God can use our weaknesses for His Glory - Joseph, from Prison to Governor

We pick up this week with Jospeh in prison, forgotten by the two men who were his chance to get released.

The Pharoah’s cupbearer and baker, two men who had dreams that Joseph interpreted.

And before we move onto the next episode in Joseph’s life let’s take a little time to see how big a deal it was that Joseph was forgotten.

These two men were high officials in Pharoah’s court and for them to be thrown in jail was a big deal.

For them to both have dreams that required someone to interprete and to not be able to find someone was also a significant thing in their lives.

The Egyptians along with other ancient near eastern empires such as the Babylonians compiled dream books and had experts who would interprete dreams based upon the accounts in these books.

Sample dreams would be written in these books and various aspects and symolism in them would be given a meaning.

Even today there is a body of evidence that certain symbols and concepts in dreams are an indicator of what the mind is trying to process and make sense of as you sleep.

In those times it was believed that the gods communicated through these dreams and it was therefore important to have people who could interprete the meansing for you.

But Joseph had a different understanding.

He didn’t see it as the god’s speaking, nor did he see that it was man’s role to interprete the dreams.

This was something that was in God’s hands.

So Joseph trusting in God asks to hear the dream so he can tell these men what God is saying to them.

Now for the Cupbearer the news is good.

In three days it all will go well for him.

He will be restored to his role.

But for the baker, a horrible death awaits.

Now there is some debate amongst scholars and you can see this in the various ways verse 19 is translated in different versions of the Bible as to wether the dream in verses 16 and 17 and Joseph’s interpretation in verse 19 indicate that the baker will first be decapitated, wether by hanging or other means before being impaled or wether he was simply impaled..

Not that it makes much difference, but I think decapitation by some means first would be preferable.

Being impaled on a pole was seen then as it is now as a particularly horrific way to die.

It always intrigues me that people in these situations don’t flee.

If in three days this man is brought to Pharoah’s court and given back suitable clothing before being presented to Pharoah, I would expect that as soon as he is left alone that he would flee or at least try to.

The guard says, “Here put on these suitable cloths to appear before Pharoah” and I would be straight out the nearest window.

Wouldn’t you?

No sharpened stake for me thank you very much!

Now all of this is rather interesting, but it isn’t the main point of the story.

What jumps out here isn’t the means of death of some official in the court of an ancient ruler.

What jumps out is the significnce of what Joseph has done for these men and the fact that in light of this he should have been remembered by the cupbearer.

But out of sight out of mind.

For two whole years, Jospeh is fogotten.

And then Pharoah has a dream and no one in his court could interprete it for him.

Here we see the third major episode in Joseph’s life begin.

In Genesis 41:25-32 we read that Joseph tells Pharoah not only what the dreams mean but from verse 33 he also tells Pharoah what he should do about it.

All the while giving glory to God as the giver of the dream and the interpretation.

Now you could spend ages going over the dreams and the interpretation and look at all the finer details such as the annual flood cycle of the Nile river and the incredible level of detail that the Egyptians went into to record the river levels each year.

You could look at how central the Nile river was to the life of the country and how droughts had devastated both the populance and the kingdom at different times.

To get all these fine details would be all very interesting , but when the scriptures clearly give you the meaning of the dream, the point isn’t the dream.

The point is why was Joseph here at this point in time.

What was God setting up?

Why was God protecting Joseph on at least two occassions so far when he could have and normally would have been killed.

Jealousy in a family and being thrown into a dry cistern in a desert climate would normally have resulted in death.

Being accused of assulting the master’s wife would have normally resulted in death.

But here we see Joseph once again going from a hopeless situation to being miraculously rescued.

From cast into a cistern to die to being pulled out and sold into slavery.

From slave market to steward of the household.

From accused and facing death to jail.

From the newest prisoner to in charge of the other prisoners.

From forgotten to proclaimed to Pharoah as the one who can interprete the dream that was troubling him.

From prison to Governor of all Egypt.

It makes a good story and if it stopped here it would make a good lesson as to why it is important to allways be faithful to God.

And yes Joseph was learning through all of this.

Learning to be wise with his words and knowing when it was wise to speak and when not.

Learning humility and knowing his place.

Learning to serve well and for the benefit of those he served rather than himself.

All good lessons for what was to come next.

Three reasons for Joseph’s journey - 1/ Saving Egypt

There are at least three reasons why God chose to use Joseph in his weaknesses.

The first is to save the nation of Egypt from famine.

Genesis 41:33-36 tells us this, “Therefore, Pharaoh should find an intelligent and wise man and put him in charge of the entire land of Egypt. 34 Then Pharaoh should appoint supervisors over the land and let them collect one-fifth of all the crops during the seven good years. 35 Have them gather all the food produced in the good years that are just ahead and bring it to Pharaoh’s storehouses. Store it away, and guard it so there will be food in the cities. 36 That way there will be enough to eat when the seven years of famine come to the land of Egypt. Otherwise this famine will destroy the land.””

God had a reason to save Egypt at this time.

God was working out a plan and part of that plan was to allow Egypt to prosper at this time to provide food for its people and stability so that it could be a place of refuge for others when the famine came.

Jacob and his sons in the land of Cannan were semi nomadic shepherds.

They lived in a region that was somewhat settled by this time.

But even though Jacob’s clan was wealthy and powerful their position in time of famine would have been precarious.

They had no store cities in which to hold grain.

Those in the cities would have seen them as a threat to their own supplies.

Their flocks would be seen as a threat to what little feed was left for the flocks of the local cities.

Three reasons for Joseph’s journey - 1/ Saving Egypt 2/ Saving the family of Jacob

Without Joseph the clan of Jacob would be destroyed by this famine.

God used Joseph through his weaknesses to provide for the family of Jacob.

Because without Jacob’s son Judah there would be no line of David, no line of the King from which the Messiah would be born.

Matthew 1 and Luke 3 both list Judah as an ancestor of King David and hence of Jesus.

Joseph had a purpose and here we see one of them.

Not that he himself played any particular role in the line of David, he didn’t.

Not that he himself played any particular role in the line of the Messiah, he didn’t.

But he ensured the survival of that line.

God used Joseph to provide food for the land of Egypt in a time of great famine.

To protect the kingdom of Egypt so that it could be a place of provision.

Provision that would ensure the survival of the Davidic line so necessary for the future of the Messiah.

God can use our weaknesses for his Glory and we need to understand that we may not see or understand at the time how God is going to use us.

But we need to see everything as an opportunity for him to use us.

Joseph would have never imagined being thrown into that Cistern by his brothers as something that God could use.

Even his immaturity and arrogance in shooting his mouth off and sharing the dreams about how his whole family would bow down to him was used by God.

Now the Bible clearly counsels against this sort of thing, so don’t be silly and think that shooting your mouth off and being arrogant is OK because somehow God will use it for his glory.

No it is likely to just get you in trouble and cause unnecessary suffering.

But do realise that God can use you even when you don’t have it all together.

God used Joseph, even his early failures to set something up truly wonderful.

Jospeh realised this when he said in Genesis 45:5-8

Genesis 45:5–8 NLT

5 But don’t be upset, and don’t be angry with yourselves for selling me to this place. It was God who sent me here ahead of you to preserve your lives. 6 This famine that has ravaged the land for two years will last five more years, and there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. 7 God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors. 8 So it was God who sent me here, not you! And he is the one who made me an adviser to Pharaoh—the manager of his entire palace and the governor of all Egypt.

Three reasons for Joseph’s journey - 1/ Saving Egypt 2/ Saving the family of Jacob 3/ Establishing the people of Israel as a nation

Up until this moment Jacob and his family, while a significant seminomadic group were certainly not an entire nation.

Less than 70 direct descendents.

Add in the wives of those who were married and servants and we see a nomdic tribe of maybe a few thousand people at best.

430 years later at the Exodus we discover that the people of Israel is an entire nation.

Numbers 1:46 tells us that one year after they left Egypt the total number of fighting men over 20 years old was 603, 550.

When you add in the Levites, who were not counted, plus women and children we see that in the 430 years since Jacob arrived in Egypt the Israelites had grown to a nation of well over two million.

Now we need to understand that these numbers are seen by many scholars as problamatic on purely practical grounds.

Two million people with the elderly, their flocks and their children would result in a very long line.

The best solution they can come up with today is that the word for division or company may have been confused at some point with the word for thousand.

So instead of reading 603 thousand perhaps it should read 603 divisions of troops.

The problem isn’t the accuracy of the Biblical text, the problem is with our understanding of how to correctly translate it.

Whatever the actual numbers are God has used Joseph and his weaknesses to build a powerful nation.

A nation that would go on to conquer the promised land and set the scene for the coming messiah.

This is an incredible story where God uses the weaknesses and arrogance of a shepherd boy from a dysfunctional family to set the environment for his chosen people to florish

How will God use us in our weaknesses?

You never know what he has planned.

That is why we need to see everything as an opportunity for God to be at work.

If he is not doing something we can understand in the here and now, perhaps he is setting things up for something generations in the future!