Genesis 42-43 | When Guilt Meets Grace

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

I can't remember the last time it really rained.

It was probably at one of my son's baseball games when we were playing baseball in the rain.

There's a little bit of bitterness there, you can hear that.

Not bitter for the rain, but having to stand out in the rain.

I don't know that we are officially in a drought yet in our region.

Maybe we are.

But there's a fascinating effect of droughts.

They often reveal what's been long covered by water.

For example, in 2022, the Mosul reservoir in Iraq was so low that archaeologists uncovered a 3,400-year-old city of the Mitanni Empire.

In 2023, Amazon rock coverings were uncovered when the Rio Negro River reached its lowest level in over 100 years.

A 2022 drought in Texas exposed the Paloxi Riverbed, revealing dinosaur inhuman tracts that had never been seen before.

So a drought does at least a couple of things at once.

It uncovers, it reveals what the water had covered over, and it drives everyone in that region looking for water somewhere else.

That's a good picture of what happens in Genesis 42 and 43.

A famine settles over the ancient world, such that the text tells us the whole world came to Joseph.

And it does the other element as well.

It drives people to look for food.

So on the one hand, we have an uncovering happening.

But what's uncovering?

What's uncovered in Genesis 42 and 43?

I would suggest to you this morning that the primary element uncovered in this drought, in this famine, is the guilt of Joseph's brothers.

It had lain submerged for more than 20 years.

And this famine uncovers it.

And they go searching at the same time for food that they cannot find at home.

And they have to go to the only place where food resides.

And in that place is the one man they had tried to forget for 20 years.

So place yourselves as best you can in the shoes of those ten brothers.

Maybe you can do it by remembering a time when you did something wrong and you felt that sense of overwhelming guilt.

I remember many times as a child where I would deliberately disobey my parents and feel this incredible weight as I waited for them to find out and what would happen when they found out.

It's that kind of thing that I think might help us to really get ourselves into the shoes of Joseph's ten brothers.

Thirteen years passed between Joseph being sold as a slave and his promotion to second in command over all of Egypt.

Seven years of plenty followed.

Abundance, crops overflowing such that they can gather in enough for seven more years after those seven years of abundance.

Now in Genesis 42, we are into those seven years of famine.

We're not told how far.

We're just told that there has been enough time past where people are looking for food.

And they are not only looking for food, they have to travel to find food.

The promise God made to Abraham that his offspring would become a great nation and bring blessing to the whole earth is already in effect as the world comes to Joseph for food.

In many ways, here, a son of Jacob, a son of Abraham, is serving as the savior of the world.

At the same time, that promise is in danger.

If this family does not survive the famine, God's promise has nowhere left to go.

But it's helpful for us to remember, before we get down that trail too far, that the text of Genesis wasn't written for general publication.

That is, Moses, when he wrote this down, didn't write it to send off to a publishing house to be published worldwide.

He wrote it to be read and understood by the second generation of Israelites that escaped out of Egypt as they're getting ready to cross the Jordan River into the Promised Land.

So that generation had spent 40 years wandering in the desert watching their parents' generation die off in the wilderness under God's discipline for their lack of faith.

And that surviving generation, now being readied by Moses and Joshua, need to know whether or not God's discipline meant that God's promises were still valid, or whether God was done with them.

This story answers that need.

So this morning we're in Genesis 42 and 43, and in these chapters, God exposes the guilt of his people with undeserved grace as he moves to save them.

So we have several components taking place at the same time.

We have an exposure of guilt.

We have grace being bestowed, and we have salvation happening.

This ancient account instructs us today about our common pattern to hide our guilt.

And how God continues to fulfill his saving purposes through his grace to us.

So as we consider Genesis 42 first, we see the impact of the massive famine on Jacob's family in Canaan.

It's here that we learn that God sometimes exposes the guilt that we refuse to confess.

Genesis 42 begins in a fascinating way.

We learn that Jacob has heard through the grapevine that there's grain for sale in Egypt.

But his sons are just standing there looking at each other.

What are you doing?

They're doing nothing about their situation.

And so Jacob tells them in verse 2 go down and buy grain so that we may live and not die.

What a fatalistic attitude.

No, I don't think it's fatalistic, actually.

I think that's there to tell us how severe the need for food is.

This famine is genuinely severe.

So ten sons go.

Benjamin, the youngest, stays home.

Because Jacob says he's already lost the son he he loved from Rachel, and he's not willing to risk the other son.

So the ten brothers must go to the Egyptian governor to buy the grain they need.

We know, we know that that man is Joseph, but they have no clue.

How could they?

They sold him as a slave to traders who go all over the ancient world twenty years ago.

They bow down to Joseph.

And as they do, Joseph's dream from twenty years earlier comes true.

Verse 9 tells us that Joseph remembered those dreams.

The brothers still have no idea what's going on.

Joseph, though, takes this strange route.

He accuses his brothers of being spies.

Now, in our modern way of thinking, that sounds strange.

Maybe at best it sounds unkind and unfair.

At worst, maybe we would say it sounds unchristian.

But before we argue that, we need to understand the portrait that Moses is painting.

The accusation that Joseph makes against his brothers is a way for him to keep them there, to press them, to bring what they have buried out into the open.

He locks all ten of them up in the same cell for three days to test their hearts.

This is not about vengeance.

It's about uncovering the reality that resides in his brothers' hearts.

And on the third day, we're told that some recognition finally occurs.

And that recognition is one of guilt.

They're alone in the cell, the ten brothers, after Joseph tells them that he fears God and he's made a plan for them to prove themselves to him.

But Joseph is acting like an Egyptian.

He has to, he's the Egyptian governor.

And so there's an interpreter in between them, making the ten brothers think that Joseph doesn't understand their native language.

And so they go on talking.

And they say out loud what they've apparently tried to forget for 20 years.

Verse 21 makes it extremely clear to us.

They say, truly, we are guilty.

Specifically concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us and we would not listen.

Now this is fascinating.

Why, 20 years later, in this particular situation, would they feel guilty about that sin 20 years earlier?

Why not be guilty about something that happened last week or a month ago?

I would suggest to you it's because they've spent 20 years trying to cover and bury this guilt.

They've not been able to.

Because Joseph could now be angry and have justification for mistreating his brothers.

They've confessed, and he's heard it.

Instead, he recognizes this is a confession of guilt that I've been wanting to hear.

And it moves him to weeping.

The same God who had sent Joseph to Egypt and had been with Joseph all along has been at work in the ten brothers.

He wouldn't let their guilt stay buried.

So what felt to them in that moment, imprisoned by the Egyptians, what felt to them like unfair treatment, because they are innocent of any guilt of spying, was God's way of eliciting confession for a buried guilt.

And in some small way, at least, it shows us that we can trust God with our mistreatment.

Does it not?

That even in our mistreatment, God is doing something.

And God, in time, in his time, will make all things right.

Joseph's made a plan.

Prove yourselves to me by bringing your brother.

And just to make sure you come back, I'm keeping one of your brothers.

He feeds their families, he sends grain back with them.

And on their way home, one of the brothers opens his sack and his heart drops.

Because right there in the top of the sack, in the mouth of the sack, is another sack of silver.

He recognizes it because it's the same sack he brought his money in.

He has no idea how it got there.

He probably remembers handing it over to the Egyptian official who received payment.

All he knows is that the money he thought he had spent for the grain is now somehow back in his hand and it terrifies all of them.

Their hearts fail to them, fail them, and they turn and look at each other with a common recognition.

What has God done to us?

Notice that they don't put the blame for this in the hand of the Egyptians.

They put this in God's hands.

Here again, Moses is letting us see a little bit behind the curtain, telling us that God is at work in the whole affair.

And even the ten brothers sense his involvement.

At this point, they think it's against them, but they still sense his involvement.

What the brothers cannot see is that God did something kind in bringing their guilt out into the open.

Even though all they felt was accusation and mistreatment and judgment.

And guilt does that to us, doesn't it?

Guilt cannot always tell the difference between the pain of discipline and its kindness.

It's hard sometimes.

When they get home and they tell everything to Jacob, minus the parts that made them look bad, of course.

They open up their bags and the nine other bags contain money.

The exact amount that they took.

And now the fear of the ten brothers is taken on by Jacob as well.

He says to them, Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more.

And now you want to take Benjamin.

All this has come against me.

Notice Jacob's perception.

It's all against me.

The world is against me.

You're against me.

God is against me.

Now, in response, Reuben, the firstborn, offers his own two sons as collateral, which helps nobody.

And Jacob simply refuses.

Benjamin will not go down to Egypt.

If anything happens to him, Jacob says, You will bring down my gray hairs to Sheol, to the tomb, to the grave.

Here's a father who has walked with God much of his life.

Yes, he's had his valleys and his mountaintop experiences, his ups and downs.

His life has been like a spiritual roller coaster.

But overall, he's been renamed Israel by God himself.

He's wrestled with God.

And he walks with a limp as a continual reminder of that.

But in this moment, he cannot see past his own grief.

He thinks God is against him.

And many of us know that feeling, right?

We know that feeling.

And like us, Jacob could not be more wrong.

The moments when we feel that God is against us are the moments that God is working.

In this account, God is working at that very moment to keep Jacob's sons alive, to keep Jacob himself alive.

He is keeping Simeon safe, and he's preparing a reunion and a future that Jacob cannot even begin to imagine, all while exposing the brothers' buried guilt.

Now think about why Moses would think that this is important for that second generation out of Egypt to consider, to meditate, to ponder.

They've just endured 40 years of discipline in the desert.

Going in circles, waiting for God's promise, wondering if God's ever going to do what he promised to do.

Their parents had been disciplined, and most of them were dead.

It would have been easy to read that discipline the way Jacob reads this situation as evidence that God has turned against the family.

How can we know that God is for us?

But Moses wants them to see what discipline is actually for.

It was never meant to end the covenant promises.

God's discipline is meant to expose the sin of their hearts and turn them back to him.

Their parents wandering in the desert for 40 years, like these brothers' imprisonment, was aimed at confession, at faith, trust, and reconciliation to God, not at destruction.

But it's easy to see our own hardships the way Jacob sees his, isn't it?

A job falls through.

A diagnosis comes back in a way that we don't want it to return.

A friendship fractures.

Someone stabs us in the back.

A drought destroys crops.

A car accident takes a loved one.

And when we get thrown into those uncontrollable circumstances, our instinct is often to conclude that God has turned against us.

If nothing else, this account tells us we have to consider a second possibility.

God may be orchestrating events to bring something that we have buried back into the light so that it can finally be confessed instead of somehow managed or controlled.

So looked at differently, our painful circumstances may be evidence of God's kindness and grace to bring us to the place he wants us to be.

Which leads us, I think, into a second point for this text.

And that is that God may use circumstances to test the place of our hearts.

Look again at what Joseph actually does with his brothers.

Because Moses is painting a very detailed and careful portrait.

We don't see Joseph lashing out in vengeance.

Now it may sound like that, right?

When he when he kind of puts on an air of authority and defensiveness for the nation of Egypt.

He has to.

That's his role.

But that's just setting up the test that he puts before them.

In fact, in chapter 42, verse 16, he uses that word.

He says, I'm going to test your words.

All of this is to set up the test of the brothers' hearts.

Step by step, he places these ten men into experiences that he himself endured.

And he watches to see what kind of men they have become.

You know all of the descriptions of character, right?

The explanations of character, like character is what spills out when you've been bumped.

Jacob's bumping his brothers.

To see what spills out.

What kind of men are they today?

Is there any difference today than when they sold me into slavery?

He puts all of them under guard for three days when they come to Egypt, and he gives them a taste of the same helplessness that he experienced.

Joseph was sold for pieces of silver, and now he has silver secretly returned to their sacks in sort of this ironic way of having the price of their crime coming back with them.

In fact, riding all the way home on the donkeys back to Canaan with them.

Every move that Joseph makes is a recreation of sorts of what he endured, of what they did to him.

And the very last element pushes on a sore spot, the most sensitive sore spot of all.

He demands that they bring Benjamin, their youngest brother, the other son of Rachel, and the new favorite of their father.

Think about what Joseph asks of them.

Because this has happened once before.

Once before, as we began this study back in chapter 37, their father loved one son more than all of the rest, and these ten men could not stand it.

So much so that they faked his death and sold that favorite son into slavery.

Now Joseph arranges a similar situation where the remaining favored younger brother is put at risk again.

Will they protect Benjamin?

Or will they hand him over the way they handed Joseph over to save their own necks, to make life better for them?

The whole test is designed to answer that question, to get at the core of their hearts.

Keeping Simeon behind is a part of it as well.

One brother stays in chains in Egypt while the others go home to their father.

It's nearly the same scene as 20 years earlier.

One brother left behind, and the rest walking back to Jacob to find a story to tell to him.

And Joseph is testing their character, their hearts to see.

Are you the same brothers?

In chapter 43, when they finally come back, the test reaches its height.

As Joseph invites them into his own home for a meal.

They're seated at a table that's separate from Joseph, and that was cultural, because Egyptians didn't eat with Hebrews.

But it's arranged very carefully.

They are arranged in order of their birth.

From oldest to youngest.

It seems in the text of chapter 2043 to unsettle those brothers.

And none of them could figure out how did how did this happen?

How does anybody know that this is how we were born?

And then to top it all off, Benjamin's plate at that meal comes back with five times more food.

What's up with that?

It's testing their hearts.

Because the favored son, even at that meal, is honored above all the others right in front of their eyes.

All while Joseph watches.

And this time in chapter 43, nothing happens.

There's no jealousy, there's no plotting, there's no whispering in the corner.

The text, in fact, says they ate and drank with merriment with Joseph.

That's how the chapter ends.

They had a good time with this Egyptian governor.

The very thing that once tore this family apart now happens again.

A brother favored over all the others.

But there's no resentment this time, instead, there's gladness.

So the test has done its work.

These are not the same ten men who stood around a pit and argued about the price of their brother.

Oh, they're the same physical men.

But something's changed in their hearts.

Something's different.

And I think that shows us that God will sometimes bring us face to face with circumstances that once drew out the worst in us.

You know, the old temptation comes back again?

The one that you failed over and over and over again?

Or the one that you failed once big time and you just can't get the memory of it out of your head?

The relationship that once stirred up bitterness in us, the the slight against us that made us lash out in anger and hatred?

The circumstance that once humbled us so much that we realize how far we have to go in our spiritual life to grow up.

It's those kinds of moments that God asks, I think, a gracious kind of question.

Has anything changed?

Has anything changed?

Testing like this is not God trying to catch us in a trap.

It's God mercifully revealing if and how his grace has reshaped our hearts.

Finally, we see that God shows his grace before we are reconciled, and he reconciles us fully through his son.

Now go back and notice the thread woven through the whole test.

All the while Joseph is testing his brothers, he's kind to them.

He's in a position of authority.

He could have thrown them in prison and tossed the key and refused to feed them.

He could have sent them home without grain to starve to death.

Joseph is in the position of God in their lives.

All the while he's showing them kindness before anything had happened, before they had been reconciled, before they even knew who he was.

The second time when they returned to Egypt, they're certain that the silver that they found in their bags was going to be used against them to enslave them.

They're scared to death.

They're terrified.

And instead, Joseph Steward meets them at the door with a sentence they probably never expected to hear.

Shalom.

Peace to you.

Don't be afraid.

Your God and the God of your father has given you treasure in your sacks.

Simeon's brought out to them, their feet are washed, they're seated and fed, and their fear is calmed, and none of it's earned.

They haven't done anything to deserve it yet.

All they've done is confess that they're guilty.

This is even before the final test in chapter 44.

And yet the grace comes to them anyway.

And I think that's worth meditating on if you follow Christ.

Because it's how God often deals with us.

Psalm 23 tells us that his mercy pursues us.

He doesn't wait until our guilt is resolved and our repentance is complete before he begins to show us kindness.

His mercy chases us down.

He calms our fears before we've sorted ourselves out.

He set the table for us while we're uncertain of how things are going to turn out.

And behind Joseph's grace stands the larger faithfulness of God.

His great faithfulness, as we've sung this morning.

Because long before Joseph was even born, God had told Abraham exactly how this would go.

He said to Abraham in Genesis 15, know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that's not theirs, and they will be slaves there.

And they will be afflicted for 400 years.

To put that in perspective, America is how old?

250?

We got another 150 years to go.

But I, God says, will bring judgment on the nation that they serve.

So the famine that drives ten guilty men down to Egypt isn't a detour in God's plan.

It's God's promise arriving on time and on schedule.

Every bit of hard, painful providence, whether we're talking about Joseph's pit in Canaan, his slavery, the false accusations, the famine itself, all of those hardships are carrying God's word towards its fulfillment.

Friends, God never improvises.

The circumstances that feel most like abandonment are often the very ones that God is using to keep his own word, to demonstrate his own faithfulness.

Generations after Joseph, another son was handed over by his brothers.

Silver was paid for him.

And like Joseph, the brother they rejected was lifted up out of his suffering and given all authority.

And his circumstances led to the greatest of all salvations.

He is the one who said that he wasn't mere grain to feed your body.

He said, I am the bread of life.

And whoever comes to me will not hunger.

Whoever believes in me will never thirst.

This is where these two chapters of Genesis point.

Joseph fed his guilty brothers before they ever reconciled to him.

And in doing so, he pointed to a greater brother who feeds guilty people with pained consciences.

And he feeds them with himself and reconciles them to God.

Now Joseph's brothers rehearsed their guilt in a prison cell.

And they didn't know at that point in time that the one man who could forgive them was already standing in the room.

They had no clue.

We rehearse our guilt not recognizing that the one who can forgive us is always present.

But our news is better still for our guilt because the one we have sinned against has already borne the penalty for it at the cross.

And he stands ready to feed us himself.

So if you're if you're carrying something that you buried, the way these brothers buried theirs, that you've been trying to forget.

Whether it was twenty years ago or twenty days ago, hear what Joseph's brothers say to you.

The exposure of your guilt is never the end of the matter with God.

He brings your guilt and your sin into the light so that he can deal with it.

And he deals with it to reconcile you first to himself.

He did it for ten guilty brothers in a foreign country, and he's done it for once for all in his son, who is the bread of life.

If I can give you one reason why you should take the text of John 6, 35 and act on it.

That whoever comes to Christ shall not hunger, and whoever believes in him shall not thirst.

If I can give you one reason, it's because the hand that exposes our sin is the same hand that saves us.

Moses wanted Israel to trust in him as they're about to cross the Jordan River into God's promises.

And the New Testament shows us how God worked to save us so that we would trust him with what needs to be exposed in us as he continues to display his faithfulness to his own word.

Trust in him.

Jesus is the worthy brother who, even though he exposes us, he saves us.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we lift you up and commit our hearts and our lives to you.

You are the only and ultimate one worthy of our trust.

And Lord, as much as I'm able, I come and confess our sins to you.

My sin, our sin as a fellowship, and even broadly, a sin as of the human race that we have rejected you.

We we stand guilty of selling you, our brother.

We had a part to play in our sin, en nailing you to the cross.

But you, our brother, paid the price and gave us treasure in return by reconciling us to the Father.

And so now, Lord, we give you thanks by lifting up our voices to give you praise forever and ever.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

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