those would be disguises in addition to that. Disguise of just the language. Joseph could speak in the Egyptian language and speak to an interpreter. He could hear his brothers directly and know exactly what they're saying. But he could continue his disguise by continuing to speak Egyptian and have an interpreter speak to his brothers.

Now, he's right at the brink. He can barely contain himself. It's time to take the guys off. So what does he do? After having seen his brothers now twice, and in fact, if you include the fact that they just left the city and were brought back three times, and seen his brother Benjamin, he's put his brothers through all these tests, seeing that they could be trusted, he clears the room of the Egyptians. And you can tell that all the Egyptians are out of the room because nobody's standing there like this. When nobody's standing there like that, then all the Egyptians are gone.

Right? Okay. Now there's nothing but Hebrews left. Okay. So Joseph cries out really loudly. Okay? This is kind of a Joey Brown sort of noise. There's a few of you that remember that name anyway. Okay. So here's the Egyptians. They're out doing whatever around the house. And they hear coming, bellowing out the windows and the doorways. Here's Joseph making just a real loud, noisy cry. The Egyptians are hearing this. Not too far away, there's Pharaoh. He's listening to this as well, and he hears it. The whole household of Pharaoh hears this, since Joseph is likely nearby. Now, the Bible doesn't say so. I would suspect his brothers also heard it too, since they're in the same room. There was enough laughter for that one. Okay. I blew it. Okay. Think of this.

It's been about 22 years since these very same brothers sold off Joseph at age 17 as a no-name, you know, who is this guy? It doesn't matter. We're going to give him a new name anyway, right? A no-name slave. That's his brother. They're seeing in front of them. There has been more time go by up to this point than actually the age of Joseph when he was sold off. So more than half his life has passed by the time we're seeing this set of events take place. Up to this point, his brothers thought Joseph is a slave somewhere. Who knows? Or he's dead. Who knows?

There's no way, they thought, that Joseph was this guy that's been testing them and sending them away with money back in their sacks for the grain that they thought they'd bought. So imagine, this revelation of the brothers comes as utter, complete shock. There's no way they would have had that. Have you ever had that happen where you've seen somebody that you knew, but because they were in a different context, you didn't recognize them?

Multiply that times about 10 for this. The brothers, the first thing, well let's get there. Joseph said to his brothers, and of course he just said it nonchalantly, and they said, okay, no, that's not how it happened. He said to his brothers, I am Joseph, if my father is still alive. And by this time all the Egyptians are gone, right? None of these guys. All the Egyptians are gone.

So here he is probably speaking, you know, for the first time to them in Hebrew. Speaking in the language that they're accustomed to. And he's got two things to say, and I'm sure he just blasted them out. I'm Joseph! Is my father still alive? And they're thinking, huh?

They have no way to register what he just told them. It's completely out of context. This is that event like I described where you see somebody out of context and you're thinking, who is that? Who is that? So they're hearing this and they can't believe it. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what the Bible says.

They couldn't answer him. They were dismayed at his presence. It was like, there's no connection here. Here's this guy who has the power of life and death over us. We sold Joseph off 22 years ago as a no-name slave. Who knows what happened to him? There's no way they could connect these two up. This is the man that they've been telling their father Jacob about.

They were stunned. No doubt about it, they were stunned. They had nowhere to put this in their thinking. Complete and total shock. You know, this is going to take a little bit to adjust to. You got that. The other thing, there's a whole lot of emotions to deal with. Remember the last emotions they had about Joseph? Should we kill him? Nah, let's sell him off. That's the last emotions they had about Joseph when they saw him. Now you see him again, what kind of emotions are you going to have?

You've got to sort through and figure this one out, don't you? This is a tough one for them to reckon with. So he recognizes these guys have this shocked look on their face. This is somehow not getting across. He says, wait a minute, guys. His initial revelation of the brothers is probably at a physical distance, maybe across the room. But there's also an emotional distance. After all, Joseph and the brothers, they've got no connection. So there's this kind of mental distance in addition to the physical distance. They can't even seem to begin to embrace Joseph's revelation. They've got nowhere to put it. So Joseph asks them, come closer. Now, here's one thing.

When a commoner approaches royalty, you don't just kind of come up and put your arm around, hey bud, you know. That's just not the way you do that. There was a fellow who I heard speak one time. He was the president of a community college in Southern California. And he wrote a letter to the Queen of England asking to spend some time with her. Just visiting, maybe have tea or something. Seemed like a stereotypical thing to do. And so he got this very honorable letter back from the Queen's secretary, basically telling him in various words, go fly a kite.

No way. You don't just chum up to the Queen like that. So here's Joseph, who is royalty. And the response there to these guys is, keep your distance. It's obviously proper. And he says, it's enough with distance. We're through with distance. You guys need to get the point. We're family. What? Yeah, we're family. Come closer.

He tells them then closely, intimately, not as royalty to a commoner, closely, intimately that he's their own brother Joseph. You can imagine him kind of looking. You know, kind of, well, do I recognize that guy? You know, now that you're speaking a little bit of Hebrew and I can look there and you've taken the headdress off. Yeah, I guess you are.

Look at what Joseph's response is. I was astounded myself and so while I typically don't just take blobs of scripture anymore and include it, this is one I thought really ought to be included in your handout. So it's on page 1 there. The quote from verses 5 through 9 in Genesis 45. Listen with your head and with your heart with what Joseph is saying.

Imagine if you were there in that same intimate gathering. Now, do not be grieved or angry with yourselves. Notice the two options here that he gives in terms of emotional response. Grieved, as if there was some intense loss, or angry with yourselves.

Ah, what have I done? Because you sold me here. You thought you were doing the selling, You thought you were just selling me off. You got 20 pieces of silver for me. But that's not what was happening. God sent me before you to preserve life. Isn't that something? Have you ever had that circumstance where we thought this or that was going on. In fact, God was doing something quite different. Ever had that happen? This is, I think, a key thing to grasp here. Earlier on, Joseph used the words trouble, difficulty. He used those kinds of words to describe his time in Egypt. He's not using those words anymore.

God sent me before you to preserve life. Oh, you thought you were selling me out to slave traders. You thought you were getting 20 pieces of silver. God had something far bigger in mind. And a lot of times we go through the experiences of life and in the middle of it we think, man, what's God doing? What sense does this make? We might even say, God, this hurts. God's doing something else. It just took Joseph a couple of decades to realize it. Isn't that something? Let's look at verse 6. For the famine has been in the land these two years. So there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. By the way, that's all new revelation to them. He hasn't talked about this up until now.

God sent me before you to preserve for you, this is the preserving life, you guys, preserve for you a remnant in the earth and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. But wait a minute, I thought, Joseph, we sold you off. Joseph, what we did to you was awful. Joseph said, yeah, but what God was doing was phenomenal. And you guys and your families are going to be saved from this tragedy that's hitting the whole world by what you thought was awful. But it's what God was doing to save us all.

Verse 8, now therefore it was not you who sent me here. Wow! I thought that's what we did. We've been beating ourselves up for it for 20 years. No, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh. And you might think, well heavens, what's that? Father to Pharaoh? How's that? That was a figure of speech to say that he was a counselor to Pharaoh.

One who would come along the side and give guidance to Pharaoh. and the Lord of all his household and ruler over all the land of Egypt." Joseph was in charge of all agriculture and the Pharaoh owned most of the agricultural land. So, ruler of all the land of Egypt, okay? He called the shots when it came to all the crops in this agricultural land, in this agriculturally based culture. "...Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, Thus says your son, Joseph..." And by the way, that says I'm alive. I'm not dead like your father thought, right? I'm alive. God has made me Lord of all Egypt.

Summarizing verse 8. Come down to me and do not delay. These are potent verses. These are verses with tremendous insight. Because while on the surface you'd look at it, that really was an awful, horrible, treacherous, raunchy thing. for Joseph's brothers to do to him. Really bad. Really bad. It isn't enough to say that it does not speak well of them. That would be understatement. What they did was terrible.

But, Joseph had finally come to a place, he says it here several times, God is the one who pulled this off. What you intended for bad, God pulled it off for good. Four times he lays it as this is to the Lord's credit. So Joseph here, knowing that there are five more years, invites his entire family to move in Egypt in order for them to be preserved because otherwise everybody's going to be devastated by this famine. I know because the Lord has revealed by interpreting Pharaoh's dream that there's five more years and they're not going to get any better. These two years that have already been devastating, boy, you haven't seen anything yet. We've got five more coming. So he invites his family to come down.

Then Joseph and Benjamin, his full brother, both of them sons of Rachel, they weep together. Then Joseph with all his brothers, all of them. Imagine that took a while. Joseph kisses all his brothers and then talks with them all. And I can imagine that had to be the sequence. First, you've got to get some major emotional adjustment to take place. And even the talking, I can imagine that being full of some real emotional adjustment as well.

Then Pharaoh, hearers of Joseph's brothers, he's pleased as well as the others of his household. Okay? So here's Pharaoh, and of course first he's heard this scream, you know, ahhh! Of course, everybody's hearing it. He hears that. Now finally, okay, now this is what it's about. Here, Joseph's brothers are here. That's finally revealed. As well as the others of his household, they also hear it.

And so what does Pharaoh do? He invites Joseph's family to come to Egypt to live too. He says, hey, you'll have the best. But he does one more thing. Here they are invited to live in what is called the land of Goshen. He says, you've got to take wagons.

Not that kind of wagon. Not that kind either. All right. More likely, and I'm sorry for the picture because I was trying to look for a good picture of an Egyptian wagon, and I guess they're all falling apart, you know, after several thousand years. So this is a replica that's in a museum. So I apologize that that's not quite the best. But nonetheless, these are basically a four-wheel affair. Probably not a whole lot different from some of our Conestoga wagons that we think of, you know, crossing the U.S. a century and a half ago or so. So, here in the last part of the chapter, get ready, get set.

Joseph sees to it that the wagons are prepared for the family, just as Pharaoh had commanded. Actually, Pharaoh repeated what Joseph said, you know, come here to Egypt, but he added this to it as a, hey, let's make it easy for these guys to get here and we'll do it faster too. He makes certain they have the provisions for the journey, load them up, give them everything they need for the trip back for these sons as well as everybody else to come back here. For Benjamin, Joseph's brother, he gave him 300 pieces of silver.

That's quite a chunk of change. And five changes of garments. If I was traveling that far, I'd probably want five changes of garments too. And you'd be glad I did. Okay. Joseph then sends to his father, however, ten donkeys loaded with Egypt's best. There's various kinds of gifts and things of that sort. And ten with food. And there's going to be a reason for all this that will show up shortly. So finally Joseph sends them off with a plea that they not be agitated along the way. Remember what he said in verse 4 there? In verse 5 rather? He said in verse 5 is this, don't be angry with one another.

There's a whole lot of adjustment on the way home here. You're going to be headed back to our Father and you've got to tell our Father You lied. You've got to tell our Father that I'm alive and explain why this whole thing has been told wrong for two decades and a little bit more. He says, don't be agitated along the way, okay? Keep it cool. It'll all turn out okay.

At first, Jacob doesn't believe it either, but could you blame him? I mean, he's kind of got settled in his mind and heart this sad thought, my son Joseph is dead. Now you've got to turn that around. He's alive! No. No. No way. After the back and forth that they have already had, and where they've already been down to Egypt and then come back and they didn't find Joseph the first time, why the second time? Is Joseph alive? Why the second time are you bringing me this news? You can understand why Jacob would think, I don't believe this. I've got no way to begin to believe what you just told me. My son Joseph has been dead for longer than he was alive, as far as Jacob's concerned.

But he sees all the wagons. Wow, where'd that come from? All the provisions and gifts, remember? Ten donkey loads just full of gifts from Egypt. And finally he says, well, I guess I've got to believe something here. This is pretty inexplicable otherwise. So he starts to believe them. And as a matter of fact, that's going to take a little adjusting to. But he says, well, I'll tell you what. The most important thing here is my son Joseph is alive. The rest of it will all take a while to accommodate that in my thinking. But Joseph, Joseph is alive.

As we look through this, not stepping through the verses particularly, but look to what are the lessons in this passage here, it's apparent that Joseph had patiently and persistently sought to resolve and restore and reconcile with his brothers. Probably over a year's time, maybe the better part of two years time, He had sought to resolve and restore and reconcile with his brothers. Yeah, he did have the question, have they changed? With two decades gone by, have they changed? Have they changed enough so that I can trust them? Have they changed enough so that I can reveal safely who I am and that everything will come out okay?

It won't end up with some additional treachery. That's what he's checking out with his brothers. One of the things as we go through God's Word, and this is kind of a beginning part here in Genesis, since it's a book of beginnings, where we see this message. But one of the things that God's Word makes clear is His will, His desire among us as believers that we seek to resolve and restore and reconcile. That's what the Lord wants us to be about.

Resolving, restoring, and reconciling. Now, we brought up last week, that's not at the expense of truth. We're just going to compromise until everything is resolved. That's not the point. But believers, while looking at things truthfully, while standing on the truth of the Word of God, believers are to pursue resolving issues. They are to look at restoring and healing up, they are to look at reconciling. That's what believers are to seek. It's God's desire with the things that we encounter that we look to resolving, restoring, and reconciling. Anybody ever hear of a church split? It's not really what God has in mind as the ultimate. squabbles within families of various kinds. Sometimes it's an outbreak of loud and feisty communications. Sometimes it's communications that stop. But the Lord's intent, the Lord's will and desire is that those be resolved, reconciled, that there be restoration. As with Joseph, these are to be pursued with patience.

One of the points we made going through Galatians not too many months back is the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience is that next one. It's interesting in the Greek language there are different words for patience. The one used here means patience with people. Patience with people. That is the fruit that the Holy Spirit brings about in the life of believers. Patience with people. Patience with people in your family. Patience with people that you are called to work with in whatever capacity. Patience with people here. Heavens may even mean patience with Vern. Another thing that we see happening here is Joseph forgave.

Yeah, you guys, yeah, what you did wasn't good. And he waited to hear had they really recognized that what they did was not good. He wanted to see that to know that he could trust them. But he did forgive, didn't he? He could have said, boy, you guys are going to pay and I'm going to spot to do it. That's not what he did. He forgave. He showed mercy. This is holding back punishment that's due or even relieving pain.

And grace to bless where it isn't deserved. Send them back with plenty of provisions. Yeah, those guys, the ones that sold me. Send them all back with things to carry themselves and their goods. Yeah, the guys that sold me off as a slave. Those guys. That's grace. That's grace.

Here in the body of Christ, we have a very special basis to forgive one another as believers. Here at Holly Hills, here in the places that the Lord has put us in contact with other people. And it goes like this. Paul writes, Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other. In what way? Just as God and Christ also has forgiven you. What percentage of your sins have been forgiven?

Every last little one. Okay? No exceptions. All forgiven. Every single one. Whose expense was that? Christ paid for it all. On the basis of that, forgive one another. Not in order that you be forgiven, but because you're forgiven. Every last thing. Every small thing. You might even have to forgive burnt. Express God's mercy and grace.

For years to come, Joseph's brothers actually had a hard time believing that he'd really forgiven them. We're going to find out in about a month when we get to Genesis chapter 50, that there are several verses there, 15 through 18, that express where the brothers are thinking, okay, now that Dad's dead, is Joseph going to do us in? Did he hold off just because Dad's still alive, and now that Dad's dead, are we just toast? And so they kind of come to Joseph with this sort of plea, and he says, guys, you don't get it. God intended this for good. We're done here. You don't need to worry about it.

For us in the body of Christ, grace and mercy are our motivation. They are the motivators. Not, you'd better do this or else. But grace and mercy are our motivators as believers. Grace and mercy are the means for us as believers to live out the life that He has called for us to live. The life that He intends to live, Christ's life, to be lived in us, to be lived through us, and to be expressed to one another by grace, by God's mercy. through each of us, all of us. Let's pray.

Lord, as we look at this passage there, certainly a story here that is very old, practically 4,000 years old, and yet the truth here is amazing, how relevant it is for us today, forgiving. grace, mercy. And Lord, we pray that you would teach these truths to our hearts so that they would be lived out where we live, Lord, lived out where we work, lived out where we play, lived out where we are in our homes and in our families, lived out among us here as believers as we gather together and throughout the week. We look for your life to be lived out through us and between us. And we ask that you would teach our hearts these truths. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.