Genesis 37:1-36 | Lord of Dreams

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

Take your Bible with me to the book of Genesis.

We finished Jonah.

And now we're going to spend the rest of the summer walking through the life of Joseph.

Life of Joseph.

You're familiar with it.

I'm sure if you spend any time in church, any time reading your Bible or growing up in Sunday school, you know the life of Joseph.

What I want us to see, though, as we walk through the life of Joseph is what no one in the story of Joseph could have seen or known.

At the same time, it's something that draws us to understand and to trust in what we cannot see or know in our own stories.

Now, as we look at the life of Joseph, there's much that is foreign to us that the original readers would have picked up instantly.

So, for example, as it starts out in Genesis 37, verse 1 about Jacob, they would have known and understood as the second generation of Israelites out of Egypt.

Genesis 37:1

Oh, this is our story.

This is our family history.

This is our father Jacob.

They would have known all of the names, they would have understood all of the background, they would have been right immersed in it immediately.

We're not that way.

It takes us a little bit of time to get centered into, oh, this is what's going on.

Some of those things we'll point out along the way, but there's far too much in these chapters for us to look at in detail.

So what we're going to be doing over the next few weeks and a couple of months is during our scripture reading time, we will read the text.

Then we're going to come back and I'm going to do my best to give an overview of it.

We're going to be moving around a little bit, skipping around, not covering all of the details.

But that means if you have questions about some of the details, feel free to ask Stephen.

He'll be glad to answer those questions for you.

Truly, we would love to try to answer those questions.

But as we look at these things, my goal in these chapters is to help us understand what the author is wanting us to get.

And what he really wants us to get over all is the very end of the book.

Where Joseph says the whole point of his life, beginning in chapter 37 and ending in chapter 50, is that God sent him.

That's wonderful.

God sent him to save many people.

But when we look at the human side of that, it becomes somewhat difficult to grasp.

Because while God did send Joseph, God also then led him to endure many, many trials.

The 1989 song Trust His Heart by Babby Mason and Eddie Carswell was drawn from a Charles Spurgeon sermon.

The song's chorus says, God is too wise to be mistaken.

That's why we sing Christ, our wisdom, right?

God is too wise to be mistaken.

God is too good to be unkind.

So when you don't understand, when you don't see his plan, when you can't trace his hand, trust his heart.

That song suggests two essential understandings, truths, realities of the Christian life.

One is that God is sovereign and always acts in accordance with his character.

So if we believe the scriptures that say that God is essentially good, then everything that he does is good, even if it doesn't feel like it.

God is sovereign and always acts in accordance with his character.

The second understanding that that song communicates is that the human life can be hard and painful.

Those two points are more significant than any others as we begin this walk through the life of Joseph.

Joseph himself puts them together in chapter 50 in front of his brothers.

He identifies God's good purpose and the evil actions of his own brothers.

And we find our story as Christians in those same two details, don't we?

We experience life in a fallen world with all of its uncertainties, all of its trials, all of its sufferings, all of its pains, all of its uncertainties.

And in the process, we choose to obey God or disobey, to choose sin or to choose righteousness, to listen or to refuse to listen.

Yet all the while God is working out his purpose.

The unseen hand of God, leading all events to fulfill his purpose, is most clearly seen in Joseph's life.

But God is rarely in the foreground.

From chapter 37 of Genesis to chapter 50, God is in the background.

We don't see him very much.

But at the end, Joseph tells us even though you can't see him, he is actively in the foreground of your story all the time.

Now, Genesis 37 begins in a home that is already in trouble.

And the fault is the father's fault as much as anything else.

Jacob, you remember, had 12 sons from four different wives.

And he chose one of those sons for special standing.

And everyone could see it because he gave him a coat, right?

The coat that he gave to Joseph made his special standing obvious.

Now we call it a coat of many colors.

The fact of the matter is we don't really know what kind of coat it was.

We don't know what it looked like.

We don't know what it was shaped like.

Sometimes we think it was a long-sleeved robe, sometimes we think it was a many-colored robe.

The fact of the matter is we don't know what it looked like in reality.

The Hebrew word for Joseph's coat is the same word used in 2 Samuel 13, verse 18, for the garments worn by the royal daughters of David.

2 Samuel 13:18

So it's not something that identifies it as an affectionate gift from a father to his favorite son.

And nor is it a statement about Joseph's chosen gender or sexuality, as some might claim it to be today.

Instead, it's a public declaration about Joseph's standing and his distinction in the family.

And probably it came with a sense of implied authority, and honor.

And every single brother understood what it meant.

They hated him so deeply that verse 4 says they could not speak shalom to him.

They could not speak peaceably to him.

They couldn't speak a single peaceable word to their own brother.

So Jacob's favoritism of Joseph had destroyed the peace in his own household.

Jacob's favoritism was, we would call it today, a parenting failure.

He set the stage for what happens at the end of Genesis.

The resentment his sons carry toward their brother has been building, fueled by Jacob's decisions, and has now reached the point where civil conversation can't even occur in the family.

Shows us how showing favoritism can destroy a family.

And this is a family story.

If you look at chapter 37, verse 2, it says, These are the generations of Jacob.

That's Moses, the author's way of saying, here's the next stage of the family story.

This is the family story of Jacob.

Something to pick up on.

The story of Joseph is not primarily about Joseph.

It's primarily about Joseph's dad, who was a failure as a dad.

Jacob loved Joseph, but that love put a target on his son.

So comparison or differential treatments and other kinds of favoritism can form the atmosphere of a home.

The peace that God intends in a family gets broken by those kinds of choices.

So Joseph may have flaunted his own position.

It's likely he did.

The text seems to indicate that.

He didn't quite treat his brothers well.

He was a tattletale, for one.

Joseph had his own issues.

But our author makes this clear that this is Jacob's story, and this starts out as a result of Jacob's failures.

This home in Genesis 37 then is an image of the impact of sin on the world.

From the beginning of Genesis, Scripture shows people making choices that impact others.

Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and the rest of the world is sunk.

Cain murdered his brother Abel.

We see Noah, though, obeying God and saving the world.

Abraham obeyed and disobeyed God's commands.

Jacob himself was a cheat, a swindler, and an all-round rascal.

All throughout Scripture, human decisions have consequences.

But we also see God working through them and through the damage that they cause.

God brings about his purpose even though sin thrives.

And we see God's intent early on in chapter 37, when he reveals where the story is headed before anything bad happens.

Joseph has two dreams, verses 5 and verse 9.

And the first one, his brother's sheaves bow down to him.

Now, some of you might not know what a sheaf is.

If you take a bunch of grain stalks and you bind them together and you wrap a string around them, you can tie them up and stand them up.

So there's eleven of them.

And eleven of them bow down to another one.

The second one, there are the sun, the moon, and eleven stars bowing down to them.

And Joseph, in his brilliancy, tells his brothers.

How would you tell your siblings about that dream?

The result is they despise him even more.

And then Joseph has the audacity to tell his dad.

And his father rebukes him in the presence of his other brothers.

But the author tells us that Jacob kept the matter in mind.

He turned it over.

He held on to it a little bit.

He filed it somewhere for later recall.

Jacob apparently didn't know what to do with this information.

But he didn't immediately pass it off as crazy.

So on the one hand, the robe suggests an element of responsibility, of honor, even of authority that Jacob had invested in Joseph.

Joseph seems to be kind of a family manager for the brothers and the sheep.

On the other hand, Jacob's rebuke indicates that there's a limited authority because he rebuked this idea of unlimited authority.

That Joseph would somehow be a king, a ruler.

But those two dreams essentially communicate the same thing.

And in the end of Genesis, that points to an aspect of certainty.

Joseph will later say about Pharaoh's two dreams, about the same famine.

He will say to Pharaoh, the doubling of Pharaoh's dreams means that the thing is fixed by God.

And God will shortly bring it about.

So this is pointing forward so that we understand, oh, God's showing them where the story's headed.

In the same way he's showing us what's going on here.

This is the pattern in the later chapters of Genesis.

God is revealing his intention.

It will happen.

So God declared where this is going before Joseph ends up in the pit.

His design for the family is on record.

Everyone hears it, even if they don't like it.

And the revelation comes at the beginning of the story of Jacob's family to announce that main point.

The God who reveals his intentions before the suffering ever begins is the same God who's at work every step of the way.

Because if that's true for Joseph, then that means that we can trust what God has revealed even before we see it happen.

Do we trust what God says even before we see it happen?

We see that in God's revelation of these dreams through Joseph and how the whole story then turns out to fulfill them perfectly.

We can trust what God has revealed.

Even if it seems hard to figure out how it's going to happen.

Now in verse 12, Joseph, I'm sorry, Jacob sends Joseph north to check on his brothers.

They're keeping their sheep near Shechem.

And Joseph goes wandering around in fields, unable to find them.

He's traveling 50 miles and then he's wandering around in the fields, trying to find his brothers and their sheep.

He can't find them.

And finally he runs across a man who tells him they've gone to Dothan.

So he goes to Dothan.

Now, on the one hand, it seems as though things just seem to work out for Joseph.

On the other hand, we are meant to understand no, they don't just work out for Joseph.

God's working them out for Joseph.

God is at work.

And when the brothers see him coming, they mockingly call him in verse 19 the Lord of dreams.

It's often translated just dreamer in our Bibles, but the Hebrew text says he's the ba'al of dreams.

He's the Lord of dreams.

It's derisive.

They're mocking him.

It's contemptuous.

They're dismissing him in his dreams.

But the brothers don't realize that they're speaking the truth.

The man, the man they have tried to silence is the one through whom God's plan is working, and their attempt to stop his dreams will instead fulfill it.

He finds them.

And they see him.

And you can just imagine them whispering to each other.

And they're saying, Come, let's kill him.

Let's throw him into one of the cisterns.

Then we'll see what becomes of his dreams.

Those exact words, come, let us kill him, result in three individual words put together when it was translated from Hebrew into Greek.

Those three exact Greek words in the exact same form, in the exact same order, show up in two other places in the New Testament.

Those exact words, come, let us kill him, appear centuries later when Jesus told a parable about a vineyard owner who sent his son to gather the prophets of the sale of the vineyard, and the tenants of the vineyard, seeing him coming, say, Here's the son.

Come.

Let us kill him.

So Jesus placed his own rejection at the end of the story that begins here at Dothan.

A story that begins with a Lord of dreams and brothers who want him dead ends with the beloved son that's hated and killed by his brother.

Now here, Reuben, the firstborn, intervenes to save Joseph.

Great, thanks, bro.

Well, kind of.

He suggests they not kill him, instead, they toss him into a pit.

Now he's thinking, okay, I'm gonna rescue him.

I'm gonna take him back to dad.

I'll be the savior.

He doesn't confront his brothers, though.

He tries to work around them, showing some kind of intent here to keep Joseph alive, but he doesn't appear to put much effort into it.

So they strip Joseph of his coat, they toss him into a cistern, and then they sit down to have lunch.

How do you conspire to kill your brother, throw him into a pit, and sit down to have lunch?

How do you do that?

And Joseph's crying from the inside of the pit.

He's crying out to them.

We know this because the brothers remember it 20 years later when they stood before Joseph in Egypt without recognizing him.

They said to each other in chapter 42, we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us, and we did not listen.

Talk about self-condemnation.

They know what they're doing.

They know exactly what they're doing.

They heard him, but they ignored it and they kept on munching away.

During the meal, every brother disregarded Joseph's cries.

Their actions are cruel.

And they bear responsibility.

But they show something that we're all capable of.

We tend to just push them off as boy, I'm so glad I'm not like them, right?

And if we do that, that's when we need to sit up and take notice.

No, I am like that.

Because we can shield ourselves from the pain that we cause others, can't we?

If we wrong somebody else, we can build a shield that protects us from their sorrow and their agony.

And we handle our consciences just like they did.

Instead of facing our actions head on, we we seek distractions from the discomfort.

Ways to kind of help ourselves ignore what's going on, what we're doing, what we've caused.

But God doesn't rescue Joseph at Dothan.

No angel comes.

There's no additional dream or vision.

Joseph's cries go unanswered while his brothers eat.

Time just keeps going on without any kind of interruption.

Joseph suffers while others keep on going.

And God is silent.

Dothan is mentioned one more time in Scripture.

It's in a fascinating biblical parallel.

In 2 Kings chapter 6, a Syrian king comes and lays siege to Dothan.

2 Kings 6 · chapter mention

He surrounds the village entirely with his armies because he knows that Elisha, the prophet, is inside of Dothan and he wants Elisha's head.

Elisha's inside with his servant.

His servant wakes up in the morning and sees that they are surrounded, and he is scared out of his mind.

But Elisha's unconcerned.

He's not worried at all.

Instead, he prays and he says to God, Would you please open his eyes?

Well, that's the problem, right?

His eyes are open and he sees that they're surrounded.

No, the problem is that he can't see spiritually what's really happening.

And 2 Kings chapter 6 says that God opens the eyes of his servant, and his servant is looking around.

2 Kings 6 · chapter mention

Because all around the other armies are the armies of heaven.

What looked like abandonment was not God's absence, it was the absence of sight.

God is always present, he's always aware, he's always watching.

And at this same place, centuries later, God opened a frightened servant's eyes to see the same truth that is true of every place and every child of God, wherever they might be, that God is there even though you cannot see him.

God's silence in Joseph's life at Dothan is not his absence.

The place where we don't hear him, when he doesn't interrupt our sorrow, where he does not rescue in the way that we want him to, are not outside of his purposes.

They are in this story and in our stories, often where God's bigger design is exactly working out his purpose.

Most of us know what Dothan feels like.

Each of our stories is going to be different, but we know the feeling, right?

A prayer that goes unanswered until it just feels unbearable.

A chronic illness that just doesn't improve while everyone else's life just keeps on going on.

A marriage that's quietly eroding away while you keep on showing up to church every single Sunday.

Or a grown-up child who turns away from the faith they once vocalized.

People go on and on with their lives like normal while you're in the pit with unanswered cries.

God's silence in those moments can feel overwhelming, can't it?

But it doesn't mean he's absent.

Dothan is a call for us to trust that we just can't see what is real.

And Joseph's life tells us that we can believe in God's presence even when he's silent.

The Dothan images of the Old Testament demonstrate that.

Even when an Ishmaelite caravan appears on the horizon, and Judah gets an idea.

Hey, let's make a little money.

Judah speaks up in verses twenty-six or twenty-seven.

What prophet is it if we kill our brother and conceal his brother?

Notice what's at the front of the sentence.

Prophet.

What can we get out of this?

Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites.

We don't want to kill him.

He's our brother.

The brothers listen.

So they sell Joseph for 20 pieces of silver.

How do you divide 20 by 11?

It doesn't come out even, does it?

Well, do you remember that Joseph has a brother from the same mother?

And all the other brothers are from the other mothers?

So if you have 12 brothers and you take out two from the same mother, how many do you have?

Ten.

20 divided by 10 works out a lot better, doesn't it?

Judah talked like this was merciful.

And in a way it was.

Selling Joseph at least kept him alive, right?

But Judah is not really trying to save his brother.

He's trying to get rid of him in a way that soothes his conscience.

In a way that keeps him from having to finish the job himself.

Judah doesn't want to be guilty of murder.

He just wants to make some money while not being too bad off.

And that kind of moral math allows somebody to profit from cruelty while telling himself, convincing himself he's still doing some kind of good.

It's okay if I do this because this is good.

He gets the money while avoiding something worse.

We do the same thing.

We manage our own consciences by finding arrangements that we can live with.

And Judah goes on with his life.

Joseph is almost out of sight, out of mind.

Judah becomes a significant secondary character in the Joseph story from here on out.

Because decisions like this have impacts.

And as we go on, we're going to see how it impacts all of the brothers, and how it impacts Joseph, and how it impacts Judah, and how it impacts Jacob.

Now in verse 28, Joseph's name appears three times in close succession.

They drew Joseph up, they sold Joseph, and they brought Joseph into Egypt.

That repetition marks a shift in the story.

We're now moving from the brothers to Joseph.

It's a providential moment that's presented here almost like an ordinary transaction.

By selling Joseph, these ten brothers have taken the first step toward everything that God said he would do in the dreams.

How ironic.

Let's do this to our brothers and then see what becomes of his dreams.

And God says, You want to see what becomes of his dreams?

Let me show you.

Let's start the ball rolling.

They meant to end the dreams, instead, they moved it forward.

They are unwittingly fulfilling the very dreams they despise because God works their evil for good.

And that's an uncomfortable truth, isn't it?

These acts are wicked.

We would not encourage them or support them in any way.

The New Testament tells us that Joseph went to Egypt in literal chains.

His feet were in fetters.

God didn't work around his brother's sins as though they were beside the point.

He worked through them.

The worst things that are done to us, the worst circumstances that surround us, are not exempt from God's design.

They're within God's design.

And God is not absent from them.

He's not ignoring the painful situations of life.

And that is simultaneously the most difficult and the most comforting claim this chapter makes.

It's difficult because we look at it from our humanity.

It's comforting because we believe God.

And it tells us that we can trust God's purposes even when life seems to work against them.

Now what happens next is almost too incredible to imagine.

The brothers kill a goat, they dip Joseph's coat in blood, and they bring the ruined garment to Jacob.

Joseph's 17 years old.

He's one of the youngest brothers.

And they make out a complicated plan.

They're trying to work around their guilt.

And they take the garment to Jacob and they say, Dad, do you recognize this?

Is this your son's?

Notice they didn't ask, is this our brothers?

They didn't ask, is this Joseph's?

Is this your son's?

They're not laying any claim to Joseph whatsoever.

Of course, Jacob recognizes it.

He tears his clothes, he puts on sackcloth, and he refuses every attempt to comfort him.

He says, I will go down to the grave, to Sheol.

Interestingly, Sheol is sometimes translated as a pit.

He says, I'm going to go down to the very place my son went down.

But there's a sad irony here in what the brothers did.

They deceived their father with a slaughtered goat and a piece of clothing.

Have you ever recognized that those are the exact same objects that Jacob used to deceive his own father?

You remember when Rebekah encouraged Jacob to steal the blessing that belonged to his brother?

Jacob said, Mom, I can't do that.

I don't smell like my brother.

I don't feel like my brother.

And she said, Oh, we'll take care of that.

Go slaughter a goat.

Make sure you skin him well.

And we're going to wrap the goat skin around your arms.

So that you smell like your brother and you feel like your brother.

The father's deception against his own father has come back on him through his sons.

The sin of Jacob's family runs through the generations, and Jacob now receives something he once did to his own dad.

We get a little bit more picture now about how this is Jacob's story.

Jacob believes his son is dead, and he mourns for him.

But he's totally wrong about the facts, isn't he?

He's been lied to.

Joseph is alive.

Granted, he's in Egypt, but he's alive.

But Jacob's not wrong to grieve the perceived loss.

He's mourning in the middle of a story that he can't see the end of.

He's grieving the end of a chapter that's nowhere near finished.

But he doesn't know that.

At the same time, the brothers have gone home bearing a burden of what they've done.

We get a glimpse of their consciences 20 years later, as they stand before Joseph, not knowing him, saying, We saw the distress, we heard his begging.

And they condemn themselves by saying, We did not listen.

Twenty years.

They carry the memory of Dothan.

They carry the memory of the goat.

They carry their father's grief for twenty years.

Choices like that are heavy with consequences.

They stay with you, and you carry them until you confess them and receive forgiveness.

If you're carrying something like that, you need to know that Judah will eventually confront his guilt for selling his brother.

In Genesis 44, the brother who sold his brother will offer himself as a substitute to protect the youngest brother.

That transformation comes from bringing what he did out into the open.

Similarly, the good news of Jesus Christ doesn't offer you a more comfortable arrangement for your conscience.

It promises actual forgiveness in Christ through the confession of sin.

Now this chapter closes with Joseph.

And it sort of brings us up short because it closes with Joseph as a slave in Potiphar's house.

With Jacob grieving in sackcloth and God silent.

But we can know that the dreams are still there.

Because they could not kill the Lord of dreams, and they could not stop the dreams.

Because God is working.

Because of our vantage point outside of the story, we can see that we can trust the God who's already written the end of our story.

None of the characters in Genesis 37 know what we know.

Jacob doesn't sit in his grief thinking back on those two dreams and drawing them back to the forefront of his memory and trusting that it's going to turn out okay.

No, he believes that Joseph's dead.

It's gone.

It's over.

He's lost his son and he's overcome with grief.

The brothers don't eat lunch at Dothan thinking that God's purpose will overcome their evil.

They're thinking, we've won.

Joseph's gone.

No more of that dreamer.

They're eating lunch because they don't care about Joseph.

Joseph, in chains on the dusty road to Egypt, doesn't think about where this is going or why it's happening, believing that it's all going to turn out.

He's trudging along in the chains, eating dust behind the carriages.

But we can see it.

Because we see the whole story.

See, the author wants us to sit in God's seat for a minute.

Help us see what God sees.

Because when we can see what God sees, we can then understand in our own stories that we can't see the end of that God is always present and he's always working.

We are like these characters in our own lives.

We live inside of our own stories, not at the end of them.

At this point in his life, Jacob cannot see chapter 45 where he will hear that Joseph is still alive.

The brothers eating at Dothan cannot see chapter 42 where they will bow before the Lord of dreams, begging for mercy.

They cannot see chapter 50, where they will be bowing before Joseph, the one they sold, and seeing him weep and hear, do not be afraid.

They don't see any of that.

And we don't get access to the resolution of our agony and our sorrow while we're in the middle of it.

What we do have is what God has already revealed.

He's shown us his character, he's shown us his faithfulness, he's shown us his purposes from beginning to end, he's promised his intention to work out all things together for good to those who love him and are called according to his purpose.

In Joseph's story, we hold the dreams of chapter 37, verses 5 through 11, and the grief and chains of 29 through 36 all together at the same time, and we see them in light of the end of the story.

But the gap between what God has said in the dreams and what anyone can see inside the story at their time is where trust must exist.

Because you don't build the you don't bridge the gap between what you know, what God has revealed, and how you feel by knowing more, or by suffering less.

It's a gap you cross by holding on to what God has said when you cannot see how he's working.

The brothers' choices were horrific.

Joseph suffered in real chains.

But the God who revealed his intentions at the beginning, before the hardship ever began, is working all the way through it toward exactly what he said.

And that's what Scripture tells us God does.

God told his people through the prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 46 that he declares the end from the beginning.

So the pain, the suffering, and the grief of a sin-cursed world do not change who God is or how he works.

So if you're somewhere in the middle of your chapter that makes no sense, trust that your story isn't over and that God is still working.

What you feel in the middle isn't the end.

The end of Joseph's story, friends, doesn't even come when he's restored to his family.

His story doesn't even end at the end of chapter 50, where everybody goes on living happily ever after.

No, Joseph's story ends when the perfect beloved son is actually killed by his brothers so that all sinners could be reconciled to God through him.

We must remember that God makes all things right through Jesus.

And that the whole story is not yet done.

Joseph was the prelude to the beloved son who was killed so that you and I might be rescued.

He is our ultimate hope.

So wherever you are in your story, believe in him in the middle of your story, before it comes to an end.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we thank you that we can look in your revealed word and see the end of the story.

You win.

You return and you make all things right.

In the meantime, Lord, strengthen our faith so that we might keep our eyes on you, that we might lift up our eyes from the road that we're on and see where our help comes from.

And to trust in the God of our salvation.

In your name we pray.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

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