Anonymous Asks (373)

“Why did Pharaoh give Joseph so much authority in Egypt?”

The question is a reference to the events of the latter portion of Genesis 41, in which the king of Egypt takes a thirty-year old foreign prisoner fresh out of the local hoosegow and promotes him to the second-highest position in the kingdom, allowing him unprecedented discretion and political influence. “All my people shall order themselves as you command.”

It’s fair to say nobody saw that coming, and the first-time reader can be forgiven for saying, “Huh. That’s unlikely.” Because it was.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

My youngest son has an amazing memory for detail. If you play him a song he’s familiar with, he can tell you when he first heard it — year, month and sometimes day — where we were and what we were doing at the time, and probably what video game was released that week.

I, on the other hand, can go back into the ComingUntrue archives, read a two-year-old post, and wonder “Who wrote that?”

It was usually me.

Five Times as Much

“Benjamin’s portion was five times as much.”

The Spirit of God frequently uses Old Testament characters to depict aspects of the person and work of the coming Messiah. To list only a few, Adam, Abel, Melchizedek, Isaac, Moses, David, Solomon and Jonah may all be compared in one way or another to the Lord Jesus Christ. Just in case we miss them, the writers of the New Testament (and sometimes Jesus himself) draw our attention to these pictures or “types”.

Joseph is generally considered a better type in that his character and experiences are more “on-model” than, for instance, Jonah or Adam. Numerous similarities may be observed between Joseph and the Lord Jesus. This chart lists 27, but the accompanying article suggests there may be as many as 100. Not only that, but it is generally held that that there are no moral missteps in Joseph’s record which would serve to ruin the sterling comparison.

Or so I have always been taught.

On the Mount (22)

Towards the end of the children of Israel’s multi-century sojourn in Egypt, they were enslaved by a king with no appreciation for the history his people shared with the Hebrew minority living among them, and no understanding of how Israel’s presence in his land had been of unprecedented benefit to his nation. So Pharaoh used force to put God’s people to work, and they built him his legendary treasure cities, places where the king could store up his excess goods against the remote possibility of bad times.

The irony is that it was Joseph, a son of Israel, who had first taught the Pharaohs the principle of laying up excess wealth as insurance against those all-too-frequent “evil days”.

The Evil That Men Do

Some time ago I acquired a cat. Or she acquired me.

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.

Worth Waiting For

“Time preference” is an economic term that expresses the relative value of having something now as opposed to having that same thing later.

People with high time preferences focus primarily on their well-being in the present and in the immediate future. They choose now over later more often than average.

People with low time preferences, on the other hand, look further down the road. They most often choose later over now.

God’s Sovereignty vs. the Evil That Men Do

The most recent version of this post is available here.