Beatitudes - Part 7 — Leonard Ravenhill

The Beatitude of Mercy

Matthew chapter 5, down at verse 7, there's a change of style here. Previously we've been thinking of our attitude to God and God's relationship to us, and now we tend to put into practice or get out of our bloodstream into action what the Lord has been teaching us and making possible by His grace.

And so in verse 7, he says, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Anybody here not obtain mercy? I was thinking of David's psalm, Psalm 51, he says, Thou desirest not sacrifice, else I will give it.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a broken and a contrite heart, and there is no substitute. If we are unmerciful to others, then the Word of God says that God in that great day will be unmerciful to us.

Again, there's this amazing sermon that says, With what measure you need, it shall be needed unto you again. This, I was going to say string of commandments, they're hardly that, you wouldn't think they are, but these exhortations to me, they're rather like a string of gems.

I remember being down in an island off the, in Keresawa. It's an island, which I think was established by the Dutch. It's between, it's just off the coast of Benidzeralia, or Benidzeralia, whichever way it's pronounced.

And I remember the main street there was all jewelry shops, because watches and other very expensive jewels are cheaper there. There was a government tax on them. And so I went into a shop, not to buy anything, but to see how they operated.

And it was very, very fascinating to see how people came in to buy different kinds of jewels. Now, I don't know what your choice would be in these Beatitudes, you know, blessed are the poor, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart.

There's a whole string of them. And I found in that shop, as I did a little eavesdropping and looked around at these sparkling gems and so forth, it was all done with very immaculately dressed people and the benches usually, you know, nice black velvet, because that gives the reflection from the lights and you see everything, every jewel at its best.

Well, lady, can I show you some diamonds? No, no, no, I don't want diamonds. Emeralds, I'm only interested in emeralds. And another counter, well, could I show you some emeralds or pearls? Oh, no, no, no, no, rubies, rubies.

All I do is buy rubies. And so everybody seemed rather a pet, uh, even in stones, not pet rocks like we were selling a few years ago, but a favorite stone. And I guess that you could select one of these Beatitudes and say, this is my favorite.

I don't know which it would be. Now, again, you can't take just one of these Beatitudes by itself, they've got to be strung together. And it's my conviction that they're in sequence. As I said before, if we began at the end and said, blessed are the pure in heart, if we put that first, we all gasp and say, well, there's not much hope for me.

But it starts at the foundation. Instead of saying, blessed are the pure, it says, blessed are the poor. Well, except we have a very inordinate amount of pride in us, I'm sure that we can, uh, again, um, identify with that.

We are poor in spirit. The classical case to me is the, is the Psalmist David, when he says over and over again in his Psalms, um, then as he says, this poor man cried when the Lord heard him. Or again, um, he dropped off out of a hollow pit.

I, I was poor. By and by, my neighbor didn't hear me. I'm poor and needy. He says that more than once. He recognizes that in the sight of God, that he's, he's just nothing. He's a kind of a zero. You've got to start off there.

That's the only place, if you're going to start traveling, if you're going to build, you've got to excavate first. And the excavationist will recognize that we're nothing. And, and we're undone. In the sight of God, you may be socially high up, you may be financially well here, you may be intellectually well on down, but that gives you no start when it comes down to the place of, uh, of reconciliation to God.

After all, I guess there's no greater intellect, at least in my judgment, than, than the Apostle Paul. And yet he, he admitted later in his life that, that he was poor and needy. Now, now this, uh, beatitude, blessed are the merciful, follows immediately after.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Filled with what? Well, filled with righteousness. And if they're filled with righteousness, then they're going to be in, uh, just as a wall, you test the wall with a plumb line, and you see if it's correct or it's incorrect.

The, the plumb line here is the righteousness of God, which has been made well in us. And the outflow should be that we're merciful. We have received mercy. And therefore, though we did not deserve mercy, we received mercy.

And therefore, we should ourselves give mercy to others. We talk these days a great deal about disposition. One of the great classic scholars was a man by the name of Cicero, and he said there's nothing more suited to a great man, an illustrious man, than a merciful disposition.

We all live in a world that's, uh, really very long on mercy. It's very long on cruelty right now. It's very long on injustice. It lacks, it lacks mercy, because it lacks compassion, and it lacks love.

Have you noticed, I'll tell them, anybody mentions the mercy of God? You mentioned the love of God, and sure we should. There are not many humans that have mercy in it. They have love, and God's kindness.

Uh, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, goodness, temperance, faith. Well, then there's no mercy in that. Yes, it's all embodied in that, in that one phrase, love.

Because I'm quite sure that if we, if we love, as God loved us, then the overflow of that love will be mercy. Again, the other, the, the, the previous gratitudes are related to ourselves and to God. This is something going out now to every fellow.

Mercy, in my judgment, is pity in action. It differs from grace. Grace, uh, implies guilt, and through the grace of God, we receive pardon. Mercy means that they're, they're, they're in, there's somebody in failure.

There's somebody that we could, uh, you know, work something out over. And, and God didn't need to have mercy on justice, which would have been all we needed, because after all, we were, uh, and sinners, we were guilty.

And yet, the outflow of love, because God is love, God is, is mercy, merciful. And this letter book says, blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Uh, look at Ephesians, the, the, the second chapter, uh, a minute.

Ephesians 2, let me get, okay. Verse 3 says, among whom there's, pardon me, there's two. Now, let's go back to this, get it in reverse. And you have to equate them to the dead in trespasses and in sin.

Now, that's you. He doesn't say us, he says you. You have to equate them to the dead in trespasses and sin. In the second verse, he says, wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, according to the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom also we all have.

Now, it's God himself. In the second verse, it's ye. In the third verse, it's we. Had our conversation. Now, that doesn't mean talk. It means our manner of life. That's the old English translation. They put the, uh, word in there that isn't, uh, totally the best, I guess.

Among whom also we all had our manner of life in the times past. This was our manner of life. Lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh, and of the mind, and of my nature, the children of wrath, even as others.

But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us when we were dead in trespasses and in sin. Now, again, God did not need to come to our situation. We had transgressed. We had broken every law.

I doubt it could be possible, but I, I doubt if anybody hears to Jesus Christ the very first time that they hear his name, particularly in a country like this, or England, or somewhere else. In human countries, yes.

In our country, a woman wearing him says, I have long withstood his grace, long provoked him to his face, with a hearken to his call, grieved him by a thousand faults. Depth of mercy, can there be mercy still reserved for me?

Can my God, his wrath, forbear me, the chief of sinners spare? Again, I have long withstood his grace. I had, I was raised in a, a very fine Christian home. There were Bibles all over the place. There, there has been Christian literature all over the place.

And yet, for years and years, I, I was saved, and just before I was fifteen, fourteen and a half, to be, to be precise about it. And you see, the mercy of God, I, I think that this is the most amazing thing to me almost every day.

That God puts up with the rebelling of the human race. There's no way you can interpret life anywhere, in any, when we talk about the planet Earth, we're not opposing, we're ending the planet Earth. There's no way you can interpret modern life as getting better, and better, and better.

They said, they said, when I was a little boy, well, you see, war, this is the first world war, and be very happy about it, it's the last one. There'll never be another world war. Well, that was 1919.

Twenty years after, 1939, we, we're back into another world war, more terrible than the first world war. And, uh, we've just invented more and more, uh, diabolical weapons, not of mercy, but suffering.

There ain't enough schools to teach mercy. We, we have schools to train soldiers. We have, we have science giving hours a day. They, they, they work twenty-four hours a day in the laboratories of the, of the world to find new inventions of, that are more merciless than ever.

I, uh, you'll hardly remember, but, uh, Life magazine showed, uh, before it went out of print, obviously, uh, they showed children being baptized in Vietnam, when we were, when we were chasing the enemy, and we sprayed them with a, with a mustard gas that it gives a big blister, then all the skin comes off, and the children were like little raw tomatoes running around.

No, no skin on them. Now, that wasn't the Russians doing it, we did it. That's Christian people, we did it, so-called Christian nations. The others were inventing diabolical things. But God is rich in mercy.

Paul’s Example of Obtaining Mercy

Um, let me look at another scripture here. 1 Timothy, excuse me, 1 Timothy 1, 13, I bet. Verse 12 says, I thank Jesus Christ, our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry, who was before a blasphemer, a persecutor, and injurious, but I obtained mercy.

I think that that thing gripped the heart of the apostle all his life. He obtained mercy. You can't buy it. It's given by, by grace, it's given by the graciousness, it's given by love, and if you remember when he stands before a group of that in the 26th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, I don't think he's boasting of his witty career, but he's making us see the transforming power of God.

He's talking about a man who was, uh, well, Agrippa was the last of the Jewish kings, the first was Saul, the king of Israel, the last one, and then he, you talk about psychology and smartness, in the 24th chapter, where he's before Festus, then he's before Felix, in the 26th chapter he says, uh, King Agrippa believed in the five of prophets, and he said, I'm not about to do this.

Why? Because he'd been raised up in a Jewish home, he'd been raised up where the law was taught, and he can drive down heavily on in that to show him that he was the same breed of person, if you like to use that word, or nation of person, and then he goes through, he says, listen, I was an evildoer.

I, I hounded many women to prison. I, I, I chased them into strange cities. In other words, he broke up homes, he broke up lives, he persecuted them, uh, he said that's the right thing to do, and they were stoning Stephen, and yet God has turned that man out.

One of the most amazing, perhaps the most amazing conversion in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ. This man had a volcano for a heart. He didn't know anything about grace. He didn't know anything about mercy.

He didn't know anything about gentleness. He was full of revenge, and bitterness, and strife. Isn't it amazing that a man whose hands were running with blood, that man who had put many people in prison, a man who had driven people into strange cities, out of their homes, out of their cities, into other lands.

Isn't it fantastic that a man like that could write 1 Corinthians 13? The most beautiful poem ever written, you can talk of Charles Wesley, and I like Charles Wesley very much, and Calper, and Madame Guillaume, and all the rest of them, but nobody has written anything comparable to 1 Corinthians 13.

In fact, I was thinking tonight, you'll be very smart if you all memorized it, and if you memorized it in Moffat's translation. He, he, he turns the words around a little bit, but he gets them right up to great.

Love suffers long in this time. Love endures not. Love mourns if not itself. And he says, love is never rude. Love is never resentful. Love is never selfish. Love is never glad when others go on. Do you like to see somebody stumble because it makes you feel taller?

Do you like to see, to see somebody stumble because, well, they deserved it anyhow, and it was coming. Do you rejoice over the fact that they make it, make a slip, and a slide? Or are you very merciful and say, well, they'll die but for the grace of God.

I'm sorry that happened, but I want to tell you that if our positions were reversed, I'd be very glad for you to come and show some mercy to me. Or, or do you take side with the crowd, as most, most people do, and say, well, you deserved it anyhow, you had it coming.

You see, that, that, that's the very last thing that, that, that mercy would do. Now, rethink of the classic case. I suppose it's a classic case in, in, in the scripture, and that is, of course, the case of the good Samaritan.

What does it say? It says that the Samaritan went and showed mercy unto him. Now, let's get this simple thing very clear. I, I think it helped me today to realize this. You can talk about doctrine, you can't talk about mercy.

Mercy is something we do. Mercy is pity in action. Mercy is compassion. Doctrine is something we stir up in our heads. I don't know what you've got in your, in your head. And if you, if you took an examination, I guess I could find out that sometimes, I, I look at what it makes you somebody, and no, no, they, they may have some little strange quirk of doctrine, and they say, well, it's, I'll be smart not to say anything while I'm here, or in some other group, but this, this group don't believe in this.

I will be around you a week before I discover whether you have mercy and compassion. It's something you can't hide. You can't hide it if you have it, and you sure can't hide it if you don't have it. It's very obvious both ways.

And that is the world looking for, not more, is it looking for more judgment? Surely it's looking for more mercy. Now, there's a very incisive world there, and, and, and James, James is very tactical.

Martin Luther said that, that, that, that the epistle of James is an epistle of straw. I, I don't know how in the world he got that. I find the epistle of James has really got some teeth in it. Supposing I, I, I say, now, everybody, pause your Bible, everybody, just take a piece of paper and a pencil, and you write the definition of, um, of godliness in, um, in less than a hundred words.

Now, what is the true Christian life? Well, you might say to be filled with love. It'd be interesting to find out answers. James puts it down, and he says, pure religion will only be found before God as well.

You know what he says? That is to love God with all your heart, and, and it's to visit the orphan, and the widow, and have compassion on those in need. That is a biblical definition of what true religion is.

It's not, not I fast twice in the week, God, listen, you know, the man that went up in the temple, and he went up to the front, and he lifted up his voice, and he lifted up all his virtues, and he made a very good government.

Well, when he came out of that temple, he was ten feet tall, and fifty inches round the chest, and he felt he was a very strong man. But the man that got God's, uh, grace, uh, uh, was, uh, uh, pardon me, God's will was moving to the man that got compassion from God, was the man that snubbed his breast.

I, I don't think he stood up at the front. I think he got behind the little big pillars in the temple, and shone to embarrass God, being merciful to be a sinner. What did he want? He wanted mercy. He knew he needed mercy.

Let alone did he need mercy, because he had no consciousness of, of undoing it, no consciousness of sin. Now, again, if you read on into the next chapter of this marvelous sermon on the mount, it says, with that measure you meet, it should be meted unto you again.

Mercy, Judgment, and the Good Samaritan

Okay, look at James chapter two here. James chapter two, and verse thirteen. Here's a, here's a summary for you. There's not, there's no practical summary anywhere else, anywhere near to this. One of the great fathers in the church, uh, Chris Austin said, Dost thou desire to receive mercy?

Then show mercy to thy neighbor. Which is only an echo, again, of what the scripture says. Look at, uh, James chapter two, and verse thirteen. For he shall have judgment without mercy, but hath shown no mercy, and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

He shall have judgment without mercy, but hath shown no mercy. Now, does that mean just on this level? Does it mean if I'm unmerciful to you, that it's just going to go around and come back and strike?

When I'm in a state of need, the same mercilessness that I viewed someone else's situation with, the same merciless conversation that I, uh, gossip I had about them, it's going to come back to me. And it won't just come back to me, it will come back with a compounded interest, or does it mean in my attitude to my fellow believer, that as merciless as I am with others, one day at the end of the journey, God is going to judge me with as little mercy that I have had in judging other people.

Now that, that's pretty tough, isn't it? He shall have judgment without mercy, but hath shown no mercy, and mercy rejoiceth against judgment. The question is this, what, what if somebody that you've dealt with, you know that, uh, okay, they've done something wrong, they've defrauded you, they've done some other thing, and they get into a bottleneck where, where you have the power to them.

Now, what do you say? You say, well, I'm going to be real just about this, boy, I think it's about time this thing was put straight. Or are you going to take again the other side and say, well, look, they're all fallible, we all make mistakes.

Now, it's not that we're going to cover it up soon, because love is just as well as merciful. But, you know, it all depends not, it's not what you do, it's not what you say so much, it's, it's how you do it, that really matters.

Think of a classic case. You remember the story where, uh, that David said he was hunted by Saul like a partridge? You see, these are the things on the roadside, the quail, and they don't have much defense, they're certainly not eagles, they don't have great big claws, they don't have big beaks to compare something else, they're, they're pretty helpless things.

And David says, well, I was just a kind of a refugee, I had a handful of people, Saul had his big armies, Saul had all the power, Saul had all the authority, Saul had sent out his watchmen, everybody's looking behind every rock trying to find me.

And, uh, I don't know how smart he, how he did it. But remember, he managed to go into a cave. I think he knew the track, you know, there weren't many roads in those days, in fact, there hadn't been any, but they were just beaten paths over the mountain, and, and maybe he'd stayed there in that cave before, and, uh, he goes in the cave and says, well, we'll have a nice quiet night here.

And before long, he hears the chomping of feet, and he looks out, and who comes in but his greatest enemy, King Saul. And Saul got down, I don't know whether he had any score, or what in the world he had, but he got down there, and before long he was tired out, he went to sleep, and his soldiers went to sleep.

And all the other guys here, David said, there you are, you see, I can imagine them saying, you see how the Lord delivered him into your hand? This is the night, get rid of him. I say, that's what he's going to do to you tomorrow if he catches you, and here you've got him asleep, just go up and sleep yourself.

But what did David do? David was already anointed. The minister of King Saul was passing. He could have rationalized it and said, well, I guess, I guess you're right, I guess, I guess, because I've already been anointed, this is intense, get rid of him, and he'll start all over again for the whole kingdom, it'd be better for everybody.

No, no, what did he do? Well, the king wore a tunic, so he goes up and gets hold of the tunic, and he cuts a nice piece off it. I'm sure he cut enough off to notice he'd missed it, he would miss it. And in the morning he was up there with the men across the valley, and they hollered and hollered and hollered, and somebody came out and said, your majesty, the man that we're after is not far away, there he is, he's hollering with the rest of his men.

Come out, come out, and bring your, bring your bodyguard with you. Now, look, who's in this? Do you remember the scripture says that they, or they put purple, a robe of purple on Jesus, it says there were two men, a rich man and a poor man.

The poor man died and was carried, I like that. The rich man died and was buried, they knew the difference. But the rich man lived in purple and fine linen every day. You know, I think sometimes you read the Bible as though it says that this man changed his coat and he kind of jumped on his camel and went to see his robot to see what was inside.

Or this woman made a garment or something. You ever realize, you know, the length of the tabernacle in the wilderness, it had walls say, I don't know the exact height, say six feet, and they were made of linen.

And every thread was put in by hand, ever thought of that? There's no machinery. They made frames and they put that, they put that stuff in, it must have taken years and years. The same was true when you, when you bought a piece of cloth.

And only wealthy people had cloth that was dyed. I remember being in North India once and I wanted to go in Nepal just to say I'd been in, so we crossed the bridge, if it was a bridge. It was kind of shaky and looked like old railroad ties and rushing river underneath, you know, you kept your head up and walked like this, you kept looking down and up.

But we went in, as we went in there was a man, he, he counted as more than about five feet, and he had a sack on his back, which was about three feet above his head. And he had a band around his head, and the sack was, was fitted like this into his back, right into the pit of his back like this, and it was leaning back, and this strap went round his forehead onto the sack, and he was coming down with a strap in his hand.

And the man that with me said, well, there's a, there's a fellow that has a, a real burden, hasn't he? I said, yes, he has. How far will he have carried that? Oh, I should say, let's see, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty miles.

A hundred and fifty miles? How much will it weigh? Oh, I think a hundred and twenty pounds, maybe. Well, the man doesn't weigh a hundred and twenty pounds. How does he carry it up? Why, why is the sack so big?

Because it's filled with a, with a kind of lichen. It's a flower that grows on the rocks, way up on the hills, and he has to strangle on his hands and knees like going on those peaks, and he takes off all the different coloured flowers, and he presses them into that sack, they dry, and he puts them into the sack, and then he has a hundred and twenty miles to walk.

You know, he starts off, he starts off sitting on a rock. A fellow helps him to put this thing into the pit of his back. He puts a rope around with a band here. He doesn't hold it with his hands, and just before he gets up, they put a rock on top of this huge hundred and twenty pounds that he has.

They put another rock weighing forty or fifty pounds, and then they help the man to stand up, and then they, they, they let him walk, you know, they see he walks all right for a while, and he goes for a while, and then when his legs begin to ache, he shakes like that, and loses the leg off, the other fifty pounds, and he looks, he's got nothing on his back.

He changes over to another set of muscles, and he walks all that way. But this is the only way they know how to die things. Now they must have known that in the scripture, because remember Libya was a cellar of purple.

But each man that died, he, he, he had purple. It was a distinctive sign. They had class distinctions then as they have now. But again, you see, in the, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, you can really bear burdens.

I don't care if it's ten times bigger than that man had in the, spiritual sense. The thing that eats us up, I don't think it's mental problem so much. It's, it's where are we in our, our, our spiritual relationship.

If you have no inward thoughts, if you find it's very easy now. It used to be easy to get irritated. It used to be easy to show anger. It used to be easy to show opposition. But now you find there's a tremendous reversal of that, and you just find it's as easy to be forgiving.

It's as easy to be gentle. It's easy to be kind. Now Saul had a garment on that I'm sure was well-dyed. And as a man stood at the other side of the valley in the morning in the light, and he said, hey, whose is this?

Whose is this? Who? This. Well, shouldn't that man be put to death that fell asleep watching the king? We're supposed to be guarding the most amazing men in the world. The men with the most power. Look, I came into your bedroom last night.

I came into your sleeping quarters. You see my sword? I could have put it through your heart. I could have slit your throat. You delivered it into my hands, but I showed mercy. Well, that's already our kind of mercy, isn't it?

Daniel, Joseph, and God’s Promotion

What about the other case? You know, there are two perfect characters in the Old Testament, as far as I understand it. One is Daniel. I, I think it's beautiful to read the story of Daniel. Have a read it later if you haven't read it.

But even the, the, the God, that the man was a heathen God, and he lived like the devil. And so did his wife. And yet, she said, in, in trouble. You know, when they couldn't solve the, the mystery of the writing on the wall.

When the king was having nightmares. Oh, she said, there is a man in the nation in whom the Spirit of the Holy God lives. Isn't that something? That in a heathen court, they recognized there was a man with the Holy Spirit of God inside of him.

Well, that ought to be true of us. I remember a place called Doncaster in England, and we were out cycling out there when we were, we were not too old. And, and here was a bank, and we said, what, what's inside of that place?

And we, we climbed up, and there was a kind of a muddy hole, or a pond, something like that. You know, the pond when you go down 16 past David Higginson's, on the right, there's a, a lake. It's only two or three feet deep.

Excuse me. And just now, the water's literally, the pads are coming up. And soon, you'll have those big white flowers on top of all that scum. Horrible. And yet, they show their beauty better, because they're framed in all that rottenness, all that corruption, all that water that looks as black as ink.

Well, isn't that why God put us in this world? Isn't it that God wants to show his grace through us, in the same way? Daniel is a character that's referred to, twice at least, by the heathen queen, as a man in whom the Holy God lives, the Spirit of the Holy God.

And the other perfect character is Joseph. Joseph lives up here. His father sends him down to Dothan to his brothers with some food. And they take him and put him down in a pit. And the Ishmaelites take him, and take him down into Egypt.

And when he gets down into Egypt, they put him down in a pit. And when he gets down in the pit, the bobbin pulls out of the pit, and leaves him. He prayed for his companions to get up, the baker and the butcher, whatever it was.

And they got out and left the man of God in jail. You'll never find a word of complaint in the life of the young fellow. I think he was about 17 years of age when he was dragged out of his home, when he was sold to the Ishmaelites.

And again, it's easy to sit in these nice jails and say, yeah, he was a slave. Poor guy, eh? Think of coke right now. All in one day. A slave. What do you think they did? Put him in an air-conditioned camel outfit?

They possibly tied him to a camel. He had to tread every inch of that road, picking up dust, spitting out the dust. It was phenomenal. And he has not, there's no word of complaint ever in the life, just as there's no word of complaint in the life of Jesus.

He's the most perfect example, I think, of Jesus in the Old Testament. And so he goes into prison. It's down, down, down, down into Dalton, down into a pit, down into Egypt, down into prison, down. The other guys get out, and he's left there, and he says nothing about it.

And then there comes a time of crisis, and God begins to put him up, and up, and up, and up, until when the king goes out of town, he says, well, here you are, here are the keys of the kingdom. You just look after the place.

Put a chain of gold around his neck. Look, here's a simple lesson. If you can learn it, it should help you for the next 60 years, if you're going to live. Well, I guess Daniel's going to live 60 more years, but Daniel, but anyhow, however long it was, 60 days, or 60 hours, or 60 what?

Do you know what? You don't have to do one thing in your life to promote yourself. All you have to do is obey God. If God wants you on the top run of the ladder, you'll get there if all hell opposes you.

And if God doesn't want you there, you'll get to the top, and you'll fall over the top. Neither men nor devils can keep you if the key is obedient. Now, I figure that he was 14 years of age when he was taken away from here, uh, 17 years of age, and he was 30 years of age when he came into power.

So was Jesus, so was John the Baptist. Again, in the Old Testament, a man could not be a high priest, he could be a priest at 25, he could not be a high priest until he was 30 years of age. Now what happened?

Well, here's the little boy that went through all the hardship and all the He lived as a slave, he was forgotten, and suddenly he gets into power, and then there's a strange situation. Uh, he has wisdom, he says, you know what I think?

We're getting some bumper crops, why don't we pull down our barns and build greater? Which is right, if God tells you, but not if you do it like the man in the New Testament. And so they built great storehouses.

He said he had 10 years, oh boy, he had vision, hadn't he? He had interpretation, he had foreknowledge. Those little boys had a lot of dreams, I don't know what they dreamt before they went to bed, but always dreaming those things in the Old Testament.

Come on ahead, Joseph, let me tell you something, um, I was dreaming the other night, there were some cows, my cows were going down to the water edge, and my cows were lean, very, very, very thin, and there were some fat cows there, and my cows not only drank water and grass, they went and ate up their cows.

And you know what? When they'd eaten them up, they were a lot fatter than when they started. That's the interpretation. So he gives the interpretation. And because of his wisdom, he was promoted up and up and up and up and up.