God’s Glory

We have been looking at the work of God in the lives of Joseph’s sin-hardened brothers. Twenty-two years before these events they had sold their innocent and unsuspecting brother into slavery, and all the years since then they had lived with their terrible secret. No one knew—not Jacob their father, not Joseph’s younger brother Benjamin, certainly not their wives or children. But God knew, and He was working in them to expose their sin and bring genuine healing to their lives.

To understand Genesis 44 we must put ourselves in the brothers’ shoes as they started out from Egypt that final morning. They had gone to Egypt with gloomy apprehensions, fueled perhaps by the even gloomier apprehensions of their father. The last time they had been in Egypt, the prime minister had been suspicious of them. He had called them spies and had refused to believe their word about their family, particularly their testimony about their youngest brother Benjamin who had been left behind in Canaan. More than this, he had demanded proof that they were speaking the truth.

Jesus stands ready not only to expose but to forgive, not only to condemn but to cleanse and restore to useful service.

In yesterday’s study, we concluded with the idea that before forgiveness and cleansing can occur, Jesus must first reveal to us the depth of our sin and the reality of our impending judgment. When a person is exposed to this divine logic for the first time, it sounds wrong. It sounds as if a person who has undergone the experience of the brothers must now be broken psychologically and must be as useless to God and others as a brainwashed prisoner. But God’s ways are not our ways, and actually the opposite is the case.

Yesterday, we ended by wondering how the brothers might respond to the silver cup being found with Benjamin. How might they try to save themselves? What story would they perhaps make up to tell their father? Thanks to the work of God, none of these thoughts was now in the brothers’ minds. Years before they had willingly sold Joseph. Now there is not one of them who did not wish that the cup had been found in his sack rather than in Benjamin’s. And they did not abandon him!