The Pain of Sovereign Grace

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Don Filcek; Genesis 45 The Pain of Sovereign Grace

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Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where you can grow in faith, community, and service.
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This message is by Lead Pastor Don Filsack and is a part of the series Beginning with God, Walking Through the
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Book of Genesis. If you would like to contact us, please visit us on the web at recastchurch .com.
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Here's Pastor Don. I'm glad that you've gathered together to worship
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God this week here at Recast. Did everybody have a good week? Good week? All right.
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Excellent. And it looks like the weather moving forward is just supposed to be beautiful. Fortunately, some summer -like weather coming for us here, it looks like.
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If you've been attending here for a while, and I recognize that that might be some of you that have been here and you just haven't quite got connected yet, and you're wondering like what's the next step, or maybe it's your first time here and you're kind of saying,
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I just want more information. There's a connection card that you received when you walked in. On the front of that, you can share information with us.
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I don't usually get up on Sunday morning and give 15 minutes of announcements. They're all available for you on the eCast.
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Just our way of saying thank you for checking us out, and we're glad you're here. And then also, any offerings you would choose to give, there's an envelope provided for you.
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Again, it's, we don't pass an offering plate. We want it to be voluntary. We don't want anybody to have that plate come in front of you and go, oh no,
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I guess I feel like obligated to give something. We want you to actually have to take that extra step of putting it in the black box back there.
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And so this is available for you. If you're not going to use this envelope, and we recognize that not everybody's going to, then you can recycle this.
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That sticker has to be put on there by our office staff. It saves them some time if you just recycle that and put that in the acrylic holder that's marked recycle back there by the black box.
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It just saves us on some paper and things like that. And then any offerings that are marked expansion fund go towards our eventual goal of building a building.
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Obviously, this is not a church building. It says Wildcats Eat Smart over there on the wall and some other things.
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And so you're kind of like, this isn't, you know that this isn't our destination as a church that we have ultimately in our mind to eventually build a building.
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And so anything marked expansion fund either in the memo line or on the envelope will go towards our eventual desire to build a building.
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So with all that out of the way, we're going to be looking at Genesis chapter 45 here and I'm going to be reading that chapter here in its entirety in just a moment.
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But I like to kind of introduce the message a little bit before we read the text, get our minds flowing on thinking through that as we come to worship and the band comes to lead us.
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It's going to be that we have actually heard something from God and then we're able to respond to him in worship through that.
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And I want to start off just by making this suggestion to you that I have a sneaking suspicion that most of us have a pretty latent view of our own free will.
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In other words, that we operate in the day -to -day, everyday activities of our lives, we operate as though we have free will.
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I'm going to raise your hand if you operated that way this morning. Like you chose what time to get up. You chose what to have for breakfast.
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You actually chose what car to drive or how to get to church this morning. So we make all kinds of decisions based on a variety of factors in our lives which definitely gives us a strong sense in the human heart of our own free will, of us making decisions.
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We choose what to eat for lunch. We choose which articles to read on the internet. We chose, hopefully you chose, who you would wake up next to this morning.
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We make the coffee on a coffee maker that we chose and we woke up in a house or an apartment or some kind of residence that we chose.
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And so you can kind of see the common theme of choosing there. And so when we encounter a text like we encountered this morning, it can be very easy to brush it over.
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A text that suggests that there is in reality an overarching plan to the activities that we take part in every day.
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That there is something going on that is bigger than us, something that goes on that super intends the activities of human life and human history.
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And a lot of times our heart is quick to rebel against that notion. It's quick to kick back because I chose my coffee maker.
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I chose what car I drive. I chose my spouse. I chose all these things. And so there seems to be this tension throughout the pages of scripture about this reality that we live in where we assume, we take for granted that we have free will and free choice and yet at the same time we're going to encounter some statements in this text that radically draw our attention in a different direction.
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And this text has to be dealt with. And I'm not going to suggest to you that I'm going to have all the answers. By the way,
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I cannot in 40 minutes, 30 to 40 minutes, solve the issue of free will versus predestination for you.
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Calm down if you think we're going to resolve that for you this morning. But what I am going to do and what my desire as a pastor is to faithfully preach the text that's in front of us.
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And so I'm going to dig in and we're going to walk through this and we're going to see what God says through the story of Joseph here.
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And he is intentionally telling us that he is doing some things that might make us uncomfortable.
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But it's in scripture. And we're going to, it's my heart that we would take that over some fuzzy notion of our freedom or our desires or our wishes or our will.
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And so we're going to look at this text and we're going to dig in and we're going to figure this out as much as possible this morning.
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We come face to face with one of the most clear teachings on the sovereign grace of God found in the narrative portions, the story portions of scripture.
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And I love this account because it does not only show us that God indeed does have an overarching plan, but it openly declares that he is the one that made the plan.
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He is the one who is working out that plan. And at the end of the day, that plan is central to the purpose of your life.
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That purpose is central to, his will is central to the purpose of my life.
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And all of this happens in our text in a very riveting setting of the story of a family that is in a state of disrepair, is broken, is messed up.
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And so there's intrigue in this story, there's irony in this story, there's all kinds of things that are going on. So if you're not already there, open up to Genesis chapter 45 and we're going to read this in its entirety.
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You can obviously navigate in an app over there or use a Bible. If you don't have a Bible in front of you right now, I'd like you to just raise your hand and somebody will come by and bring you a
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Bible. So if you don't have one and if you don't own a copy of the Bible, there are some over there and we can take that home with you.
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It is our desire for everybody to have a copy of the word of God. But follow along as I read Genesis chapter 45 in its entirety.
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This is God's word recast to us here this morning. Then Joseph could not control himself before all those who stood by him.
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When Joseph stood by him, he cried, make everyone go out from me. So no one stayed with him when
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Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept aloud so that the Egyptians heard it and the household of Pharaoh heard it.
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And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?
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But his brothers could not answer him for they were dismayed in his presence. So Joseph said to his brothers, come near to me, please.
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And they came near and he said, I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt.
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And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here.
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For God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years and there are yet five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvest.
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And God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on the earth and to keep alive for you many survivors.
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So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh and Lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.
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Hurry and go up to my father and say to him, thus says your son Joseph, God has made me
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Lord of all Egypt. Come down to me, do not tarry. You shall dwell in the land of Goshen and you shall be near me, you and your children and your children's children and your flocks, your herds and all that you have.
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There I will provide for you for there are yet five years of famine to come so that you and your household and all that you have do not come to poverty.
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And now your eyes see and the eyes of my brother Benjamin see that it is my mouth that speaks to you.
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You must tell my father of all my honor in Egypt and of all that you have seen. Hurry and bring my father down here.
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Then he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept and Benjamin wept upon his neck and he kissed all his brothers and wept upon them.
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After that, his brothers talked with him. When the report was heard in Pharaoh's house, Joseph's brothers have come.
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It pleased Pharaoh and his servants. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, say to your brothers, do this, load your beasts and go back to the land of Canaan and take your father and your households and come to me and I will give you the best of the land of Egypt and you shall eat the fat of the land.
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And you, Joseph, are commanded to say, do this, take wagons from the land of Egypt for your little ones and for your wives and bring your father and come.
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Have no concern for your goods for the best of all the land of Egypt is yours. The sons of Israel did so and Joseph gave them wagons according to the command of Pharaoh and gave them provisions for the journey.
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To each and all of them he gave a change of clothes but to Benjamin he gave three shekels of silver and five changes of clothes.
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To his father he sent as follows, ten donkeys loaded with the good things of Egypt and ten female donkeys loaded with grain, bread and provisions for his father on the journey.
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Then he sent his brothers away and as they departed he said to them, do not quarrel on the way. So they went up out of Egypt and came to the land of Canaan to their father
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Jacob. And they told him, Joseph is still alive and he is ruler over all the land of Egypt.
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And his heart became numb for he did not believe them. But when they told him all the words of Joseph which he had said to them and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father
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Jacob revived and Israel said, it is enough. Joseph, my son, is still alive. I will go and see him before I die.
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Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father in this text we certainly have a lot of history to cover here and there's a lot of difference between where we live in 2014 and this ancient document that we read and yet at the same time we recognize just, we see within this text family relationships and the brokenness and the reconciliation and father a glorious picture of that.
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But then in this text we also see something that is mysterious to our minds, it's difficult to comprehend even Joseph's comment that it was not them that sent him to Egypt but that it was you.
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So father I pray that you would help us in our minds to understand what it is that you desire to communicate through this text to us here in 2014, here today.
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And father that we would be recognizing you as you are. Father I pray that we would not come before you in worship seeing you as something that you are not, envisioning a smaller
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God in our mind than you actually are. But father that we would be moved to the mystery of you who are sovereign, you who are in control, you who are orchestrating your ends for your glory and for your honor.
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And you are worthy father and so I pray that we would sing these songs out of hearts of praise recognizing how utterly and amazingly worthy you are of all of our worship.
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And it's in your son Jesus' name that I pray, amen. Well I encourage you to get comfortable, make sure that you have your
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Bibles open to Genesis chapter 45 as we're going to walk through that I recognize that in the shuffling during the connection time you might have lost your place and so having your
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Bible open in front of you will help you. That's the outline of the text, we're going to walk through it together and then talk about what does that have to do with us where we live here today.
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And get comfortable like I said if you need any more coffee or donuts or juice are available, if you need to get up, if the chair that you're sitting in gets uncomfortable you can get up in the back and stretch out.
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Restrooms are out the double doors to the end of the hallway, men's upstairs, women's downstairs. We want you to use the bathrooms on that end even though there are some down here, those of you that are familiar with the building we want to reserve those for the kids ministry so we want the adults to use the restrooms down at this end.
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As we dig into Genesis 45 we come to the climax of a story that began all the way back in Genesis chapter 37 so we've been taking chunks of this story progressively building on each other up to this high point that we come to this week in the text.
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As a matter of fact, if I could have, I would have loved to have preached this as one entire sermon from chapter 37 all the way to 45 but I really have the conviction of God on me to preach verse by verse and that could have been one extremely long sermon if we had taken all of that on and so we've broken it up but the fact of the matter is if I just jump in without giving you some of the history of where we're at at this text, you know, right away you read verse one, then
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Joseph could not control himself, like what? What's going on here? Like you need some context. It's like jumping into the last three minutes of a season finale of an entire series, right?
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A sitcom or something, you're like what's going on here? You know, like watching the last three minutes of game seven of an
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NBA final, you haven't seen the drama and all that's unfolded in those seven games, you get, it's still kind of cool to watch the last three minutes, right?
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So let me hit some of the highlights of Joseph's story as we launch into this text before we just launch into the text and some of the highlights, remember that as a child we saw right away that Joseph was daddy's favorite, that comes into play here throughout the text.
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He was the firstborn to his dad's favorite wife, Rachel, which calling her his favorite wife lets you know that he had more than one wife but his favorite wife was
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Rachel and he had two children by that wife. He was the second to the youngest in birth order of 12 kids, his younger brother
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Benjamin was born quite a bit after him and his mother died in childbirth giving birth to his younger brother
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Benjamin so he had lost his mom early in life. At one point the text told us that Joseph's older brothers could not ever speak kindly to him.
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The words in Hebrew in the book of Genesis actually said basically every time that these siblings interacted with Joseph it resulted in hostility and animosity.
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They could not speak kindly to him. Every interaction between these brothers in their childhood, some of you feel like that's the way your kids are right now, like there can be some hope in there but sometimes there's a lot of hostility between siblings and this family was no different.
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And so one day Joseph was sent by his father to go out and visit his brothers in the field about 60 miles north of where they lived and they saw him coming across the field and they could recognize him right away off in the distance as he walked to them because he was wearing his famous Technicolor dream coat, right?
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He was wearing that cloak that was very easy to recognize and not only that but that cloak was a reminder that he was dad's favorite.
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Dad had bought for him a special or creative, you know, built for him, designed for him, had tailored, thank you, somebody helped me there, had tailored for him this special coat and so it was a reminder and as he comes across the field they plot, they start talking to each other and they're like, let's kill him.
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Wow, right, okay, it's pretty stark in the text, let's kill him, let's be done with him. And so as he arrives on the scene to check up on his brothers, they beat him up.
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They tear his cloak from him and they throw him in a pit while they stand on the edge of the pit deliberating whether, like, basically, how do we want to do this thing?
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We could just leave him, we could just leave him, he'll die there and that's great, that might make our hands more clean of this if we just let the elements take him or something like that.
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But then Judah lifts up his eyes and sees off in the distance a caravan coming and he's like, hey, ding, you know, the light bulb goes off, hey, why would we kill him and let his blood be on our hands?
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Let's sell him for a profit. Let's sell him, I mean, we can get some money out of this whole deal. So they actually sell him to a caravan of Bedouins that's rolling through the area from the nation of Midian at the time and they're bound for Egypt with goods to sell and to barter with and they certainly are willing to buy this guy.
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They can turn him for a profit in Egypt and so they buy him for 20 pieces of silver.
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Joseph, we know, was carried to Egypt where he was sold as a slave, falsely accused of attempted rape by his master's wife as he was thrown, and then therefore he was thrown in jail.
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So he was brought into the household of this man named Potiphar and Potiphar's wife was constantly trying to harass him and eventually, in one fateful day, he is accused of attempting to rape her which he did not in any way, shape, or form do and he is falsely accused.
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Slavery and imprisonment then accounts for 13 years of Joseph's life. We don't know in what proportion.
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We know that he was enslaved first and then imprisoned later and we don't know what percentage but I've mentioned before in some of my sermons that I'm not sure how much it matters, like put the choice to you, imprisonment or slavery, which one do you choose?
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Neither one sounds pleasant and for 13 years that was his lot in life. But because of his
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God -given ability to interpret dreams, he had interpreted dreams in the past and so because of that,
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Pharaoh catches wind of this because he's had some dreams as well and he enters and is called into Pharaoh's presence and he uncovers the future plan of God for seven years of plenty followed by seven years of dire, worldwide, devastating famine.
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Pharaoh made Joseph second in command because this wisdom was revealed through him and so back at home,
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I'm sorry, he made him second in command and he heads up a huge grain storage program over the course of that first seven years storing up grain to make
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Egypt the most powerful nation on the planet during this era and this time all on the shoulders of Joseph, which by the way, we might have in our mind and from our
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Sunday school lessons the notion that Joseph ends up becoming primarily the guy that's over the grain, right?
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Like that's what he does during this. But he is a ruler over Egypt. He has all authority.
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He is not just merely like, you know, the Secretary of Agriculture, okay? He is a bona fide ruler of Egypt during this time and second only to Pharaoh and the only thing
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Pharaoh reserves for himself is, dude, you can't sit in my seat, okay? You can't have my throne, but everything else goes.
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It's all yours. It's in your hands. Do with my nation what you want, just don't infringe on my throne.
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Back at home, meanwhile back at the ranch, Joseph's dad was led to believe that Joseph was torn up and eaten by wild animals.
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They took that cloak, that special cloak that specially identified Joseph. They killed a goat. They dipped that torn up robe in goat's blood and then took it to dad and said, what does it look like happened here?
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Now, they didn't outright lie, but they definitely misled and deceived and their father
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Jacob is led immediately to the assumption that my son has been torn up by wild animals and I will never see him again.
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So therefore, Benjamin, his youngest, becomes Jacob's favorite son. Eventually down the road, the famine becomes so severe and Joseph's brothers went to Egypt to buy grain and they come into Joseph's presence.
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Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they don't recognize him and so he sets up an elaborate, somewhat vindictive test to see if his brothers have changed at all.
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They've sold him into slavery 22 years prior to the text that we're looking at here. They sold him into slavery.
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Have they changed? And last week we saw that Judah, the fourth born of the family, who was the one who had the idea to sell
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Joseph to the Midianites, has changed enough that he is willing to sacrifice himself, he's willing to be a substitute for his younger brother
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Benjamin, and he's willing to put his life on the line for Joseph's brother.
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And that leads us up to these words. We saw Judah willing to sacrifice himself was the last thing we saw last week and it leads up to this phrase,
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Then Joseph could not control himself before those who stood by him.
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He's there in the presence of his brothers. Judah has just offered himself up as a sacrifice in the place of their youngest brother
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Benjamin and he has moved because he actually now, beyond hope, has recognized and realized that his brothers have indeed changed.
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That there's been a heart change and a heart transformation in them. And he loses it.
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Joseph loses control and he commands all of his Egyptian attendants to leave his presence.
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He says, everybody out! It would be undignified for a ruler to lose control. We've seen a couple of times that he's had to suppress his emotions and go in hiding, go into his own private chamber and weep a couple of times in the interactions with his brothers.
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But now he's like, I can't control this anymore. You guys, everybody leave me with these Hebrews. I wonder if they're kind of thinking, okay, our heads are going to fall now, they don't really know what's going on.
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And remember, to them at this point, this is an Egyptian ruler. They do not know who he is at this point in the story.
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And he begins weeping so loud, I wonder if there are snot bubbles in this scenario, you know what I mean? It's like, he's weeping, okay, he is emotionally moved.
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I'm imagining they're having a hard time understanding him. And the word for weep is a pretty strong word.
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As a matter of fact, he's weeping so loudly that they could hear it around the neighborhood, okay? Like in Pharaoh's house,
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Pharaoh just across the way or whatever. And they could even hear it all the way, the attendants in Pharaoh's house were able to pick this up.
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Now, I want to point out though, I mean, amongst all of this weeping and crying and stuff, remember that Joseph, I want to make abundantly clear, he is not just a crybaby, okay?
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Joseph is not one big crybaby. Some of you guys here are like, I can't remember the last time I cried, and you're proud of it.
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That's not necessarily something to be proud of, okay? That's not great. Don't boast about that. But, you know, I mean, there's different levels of emotion and things like that.
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But I believe that in part, what we are seeing here in our text is we're seeing a man who is encountering the meaning of his suffering.
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We are seeing a man at a snapshot when his life is beginning to make sense, the hardships that he has faced.
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Some of us have had that encounter. Some of us have had that experience where there's a point in history where you look back and go, that's when it snapped into focus.
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That's when I understood what this life is for. That's when I understood what that suffering was for. That's when I understood why that heartache came into my life, and I believe that that's what we're encountering here.
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And he is emotionally distraught and moved and weeping over this recognition.
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All of this emotion about his family and the reconciliation that is happening here in his midst is all fueling this heavy emotion.
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Imagine what Joseph has endured. Imagine being rejected by your family, rejected so much that you were sold by your own siblings.
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Imagine being sold into slavery against your will by anyone, by anyone, it doesn't matter. I mean, in this case it's his brothers, and that makes it all the more painful, but just being sold.
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How many of you signed up for that gig? None of us. Imagine being owned by another human being in a foreign culture.
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He endured that. His whole purpose in life during a period of that 13 years was to serve another man's wealth, to serve another man.
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I mean, he didn't have freedom to go to the store when he wanted to. He didn't have freedom to have his own flock. He didn't have freedom to do what he wanted to do.
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He was totally, totally submitting to the will of another human being.
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Imagine being falsely accused of attempted rape by a person who has been consistently sexually harassing you. Imagine the injustice of just that alone.
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She was pursuing him, and he constantly said, no, no, no, no, and then one day she says, he tried to rape me, and he's the one in prison.
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Imagine spending years in terrible prison conditions feeling forgotten, alone, and hopeless for something you didn't do.
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Now, I want to point out that I don't think I'm reading too much in the text to use those emotional feelings for Joseph, because in one part of the text, earlier on in the previous chapter, he actually said, the only thing
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I want is to get out of here, so please remember me before Pharaoh. He said that to the head cupbearer.
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When you get back there, could you please just remember me? The only one thing I want in life is to get me out, please get me out of here.
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So he was, and then it says later in that same text, he was forgotten by the cupbearer.
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So it's reasonable that Joseph has an explosive emotional reaction in this reconnection with his brothers.
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In Hebrew, his reveal is just two simple words. What he says to them is two words in Hebrew, three in English, I am
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Joseph. And I just picture them almost like falling on their faces, like just,
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I am Joseph, and it's like, bleh. This is a lot more powerful, by the way. Some of you remember the initial time, the very first time you heard the phrase,
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Luke, I am your father. And you're like, no, I'm blown away, like my mind just, he's his father, how's this going to work out?
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But this is even more impressive than that, okay? And some of you are just like, what is he talking about, like what is, yeah, welcome.
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But it elicits a similar confused response, okay? I mean, you have, you can picture Luke clinging there, no.
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But it's not quite that, because they're moved to actual speechlessness. They can't talk. The word that's used in English, the translation is a word we don't use very often, and even though I can say it, and you have some fuzzy notions,
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I bet you have a hard time defining it. What does the word dismayed mean? Could you come up with a good dictionary definition?
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Is that a word that you used this past week? How often do you use the word dismayed? There's so many synonyms for that word that you probably rarely use it.
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And so I went down into the Hebrew to figure out what other uses does this word have throughout the
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Bible. And it's most often used as a military term for the paralyzing fear that occasionally strikes a man on the battlefield, a paralyzing fear where he's got his back up against the sand bunker and the commander says, at my shout, we're fixing bayonets, we're turning, and we're going that way where the bullets are flying over your head.
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And occasionally it's been documented that some guys literally become catatonic and cannot physically move.
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And that's the word that's used here. It's a paralyzing type of fear that they hear the word
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Joseph and they're like, ah, I mean, no words are coming.
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They're not able to process this. They are reasonably, now I want to point out that this does not look like Joseph.
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This man has no hair. In Egypt during the dynastic periods that we're looking at, they loathed hair in the upper echelons of society.
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So I'm talking no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no facial hair. I mentioned earlier in one of the messages that most of the pharaohs had two barbers in attendance in case a hair cropped up.
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I mean, in attendance on them at all times there was a barber in their presence ready to remove a hair. I think
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I got something going on right here. Done. So he is basically bare from the waist up, no hair on his body, completely bald.
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He probably wears the gold fake beard that you've seen. By the way, those are not real beards.
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Those are always a gold symbol of power and authority. He probably carries with him a scepter of authority, a rod of gold of some sort designating you bow before me when
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I'm here. He's got gold chains all over his chest. He's all blinged up and from the waist down all the way to his ankles he wears linen, fine linen like some of the most expensive things that you could have during that era in time.
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He does not look very Hebrew. So they're going, I mean, but he says,
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I am Joseph and they are, they assumed he was dead, right? Or at least a slave in some distant land.
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And now he's here. He is ruler. He is in ultimate control.
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They are at his complete mercy. He can do whatever he wishes with their lives.
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He holds them now in the palm of his hand. Can you imagine the fear?
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Can you imagine the assumption? What's running through your mind? We are dead. And it's,
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I hope it's quick. I hope he does not torture us. We deserve it. But I hope he is merciful and just ends it quickly.
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Quickly. So everything that flows out in this text is like, I mean, they're standing there.
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They're completely paralyzed by fear. And then Joseph says, come a little closer. They're paralyzed.
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They're terrified. But they also probably at some level in their psyche they know that obedience to this man might be wise.
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Right now they actually draw in, assuming this is how it's going to end. Any second now something is going to happen.
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He calls them in close. And he confirms, I mean, I think they're probably, they're still confused.
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So he says once again, I am Joseph. And then he goes on to say something that only he could know to verify that he is
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Joseph. How are they going to know that he really is who he says he is? And he says,
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I'm Joseph, the one you sold into slavery. Now they're sure they're dead.
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You remember that? Oh, you remember that? You remember how you got here, okay. But he's saying it in a sense of like, they haven't shared that with anybody.
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This has been their little dark secret for their entire lives, that they've harbored this guilt and this sorrow and this frustration over this sin.
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And this has been a weight on their shoulders. And here he stands in their presence and he's able to say, hey, remember me, come in closer.
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I'm the one you sold. Woo. And just at the point, the dramatic point in the text when it is reasonable, if you were reading this for the first time,
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I think sometimes I regret, I feel like my mind has been, I miss a lot because of Sunday school. I miss a lot because I was raised in the church.
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I wish I could read the Bible with fresh eyes. Because if you could read this story for the very first time without any background knowledge, you'd be like, what is going to happen now?
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Can you feel that anticipation? What is going to happen next? And just at the point when we think heads are going to roll,
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Joseph, are you ready for this? Joseph comforts his brothers.
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He provides words of comfort to his brothers. How is it possible that this man can be a comfort to his abusers, to the ones who sold him?
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He says to them, don't be distressed. Don't even be angry with yourselves. And then he goes on to in detail explain what motivates that comfort that he offers to them.
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He gives this reason. Because God has been in this. God has sent me ahead here to this location, to this position here in Egypt to preserve life.
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It has snapped into focus to him what all of this has been for. And he sees purpose and intention in the hardships of his life because he understands
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God's big picture. Joseph ultimately appeals to the overarching plan of God as comfort to all of them in this intense circumstance.
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How could Joseph possibly be moved beyond all the injustice and abuse he had received at the hands of his brothers?
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He identified God's will and God's plan. And he has come to see clearly that all of this has occurred for the end goal of saving his people.
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They're only two years into a devastating seven year famine. Do the quick math. How many more years left do they have?
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And God is using Joseph to preserve for himself a remnant, the text says, uses that word remnant, and to keep alive survivors.
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The text doesn't tell us the exact time when Joseph came to this conclusion. I think it's sometime within this text that it snaps into focus what he has been made to do, what he has been designed for.
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But it is a powerful conclusion that I want to point out to you flows out of his knowledge of God, flows out of, ready for the word, theology.
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Let me just say briefly that your theology, that is your knowledge of God, your understanding of God is possibly the most important,
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I would say is the most important thing about you. The thoughts that you have about God define your life and so many things about you.
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Our behavior in life, our sense of hope, our sense of purpose, our sense of destiny, our sense of ourselves, all of these things are intimately related to what we believe about God.
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And ironically, the absence of a belief in God, God is so central to a life that even not believing in him has a dramatic impact on a person's life.
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It affects every sphere of their life if they don't believe in him. Now if I don't believe in a spaghetti monster, that doesn't have a whole lot to do with my life.
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But if I don't believe in God, it's going to affect the way I live. Are you getting what I'm saying? It's going to have an impact on me if I don't believe
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God exists. If I do believe that God exists, then it would be sensible for me to study him to know who he is, how he rolls, what he wants of me, what is his purpose in life, why did he create this thing?
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Are you getting what I'm saying? Our theology matters. Theology is not just some dusty study of dusty books by old men with long beards.
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It's something that's practical that all of us have a theology, all of us have some understanding of God, and it would be wise for us to think intentionally, what kind of views do
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I hold about God? You see, Joseph's theology of sovereign grace, that is that God is graciously moving in the actual events of your life and mine, that's what sovereign grace means, for the purpose of salvation.
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And that God's sovereign grace led him to conclude that all those years of suffering were orchestrated by God for a gracious and divine purpose.
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A different theology would have landed Joseph somewhere else. A different theology would have brought him to a different conclusion.
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If we assume God has less control, if that's our theology, then we will be more prone to blame people around us when things go wrong, and we will have a harder time getting past the hardships that we face in life.
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If we think God only wants us healthy or wealthy, then we will be left wondering what we did to tick
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God off when hardship strikes, right? That will be where we'll live there for a long time, because we'll be like,
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God, what did I do wrong? I mean, I'm not wealthy. I'm not healthy. You've given me a diagnosis that I don't want right now.
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What did I do wrong? Rather than actually acknowledging that maybe God has something for us in it, imagine that.
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The better we understand God as he shows himself in the text of Scripture, the more equipped we will be to think correctly about our lives, and not just think correctly about our lives, but live our lives well in the face of all that we endure and go through and the twists and turns.
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How many of you have had some twists? Raise your hand. I want some participation. Raise your hand if you've had some twists and turns in your life, unexpected journeys.
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We've all had that, and so how do we make sense of those in the light of our theology? What does our theology say to us about those types of things?
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And so therefore, in the most explicit statement in this text about God's sovereignty, in verse 8,
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Joseph forbids his brothers to take any responsibility for his arrival in Egypt. He says, don't even take any responsibility.
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It was not you who sent me here, but God sent me here. Now, I send out my sermon to people every week, and somebody actually commented, they said, because that's the end of a paragraph here,
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I wasn't going to extrapolate on that, and they said, that's kind of like dropping a bombshell. And yet I believe the author dropped the bombshell.
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I believe the author has left us hanging here some. He is not going to afford me the chance to, from the text, explain to you how that's worked out.
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And I don't believe that I can. I believe that I am finite enough, and I'm willing to admit that as a pastor, that I cannot exactly explicate how the behavior of these brothers proved to be the will of God in the life of Joseph.
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How did God get Joseph to Egypt? He intentionally brought him there.
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How did, I guess I might as well just ask, how did God get Jesus to the cross?
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It's the same question. It's the same question. I cannot answer that for you. I wish that I can.
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But we are going to dig more into this. We're going to mine a little bit more when we get to Genesis chapter 50. Because once we get to Genesis chapter 50, it's going to outright say this phrase, this is for the future, this is kind of chumming the waters for a few weeks from now, but he's actually going to say to his brothers,
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Joseph, what you meant for evil, God was actually doing for good.
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So they meant something evil. They intentionally were trying to harm their brother, but God took that and created good out of it.
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Is that mysterious? Anybody's head spinning? You about to explode? Let's move on. God has made
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Joseph father to Pharaoh. He says, God has been in all of these events. God has been orchestrating every step of the way.
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He's been working this thing out. And he says, I'm now father to Pharaoh. That doesn't mean offspring, biological father.
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Like, whoa, what happened there? He is the advisor, too. That's what it means to be the father of someone.
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And so, especially in the context of a king or a ruler. So there's really three words that are applied that God has given specifically to Joseph.
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He has made him advisor, he has made him manager, and he has made him ruler. Manager of Pharaoh's house, advisor to Pharaoh, and ruler over all of Egypt.
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But God gets full credit. And I want to point out that God is not just getting credit for the rise to power, but he also gets credit for all of those events that come and brought him to Egypt.
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God has orchestrated all of these events to bring about the salvation of his people. That's been his ultimate goal.
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And with urgency, Joseph is desperate to see his father, as you can imagine. Judah, by the way, in last week's message, had painted a pretty dire picture of the health of their father.
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And so in that, I think there's probably a notion, a desire for him to quickly get his father in his presence.
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And I'm sure that Joseph fears that his father is going to pass before they're reunited. So he commands them to hurry and return with the entire family to Egypt.
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There are still five more years of famine, and their family will certainly be completely destitute and brought to poverty, or worse, if they don't get to Egypt soon.
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They've got five more years of no planting, no sowing, no reaping, no harvest. So he promises to them the land of Goshen, which is a land between two of the spurs on the
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Nile Delta, a fertile land even in hardships and difficult times. If there's any water in the Nile, then that's going to be an area that is going to have, you know, is going to be good.
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And so he promises them Goshen, and Pharaoh himself catches wind of this discussion, and he confirms
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Joseph's decision, and also takes up the ante and says, give them wagons too, so they can hurry and expedite this trip.
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The initial shock, I think, begins to wear off on the brothers, finally that paralyzing fear, because it's dissipated primarily because of Joseph's repetitive pledges of goodwill towards his brothers, and actually giving them the rationale that he's talking theology to them.
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And the reconciliation moves to physical embraces, the Middle Eastern kiss of greeting and many tears.
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He starts by weeping on Benjamin, his biological brother, and they all get caught up on the past 20 years.
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This is possibly the first known conversation between this set of brothers that does not end in hostility.
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This is a, like, they know what they're talking to Joseph, and this is a good conversation. Down in verse 22,
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Joseph gives an amazingly symbolic gift of reconciliation that doesn't necessarily turn up well in the
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English language, but it's very highly symbolic. They had once been angry with him regarding a cloak that his father had given to him.
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They tore it from his body, they dipped it in blood, and offered it to their father as deceptive evidence that Joseph had been killed.
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But now that Joseph is in authority over his brothers, what does he turn around and give them? Cloaks. He turns around and gives every one of his brothers a cloak.
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And not only that, but he gives Benjamin a treasure chest of silver, and he gives him five cloaks. He also sends an extensive gift to his father as evidence of goodwill, and evidence that things truly are well in Egypt.
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It might be kind of curious, like, if he's bringing him here, why does he send a gift there? But it's evidence, it's showing, hey, we have plenty here, come and live in Egypt.
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And I love the part in common in verse 24, I think it's meant to be sarcastic, and it's meant to show us a little bit of how much
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Joseph knows his brothers. Don't quarrel on the way. Do you think that he knew his brothers?
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Do you think he knew that there might be some intention, some division between them? He knew them real well and says, don't quarrel.
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So I'm assuming they obeyed him. So they returned to their father Jacob, and remember that there is only one thing that their father prayed for before he sent them out.
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He prayed and he said, God Almighty, God Almighty, please be merciful and return my
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Benjamin to me. Now, I told you that there's extreme favoritism in this family. This family is jacked up with favoritism.
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Okay, so he actually said at one point to his brothers, I only have one son. I mean, Jacob said to all of his sons in his presence,
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I have one son, Benjamin. Benjamin's the one. And really, I mean, he's kind of like, well, if Benjamin shows up, and Benjamin comes back and everything else is a loss, okay.
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That's the attitude of Jacob. I mean, Jacob is messed up. He's not, these people are not necessarily role models for us.
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These stories do not exist to do what they did, okay. They are there to show us ourselves. I mean, you can see yourself sometimes in these characters, and it's not pretty.
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It's not pretty. But he had prayed and said, please, God Almighty, be merciful and allow my
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Benjamin to return. And so, I'm sure that he has scouts and servants that are watching the horizon, you know, as a man that lives in tents and stuff.
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And so, they're looking out, and they see a caravan coming. And they see donkeys, and they see, you know, all of this stuff.
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And wagons loaded down. And there's one thing that he's looking for. He's looking for Benjamin.
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And immediately upon arrival, the brothers tell their father. He sees that Benjamin is with them. And they tell him right away,
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Joseph, your son, is still alive. And he is now ruler over Egypt. And Jacob is, as you can imagine, emotionally impacted by the news.
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His heart became weak within him. And he did not believe them. It's ironic that when his sons lied to him earlier and brought to him the cloak and declared
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Joseph dead by inference, he believed them then when they're lying.
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And now that they're telling him the truth, Joseph is alive, he disbelieves. But as they recount the conversation with Joseph, and he takes into account the wagons that were sent along, he finally believes and says, that's enough evidence.
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I've got it. I believe you. And he has moved to hope beyond hope to believe that Joseph, my son, is still alive.
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And he agrees to go and see his son before he dies. God has not just brought back
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Benjamin to Jacob, but he has returned to him the son that he thought was dead.
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He has assumed that Joseph, and it's as if he receives Joseph, as if receiving him from the grave.
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Our text is deep. It's got a lot of facets to it. At face value, there's a nice little
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Sunday school application in this, that there's this beautiful historical reconciliation that occurs in our text within the context of a family.
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And a simplistic view would keep us right there and would not allow us to go deeper. We might apply this at some level as something like, be kind to others and forgive others.
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That's a great application, but that's not the extent of what this text is communicating to us. We find out that at a deeper level, this reconciliation has been sponsored by, or brought to you by, the sovereign grace of God.
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Okay, so there's an underwriter here. There's something that's underwriting this reconciliation that we need to deal with and address.
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In other words, Joseph tells us what is keeping him from retribution towards his brothers. What is keeping Joseph from vengeance is the recognition of the sovereign grace of God in his life.
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Joseph realizes, Joseph's realization of the plan of God in his life is the reason he is able to release them and forgive them.
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And so the application at this level pertains to believing and trusting in the sovereign grace of God. But there is even a deeper and more far -reaching thing going on.
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That the sovereign grace of God is to an end. It is to a purpose. It is moving our world in a direction.
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Joseph reconciles with his brothers because he knows that God is sovereign and that God in his sovereignty is using
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Joseph to preserve for himself a remnant of people. He is saving his people through Joseph.
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And Joseph comes to understand that. So on the surface level, this is about a family.
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One step deeper, it's about the sovereign will of God. And one step deeper, it's about the plan of salvation that God is working out on this planet, in this place.
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So let's apply these levels to our lives as we conclude this morning. At some point in Joseph's life, he came to realize that God is sovereign.
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He is in control and he is orchestrating events to accomplish his will. Joseph was not willing to only accept the good things from God and say the bad things were from somewhere else, but he was willing to look at all of his life and say,
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God, your will be done. I mean, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
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I don't really want to do this, but Father, if it's your will, I'll go through hell for you. And Joseph understood that the horrible experiences that he had had in life were ultimately for a purpose.
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They were serving something. Joseph landed on the belief that God even uses the hardships we face in life to bring about his will.
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And a bit of a side note, but not too much of a side note. I mean, if you're taking notes, this might be good to write down.
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I want to point out that Joseph came to this conclusion on his own. He didn't have friends pestering him while he was in prison saying, do you know what this is for?
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Have you figured out what God's trying to do in your life? Has God taught you anything through this hardship? Is God teaching you something in prison?
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Do you have it figured out yet? I think this is very important.
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Because I think far too many well -meaning Christians are eager to teach others about the sovereign grace of God as those others are going through hardships and difficulties.
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It's cliche, it's quoting. God works together all things for the good for those who are called according to his purposes.
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Is he working it out for you? How's he doing that? I told you all that just, and I've mentioned this before and some of you are newer and so you may not have heard this illustration, but just weeks after my mother died of cancer, my mother died of cancer when
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I was 22 years old, 1995. Actually, she did not get to be at my wedding. I was married in June that year.
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I mean, married in December and she passed away in June. I had very well -meaning people in my life at the time, good people in my life, that asked me, point blank, within just a couple of weeks, we had just buried my mom and I had people ask me, so what's
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God teaching you? What's God showing you in this? Have you figured out yet why
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God took your mom? Got that figured out? I wanted to punch them in the throat.
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Like literally, I was like, just get away from me. I don't need that right now.
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I'm kind of like, I'm a little torn up about this right now. Maybe you could give me a little space and get outside of my arm's reach.
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Anybody ever had a well -meaning Christian say something that was completely insensitive to you at a time of hurt? Any of you been that Christian who has said,
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I think all of us have, so I've got to be careful being too judgmental because in all honesty, all of us are moved to not knowing the right things to say and sometimes putting our foot in our mouth.
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Sometimes I mean to just encourage you, if you don't know what to say, don't. Just don't, just be silent with your friend that is mourning.
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Cry with them. Be broken with them. Don't feel like you have to be the solution.
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Because probably if you feel like you are going to be the solution and you're going to take care of their problem, then you know what? You're not.
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You're probably going to make it worse. Are you getting what I'm saying in this? Joseph came to this conclusion, but I want to say this and I've got to say it delicately and carefully because I don't want to backtrack on what
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I just said, but I've got to clarify that now, where I live here today,
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I can look back at the passing of my mom and I can see good that has come of it. I can see
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God's hand in it now, but it wasn't because somebody came to me and said, do you see God's hand in it? It's because it takes time.
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It's like when those hardships hit, it's like driving 60 miles per hour down 131 and it is a torrential rain.
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Have you been in that rain where your windshield wipers can't keep up? Have you been in that rain where you're kind of like, I think
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I better pull over because I'm not sure I can see the car in front of me and it's like your windshield wipers aren't keeping up and it's like you can't do anything except try to strain to see what's ahead, but you're so broken and torn that it's like,
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I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what's out there ahead of me. I can't see. But time has a way of clearing up those things to the point where you can look in the rearview mirror as you're driving and you can begin to see purpose.
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You can begin to see the hand of God. You can begin to see what he has created you for and what things he has brought you through to make you a stronger individual.
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Time, patience, and faith in God have a way of showing God's hand in our past. But for Joseph, remember that he had to suffer years before being raised up to power.
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The second thing is that realizing that God is sovereign is just the starting point. The next step is seeing the big purpose of God, understanding what is he doing sovereignly.
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So what is he trying to accomplish? What is his overarching goal? Because he's declared it for us in Scripture.
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He has shown us what he is driving for. In the text he tells us it is for a remnant and a host of survivors.
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Those who will be a remnant and those who are survivors. In this context, it's a famine, but that's a common theme. That is the theme of Scripture, that God is saving out for himself those of us in this sinful race.
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He is saving out for himself a remnant of survivors. Everything that God is doing on this planet has one of two goals, and really those two goals are so wrapped together that it's hard to pull them apart.
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The first goal is that everything that God does is ultimately for his glory.
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Now, I think some of us might wrestle with this, right? Because you're going to go like, if I say everything I do is for my glory,
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I'm an egomaniac, right? Am I a little out of balance? I was reading in Isaiah, and actually if you read my blog, you've read some of this, but I was reading in Isaiah this week, and I'm thinking about my sermon here, this part of my sermon right now, and I read in Isaiah these words, spoken by God, God speaking to us, and he says, those who hope in me will not be disappointed.
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Now, if a man says that, run! Okay? I mean, it was funny because then
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I blogged that, and I was able to actually find a quote from LeBron James that said, I will disappoint no one.
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I was like, well, I think there's some people in Miami that are a little disappointed right now. I'm just going to say, I think you may have to go back on that statement because how many of you know we can't pledge that we're going to be breathing an hour from now?
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So to make pledges and say I won't disappoint anybody, that's false, that's a lie. But for God to say
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I will disappoint nobody, how many of you know he can make true on that promise? Because he is all that and a bag of chips and more.
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Okay? He is, he is, he is it all. All worthy, all glorious, all majestic, good, faithful, kind, merciful, just.
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True in his indictment of us. Perfect in all of his ways.
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Completely righteous and just in all of his decisions. And so everything, it is completely reasonable that everything he does is for his glory because there is no one else to serve.
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God serves himself. And that's great. That is a good thing. He does only those things which will end in his ultimate honor.
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But secondly, so that's the first thing, he's always doing what he does for his glory. But the second thing is everything he does is moving this broken world, the way that he interacts with us, is moving this broken world towards redemption and reconciliation with him.
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Everything that God does is moving this world towards redemption and reconciliation. He hatched a plan to develop a people.
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We saw that in the book of Genesis. We're seeing a portion of that story. He set out to protect and preserve those people by creating a great nation and a great land and protection for them through the famine, through the flood, protecting and preserving a remnant for himself.
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A remnant of survivors. And the two words that I keep using, remnant and survivors, in verse seven, I did a word search on those and just kind of came up with where do we find those two words in proximity?
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And it's all over in the prophets. The prophets are constantly talking about a remnant of survivors.
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And at the end of time, there will be a remnant of survivors that pass through that final day of judgment. There will be survivors on that great day.
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And they will be saved by the plan that God has put in place. Nobody will survive that final judgment and will pass through that judgment based on their own works, based on their church attendance, based on how loud they sang during the praise time, based on how much they gave to the poor.
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But it will only be because of the grace of God given to us through Jesus Christ, His Son. Like Noah's family is saved by an ark through the flood.
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Not on the ark, not saved. On the ark, saved. Joseph's family is saved by Joseph through the famine.
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Go to Egypt, get grain. Don't go to Egypt, don't get grain and die. And the final remnant will be saved by the blood of Jesus.
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Go to Jesus and be saved. Don't go to Jesus and perish. Same parallels through Scripture.
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And third and last, so what are we to do practically with this text? Now the fact is that not all of us are going to find that our calling is to be raised up to the position of vice president.
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Right? Like Joseph. Joseph was vice president of his country, of his nation. He's second in command. And I fear that too many in the church have adopted a mindset that God has called you to be really important.
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That's what God's really calling me to. He just wants me to be really important. And it's possible to abuse the
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Joseph story and assume that Joseph's rise to power is normative in the expectation of every Christian.
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I was made for greatness. I was made for awesome things. But let me clarify, let me clarify and be careful here.
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You are very important. In God's redemption story, you are vital and important.
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And the reason I can say that with confidence is because you're here. You're here on this place where what
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God desires is redemption and reconciliation on this planet. And he sees you as a part of that.
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He has you here for a reason. And so we would be silly to listen to this and experience this text and not identify where we're at in God's amazing and glorious plan.
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As we come to communion this morning and celebrate the salvation of God through Jesus Christ, consider, have you encountered the sovereign grace of God?
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If you have not met him and put your trust in his overarching plan of salvation through Jesus Christ, then
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I'd encourage you to skip communion, but come and speak with me at the end of the service. If there's something that you can identify that's a hang -up, that's holding you back from trusting
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Jesus to be your Savior, I would love to talk with you. At the very end of the service, I'll be standing out at the double doors, greeting people, but don't hesitate to grab my hand and say,
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I need to talk with you. We can step aside and have a conversation. But maybe after some reflection, some of you sitting here, you know you have met the sovereign
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God, but you need to connect your life into the plan that he has for you. Joseph spent a few years of life, think about this, he spent a couple of years selling grain without any salvation purpose in that whatsoever.
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He's doing what he did. What was he supposed to do? I mean, he had been put in this position, he's selling grain.
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But do you see how God took selling grain and made it about his kingdom, made it about his ultimate purpose to save a people for himself?
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Do you see that? And so it's possible that you're sitting here and you're like, I don't know, I just sell grain. I just deliver
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UPS packages. I just teach some kids when school's in session. I just do this,
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I just do that. Well, hold on a minute. Remember that what God is doing with Joseph, I mean, he's just doing his work, but there came a day when his work snapped into focus for him.
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And he realized that he was not given this gift of power and authority just for himself.
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And so consider where you're at in life right now, not where you want to be in the future, not some future grandiose plan, but think about what you've been given right now where you stand.
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Are you being faithful to the kingdom purposes of God for reconciliation and redemption where you live? You have a position in life that you have right now.
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You have skills, you have talents, you have abilities, you have resources. And are you using those to serve the bigger purposes of God?
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Think about it in these terms, and I'm going to wrap up here, I know it's hot in here. Are you raising kids? Or are you raising godly offspring?
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Are you hiding out in a neighborhood in the comfort of your backyard with your high fences? Or are you reaching those around you with the love of Jesus Christ?
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Are you working a job? Or are you available to bring the glory of God and His great love for the people you work with into your workplace?
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Are you willing to serve others at your own cost? God is on a mission to redeem.
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And He has you here as a part of that sovereign plan to save for Himself a remnant of survivors in that last day.
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And it just may be that you or I will be the key to bringing somebody else in to that remnant, maybe even this week.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank You for Your grace, Your sovereign grace.
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I truly believe that You are completely in control. And yet that's just so mysterious to us, and we certainly know that we're going to go out from this place, and we're going to make choices, what to eat for lunch, and all of this stuff.
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And so Father, I pray that You would remove from us all that confusion and that mystery, and in the end help us to recognize that You are both good,
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You are powerful, You are sovereign, that You are just, and to put our trust in that goodness, that goodness that's reflected to us by the cross of Jesus Christ that we celebrate in communion, that we take this juice to remember
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His blood that was poured out for us. We take the cracker to remember His body that was sacrificed as a substitute in our place, where we deserved punishment and wrath for You righteously.
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It was the right decision that You would condemn us, and yet You have, by Your grace and Your mercy, just like Joseph standing there in the presence of his brothers,
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He comforted them when they deserved His wrath. So I thank
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You for that expression of infinite love towards us at the cross. I pray that You would move us throughout this week to consider ourselves on mission for You, on this mission of what
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You are doing in the world. The reason You have left us here and have not taken us home yet is Your purposes of redemption and reconciliation.
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I pray that we would get busy in relationships that we have now and in the calling that You have on our life to bring the truth to others.