“Jacob lived in the land of his father’s sojourning, in the land of Canaan.” Genesis 37:1
The life of Jacob has led him to a place where his wanderings are over. It’s the place the Lord wanted him to be and the place, we should note, that he could have been all along had he trusted the Lord. This emphasizes that the primary duty of all men and women is to trust the Lord. Since God is both sovereign and good, He’s never wrong or amiss when we come to a difficult circumstance. Jacob’s life was marked by God’s gracious overruling of his sins and such it is with all who learn to trust Him. Their failures will be defeated in Christ. Nevertheless, this doesn’t eradicate the fact that our sins and refusal to trust Him have consequences. We should pray with the Psalmist to declare us innocent from hidden faults and to keep us back from presumptuous sin (Psalm 19).
Joseph comes in to the Biblical story and he’s a wonderful picture and type of Christ. For this reason alone he’s worthy of in-depth study. As Barnhouse points out, we can love Joseph freely without being repelled by the open wounds of sin. Indeed, Joseph had the Adamic nature like all fallen men but great sins are not recorded of him. On the contrary, he stands nearly alone in Scripture, save Christ, as one who showed remarkable faith throughout horrific trials. Many speak – and rightly – of the patience of Job, but we also see immense lessons of faith and trust in Joseph, high walls we should aspire to climb in our own lifetimes. Joseph comes as his father’s most beloved son (Genesis 37:3). This is significant because Jacob’s firstborn, Reuben, as we’re told succinctly in Genesis 35:22, disqualified himself from the firstborn’s benefits by sleeping with his father’s concubine Bilhah. The sons of Jacob were certainly not saints. They were conniving, violent and untrustworthy. Joseph, however, stands over against this and has a peaceful, trustworthy, and Christ-like character. For this his father loves him dearly.
The events to follow are instructive because they show that righteousness and the blessings that often follow from it produces, in the ungodly, jealousy and wrath toward the one who trusts God. Sin is not only a thing we do; it’s an active force, a crouching and hunting lion seeking to devour souls whole and complete (1 Peter 5:8). This pattern started immediately in history after Adam fell with Cain and Abel. Cain killed his brother because Abel was the one he could reach with his hatred, but in all it was God whom Cain hated. And he hated God because the principle of sin is the desire to be as God. Sin twists and distorts all things and in the desire to be as God, man wants fiat power. He wants security and ease because the necessity to change, risk, and adapt marks us as created beings, not Creator. The reality of covetousness has its root deep in the soul that resents not being as God. In sin, we want to be as God, but not righteous. The life of Jacob showed how he learned to accept risk and temporary frustrations because he learned to trust God. In Joseph’s life, even through his incredible deprivations and seeming failures, we discover a great example of what it means to wait on and trust the Lord. Through this study the hope is that we learn to hate our natural (sinful) inclination to rely on our circumstances and instead grow to see God’s hand in all things.
Joseph’s brothers, on the other hand, learn the hard way. There is incredible arc and character development in Joseph’s story (as a writer would say). They prove the truth of Proverbs 29 that unless a person regards the rebuke of the wise man – and in our case today, the wisdom of the Lord’s word and His ministers – he will only learn when judgment punches him in the nose. In the fifth chapter of Amos we see that the Lord sends judgements – that is, pain, failure, and frustration – to His people in order to bring them to repentance. The scoffer, however, in Proverbs 9 especially, will not lay down their pride. Instead, they refuse correction (Proverbs 12:1) and abuse those who try and instruct them. The sons of Jacob, save Joseph, will learn their lessons through this story, as we’ll see. Joseph stands out as a type of Christ who delivers his brothers from not just starvation but from the tyranny of sin and guilt. It’s an amazing story and famous for all the right reasons. It shows us how Christ will often use life’s frustrations and pains as a means to correct His people and bring them to Himself. C.S. Lewis said that pain is often God’s mega-phone that call us to repentance and obedience. But what kind of obedience? The obedience of faith (Romans 1:5)!. The great contrast between Joseph and his brothers is how even through his trials he waited on and trusted the Lord whereas they often took things into their own hands.
And that’s the thing with sin. Reuben sleeping with Jacob’s concubine and all the other sordid details of the family are examples of fallen men unwilling to wait on the Lord and trying to ameliorate the frustrations and yearnings of life while ignoring the Lord. In Joseph’s case, there’s nothing he can do except wait on and trust in Him for deliverance. It’s an incredible lesson and it’s especially relevant for our time. For instance, envy of the wealthy is rampant. We may not conspire to throw people into a pit and sell them into slavery, but the spiritual impulse to such hatred is very much alive. The ideas of Marxism are those that would sell our neighbors into slavery. Marxism is the political philosophy of envy, pure and simple. Impatience and the hatred of our circumstances reveal our idolatry and self-worship to which the antidote is the gospel and faith in Jesus Christ alone…not only for our ultimate destination but our every pit-stop here too.
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