11 Genesis Sproul

Joseph as a Study in Irony and Effective Management

Now, in this lesson from the book of Genesis, we're going to consider the portrait of Joseph. I think the story of Joseph is one of the most fascinating stories in all of the Old Testament. It's a study in irony, isn't it?

And there's something very, very contemporary about the life of this man. In fact, Joseph might be a good person to study as a case study at Harvard in effective management. Because of all of the personages that appear in the pages of the Old Testament, this man, Joseph, perhaps distinguishes himself more than anyone else as an effective manager.

In fact, he's so effective in administration and as a manager that he elicits repeatedly the negative reaction of his peers. This man and his story is the story of a victim, an innocent victim, one who suffers repeatedly because of jealousy.

We learn that very, very early in the story, don't we, that Joseph is introduced to us as one of the younger sons of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons from whom we derive the names ultimately of the twelve tribes of Israel.

And the two youngest boys were Joseph and who else? Benjamin. Now Jacob had twelve sons, but he had several wives. And the thing that was distinctive about Benjamin and Joseph was that they were born in Jacob's old age, and they both were born from the same woman.

So all of the brothers who were brothers had the same father, but they did not have the same mother, so then there's a certain sense in which they're half-brothers. But Joseph and Benjamin are full brothers.

And Joseph, we're told, was the apple of Jacob's eye. And the reason we're told is that because he was the child of Jacob's old age. But favor was bestowed upon Joseph, and he was of a good build, we're told, and handsome.

He was bright and able and capable, but he was also a dreamer. Not a dreamer in the poetic sense, but in the spiritual sense. He had dreams, and he had the gift of interpreting dreams, and he exercised this gift while still a young boy in the presence of his brothers.

And the dream that he had indicated that his brothers someday would fall down and prostrate themselves before him. Now as Joseph reveals that story, we sort of catch a note in the text that he is doing it without guile.

It's not like he's parading himself in front of his brothers and bragging about this future prophecy that he's just been given in terms of interpreting the dreams. But he himself is caught up in it. He's surprised by it.

He explains it to his brothers, and he assumes that the brothers will rejoice in the good news. Instead, they're furious, and their fury is intensified by the favor that Jacob shows to Joseph by having a richly ornamental robe made especially for this one.

The children learn this story in Sunday school about Joseph and his coat of many colors. Well, whether it was many colors or just richly ornamental is a matter of difficulty of interpreting the text, but in any case, he has this exquisite cloak that is given to him by his father.

And again, instead of rejoicing in their brother's good fortune, the brothers rise up in fury, born of jealousy. And you know the story, what happens. How Jacob sends Joseph out to find his brothers. They see him coming.

They plot against him, and the first thing they do is they take him and throw him down into an empty cistern, a well out in the desert, and they are going to leave him there to die. But, of course, that wasn't the end of Joseph, was it?

His brothers, led by Reuben, who was having guilt pangs about this, said, we don't have to kill him to satisfy our revenge. That's not a good thing to do. The other brothers were in the conspiracy. They said, no, let's take his coat, put some animal's blood on it, and we'll take it back to our father and tell him that a wild animal killed our brother.

But Reuben came up with an alternative plan. They saw a caravan of traders, Midianite traders, and they said, rather than kill him, let's sell him, and that way we can make some money out of the deal as well.

So the story progresses. Joseph is sold to the Midianite caravan traders for twenty shekels of silver, and the brothers still concoct this story to go back to Jacob and say that their brother had been killed.

Joseph in Potiphar’s House and Prison

Well, the Midianite traders are on their way down into Egypt. They go down into Egypt, and as soon as they get to Egypt, they sell Joseph as a slave to a captain of the Egyptian guard whose name was Potiphar, and he is just one of many slaves that are owned by Potiphar.

But even as a slave, he manifests this gift of management, and he becomes so effective as a slave that in a very short period of time Potiphar keeps elevating him through the ranks of the slaves, and finally Potiphar puts Joseph in charge of all of his business enterprises, and in fact he becomes the steward over Potiphar's house, so that now all of Potiphar's affairs are being managed by Joseph, and the Scriptures tell us that Joseph again excels.

But he gets in trouble. What happens? Potiphar has everything going so well for him under the management of Joseph that he's taking time to go out, go golfing, to go on vacations, and he's not spending a whole lot of time around the house, and Potiphar's wife has an eye for Joseph, and again she sees that he's handsome and strong and desirable, and so she comes to him overtly, crassly, says right out, come to bed with me.

What does Joseph do? He says, no, because to do so would be a sin against God. Now hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Potiphar's wife doesn't give up, and repeatedly Joseph resists the advances, and then he makes it a practice not even to be present in the house when she's around.

But on one occasion where he happens to be nearby, she comes out and virtually attacks him, and he flees not for his life but for his integrity, and when he flees she grabs his cloak, and when he runs she screams rape.

She's so furious at the rejection that she accuses Joseph of trying to rape her. So when Potiphar comes home, what does he do? He has Joseph thrown into prison. No sooner is Joseph thrown into prison, but he's not just thrown into the general prison, but his prison is a special prison.

It is the prison that contains political prisoners. It is the prison that is reserved for the prisoners of the king, and just as he is thrown in the prison, he meets two other men who had just been thrown in the prison.

One had been the cup bearer to the king. The other was the king's personal baker, and you know what happens. Joseph isn't in jail very long until pretty soon the warden of the king's prison recognizes in Joseph this unbelievable ability to manage, to be an administrator.

And so in the prison, Joseph moves up the ranks from just the rank and file prisoner to a trustee to a warden's assistant, and pretty soon the warden is letting the prison being run by Joseph. In the meantime, the cup bearer and the baker have these weird dreams, and they can't understand what the dreams mean, and Joseph tells them what the dreams mean, and he explains to the cup bearer that his dream means that in three days he's going to be restored to favor to the king and go back to the old position that he once held.

That made the baker excited. He said, What about my dream? And Joseph says, Your dream means that in three days you're going to go back to the king too, but the king's going to hang you, and that's going to be it for you.

But he tells the cup bearer, When you go back to the king's table, remember me. Tell the king about me. What happened? Three days later the cup bearer comes back and is restored to favor. Three days later the baker is hanged by the king, and the cup bearer forgets about Joseph, and so for two more years Joseph is in the prison.

Then finally the king, the Pharaoh, has a disturbing dream, a repeated dream with different images about fat cows and skinny cows and plump grain and withered grain, and all of the court magicians and priests can't help the king figure out the dream.

Finally, the memory of the cup bearer is stimulated. He said, Ha! I remember a young Hebrew who has a way about interpreting dreams, and so the Pharaoh has a meeting with Joseph, and what does Joseph do?

He interprets the dreams and tells him that there is going to be seven years of abundance in the harvest of Egypt, followed immediately by the most severe seven years of famine in the history of the nation.

So when the king hears this, he releases Joseph from prison, and in a very short period of time Joseph is raised through the ranks of the imperial administration and finally reaches the level of what would amount to be the prime minister of the country, and he manages the Egyptian program of storing up resources so that when the famine would come, the people in Egypt would have enough food to make it through the seven years.

And so the great storehouses of Egypt were built under Joseph's administration. Now here is incidentally one of those places where the patterns of history recorded in the Old Testament intersect secular history.

We know that in fact there was a severe famine around this time in Egypt, and that the Egyptians had the foresight to establish huge storage places, like grain silos, to store up the food for the eventuality of the famine.

In fact, they were called store cities. We read about the store cities of Pythas and Ramesses in the book of Exodus later on, and we asked this question, how did the Jews ever get in Egypt in the first place?

And the story of the Bible starts out there with Abraham up there in Ur of the Chaldees, and God calls him out of there and takes him to this promised land, and they finally come into the land of Canaan, and the patriarchs are there.

How did the Jews ever get from Canaan to Egypt so that there could be an exodus in the first place? Well, it all had to do with this famine that Joseph was preparing to endure. Well, the famine comes, and it hits the whole ancient area, and who's feeling it?

The people up in Canaan. And here is Jacob, an old man with his sons, and they don't have any food, but the word comes to them that there's all kind of foodstuffs stored up in Egypt, and so he sends his sons down to Egypt in order to try to secure some kind of emergency food relief from the Egyptians.

And so they come to the royal palace, and they get an audience with the prime minister. Who's the prime minister? Joseph, their brother that they hadn't seen in years. And as soon as they come in with their request, Joseph recognized them immediately, but they did not recognize him.

And in the discussions that ensued, Joseph was careful not to reveal himself through his own voice. His appearance had obviously changed. His dress style was different. He looked like an Egyptian. They had long since forgotten about their brother.

They figured he was dead by now or something. So they never made the connection, and the thing that would have given Joseph away would have been his voice. So Joseph speaks in Egyptian and speaks to his brothers through an interpreter, and he feigns anger and accuses these Israelites of being spies.

You've just come down here to spy out the land to see what our strengths and weaknesses are and all of that, and they say, No, no, no. We're just hungry people. We want some food. He keeps accusing them of all these diabolical and treacherous motives, and so he puts them to a test.

He asks them sort of indirectly about their background, and so he's able to get answers to his questions about whether his father is still alive and whether his real brother, Benjamin, is alive because they didn't bring Benjamin with them.

Jacob wouldn't let Benjamin go, you remember, because he was too young, and Jacob was all concerned. He said, I've already lost one son. I can't bear the thought of losing the other young boy, and so Jacob kept Benjamin at home.

So Joseph says, How am I going to know that you are not spies and that you're telling me the truth, that you really have a young brother and all of that back up there? He said, I'll tell you what I'll do.

He said, You go back and bring that brother, and if you show up with your brother, then I'll know you're telling me the truth. But in the meantime, I'm only going to release you while I keep one of your people hostage, and Simeon is left behind as a hostage, and the rest of the brothers are sent back.

But what does Joseph arrange to add some more irony to the story? He sneaks silver into their traveling bags to make it look like they were thieves, and they're halfway home, and they're opening up their duffel bags and everything, and they say, Oh, my, everybody has to find the king's silver.

And there he said, That guy's never going to believe us. Now, you know, he's going to kill us. Now what are we going to do? We have to go back and tell our father that they think we're spies. We left Simeon back down there, and they want us to bring Benjamin, and we've got this hot silver in our bags.

So the story is they go back to Jacob, and Jacob says, you know, he's renting his garments. He's all upset. We're Simeon, and they say, Look, we have to go down there and go back. We're all going to starve to death, but we have to take Benjamin with us.

And Jacob says, Not on your life. I'm not letting…. I've already lost Joseph. Now I've lost Simeon. You want me to risk Benjamin? No way. And who is it? Reuben again or Judah? I forget which one that stands up.

I think it's Reuben that comes up and says, Hey, I will be responsible for this. You can kill my children if we don't pull this off. And he talks his father finally into letting them come back, and they come back with double the amount of silver so that they can prove that they weren't trying to steal the king's silver.

They're going to return the silver twofold. So they get there. Let me read the section that we find when they meet again. The first time that Joseph saw his brothers, in the midst of the conversation he abruptly excused himself because he couldn't stand the emotion.

He couldn't stand the drama, and he went out into his private chambers and wept. Then he got himself back together and came back and carried off the charade. Now, the second meeting, they have returned, and Benjamin is with them.

It's more than he can stand. And so we read in chapter 45 of Genesis,. Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that stood by him, and he cried out, Cause every man to go out from me. Now what he meant by that was all of my assistants, all of the soldiers, all of the Egyptians, I want all of you out of here.

I want to be left alone with these men from the north. And there stood no man with him while Joseph made himself known to his brothers. And he wept aloud, and the Egyptians and even those in the house of Pharaoh heard him wailing.

And Joseph said to his brothers, I am Joseph. Is my father still alive? But his brothers couldn't answer him because they were so troubled, terrified at Joseph's presence. And so Joseph said to his brothers, Come near to me, I pray you.

And they came near, and he said, I'm Joseph, your brother whom you sold into Egypt. Now don't be grieved or angry with yourselves that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. Here is the man who is the supreme victim of jealousy.

He is an innocent victim. His whole life is spent in prison or in exile in a strange and foreign land, cut off from his family, from the religion of his family, living in a pagan nation, most of the time, as I said, either in prison or as a slave.

How bitter would you be? Sometimes it does happen that innocent people are convicted and put into prison. We saw it on 60 Minutes not too long ago about a man who spent like seven years in prison for a rape he didn't commit.

And the issue when he got out was what? People in prison are going to say, I'm sorry. Maybe the state of Ohio gives some compensation, maybe $50 ,000, maybe $100 ,000. But he said, Who is going to give me back seven years of my life?

Life is a precious thing. Who wants to have seven years unjustly taken away from you? Joseph virtually has his whole adult life taken away from him. If ever a man had a legitimate basis for bitterness, it was Joseph.

Instead he said, Don't sweat it. Don't grieve about it because you didn't send me here. God sent me here to save your life. That's R .M .E. Later when he did meet his father, and his father is crying about it in the Great Reunion, the immortal lines are spoken, They meant it for evil, God meant it for, and Joseph could understand that.

The Providence of God in Joseph’s Suffering

What we have in this life of Joseph is the clearest example I can think of in all the Scripture of the doctrine of the providence of God that reveals to us in flesh and blood, not an abstract theory, what the sovereignty of God means in human history.

If Joseph dies in the cistern and is not sold to the Midianites, what happens? Well, he doesn't go to Egypt. He doesn't become prime minister of Egypt, and so when his brothers come down to get food, they don't meet Joseph.

They meet some other guy, but instead the brothers meet Joseph, and not only does Joseph provide the foodstuffs they're looking for to be spared from starvation, but he establishes a region of Egypt and invites all of the family of Jacob to migrate down into Egypt so that they can be fed the rest of their days, and so they settle in the land of Goshen.

And so all of a sudden the Jews move from the north down into Egypt, and not only they move down into Egypt, but then what? Then a couple of pharaohs later, the new pharaoh comes on the scene. He forgets all about the promises that Joseph made to his family, and he doesn't like the Jews, and so he takes these people and makes them his slaves.

And then, of course, they cry out and groan under their burdens, and God hears them, and He appears in a burning bush to this guy out in the desert, and Moses comes down, takes on the people. You have an exodus.

They go to Sinai. They receive the law. There they receive the whole instructions for the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, and when that's violated, the prophets come, and the prophets call them back to the original agreement that they made in the desert after the exodus, and when the law isn't fulfilled, an atonement is necessary for the people, and God becomes incarnate and comes to this world through the virgin's birth, and so on, and so that the whole history of redemption hangs on that cistern.

No cistern, no Egypt, see? No Egypt, no Moses. No Moses, no Ten Commandments, no Israel, no Jesus, no England, no United States of America, all of which ultimately trace its political history to a concept of law that was given to a bunch of semi-nomads out in the middle of the desert in the Mediterranean, all because some kid gets a coat, and his brothers are jealous about it.

You meant it for evil. God meant it for good. God sent Me here, is what He said, and in this story we see sovereignty. We see that human history is in the hands of the God who is concerned about the smallest details.