Yesterday, we concluded with the idea that when Joseph’s brothers found the money for the grain in their sacks, what bothered them was the providential nature of the event. However insignificant this discovery was, for them it was proof that God was present in their circumstances and that he was going to demand a reckoning for their sin where Joseph was concerned.
I have found this many times in my counseling of troubled or convicted people. God had been working with them, and as they tell me their stories they often stress some small or several small details as evidence of God’s working. Looked at coldly, such circumstances are nearly always explainable. An unbeliever would dismiss them as mere accidents. But I have learned not to think like this. To some other person they may well appear as accidents, as nothing, but they are the touch of God’s hand to the one under conviction. In speaking of them the person is acknowledging that God is working in his life and is accomplishing more than he can see by the circumstances.
You cannot approach the true God without being aware of your sin. You cannot find salvation without confessing it.
2. What does the brothers’ statement concerning God signify? The answer is that they were coming to grips with the true God at last. In other words, their statement does not only mean that they were recognizing that God was doing something to them (“What is this that God has done to us?”) but also that they were recognizing that it was God who was doing it (“What is this that God has done to us?”). A moment ago, when I was trying to show the importance of this verse, I pointed out that this is the first moment in the story when any of the brothers refers to God. Not once before this is the word “God” even found on their lips. I do not mean to have suggested, however, that in literal fact there was never an occasion on which any one of them ever used God’s name. On the contrary, though it is not recorded for us, I am sure there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of times when one or another of the brothers would refer to God, saying, “God this . . .” or “God that…” After all, they were the sons of Jacob, and at Hebron the God of Jacob was a household word. He was the one who had brought Abraham, their great grandfather, out of Ur. He was the one who had appeared to their father at Bethel and had wrestled with him at Jabbok. God? They knew all about God!
Ah, but they did not! They used the word “God,” but that did not mean any more to them than the words “nature” (if they had such a word) or “fate” or “destiny” or “happenstance.” God was not real to them. They had been living their lives as if God did not exist for them personally. When they say, “What is this that God has done to us?” they are acknowledging the bearing of the true God on their lives for the very first time.
I wonder if you have come to the point at which God has really become God to you? You have used His name carelessly. You have joined the babble of the multitudes whose two most popular words today are “My God!”
You have said, “God bless you,” and have not understood what you were saying.
You have said, “God knows.”
Perhaps, God forgive you, you have used God’s name in swearing. These uses of God’s name do not mean that you know God. On the contrary, they are evidence that you probably do not. Who is the God of these expressions? Nobody! An entity the unbeliever cannot even begin to define!
