Hello everyone and welcome to Trinity Sermons.
Here at Trinity Church, Streetsville, we want to share our weekly sermon with you so as
to inspire and encourage you in your daily walk with Christ as together we are learning
to love Jesus, live like Jesus and lead others to Jesus.
Now this is our final sermon in our series of Joseph called Live in the Dream and today
we have Justin Stratus with us where we will be looking at reunion and reconciliation.
And before we begin, we'd like to invite you to follow our podcast, to check us out
on social media and visit our website at trinitiestreetsville.org.
Thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy.
God bless.
Morning.
The reading from Genesis chapter 45 verses 1 to 11 and 15.
Then Joseph could no longer control himself before all his attendants and he cried out,
have everyone leave my presence.
So there was no one with Joseph when he made himself known to his brothers.
And he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and Pharaoh's household heard about it.
Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph.
Is my father still living?
But his brothers were not able to answer him because they were terrified at his presence.
Then Joseph said to his brothers, come close to me.
When they had done so, he said, I am your brother, Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt.
And now do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here
because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.
For two years now, there has been famine in the land and for the next five, there will
be no plowing and reaping.
But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives
by a great deliverance.
So then it was not you who sent me here, but God.
He made me father to Pharaoh, Lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.
Now hurry back to my father and say to him, this is what your son Joseph says.
God has made me Lord of all Egypt.
Come down to me, don't delay.
You shall live in the region of Goshen and be near me.
You, your children and grandchildren, your flocks and herds and all you have.
I will provide for you there because five years of famine are still to come.
Otherwise, you and your household and all who belong to you will become destitute.
And he kissed all his brothers and wept over them.
By the words, his brothers talked with him.
The word of the Lord.
Good morning, everyone.
Well, I didn't want to say this.
I don't like to say this to the different services, but the 1115 service is the coolest
and best looking service.
That's how you endear yourself to your audience.
Well, today is our last of a sermon series on the life of Joseph, which we've called
Live in the Dream.
And it's my job to bring this sermon series in to land as a guest preacher.
So hopefully what I'm about to say matches in some sense what Rob had intended for this
series.
But just in case, let's pray before I do so.
Lord, we believe.
Help thou our unbelief.
Amen.
So the Joseph story takes up the biggest amount of space in what is already a big book of
the Bible, Genesis.
And as we've been learning, it tells the story about how Jacob's favorite son, Joseph, makes
his way from the land of Canaan all the way to the palaces of Egypt.
But it all starts back in chapter 37 with a couple of dreams.
Dreams in which the whole world, including Joseph's own family, is depicted as bowing
before him.
This little guy, this little 17-year-old shepherd.
Now at the time, no one could really guess what the dreams meant.
Even Joseph really didn't understand, which is why he naively started telling his brothers
about them.
But what was clear, though, was that to most people, Joseph's dreams were extremely disturbing,
which makes sense.
I mean, if you met a 17-year-old kid who starts having intense visions of grandeur and dreams
about how they're going to one day take over the world, you would probably be slightly
alarmed.
They're not the kind of person that you'd want to sell firearms to, for example.
And so the brothers get so annoyed with Joseph that they decide to get rid of him, and they
sell him into slavery, telling their father, or at least implying to their father, that
Joseph was torn apart by wild animals and is dead.
Jacob, of course, is devastated, but the brothers kind of band together and make a pact that
they'll never speak of or tell anyone about this dark secret for the rest of their lives.
As long as they keep their mouths shut, everything will be fine and things will go back to normal.
Meanwhile, Joseph heads back to Egypt, where he's purchased, as we heard, by an Egyptian
official named Potiphar.
And as Rob taught us, Joseph, through his sort of grit and good work ethic, rises through
the ranks of Potiphar's servants until he's finally put in charge of the whole household.
And everything's going fine until, of course, Potiphar's wife takes notice of Joseph and
makes a pass at him.
And when Joseph refuses her advances, she gets him thrown into prison under false pretenses.
Now for years, Joseph is languishing in an Egyptian jail, but again, just like in Potiphar's
house, he ends up rising through the ranks.
And through a whole series of kind of crazy circumstances and events, he eventually gets
an audience with Pharaoh, Egypt's supreme ruler.
Now if you remember the story, at this time, Pharaoh is having some crazy dreams himself.
But unlike his own dreams, Joseph is given the ability by God to actually interpret them.
And the interpretation is that the whole region will face seven years of plenty followed by
seven years of famine.
And Pharaoh is so impressed that as we heard last week, he ends up putting Joseph in charge
of the whole of the land of Egypt.
And that's where we find him today in the context of our passage.
20 years have passed since that first dream.
And Joseph is now in charge of all of Egypt.
And he presides over their considerable food stores in a time of famine.
He's in his late 30s.
He's got a new Egyptian name.
He's got a new Egyptian family.
And he's in control of the most powerful empire in the whole world.
And he holds the keys to the most precious commodity in the whole world.
So this is a situation in which Joseph holds all the cards.
He has all the power and he has all the advantages.
So imagine how Joseph must have felt when who should come knocking on his door, literally
begging for food, but the 10 brothers who threw him into that cistern when he was a
teenager, which is the dream scenario.
Right.
I mean, this is like if you were interviewing someone at your work and the candidate walks
in and it turns out to be the high school bully that bugs you all through your youth.
Right.
It's the kind of revenge scenario that we dream about.
You know, every time someone cuts you off in the road, you're like, one day they're
going to apply for a job and it's going to be up to me.
Right.
And I can just imagine Joseph sort of peering behind the curtain, watching his brothers
congregating, just sort of rubbing his hands together and thinking like, oh man, this is
just too perfect.
But there's one thing that keeps him from getting rid of his bullies right then and
there and that's his intense love for his father, Jacob and his brother, Benjamin.
And so from this position of power and advantage, Joseph begins to hatch a plan in his own mind,
which I like to call operation get Ben.
We don't have time to go through all the details, but suffice it to say that Joseph does actually
get a little bit of revenge on his brothers.
He puts them through the wringer.
First he accuses them of being spies.
Then he demands to see his brother, Benjamin, and ends up imprisoning his brother, Simeon,
until Benjamin can ultimately be produced.
He sends them all back to Canaan where they break the news to Jacob that if they have
any hope of getting more Egyptian grain, the price is going to be Benjamin himself, the
last remaining son of Rachel, who is Jacob's beloved late wife.
They don't want to do this.
They hold out as long as they can, but eventually hunger forces Jacob to send his sons back
to Egypt, now with Benjamin in tow.
And Jacob is left sitting at home with nothing but a wing and a prayer that matters won't
get worse than they already are.
So for a second time, Joseph receives his brothers, but using a bit of sly trickery,
he ends up maneuvering things to keep Benjamin there permanently.
And at that point, the brothers finally crack.
And so in chapter 44, verses 18 to 33, Joseph's brother Judah begins to rehearse the whole
sad story before this, to him, tyrannical Egyptian ruler who seems hell bent on destroying
Jacob's family for some unknown reason.
And he makes his final plea to Joseph for Benjamin's freedom.
And this is what he says.
So now if the boy, Benjamin, is not with us, when I go back to your servant, my father,
but if my father, whose life is closely bound up with the boy's life, sees that the boy
isn't there, he will die.
Now then, please let your servant remain here as my Lord's slave in place of the boy and
let the boy return with his brothers.
How can I go back to my father if my brother is not with me?
No, don't let me see the misery that would come to my father.
And with that speech, we finally encounter the climax of the whole story of Joseph.
It's the moment when Joseph finally reveals himself as Jacob's long lost son.
And I think it's one of the most powerful moments in all of the Bible, emotionally powerful,
but also theologically powerful, because it's this moment when we see that when faith takes
a second look at the apparent mess of life, God is there, leading us towards the fulfillment
of all his promises.
When faith takes a second look, God is there.
And so for the rest of this sermon, I just want to zoom in and look at some bits in this
passage and show you three ways where I think God teaches us this truth through the story
of Joseph.
And here they are for those taking notes.
When faith takes a second look, God is there, number one, in the revealing, number two,
in the retelling, and three, in the restoring.
Very proud of this.
Not only do I have three points, they all begin with the same letter, right?
Revealing, retelling, and restoring.
So first, when faith takes a second look, God is always there in the revealing.
At the beginning of chapter 45, after Judah's speech, the text says that Joseph could no
longer control himself before all his attendance.
Now there were moments in this story where Joseph kind of lost it at the sight of his
brothers, but this time is kind of different.
In previous occasions, Joseph would kind of compose himself really quickly and run off
to his bedroom or run off somewhere in the corridor and kind of weep quietly to himself
before he gathered himself and put on his cool Egyptian eye makeup on again and went
out.
But this time, he didn't have time to do that.
He was losing control of his emotions and the whole situation just kind of flooded over
him and caught up with him in a moment.
Now I can't be sure, and this might be a little bit speculative, but I have this theory that
it was at this moment when Joseph loses his composure that he finally realized the meaning
of his boyhood dreams right then.
Now, I think he had an inkling of this in earlier parts of the story.
So back in chapter 42, for example, the brothers come in and they end up literally bowing before
him.
So I think some light bulbs were going off in Joseph's mind.
But that's not really the same thing as him figuring out the meaning of the dreams.
It's kind of like a literal fulfillment, but why did God give him these dreams?
What was their significance in the story that God was telling?
Well, the real meaning of the dream, as Joseph is going to explain later on in the passage,
is that God puts Joseph in this incredible place of authority for a very specific purpose,
and that is to save his family and in saving his family, to save the world.
Which means that this whole episode that Joseph was going through with his brothers wasn't
just about the brothers getting their sort of comeuppance, getting payback, like a giant
lesson in, well, what goes around comes around.
Neither was this kind of like a moral tale where it proves to us that if you do right
and act righteously and sort of do your job well, eventually you'll get rewarded and get
elevated to great positions of power.
That's not really true either.
I mean, look at the book of Job, for example, as a counterpoint.
Now I think what caused Joseph to sort of crack under the pressure was this realization
right then and there that his whole life and the life of everyone he knew was part of something
that was way bigger than they could have anticipated at the time.
And that's what makes the reveal so significant.
I mean, think about it, put yourself in the brothers position.
Here's this Egyptian ruler standing before them and he's just been just messing with
them for years now, really grinding them down, treating them harshly.
He sends them home, he abducts one of their brothers, he's messing with them, he's threatening
to steal Benjamin away from Jacob forever.
I mean, this man is their worst nightmare and for some strange reason, he's just out
to get them.
He has their number, he won't let up.
And to make matters worse, in the middle of them going through all of this abuse at the
hands of this Egyptian leader, it starts to hit the brothers that, well, maybe they deserve
all of this stuff happening to them.
And in the midst of one of their sort of hostile encounters with Joseph, the text describes
how the brothers said to one another, quote, surely we are being punished because of our
brother.
We saw how distressed he was when he pleaded with us for his life, but we wouldn't listen.
That's why this distress has come on us.
And later on, Ruben, the oldest brother, says to his brothers, now we have to give an accounting
for Joseph's blood.
Right?
This is all our fault.
From their perspective, this was karma catching up with them.
They tried to bury this dark secret in the past, but it was coming back to haunt them.
The jig was up.
Be sure your sin will find you out, as it says in the book of Numbers.
And this seemed like it was the end of the line, that the secret was about to be spilled
out in front of everyone and God was going to take his vengeance on them.
But then the big reveal happens.
This tyrant, the tormentor, the instrument in their minds of God's wrath and punishment
looks down from his Egyptian throne at the brothers cowering in fear before them, before
him.
And he says, I am Joseph.
It was me all along.
Which is an interesting plot twist.
Now, Joseph probably thought they would immediately celebrate and say, yay, it's Joseph.
What an encouraging moment.
I mean, that's not necessarily how it went initially.
Remember, these guys are Joseph's childhood bullies, to put it mildly.
Put yourself in the other position and imagine you're interviewing for a job and the person
sitting across the table is the person you bullied in all of your high school years.
I mean, surely they must have been thinking this is the moment when Joseph is going to
drop the hammer.
But then again, when they looked again, Joseph didn't really seem angry.
In fact, it seemed like he was crying loudly, very loudly, the text says.
And slowly then, as Joseph continued to explain, it starts to dawn on the brothers, wait a
minute.
I don't think Joseph is actually going to harm us.
I don't think he's going to punish us.
I think he actually might be forgiving us right now.
In fact, I think he might be saving us right now.
And that is a whiplash moment.
I mean, in one moment, this man in front of them, this Egyptian ruler was looking down
on them and seeming to them as nothing but an instrument of God's wrath and punishment.
He is the embodiment of justice.
He's about to mete out punishment for what they did to their brother all those years ago.
And in the very next moment, they look up and who did they see but Joseph himself, not
an instrument of wrath, but an instrument of God's love.
Once upon a time, there was a guy by the name of Martin Luther.
Have you heard of him?
Big fat jolly fellow.
Well, he's not like Santa Claus, but you know what I mean?
Big German beer drinking, loud mouth guy who God provided, I would say, to the church.
And he started the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.
So Martin Luther, for most of his life, viewed God as a judge.
When he thought of God, when he prayed to God, he pictured this kind of imposing, towering,
terrible figure whose one sort of will in the world was to just crush sinners for any
kind of minor infraction.
And when Luther thought of God's righteousness, he wasn't comforted.
He thought of God's righteousness as something to fear because no one could ever measure
up to how righteous God is.
No one can measure up to that sort of perfection.
And so he really struggled with his faith and he struggled with his prayers.
He was terrified of God.
But after years of this torment and this struggle, Luther came on a very surprising discovery
when he picked up his Bible.
When he looked at Jesus in scripture, it dawned on him that God wasn't actually against him.
God was for him.
God wasn't out to get him.
God loved him and he gave his only son to save him from his sins.
And that meant that when Luther thought of God's righteousness, it wasn't any more something
to be feared.
It was something to actually be cherished, to be grateful for because Luther realized
in Christ, God was justifying sinners.
He was making us righteous and bringing us home to God the Father.
And so just like for Joseph's brothers, the face of the judge, when it was refracted through
the eyes of Luther's faith, turned out not to be the face of punishment, but the face
of love and forgiveness.
I wonder if any of you can relate to Brother Martin's story.
Maybe you've experienced God as nothing but a judge, a tyrant, someone to be feared like
Joseph seemed to his brothers.
What I think scripture is encouraging you to do is to just take another look, look closer.
Because the more you look to God, the more that terrifying face of the judge is going
to dissipate and in its place, the face of Jesus will begin to emerge, kind of like looking
at one of those old magic eye puzzles.
It starts to take form before you.
Remember, as Jesus himself says in the gospels, if you have seen me, Philip, if you've seen
me, you've seen the Father.
And where else can we see the Father except in the cross, the very place where God loved
us and gave himself for us.
So again, when faith takes a second look, God is there in the revealing of his merciful
love.
Second, when faith takes a second look, God is there in the retelling, in the retelling.
Three times in this passage, Joseph tells his brothers that the reason he ended up in
Egypt, the whole point of his life and his long and winding road to where he was, was
because God sent him there.
As he says in verse eight, it was not you who sent me there, sent me here, but God.
Now how can this be, right?
We saw how this whole sequence of events played out.
We saw his brothers throwing Joseph and the cistern.
We saw how Potiphar's wife did Joseph dirty and how the fellow prisoners forgot about
him until the last possible moment.
These were things that people did, right?
It was just people propelling the story, doing things, making choices, making decisions.
So if anything, this was a story of how God can make the best out of a bad situation,
how God sort of gathers up the fragments of Joseph's tragic story and make something
good out of it in the end.
But that's not what Joseph says.
He doesn't say God sort of took these things after the fact and made something beautiful.
He says that his whole journey to Egypt was God's plan all along.
What Joseph is realizing, I think, is that God's love is so great that God can actually
rewrite the story of his life.
God can rewrite the story of everyone's lives so that what seems like a tragedy ends up
being the canvas upon which God is painting his grand tapestry of redemption.
Now for keen listeners, you might realize that what I just said opens up a huge can
of theological worms.
The wormiest can of all the worm cans of theological controversy.
And that is the relationship between God's sovereignty and human responsibility.
Now some of you might know that in my day job, I work at a theological college.
So I have so many thoughts on this issue, but I'm not going to tell you them right now,
which might be a relief to you.
But I mean, look at me.
I've got the jacket.
I've got a beard.
I'm like exactly the kind of person that wants to talk about that stuff.
But anyway, we'll leave that to the side.
What I will say is this.
In some sort of mysterious way, we can look at our lives in two equal and equally true ways.
On the one hand, you can look at your life completely naturally without reference to God.
So I can define myself by all the atoms and molecules inside my body bumping against one
another and maybe I'm the aggregate of all the events and people I've known and decisions
and random encounters of my life.
And one of the cool things that psychologists and psychotherapists and counselors can do
is they can sort of look at all that stuff and untangle maybe some of the reasons why
we act the way we do, right?
By looking at sort of the natural history of our lives.
But there's another way of looking at life.
I can also look at my life as kind of a place, as a theater, a space where God is doing things,
where God is at work.
And both perspectives are true.
This natural view and then this quote spiritual view.
But that second view, seeing life in the light of God, it requires something called faith.
And in particular, it requires the Holy Spirit to open our eyes.
And this is what was happening to Joseph and his brothers.
God was opening their eyes to a deeper reality.
The reality of God's providential hand that was leading them to the promised blessing
that was given to their forefather, Abraham.
And once Joseph saw this, he was able to sort of go back to the beginning and retell the
story of his whole life in a second, equally true way.
Now through the lens of faith.
Now brothers and sisters, as people who have been brought into Abraham's family through
Christ, we can do this too.
We are part of this story as believers.
It may not be clear now, but faith believes that the final story, the final version of
our lives is yet to be revealed.
Of course, we don't know how all the details fit.
We don't know how they'll look different to us at the end.
But in Christ, we believe that our lives are always re narratable.
And indeed are in the process of being retold in light of God's grace.
Now to be clear, that doesn't mean that we're supposed to excuse or downplay evil and sort
of rejoice in evil things that happen to us.
That's not what we're talking about.
Evil is evil and sin is sin and we should never be guilty of calling evil good or speaking
peace where there is no peace.
That's not what I'm talking about.
What I am saying is this.
As in Joseph's story, God is able to gather up the fragments of our broken lives and cast
them in a new light.
And this means that when all is said and done, we will look back on our lives and see that
at no point in our story were we beyond God's reach.
At no point in our lives had God forgotten or abandoned us.
And that means at no point in our lives were we ever in danger of missing out on the good
and the loving and the gracious plan that God has for our lives.
When faith takes a second look, God is and always has been there.
And God will retell our story in ways that will lead us to praise and glorify God's glorious
name.
Thirdly, and finally, when faith takes a second look, God is there in the restory.
So after Joseph's brothers pick their jaws up off the floor, that's when the party starts.
Right.
Egyptian style.
And so this group of Hebrew shepherds, the fourth generation after Abraham, find themselves
improbably in the heart of an Egyptian palace, embracing, weeping, and maybe for the first
time in a long time, making plans for the future.
It's a picture of the kingdom of God in the strangest of places.
But this wasn't just any restoration.
It was a restoration based on this sudden realization that actually God's promises were
still in effect.
That God's face had not turned away from his people, but was turned towards his people
as that always has been.
In other words, what was in danger of being forgotten, that is God's promises, were now
being remembered again.
And so there's no need to nurse grudges or sort of execute vendettas because the future
of this family was not up to them.
Right.
They didn't have to make the right moves anymore.
They realized that God was with them.
And as Joseph and his brothers took stock of this truth, that God was going to bear
them up through thick and thin for generations to come.
They celebrate and they embrace because they're becoming a family, not a family bound by blood,
but a community that's gathered around their mutual trust in their God.
They're becoming a people.
They're becoming a church.
I've talked a lot in this sermon about individuals, right?
About how God can rewrite your story and my story and give you faith to see his presence
in unlikely places.
But the truth is, God only saves individuals because he's got a larger plan at work to
create a people, a family, a community for his very own.
And we are a people in so far as we are in Christ.
When God brings healing and restoration to a person, to a relationship, to a family,
to whatever, that's not just the end in itself as good as it is.
God heals and restores these things in order to build his kingdom, to build his church.
And that's why we continue to gather as we are right now, because together as a church,
we are evidence of that greater plan, of that revealed and rewritten story of God's grace
and love for his people.
There's no forsakenness in the household of God because there's no forsakenness in the
kingdom of God in the age to come.
So when faith takes a second look, God is there in the restoration of the human family
in Christ.
Right?
So you catching this now?
We got three again.
What is it?
Revealing, retelling, restoring.
That's it.
God is there in all three of those moments for those with eyes to see.
So let's finish this up.
To my mind, the Joseph story is all about grace.
It's all about God's grace and God's love and God's mercy.
Joseph is the protagonist, right?
That's why we call it the Joseph story.
But really, it's God who is moving things forward all along.
What I love about the Bible, I mean, it's earned its place as the bestselling book of
all time, in my humble opinion.
It's a great book.
What I love about the Bible is that it never shies away from the messiness of life.
And the Joseph story is a story with just about as much messiness as you could stand
from beginning to end.
It's got family dysfunction.
It's got these infuriating moments of injustice that happen.
It's got vengeance, envy, sin, grief, despair.
It's got economic problems like food scarcity and natural evil problems like famines and
lack of rain.
It's a realistic picture of life.
At least life as pessimists like myself see it.
But in the midst of all that messiness, in the midst of all those trials and tribulations,
the Bible is inviting us to look again more carefully, more deeply in faith, and especially
in the light of the cross.
As it was for Joseph and Martin Luther and all the other saints throughout history and
in the lives of saints sitting here in this room right now.
The Spirit offers us the gift of faith to see life in a new way, to take that second
look and to see that God is there as he reveals, retells, and restores our lives in surprising
ways, just like he always said he would.
So we should be encouraged.
But more than that, we need to pray earnestly that God gives us this faith, that God opens
our eyes to see where his hand is in our lives.
And we need to pray that God will give us the faith to say with Joseph, as he says in
one of the greatest sentences in all of scripture in Genesis chapter 50, you intended to harm
me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many
lives.
So then don't be afraid.
Amen.
Thank you so much for joining us today and we hope that you found the sermon positive
and inspiring.
And if you enjoyed the sermon, please take a minute to rate and review our podcast and
we'll see you again next week as we begin our season of Advent.
Today's sermon was taken from the 1115 service on November 26, 2023 at Trinity Church, Streetsville
in Mississauga, Ontario.