Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Good morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here at Westside and excited to be with you here on week seven of our Sunday school series where we've been going all the way back through these Old Testament stories that were probably familiar to you in Sunday school. And if you didn't go to Sunday school as a kid, then maybe there's some new and fresh perspective that these stories can bring in today. Genesis 37 is where the story of Joseph begins. And it's. It's such a big story and it actually spans a ton of text at the end of Genesis. And we're going to touch on the beginning of the story and then I'll. I'll bring in some of the narrative from the middle and then the end. But it'll mostly be the middle of the story or the beginning of the story and the end of the story.
[00:00:49] You should go take a look. There's tons in here. We could do a 10 week series just on this story. So if it feels a little bit incomplete for those of you who know it, that's because it is. We're going to touch on this and I'll do my best to glean as much as we can out of it. But there's a lot here that you should Explore. So Genesis 37, verse 1 says, so Jacob settled again in the land of Canaan where his father had lived as a foreigner. And this is the account of Jacob and his family when Joseph was 17 years old. He often tended his father's flocks and he worked for his half brothers, the sons of his father's wife, Bilhah and Zilpha. Those of you who are expecting, these are great name options. Okay, I want to see a bill. Huh?
[00:01:33] Bill for short.
[00:01:34] But Joseph reported to his father some of the bad things his brothers were doing. Quality younger brother behavior. Tattletale stuff. It's great.
[00:01:43] Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other children because Joseph had been born to him in his old age.
[00:01:49] So one day, Jacob had a special gift made for Joseph, a beautiful robe.
[00:01:53] But his brothers hated Joseph because their father loved him more than the rest of them. And they couldn't say a kind word to him.
[00:02:01] And then one night, Joseph had a dream. And when he told his brothers about it, they hated him even more than ever. Listen to the dream, he said. We were out in this field tying up bundles of grain, and suddenly my bundle stood up and your Bundles all gathered around, and they bowed before mine.
[00:02:19] Cool, right?
[00:02:21] What a dork.
[00:02:25] You already have this tense relationship and you're like, here's this great dream I have. I wonder what it means.
[00:02:31] Go, Joseph, his brothers responded, so you think you'll be our king, do you? Do you actually think you'll reign over us? And they hated him all the more because of his dreams and the way that he talked about them. And then the text says the next several scriptures that, that Joseph had another similar dream, this time with planets instead of bundles of grain, once again pointing to his brothers, bowing down to him. And he tells this one to his father, who scolds him for it, but also wonders if the dreams are significant.
[00:02:58] And so it goes on. Soon after this, Joseph's brothers went to pasture their father's flock at Shechem. And when they had done, when they had gone for some time, Jacob said to Joseph, your brothers are pasturing the sheep at Shechem. Go get ready and I will send you to them. I'm ready to go. Joseph replied, go and see how your brothers and flocks are getting along. Jacob said, then come back and bring me a report. And so Jacob sent him on his way. And Joseph traveled to Shechem from their home in the valley of Hebron.
[00:03:24] So we're hitting this point in the story. Maybe if you're unfamiliar with it, you can even start to read the tea leaves a little bit, that this younger brother, who is have maybe a little bit of a superiority complex already and lacking some self awareness, who is known to tattle on his brothers, is going to check on them again to give a report back to dad. And once he arrives with them, they hatch a scheme to kill him this time.
[00:03:50] But Reuben, one of the brothers, argues that it would be better to leave him in a hole to die of natural causes.
[00:03:56] Thanks, Reuben.
[00:03:58] Reuben's actually got this plan. He wants to come back and get him. Reuben's a good guy in the story.
[00:04:03] But then Judah, one of the brothers, sees a caravan passing by and decides instead to come up with a different plan. And it says in Genesis 37, verse 26, that Judah said to his brothers, what will we gain by killing our brother? All right. Finally some reason. This is great. We'd have to cover up the crime.
[00:04:20] Okay, rough motivation, but I'll allow it. Instead of hurting him, let's sell him to those Ishmaelite traders. After all, he is our brother.
[00:04:31] It's like home for Christmas vibes with this group, you know, hey, he's our flesh and Blood. We don't kill each other, we just sell each other. Far better.
[00:04:40] His brothers agreed. And so when the Ishmaelites, who were Midianite traders, came by, Joseph's brothers pulled him out of the cistern and told and sold him to them for 20 pieces of silver. And the traders took him to Egypt.
[00:04:55] This is a story about hearing and believing the voice of God and also doing our best to believe the voice of God, especially when we can't hear it. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you for your scripture. Pray that it would. That it would inspire our understanding of you and how you love us and how you see us. I pray that it would rekindle this understanding that even when things seem difficult and dark, that you're with us, Lord. And ultimately all of this, we pray that it would point our hearts to Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.
[00:05:29] My son started playing a skateboard video game called skate on the PlayStation the other day. And I grew up playing Tony Hawk, which is the superior. Thank you. That is the most apt round of applause I've gotten today.
[00:05:45] And great game soundtrack is amazing. I fell in love with pop punk from the first time I played that video game.
[00:05:53] And it was kind of this first experience in what is called an open world where you had tasks and stuff that you're trying to accompl, but you could kind of go and do anything. And so my friends and I would play that just for hours and hours and hours. So my son started playing this skate game and I was like, oh, it's cool. It's kind of like Tony Hawk. All right, I'm in. I'll watch. And then he starts trying to accomplish these objectives. And pretty quickly, without much stress, the game asks him, would you like a hint to figure out the next part? And I was like, hey, what is this garbage?
[00:06:26] When I was a kid and we played Legend of Zelda, we wandered around Hyrule for days.
[00:06:32] No instructions, no help, no wise wizard coming out. We didn't know that. We just had to move the bush. And then there was a door that we had to learn this on our own or pay $60 for the magazine that would give you the hints. This is how we did. What is this hint garbage? You're getting through these games with a hint.
[00:06:50] And it happened to me.
[00:06:53] My wife and some friends and I went to an escape room for her birthday. She loves escape rooms. And if you don't know what an escape room is, you get into this room, you have to escape by doing. It's Great. You pay money to be locked away.
[00:07:07] You have to, like, accomplish puzzles and do these little things in order to get to the next area of the room and eventually get all the way out. And there's a time limit.
[00:07:14] And that's one of those places where, again, there's a guy watching you through a security camera available to you to give you hints on the puzzles whenever you might need them.
[00:07:24] And I am a vehement. No hints allowed for our group. I want to do this. I want to feel like we can accomplish it. But of course, I'm halfway through this thing, and I've got these, like, red lensed glasses that I'm supposed to be able to see something through. And I'm just wandering around the room like this, you know, and eventually I'm just standing in the middle and I'm kind of looking up at the security camera, like, now might be a good time.
[00:07:50] We never took a hint. We didn't take a hint. But you know, that feeling of.
[00:07:54] Especially with puzzles and stuff, that feeling of, I just.
[00:07:58] Can I just at least know I'm headed in the right direction? And maybe you've even said this to somebody, like, don't tell me how to do it.
[00:08:06] Just tell me if this is wrong, you know, or is this right?
[00:08:10] And it's so much our nature. We want a scoreboard. We want a time clock. When you're doing a workout, you want to know in the middle of all the pa, you can look up and say, okay, there's four minutes left. I think I can do this for four minutes, and this is how I'm gonna survive. We love the hints and the clocks. And I've got news for you. One of the biggest difficulties of life is that none of that really exists for us.
[00:08:32] Out in the wild of trying to figure out why has God brought us here and how do we navigate this next difficulty and this next painful thing or this next wonderful thing? There is no scoreboard. There's not always a voice that's looking at us and speaking to us and saying, okay, now a little bit farther.
[00:08:49] And what happens with Joseph is he gets this kind of calling. And even he's kind of marked at the beginning, right? He's marked with this coat and these dreams. And it seems to be coming clear that God has this plan for him.
[00:09:05] And in the middle of navigating it and finding out how to accomplish the redemptive ending and story arc of this whole thing, God's voice is not necessarily present at every one of these difficult places.
[00:09:19] Joseph's story to me is one of the clearest demonstrations in all of scripture that God's silence is not his absence, that God's silence is not his absence.
[00:09:32] And so when we read Joseph's story, and we don't just see success after suffering, that would be an easy way to tell the story, but we actually see God's invisible hand riding redemption through betrayal, injustice, and years of waiting.
[00:09:50] Now there's these three movements in how I'm thinking about it, at least, and I'm calling it the Pit, the Providence, and the Promise. The Pit, the Providence, and the promise that Joseph walks through. And so the pit is that he begins as a dreamer. He's favored, gifted, and he's ambitious. And in within one chapter, the coat is literally stripped off of him and he's thrown into a pit and then sold as a slave.
[00:10:11] This is a really quick descent into hiddenness, through this betrayal.
[00:10:16] It's this place that maybe you've come to in your life before, where you felt called or confident or equipped and knowing, I'm educated, I'm ready for this next section of my life. And then you've walked into something, and you realize that you have a lot less control than you thought you did.
[00:10:32] I'm gonna move into this thing, and I know how the next 10 years of my life is gonna go. I love that question. Sometimes we even ask it in job interviews around here. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? And having lived as much life as I've lived now, I'm like, how does anybody know where they could possibly be? And do any of us have confidence of what that might look like in the next five years?
[00:10:54] And it's difficult for us to walk through that feeling of, oh, my gosh, I don't have as much control as maybe I had hoped or I had planned on.
[00:11:04] And so these illusions of control continue to get stripped away. And between Genesis 37 and 39, we learn that Joseph goes through things, everything from prison to an elevation as a slave and a servant in this one house and power into an accusation of rape against him. And then he is in jail, and he goes through all this roller coaster of life. And what we do learn is that after the betrayal and after the pit and after the chains, in the text, it literally says repeatedly, but the Lord was with Joseph.
[00:11:39] The Lord was with Joseph. The late, great pastor Tim Keller says, when God seems most absent, he's often most active.
[00:11:47] Joseph couldn't see God's plan, but the pit was the beginning of his preparation and not the end of his purpose. And so we learn the importance of understanding that the presence of God continues to go with us, even if we aren't getting the hint every time we come to a difficult situation, that the presence of God is. Is with us. But I gotta be honest with you, that preaches really well. That's good theology, what I just told you, and the practice of it in reality for a human being is really, really, really stinking difficult.
[00:12:18] I don't know about you, but have you ever been in this position where you're like, look, I believe that God is with me, and I'm a good church person, and I. I think I have a semblance of faith. But one time, one time, I just want to hear it, make it obvious, show me the thing.
[00:12:36] And I gotta believe that Joseph maybe even took some of these as signs. He comes out of the pit, he gets sold into slavery, he ends up at this guy named Potiphar's house. And then he becomes influential, and he becomes fairly wealthy in his house.
[00:12:48] And maybe he's thinking, okay, all right, good. This is the sign that I'm on the right track. Bam. In jail. Well, now what?
[00:12:55] Tell me the sign now. Help me. Give me some guidance. Now, I don't know about you, but if you've ever found yourself on this place of life, I want to confirm to you.
[00:13:03] Very normal to have this prayer life that often just sounds like God. Are you actually here?
[00:13:10] Because I'd love to know right now.
[00:13:14] You guys, I've been through years where that's been. My only prayer at the time, I would have had a hard time even calling it a prayer.
[00:13:24] Are you even around?
[00:13:26] Do you even care? Amen.
[00:13:31] But those conversations, even as short or as simple or even as dysfunctional as they can seem, are a valuable part of this relationship with God. I would encourage you to keep praying.
[00:13:45] Even the angriest or most lost prayers, as in them, I believe you will find the goodness of God.
[00:13:54] This pit is where God trains us to trust his presence more than our position.
[00:13:58] The pit is the place where we learn. Do we really love the calling of God on our lives, or do we really, really love the fancy coat and clothing that comes along with our position?
[00:14:10] As is in these tension points, we can quit and give up all that we have done or all that we believed for the sake of simply our anger toward losing something that we liked to hold dear.
[00:14:25] But when you can't trace the hand of God, I believe that you can trace and trust his heart.
[00:14:34] And so the story goes on Joseph, like I said, goes through these different iterations. That's fascinating story interpreting of dreams like all this stuff is in this story.
[00:14:43] But he ends up being at the right hand of Pharaoh, Pharaoh's most important man.
[00:14:50] And as he does this or as he rises, he gets the influence to help save this area from a famine that's along the way. So they've gathered all these extra resources in order to feed people through a time of famine. And what happens is his family ends up arriving at the palace to ask for help for food and for resources for their family. Now remember, they all think Joseph is dead, but of course we know he's not.
[00:15:18] And it says Joseph then could stand it no longer after they come and make this request and so many things happen. And says there were several people in the room. And he says to his attendants, out all of you for he. So he was alone with his brothers when he told them who he was. And then he broke down and he wept so loudly that the Egyptians could hear him. And word of it quickly carried to Pharaoh's palace. I'm Joseph, he said to his brothers, is my father still alive? But his brothers were speechless. I bet they were.
[00:15:47] Yeah, probably a few expletives uttered in that. I'm Joseph. Oh, sh.
[00:15:56] Good, good, good.
[00:15:58] You're definitely the person we wanted to talk to.
[00:16:01] But of course he handles himself in such a graceful way.
[00:16:06] Says they were stunned to realize that Joseph was standing there in front of them. Please come closer, he said to them. So they came closer and he said again, I'm Joseph, your brother whom you sold into slavery in Egypt.
[00:16:15] But don't be upset and don't be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place.
[00:16:20] It was God who sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives. This famine that has ravaged the land for two years will last five more years and there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. And God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors.
[00:16:36] So it was God who sent me here, not you. And he is the one who made me an advisor to Pharaoh, the manager of this entire palace and the governor of all of Egypt.
[00:16:45] So he has this perspective and he can see the invisible hand of God on his story all along.
[00:16:53] Now, I'm not the kind of person that doesn't have regrets. I don't know about you, I have many regrets.
[00:17:01] I think specifically for me personally, somebody made me a pastor at 19, which was a huge mistake.
[00:17:08] And I did. What a ambitious 19 year old pastor has often done. In my experience, I was extremely arrogant and often manipulative, outright mean. I would do all kinds of things in order to try to gain or curry influence over the people around me.
[00:17:31] I was a poor leader.
[00:17:32] And I can think about specific conversations that I've had with people, many of which I've since apologized for.
[00:17:38] I can think of many conversations that were so not the heart of God and yet so drenched in language that is Christian.
[00:17:48] And it's revolting to myself even now when I think about it.
[00:17:52] And those are regrets and things that I look back on and I go, what a horrific waste.
[00:17:59] I think I may have disconnected some people from faith at that time. I have certainly just, at the very least, hurt our relationship personally. And I allowed things to come from my soul in those times that are toxic and gross, and I consider them to be a waste.
[00:18:18] Now, I will not come to the point that I really want to, as a Christian that, you know, just wants to kind of say platitude sometimes. And I want to say, well, God had me do all those things because ultimately, look, it worked out like, you know, I'm the pastor at Westside Church in Bend. This is great. Things are good for me. I don't believe that at all.
[00:18:35] I don't believe that God orchestrated horrific leadership in my life in order to build up some story that I can tell myself now. I don't believe it.
[00:18:44] But I do believe that I serve a God that in spite of all of my shortcomings and manipulation and problems, he continues to offer me grace, as well as the grace for those people that I hurt along the way.
[00:18:59] Thanks.
[00:19:02] God has a tendency to do this.
[00:19:05] And so we can't wipe away every problem that we've made. We should apologize and make amends, and we should do those things. And we have to understand that God can still write a redemptive story with us.
[00:19:21] Beautiful things come out of understanding that there's waste in this life and discovering what to do with it. It reminded me of a quote that I felt like I heard as a kid, and it turned out I was right.
[00:19:35] But it reminded me of learning in elementary school about George Washington Carver. You guys remember George Washington Carver?
[00:19:42] I thought George Washington Carver created peanut butter.
[00:19:47] And so legend, right?
[00:19:49] He didn't, so a little bit lower.
[00:19:52] But no. He actually came up with 300 uses for the peanut and 100 uses for sweet potatoes, dyes, plastics, fuel, medicines. This guy was a botanist and an artist. It led many people at the time and still today, to describe George Washington Carver as the Black Leonardo da Vinci.
[00:20:10] And Carver was born into slavery in Missouri during the Civil War. And his father died before he was born and his mother was kidnapped by raiders. He grew up frail and sick and often working with soil that everyone said had worn completely out.
[00:20:26] And along the way, George Washington Carver accomplished so many of these things in medicine and in botany, and he was a Renaissance man in every single way. And toward the end of his life, he actually communicated what his motivation was to use these gifts, the gift of his mind that he had, what his motivation was to use those gifts for so, so, so much good. And what he tied it down to, not outside his Christian faith. He's a. He's a Christian. He was a Christian.
[00:20:54] But what he tied it to within that faith was he could not stand, he hated more than anything, waste stuff that was cast aside.
[00:21:06] Said it couldn't be possibly used well anymore or it didn't have any use at all. And that is where all of this creativity and innovation came from.
[00:21:17] I wonder for us.
[00:21:20] And maybe you're like me. Maybe you are a no regrets person, and I think that's great for you. And I can't possibly get my mind there for me.
[00:21:32] Maybe you are someone that has a laundry list of missed opportunities and waste regrets, things that you wish you could take back, do over again, or say in a different way.
[00:21:46] Well, the difficult news is that none of that can be taken back in all of those ways.
[00:21:51] But I do believe in a God that hates waste for the sake of waste.
[00:21:58] That ultimately, no matter where you find yourself today or what maybe you need to apologize for, you're hoping to receive forgiveness for that. God can use your story and your mistakes and the things that you feel like have gone along the wayside and ultimately create this redemptive arc of a story that is full of grace and mercy for you and the people around you.
[00:22:20] It seems impossible.
[00:22:23] Just like for Joseph, it would have seemed impossible that this would be the end somewhere along the road.
[00:22:29] But God accomplishes it. And so Joseph has this perspective.
[00:22:37] And he says at the end, end of his life to all the people that are facing now new issues and difficulties and problems, he says with all the confidence of someone who's seen many things, he says, God will surely come to your aid.
[00:22:55] Joseph's last act in what was virtually his deathbed, is faith in future grace.
[00:23:05] Now, we talk often about having faith for right here and now, but I believe that God is calling us in this moment to have faith for what God can do in the past, that God can take all these things that feel so worthless and shameful and difficult and create something better. And he can do the same today and the same for this future grace tomorrow.
[00:23:27] Joseph dies still believing a promise that he never lived to see, that God would bring his people home. And yet this faith is there for them now. Faith isn't just trusting God for deliverance today. It's staking everything on his promise for tomorrow.
[00:23:44] Joseph knew that this history was going somewhere. And now I hope that you can believe for yourself the same is true for you.
[00:23:55] Faith isn't sight. It's a confidence that God's unfinished story will end in goodness.
[00:24:03] As Christians, we have to believe this even in the darkest of hours. We have to believe that this unfinished story that we find ourselves in today will end in goodness.
[00:24:19] So when Joseph finally stands before his brothers, he doesn't say, you'll notice everything worked out just fine.
[00:24:27] Instead he says, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. That's not a resignation kind of a statement. Instead, it's a revelation statement.
[00:24:35] He sees that God can take the worst thing that has ever happened, and he can then turn it into the best thing that has ever happened.
[00:24:43] And the Gospel tells us about this ultimate Joseph, Jesus Christ, who went to the deepest pit so that we could be lifted into the highest place.
[00:24:51] A continuation of this faith of Joseph exists in Jesus.
[00:24:56] And you see this pattern, right? Like there's this connection. Stephen, before his martyrdom, summarized Joseph's life as a foreshadowing of Jesus. He said he was rejected by his brothers as Jesus was rejected by his people. He was sold for silver, and Jesus was betrayed for silver. He's wrongly condemned, just as Jesus was, and tried unjustly. He forgave his enemies, did Joseph, and Jesus offered forgiveness for the world. Joseph was great, and we need an even better one, and his name is Jesus.
[00:25:29] I'm going to close with this scripture that is on the nose, and it belongs with this story. And it's from the Apostle Paul to the church at rome in chapter 8, verse 28. The apostle Paul, by the way, being someone that had seen plenty of things himself. He says, and we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose.
[00:25:57] There are so many things that maybe you've experienced in this life that have been meant for evil. And we have to believe today, even though it might be really, really difficult to say the words out loud, that something good can and will come from this.
[00:26:13] To stand in faith together, to understand that we are only a piece of this really long story that God is telling about the history of humanity and the world and of himself. And we get to participate in this piece and hopefully believing that some good will come of it because you are called and loved and chosen by God today so things will work together according to the purpose of God. Amen.
[00:26:37] In just a moment, I'm going to pray for this room.
[00:26:42] And specifically, I want to pray for those of you who think that these decisions and problems that you have created in your life are too far gone to be redeemed.
[00:26:55] You're not too far gone. Never too far gone.
[00:27:01] And while all these issues and things you feel like you want to repent over might not feel completely solved in and of a single moment, we have to believe for this longer story that God is telling about you.
[00:27:12] And I want to pray for those who just want a hint.
[00:27:17] Just once, just tell me, am I doing the right thing? Specifically, I want to pray for those of you who are just like, I just want to. I just want to know that I'm doing good.
[00:27:30] Can be such a lonely place to wonder exactly how things are going and if how much you care is translating to the world, world around you.
[00:27:38] So, Father God, I pray for those in the room that feel like what they have done makes them too far gone. It's too deep a pit.
[00:27:46] The chains are too thick.
[00:27:49] There's no way out of this.
[00:27:52] Lord, I pray that even now, in the middle of that deep, difficult darkness, that they would know there is goodness at the end of this story.
[00:28:04] Lord, I pray for those who just.
[00:28:07] I know that feeling. It feels desperate in and of, in the moment of just like, can you please just give me a sign? Tell me something.
[00:28:15] And Lord, we pray that they would hear you speak.
[00:28:19] And Lord, we pray that for those who don't hear you, that they would be reminded that you are with them in the pit, in the cave, in the dark night. You're with them.
[00:28:33] In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
