Preparing to Preserve His People

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You know, when God is involved, there’s a tendency in our lives for negative circumstances work out in a way that we’re better off because of them. You know, we’ve seen this in my family’s life, having a child that was born with a heart defect saying, why are we having to deal with this? And then getting to watch my wife as she has taken the opportunity on herself to minister to other ladies that have kids born in similar circumstances and who don’t know the Lord and don’t have that relationship.

And she would not have had that opportunity to minister and bring hope and point people to Jesus if it weren’t for what we had to walk through with our child being born in those circumstances. And so we look at it and say, this was a really awful thing to have happen, but God has used it for good. Years ago, I had some friends, they were church members as well.

You can have church members who are friends. But it was an older couple that I really got close to. And he was in really bad health.

She took care of him for years and years. And long after I was gone from that church, I found out he had passed, and I know she had a rough time with that. It was hard all of a sudden to be without him.

I think they’d been married something like 60 years. It was hard after all that time to suddenly be without him. And I reconnected with her a few years later.

and even though she still wouldn’t look at it and say you know I’m glad he’s gone who would who would do that right she was able to point to and say God had brought some good things out of it because now she had this opportunity to step into other roles that that God had given her and she she was involved in she was involved in missions she was involved in in ministering to other ladies who’d walked through similar things. And just seeing what God did in her life through those difficult circumstances, it was amazing. And we all probably can point to circumstances in our lives that we say, this was a really awful moment, what happened.

And maybe I’m still not even over the awful moment, but on the other side of this, I can look and see how God used it to make something great happen, how God used it in a way to change my life and change the lives of other people around me. That’s what we’re going to look at this morning in the life of one of the Old Testament saints. And we’re going to be in Genesis 42 and Genesis 50 just briefly.

Now, I mentioned, I think it was last Sunday night, that this is where I thought we were going in our study of Jesus in the Old Testament. And this is going to be a difficult study for me, maybe not for you, but this is not my preferred method of preaching. If you’ve been here any length of time, you know I like to pick one passage and camp out there and dig into it.

Well, the story of Joseph in the Old Testament covers 14 chapters. You all do not want to be here today. I don’t care how much you love the Word.

I don’t care how much you love Jesus. You don’t want to be here today. Well, I dig into 14 chapters.

So we’re not going to do that. And that doesn’t make you less of a Christian to admit it. We all have an attention span.

So what we’re going to do this morning, I’m going to summarize those 14 chapters, and we’re going to look a little more in depth at these two brief passages in chapter 42 and chapter 50. So if you would turn with me to Genesis 42 this morning, and once you find it, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word. And if you can’t find it or don’t have your Bible, that’s all right.

It’ll be on the screen for you as well. Let’s follow along as we read it together. Genesis 42, starting in verse 18.

It says, Now Joseph said to them on the third day, Do this and live, for I fear God. If you are honest men, let one of your brothers be confined in your prison. But as for the rest of you, go.

Carry grain for the famine of your house holds, and bring your youngest brother to me so your words may be verified, and you will not die. And they did so. And they said to one another, truly we are guilty concerning our brother, because we saw the distress of his soul when he pleaded with us, yet we would not listen.

Therefore this distress has come upon us. Reuben answered them, saying, did I not tell you, do not sin against the boy, and you would not listen? Now comes the reckoning for his blood.

They did not know, however, that Joseph understood, for there was an interpreter between them. He turned away from them and wept, but he returned to them and spoke to them. He took Simon, but when he returned to them and spoke to them, he took Simeon from them and bound him before their eyes.

Now go with me to chapter 50, if you would, please. Just turn back a few chapters to chapter 50, and I’ll explain what’s going on in these passages if you’re not familiar with the story. Chapter 50, starting in verse 15.

It says, when Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, what if Joseph bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong which we did to him? So they sent a message to Joseph saying, your father charged before he died, saying, thus you shall say to Joseph, Please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did you wrong. And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.

And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, Behold, we are your servants. But Joseph said to them, Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place?

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid.

I will provide for you and your little ones. So he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. And you may be seated.

These passages give us just the briefest glimpse of how God used tragedies in Joseph’s life to preserve his people. And we’re going to talk about what happened in Joseph’s life. Just to briefly recount the story, in case anybody in here is unfamiliar.

Joseph was the great-grandson of Abraham. Sorry, I knew that before this morning. But if you’ve ever done genealogy, you realize the generations kind of blend together after a while.

He’s a great-grandson of Abraham who we talked about last week, the grandson of Isaac. And he was the son of Jacob, who was Isaac’s son. And Jacob had some problems in his family that frequently stemmed from favoritism in his family.

That as he would pick one person over the other, one child over the others, one wife over the others, it led to conflict. Joseph was his father’s favorite. And that’s not any reason to fault Joseph, but Joseph was his father’s favorite.

Joseph was uniquely beloved by his father. There’s that phrase that we used last week talking about Isaac. And his brothers got jealous of him.

Joseph received visions from God that he passed on to his brothers that talked about them bowing to him. And I’ve heard people say, well, that was, Joseph was rubbing it in. He was boasting.

No, Joseph was telling them what God had said. If Joseph didn’t tell what the vision was, how would they know later when God fulfilled it? But all of this, all of this worked together.

Joseph’s relationship with his father, the words that Joseph received from the Lord, that they made his brothers jealous. And his brothers decided to get back at him or get rid of him by throwing him into a pit. They decided, we’re going to throw him in a pit and decide what we ought to do with him.

Should we kill him? Oh, we could kill him. But you know what?

Let’s human traffic him down to Egypt. Instead, we can make some money off of it. So they sold him into slavery and pocketed the money.

They decided we’re going to kill an animal and tear up his very distinctive coat of many colors and put blood on the coat so that we can tell our dad that he died. He was mauled to death by an animal and he’s just gone. And then we don’t have to answer for any of it.

And so Joseph was sold into slavery, went on down into Egypt, Jacob thought his favorite son was dead. They thought they got away with it. For many years, they didn’t have to think about it anymore.

Meanwhile, Joseph is in Egypt. He is, as a slave, he worked hard, he showed himself trustworthy, and ended up in a position of authority and trust in his master’s household until one day his master’s wife took a liking to him and wanted to have an affair with him, and he refused. And he refused her over and over to the point that she became angry, and when he, once again, this coat becomes a recurring theme, he dropped his garment, trying to run away from her, trying to run from that temptation.

She grabbed the coat and said, look, he came in, he tried to assault me, and got Joseph thrown into prison. So now we have Joseph in a second predicament, first being in the pit, well, a third, I guess, in the pit, in slavery, now in prison, all through no fault of his own. But they recognized in the prison there’s something different about this guy.

They began to trust him. And as he was in the prison, he had the trust of his fellow inmates, and two of those were Pharaoh’s baker and cupbearer, who had been cast into prison, and they had these dreams that they couldn’t figure out. And God gave Joseph the ability to interpret these dreams and told the cupbearer, your dream means in three days you’ll be restored back to your position with Pharaoh.

And the baker thought, oh, good, what about me? He said, in three days, Pharaoh’s going to remove your head. You kind of wish at that point you hadn’t asked, right?

Just left well enough alone and not known. But he told the cupbearer, he said, in exchange for interpreting this for you, Would you remember me when you’re back restored into Pharaoh’s household? Would you tell him I am falsely imprisoned here, falsely accused, wrongly imprisoned?

Yes, yes, I will. He goes back and he forgets all about Joseph when Pharaoh restores him. So Joseph is stuck there again.

Then two years later, Pharaoh has a troubling dream. He has a dream where there are these seven fat cows. And if you raise cows, you want fat cows.

There are these seven fat cows grazing. And then suddenly seven skinny cows come and eat the seven fat cows. And Pharaoh is understandably creeped out by this dream.

And he’s trying to find anybody that can interpret it for him. Nobody can help him make sense of it. And finally, the cupbearer says, oh, wait a minute, there was that guy in the prison.

He remembers Joseph, tells Pharaoh about it. Pharaoh sins for Joseph. And Joseph says, this is a warning from God, that Egypt is about to experience seven years of abundance.

And so while you’re in those seven years of abundance, I want you to be wise, and I want you to prepare, because after that, there’s going to be seven years of famine, and people are going to be starving. So what you do in those first seven years determines whether you survive the second seven years. Pharaoh has Joseph brought out of prison, has him put in a place of authority, and eventually Joseph becomes the second most powerful person in the kingdom of Egypt behind only Pharaoh himself.

There’s the seven years of plenty, and Pharaoh has put Joseph in charge of the preparations, taking this food and storing it up and preparing for the famine that’s going to come. And after seven years, the famine begins to hit. And it doesn’t just hit Egypt.

It hits over in the land of Canaan as well, where Joseph’s family is still living after all these years, having completely forgotten about him, not given him a second thought. But they hear that there’s food in Egypt. And so Jacob sends ten of his sons.

He doesn’t send the youngest, but he sends the other ten sons into Egypt. Go down there and buy food and bring it back, because we hear they have plenty. They go down and Joseph has them arrested.

You might say, well, that’s some pretty delayed revenge there. It wasn’t revenge. He was testing them.

To see before he punished them, are they the same guys that threw me in the pit? I mean, yes, he knew it was his brothers, but are they the same people they were when they threw me in the pit? And that’s where we come to that first passage.

where he’s got them in prison, and they think he’s Egyptian, and he’s used an interpreter between them and him the whole time, so they don’t know he can understand them. That could be a lot of fun. I can just imagine the time Joseph had with that.

It makes me think of the time in college that I picked up the French exchange students at the airport and drove them to OU, and they were so insulting about Oklahoma. And I love Oklahoma, and I also speak French, and they didn’t know that until we got almost to the OU campus, and one of them asked that we passed Norman High School, and they said, what is that? Is it a prison?

And I said in French to them, it’s a high school, and they did all the blood drain out of their faces. It was one of my favorite memories in all of life. So I could just imagine the fun that Joseph had with this, but they don’t know he can understand them.

And they’re talking about, this is God’s judgment on us for what we did to our brother. We were wrong. And Reuben says, I told you, you shouldn’t have done this.

And he had. He kept them from killing Joseph, at least. And Joseph has to turn away to hide the tears because he recognizes that his brothers are repentant. He puts them through some other tests that I don’t have time to go into today, but it all ultimately results in the entire family being reunited together in Egypt and being able to be saved from this famine.

They bring the younger brother, they bring dad, they bring everybody, And everybody is able to be saved from this famine. And the only reason they are able to be saved from this famine is because God put Joseph in a position to be able to provide for them. Because God put Joseph in a position to be able to warn the Egyptians so that they would have a place to go.

And you might say, well, couldn’t God have just warned them to store up food? He could have. But this also gives us a picture of Jesus, and that was part of his plan as well.

These events are a lot of work just to prepare for a famine. But we look at them, and we realize God is preparing for something else as well. God used tragedies in Joseph’s life to prepare his people for Jesus.

And we’re going to look at a few of these. At the rate we’re going, I probably have the time to give you the Scripture references in Genesis, or they may be in your bulletin. instead of us going and looking at all of them individually today.

I would love to dig into this more deeply, but again, 14 chapters, I have to restrain myself. God was using this to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus. Otherwise, God could have just said, you know what, prepare for a famine.

But there was something greater they needed to be prepared for, that was the coming of the Messiah. And I mentioned to you last week that we could, you know, when you start looking for Jesus, when you start looking for pictures and promises and prophecies about the coming of Jesus in the Old Testament, they are all over the place. And if we were to look at one or two of these things, we might say, well, you know, that’s a coincidence.

But when you start looking at the sheer number of coincidences, I’m sorry, I don’t have that much faith. And I started looking at the story of Joseph this week again and trying to say, where are the parallels I saw? And I picked out the ones I saw.

And then I went and started looking it up, other reputable teachers and saying, you know, what have they put out there? There was one ministry that put over 60 parallels between the story of Joseph and the story of Jesus. I don’t have time even to go through all 60 of those with you.

But you can’t say there are all these parallels between the story of Joseph and the story of Jesus and say, oh, that’s just all coincidence. I want to look at a few of them this morning. Both of them were rejected because of their claims. Joseph was rejected by his brothers because he claimed he had this special relationship with his father.

It wasn’t just a claim, but he claimed it. He had this special relationship with his father. He had these special revelations from God, and they didn’t like it.

And so he was rejected because of his claims. The Bible says the same thing about Jesus in John 1 11. He came to his own and those who were his own did not receive him. He was rejected by his own people.

And as we read through the gospels, we see that it’s because of his claims. Because of the authority he claimed to possess when he taught, because of the relationship he claimed to have with the father, they rejected him. Just like Joseph’s brothers rejected him. We see that both of them were plotted against. there’s the story in Genesis 37 18 through 20 talking about his brothers plotting against him throwing in throwing him in that pit trying to decide do we kill him what do we do and I’ve lost count of how many times in the gospels it talks about people plotting against Jesus seems like every time they would come to him with a gotcha question and if you’ve watched any of the debates recently you know what gotcha questions are they’re trying to make somebody look bad.

They would come to Jesus with these gotcha questions, and they would think, we’ve got him this time. There’s no answer. And then he would turn it around, and he would give an answer they hadn’t even thought about, and he would show his wisdom and their foolishness, and it would make them angry, and they would go back and plot, how do we get rid of this guy?

How do we kill this guy? And one example of that, Matthew 26, 4, they plotted together to seize Jesus by stealth and kill him. Joseph and Jesus were both plotted against. Both of them were pulled alive from the pit.

They could have killed Joseph. Most of them wanted to. But in Genesis 37, 28, they decided to spare his life and pulled him up out of the pit.

And that might not seem too much of a parallel to the story of Jesus, except that’s the way the The grave is described by some of the apostles. As a matter of fact, in Acts 2. 27, it uses similar terminology when the apostle Peter says, about Jesus, you will not abandon my soul to Hades, nor allow your Holy One to undergo decay.

There was this idea of Jesus being in the grave. And by the way, what he said there in Acts 2. 27 was a quote from the book of Psalms. That when they crucified Jesus, they thought he was dead.

They buried him in the ground. It was a cave-like tomb, but it’s in the earth. They put him there, and three days later, the Father pulled him up alive out of that pit, out of that grave.

Both Joseph and Jesus were tempted without giving in. There’s that story of Potiphar’s wife trying to seduce Joseph. And with the amount of trust that Potiphar had for Joseph, Joseph might have gotten away with it if he had just given in to the temptation, but he refused.

He knew it wasn’t right. And so he refused. He was tempted.

Jesus also was tempted without giving in. There’s the story that the gospel writers record of Satan taking Jesus out and showing him all the kingdoms of the world. If you’ll just bow down to me, I’ve always thought that was.

. . I’ve never understood why he would do that.

If you’ll just bow to me, I’ll give you the stuff that is already yours. But never said Satan was an original thinker. He’s only got a limited number of tricks, according to Scripture.

But he goes out and tries to tempt Jesus, and Jesus comes back every time with Scripture. That’s why the writer of Hebrews says, We do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, talking about Jesus, but one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Now, I want to be very careful as we’re talking about pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament.

None of these people are sinless. Joseph was not sinless. Genesis just doesn’t record any of his sins.

And I think that’s because, again, they’re using the story of Joseph that really happened to point us to the Messiah who was going to come thousands of years later. So we know that Joseph wasn’t sinless, but he doesn’t have any sin recorded in the book of Genesis precisely to point us to Jesus who was tempted in all the ways we are but without sin. Both of them were falsely accused and wrongly punished.

I’ve already talked about how that happened with Joseph. The gospel writers tell us like Mark does in Mark 14, 56, many were giving false testimony against him, but their testimony was not consistent. They had to lie and make things up in order to get Jesus, just like Potiphar’s wife lied against Joseph.

Both of them were delivered by God multiple times. Joseph is delivered from a difficult situation he’s in, in ways that we can’t explain other than by divine intervention. And Peter also in Acts 2.

24 says, speaking of Jesus, says, God raised him up again, putting an end to the agony of death since it was impossible for him to be held in its power. We see both of them were exalted. Joseph was raised to the position of being the second highest ranking official in Egypt.

And the apostle Paul tells us of Jesus, God also highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue should that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Both of them were given the ability to judge, and we saw that in what we read in Genesis 42, that first passage we read. He’s judging his brothers.

He’s trying to see if they were repentant or not, and he decides they are. And he decides, it’s totally in Joseph’s hands, what am I going to do with these guys? He could punish them.

He could set them free. He decides to see if they’re repentant and go from there. And we’re told of Jesus, that the Father gave, in John 5, 27, the Father gave him authority to execute judgment because he is the Son of Man.

And both of them saved Israel. Both Joseph and Jesus saved Israel. All through the latter chapters of Genesis, it talks about how God used Joseph to save Israel from the famine.

And the Apostle Paul, I’m sorry, I think maybe it was Stephen. I’ve forgotten now. God, he said in Acts 13, 23, God brought to Israel a Savior, Jesus.

We talked last week a little bit about Isaiah 53. There was this idea that the Messiah was coming not just to be a conqueror, but to be a Savior for Israel, and that’s what Jesus did. Now, these are just, I think, nine of the parallels that we see between Joseph and Jesus.

I think you start looking at these parallels, it’s really interesting. It can be, if that’s an area of interest for you. But I don’t want anybody to leave here this morning just thinking, oh, that’s interesting.

I never realized that there are the connections between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The connections are there for a reason, and it’s not just to pique our interest. God uses this story. God uses the events that happened to Joseph to illustrate that Jesus offers forgiveness to repentant sinners.

And that’s why out of those 14 chapters, out of all the stuff we could have looked at this morning, I took us to those two particular areas of Joseph’s story. In chapter 42, he’s looking at his brothers, trying to decide, what am I going to do with these guys after everything that they’ve done? And he decides to put them through the test, and he hears without them knowing he can understand what they’re saying, that they are repentant, that they’re not just upset about consequences.

They’re not looking at this going, oh, it’s Joseph, we’re caught. They recognize they are in this position because they’ve done something wrong, and they genuinely are remorseful and repentant for what they’ve done wrong. And it stirs Joseph’s compassion.

And we go to chapter 50, where their father has died, and we see that they are now suddenly worried that, wait a minute, maybe the mercy he’s shown us up until now was just a ruse. Maybe he had to be nice because dad would have something to say about it, but now dad’s gone, what are we going to do? And Joseph forgives.

It was completely in Joseph’s power whether to forgive these guys or throw the book at them. But what we see in the Old Testament and the New Testament are we have two stories of people who were sent by God to suffer, and to suffer so that their brethren could be saved. And that after their suffering, both of these men were exalted, and both of these men offered forgiveness to those who were repentant over their sins.

Now when I say men, it’s because Joseph was a man and Jesus became a man. He’s more than a man. He’s God in human flesh, but he came to earth as a man to accomplish this.

God could have in the first century just dropped Jesus into the middle of Israel to do all the things he did and to be crucified and to die for their sins and rise again, but for hundreds of years, for thousands of years even, God was preparing the nation of Israel to be able to understand what Jesus was doing when he came. And yes, a lot of them ignored it, a lot of them rejected him, but some people saw it and some people got it. That it’s right there in the story of Joseph, yet another example, that God sends someone to suffer for his brothers and to be exalted and to bring forgiveness, and that’s what Jesus did.

The story of Joseph was not only for the immediate benefit of saving the people from the famine, but it was also to point people to the salvation that comes in Jesus Christ. They knew Joseph had the right and the ability to punish them. But Joseph forgave them because they were repentant and he let them go free. Folks, that’s a picture of the gospel.

You and I, you and I will one day stand before a God who has every right to punish us for the wrong we’ve done. We will one day stand before a God who, it is completely in His power to punish us or let us go free. And if he punishes us, it’s not like he’s doing something wrong to us because we’ve sinned against him.

And yet that God will stand before God the Son came to earth to suffer and was exalted so that now he can offer forgiveness to you and me. Jesus Christ took responsibility for my sin and for yours. And he was nailed to that cross where he shed his blood and he died to pay for every wrong thing I’ve ever done or thought or said or wanted.

And the same goes for you. And the only thing that’s necessary, and then he rose again three days later to prove it. And the only thing that’s necessary for us is to come to him seeking that forgiveness.

We have to trust that he paid for our sin in full. And people get real hung up on the relationship between repentance and faith. Are they two different things?

They’re two sides of the same coin. because even if we think it’s true we’re not going to put our faith in it unless we’re repentant enough to acknowledge that we need it they go hand in hand so this morning I don’t care how far you’ve wandered away from god I don’t care what you’ve done jesus christ suffered and was exalted so that you could be forgiven All that’s necessary is for you to acknowledge you’ve sinned and believe in Him as the one and only payment for that sin. And the Bible says you’ll have that forgiveness.