She came through my window, crawled onto my shoulders,
head-butted me and began to purr like a broken air conditioner. She had an
obvious upper respiratory infection and one bad eye, but seemed energetic and
very sociable. Once she found the dog’s dish and began to chow down, she obdurately refused to leave.
Initially I
thought she was an outdoor kitty belonging to a neighbour, but from her
trusting nature and complete absence of interest in going anywhere near the door, I
concluded that being outdoors was not normal for her (something that was
confirmed when her former owner admitted she had been outside for only two weeks
of her life).
Still, whether the original owner (who declined to take her back) lost his cat intentionally or otherwise, her untroubled, sunny disposition suggests that he must have treated her reasonably well.
Backstabbing, Lies and Betrayal
My sister, on the other hand, has a feline schizoid, a personality condition we attribute to
a three-and-a-half week quarantine spent almost entirely in a small cage.
Like cats, human
personalities are frequently shaped by the treatment they receive. The abused
often become abusers, or at least lose their ability to trust, love or display affection.
Joseph was the exception:
“When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him.”
In a previous post I had a little bit to say about the sovereignty of God in connection with
the short-sighted, cowardly or generally unwise decisions his servants tend to
make from time to time. But what do the scriptures teach about God’s
sovereignty when the difficult circumstances in which his servants find
themselves have nothing to do with their own sin or stupidity, and everything
to do with the actions of others?
With, for instance, unsolicited hatred, backstabbing, lies or betrayal?
Sovereignty on Display
There’s a lot of
sovereignty on display in Psalm 105. The psalm’s writer does not see the normal
course of events simply taking place, effect following cause, but rather, he
points out the ways in which God has historically managed, timed, used and
overridden otherwise-natural events to accomplish his purposes and keep his
promises throughout the history of his people. Much of the details of God’s
workings are found in these few verses concerning Joseph’s experience: God “summoned a famine”;
God “broke all supply of bread”; God “sent a man ahead of them”; and finally, “the
word of the Lord tested him”.
Such “big picture” explanations of God’s superintending care (in this case, for his
people Israel) can be a great encouragement to us, but I wonder how this all
appeared to Joseph, the man in the middle of these events. We read that the “word of the Lord tested him”, and it
surely did.
It tested him in a major way. Could Joseph cling in faith to what God had promised him, even though years had passed and his life experience continued to provide him with no evidence of its coming fulfillment — and every indication he had somehow misunderstood God’s plan?
A Word of Hope and Confidence
Where Abraham, in our previous post, failed to recall the words of God or to apply them to the
difficulties he was experiencing, it seems that perhaps Joseph remembered.
Because Joseph too had a promise, a “word” upon which he fixed his hope
and confidence. Joseph’s dreams were a little less explicit and personal than Abraham’s direct promise from
God, but no more open to misinterpretation, and no less significant to
his life. In one dream, the sun, the moon and eleven stars bowed before him. In
another, he and his brothers bound sheaves of grain in a field, and the sheaves
of his eleven brothers bowed to his sheaf.
We do not have any indication that Joseph became haughty or unpleasant because of his dreams,
but it is clear that his brothers and his father understood exactly what the
dreams signified when they were told about them. “Are you indeed to reign over
us?” his siblings asked, and hated him “even more”.
If you’ve ever
heard a preacher find fault with Joseph’s behavior as recorded in scripture,
then you know that one has to work pretty hard to do so. The speaker probably
did a fair bit of extrapolating and conjecturing because, well — it isn’t there. There’s nothing in the record to
suggest that Joseph was responsible for much of anything that happened to him.
And happen it did.
From Bad to Worse
It should not
escape our notice that it was the very dreams that God gave Joseph — the very
promises that God was at work in his life in a significant way — that provoked
what followed. Joseph didn’t ask for his dreams, and we have no hard evidence
that he deliberately instigated trouble with his brothers. Unlike Abraham,
he was not the author of his own subsequent problems.
His brothers
took the first opportunity to sell him into slavery behind his father’s back.
If not for the intervention of the eldest they would have
killed him outright. But since that would have made God’s promises slightly more complicated to fulfill, Reuben, who had gone this far without apparent qualms, became stricken with guilt about what killing Joseph would do to their father and persuaded his brothers to throw Joseph into a pit instead of murdering him. So they sold him to Ishmaelite slavers for twenty shekels of
silver and he was taken to Egypt.
It is noteworthy that they did so in open defiance of the sovereignty of God, saying “We will see what will become of his dreams”.
How did this
appear to Joseph? What was his state of mind? We’re not told, but it cannot —
at least as it was happening — have been all stoicism or uninterrupted,
peaceful faith, can it? He must surely have wondered, as we often do, Why on earth is this happening? Where is God
in this situation? Or most frequently, perhaps, Did I do something wrong that I don’t know about?
So Joseph wore fetters
and a collar of iron instead of the robe of many colours given to him by his father.
Punished for Doing Good
Not only was Joseph punished for doing nothing, he was punished for doing good. He was sold to Potiphar, the captain of Pharaoh’s guard, where he so excelled at his job that
Potiphar left everything of importance to Joseph’s care. And his “reward” for
excellence, loyalty and duty, if you remember, was that he was falsely accused of sexual assault by Potiphar’s wife and thrown in prison, where he excelled some more and was given a position of responsibility.
In all of this, the writer of Genesis keeps repeating “The Lord was with Joseph”
and even “and showed his steadfast love”.
But one has to
wonder how this all seemed to Joseph at the time. Did he remain resolute every
moment in his confidence in the word of God to him, or did he sometimes wonder
how bad things could get?
So how bad can it get when you are faithful in the
service of God? Pretty bad, I suspect. Which is what the psalmist seeks to
remind us.
But he goes on
to declare this: “What [God] had said came to pass”.
The Hand of God at Work
When Joseph’s
brothers hated him, God worked it for his good (and theirs). When they sold him
into slavery, he wound up exactly where, years later, he was most needed to
preserve his family, the nation of Israel, and the promises of God. When he was
lied about and jailed, God used it to lead him to the second-highest place in Egypt.
Whatever degradations
his family, circumstances and his enemies would heap on him, the hand of God
protected him from the worst, made him a testimony to the power of the God of
the Hebrews in Egypt, and exalted him at the end of it all. And Joseph was able
not just to forgive his brothers but to embrace them and to explicitly
acknowledge the workings of God’s sovereignty in his life, saying, “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”.
It’s a great deal more difficult to work hard, trust or love unconditionally when you encounter
mistreatment, hatred and abuse. But it is not only possible as a follower of
Christ, it is his expectation and desire for those who would be his disciples.
Watching Sovereignty in Action
After all that
he had endured, how could Joseph brush off the evil his brothers had done? Was
he just an exceptionally decent human being who refused to carry grudges?
Possibly so.
Or maybe a
lifetime of watching sovereignty in action; of worshiping a God who works “all
things ... together for good, for those who are called according to
his purpose” gave him the confidence to open himself up even to those with a confirmed track
record of stabbing him in the back.
Because his
confidence was neither in circumstances nor in his ability to predict or manage
the conduct of others, but in a God who is able to re-order the circumstances
no matter what their intention.
Doesn’t that sound like a more desirable way to live?
No comments :
Post a Comment