“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.”
Genesis 37:25 ESV
After kidnapping their brother and throwing him into a waterless pit, they casually sat down to eat. And as they did this they noticed that here came a caravan of traders going about their business.
Remarkable things in Scripture are often missed because of its matter-of-fact delivery.
The cold-heartedness of the brothers is nowhere more evident than when they figure to have a meal while Joseph, alive and able to hear everything going on, aware of his awful fate, sits in a pit. The cruelty of such a betrayal is nearly unthinkable. The terror gripping Joseph’s heart had to be paralyzing.
Much of the world has marveled at the cruelty of the last century with its concentration camps and gulags. Man’s inhumanity to man is treated in the main as if it’s a rare thing. Yet the word of God doesn’t share the fantasies that infect our vacuous self-evaluations. While we feign shock over history’s wars, rapes, and slavery, Scripture tells it like it is. Nazis and communists weren’t so inhumane to their neighbors because they were a special kind of evil. The fact is, the ideologies of national socialism and communism simply inspired the hidden evil already lurking in the hearts of men. It watered the seeds already there.
The fact is that we’re all murderers but we don’t have the power to follow through on the impulse. Yes, that’s in our hearts and it’s only the grace of God that keeps our feet, which are swift to shed blood (Romans 3:15), from following through. The sons of Jacob were, among the people of that region, most likely to be righteous, after all, and yet they broke bread after so sordid and sorry a deed. When people sit and ponder, as many do, how it was that the everyday German could have seen the horrific evils of Nazism and not stood against it they puzzle because they erroneously believe that all men are basically good. An informed Christian, however, reckons with the evil in their very reflection. The truth is hard to hear but we must hear it.
The fact is that a person that will sin against their loving God, who sees all and knows all, as if He can’t see and doesn’t know, is capable of literally any atrocity. The refusal to acknowledge, thank and worship God is the basic sin which leads to all others. To rebel against God is the vilest act of all and yet you and I do it every single day in thought, word, and deed. But the great fact, and the greatest ever to be told, is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:6-8). Far from being negative about the human condition, the reality of sin’s ugliness is the only thing that sets God’s amazing love and grace in its proper light. God’s grace isn’t like a walk on the beach for a guy that’s never seen it before…that has always lived in the mountains or in the flat lands of Kansas. It’s so much more than that. Imagine a child enslaved to coal mines – born and raised there, always and forever toiling in that blackness, never seeing the resplendent sun or breathing fresh air. All he knows is the darkness and the soot and the damp. Now imagine that child emerging as an adult on some sun-drenched and tropical shore.
And that’s still an insufficient picture of God’s mercy to us. Oh, that we would know how far and high and wide is His love! The greatest ethical lie is that we aren’t so bad as we are because that lie sullies the beauty of the gospel, which itself reveals the righteousness of God. So, no, this telling, though unpopular today, isn’t a Debbie-downer, a fire-and-brimstone yelling. It’s the cold, hard fact of the human condition that we are all capable of the worst.
But God, though we were dead in our trespasses and sins, calls us up and out like we’re Lazarus laying lifeless in the tomb. We emerge wrapped in the grave-cloths of sin, blinking in the stunning daylight of grace, unable to comprehend what’s been done to and for us. This is what it means to be born-again. Sanctification is the process of realizing step by tentative step how bad and deep the rot of sin truly is in us and yet how much God’s love transforms us. Sin is that bad, yes. Yet God’s love is so great as to remove all its stains.
There is no sin that you’ve committed over which the blood of Christ cannot utterly wash away its stain…to be remembered never more, so that you are now clean and restored. Do you carry guilt? Do you hide from Him in a dark corner of your heart when, in fact, He beckons you to the great beaches and those sunny shores of grace? Have you backslidden and fear that He’s lost His passion for you? Oh, that we would see Him as He is! Oh, that we would know His love…and His power over even sin!
The tragic thing about downplaying how great our sin is, how truly infected with it we are (the doctrine of total depravity), is that we can be deceived into living on the edge of grace even though we’re saved – rather than coming fully to Him and knowing what it is to be not just forgiven, but washed clean. What a loss we suffer when we don’t know the power of Christ to renew us. What a shambles we make of our days when we live under the specter of defeat when we’re wearing the blazing white robes of Christ through grace alone. We’re like a man to whom has been given an infinite fortune but who nevertheless lives in abject poverty, wearing rags, rummaging through garbage tins seeking a morsel.
So, what of the caravan? Do you see God’s sovereignty even over our sins in this? Those Ishmaelites were men who had lives and families and dreams and all that. They’d traveled many miles and done so many things and yet all those details, too numerous to detail, all coincided at His sovereign decree to meet during that meal with Joseph in the pit. And murder is transformed into slavery. Later, slowly but inexorably because it is God’s will, slavery will also be transformed…into deliverance. Into forgiveness. Into restoration.
No sin and no rebellion will ever overthrow God’s purpose and love.
Do you know this? Do you kneel down literally and in your heart before this great God revealed only in Scripture? If you’re anxious over your circumstances it’s because you don’t settle your mind enough upon His absolute rule over all of life. Or perhaps you don’t trust His goodness and fear the circumstances – the particulars – will be too much for you bear. Then remember it is Christ who died literally for you! The One whom will judge all the earth is the One who endured the atrocity that was death by crucifixion. For you! And remember that He will not allow a single arrow of the enemy to pierce your flesh unless it is for your good. This truth will change everything about you bit by bit, step by step, stage by stage as you grow in all that love.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:38–39 ESV
But we must also take care to consider ourselves in light of Scripture lest we be duped into thinking like Joseph’s brothers. How many egregious deeds we do to each other when we focus not on Christ, resting in His sufficiency and provision, and instead dwell on the what we think others owe us. Remember, all of this could have been avoided if only the house of Jacob had been a praying house, faithful to the Lord. The other lesson here is that though God’s grace and love can and will overrule our sins, these transgressions are nevertheless real and will be dealt with by Him. God’s sovereignty does not preclude our responsibility to live faithfully and, indeed, whatever is not of faith is sin (Romans 14:23).
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