Author: Josh King

All the Bible is God shouting to us, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.”   Unfortunately we like the disciples want to build altars to Moses and Elijah.  Judah impresses us here, but don’t settle for second hand glory.  Let his moonlight excite you to discover the source.

One image Scripture uses to speak of Christ is that He is our True Elder Brother.  He is the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29).  We are fellow heirs with Christ (Romans 8:17).  As we survey Genesis brotherly love is profoundly absent.  The first brotherly relationship ends in fratricide.  This last section is titled “the generations of Jacob” (Genesis 37:2).  It is about these brothers, the nation of Israel in embryo.  In the ESV “brother” occurs ninety-nine times in this last section.  As we come to the close of this book brotherly love is restored.  And oh how gloriously God does it.

Instead of taking life, a brother will give up his life.  He will pay the penalty for the “guilty” and suffer the consequences.  He will suffer bondage that the “thief” may go free (Genesis 44:32-33).  Which brother does this?  The brother who previously pragmatically suggested they fully benefit from Joseph plight.  He wanted to keep their wallets fat and their consciences light (Genesis 37:26-27).  Now his conscience is stricken, out of love for his father (Genesis 44:34).  Likely having lost two sons of his own has put his heart in tune with his father’s.  Who is this brother?  Judah, who is to become the kingly tribe (Genesis 49:10), the tribe of David, from which the Messiah will come, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah.

God, to magnify His Son, “exorcises” the “spirit of Cain” from the brothers and fills them with the Spirit of Christ.  He not only is relocating them from Canaan to Egypt, but from Enoch (the city built by Cain in Genesis 4:17) to Philadelphia.

We are not types of Christ as Judah was, but God’s providence is nonetheless at work to conform us to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29).  He disciplines us as sons to make us look like the Son.

Sometimes there can be right in your wrongness.  We are frail sinful creatures.  All our good is mixed with evil.  When I was a high school student I overheard a struggling pastor say he didn’t know if he could bring his teenagers to church camp.  I anonymously sent him some money to be used for this purpose.  I’m sure there was some initial pride involved in the deed.  Within the last couple of years I was speaking with my mom about this pastor and she reminded me of the act.  It took a while for her to remind me, I had nearly forgotten the deed.  But now every time I read Matthew 6:3-4, I think, “I did that once.”  In our right there is always some wrong mingled in.  But have you ever considered that by God’s grace in your wrong, there can be right?

God uses the brother’s wrong conceptions of what God is doing, to bring about the actions God desires.  The brothers seem to think God is exacting payment for their sins (Genesis 42:21-22, 28).   God is working to bring about their repentance, by their wrong conception of Him.  These brothers are not experiencing God’s wrath for sins, but His covenant faithfulness.  God is not exacting payment from them.  They couldn’t foot the bill.  The wages of sin is death.  There are only two sufficient payments for sin, eternity in hell, and the cross.  Jesus paid for all their sins.  God’s chastisement is not an exacting of payment, but a mark of love.

This is not to say our wrong perceptions of God are ok.  They are not, they are sin.  Sin is not legitimized, but God grace is glorified.  Tozer was absolutely right when he wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  Yet God graciously leads us to repentance of our sins and to a true knowledge of Him.  Oh matchless grace greater than all our sin.

God uses their sinful perceptions of His providence to bring about repentance.  God uses Joseph to unify, sanctify, and preserver the covenant family.  He uses a famine to provide the world with the Bread of Life.  This should not surprise us.  He used the cross to break that Bread, and extract the wine that we might partake and have eternal life.  God ordained the greatest sin ever as the act whereby our sins were washed away.

ADDENDUM:

As soon as I posted this I read this J.I. Packer Quote on Justin Taylor’s blog.

It is certain that God blesses believers precisely and invariably by blessing to them something of his truth and that misbelief as such is in its own nature spiritually barren and destructive.

Yet anyone who deals with souls will again and again be amazed at the gracious generosity with which God blesses to needy ones what looks to us like a very tiny needle of truth hidden amid whole haystacks of mental error. . . .

Every Christian without exception experiences far more in the way of mercy and help than the quality of his notions warrants

God’s transcendence and immanence are related.  Because His holy glory is so transcendent, it is immanent (Isaiah 6:3).  God’s glory cannot be contained, it is infinite, immeasurable, vast; it is even right here.  In our text we see God’s transcendent sovereignty mingled beautifully with His immanent mercy.  In fact we learn that they are never separated.  His immanent mercy is a transcendent sovereign mercy.  You cannot dissect God and His attributes.  Consider what we learn of God here.

1. God is sovereign. He raises up kings and brings them down (Daniel 2:21).  Their hearts are in his hand (Proverbs 21:1).  He uses them as his tools (Isaiah 10:5-7).  God gives Pharaoh this dream and is Lord over feast and famine (Psalm 105:16; Genesis 41:25, 28).

2.  Not only is God sovereign, but He also has a plan. Strength without wisdom is a dangerous thing.  In God infinite power meets infinite wisdom.  All His sovereign power is moving all things to His purpose (Isaiah 46:8-10).  It was God’s plan for Joseph to go to Egypt (Genesis 45:5-8).  God desired for the chief cupbearer to forget for two more years.  God wants to relocate His people to Egypt for a time, and He is orchestrating all of this, exercising His sovereignty to achieve His plan (Genesis 15:13-16).

Too many are sloppy theologians, they compartmentalize and rarely harmonize.  For instance, I think few connect the doctrine of God’s omniscience with the doctrine of God’s omnipotence.  Why is it that God knows the future?  Because He has a plan and nothing can thwart it.  He knows the future because he does the future (Proverbs 19:21, Job 23:13, Isaiah 14:27, Psalm 115:3).

3. Not only Is God sovereign, not only does He have a plan, but He also discloses His plan to His people. Two generations before Joseph God told Abraham of these things (Genesis 15:13-16).  Joseph as a young boy was given a dream that is controlling this final narrative of Genesis (Genesis 37:5-11).  Now God is revealing to Joseph what He is about to do.  God does nothing without revealing His secret to the prophets (Amos 3:7).  We are not prophets as Amos speaks of, but we have the word of the prophets.  Jesus makes known to His own His plan (John 15:15; 1 Corinthians 2:6-16).

4. Not only is God sovereign, not only does He have a plan, not only does He disclose His plan to His people, but He also graciously uses us to accomplish His plan. Joseph becomes the means God uses to preserve, unify, and sanctify the covenant family.  Joseph is the means God uses to disperse the bread of life.  In a greater way, not lesser, God catches us up into His plan, to proclaim the Bread of Life that has been broken.

Oh what transcendence!  Oh what immanence!

Your way, O God, is holy.
What god is great like our God?
You are the God who works wonders;
you have made known your might among the peoples. (Psalm 77:13-14)