SOVEREIGN GRACE KILLS WITH KINDNESS

Genesis 43: 15-34

INTRODUCTION

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.  This is the opening line in small tract called the “Four Spiritual Laws” which seeks to explain what it means to be a Christian.  That is a true statement.  However, what you think is a wonderful life and what God thinks is a wonderful life are two different things.  Our ambitions are health, enough money to enjoy life without having to worry much, good friends and close family relationships.  God’s plan is to enable us to enjoy the greatest thing in the universe, himself.  God’s goal for us is to bring us to the place where we can say with the Apostle Paul, “I consider everything loss compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  The trouble is that we do not believe that to lose everything and to have God alone is to have everything.  So God is working in our lives to show us that knowing him is a wonderful life.  God is working to kill our love for this world and to awaken in us a passionate love for himself.  This is what we are witnessing in the lives of Jacob and his 12 sons.

We, as the readers of this story, are seeing how God is working in the lives of these particular individuals to persuade them that to know him is the best thing that could ever happen to them.  By watching what is happening in their lives we are also seeing what is happening in our lives.  The reason that these stories have been recorded for us is so that we can know that behind the seeming random, mundane and sometimes painful details of our lives, there is a grand and glorious plan being worked out.  In all of our pleasures and our pains there is powerful and loving God at work.  He is determined to bring the universe to the end for which he has determined so he will be seen and worshipped and to safely bring all of his people into the eternal joy of his presence.

We are like the men in these stories who do not know what is going on behind the scenes.  They and we are trying to live out our lives by seeking to find as much pleasure as we can in this world and to avoid as much pain as we can.  What we do not know, apart from God’s revealing it to us in his Word, is he is working out a plan that is infinitely superior to anything we could ever imagine.  He is working, always and in every detail of our lives, to awaken us to this reality so that we will stop acting as if we are in charge of our lives and live in complete confidence in him and his gracious work in us and for us.  I want you and I to live in the joy and the freedom that comes to those who know that they are living in the midst of the greatest story ever told.  Like Jacob and his twelve sons we do not know what twists and turns the plot is going to take.  But we can know that nothing is random and that the end of the story is better and greater than anything we could ever imagine or achieve.

It’s been seven weeks since we last considered this story and so I want to summarize what has happened for those of you who may not be familiar with it.  I would recommend that you read again Genesis 37 to 43 to refresh your memory.  (It would also help if you were to read the transcripts of the sermons covering those chapters from our website.)  This is the story of Jacob, his four wives and their twelve sons.  This family has been chosen by God to be his people and to be the instruments of salvation for all the nations of the world.  God has made extravagant promises to this family.  However, like all human beings, they are far more impressed with the pleasures to be had in this world than they are with the promises of God.  They, like us, want their happiness now, not later.  They want their pleasures in the ways they prefer, not in the way God prefers.  When God picks out one of the brothers, Joseph, to be his spokesperson to the other brothers, they respond in a very normal human way.  They are jealous of their brother and they hate him.  Their hatred overflows into a violent act when they get Joseph by himself, away from the protection of their father.  They beat him and throw him into a dry well out in the desert.  While debating whether to kill him outright or to leave him to die in the pit a caravan on its way to Egypt passes by and the enterprising brothers decide to make a profit and get rid of their pampered brother.  They sell Joseph into slavery.

For twelve years Joseph suffers as a slave and then a falsely convicted prisoner in Egypt.  Yet, in all of his suffering, the Lord was with him.  God enabled him to live by faith in his promises even while all the circumstances of his life appeared to contradict those promises.  Then through and because of his suffering, Joseph, in less than one day, is taken from the dank dungeon and made the ruler of all Egypt, second only in power to Pharaoh.  It is a stunning and completely unexpected deliverance.  God does far more than Joseph could have ever imagined or hoped.  Then after eight years of glorious rule in Egypt, God, through the hardship of famine brings the ten treacherous brothers of Joseph to Egypt.  They come to Joseph, the ruling prince of Egypt, and bow before him, ignorant that he is the brother they betrayed.  So God, through Joseph and the circumstances of their lives, begins the process of bringing these ten brothers to the place of repentance and faith in the God of their fathers.

During their first trip to Egypt God, through the Egyptian prince, causes them to admit to each other that what they did to Joseph was wrong and that God is justly angry with them for their grievous sin.  Joseph tells them that if they want to live, to have the eternal life that God offers they must leave one of their brothers behind, go back to Canaan and then return to Egypt with their youngest brother and Joseph’s only full brother, Benjamin.  He tells them that if they will bring Benjamin back to him, they will live but if they do not bring Benjamin back, they will die of hunger from the famine as he will give them no food.  The nine brothers return to the land of Canaan and inform their father Jacob that another of his sons, Simeon, is missing and a captive in Egypt.  After a tumultuous year and only after all the food they brought back is gone does Jacob agree to let his youngest and dearest son go to Egypt.  Jacob, after 22 years of living in unbelieving despair finally entrusts himself into the hands of God and sends his ten sons to the fierce prince of Egypt to obtain food for his family.

While God has successfully brought Jacob to rest in his sovereign grace, he is still working to kill the brothers’ love for this world and create a love for him.  As we examine God’s work in the lives of these brothers, we are going to see that…

MAIN POINT

God kills our love for this world to create love for him by…

I.  Showering us with unexpected and undeserved kindness (vv. 15-23)

The brothers leave Canaan with the prayer of their father and his confession of faith in God ringing in their ears.  “May God Almighty grant you mercy before the man so that he will let your other brother and Benjamin come back with you.  As for me, if I am bereaved, I am bereaved.”  Unfortunately, they have not submitted to God as their father has and they do not believe in a God who answers prayer.  So while God does exactly what Jacob prays, they live in the fear and despair of unbelief.  They cannot see what God is doing.  When their unknown brother, the prince of Egypt sees Benjamin and realizes that they have done as he asked, he tells his steward to bring them to his house so he can have lunch with them.  Joseph does more than he promised.  He doesn’t simply sell them grain and let them all go home but he invites these backwoods boys to come to his palatial home and enjoy the finest food that can be found in the world with the most powerful man in Egypt.

However, these guilt-ridden men view the invitation to lunch as a fraud.  They cannot imagine that this ruler of Egypt, who was so hostile upon their first visit, could possibly be this kind, nor this faithful to his promises.  Their consciences have been awakened to their sinfulness and they cannot imagine that they can be the recipients of any kindness.  They view the prince as the agent of God in their condemnation and so they consider any action by him as merely a pretense to cover up his true motive, which is their destruction.  Look at v. 18.  Joseph’s chief steward brings the men to Joseph’s house in order to feed them.  They however are frightened.  They are sure that Joseph’s plan is to attack them and to enslave them.

Now I want you to notice how they reason in the face of this “danger”.  When they returned from their first trip to Egypt with bags of grain to feed their family back in Canaan, each of them discovered that the money they had paid for their grain was in the mouth of their sacks of grain.  We know, as the readers, that Joseph, as God’s agent, put it there out of pure kindness.  He was acting graciously.  They are sure that the money was put in their sacks in order to give the Egyptians a pretense for making them slaves.  They view an act of kindness as an occasion for condemnation.  The reason they think in this way is because they are so aware of their guilt in selling Joseph and understand that God must be angry with them and out to get them.  However, they do not cast themselves upon God for mercy but try to outwit God.  Notice how they reason with the steward of Joseph’s house.  They know they are guilty of treachery but they are not guilty of thievery.  So they seek to justify themselves, to escape being enslaved by arguing that they are innocent of stealing and so shouldn’t be made into slaves because they didn’t steal.

Do you see how they are not reasoning?  They are not saying, “We are guilty of a great crime against our brother and it would only be right if we were made slaves ourselves.  Yet, we know, because of the promises that God has made to us that he is a gracious and forgiving God.  We will trust him, like our father trusted him, and if we are made slaves we are made slaves.  We will ask God to have mercy upon us and trust that he will do what is right.  We can have confidence, not because we are innocent but because God is gracious.”  Rather than depending upon the grace of God, they try to justify themselves and to prove they are innocent, which they certainly are not.  This is infallible evidence that they have not yet come to full and complete sorrow for their sin.  While they know they are guilty of sin, yet they are unwilling to acknowledge that they do not deserve to be treated well.  If they really knew that they deserved to be dead and in hell they would not be afraid and they would not be trying to argue that they are innocent. 

There are so many people who live like this.  They are always afraid that something bad is going to happen to them and yet they continually protest and explain why bad things shouldn’t happen to them.  Good things happening to them makes them nervous because they are sure that something bad is certain to follow.  When you understand who you really are in relation to God you are no longer afraid of bad things happening.  You know you should be dead and in hell.  You know that you have never been treated, as you deserve.  You know, as the psalmist puts it, that “God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.”  You know that God delights to care for his people and so you trust him to do what is right.  You are able to receive good things happening to you without being afraid God is just waiting to get you and you are able to accept bad things happening because you know that you don’t deserve better and that there is a loving God who is ordaining all things for your good.

The steward, in v. 23 tells them what is really going on in their lives.  If they believe what he says, they will not be afraid and they will not protest their innocence.  The steward announces the gospel.  The English Standard Version has the literal translation of what he says, “Peace to you.  Do not be afraid.  Your God and the God of your father has put treasure in your sacks for you.  I received your money.”  This non-Jewish, Egyptian man is announcing God’s good news to these men.  As a note, this means that Joseph has shared about the only true and living God with his Egyptian servant.  This non-Jewish man is a believer in Yahweh.  Additionally, this man is fully aware of who the brothers are and is working with Joseph as God’s agent for their salvation.  He is not lying.  He did receive their money and God did put the money in their sacks, through him.

Let’s think about what God is saying to them and to us.  The Hebrew word “shalom” is the word that the steward speaks to these men.  This word refers to being in the state of salvation.  It is to have God as your friend, not your enemy.  It is to live in the security of his care, in harmony with his people, enjoying his favor.  The steward is saying, “God’s salvation is with you, you do not need to be afraid.  God has determined to be your friend, not your enemy and so you have nothing to fear.  The evidence that he is for you is that he put treasure in your sacks.”  God’s peace is not given to them because they deserve it.  God has not made the promise of salvation to them because they are not thieves or because they have done anything to deserve his kindness.  He is giving them salvation graciously, not according to what they deserve but according to his determination to love them.  He put the money in their sacks to show them that he is for them and will care for them.  The money isn’t put there in order to trap them or set them up but to show them that he can be trusted.  They can safely go to him, confessing their sins and safely tell their father what they did and safely go to Egypt.  “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  This is the point that the steward is trying to make to them but that they do not believe.

There is not a person sitting in this room that has not had God put treasure in his or her sack.  Everyone in here is the recipient of enormous kindness from the hand of God, beginning with your birth.  Every breath you’ve taken, every joy you’ve experienced is a gift from God given to you so that you will trust him with your life and stop trying to outwit him or earn his favor or prove how worthy you are to have good things happen to you.  God is kind to you even though you too are a murderer and an adulterer and a thief.  It will do no good to protest to God that you are innocent and demand to be treated well because you deserve to be treated well.  God is showering you with unexpected and undeserved kindness every day for one purpose: to get you to stop loving the world and believing that you have a right to be treated well and to cast yourself totally upon Jesus Christ.

God kills our love for this world to create love for him by…

Ø      Showering us with unexpected and undeserved kindness

Ø      And by…

II.  Serving us and refusing to let us serve him (vv. 24-30)

The steward, to prove to them that he is not lying to them brings out a healthy and happy Simeon.  Then he takes these murderous men, these proud men and he has their feet washed and he feeds their donkeys.  He invites them to come sit on the shaded patio that overlooks the lush plains along the Nile River.  He serves them some of the finest drinks to be had in Egypt.  This is a startling picture.  The country bumpkins, who sold the owner of this house into slavery, are being treated with the best hospitality that is available in the wealthiest nation on earth.  This house they are in is a mansion by any standard.  The construction and the fixtures and the servants are the best and most beautiful that money can buy.  They are in the home of the second most powerful man in the world.  Now notice what they do while they await the arrival of Joseph in this luxurious home.

They go out to their dirty and dusty packs and get out their rough sacks full of the agricultural products of the land of Canaan that is in the midst of a two-year drought.  I think v. 24 is one of the most pathetic verses in the Bible.  They prepare this gift as if it will somehow make them more acceptable to this wealthy and noble prince.  When Joseph arrives they bring in their offering of shriveled fruit and tiny almonds and pistachio nuts and small jars of honey.  They set it before Joseph and bow down before him.  Joseph, seated upon his ornate chair does not even mention or notice the gift but instead asks them how they are doing!  He asks them about their elderly father and if he is well.  These men do not understand grace.  They believe that they can impress Joseph and persuade him, by their gift to be kind to them.  Do you see how ludicrous this is?  Joseph needs nothing that they have.  In addition, they owe Joseph everything they have.  He would be right to make them his slaves for the rest of their lives.  He would be right to throw them into prison.  There is nothing they can do to earn his favor or to obligate him to be kind to them.  He is kind to them, not because of who they are, but because of who he is.

God doesn’t need you.  You owe him everything.  It would be completely right for God to kill you right now and send you to hell.  But he doesn’t do that.  He showers you with kindness, he provides for your needs and most of all he sent Christ to do for you, what you could never do for yourself.  He sent Christ to obey his laws for you.  He sent Christ to suffer and to die the death you deserved.  He offers Christ to you as your servant.  Jesus himself said, “I did not come to be served but to serve and to give my life as a ransom for many.”  God is not interested in what you can do for him he is only interested in you trusting that he has done everything for you in Christ.  The only people who are going to be accepted by God are those who have stopped trying to serve God and who are depending upon Christ to serve them.

These brothers foolishly think that their gift makes a difference in how the prince is going to deal with them.  They have no idea that this prince knows everything about them and yet has determined to be kind to them, in spite of who they are and what they have done.  It’s at this point that we are reminded that while Joseph represents Jesus and is acting as God’s agent for the salvation of these men, yet Joseph is still a human being who is himself being saved.  He does not know everything about these men and so he cannot yet reveal himself without placing his younger brother in jeopardy.  He has yet to find out if they are repentant sinners or simply sinners who are trying to escape what they deserve by trying to outwit God or to buy God off.  Joseph has been steadily avoiding looking at his younger brother Benjamin as he talks with Judah and Reuben the oldest brothers.  But now he turns his gaze upon Benjamin and asks, though he does not need to ask, “Is this your youngest brother, of whom you spoke to me?”  In one of the most tender and poignant scenes you could imagine Joseph says to his mother’s other son, whom he has not seen for 22 years, since he was a young child, “May God be gracious to you my son.”  The last time Joseph saw Benjamin was when Joseph left to go find his brothers.  The last time he saw him he was a little boy standing next to their father waving goodbye to his favorite older brother.  How many times during those years of slavery and imprisonment had he thought of playing with his little brother and wondered if he was safe or if the murderous brothers had killed their only rival for their father’s affection?

Joseph cannot control himself.  His affection for his brother and relief and joy at seeing him well, in his own home overcomes him and he quickly excuses himself from the prostrate brothers and goes to an inner room where he weeps his joy and his love before God.  We know from 42:24, when Joseph wept over the admission of guilt by his brothers, that his affection for all of these men is very real.  He yearns to live in unbroken fellowship with all of his brothers but he does not yet know if they want to do so.  So he continues to hide his identity and the depth of his love for them.  He has brought them into his home in order to serve them, to show them they have nothing to fear from him.  However, they do not yet know that they can do nothing to serve Joseph.  Their salvation is in the hands of the one they betrayed and turned over to death and who does not need them for anything.  Yet this wealthy and powerful man who has the right to destroy them is seeking to serve them so that they will repent and trust him.  The only way any of us will ever go to heaven is by letting God serve us in Christ and by stopping our incessant attempts to prove our worth and obligate him to us by serving him.

God kills our love for this world to create love for him by…

Ø      Showering us with unexpected and undeserved kindness

Ø      Serving us and refusing to let us serve him

Ø      And by…

III.  Giving hints of his sovereign power (vv. 31-34)

After Joseph washes his face and composes himself he returns to the bewildered brothers and orders that they be served lunch.  Joseph eats by himself, the eleven brothers by themselves and the Egyptians who are part of Joseph’s household by themselves.  Notice what Joseph does through his servants.  The eleven brothers are seated in their birth order from oldest to youngest.  Why did Joseph do this? Was he just playing games with them?  Was he trying to give them a “Twilight Zone” sort of experience?  Was he showing off or trying to make their skin crawl just for the fun of it?  It was none of these.  Joseph, acting as God’s agent was demonstrating that he knows them, he knows who they are and what they have done.  By arranging the seating chart, Joseph is seeking to break their illusion that they are in control of their destinies.  He is seeking to confront them, not only with the grace of God but with the all-knowing, all-powerful nature of God.  These are proud men who think they can outwit God.  These are proud men who think they can somehow avoid facing who they are and what they have done and God, through Joseph’s seating arrangement is confronting them with the fact that they live before God.  He sees all and knows all.  As the writer to the Hebrews says, “All things are open and laid bare before the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”

 The point is not lost upon these eleven brothers.  You can just imagine as they sit down their eyes are fixed on the sumptuous lunch spread before them.  But then one of the brothers, maybe Simeon, the third born son, notices that Levi, the second born son, is on his right and Judah, the fourth born son is on his left.  He leans forward and looks down the table and his mouth drops open as he sees his brothers lined up according to their birth.  He then calls out, in Hebrew, to his other brothers to notice how they are sitting and the overwhelming realization dawns upon them that someone knows about them but they don’t know who or what.  The word that is translated “astonishment” in the NIV is everywhere else in the OT translated by words like “appalled”, “stunned”, “terrified”.  The metaphor of a woman in labor is often associated with the word.  It is a very powerful emotion that they are experiencing.

This last week while at the Bethlehem Pastors Conference in Minneapolis, Dr. John Piper told us the story of Adoniram Judson the first foreign missionary form the United States.  Adoniram was the son of a Christian pastor and his wife.  He left home at sixteen to go to college at Andover College.  While he was there he became friends with another young man named Jacob Eames.  Joe, was a Deist.  That means that Joe believed that God had created the world but that he was no longer involved in anything that happened on earth.  Jesus was just a man, most likely a crazy man.  God was not involved in anything in the world.  We are at the mercy of natural law and are completely free to do as we like.  We will never have to face God as our judge.  By the time Judson was finished he had no Christian faith. He kept this concealed from his parents until his 20th birthday, August 9, 1808, when he broke their hearts with his announcement that he had no faith and that he intended to go to New York and learn to write for the theater - which he did six days later on a horse his father gave him as part of his inheritance.

The next years were spent traveling around the countryside with a troop of actors.  They often stole and conned respectable citizens in order to live.  Adoniram described those days as living in the midst of and participating in the depths of human perversity.  He finally came to despise those with whom he was consorting and broke company with them.  One evening as he journeyed alone he came to an inn and asked for a room.  Through the night he heard comings and goings and low voices and groans and gasps. It bothered him to think that the man next to him may not be prepared to die. He wondered about himself and had terrible thoughts of his own dying. He felt foolish because good deists weren't supposed to have these struggles.  When he was leaving in the morning he asked if the man next door was better. "He is dead," said the innkeeper. Judson was struck with the finality of it all. On his way out he asked, "Do you know who he was?" "Oh yes. Young man from the college in Providence. Name was Eames, Jacob Eames."aid he stood there stunned, appalled, terrified and immovable.  He could not bring himself to leave the inn as he recognized the hand of God chasing him down.  No matter how much he told himself that this was a simple coincidence and meant nothing he could not escape the conclusion that God was after him.  He did not become a Christian for several more months but the death of Joe Smith next door to him in that inn convinced him that he must deal with God and could not ignore him anymore.

By the arranging of simple details God reveals that we are not alone and we are not our own.  Haven’t all of us had these sorts of experiences where we know that the coincidence is no coincidence?  We know that the almost car wreck, the appearance of a friend at just the right time, the recovery or the loss of some item of value was orchestrated by an invisible, omnipotent hand.  These revelations of God’s sovereignty are designed to move us to turn away from our love for this world and to cause us to love him supremely.  We are to be overwhelmed with the knowledge that the one who sees all cannot be outwitted or appeased but must be submitted to with joyful abandon.  God gives us hints of his sovereign power so that we will face the fact that he knows who we are and what we have done and he has the power over our lives.  The last verse in the chapter is such a picture of us.  Joseph has been kind and terrified them by his knowledge.  Yet they forget everything in the enjoyment of all of his good gifts.  They eat his food and drink his wine and enjoy it all, while forgetting the terror they felt moments before.  Don’t forget the terror.  Don’t ignore the grace that is being poured out on you every day and has been demonstrated in the person of Jesus Christ.

God kills our love for this world to create love for him by…

Ø      Showering us with unexpected and undeserved kindness

Ø      Serving us and refusing to let us serve him

Ø      Giving hints of his sovereign power