When Dreams Are Dashed

Let’s start this morning’s message with a quick thought from the book of Proverbs:

Proverbs 13:12 ESV

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

We have all experienced this—when you are waiting for something you want and it takes longer than you expect.

On a minor level, there is that time when you order something off Amazon or something, it takes forever to ship, and then you get the notification that it is out for delivery, but it doesn’t come that day because of some delay.

If we live long enough, though, we see this on a much deeper level. The promotion we are waiting for just doesn’t come when we think it should. You don’t make it into the college or the degree program you thought you would, or someone else outbids you on the house you had your heart set on. Mr. or Ms. Right doesn’t seem to come along when you think they should, your spouse isn’t changing, or some other dream just doesn’t pan out.

There are times when that hope isn’t just deferred; your dreams are dashed.

You had hoped things would play out a certain way, but it just isn’t going to happen—things seem so bleak that you can’t see any way for things to work out.

How do you respond when your dreams are dashed?

Let’s walk through Genesis 37 this morning to see what it looks like when dreams get dashed.

I don’t want to seem trite, dismissive, or cliche in the way I say this today, but here’s what I want you to walk away from this with: When your dreams are dashed, cling to the fact that God is still at work.

As we pick back up in Genesis today, we are starting a new section that will carry us through the next month or so as we wrap up the book.

This chapter is foundational for what happens next, so we are going to spend most of our time this morning looking at the events of the chapter and draw some conclusions toward the end.

We spent the last few months looking at how God has been working to carry out his promises to Abraham and his family. Over and over again, we have seen that God is faithful despite the flaws of his people.

We have looked at Abraham, his son Isaac, his son Jacob, and now we are seeing what God is doing in the lives of Jacob’s twelve sons.

While the accounts are going to involve all of the brothers, the focus of the rest of the book is really on Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph.

Pick up the setting with me as we read 37:1-2.

The writer of Genesis uses the phrase, “These are the family records of...” to introduce a new section in the book that usually deals mainly with the sons of that person.

That’s what is happening here. We are looking at Jacob’s sons and how God worked in and through them.

We see that Joseph is 17 years old at this point, and he is the oldest son of Rachel, one of Jacob’s wives. There is some question about whether or not Benjamin has been born at this point, but the text doesn’t really make that clear.

Regardless, Joseph is the youngest son who is old enough to go work in the fields, and he has brought a bad report to his dad about how his brothers have been acting.

We don’t know what they were doing and whether Joseph was just tattling or if he had been sent to check on him.

Either way, when your half-brother is ratting on you, that isn’t going to sit well.

Their father, Jacob, made the situation unbearable for the brothers. Read verses 3-4...

Jacob should have known better than to play favorites! If you have been with us through this study, you know just how much damage was done when Jacob’s mom and dad each had a favorite son.

However, Jacob follows his family’s pattern.

Joseph was his daddy’s favorite, which he showed by giving Joseph some kind of ornate robe.

Some translations say “many colored” or “ornamented” while others say “long-sleeved”.

We don’t know the specifics, but this robe was fancy and made it clear that Joseph wasn’t expected to actually do work.

Although he was the youngest in the fields, he got preferential treatment and got to supervise instead of doing the actual work.

He had already told his dad that his brothers weren’t doing what they should have, and now it is clear that he is the favorite who can do no wrong.

They were so angry at Joseph that they couldn’t even speak peaceably to him. There was nothing nice they could say to him because they hated him so badly.

Through a series of dreams, Joseph is about to make this even worse. Pick up in verses 5-8.

He dreams that his brothers will bow down to him. Instead of keeping that to himself, he shares it with his brothers, and now they hate him all the more.

He tells them about another dream, only this one involves his parents as well. Read 9-11...

Not only are his brothers going to bow to him, so are his parents! His brothers are jealous, but his dad begins to contemplate what this might mean.

Joseph is his favorite son, after all, so at least this might mean that he rises to some level of authority.

So, what are the dreams we see so far?

Joseph, the fair-haired child who can do no wrong, has these literal dreams of greatness. At age 17, he has seen that his whole family will one day bow down to him.

Jacob sees that his favorite son will be in a favored place.

They are dreaming of greatness for Joseph, but those dreams are soon to be dashed.

Jacob sends Joseph to go check on his brothers who are 60 miles away from home, pasturing their flocks near Shechem.

This should raise some red flags for us, because things didn’t go great last time they were in Shechem, did they? That’s when Joseph’s brothers murdered all the men of the town of Shechem.

When Jacob goes looking for them, he finds out they have moved even farther north to a town called Dothan, which was situated along a major trade route.

Here’s where it gets really bad. Pick up in verse 18-19...

The brothers’ initial plan is to kill Joseph and throw his body into a pit. They later say that this pit didn’t have any water in it, so it may have been a cistern, which was a lined pit in the ground that you stored water in for the dry season.

Sibling rivalry is one thing, but this has risen to the level of murdering your own brother.

We know that at least two of the brothers are capable of murder because of what they did to the men at Shechem.

However, that was about revenge for what they had done to their sister—this is their own brother.

Sure, he has been obnoxious and he is dad’s favorite, but murder?

The oldest brother, Reuben, tries to intervene. Read verses 21-24.

There may be another dream at play here. One of the passages we didn’t have time to cover in chapter 35 told us that Reuben had fallen out of favor with his dad, Jacob, because Reuben actually slept with Bilhah, one of Jacob’s concubines.

The text doesn’t tell us clearly, but it could be that Reuben wanted to rescue Joseph because that would get him back in good standing with his dad.

It could also be that he was older and more level-headed than some of the brothers and he realized this was wrong.

Whatever his motive, Reuben’s hopes didn’t work out either.

The brothers sit down to eat a meal. While they are eating, a caravan of traders comes by. They are Midianites, descendants of Ishmael, and they were heading down to Egypt.

If you like digging into these things, there are so many echoes in this passage of what we have seen in our study already—Ishmael isn’t the son of promise, Abraham journeyed to Egypt while others were prohibited from going there and leaving the land God promised—so many little threads that God is weaving together.

God wove these stories together so intricately that it really is incredibly beautiful.

That’s easy for us to say, because we aren’t Joseph looking up from the bottom of a pit.

Pick up in verse 26-28...

Judah will be an important figure later. Keep in mind that he is the one who decided to sell his own brother so they could at least make a little something off him.

We don’t know how much older he was than Joseph, but Judah sells his own brother because of his jealousy.

Reuben was somehow absent for the sale of Joseph, so he goes back to rescue his brother and finds he his gone.

Now we are seeing some dreams being dashed, aren’t we?

Reuben’s hopes of sparing Joseph and restoring him to Jacob are shot.

Instead of his brothers bowing down to him, Joseph looks up from the bottom of a pit to see them standing over him, only pulling him out to sell him.

The brothers aren’t done yet, though. They take Joseph’s ornate robe, tear it up, and cover it in a goat’s blood.

They send it back to Jacob and allow Jacob to draw his own conclusion.

Remember how Jacob was the deceiver? His own sons have now deceived him, and all the hopes he had about his favorite son are torn to pieces.

In verse 35, Jacob is inconsolable as he mourns for his son.

We have one last note in verse 36 - Joseph is taken to Egypt and sold as a slave to Potiphar, a captain of the guard in Pharaoh’s court.

His brothers were supposed to bow to him. Instead, they almost murdered him and now he is away from home and enslaved.

The Bible doesn’t tell us what he was thinking at this point, but I think it safe to say that he was pretty hopeless.

His dreams had been dashed, but God’s work in his life was just getting started.

We are going to do something you don’t usually do with a story, and we are going to jump to the end. We will come back over the next few weeks and cover the middle, but how many of you know how Joseph’s story ends?

He ends up the second in command over Egypt and is responsible for saving the lives of literally millions of people and reshaping the Egyptian economic system.

Eventually, he is reunited with his brothers and brings his family to Egypt.

At that point, he is able to say:

Genesis 45:7–8 CSB

God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

Years later, he would tell his brothers:

Genesis 50:20 CSB

You planned evil against me; God planned it for good to bring about the present result—the survival of many people.

Here’s the thing, though: It may have been around 25 years from the time Joseph had the dreams to the time where he told his brothers that it was God who sent him.

For 13 of those years, Joseph was enslaved and maligned and mistreated. That’s about 4,700 days.

It was over seven more years before he would see his brothers again.

That’s a really long time when you are enduring mistreatment like that!

We don’t know at what point God gave Joseph the understanding that he was working through all these things, but as we will see as we go through his story, there were several times where the rug was ripped out from under him and he found himself stuck in a bad place.

Now, what does all of that have to do with us?

If you are saved today, you have a lot in common with Joseph.

When God adopts us into his family, we become honored sons.

We see a lot of this in the promises he has made to us.

Here are just a few of the promises God has made: Abundant life, a heavenly home, divine sonship, fellowship with Jesus, spiritual gifts, God’s protecting care and guidance, hope, joy, knowledge, peace, renewal, rest, strength, wisdom, and much more. (Wilmington’s Book of Bible Lists).

In many ways, we are like Joseph—we are especially blessed by our father with riches we don’t deserve.

We have the promises of current and future blessings, yet like Joseph, we all find ourselves in a pit at some point.

There are disorienting seasons where faith is hard to cling to and everything seems upside down.

Things are not working like we thought they would, or maybe it doesn’t even seem like they are working like God said they would!

What do we do in those moments?

We look to people like Joseph to see that God has always been working his plan, even when it doesn’t make sense for years!

Keep this in mind: When Joseph realized what God was doing, the point wasn’t that God was working to make Joseph powerful or wealthy.

Look at it again:

Genesis 45:7–8 CSB

God sent me ahead of you to establish you as a remnant within the land and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Therefore it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household, and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

What God did through Joseph wasn’t for Joseph; it was to continue the promise he had made to Abraham.

If God hadn’t given Joseph the wisdom and position he did, millions of people would have died in the famine that impacted that entire region.

That likely would have included Jacob and his family.

God’s plan was preparing Joseph a step at a time for the role he would play in carrying the Abrahamic covenant on.

Joseph’s sons wouldn’t be the source of the promised Messiah, but God was working his plan through Joseph’s life.

Every heartache, every betrayal, every setback was part of what God was doing to save the world through Abraham’s descendants.

When our dreams are dashed, then, we can rest in the reality that God is doing something we may not see for years.

Hear me clearly on this: That doesn’t mean that you and I are going to get what we want eventually if we just hold on.

It does mean, though, that what God is doing in and through us will not stop.

Joseph’s life didn’t look anything like he thought it would, I am sure. Ours may not either. We may never know why we had to go through this or endure this hardship.

Yet, in every situation, God is working, even when our dreams are dashed.

God showed clearly what he was trying to accomplish through Joseph’s life, but what if he doesn’t?

What if his brothers had killed him in the pit that day?

God is still working, even if our life ends in the pit without us ever getting out.

Why? Because the promises God have made to us are far more than just those in this life.

He has promised us a home in heaven, a place in his kingdom, eternal life, and eternal rewards.

Those things can never be taken away, even if we die in the pit.

But how can we say that? How can we know for sure that God is doing things like this in our lives?

Because of another Son the Bible tells us about.

While we are adopted as God’s sons, Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God by his nature—he is in a class all his own.

Everything in all creation should have bowed down to him, but he was rejected and despised instead.

Jesus was so hated that he was condemned to die and nailed to a cross.

There, he died in our place, taking our sin and our punishment and our death on himself.

He wasn’t laid in a pit but in a tomb.

However, when he came out of the tomb, he wasn’t sold into slavery. Instead, he was raised from the dead to free us from our slavery to sin and to draw us into a relationship with himself.

Now, if anyone will surrender to him, turning from what he says is wrong and sinful and turning to him as their Lord, they can have a hope that withstands the disorientation and disillusionment of life.

We can trust God to work, and we can cling to him when our dreams are dashed.