God’s Provision for Our Peace
Meant for Good • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Genesis 50
Genesis 50
Good morning! Please open your Bible to Genesis 50. Today we conclude our series on Joseph that we are calling Meant for Good. Throughout the series, we’ve talked about God’s process for transforming us to become more and more like Christ.
Let’s review the journey we’ve been on together.
There’s a promise: (Salvation)
There’s a process for fulfilling God’s promise. Christians call this sanctification, and it involves all the tools God uses to transform us from the inside out. For Joseph, that process involved a lot of pain along the way. And sometimes that is exactly what it takes for us for us to die to ourselves and give ourselves completely to the rule and reign of Christ in our lives.
We talked about how the Biblical definition of perfection Theologians call this glorification, when 1 John 3:2
“2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
Then there is God’s ultimate purpose (transformation)
So this morning, we want to finish up this series on Joseph by looking at how God has provided for our reconciliation, and has prepared a way for us to live in peace— truly being reconciled to God and to each other.
I want to begin our time together by reading Genesis 50:14-21. Please stand to honor the reading of God’s word.
14 After he had buried his father, Joseph returned to Egypt with his brothers and all who had gone up with him to bury his father. 15 When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him.” 16 So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died: 17 ‘Say to Joseph, “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.” ’ And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. 18 His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.” 19 But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. 21 So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
Let’s pray. [pray]
We have covered so much already about Joseph, that there’s no way I could recap it all. But all the sermons in this series are available on You Tube, so I hope you will check them out.
And I know I’m kind of jumping to the end, because we finished with chapter 44 last week. But here’s the highlight reel from chapters 45-49:
Joseph reveals himself to his brothers. And after all they have done to him— their jealousy, their hatred, how they ultimately sold him into slavery, Joseph says in Genesis 45:5
5 And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.
So from the beginning, Joseph recognizes that everything that has happened is from the hand of God. He says in verse 8 “It was not you who sent me here, but God.”
Joseph sends the brothers back to Canaan to bring back the entire family, along with their flocks and herds and everything they have. And most importantly, bring back dad.
They have a big family reunion, hugs all around, and then they get settled in the land of Goshen, which was a region of Egypt. Genesis 47:27 says,
27 Thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen. And they gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly.
Highlight that. We will come to it later.
In chapters 48-49, Jacob blesses his children and grandchildren. These blessings aren’t just blessings, like live long and prosper, but they are also words of prophecy. It’s in Jacob’s blessing of Judah that God reveals that there will always be a descendant of Judah on the throne of Israel. Genesis 49:8-10
8 “Judah, your brothers shall praise you; your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons shall bow down before you. 9 Judah is a lion’s cub; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down; he crouched as a lion and as a lioness; who dares rouse him? 10 The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.
After that, Jacob commands his sons that when he dies, they are to carry his bones back to the land of Canaan. We’ll cover that in a few minutes. But here’s where I want to get to our main passage. Look what happens after Jacob dies:
15 When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, “It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him.”
What word do they use to describe what they had done thirty years before? That’s right. Evil. What they did was evil. They didn’t say, “Pay us back for that little thing with the pit.” They called it what it was. It was evil.
And that’s what we need to do as well. In order to be reconciled to God, we have to
Be honest with God about your sin (Gen. 50:16)
Do you ever notice how we minimize our sin? We call it everything BUT sin. It’s a mistake, a setback, a bad decision, a poor life choice, and any number of other euphemisms in order to avoid calling it what it is. Sin. Joseph’s brothers finally came to the point where they admitted that what they did to Joseph was evil.
When I was in seminary, I went to a meeting of Narcotics Anonymous (Nar-Anon) with my friend Cathy. Cathy’s brother Jim was an addict. NarAnon is a support group for families of addicts. And its set up like every other twelve step support group. The first step is to admit that you are powerless over whatever your addiction is. In Cathy’s case as the sister of an addict, The first step is “We came to the point where we admitted we were powerless over our family member’s addiction.
“Hi I’m Cathy, and my brother is a drug addict.” And the room responds with “Hi Cathy.”
That’s what being honest about our sin looks like. We call it what it is, without mincing words. The first step of repentance is to realize we are all powerless on our own to break our addiction to sin.
What if we started every Sunday school class with “Hi, I’m ________ and I’m a sinner.” We should try this when we do the opening greeting time. “Go find someone you don’t know and tell them you’re a sinner.”
The power of a twelve step program is that no one comes with a front. You bring the real you to the meeting, and the group accepts you for who you are.
Side note: It was my friend Cathy whose husband died last week. I was at the funeral in Georgia yesterday, and Cathy’s brother Jim spoke. He’s been clean for over 20 years now. When he stood up to speak, he began with, “Hi, I’m Jim…” He didn’t finish the line, but all of us in the room who knew his story responded with “Hi Jim”
Bring the real you to the real Jesus.
The real Jesus is the one revealed in the Scripture. Let’s stop the silly nonsense about “well, my God would never do this, or my god is a god of love, or my god (fill in the blank). Purge that from your vocabulary. Instead, get in the habit of saying, “God, as He is revealed in scripture, is…” Jesus, as He is revealed in Scripture, is…
As you spend time in God’s word, you will learn about the character and heart of Jesus. What He likes. What He hates. You aren’t going to find that in all the imaginary Jesuses that people have made in their own image.
Then, bring the real you to the real Jesus. Not the dressed up version of you that you bring to church on sundays. Bring all your failures, bring your addictions. Bring your struggles. When you bring the real you to the real Jesus, your life is transformed.
The problem is the brothers didn’t know the real Joseph. If the key to knowing Jesus is spending time in his word, then the key to knowing Joseph would have been for the brothers to spend time with him. But apparently in the seventeen years they had been with Joseph in Egypt, they still didn’t truly know him.
So here is the second point. Be confident in God’s character and love (Gen. 50:17)
This is what the brothers are missing. Here’s how I know this:
The brother’s are thinking, “Maybe Joseph has only been nice to us because Jacob was still alive. And now that he’s dead, it’s probably payback time. Even though Joseph had told them years before that it wasn’t them that sent Joseph to Egypt but God, I guess they were thinking, that Joseph was playing some kind of long game with them.
So here’s what they do: Genesis 50:16 says they
16 So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died: 17 ‘Say to Joseph, “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.” ’ And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him.
The brothers did this through a message. They were afraid to talk to Joseph directly. Now Scripture doesn’t say this, but I think the brothers were lying. I don’t think there was ever this conversation with dear old Dad. But its clear that the brothers were terrified of Joseph. The whole time they lived in Egypt, they never got to the point where they trusted Joseph.
And I think we do the same thing with God. Don’t we do this to God? We are afraid to approach him. We think his forgiveness is too good to be true.
We come to church every week, and we hear the sermons, and we drink the coffee, and we make small talk about how our football team yesterday, but we always keep God at arms length because we are afraid that will be rejected if we are honest with God and with each other.
Why did Joseph weep when he heard this? Because it showed how little the brothers trusted that Joseph actually loved them. That they really could be reconciled.
Joseph didn’t mince words about what his brothers had done to him. He didn’t say, “Guys, that’s all water under the bridge. It’s all good. No— he said, “you intended this for evil.” What you did to me, evil.” But God intended it for good.
Be careful about getting too comfortable in Egypt (Genesis 50:25; Hebrews 11:22)
I want to go back and pick up on something from earlier in the story. Turn back to Genesis 47. After Joseph brought his father Jacob and all his brothers to live in Egypt, Jacob was presented to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh asked him how old he was. Jacob tells him he was 130 years old (Genesis 47:9).
Now, skip down to verse 28. How old was Jacob when he died? 147. That means Jacob’s family lived in Egypt for 17 more years. So at least ten years after the famine was over, Jacob’s family was still living in Egypt, even though not their home.
Now, turn back to Genesis 49. In verse 29, Jacob made Joseph swear to him that he wouldn’t bury him in Egypt, but that he and his brothers would take his body back to Canaan. And that’s where we picked up the story with this mornings reading. Joseph and his brothers get permission from Pharaoh to return to Canaan to bury Jacob.
But here’s where it gets really interesting. According to Genesis 50:8, they leave their children, their flocks, their flocks, and their herds in the land of Goshen
8 as well as all the household of Joseph, his brothers, and his father’s household. Only their children, their flocks, and their herds were left in the land of Goshen.
So Joseph and his brothers go back and bury Jacob, and verse 10 says they mourned Jacob for seven days. Notice what their former neighbors say in Genesis 50:11:
Genesis 50:11 (ESV)
11 When the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning on the threshing floor of Atad, they said, “This is a grievous mourning by the Egyptians.” Therefore the place was named Abel-mizraim; it is beyond the Jordan.
They had gotten so comfortable in Egypt that their neighbors didn’t even recognize them.
Now, look at the last few verses of Genesis. I’m going to read from verse 22 to the end:
22 So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s house. Joseph lived 110 years. 23 And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation. The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph’s own. 24 And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” 25 Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” 26 So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.
Joseph was around 50 when Jacob died. And 60 years later, he and his brothers are still in Egypt. And why wouldn’t they be? Egypt was great! They were rich there. They had power and influence there. Things were great in Egypt.
But still, Joseph knew it wasn’t home. Just as Jacob did, Joseph made his children swear they wouldn’t bury him in Egypt.
Hebrews 11 in the New Testament is often called the Hall of Faith, because it is all about how the heroes of the Old Testament exercised faith. “By faith Noah built an ark. By faith Abraham moved his family to the land of promise. By faith Jacob blessed his children.
Now, when the writer of Hebrews got to Joseph, what was the one detail about his extraordinary life would you expect him to record? By faith Joseph… what? rejected the advances of Potiphar’s wife? Saved Egypt from famine? Forgave his brothers? Any of those could ha ve landed Joseph in the Hall of Faith. But the writer of Hebrews didn’t talk about any of these as examples of Joseph’s faith. The one thing he brought up was
Hebrews 11:22
“By faith Joseph, at the end of his life, made mention of the exodus of the Israelites and gave directions concerning his bones.”
You see, no matter how great things were in Egypt, Joseph knew (deep in his bones) that it wasn’t his home. Regardless of how much power and influence and wealth and status and comfort Egypt gave Joseph and his family, Egypt was not their home.
The last sentence of Genesis is an ominous foreshadowing of what comes next:
Genesis 50:26
“So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.”
It would be another 450 years before Joseph’s descendants fulfilled their promise to him.
Because things were great in Egypt until they weren’t. Eventually there arose a Pharaoh who according to Exodus 1:8 “knew not Joseph.” He made slaves of the children of Israel.
I would argue that the Israelites had become slaves to the comforts of Egypt long before they became slaves to the Pharaoh of Egypt.
This world is not our home. No matter how beautiful it is, no matter how comfortable we are, no matter how much of a “preferred community” Prattville is, we should never prefer it over our heavenly home.
In 2023, one of the great heroes in our own congregation, Ed Armstrong, passed away. He had fought a long battle with a host of different issues.
I’ve visited with Ed several times since then, and I’ve seldom seen anyone face death with such courage and hope. The first thing he showed me was his army uniform. As soon as he had made the decision to discontinue treatment, he had it cleaned and pressed so he could be buried in it. It was in the dry cleaner’s bag, hanging well apart from any other clothes so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. “It’s ready, whenever God calls me home.” he said. “And it still fits!”
I saw Ed for the last time the day before yesterday. He was in his recliner, which later that day would be replaced with a hospital bed. He apologized for not having his dentures in. “If I’d known you were coming, I would have put my teeth in,” he said with a smile.
“How are you, Ed?” I asked, smiling back at this brave, precious old man.
“I want to go home,” he said. “I’m ready. I have no regrets.”
Ed died on January 27. On January 28, our Bible reading plan had us in Genesis 47-50. And as I read about Jacob and then Joseph making their children swear to take their bones to the promised land, I thought about Ed and how excited he was to go home. I wrote this poem for Ed that morning, and here’s where we’re going to end this morning:
Carry me up out of Egypt,
‘Cause my body’s not at home here.
Too long I’ve lived in a foreign land
I can feel it in my bones here.
Carry me up out of Egypt,
‘Cause Pharaoh’s making slaves here.
He took their silver, land, and lives
And he’ll treat us the same way here.
Carry me up out of Egypt;
The Nile is okay here
But over Jordan’s my true home,
And I just don’t wanna stay here.
Carry me up out of Egypt
Swear an oath to me here.
‘Cause Egypt’s sure to get in us
The longer that we be here.
Dear church, this world is not your home.
[Invitation]