Joseph

The Hidden Hand of God

Liam Goligher

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781845509934

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Happy Families

Who doesn’t know something about the story of Joseph? Even if it isn’t familiar from school or Sunday school, most will have heard of the musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. However, this isn’t a story just for children or theatrical entertainment. The story of Joseph is one of the best-told stories of all time. It is the tale of a hero who overcomes all the odds, surviving childhood and the dangers of early adulthood to become a great man of his time. It has all the elements of a gripping story – conflict, envy, murderous intentions, sexual temptation, desperate circumstances, improbable coincidences and even supernatural interventions. If we think of the story of Joseph only in these terms, however, we shall miss its real significance, because it is actually part of a much bigger story, one which tells of God’s dealings with humanity.

The story of Joseph, which appears in the first book of the Bible, marks a new departure in the unfolding drama of God’s creation plan. The book of Genesis (meaning ‘beginnings’ or ‘origins’) opens with God’s creation of a perfect world where people live in perfect harmony with Him.¹ Once people choose to go their own way instead of obeying God, things start to go wrong.² By the time of Joseph, God has started on His plan of redemption, choosing to create a people who would have a special relationship with Himself. It started with just one man, Abraham,³ and progress was slow, because Abraham only had one son, Isaac, by his wife, and Isaac just had twins, Esau and Jacob.⁴ God chose to develop his special family through Jacob’s sons, and that’s when the tribes of Israel (the new name which God gave to Jacob) were founded, because amazingly Jacob fathered twelve sons, one of whom was Joseph.

Family favourites

At one level the story of Joseph is the story of a dysfunctional family. That is not why the story is in the Bible, but the fact that it was that kind of family and that it has been recorded in Scripture, helps us to see not only the extent to which sin can spoil the closest of human relationships, but also how God can use even such dysfunctionality to further His purposes. Joseph was born into a complex family situation. There was one father, Jacob, but four mothers (two wives and two concubines), eleven sons and one daughter. When Joseph was still quite young, his mother Rachel had another son, Benjamin, but she died in childbirth. This is the background to the favouritism that Jacob showed to Joseph:

Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he was the son of his old age.⁵

He was also the firstborn of Rachel, the love of Jacob’s life for whom he had had to work and wait seven years after being tricked into marrying her elder sister Leah. Rachel had fertility problems, whilst her sister produced with ease. By the time Rachel had Joseph, both women had vied for their husband’s favour by getting their maids to act as surrogate mothers. The ensuing rivalries and tensions between the women and their children is not hard to understand. It must have been something of a nightmare for Jacob too!⁶

You might have thought that Jacob would have learned from his own past. His father Isaac had favoured his brother Esau, and Rebekah, his mother, had preferred Jacob, resulting in a rivalry which ended in Jacob having to leave home under a cloud.⁷ Yet now he loved some of his own children more than the others. Perhaps it was understandable that he should favour the children of his old age and his dearest wife, but there was no excuse for him to show it, and certainly not to accentuate it by marking out Joseph as he did when he gave Joseph his famous coat. Some people never learn!

There are people fortunate in having happy childhood memories of family life.

When I was young we loved to have company round to visit, especially family. Often, as the last person left, my mother would close the door, let out a feigned sigh, and with a playful smile quote a line of an old hymn: ‘Peace perfect peace, with loved ones far away!’ She was only kidding of course, and my brother John and I knew that mum really loved having visitors, but we also knew she liked to have her house back to herself again. I smile as I think of her; she was great fun.

Other people don’t have such happy memories of childhood, and the further they can get away from their ‘loved ones’ the better. As I write this, I have just been on the phone with an old friend whose childhood was miserable, whose father was always abusing his mother, and who was himself the object of abuse. To this day there is a legacy of bitterness and an inability to express affection, which is having a negative impact on the next generation. There is perhaps nothing more destructive to an individual than to be in a dysfunctional family. If your family life sometimes seems to be getting out of control or going terribly wrong, and you are finding that hard to bear, then this is a story with which you will empathise.

Clearly, Jacob’s family was far from perfect, so we learn right at the beginning of the story that God can use imperfect people. In fact, the only material he ever has to work with is fallen, sinful and often deeply flawed, which means that He can work with someone just like you and me! So if your past is one you would rather forget, then let the story of Joseph give you hope that God can take the broken threads of your life and weave them into a beautiful tapestry that will give joy to others.

The big picture

Joseph’s story, which begins in Genesis chapter 37, marks a new phase in God’s plan. In the bigger picture of Scripture, God is setting things up for a greater story, the redemption of His chosen people from Egypt. Before His people can be rescued from Egypt, however, they have first to get there, and this is where Joseph comes into the story.

Before looking at Joseph’s life in detail, two principles of biblical interpretation need to be borne in mind. The first is that when reading these Old Testament stories, the biblical text must guide us in our interpretation. The bible is its own best interpreter. In fact this is how we should interpret all Scripture; it is clear and capable of interpreting itself. So we must be careful not to speculate beyond what is written.

The second principle is that we must not read the Old Testament (as many scholars do) as if the New Testament had not been written. We read it today as Christians, that is, as those who have the final revelation from God written in our New Testament. The Old Testament is still a Christian book, however; it is simply full of Christ. As someone has said, ‘every story whispers his name’ - and I would want to add that some Old Testament stories shout it out loud! So, after His resurrection, Jesus met His disciples and ‘beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself’.⁸ Those ‘Scriptures’ were, of course, what we know today as the Old Testament.

Genesis 37:2 begins by saying, ‘These are the generations of Jacob’ The Hebrew word is ‘toledoth’, which means ‘generations’. Throughout Genesis it is used as a technical heading for each new section of the story. So, for example, in Genesis 2 it reads, ‘These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.’ Later we read about the ‘generations of Adam … of Noah … of the sons of Noah … of Shem … of Terah (the father of Abraham) … of Isaac … of Esau …’ and now, ‘of Jacob.’ Up to this point in the book there were those who ‘called on the name of the LORD.’⁹ Among them was Abraham, the father of those who have faith. Now those who call upon God’s name – the church of that age – are going to be called ‘Israel’, which was the new name given to Jacob by God Himself.¹⁰ In fact even in the New Testament people who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus are called ‘the Israel of God’ by the apostle Paul.¹¹ This is the last time this heading (the generations of …) is used in the whole Old Testament Scriptures, because the rest of the Old Testament is about the nation of Israel, the descendants of this individual. Joseph is used to set things up so that Israel might grow into a great nation in the safety of Egypt and later be redeemed by the mighty hand of God.¹²

The next time in the Bible that this expression (‘toledoth’) is used, it marks a new departure again. We find it used in Matthew chapter 1: ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’ If Matthew had written in Hebrew, he would have used the same word as is used in Genesis (‘toledoth’). What is Matthew telling us? He is saying that with the coming of Jesus into the world a new thing happened, something that continues the story, that picks up and fulfils promises made all the way back in Genesis. It is also worth noting that ‘the generations of Jacob’ begin and end with a Joseph. Joseph is the first name introduced after the ‘generations of Jacob’ appear in Genesis, and Joseph is the last name used in the genealogy of Jesus as detailed in Matthew.¹³ Joseph, the legal father of Jesus, would be the last Joseph mentioned before the new toledoth of Jesus came in.

When God is invisible

That is the bigger picture of where the story of this seventeen-year-old boy Joseph is going. But none of that was known to him at this stage. In fact if you read the first chapter of his life, you will find that God’s name doesn’t appear at all.¹⁴ Moses, who wrote this account, wanted his readers to ask the question, ‘Why isn’t God mentioned?’ This is one of the author’s teaching techniques. The absence of God’s name is deliberate in order to provoke the question and make the reader or hearer think. Although God’s name is not mentioned and His presence is not seen, he is nonetheless active in everything that takes place. The reality is that in your life and mine there are many days, and hours within days, when God’s presence is not felt, when He seems miles away and when no reference either in thought or word is made to Him. To anyone looking on at the circumstances Joseph goes through, God does not appear to be involved. That’s why secular writers can write about his life and miss the point of what is going on. That is also why our non-Christian friends can look at us and see no obvious sign that God is alive and at hand for us. Like them, we struggle to get up in the morning, we take colds and cancers, and we grow old and die. Circumstances over which we have no control often seem to determine the course of our lives; we make good and bad decisions, and God seems a million miles away. Very often the most ‘spiritual’ among us forget to consult Him and push on with our own agenda. That is what we find people doing in this story; that’s the way the story is told because that’s the way we are as human beings. Made by God, we ignore Him; provided for by Him, we forget to give thanks; loved by God, we don’t return the compliment.

‘Any dream will do’

Things were already in a pretty dreadful state in Jacob’s family when our story begins. Joseph was seventeen and his brothers were grown men, but they were already annoyed by their father’s obvious preference for Rachel’s children. The ‘coat of many colours’ didn’t help, of course. Its significance was that it indicated status as well as favour. It marked Joseph out as the management rather than the worker. It may even have implied to the brothers that their father might favour Joseph over them when it came to the question of inheritance. If there was anything guaranteed to make Joseph stand out as being a daddy’s boy, that coat would do it.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a robe of many colours. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him.¹⁵

His brothers hated him for it. But there was more to their hatred than that.

The story begins by telling us that Joseph brought a ‘bad report’ of the ...

Table of contents

• Reviews
• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Happy Families
• 2. Sold for 20 Pieces of Silver!
• 3. An Indecent Proposal
• 4. Fatal Attraction
• 5. When Life Closes In
• 6. 'Uneasy lies the head'
• 7. A Severe Mercy
• 8. No such thing as a free lunch
• 9. Putting it back together again
• 10. A Perfect Day
• 11. Down to Egypt
• 12. A fresh start
• 13. Facing the Future
• Bibliography
• Tell me the Story
• Esther, A true First Lady
• Bible Boot Camp
• God's Hall of Fame
• Christian Focus