Genesis 43:1-34

April 2, 2017

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Download the bulletin.

Download the Kids’ Korner.

The sermon starts at 17:50 in the audio file.

Or, Joseph’s Brothers Are at His Mercy

Adults pretend way better than kids. Adults have a wider variety of background material to work with. Adults have more mental horsepower under the hood. Adults produce some fabulous and complex fictional worlds, sub-creations as Tolkien labeled them. Bestselling novels and blockbuster movies and role-playing video games all provide astonishing evidence that we can pretend real good.

But that’s not the first fiction I’m thinking about when I say that adults are way better at pretending than kids are. I mean that adults are way better at pretending that they are in control.

I am not a fatalist or a hypercalvinist. I believe that man is responsible, that todo lists and doing the todos are good things to do, that our responses matter, that goals should be made and pursued, and that enjoying the process is right and necessary for humanity. I don’t think anything happens by blind chance or luck or fortune. I am the kind of Calvinist who believes that I am responsible to drink enough coffee every day to keep myself healthy.

But it just doesn’t take that much looking around before being confronted with the reality that I am not in control. “The way of man is not in himself” (Jeremiah 10:23). “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21). That reality punches me in the throat daily, minutely. Not one of us can control time or our own heartbeat. We can’t control the weather, we can’t control gravity, we can’t control growth, we can’t control other people. We can barely control ourselves.

It is make-believe, as in, footloose and fantasy faith, to imagine that we are in control. We might not pretend that we are omnipotent, but more like we are semi-sovereign, and enough of us do it at the same time so as not to deflate our collective illusion. But we need to come to terms with our dependent status. We are at the mercy God and, because of how He made the world, at the mercy of others God puts into our lives.

Joseph, Joseph’s brothers, and Joseph’s dad have to come to terms with things out of their control. Not even Pharaoh can boss his way out of a famine, even though he took measures to counteract it. Yet he only took those measures because God revealed beforehand what God was about to do, and because God sent Joseph to interpret the dreams, and because God gave Pharaoh advice through Joseph for sake of God’s plan to save Joseph’s family. Pharaoh did not have, nor did any other character, control on the macro level of human history or on the micro level of seed sprouting and Joseph’s chariot wheels staying attached as he circuited Egypt building barns.

In Genesis 43 we are around two years into the seven year famine (see Genesis 45:6). Joseph’s brothers have already come to Egypt to buy grain, and Joseph recognized them and put them to the test. He gave them grain but kept Simeon. He told them that if they wanted to see their brother again, they must bring their youngest brother back to Egypt. When the brothers told Israel, he flipped out at them and said such a thing would never happen or else he would die. He’s about to die anyway, not from sorrow but from starvation.

Two parts to this chapter: negotiation and resignation (verses 1-14) and fear and feasting (verses 15-34). The brothers, in particular, are at Joseph’s mercy.

Out of Options (verses 1-14)

Things are even more intense than they were at the beginning of chapter 42. The famine was (still) severe in Canaan, the cupboards were bare like before, but now one of the brothers is in jail in Egypt and their father is as rigid as a petrified tree. They are between a rock and a hungry place.

Negotiation (verses 1-10)

When the[...]