Hello everyone and welcome to Trinity Sermons. Here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, we want
to share with you sermons that inspire and encourage you in your faith journey, as together
we are learning to love Jesus, live like Jesus, and lead others to Jesus. Now this is episode
two of our sermon series, Live in the Dream, and today Rob Perkmans will be with us where
we are continuing our journey through the story of Joseph and learning about how to
manage life when life is less of a dream, but more of a nightmare. And before we begin,
we'd like to invite you to follow our podcast, check us out on social media, and please visit
our website at trinitystreetsville.org. Thanks so much for listening and we hope you enjoy.
God bless.
Good morning everyone.
I am reading today from Genesis chapter 37 verses 12 through 36.
Now his brothers had gone to graze their father's flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph,
As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send
you to them. Very well, he replied. So he said to him, Go and see if all is well with
your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me. Then he sent him off from
the valley of Hebron. When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around
in the fields and asked him, What are you looking for? He replied, I'm looking for my
brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks? They have moved on from here,
the man answered. I heard them say, Let's go to Dothan. So Joseph went after his brothers
and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance and before he reached them,
they plotted to kill him. Here comes that dreamer, they said to each other. Come now,
let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured
him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams. When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue
him from their hands. Let's not take his life, he said. Don't shed any blood. Throw him into
this cistern here in the wilderness, but don't lay a hand on him. Reuben said this to rescue
him from them and take him back to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they
stripped him of his robe, the ornate robe he was wearing, and they took him and threw
him into the cistern. The cistern was empty, there was no water in it. As they sat down
to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead.
Their camels were loaded with spices, balm, and myrrh, and they were on their way to take
them down to Egypt. Judah said to his brothers, what will we gain if we kill our brother and
cover up his blood? Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him.
After all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood. His brothers agreed. So when the
Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold
him for 20 shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt. When Reuben returned
to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. He went back to
his brothers and said, the boy isn't there. Where can I turn now? Then they got Joseph's
robe, slaughtered a goat, and dipped the robe in the blood. They took the ornate robe back
to their father and said, we found this, examine it and whether to see whether it is your son's
robe. He recognized it and said, it is my son's robe. Some ferocious animal has devoured
him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces. Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth
and mourn for his son many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he
refused to be comforted. No, he said, I will continue to mourn until I join my son in the
grave. So his father wept for him. Meanwhile, the Mennonites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar,
one of Pharaoh's officials, the captain of the guard. This is the word of the Lord.
You know, when I was holding little Ainsley there this morning, I couldn't help but think
back to the days when we used to tuck our own children into bed and how sweet it was
just to kind of cozy them up and, and, and tuck them in and, and maybe read them a little
story and say a prayer with them. And then, then as you walk out of the room, you turn
off the light and you, you turn around and you say sweet dreams, sweet dreams, little
one. You know, why do we, why do we say sweet dreams? Why do we do that? I think the reason
is, is because we know that not all dreams are sweet and that sometimes the dreams we
dream are actually bad dreams. Sometimes we in fact dream nightmares. And I should say
it's not just children who struggle with dreaming nightmares. Adults as well have some really
bad dreams with regularity. So here is a quick question to just kind of get us started. How
many adults do you think report having a nightmare at least once a year? How many adults have
a nightmare once a year? Take a moment, just turn to one or two people around you, try
to think what your answer is to this question. How many adults have a nightmare once a year?
All right, let's do a little show of hands here. How many would say A 15%? Nobody, nobody.
How many would say B 25%? I see that hand. Thank you. Two, two of you. How many would
say 55% just over half of us? Yep. Yep. How many would say 85%? Oh, D everybody thinks
it's D and you know what? You're correct. It's very interesting. In fact, I'll just
tell you some other fun facts about nightmares. And that is the women have more nightmares
than men. And, and those over the age of 70 have more nightmares than those under the
age of 70. And actually during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was this thing going around
it was just called the COVID nightmare. I'm not sure what that was or what it was about.
But if you think about it, that means if you're a woman and you're over the age of 70, then
during the pandemic, you are probably having like nightmares every single night, you're
probably like a nightmare machine. Right? I, when I think about nightmares, for me, I
think there's, there's four main categories of nightmares, four kinds of nightmares. The
first nightmare, you find yourself in a scary place, right? You're walking down a dark alley.
You're in a haunted house or you're in a creepy basement. It was just a couple of weeks ago.
I had a dream. I won't call it a nightmare, but I had a dream that I was in an abandoned
asylum. Right? That's a scary place to be. I don't know what that dream meant either.
But, but the second kind of nightmare you can have is not just that you're in a scary
place, but you find yourself in a frightening predicament, right? Your, your car breaks
down and you, you don't know what to do. Your, your house is on fire. Or one of the most
common frightening predicaments is that you show up to school and you realize that you
forgot to put on any clothes. Right? That have you, you've probably had that one, right?
The third kind of nightmare that you can have is what might call deadly peril. You're being
chased. You're being attacked. You're falling or you're drowning. You're drowning. And then
the fourth kind that you can have is where you're going through some kind of agonizing
pain. You, you're suffering an injury, illness, or even death. Some people dream dreams of
their own death. It has been shown that the pain center of our brain can actually be activated
during an especially vivid nightmare, which means that your nightmares can actually cause
you to feel pain. Why does this happen? I mean, we don't have to go into all the details.
There's a bunch of different reasons why we have nightmares, everything from stress. Some
people say some of the diet, what we eat, medications, traumatic events. Many people
with PTSD actually, their nightmares are just are replaying some especially traumatic events
that they suffered earlier on in their life. Wow, Rob, you're probably saying what the
heck? This is a kind of a creepy way to start a sermon. Why are we talking about nightmares?
Well, the reason we're talking about nightmares is we're doing this teaching series for a
few weeks called live in the dream, live in the dream. And of course, when you hear someone
say I'm living the dream, what does that mean? You know, if someone said, Rob, how are you?
And I said, I'm living the dream. What it means is I'm doing great. Life is going along
in a great direction. Everything's happening as it should. I'm living the dream. And that's
why we kind of had these t shirts printed and you guys got little notepads last weekend
and all that stuff. But here's what we got to talk about today. Let's be honest. Often
life is not a dream. And often when we think about our life is certainly not a sweet dream.
It's more like a bad dream. And what do you do? What do you do when life actually becomes
not a dream, but a nightmare? When you find yourself in a scary place, you're like, how
did I end up here? I don't want to be here. Well, how did I get in this situation? Or
you find yourself in a frightening predicament. You know, you're trapped. There's a crisis.
You don't know which way to turn. You don't know what's coming. Or you find yourself facing
some kind of deadly peril in your life. Maybe it's a sickness. Maybe it's the loss of a
loved one or something like that. Or you find yourself suffering agonizing pain. When those
things happen in our life, we are not living the dream. Instead, it's a living hell. We
are living a nightmare. And when that happens in our life, one of the hard questions that
comes to our mind, and I think you probably know this, is you would say, well, why is
this happening to me? Why am I suffering this way? Whose fault is it? Is it my fault? Is
it somebody else's fault? Is that why these things are happening to me? Or is it God's
fault? Because listen, isn't God in control of everything? And if I'm going through this
problem, this pain, this predicament, this peril in my life, then surely God could have
prevented that so it doesn't the blame ultimately end up on God? Have you ever been in that
moment in your life where you're like, God, what are you doing? What is going on? If you've
ever been there, and I dare say most of us have, then you probably can connect really
well with the story of Joseph. Joseph, as we learned last week, was a dreamer. He was
a big time dreamer. But today we see how Joseph's dream descends into a nightmare. Last week
we learned how Joseph dreamt that he was going to be a leader. He was going to be a ruler.
Everybody was going to bow down to him. He had great dreams of grandeur. But now we see
it's all turned into a gigantic nightmare. And it's the worst kind of nightmare because
if you look at Joseph's story, all four types of nightmares are blended together in his
story. In Joseph's story, you'll see he finds himself in a scary place, in a frightening
predicament, facing deadly peril and agonizing pain. All of it coming together. It's the
perfect storm. So we're going to look through Joseph's nightmare and see what we can learn.
Maybe there's something we can learn here that will help us as we struggle through our
own bad dreams, the bad dreams of our life. Let's start with the very first piece of his
nightmare. Joseph finds himself in a very scary place. What do I mean by that? Well,
let's read the text again here. It says, now his brothers have gone to graze their flocks
near Shechem. And Jacob, Joseph's father, said, Joseph, as you know, the boys are down there.
They're grazing the flocks near Shechem. So I want you to go down. I want to send you
down there. Now, let's just get a little context here. Actually, Jacob was world famous rancher.
He was a world famous shepherd. His flocks grew and grew and grew so much so that he
couldn't even keep all the sheep and goats in that valley in Hebron anymore. So we had
to start sending the flocks to different places to graze. And one of the places he ends up
sending them is 50 miles down the road to a place called Shechem. And ladies and gentlemen,
I want to tell you Shechem was a very, very scary place. Let me tell you why. Years earlier,
when Joseph's family had been traveling by Shechem, the men of Shechem raped Joseph's
sister Dinah. You can read about that earlier on in Genesis. It was a horrible, horrible
thing. It caused great anguish everywhere. But two of Joseph's brothers say, we're going
to take matters into our own hands. And so one night, you know what they did? They drew
their swords and they slipped into the village of all the Shechemites and they slipped the
throats of all of the men. At least the Bible tells us all of the men of Shechem. They killed
them all. It was an absolute bloodbath. And when, and when the father realized what these
two sons had done, they were like, do you realize what you've done? This is very, very
dangerous for us now because there's so many Shechemites and they have friends and they
have neighbors and they all team up against us. We're done for. We're totally outnumbered.
So Joseph and his brothers and his father, they all had to gather up and they had to
scoot out of Shechem and go find another place to live. And, and you got to believe, you
got to believe the Shechemites had never forgotten that moment. Surely they're still furious
with Jacob and his boys for what they did. Surely they're looking for revenge. And so
when dad says, Hey Joseph, I'd like you to go on a long journey, 50 miles from here alone
as a 17 year old boy, I want you to go alone to Shechem. I imagine Joseph kind of went
gulp, right? Because this is the stuff nightmares are made of. If it were me, I would have said,
dad, no way. Sorry. Too scary. I wouldn't even go into the basement as a kid. I was so scared
of that. I'm not going to go 50 miles to our arch enemies, you know, village. So he says,
but that's not Joseph. Joseph is way more courageous. I'm way more brave than me. He
went, he went and it gets even scarier. I'll tell you why it gets even scary because when
Joseph actually gets to Shechem, he looks around and his brothers aren't there. He's
like, Oh my gosh, where are they? They're not where they're supposed to be. They're
supposed to be in Shechem. And I bet his mind said, Oh my gosh, the Shechemites, the Shechemites
have got them. They're probably all dead or they're being tortured. They're all captured
and tied up somewhere. And I'm next. He probably thought, and then this creepy guy starts coming
through the field and he's like, Hey little boy, what are you looking for? And, and he's
like, Oh, I'm just looking for my brothers. Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me.
Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me. And, and actually the guy turns out to not
be that creepy. And I took a huge amount of license. He's probably a really great guy,
probably a great Dothanite or a great Shechemite fellow. I don't know. But anyways, he says,
actually, no, they, they went on a little further. I saw them. They went out to this
other town called Dothan. Dothan. Okay. So if I were Joseph again, I would say, okay,
all right, I did what my dad said. Dad said, go to Shechem, check up on your boys, check
up on the boys, see what they're up to. I did that. So I'm going to go home and I'm
going to tell them what I did. But no, Joseph's better than me, probably better than you too.
He said, no, I'm going to keep on going. I'm not just going to go to this, to this dark,
dangerous place, but I'm going to go to this distant place, 25 miles further to Dothan
to look for my brother. So listen, it's a scary place. It's a scary place. He finds
himself in, right? And I just wonder if part of the, if you're, if your life is like a
bad dream in any way, is it partly because you find yourself in a place that you just
don't want to be, right? I don't want to be in this relationship. I don't want to be in
this job. I don't want to be in this school. I don't want to be in this program. How did
I end up with friends like this? How did I end up alone? I don't fit in. I want to go
home. I think we, that, that, those are scary thoughts. Those are scary places to be. But
somehow Joseph, I don't know how he pushed through and he kept on going. But that was
only the first part of the nightmare. It wasn't just that he faced a scary place. Now he faces
a frightening, frightening predicament. What do I mean by that? Well, listen, you remember
last week, last week we learned that from time to time, what Joseph would do is he would
see his brothers doing something they shouldn't be doing, misbehaving, and he would bring
back word or bring back a bad report to his father to say, dad, this is what my brothers
are all doing and go punish them or something like that. So what this tells us though is
that two things, one, Joseph's brothers were often up to no good. And secondly, Joseph
would often rat them out. So this puts Joseph in a very frightening predicament because
these guys were bad news. You don't mess with these guys. A quick read through Genesis 30
to 40 and you will see time and again, these guys are guilty of multiple crimes. I wrote
a few down wholesale slaughter, incest, murder, jealousy, kidnapping, lying, adultery, prostitution,
really bad judgment. In fact, in Genesis 39, you can read about one of Joseph's brothers,
Judah, and he decided he was going to have his daughter-in-law killed, executed because
he found out that she was pregnant outside of marriage. And so they're getting ready
to burn her to death when he finally realizes, oh, wait a second, I'm the father of that
child. I had sex with her. That's my child. Oh, that's right. That's right. Put the fires
out. We're not going to burn her after all. I mean, these were horrible, horrible guys.
Like what kind of, you can't make this stuff up, right? This was a frightening, frightening
predicament. These are frightening people that Joseph finds himself around. But what
added to that predicament was that they obviously hated Joseph. So that, you know, Joseph, there
was tension between them and his brothers. He was a snitch. He was Jacob's favorite.
And so here's the predicament. Here's the predicament. Joseph has a bunch of brothers
who already hate him with a passion. And he's being sent to go visit them far, far away
from home where dad can't see. And they've been quiet for a long time. In fact, that's
why dad sent him. They've been quiet a long time. And when you know, you know, when kids
are quiet for a long time, they're usually up to no good. And so, and so they're, they're
doing something they're not supposed to be doing. And he puts himself into this predicament,
right? Why, why did he throw himself into this predicament? He's courageous. He's courageous,
more courageous than me. And maybe the reason why your life right now feels like it's this
bad, bad dream is that you like Joseph, you find yourself in this frightening predicament.
You don't know what to do. You know, right, wrong. Yes, no. Maybe, maybe your career right
now is in a frightening moment. Maybe your marriage right now is, is hanging on a thread
and then you feel trapped or vulnerable or helpless or hopeless and, and you don't know
what to do next and you don't know what's coming next. And, and I think that's exactly
how Joseph felt as he proceeded through this dream that became a nightmare. But more than
that, it keeps on going, right? It wasn't just that he was going to a scary place or
a frightening predicament, but he experienced this deadly, deadly peril. Even before Joseph
gets there, his brothers have decided to kill him. But when they saw him in the distance,
they said, here comes that dreamer. They said to one another, come now, let's kill him and
let's throw him into one of these cisterns. Hey, it says that they saw Joseph from a distance
and they recognized him. How could they know it was Joseph from such a far away away? The
coat, right? He had that multicolored coat on. Oh my gosh, that thing, you can see it
a mile away. It must be Joseph. And so this is not like involuntary manslaughter. This
is premeditated murder. They are going to kill this guy when he shows up. And so they
decide to kill him and they decide to throw him into one of the cisterns that were kicking
around there. Now, this is what cisterns look like in the ancient world where we're talking
about. You can see it had a very narrow neck on the top and then it kind of went out like
this at the bottom, which means that if you were thrown into one of these things, there
was no way you were climbing out of it, right? It was a death trap. In fact, I was doing
some research and I found out that in the area where they think Dothan was, archeologists
have unearthed cisterns like this. And get this, some of the cisterns have had skeletons
in them, right? So I'm telling you, these things are a death trap. There was no question.
The plan was to kill him. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his
robe, that ornate robe that he was wearing, and they took him and they threw him into
the cistern. We're told the cistern was empty. There was no water in the bed. It didn't matter.
This was the end, right? What a nightmare. And here's the most callous bit of all. We're
told that after they had done this, the brothers sat down to have a meal. They sat down to
eat, right? So here, here, can you imagine? Here comes Joseph, grab him, strip him of
his clothes, beat him up a bit, throw him in the cistern, put the rock over the top.
And now, hey guys, what do you want to have for lunch? What do you sit down? Right? He's
screaming. He's screaming, guys, let me out, please don't kill me. They're like having
a sandwich. These, I don't understand how these guys are so cold and callous and heartless.
Right? In fact, we know if you go on and read, let's just skip ahead for a moment. You go
on further in the story. Later on, when Joseph actually confronts his brothers, we find out
that, yeah, they heard him screaming and they say, we are truly guilty concerning our brother,
for we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us and we would not hear. How
nice guys, not nice guys. Eventually, they say, oh, I got an even better idea. Let's
sell them. Let's sell them and make some money from his life. And these merchants come by
and they pull Joseph out of the cistern and they sell them for 20 shekels of silver, which
you might be like, how much is that? It's not a lot. I think I want to say it's something
like 50 or 250 dollars. It's not a lot of money. They sold him. And friends, this is
the stuff that nightmares are absolutely made of attacked, threatened with death, thrown
into a well, sold as a slave. I hope you never face deadly peril like this in your life.
But I know some of you have actually. There are some of you, many have come to Canada
from other countries and you have fled violence. You've had to run for your life and maybe
some of your family members are still back there and they're hiding for their life. Or
maybe some of those family members have even perished in the deadly peril that they faced.
Others of you, you're facing a different kind of deadly peril. You got a diagnosis. The
doctor told you something and it doesn't look good. Or you've been through an accident.
You survived an accident, but just barely. Yeah, you say, Rob, I've never been thrown
into a sister. I've never been thrown into a pit, but I know what it feels like to be
almost dead and buried, to have your dream turn into a nightmare. And that means you
probably also know this fourth aspect of a nightmare. You know what it's like to have
agonizing pain. Joseph's nightmare. I mean, Joseph suffered agonizing pain. Good grief.
He was sold, taken to Egypt. He was a slave, separated and isolated from his family for
30 years. That is a lot of suffering and pain, but he wasn't the only one. Everybody suffered
as a result of this horrible nightmare. His own father, we read, suffered greatly. Then
when he found out that his boy was dead, when the brothers came back and said, look, a wild
animal must have eaten him. We read that Jacob tore his clothes and he put on sackcloth and
he mourned for his son. He refused to be comforted. He said, I'm going to mourn until the day
I die, until the day I join my son in the grave. This boy, my boy, my boy, my favorite
little boy, he's no longer with me. He's been taken from me. And, and you know what? 30
years later, he is still mourning every day for the loss of his son. And I know there
are even some of you here and you know what that kind of pain feels like. It is the bad
dream that you can never, ever forget. But I wonder if those who suffered the most pain
in the story weren't the brothers themselves. Because if you read between the lines, it
means that day after day they watched their father and they saw their father's pained
face and they knew what they had done to hurt him. And that memory would never go away.
Joseph's tortured face, they could never forget that. The sound of his blood curdling screams
from the well or as the merchants took him off to Egypt. You see, they could not forget
that. It haunted them for the rest of their life, I am sure. And, and that's the thing
about pain. Yeah, sure. Some of us suffer pain because of things others have done to
us. But sometimes our pain is a result of things we have done to hurt others. And it
haunts us. Those skeletons in the closet, they just never go away every day. It's a
different kind of bad dream, but it's still a bad dream. Still full of pain. So there
you go. The perfect storm of a nightmare. And I just wonder, if you look at this, where
do you see yourself in this at all today? Maybe you'd be like, Rob, total sweet dreams
over here. I'm living the dream. And we're all like, amen, God bless you. Go for it.
You live your best life. But there's others of us who are like, you know what? Yeah, I
had a sweet dream. It became a bad dream. I'm going through a dark place right now. Are
you in a scary place? Do you find yourself in a frightening predicament? Are you facing
some peril? Are you coping? Are you coping with some pain? If so, probably asking those
questions again, right? Whose fault is it? Whose fault? You could say some of this was
Joseph's fault. I mean, he was a bit of a braggart. He was a showboat and he was a snitch,
a tattletale. So we can probably blame him to a point. And maybe there are things in
your life that you actually have done that have led to some of the pain that you're experiencing
now. So yeah, maybe, maybe some of it is our fault. But certainly a lot of the fault and
the blame falls at the feet of Joseph's brothers in the story. They were horrible, horrible
people. They were bad apples, bad to the core. They and you maybe blame other people in your
life for the suffering that you're experiencing right now. And that's certainly happens. But
then there's the God question, right? And come back to that one. Is it God's fault?
Surely Joseph could have said, God, this is your fault. God, you could have delivered
me from this. God, you could have saved me from this at any time. Couldn't God have intervened
in Joseph's life? Couldn't God have intervened in your life? Saved you from that place, that
predicament, that peril and that pain? Why didn't he? Right? This is the question of
suffering. It would take a million sermons to even begin to scratch at why good things
happen to bad people, why we suffer and where is God in the midst of it all. So we're not
going to get there today, but I want to show one piece of this story that might shed just
a glimmer, not always, but a glimmer that might explain some of the nightmare and that
is this other P word, providence. Could it be that in our bad dreams or nightmare of
a life that we're living that actually God is doing something behind the scenes, something
that we do not know? That's providence. Providence. Think about it this way. Think about it. If
Joseph had never dreamed the dream, he never would have been attacked by his brothers.
He never would have been hated. He never would have been sold. If Joseph was never sold to
Egypt, then he never would have risen to power in Egypt. And if he had never risen to power
in Egypt, he never could have formulated the plan by which Egypt would survive the coming
famine by storing up grain. And if Egypt didn't store up grain, then all the neighboring people
around Egypt also would have perished in the famine. And among those who certainly could
have perished would have been Joseph's own brothers and his father. And if Jacob and
the brothers, if that family line had ended, then how would the Messiah Jesus of the line
of Judah come to be? Right? Had he not been in that place, in that predicament, gone through
that pain, then maybe the promise would never have arrived. You see, what everybody saw
was evil and wrong. What everyone assumed was a huge mistake on God's part was just
God's way of allowing this dream to be accomplished. The brothers said, let's destroy that dream.
And they tried to destroy that dream, but actually in the very process of destroying
that dream, they enabled the dream to actually come true. That is what we call the providence
of God when God brings about his plan in ways that just seem totally backwards to us. In
fact, it makes me think of Jesus. You know, Jesus on the night he was arrested, he said,
God, take away this nightmare. God, get me out of this bad dream. But Jesus said, if
this is the way it has to be, then your will be done and not my will. See, Jesus saw that
nightmare, but he believed that God would turn the darkness of death into the dawn of
new life. And he did. So you see, God has a plan. God has a dream for your life, for
my life. Sometimes that dream feels more like a nightmare, like a very bad dream, and we
would do anything to avoid that place, avoid that predicament, avoid the peril and the
pain. Jesus knows what that's like. And if you're going through something like that in
your life right now, I really hope as a church, we can surround you and love you and support
you as you deal with your pain. We also need to remember God's providence. Sometimes you
got to go through the scary place to get to the good place. Sometimes you got to go through
the predicament to get to the peace. Sometimes you have to go through the peril to get to
the pleasure. And sometimes, sometimes you have to go through the pain to get to the
promise. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thanks so much for joining us today, and we hope that you found the sermon inspiring.
And if you enjoyed the show today, please take a minute to rate and review our podcast
so that we can continue to spread the good news with others. Please come back again next
week, and thanks again for listening. Today's sermon was taken from the 1115 service on
November 5, 2023 at Trinity Church, Streetsville in Mississauga, Ontario.