When God is Hidden
Download MP3If you would open in your Bibles to Genesis 37. Genesis chapter 37. What we're about to read is different than most of the things you have read this week, which we're constantly reading, blogs, we're reading tweets, reading books. This is the word of God and so we want to listen appropriately. I found it interesting in our home group this past week that over and over again, people actually said how it was during the time when the scripture was read, not when I preached, but when the scripture was read that God spoke to them and that they began to see things they had never seen before.
Joel Brooks:And God does that when we prayerfully read through his word. Genesis 37 beginning in verse 1. Jacob lived in the land of his father's sojournings and the land of Canaan. These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being 17 years old, was pastoring the flock with his brothers.
Joel Brooks:He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of any other of his sons because he was the son of his old age and he made him a robe of many colors. 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. Now Joseph had a dream and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him even more.
Joel Brooks:He said to them, hear this dream that I have dreamed. Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field and behold, my sheaf arose and stood upright. And behold, your sheaves gathered around it and bowed down to my sheaf. His brothers said to Him, are You indeed to reign over us? Are you indeed to rule over us?
Joel Brooks:So they hated him even more for his dreams and for his words. Then he dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers and said, behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, 11 stars were bowing down to me. But when he told it to his father and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, what is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?
Joel Brooks:And his brothers were jealous of him. But his father kept the saying in mind. Now his brothers went to the went to pastor their flocks, father's flocks near Shechem. And Israel said to Joseph, were not your brothers pastoring the flock at Shechem? Come and I will send you to them.
Joel Brooks:And he said to him, here I am. So he said to him, go now see if it is well with your brothers and with the flock and bring me word. So he sent them from the valley of Hebron and he came to Shechem. And a man found him wandering in the fields and the man asked him, what are you seeking?' 'I am seeking my brothers.' He said, Tell me please where they are pasturing the flock. And the man said, they've gone away for I heard them say, let us go to Dothan.
Joel Brooks:So Joseph went after his brothers and found them at Dothan. They saw him from afar and before he came near to them they conspired against him to kill him. They said to one another, here comes this dreamer. Come now. Let us let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits.
Joel Brooks:Then we will see that say that a fierce animal has devoured him, and we will see what became of his dreams. But when Reuben heard it, he rescued him out of their hands saying, let us not take his life. And Reuben said to them, shed no blood, throw him into this pit here in the wilderness, but do not lay a hand on him that he might rescue him out of their hands, to restore him to his father. So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe. The robe of many colors that he wore.
Joel Brooks:And they took him and threw him into a pit. The pit was empty. There was no water in it. Then they sat down to eat and looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh on their way to carry it down to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, what profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood?
Joel Brooks:Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him for he is our brother, our own flesh. And his brothers listened to him. Then Midianite traders passed by and they drew Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 shekels of silver. They took Joseph to Egypt. When Reuben returned to the pit and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, he tore his clothes and returned to his brothers and said, the boy is gone and I, where shall I go?
Joel Brooks:Then they took Joseph's robe and slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in blood and they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, this we have found. Please identify whether it is your son's robe or not. And he identified it and said, it is my son's robe. A fierce animal has devoured him. Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces.
Joel Brooks:Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted and said, no. I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him. Meanwhile, the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of pharaoh, the captain of the guard.
Joel Brooks:Pray with me. Lord, right now I pray for clarity and not confusion. My job is not, to add new exciting things to your word, to try and make it relevant as if it is not. It's not to entertain with stories. My job here is simply to point to the text and tell your people what it means.
Joel Brooks:There is a power in that. Through the power of your spirit, you come and through your written word as it is proclaimed, you change lives. I believe that. So people don't need to hear from me. They need to hear from you now.
Joel Brooks:So I asked that my words would fall to the ground, blow away and not be remembered anymore. But Lord, may your words remain and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. We've been working our way through Genesis.
Joel Brooks:We are finishing up some of the life of Jacob. Last week, we looked at, what I would call the defining moment in Jacob's life when he wrestled with the Lord. It is here that before the Lord, he finally acknowledged who he was. He finally confessed. He said, I'm Jacob.
Joel Brooks:I am the cheater. And when the Lord heard that, the Lord blessed him. And then the Lord, after he blessed him, he changed his name to Israel. Now if this were a movie, what we would expect after that kind of life changing moment is for Jacob, you know, to mount his camel and to to ride off into the sunset having lived a great wonderful life serving the Lord. But rarely do things happen that way.
Joel Brooks:This is real life. People are made up of real complex emotions. Jacob has this defining moment in his life, and it seems that he's about to turn the corner, but then all of a sudden he kind of goes back again to his old life And you're going to find this over and over. They're going to kind of keep going up and he's going to kind of keep going down. Even after this defining moment, even after he professes his faith and his love for the Lord, and even after the Lord changes his name.
Joel Brooks:The moment after he meets Esau, after he wrestled with the Lord in preparation for meeting with Esau, the moment after he meets Esau and Esau forgives him and they, they hug like long lost brothers, and Esau says, Alright, let's, let's journey on together to this town. Let's catch up on old times. And Jacob says, that's great. Let's do that. Hey, you go ahead, and I'll follow right behind.
Joel Brooks:And so Esau goes ahead and then Jacob goes the other way. He lies to his brother right after this defining moment. But then, you know, a chapter later or so, he, he steps up to the plate and he acts really righteous. He tells his family to get rid of all their idols and to come and let's have family worship time together. And so they do that, and then he stumbles again, and he's going up and he's going down.
Joel Brooks:You're gonna see this pattern in Jacob's life. And actually the narrator brings this out because even after Jacob has been renamed Israel, about half the time he is still called Jacob. Sometimes he's called Israel, sometimes he's called Jacob. It's like he's going back and he's forth, back and forth. And you don't find that with Abram.
Joel Brooks:When Abram was named Abraham from that point on, he was always called Abraham, but not so with Jacob. Sometimes Jacob, sometimes Israel.
Jeffrey Heine:And I don't know
Joel Brooks:about you, but this is actually a comfort to me because I can relate to a person like this. I relate far more to Jacob than I do to a Abraham. And I think that's actually one of the reasons that there's so much is written about the life of Jacob is because we identify with him and we can find hope that even at the times when our faith falters, God still is faithful. That our our righteousness doesn't depend on our own faith. That's we could turn our own faith into an idol.
Joel Brooks:And our righteousness doesn't depend on our own faith, it depends on God's faithfulness and it's God's faithfulness that we see over and over again on Jacob. God has a hold of Jacob and will not let him go. So far we've seen Jacob fail as a son. He has failed as a husband and now we're going to see him fail as a father. Jacob makes the same mistake that his father made with his children.
Joel Brooks:He places all of his love and his affection on 1. Look at chapter 37 verse 3 says, 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 colors. Now, Jacob, as we've seen so far, he's always looking for that one person, or for that one thing that's finally going to make his, finally going to fill that hole in his life. Finally make him happy. You know, for first it was the blessing of his father, and then that didn't work.
Joel Brooks:And then it was, I'm going to fix all of my hopes and dreams on Rachel, and on that marriage there. And then that didn't fill his heart. And so now he has a son. He's like, now this son's going to fill the hole in my heart. And so he places all of his eggs now in his son's basket right there.
Joel Brooks:My hope and my happiness is in him. A recent study came out that says your firstborn actually receives 3,000 more quality 101 parent hours than your second born. 3000 more quality 1 on 1 parent hours. Now I have 3 children, and I can only say that that number actually seems low to me. Because when he had multiple kids, once the second is born, you never have alone time.
Joel Brooks:It seems with any of your children. There's always somebody around. Jacob here is bucking that trend. He is deciding now that he has many, many children, he's going to place all of his time and all of his affection on 1, Joseph, the son of, or the son of Rachel. And by doing this, he's actually poisoning his family.
Joel Brooks:He's creating this environment of bitterness, hostility, jealousy, arrogance, deceitfulness, hate. Basically, he's creating the home that he grew up in all over again. The narrator describes 3 things that give us a great look at these destructive family dynamics. First, we learned that Joseph, he's a lad of 17 years old, 17 year old, shepherd with his brothers. And then at the end of verse 2, we find this about Joseph.
Joel Brooks:It says, Joseph being 17 years old was pasturing the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to their father. Now several commentaries will tell you that that that word bad report there, elsewhere is used in scripture to mean a untrue or a false report. And so we kind of get this hint here of Joseph.
Joel Brooks:He goes off and he looks at his brothers and he comes back and he either gives a false report or maybe he just exaggerates on the evils in order to present his brothers in a really bad light. Well, kind of showing a personal devotion to his father. The second thing that the narrator mentions here is that Jacob loves Joseph more than all the other sons. And then he gives them that famous coat of many colors, which instantly turn into, you know, bad plays, musicals, cartoons, picture Bibles. Actually, I mean, even hideous commentary covers.
Joel Brooks:Like you don't know what this commentary is about. It's actually a good commentary except for the the cover. We actually don't know if the coat was many colors. Some of your Bibles probably have a little footnote that says, you know, it could be long sleeved, which isn't as fun to color, or it's, it's used to describe like a royal robe, a really ornate robe. It's an expensive robe.
Joel Brooks:The third detail that the narrator mentions is about the dreams. Joseph has a dream that you know, that there's all these sheaths of grain and they're bowing down to his sheath of grain. And, he decides to tell his brothers about this dream And it goes over so well, that when he has another dream about the sun and moon and everything bowing down to him, he decides to tell them again. And and this time even go to his father. And even his father who doted on him rebukes him, says, hey, you're all right.
Joel Brooks:Even that's a little over the top. Just rein it in. Okay, Joseph? So very early on in the story, we, we see a family in which there's bitterness, there's jealousy, and it's beginning to boil over. Joseph first gives a false report about his brothers.
Joel Brooks:He's then given this this beautiful coat that they're all jealous of. He has these dreams. At first he just tells 2 brothers about his first dream, then he tells all of his brothers about the next dream and it's just all kind of building. It's building. This bitterness spreads and it will climax in Dothan.
Joel Brooks:His brothers go off to Dothan to pasture a flock. Joseph doesn't go. Apparently now after receiving this wonderful robe, you know, he's no longer required to go into the field. He can stay at home while his brothers do the hard work. Jacob then sends Joseph just to go check up on his brothers.
Joel Brooks:Verse 18 says that they saw Joseph from far off, meaning Joseph is strutting over the hill wearing his fancy coat and they can see him from a mile away. They're like, it's stupid. He's being stupid here going to see them dressed like that. And it's the last straw. The brothers conspired to kill him.
Joel Brooks:Now let me divert just just for a moment here and say something about the fruit of jealousy and the fruit of envy. Envy is as dangerous as it is joyless. It gives murderous thoughts. Envying is not the same thing as coveting or jealousy. It's not the same thing.
Joel Brooks:When one covets, one wants what another person has. You want what another person have, and you want it so much that you're tempted to maybe even steal to get it. That's coveting. But, but envying is altogether different because envying, first off, it doesn't so much want what the other person has, it just wants that person not to have it above all else. An envying person is, they're not tempted to steal it, they're tempted to destroy it, so that nobody can have it.
Joel Brooks:That's the fruit of envy. They want, maybe they grew up deprived of a certain blessing, and they want to make sure everybody else is deprived of that blessing. And if they hear of somebody else having that blessing, they don't so much want it, they just want to deprive them of it. You know, a silly example of something like this would would be maybe if you had neighbors who, had a housekeeper come every day. Wouldn't that be amazing?
Joel Brooks:You know, you have a housekeeper come every single day. Now jealousy would be, I would like a housekeeper every single day. Envy would be, they don't deserve to have a housekeeper come every day. That needs to stop. You're not happy for that blessing.
Joel Brooks:You want it destroyed. Those who struggle with envy have a really hard time rejoicing at anything. It's hard to feel good about another person's blessing, you know. And I've seen this in the church so much in which people are really good at weeping when other people weep. Mourning with people, but we're usually really bad at rejoicing when other people rejoice.
Joel Brooks:It's a hard pillow pill to swallow sometimes. So if you struggle with envy, I want you to know that really at the heart of it, you're you're struggling with grace. That's your real struggle if envy is part of your life. Because it is hard for you to accept that anybody can get a undeserved good. And it drives you crazy.
Joel Brooks:And so envy can actually destroy your ability to believe the gospel. It's going to rob you of joy. It's going to poison your ability to love others. I mean, how can you love other sinners if you think that nobody should have undeserved kindness? You can't.
Joel Brooks:And you see the full fruit of envy here in the story of Joseph. His brothers not so much wanted what he had, they just wanted to destroy what he had. They wanted to end it. They wanted to deprive him of any blessing. And so their envy gave birth to these murderous thoughts.
Joel Brooks:And if Reuben had not gotten there just in time, they would have gone through with the murder. But Reuben does arrive. So instead of killing Joseph, they come up with this plan. They throw him in the cistern and they, they rip off his robe. We learn later in chapter 42 that Joseph begs for his life.
Joel Brooks:He's screaming, he's begging for his life, but they ignored him. Did it show just how callous they are? I mean, look at verse 24. This is, this is unbelievable. Says, and they took him and threw him into a pit.
Joel Brooks:The pit was empty. There was no water in it. Verse 25, then they sat down to eat. So they get him and they throw him in a pit, beat him up, rip him of his robe, throw him in a pit, and then they sit down and they have lunch while he is screaming, crying out for mercy. They're acting like nothing's happened.
Joel Brooks:No big deal. Reuben then apparently goes off to check on some sheep, and when he leaves, they come up with a plan. Like, you know, we should sell him to it. We'll sell him to these Midianite traders over here. And so they do that and then they kill a lamb, they smear blood on the robe, and they take it back to their father and they're like, you know, is is this the robe?
Joel Brooks:As if they didn't know. And so Jacob, who had deceived his father through slaughtering a lamb and through wearing a false robe is now deceived in the same way. Now as you go through all of this, it begs the question, where is God in all of this? Where is he? I taught at, Cornerstone School a few weeks ago and there's a bunch of little kids there and we had a little Bible drill, said, alright, first person who could find the name God in chapter 37.
Joel Brooks:We're going through this. Stand up and I will give you a prize. And they're all going crazy crazy. And then nobody could find it because God's not mentioned in chapter 37. It's the only chapter outside of the chapters with genealogies.
Joel Brooks:It's the only chapter which God is not mentioned at all. He seems to be utterly absent, but he's not. You find today that there's 2 dominant views of God. 1, I'll call them, it's an intrusive view. It's that God always comes, God always rescues, God always does the miraculous, he always saves the day.
Joel Brooks:He always with an outstretched arm performs. That's one view. Then you have this other view, which is the exact opposite, which God doesn't do any of those things. God's only hands are ours. It's what we do.
Joel Brooks:It's what we do. The Bible has a third position that's being developed here, that's being shown here. And it's neither of those. It's simply that God is hiding. God's hiding.
Joel Brooks:That God is still at work, but most of the time we cannot see it. Genesis has been moving us towards this view. The first 11 chapters of Genesis. I don't know if you noticed, but God, I mean, he like comes down with people. He's walking with them and the garden, he's talking with them.
Joel Brooks:He takes Enoch up. You know, it's just, we call that theophanies. He comes down to people and he's personally talking to them. Then after chapter 11, you don't really get that anymore. You you get visions, you get angels, you get things like that.
Joel Brooks:That's the way God communicates. And that goes on from like chapter 12 to the thirties, and and then after that, those things begin disappearing and, and you no longer get theophanies, you no longer really get visions. You get maybe an occasional vague dream, but usually it's God communicating through circumstance, or God communicating through other people talking. And it's it's almost as if God got things established and then he's he's backing off a little bit, increasing our faith and he is hiding himself a little bit more and more. Joseph here has no visitations from angels, no voice from heaven.
Joel Brooks:He's got no great visions, just those, those kind of dreams there. And what's striking about this story is it's so ordinary. There's no supernatural events, no kind of hyper spiritual activity going on, and I love that because that's where most of us live our lives. Unless you, you know, you could wake up and you have angels coming and talking to you. I don't have that.
Joel Brooks:I live a very ordinary life, in which I rarely see the supernatural. And so I have to trust God you're still at work. That's what you have to do when you, when you come to this now, you have to trust God. You're working behind the scenes, and you can see God working behind the scenes here. But you have to look carefully.
Joel Brooks:Let me just kind of go through a few coincidences or details of the story. Joseph's brothers, they go 30 miles north to a place called Shechem to pastor the flocks. And then for some reason, we don't know, they decide to go 15 miles further north to Dothan, which is out in the sticks. And nobody really goes to Dothan, but it happens to land on a trade route, which is very important. Joseph goes to Shechem to find his brothers.
Joel Brooks:They're not there. He's wandering in the fields, but a guy happens to be there. We don't know who the stranger is, just a guy looks, says, hey, are you looking for anyone? Says, I'm looking for my brothers. And this guy just happened to be close enough to his brothers that he overheard a conversation in which they said, hey, we're going to go to Shechem.
Joel Brooks:And so he told that to Joseph. So then Joseph, he goes, He goes to Shechem, and his brothers grab him and are about to kill him because Reuben's not there. But right when they're about to kill him, Reuben arrives. So they don't kill him, they instead throw him into a pit. Then Reuben has to go off to shepherd some sheep, find some sheep who knows what he's doing, but he goes off for a little while and while he's gone, they come up with a plan.
Joel Brooks:Midianite traders are coming along at that exact moment. They think, let's sell them to the Midianite traders. And they're just not any slave traders, these traders are going to Egypt. And they're gonna sell Joseph to Potiphar, who's an officer in Egypt. I mean, there's a lot of coincidences here.
Joel Brooks:Now we can look at the end of the story and we can see, wow man, look how God is working and all these little details, but Joseph doesn't know that. Like we don't know it. We're just kind of in the middle of it and we don't see God around. We have to understand that although at the surface we don't see God working directly, he is orchestrating everything towards his end. Kind of the soft word for that is providence.
Joel Brooks:The hard word for that is predestination. Regardless of what you call it, know that God is working everything out for his purpose and pleasure. Everything. If anything happened differently than what happened, everybody would have been dead. You realize that?
Joel Brooks:If the stranger hadn't been there, if the Midianite traders hadn't come that way, if Reuben hadn't gone at that exact moment, come back, anything happened differently, everybody would have been dead. Joseph would not have been in Egypt to preserve all of the civilization there from the famine. In the Bible, Dothan's mentioned a couple of places. As mentioned here in Genesis 37 where we have Joseph in a pit crying out for help, and God seems to do nothing. I just want you to mention one other place in 2nd Kings 6, kind of a familiar story.
Joel Brooks:It's when Elisha is surrounded by an army that's about to come in the city walls and kill everybody. And Elisha is just so at peace, and his servant is scared to death. And so he cries out to God for help. And so God opens up the eyes of his servant, and they look around and they see an entire army of angels all the way around the city. That happened in Dothan as well.
Joel Brooks:And I just find that interesting that the, the, the two places, the two times the city has mentioned there, you have one time you have a person crying out to God for help and you can't see God anywhere and horrible things happen. Then you have another time in Dothan, things are really bad, they cry out for help, and you have an entire army of angels surrounding with flaming swords. I mean, you can't get anything more dramatic than that. Yet God is at work in both of those. Whether he is hiding or whether he comes and he allows us to see.
Joel Brooks:We have the same God, even when it looks like in the same place and in the same situation, he looks to be doing 2 different things. As a matter of fact, if we fast forward 2000 years from this moment, we're gonna find another time where God seems absent and he's actually working his greatest work. And that's in the death of Jesus. Jesus who was also sold for silver like Joseph, who was also betrayed. Jesus who was also stripped of his robes and beaten.
Joel Brooks:But unlike Joseph, his life was not spared. Jesus died and as he was on the cross dying, he cried, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Or my God, my God, where are you? Because I don't see you and I can't feel you. Where are you?
Joel Brooks:It certainly seems like all these evil things, every spit I've received, every blow I've received, you know, every thorn that's pressing my brow, it certainly seems like you're nowhere around. Why have you forsaken me? But we know that everything, every blow, every spit, every nail happen according to the predetermined plan of God. Acts tells us that. God was working behind the scenes in order to bring about the greatest blessing of all.
Joel Brooks:Jesus had what I would say is the opposite of envy in which Jesus had glory and we did not. We didn't deserve glory. And yet Jesus, it says, although he had glory, something that should be grasped, He laid it down and he gave it to the people who were undeserving. And he went through the cross in order that we might receive that glory in order that we might be blessed. That's the gospel.
Joel Brooks:That's the gospel.
