To start my sermon, I just wanna recap what we've looked at so far in Joseph, the points that KJ has been preaching over the last four weeks. We see so far a lot of interesting things have happened. We see the mess of the family that's tormented by guilt, jealousy, hatred. It's a pretty nasty family situation. Father doesn't love the sons equally.
There's a lot of tension between these guys and we see that manifest in the brother's actions towards Joseph. We see them beating him to inches of his life. We see them selling him as a slave to Egypt. It's about as bad as a family can get. Next though, we see the preparation of Joseph for God's will.
We see him suffering. We see him imprisoned, and then we see him provided for by God through these dreams that he's able to interpret. This leads him into a position where he is in fact in charge of basically all of Egypt. He basically becomes the prime minister of an entire nation and one of the most powerful nations in the world at the time. After that, we see the tests, the tests designed for Joseph's brothers that God Himself uses Joseph to assign.
These tests are a way for both Joseph and God to show and to reveal the guilt that the brothers are feeling, to bring up the sin of their past. We see that these tests eventually bring them before Joseph with Judah, probably one of the most nasty brothers out of the bunch. He slept with his daughter-in-law. He burned her at the stake for prostitution. He's a pretty nasty guy, but we see him on his knees before Joseph not even knowing it's his brother delivering one of the most heartfelt speeches ever saying, I will sacrifice myself for my younger brother, the favourite brother, the brother his father loves more.
And through that, we can see that this change has occurred in the brother's lives. So you can see that the guilt and the sin has really hit them and it's actually affected their lives through their actions. From this, we finally get to the big reveal. This is the point that we're up to where Joseph reveals to his brothers that he is in fact Joseph. So if you wanna turn to Genesis 45, we'll be reading from Genesis 45:1-16.
Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants and he cried out, have everyone leave my presence. So there was no one with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers and he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and Pharaoh's household heard about it. Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still living? But his brothers were not able to answer him because they were terrified at his presence.
Then Joseph said to his brothers, come close to me. And when they had done so, he said, I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt and now do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now, there has been famine in the land and for the next five years, there will not be ploughing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve you for a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then it was not you who sent me here, but God.
He made me father to the Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt. Now hurry back to my father and say to him, this is what your son Joseph says, God has made me Lord of all Egypt. Come down to me and do not delay. You shall live in the region of Goshen and be near me. You, your children and grandchildren, your flocks and herds and all you have.
I'll provide for you there because five years of famine are still to come. Otherwise, you and your household and all who belong to you will become destitute. You can see for yourselves and so can my brother Benjamin that it is really I who am speaking to you. Tell my father about all the honour accorded me in Egypt and about everything you have seen and bring my father down here quickly. Then he threw his arms around his brother Benjamin and wept.
And Benjamin embraced him weeping and he kissed all his brothers and wept over them. Afterward, his brothers talked with him. When the news reached Pharaoh's palace that Joseph's brothers had come, Pharaoh and all his officials were pleased. Thus far, our reading.
The first thing I noticed when I was reading this passage is how intense the reading actually is. We see a lot of weeping from Joseph. We see a lot of uncontrollable crying and a lot of hugging as well. There's so much emotion that has been built up into this piece. Joseph commands everyone but his family to leave the room, but even in doing so, we see that all of Pharaoh's servants could still hear him from his house, which is obviously a pretty big sign that he was quite emotional.
Judah's speech from the previous chapter has a lot to do with how emotional Joseph has become. The change in his brothers is really overwhelming. Seeing someone who literally beat him up, who scorned him, who sold him into slavery on his knees begging to save the life of a younger brother. Yeah. It really affected Joseph.
He says something a bit strange though, which I wanna cover. He asked straight away, how is my father? We've seen the previous passages, he's already talked to the brothers on this same trip about their father, how is he, go speak to him, you know, ask him this. But why does he again ask his brothers, why is my father okay? It seems a little bit odd.
Two reasons that make a lot of sense and that you can get from the passage is that, one, he feels guilty about the stress that he placed on his father. He knows his part in the test from Judah's story, put a lot of strain on his father. He says, if Benjamin isn't returned to me, then I will surely die. Judah says, we will have to bury our own father if we do not return to him with the youngest son. And Joseph, being one of the favourite sons, has a lot of love towards his father and this really gets to him.
And you can tell that through the passage because he repeatedly says, go get my father, bring him to me, bring me close to him. And in that way, we also see God's relationship with us through that. We can see that God wants each of us to be returned to Him so much so that He would be willing to die for us. It's that comparison between having a favourite son, but in reality, we're all His children. We're all His favourites.
He doesn't partially love any of us. And we're all a part of His family. Secondly, he knows that if his father passes away, there'll be no chance for reconciliation, and this is something that Joseph would be very worried about as well. Obviously, knowing if his father passed away, he would never have any idea that his son had lived, never have any idea of the position he held and how well he'd done in life. And naturally, as children, we do want to impress our fathers.
So this emotional buildup has led him to asking about his father again just to make sure that he is okay. His brothers were obviously pretty shocked to find out that Joseph was still alive. It's a pretty surprising thing to think you literally killed your brother, sold him as a slave and find out he's the prime minister of the biggest nation at the time. And they're so worried that they were about to receive some form of revenge, some form of final showdown that was going to smite them from the earth or make their lives horrible or terrible. But we really see Joseph's growth, his maturity through this passage.
He comforts his brother for the sins that they committed. He doesn't just go, you guys are evil. Now you know who I am. I'm going to banish you from the land. I'm not gonna give you resources.
No. He says, I understand. Do not be afraid. He comforts them through the guilt that they transgressed against him himself. It's not just guilt they've got against other people, but against Joseph, and he still manages to forgive and to reconcile with his brothers.
The reason that Joseph can do this is because of hindsight. He looks back at his story, he looks back at the last twenty two years and he can see that God's handiwork brought him to the place that he is now. He can see God's beautiful calligraphic pen writing this amazing story through his life. There was suffering, there was trials, there was tests, but it all led down to the reconciliation of one messy family. And without that trouble, without that testing, that fire that they went through, Joseph's family may never have become whole again.
We see God's providence through this story. We know that God uses seriously messed up situations to teach us lessons. They might not be the easiest lessons. They might not be something that we wanna hear every now and again, but unfortunately, as humans, we tend to learn the hard way and this is something that God uses in our lives to really grow us, grow our character, and set us up for communion with Him. Our God is not only a God who looks after us individually and in our own timelines, but we have a God with a plan.
He's an artist constructing the ultimate masterpiece. We may only be a stroke of the brush in that painting, but the Lord however takes great care in those lines or colours or in the blending of those brush strokes because inevitably it's all connected. We see this here in Joseph's story. Through this redemption, the coming together of a family, we find later in Genesis 49:9-11, Jacob is passing his blessing down to Judah, keeping in mind what a hypocrite he has been in his past life. God reconciling this person into becoming the forefather of the tribe of kings.
He's the forefather of David, Solomon and eventually even Jesus Himself. This sinner, this man who burned his daughter-in-law, who's going to burn his daughter-in-law at the stake has been reconciled from such deep sin into a position where he can actually be the head of the tribe of kings of Israel, one of the greatest nations, God's nation throughout the story of the Bible. It's just struck me that if God can use such a messed up person from a messed up family in such a glorious way, He saved this family to start a nation, how much more can He use us in His will to do things that are part of the bigger picture? We may think this suffering in our lives right now, this transformation we're going through is a selfish, it's a personal story that we might feel no one else can be involved with. But as we get deeper and deeper, we see that God connects us to other people for a reason.
He intertwines our storylines with people. A lot of the change and struggle we go through is to affect the people around us in a way that glorifies Him. His will is not just to help us, which it is. He always knows that His purpose is perfect and His will is true, but it doesn't just apply to ourselves. Our changes, our reconciliation to God is all a part of this big picture that He has planned.
The perfect masterpiece that He has designed for this world. We're actually chatting at small group on Thursday night, and we had some interesting questions raised. And one of them was, what if God is the perfect guider, He guides us through life, why doesn't He just stop us from making those terrible mistakes in the first place? Why doesn't He just choose our steps the first time and let us nail it on the head? We actually came up with two reasons as a group and I think it'd be really cool if I could share them with you.
Firstly, it's character building. The Bible talks and mentions storing up treasures in heaven and it actually alludes to the fact that these characteristics that we build, these personal growth moments we experience on earth are taken with us into the next life. These tests are God's way of building us up and growing us, and that leads to the second point of giving us the chance to choose. We have no choice in how we have a choice, sorry, in how we can take these tests. And we may fail, we may succeed, either way, best way to learn, is quite often and frustratingly, definitely the hard way as I said before.
Through that suffering, the amazing thing is if we trust God, in those moments and in our life, we can look back and see God's hands being there, guiding us the whole time. And a good way that I found to put it is, we might choose our overall journey, we might choose the general direction our life takes, but if we look back at any point, we can see God stepping side by side with us, guiding us through those little moments. The decisions that we're not quite sure of, we look back and just unfailingly can see God leading us no matter how much we thought we were making the decision. It's just grace in its finest form. We see throughout this story of Joseph, this flowing effect of reconciliation.
There's not just one step and next thing the family is reconciled, it's a process that leads this family to being able to love each other and to be one again. It starts with acknowledgment of our sins, starts with knowing that we have downfalls, knowing that we are not perfect. We see early in the story the brothers don't even admit to the sin that they committed in beating and selling Joseph to slave traders. The tests we see Joseph and through Joseph God put the brothers through is what draws this attention to their sin. We see that without these tests, we probably would never have dug up this buried wound, this buried infection that was there lying in wait.
This leads them to repenting, openly admitting to someone they didn't even realise was their brother about their sins. We read back in Genesis 44 that Judah actually repents, says forgive us for our wrongs. He's not actually talking about stealing the silver. It's not just this sense of Benjamin taking the silver cup or taking the silver with them.
It's this deep ingrained sense of guilt finally coming out of the brothers for the sins that they'd committed against their brother, against family throughout their lives. The next step that comes is repentance. And this is one of the most important steps. It's the process of going, here's my sin. I'm truly sorry for it, and then changing because of it.
The action that comes from repentance is the proof that Joseph, the proof that God saw, that these brothers really had reconciled themselves to God. Without that action, there's no way that Joseph would have known that his brothers had changed. If they have done the exact same thing but said, we're sorry, we're sorry, we're sorry, it doesn't have the same effect. It's like punching your sister on the shoulder because she's annoying you. You say I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I won't do it again.
You do it again five minutes later. No one's gonna believe that you changed. No one would believe that you're sorry. But through the actions they show themselves to have actually reconciled with Joseph and with God Himself. In our own lives, we often need to take a step back to look at the narrative of our life and realise the authorship and power of the one who wrote not only our story, but the story of the entire world.
The way His brush and ink flows and guides us through our life. The ink blots that blossom and spread into beautiful pictures. God's artistic skill and His sovereign grace allow Him to turn these issues, these relationships that might seem like dark blots in our life into a picture worthy of the Lord's perfect will. He shapes us, He grows us, and leads us through the process of acknowledging sin, repenting for the sin, taking action to avoid our past mistakes and to improve ourselves as Christ would want us to. And finally, this leads us to our pure loving reconciliation with our true Father in heaven made possible through the death of Christ on the cross.
We are a part of His big picture and He wants us to step up and take our glorious part in His loving masterpiece. Let's pray. Dear Lord, thank You for the story of Joseph's family being recorded, Lord. It's such a powerful imagery of Your ability to turn us back to You no matter how dark life seems to get. We thank You that You've given us the ability to feel guilt, the ability to feel remorseful, Lord, but that You give us the opportunity to use that to repent with You and to change our ways, Lord.
Your grace is just astounding and we know that You are our perfect illustrator, our perfect artist and that the way You draw our lives and the direction You take us is in accordance with Your perfect will. We hand that trust to You, Lord, and we thank You every day for Your guidance. Jesus' name. Amen.