COMPLETED TRIALS COMPELTE: JOSEPH
James: Faith that Works • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colors.
But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.
Now Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers they hated him even more.
They saw him from afar, and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him.
They said to one another, “Here comes this dreamer.
Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits. Then we will say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what will become of his dreams.”
But when Reuben heard it, he rescued him out of their hands, saying, “Let us not take his life.”
And Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood; throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him”—that he might rescue him out of their hand to restore him to his father.
So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the robe of many colors that he wore.
And they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty; there was no water in it.
Then they sat down to eat. And looking up they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh, on their way to carry it down to Egypt.
Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?
Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, our own flesh.” And his brothers listened to him.
Then Midianite traders passed by. And they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt.
he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave.
Coincidence - a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.
Coincidence - a striking occurrence of two or more events at one time apparently by mere chance.
AS CHRISTIAN’S WE BELIEVE IN PROVIDENCE NOT COINCIDENCE.
AS CHRISTIAN’S WE BELIEVE IN PROVIDENCE NOT COINCIDENCE.
Joseph’s journey into slavery was not an accident—it was God’s means to bring about future good. This evil, therefore, was not outside of God's control. Rather, it was the first step in the unfolding of His redemptive plan for Joseph, his family, and many others.
Meanwhile the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard.
Now Joseph had been brought down to Egypt, and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, had bought him from the Ishmaelites who had brought him down there.
The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man, and he was in the house of his Egyptian master.
His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands.
So Joseph found favor in his sight and attended him, and he made him overseer of his house and put him in charge of all that he had.
So he left all that he had in Joseph’s charge, and because of him he had no concern about anything but the food he ate. Now Joseph was handsome in form and appearance.
And after a time his master’s wife cast her eyes on Joseph and said, “Lie with me.”
But he refused and said to his master’s wife, “Behold, because of me my master has no concern about anything in the house, and he has put everything that he has in my charge.
He is not greater in this house than I am, nor has he kept back anything from me except you, because you are his wife. How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?”
And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her, to lie beside her or to be with her.
But one day, when he went into the house to do his work and none of the men of the house was there in the house,
she caught him by his garment, saying, “Lie with me.” But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house.
And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled out of the house,
she called to the men of her household and said to them, “See, he has brought among us a Hebrew to laugh at us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice.
And as soon as he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me and fled and got out of the house.”
Then she laid up his garment by her until his master came home,
and she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to laugh at me.
But as soon as I lifted up my voice and cried, he left his garment beside me and fled out of the house.”
As soon as his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, “This is the way your servant treated me,” his anger was kindled.
And Joseph’s master took him and put him into the prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined, and he was there in prison.
But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.
The keeper of the prison paid no attention to anything that was in Joseph’s charge, because the Lord was with him. And whatever he did, the Lord made it succeed.
Only remember me, when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.
For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.”
Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.
After two whole years, Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile,
So in the morning his spirit was troubled, and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt and all its wise men. Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was none who could interpret them to Pharaoh.
Then the chief cupbearer said to Pharaoh, “I remember my offenses today.
A young Hebrew was there with us, a servant of the captain of the guard. When we told him, he interpreted our dreams to us, giving an interpretation to each man according to his dream.
And Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find a man like this, in whom is the Spirit of God?”
And Pharaoh said to Joseph, “See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt.”
Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt. And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh and went through all the land of Egypt.
The good in these events is God’s providential positioning of Joseph. What seemed like continual setbacks were actually steps toward a divine purpose. Joseph’s wisdom, shaped by suffering, would be used by God to save many lives, including those of his own family
And Reuben answered them, “Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood.”
They did not know that Joseph understood them, for there was an interpreter between them.
Then he turned away from them and wept. And he returned to them and spoke to them. And he took Simeon from them and bound him before their eyes.
And Joseph gave orders to fill their bags with grain, and to replace every man’s money in his sack, and to give them provisions for the journey. This was done for them.
They said, “Your servant our father is well; he is still alive.” And they bowed their heads and prostrated themselves.
And he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother’s son, and said, “Is this your youngest brother, of whom you spoke to me? God be gracious to you, my son!”
Then Joseph hurried out, for his compassion grew warm for his brother, and he sought a place to weep. And he entered his chamber and wept there.
Then he washed his face and came out. And controlling himself he said, “Serve the food.”
Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him. He cried, “Make everyone go out from me.” So no one stayed with him when Joseph made himself known to his brothers.
And he wept aloud, so that the Egyptians heard it, and the household of Pharaoh heard it.
And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am Joseph! Is my father still alive?” But his brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed at his presence.
So Joseph said to his brothers, “Come near to me, please.” And they came near. And he said, “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.
And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life.
And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors.
Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, ‘Thus says your son Joseph, God has made me lord of all Egypt. Come down to me; do not tarry.
And he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them. After that his brothers talked with him.
When the report was heard in Pharaoh’s house, “Joseph’s brothers have come,” it pleased Pharaoh and his servants.
17 YEARS PASS
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.”
So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died:
‘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.
His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.”
But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?
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.
So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.
THE GREATEST GOOD THAT GOD INTENDS FOR HIS PEOPLE. HE MANY TIMES WORK OUT OF THE GREATEST EVIL.
THE GREATEST GOOD THAT GOD INTENDS FOR HIS PEOPLE. HE MANY TIMES WORK OUT OF THE GREATEST EVIL.
What was going through Joseph’s mind during the time of great plenty? Did he ever stop to reflect on what God was up to in his life and wonder about things back home? The text tells us what Joseph was thinking by giving us the names he gave to his two sons born during that time. In Genesis 32, the names that Rachel and Leah gave their sons revealed the thoughts of their hearts during that season of their lives. Here too, the names that Joseph gave his boys and the reasoning behind those names reveal Joseph’s thinking. He called his firstborn Manasseh because
Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh. “For,” he said, “God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house.”
The name of the second he called Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.”
What do these names reveal? First, both names affirm that God was doing something in Joseph’s life: God made him forget, and God made him fruitful. Isn’t the failure to remember that truth one of our constant problems in life? We are convinced that we are doing things (whether good or bad) and that others are doing things (whether for or against us), but we so often forget the overarching truth that God is the primary actor in our lives, shaping us in particular ways according to his own purposes. Joseph’s two children were no more accidental than Pharaoh’s two dreams or Joseph’s additional two years in prison: they were the means by which God was doing something in his life. So too in our lives today, God is shaping everything, the painful as well as the joyful, to accomplish his providential purposes in us and through us in the lives of others. Joseph understood that, and it was crucial to his peace and his faith in the midst of otherwise crushing circumstances.
Second, don’t miss the irony of calling one’s son “Forgetful.” We can understand why Joseph would want to forget his sufferings, but names and their meanings are remembered. Calling his son Manasseh actually assured the perpetual remembering of his declaration of forgetting! How can you constantly remember that you have forgotten something? I think it gives us a different perspective on what it actually means to “forget” painful memories. Perhaps you are wrestling with the reality of life-shaping events that you simply can’t forget. These may be terrible sins that other people have committed against you. Alternatively, your own sins and wrong decisions may haunt you continually like a bad dream. What is more, these painful memories from your past continue to affect the way you respond to events and situations in the present. You view people and relationships around you in the present through the lens of those intensely painful events from your past, and the result is chaos and turmoil in your emotions and in your reactions. Well-meaning friends may tell you simply to put these events behind you and move on. But how do you “get over” such a terrible trauma? How can you forget? You cannot simply wipe out the past from your memory banks by an act of the will, as if reformatting the hard drive of a computer. Neither could Joseph.
What Joseph did by naming his son Manasseh was to reshape the significance of the past by putting it into the context of what God was doing in his life.
His son became a permanent testimony to God’s power to redeem the past.
His son became a permanent testimony to God’s power to redeem the past.
Of course, Joseph could never completely forget his experience of hardship at the hands of his brothers or in Egypt. However, from then on he would remember it through the lens of God’s presence with him in his pain and God’s faithfulness in ultimately bringing him through that suffering into prosperity. To use an image from the prophet Joel, the Lord had fulfilled his promise to
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.
In Joseph’s personal situation, the thin cows of affliction had been consumed by the fat cows of God’s providence.
God gave Joseph the grace to put his past hardships and sufferings into a new, redemptive context. The marks of the wounds remained in his life and could never be forgotten, but those scars had been incorporated beautifully into the intricate pattern of God’s grace in his life, and Joseph was determined not to forget that.
It is the same for us. You don’t simply forget an experience of life-changing suffering. You can’t. Those scars will mark you indelibly for the rest of your life. Yet what God does by his grace is to take those ugly wounds and reshape them into a beautiful part of the tapestry of purpose and blessing that he is weaving in your life.
He can overwhelm the painful memories of your past with the wonderful memory of his greater faithfulness and grace to you in the midst of all your pain and with the assurance that he will bring glorious good even out of your worst suffering.
How does this reshaping of our painful memories happen? The name that Joseph gives to his second son, Ephraim, is a clue. Joseph explains, “God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction.”
God doesn’t necessarily promise to deliver us out of the land of our affliction, though that is what we want and is usually what we pray for. I
’m sure Joseph prayed repeatedly to be taken out of the pit and restored to his family in Canaan. Instead, God’s purpose for Joseph to be fruitful took shape precisely in the land of affliction, in Egypt, where God used him to be a blessing to those around him, ultimately saving many from famine and death.
It is often in the land of our affliction that the Lord makes us fruitful.
It is often in the land of our affliction that the Lord makes us fruitful.
In the same way, it is often in the land of our affliction that the Lord makes us fruitful, in ourselves and in the lives of others around us. We typically want God to make us into fine decorative china plates, which sit comfortably in a glass cabinet being admired by everyone. Instead, God makes us into serviceable water pitchers that get chipped and scratched and dented through repeated use. That is how our sufferings produce endurance, character, and hope in us (Rom. 5:3–5). It is also how he makes us useful to others around us, who have their own sufferings and difficulties to endure.
Yet Joseph is never just a model from which we may learn in these stories. In his original dreams back in Genesis 37, God gave Joseph a vision in which all creation would come and bow the knee before him. In one sense, his brothers were right in seeing this as expressing a reality far bigger than their little brother could ever fulfill.
Joseph was a shadow and forerunner of a greater deliverer to come. Before Joseph could even begin to fulfill that calling as a shadow savior, he had to endure repeated and long-lasting suffering that would leave permanent scars. But after that painful preparation, God used him to be a blessing to the nations.
In chapter 41, Joseph’s ministry is described in terms that point back to the Abrahamic promise: the grain piles up “like the sand of the sea” (Gen. 41:49), a clear allusion to the blessing given to Abraham in Genesis 22:17 and repeated to Jacob in Genesis 32:12.
Joseph was fruitful and multiplied in the land of his affliction, and the result was life-giving blessing to the nations, first to Egypt and then to all the earth. All who blessed Joseph and bowed the knee before him were blessed and received life. If they refused to bow before him, they inevitably died of hunger.
In this way, Joseph pointed beyond himself to the true Messiah, who was yet to come. Joseph pointed forward to the Christ, who followed the same pattern of suffering and then exaltation and public acclamation.
Jesus was not merely second in line behind the Egyptian Pharaoh. He was, and is, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord.
Yet this one before whom all nations will bow also learned obedience through what he suffered, and became fruitful precisely through his afflictions, as his suffering on the cross brings us life and health and peace.
For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.
Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.
And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him,
The perfection here has to do with completing one’s preparation to fulfill a task. He is saying that Jesus was fully qualified as our High Priest to make a sufficient atonement for sin and was able to secure for us a righteousness that becomes ours through faith because he faithfully obeyed his Father and offered up a sinless sacrifice for sin. Our Lord demonstrated that he was competent and qualified to be our Savior because he trusted in his Father from beginning to end, even when he suffered horribly at the hands of sinful men.
In Hebrews 5:8 it says that Jesus “learned obedience through what he suffered.” I think the words “made perfect” in 2:10 mean the same thing as his “learning obedience” in 5:8. It doesn’t say that Jesus learned “to obey” as if to suggest he was formerly disobedient. Rather he entered into a personal and experiential understanding of what obedience is and what obedience entails by actually obeying. As John Piper has explained, “This does not mean that he was once disobedient and then became obedient. It means that Jesus moved from untested obedience into suffering and then through suffering into tested and proven obedience. And this proving himself obedient through suffering was his ‘being perfected’"(from the sermon, Our Captain Made Perfect Through Sufferings, June 2, 1996).
Our inclination and habit is to suffer and conclude that God isn’t worthy of our devotion or praise. We bail out on him precisely in order to avoid suffering or to diminish its discomfort. Not Jesus. He pressed through suffering in complete devotion to the Father and his saving purpose and in doing so showed himself “perfect” for the job at hand.
It is striking that Jesus’ resurrected and glorified body still bears the scars of his suffering: there are still nail prints in his hands and a wound in his side. Why didn’t the Father heal those wounds at the resurrection, so that Jesus’ restored body could be unscarred? It is because these scars that speak of painful sacrifice are made beautiful by the fruit that they bear for God’s redemptive purposes. Jesus will never forget the cross and his profound sufferings at the hands of his brothers. But neither will he forget the fruit born of that suffering: a new family of men and women from every tribe and nation, who now receive new life at his hands. God made that terrible affliction bear incredible fruit, and those indelible scars now speak permanently of indelible grace.
Just as Joseph’s exaltation was not just for himself, so too Jesus’ exaltation leads to blessing for all nations, if they will come and bow the knee before him. He himself is the true bread of heaven, the one whose broken body is the source of all life. He invites all those who are hungry to come to him and eat, and all those who are thirsty to come to him and drink. Jesus doesn’t sell his produce to the highest bidder: he gives it freely to those who have no money with which to buy. The salvation that Jesus offers is not based on you performing a certain number of good deeds, or vowing to quit all your evil habits. It is given to you freely, without cost. All you have to do is come to Jesus as a helpless refugee seeking food. You come with empty hands and nothing to give, asking Jesus to give you the perfect righteousness that you need to stand before God. All who come to him on those terms will be welcomed into his kingdom and will never be sent away. The Father can never forget those for whom Christ died.
What is more, when God comes into your life, he makes you forget your sufferings and makes you fruitful in this land of afflictions. He enables you to set your pains and difficulties, past and present, in the context of the glorious inheritance that he has prepared for all those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
He will use all of the trials and challenges that he brings into your life to grow your love, your hope, and your faith. He will also use them to develop your longing for your true homeland, the place where all of your tears will finally be wiped away and forgotten, where all of our hearts will finally be healed, and where the full harvest of God’s redemptive work in our lives will finally be revealed.
This world is not our home. This is the land of our affliction. God can and will make you fruitful here by his grace. But we must never forget that there is another land that God has prepared for his people, a land without affliction and pain, where he waits even now to welcome us forever.
