Forgotten Interpreter

Hello, Church.

Hear now the word of the true and living God, Genesis forty.

Sometime after this, the cupbearer of the King of Egypt and his baker committed an offense against their lord, the King of Egypt, and Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the prison where Joseph was confined.

The captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be with them, and he attended them.

They continued for some time in custody.

And one night they both dreamed, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, each his own dream, and each dream with its own interpretation.

When Joseph came to them in the morning, he saw that they were troubled, so he asked Pharaoh's officers, who were with him in the custody of his master's house, Why are your faces downcast today?

They said to him, We have had dreams, and there is no one to interpret them.

And Joseph said to them, Do not interpretations belong to God?

Please tell them to me.

So the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, In my dream, there was a vine before me, and on the vine there were three branches.

As soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth, and the clusters ripened into grapes.

Pharaoh's cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh's cup, and placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand.

Then Joseph said to him, This is its interpretation.

The three branches are three days.

In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh's cup in his hand, as formerly, when you were his cupbearer.

Only remember me when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.

For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.

When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable, he said to Joseph, I also had a dream.

There were three cakes, uh cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.

And Joseph answered and said, This is its interpretation.

The three baskets are three days.

In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat the flesh from you.

On the third day, which was Pharaoh's birthday, he made a feast for all his servants, and lifted up the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants.

He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand, but he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them.

Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Welcome to church this morning.

Thanks for joining us.

It was we had such a wonderful Easter last week.

It was such a joyful celebration.

I hope it was for you all as well.

Uh uh when going home and celebrating with your families that afternoon.

And we've got another beautiful Sunday here, so that's nice after a Saturday.

Uh let's uh pray and then we'll move into today's text.

Holy Father, interpretation belongs to you.

And we are surrounded by lives that are uh confusing and strange and not what we would expect or would plan.

And yet, Lord, you offer the true interpretation of what our lives mean.

Lord, we find our meaning in you.

I pray that you would give us, as we sang this morning, wisdom and grace to interpret our lives after your own thoughts.

That we would know where we are, we would call what you call good, we would call what you call evil evil, and we would be wise to understand the lives that you've put us in, that we might honor and glorify you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right.

Let's interpret some dreams.

So, dream interpretation is not particularly common in scripture, uh, but it does happen.

We see in a couple of stories, in Joseph's story in particular, it's it's essential.

Dream interpretation is a real part of the thread of Joseph's story.

There's three occasions in which there are dreams in Joseph's story.

There's his original dreams that he has of uh the moon and stars gathering around and bowing down to him, and the uh sheaves of grain that gather around and bow to his sheaf, and that causes a lot of trouble among his family.

And then there are these dreams that the chief cupbearer and the chief baker to Pharaoh have, and Joseph is able to offer the true interpretation of those dreams.

And then we'll see next week that Pharaoh himself has two dreams, and Joseph is also able to offer those interpretations.

We also see in, for example, the story of Daniel, a really similar type of thing where the Pharaoh, not the Pharaoh, but the emperor, has a dream and no one is able to interpret it, and then Daniel is able to offer a true interpretation of that dream.

And so dream interpretation is something that we see in Scripture, and it's particularly important in Joseph's story.

What are dreams?

Well, there's something to notice, first of all, that the two stories in scripture, Joseph's story and Daniel's story, where dream interpretations take uh the most central focus, are both stories of uh men in exile.

These are examples of men who are taken from their homes and they're living in a foreign land.

And it is here that they are able to interpret the dreams of foreigners.

Exile and dreams are united in scripture because they're sort of similar to one another.

In exile, you are in a separate culture where you aren't able to really understand the signs and symbols of the culture around you because it's not like the signs and symbols of the culture that you were raised in.

And so you're surrounded by things that that are strange and difficult to understand and hard to interpret.

And it is in that very place that dream interpretation seems to take uh a central role in the narratives.

You can sort of think of it like this uh dream interpretation, a dream, this is going to sound strange, but stay with me.

Dreams to the individual.

We're gonna do a little SAT practice.

Dreams are to the individual as exile is to the nation.

You are removed from your conscious existence.

You don't have control over your mind and where it goes in a dream.

And you aren't able to piece together the signs and symbols when you're dreaming.

You know, right now you look around and you're consciously able to understand, yeah, I'm sitting in the seat because I drove here this morning and we parked and I got a cup of coffee, and then I came and I found this seat because it's the seat that I normally sit in, and you know, things like that.

And you can piece those things together.

But in a dream, you can't piece things together like that.

It's much more strange, much more difficult to understand.

And so, in that sense, dreams are sort of a maximal example of the interpretive power of God.

How God is able to reach into the most confusing places of our lives.

He's able to reach into those places where we're in exile.

And none of our story is not going in a way that we can easily understand or easily make sense of.

You can't draw such a simple conclusion as how you ended up in this seat today.

Because that job that you worked really hard for is now gone.

Or the job that you were really hopeful to get is suddenly terrible.

The marriage that you so hopefully pursued is now a place of deep loneliness.

You find that when those narratives don't align anymore and you can't interpret the symbols, you need God to provide the interpretation.

And that's what we see in Joseph's story.

Now, when sin entered the world, interpretation became even more challenging.

Because before sin entered the world, heaven and earth were in this perfect alignment.

All of the intentions of God were perfectly expressed in the created order.

So that when Adam and Eve were working in the garden, all that they were doing, every little weed that they picked or every little tree that they pruned, they were able to tie up in a clear and meaningful way into the commands and intentions of God, so that they were experiencing a constant joy of meaning in their lives.

But when sin entered the world, those were fractured, and the intentions of God are no longer clearly expressed in the world.

We see our own corrupted intentions being manifest and the corruptness of nature under our rule being manifest as well.

And so when we look out into the data that we have, which is our experience of the world, we aren't able to tie it up in any sort of clear, meaningful way into the intentions of God.

And then you add to that the reality that all of our lives end in death.

And that if you were to draw a far enough line for any of us, it would look like it results in meaninglessness.

And so we see in the interpretation of dreams by men in exile that God is showing us in the deepest depths of meaninglessness, I can offer you a true interpretation which brings real meaning.

This is our hope that we see in the interpretation of these dreams.

So these are the themes that we're going to be working with this morning.

And we're going to see them laid out in practice in Joseph's story.

So let's go ahead and jump into the story and begin to understand uh dream interpretation.

You'll all be able to charge like 25 cents a dream interpretation by the time this is done.

We'll see all your booths set up along Caesar Chavez Park on First Fridays or something.

All right, let's jump in.

Genesis 40, verses 2 through 4.

Genesis 40:2–4

And 40 was whoops.

And Pharaoh, not 40.

He was the 40th Pharaoh, though.

He wore hats that said 40 on them.

And Pharaoh was angry with his two officers, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker.

And he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard in the prison where Joseph was confined.

The captain of the guard appointed Joseph to be with them, and he attended them.

They continued for some time in custody.

I skipped verse one, but verse one basically just says that the chief cupbearer and the chief baker did something bad.

So this isn't just that Pharaoh was like, I don't like them anymore.

It seems as though they actually did something wrong.

There was reason for the accusations against them.

And because of that, Pharaoh places them into the very prison that Joseph is in.

We remember in Joseph's story that he experiences this strange sort of success wherever he goes.

He keeps getting pushed down, but in whatever world he gets pushed down in, he seems to rise up.

So when he gets sold into slavery in Potiphar's house, he becomes the head of Potiphar's house.

And then when he gets falsely accused by Potiphar's wife and then placed in jail, he rises to the top of that jail.

So he becomes the one on whom authority rests in the world in which he lives in.

So when these two men, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker for Pharaoh, are placed in jail, we see the same sort of movement of Joseph.

He is in jail, but there's this strange sort of success because these are the most high-profile prisoners of their time.

You know, it would be newsworthy if the chief baker and the chief cupbearer were suddenly placed in prison.

And it is these men who Joseph is placed in charge of.

Now, what's interesting is it says that he's placed in charge of those men by the captain of the guard.

And we learned earlier that Potiphar is the captain of the guard.

So it's a strange thing where Potiphar, the one who placed him in jail, is also now participating in him being risen up.

But we should see in this same sort of thing in Joseph's life where he is raised up, but he's still the servant of prisoners.

So there's a sense, there's always this double movement that you have to map in Joseph's life, where it's a raising up at the same time, it's like the depth in the raising always grow together.

So Joseph is placed in charge of these two prisoners, the cupbearer and the baker.

Now, verse 5, and one night they both dreamed, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison, each his own dream, and each dream with its own interpretations.

We saw when Joseph dreamed his first dreams of the sheaves that would bow down to him, and the stars in heaven that also bowed down to him, that there was a confirmation in the fact that there were two dreams.

Because there are two dreams, there's something like a certainty.

And we get, I don't just like know a lot about dreams.

You know, it's in the Bible, that's how I know that.

Because later in the next chapter, Pharaoh will dream two dreams, and Joseph will say, Because there are two dreams, this is a mark of certainty from the Lord.

Now, these two dreams, one from the cupbearer and one from the baker, are not the same dream.

They each have their own dream.

But because there are two that arrive in the same night, the simultaneity of the dreams shows that there is some clear intention of the Lord taking place.

And we should think Joseph would notice that.

Because Joseph is the one who later teaches us that when dreams come in pairs, there's something like a certainty taking place in that.

So Joseph would notice that these two dreams are not some happenstance, but they ought to be interpreted, and an interpretation should be given from the Lord.

The Lord is doing something to sort of capture their attention.

Now, the first thing that Joseph interprets well in this story is just the faces of the men.

Joseph wakes up one day, and after the cupbearer and the baker had been in the prison for some time, they have these two dreams, and Joseph notices their faces, and it looks like their hearts are troubled.

And so Joseph asks them, he says, Why are your faces downcast?

Now, of course, this is a plot point because we have to get the conversation started somehow with the chief cupbearer and the baker.

But we should notice Joseph's character.

Joseph is managing prisoners.

But why does he rise to the top so well in every world that he's in?

It's because he wisely notices the things that matter about the people around him.

He sees these two prisoners, but these are not just parts of his job or, you know, objects that are sort of in the way of whatever prison duties he had to accomplish that day.

He sees people.

And he notices, and these men, their faces are downcast.

And he asks with care, why are your faces downcast?

He doesn't just think, yeah, I'd be downcast too if Pharaoh threw me out.

He sees them.

That's the first right interpretation that Joseph shows us.

In Joseph's heart, he cares for the people around him.

This should cause us to consider how many downcast faces do we miss?

How often do we just not simply see and read the faces of the people around us?

And the reason that we ought to see and read the faces of the people around us, the reason we ought to be trying to interpret one another is because we understand that we are in a story that is being written by God.

We are not the only characters in this story.

We're not even the central characters in this story.

It feels like that, you know, because life is a first-person shooter, you know, like you're always looking out your own eyes.

And there's no other perspective that you can experience life in.

So it can be a bit of a trap, you know.

It'll it feels like, yeah, I must be the main character of the world taking place because that's the perspective in which I hold.

But Joseph understands I'm a part of a bigger story.

The Lord is writing the story, and there are other characters whose experience of the world is about just like mine.

And so when their faces are downcast, it is no less meaningful than my own face being downcast and is worth exploring with curiosity.

Our understanding of all of us being within the story of God and under the care of God ought to drive us to interpret the faces of these other people around us who God loves.

Our right interpretation begins when in our waking life, opening our eyes to pick up on the right details of the people around us.

And Joseph just models that so well.

So he asked them, Why are your faces downcast?

And in verse 8, they said to him, We've had dreams and there is no one to interpret them.

And Joseph said to them, Do not interpretations belong to God?

Please tell them to me.

So why are they downcast?

We've had dreams, and there's no one to interpret them.

Some of the commentators that I read um pointed out that this is a particularly Egyptian thing.

So Egyptians loved dreams and dream interpretation.

Now, I think it's probably better to say we know that because there's some um uh archaeological evidence of books that were written about dream interpretation for the Egyptians.

But this is a pretty typical ancient culture thing.

You know, this is uh we think of of our understanding of dreams is in a different metaphor than the ancient peoples would have viewed their dreams in.

We think of dreams in a Freudian sense as purely psychological phenomena.

And in that sense, we almost think of them as not a part of reality, which is strange because where else would they be?

You know, this is the only place there is reality, you know.

You can look around and see each other in it.

We're all in it together right now.

They thought of them as parts of reality that ought to there that ought to therefore be interpreted.

We think of them as just purely psychological phenomena, and we invent, we uh we always do this.

We we invent a parallel metaphor to the heaven and earth metaphor, and we call it a um subconscious and a conscious.

It may be true, may very well be true, but it's worth recognizing that uh rather than uh thinking of this as a scientific fact or some some absolute discovery, it's a modernizing of an ancient way of viewing the world, which is that meaning is found in the integration of heaven and earth.

We would say something like, well, well, once you make the subconscious parts of your dream conscious, then you are able to speak about them and engage with them in a meaningful way.

Don't you see how that's the same, that's the same pattern that we're talking in?

So they have no one to interpret their dreams.

They have these dreams, these are a part of their reality that they're experiencing, and it has no meaning in it.

And so they're downcast because of them.

They are lost in themselves, they don't know how to connect with their own story, and they feel disjointed as people.

We experience this in in all kinds of ways when we just get shocks of sickness or family breakdown, or as I had said earlier, like the job that's suddenly a disappointment, these these shocks that can come into our lives that upset the narrative that we thought we were in, all of a sudden we find ourselves I can't interpret this.

I don't know what this means.

I I thought that I was following the will of the Lord, we might say.

And then it ended up in this terrible place.

So, what does this mean?

Mean.

And then, much like these prisoners, we might say something like, I have nobody here to interpret this for me.

I've been on a series of losses, and I can't even really point towards like the thing that was my fault in them.

It's just confusing.

And I have nobody here to interpret it for me.

We become lost to ourselves.

I know it's strange because it's written in dream language, and we don't talk about this a lot.

Like I don't think many of if I saw, if we like went and grabbed coffee and I was like, you seem sad, what's going on?

And you're like, ah, I had a dream that nobody can interpret.

You know, that might sound strange, but I want you to hear that this isn't this is not so distant of an experience for you.

I just I feel so torn between these two things, and I I feel like I'm split within myself, and I can't decide which which interpretation is true.

You know, what was this person's intentions really to harm me?

Or is there just some misunderstanding here?

And I can't figure out which one it is, and so I don't know how to make this relationship work with them.

See, that's the same thing.

I can't interpret the data that's in my life.

And so I don't know what story it becomes a part of, and I'm lost in it.

This is exile.

You're exiled from where you think you should be.

Picture an Israelite who is taken into exile into Babylon.

And he brought his calendar with him, and he pulls out and he says, Oh, today is the sundown, marks the beginning of the Sabbath.

Oh, so what are my plans for tomorrow?

Well, nothing.

It's the Sabbath.

Then he wakes up and it's the Sabbath day, but now he's in Babylon.

And the whole city's abuzz.

And as the city's abuzz, people are walking and they're offering sacrifices to pagan gods and they're interacting in all sorts of strange ways.

And this Israelite would think, How do I interpret this world?

How am I even supposed to live in it?

Because I was a part of a structure which tied things up to their meaning in God.

But now I'm living in a world where it doesn't look like there's any relationship I can participate in which would tie things up to meaning in God.

And so I'm lost, and I don't know how to interpret the situation.

That is where these men are with their dreams.

They are lost.

Now, Joseph understands something.

He says to them, Do not interpretations belong to God?

Please tell them to me.

Now for Joseph, dreams are like the rest of life.

The interpretation belongs to God.

And so in these places, these exiles, these dream worlds, where it seems like we have no control and strange things are happening that are hard to understand, God interprets even there.

Even in these places, the answer is found in the Lord.

Joseph understands that.

And so he asks him, please tell them to me.

He understands there's no depth to which God will not go to show the meaning of what he is accomplishing to his people.

Okay, so they tell him the dreams.

So let's look at these dreams in order: the cupbearer's dream and then the baker's dream.

So the cupbearer's dream, he describes that he sees one vine, and there are three branches growing off the vine.

And the vine buds, and then as soon as it buds, it rapidly blossoms.

And then those blossoms rapidly manifest, clusters of grapes.

And then he looks and he has Pharaoh's cup in his hand.

Because, you know, dreams.

Huh, yeah.

And he sees the grapes and he takes them and he uh presses them and he puts the juice in Pharaoh's cup, and then he holds it up to Pharaoh, and the cup is placed in Pharaoh's hand.

That is the dream.

How does Joseph interpret it?

Verses 12 through 14.

Then Joseph said to him, This is its interpretation.

The three branches are three days.

In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head.

He plays with that phrase quite a bit.

In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh's cup in his hand as foremost as formerly.

That's a hard word.

When you were his cupbearer.

Okay, so this is a dream of restoration.

The cupbearer will be placed back into the role in which he was cast away from.

He will be restored from his exile, put back where everything is in its right place, and he is able to engage with it meaningfully.

Now, you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to interpret this dream.

We can understand it.

Everything in the cupbearer's dream is in its right place.

It is not as though we see something strange, like you sometimes get in your dreams, where it's like there was a grape first, and then the vine sprouted out of the grape.

You know, this is that's like an upside-down world.

What's described to us is the way that grapes grow.

There's a vine, and then there's branches.

You see the order?

The vine, the branches, the budding, the sprouting, the grapes, the grapes smashed, the juice in the cup, the cup in Pharaoh's hand.

Everything is serving its right purpose.

And so Joseph sees this and he's able to understand this is a pattern of restoration.

Because things are being put back into the order in which they belong.

When things are put back into the order in which they belong, that is a picture of the wedding of heaven and earth, where the meaning that ought to be there, which is described to us in the heavens, think of that as like a heavenly realm, the invisible, the invisible places, you know, that order the world.

When the world is then formed to match that pattern, to match that good order, this is a picture of restoration.

We can see this is a picture of what the Lord is doing in the world.

You know, Jesus, when he heals the man with the withered hand, it is a picture of restored being restored to the order that God intended the world to be taking place in.

When we come and we confess our sins before the Lord Sunday after Sunday, we are seeking to bring our hearts into the order that God intended things to be in.

This is why there's that thrill in Christian theology of our doctrine of creation.

Because our doctrine of creation is not like other religions.

We are not like Platonists, or we would, and we are not like Buddhists, which are kind of the same thing, just Eastern and Western versions, where we say that the creation is something that is bad and terrible and confining and uh or just an illusion and it needs to be escaped from up into the spiritual realm where things are ordered and plain and clear.

No, our doctrine of creation does not say that the world that we live in is bad, but here is what God pronounces.

He says it is very good.

The right ordered world is very good.

And so when God is seeking to accomplish his redemption, he is bringing the world into its right order.

Our imaginations need to be transformed.

We need to let God own the interpretation of our lives to even be able to understand what a rightly ordered world is.

Otherwise, we will fall into radical depths of corruption.

We won't be able to tell what is good and what is bad.

We will do strange things like look at a man with a withered hand and say, Oh, it doesn't really matter that it's withered.

That's nothing to mourn.

It's just the way that hand happens to be.

Our doctrine of a good creation does not allow us to look at what is bad and say, it's fine.

What is bad and good anyway?

No, this is a pattern of restoration.

Restoration to the good order that God calls us into.

So we see that pattern in the cupbearer's dream, and the cupbearer experiences this very pattern and will be raised back up into participating in his life in this rightly ordered way.

Now, the baker's dream.

The baker hears the cupbearer's dream, and it says in the text, because he heard that the cupbearer got a favorable interpretation, he worked up the courage to share his own dream as well.

So now he shares his dream.

The baker's outcome is worse.

He dreamed of three cake baskets on his head.

The top cake basket was full of baked goods for Pharaoh, and birds were coming and eating the food out of the basket on his head.

All right, now let's just consider this in terms of a rightly ordered world.

These cake baskets are baked by the baker, and who who are they meant for?

Pharaoh.

Right.

Now, when you hand someone things, if you're a servant, for example, do you, just draw on your own experience, typically use your head or your hands?

Typically use your hands, yeah.

So if you're offering something to somebody, then you wouldn't expect these things to be offered to you from three stacks on the top of his head.

You would expect him to be like the cupbearer, offering them to Pharaoh.

So we see just the image itself is disordered.

The baker is not over his creation, this thing that he makes, and then submits it as an offering to that thing which is above him.

Instead, he is beneath, three levels down, the things which he makes.

He is somehow being controlled by this thing.

And then the bread does not make its way into the baker's hands and then into Pharaoh's hands, but the bread is in the mouths of birds.

Birds are those things which come and eat uh dead animals.

So the pattern is a pattern of disorder.

The dream pharaoh would ask something like, Hey, where's my bread?

And the baker would be like, It's in the mouths of the birds on my head, you know, in a dream world.

And that's a strange place for them to be.

This is a disordered world.

So Joseph reads this uh as the disorder that it shows.

And he offers this interpretation in Genesis 40, verses 18 to 19.

Genesis 40:18–19

And Joseph answered and said, This is its interpretation.

The three baskets are three days.

In three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a tree, and the birds will eat the flesh from you.

Now, I know the way this reads.

Why phrase it like that?

It seems so cruel.

You know, he will lift up your head, and the baker's like, oh, great, from you.

You know, that just seems mean.

But uh, I don't think we we we've seen the kindness of Joseph just in recognizing the their sad faces.

We shouldn't read this.

You can, you know, I'm sure Joseph had the wherewithal to, when he was sharing news like this, to share it in such a way that was like, your head will be lifted from you.

You know, there's a w we shouldn't read this and think like, yeah, Joseph.

It's kind of a mean way to say that.

But he shows the pattern, and the pattern results in death.

It is a lifting up into death, a pattern which is frequently shown in scripture.

Both heads are lifted up, one in glory, the other in defeat.

The first dream, everything is restored to its right place, and the second dream, it is a completely disordered world.

And in both instances, Joseph's interpretation of their dreams comes true.

It manifests in reality.

Now I've skipped apart.

Right after Joseph's interpretation of the cupbearer's dream, he says this.

In verses 40, 14 through 15, he says, Only remember me when it is well with you.

Because remember, he tells the cupbearer, You'll in three days you'll be restored to your high position.

And then he says, Only remember me when it is well with you.

And please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house.

For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.

This is the first time in Joseph's story that we see him really advocate for himself, that we actually see any acknowledgement of the pain that he's experienced throughout his whole story.

And he explains it clearly.

And then I have done nothing that I should be put into this pit.

Now, with what we've grown to understand about exile and dreams and those strange points of life that have no clear interpretation, look at Joseph's life.

You know, how could he tell it?

I had these dreams that were made certain by God.

And since then I have been sold into slavery.

And then, as though it couldn't get worse, I was falsely accused and then imprisoned here in this prison.

I don't know what is coming of my life.

Nothing of my story seems to be fitting the pattern of my life that God has shown to me.

Now consider what pattern for life have we been promised in Christ abundant life, joy in his presence.

We know that he is a giver of good gifts, that there is nothing that he withholds from those who love him.

All good things come down from the Father of lights.

And then you move into your own story.

And you see, this is not, this does that pattern does not match.

If I were to just interpret this, it does not seem to line up.

And I am in an interpretive trap.

I don't know how to make sense of both of these things.

How can I make sense of these glorious promises that God has shown me?

You know, the heavens, the place of meaning and order with the earth, which is my life and seems disordered even into my own heart.

It is a disordered place that does not match these promises of God.

Where is the interpreter there?

Joseph himself is in this strange dream world, asking to get out of it, appealing to the only authority that's available to him, a cupbearer who might be raised up, that he might be remembered.

But then it gets worse.

The last verses of the section.

I don't know why.

This is a side note.

But like a pharaoh throwing himself a birthday party just feels so petty.

I don't like it.

Like, I don't know.

Just like the Pharaoh being like, everybody, it's my birthday.

All right, Pharaoh.

Relax.

But anyway, the pharaoh does.

He throws himself a birthday party, and he invites the cupbearer.

Well, it says this, and it he invites the cupbearer and he brings the baker, just as just as Joseph interpreted, the baker is hung, and the cupbearer is raised back into his position.

And these are the final verses.

It says he restored the chief cupbearer to his position, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand, but he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them.

Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.

And Joseph remained forgotten in the prison for two more years.

I was like, what's two years like?

And I looked it up, and uh two years ago there was still a mask mandate.

Feels like an eternity ago.

That cannot be long enough ago.

That was just two years.

So every day for two years, Joseph sits.

Now, where is he sitting?

He's in dreamland, man.

He's in exile.

What data does he have to receive any sort to be able to interpret in any way how his life could be participating in the meaning that God has promised him?

You know what he did the next day after the chief cupbearer and the I don't know, just whatever you do in prison when you're when you have to take care of the prison.

That's what he did.

And then he repeated that for the next two years.

Participating in none of the heavenly patterns that he was promised by his people in exile.

A dream world.

But Joseph knew something.

Joseph understood that interpretation does not belong to him.

Interpretation belongs to God.

And so what do you do when you cannot offer a real interpretation of your life?

When you're not able to gather the data together and explain to yourself, okay, you know, how could Joseph have possibly imagined?

Like, oh, yeah, it's good that the cupbearer forgot me for two years.

Because if he had remembered me even slightly earlier, then I wouldn't have been called up to interpret the dreams of Pharaoh.

And it is in interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh that I will be raised to the second highest position in the kingdom of Egypt, that I will be able to save the lives of thousands and thousands of people from all over the world by organizing their economy well, that I will be restored to my family, and that the blessings of God which have been promised to my family, I will be able to participate in.

He would not have written that story.

He did not have the data available to him to interpret that.

But if interpretation belongs to God, then he could hold to the hope that God had given him by faith.

Don't you see how how faith is utterly necessary for our participation in the Christian life?

A lot of times people tell these like mythological stories about themselves, where they're like apologists do this all the time.

Well, they're they'll give like a testimony that was like, I explored all of the other religions of the world, and then I saw that Christianity was the most reasonable.

And then I stood back and decided by reason alone that I ought to submit myself to this particular faith.

I I don't believe that.

I don't believe that story.

What happens is the world is very strange.

And then the Spirit transforms our hearts so that we might be placed back into this right order with God, and then we might hold to Him by faith in a very strange world.

With stories, with tons of twists and turns that are hard to interpret, that make us feel like lost exiles.

In fact, exile is the very word that is used to describe Christians living in the world.

We live as exiles in the world.

So how do you live as an exile?

You trust that interpretation, even of your life, belongs to God.

So let's talk about dreams and exile.

In a biblical way of thinking, there's only one difference between sleeping and death.

Can you think of it?

In sleeping, you wake up.

That's the difference.

And so we see this pattern of sleep being used to describe death throughout all the scriptures.

So there's this sense in which the dream pattern is a death and resurrection pattern.

You're going into the most uninterpretable parts of life, the parts of life that seem the most absolutely meaningless.

But interpretation belongs to God.

It does not belong to us.

If interpretation belongs to us, then we make godless interpretations and we would draw the obvious conclusion that if your life ends in death, it is ultimately meaningless.

And you trying to participate in any sort of meaning now is just a practice of self-deception.

And maybe you could get very good at it.

But it is just self-deception.

That is reasoning about death apart from God.

That is reasoning about death with our own human interpretations.

But we are taught interpretation belongs to the Lord.

And so Joseph, as this dream interpreter, who goes into the depths of the most uninterpretable places and then brings meaning there, like a wedding of heaven and earth, so that we can be meaningfully engaged with it with our lives.

He is just a pattern, just a shadow of the one who will come after him.

Jesus enters dreams.

Nope.

Joseph enters dreams.

I showed my hand.

Jesus enters death itself.

The very place that cannot be interpreted, that by any human understanding is the picture of meaninglessness.

Now, if interpretation belongs to man, the story is over.

But interpretation belongs to God.

So that if God is good enough to enter exiles and dreams and say that there is actually meaning here that I am accomplishing, you may not be able to see it of your own accord, but if you trust that interpretation belongs to me, you'll be able to hold it by faith.

Oh, how much grander is it?

How much more of a wedding of heaven and earth, of meaning-making is it?

When Jesus, the one from heaven, comes to earth, the ultimate exile, and enters not just dreams, not just sleep, but death.

And in that death, he turns it on itself.

And by that death, he kills death itself, so that we know that death does not have the final word for any who would trust in him.

So, what does that mean for your uninterpretable life?

It means that there is no such place where there is not meaning that is brought to it by the life of Christ.

That's how we live in the world.

This is the picture that we're shown in Jesus.

There's a place deeper than dreams.

It is called death.

But even there, interpretation belongs to the Lord, and we will find life in him.

So we live by faith.

We live by hope in his promises.

We seek to love one another.

Faith, hope, and love are not just pretty things.

They're not just like nice Christian virtues.

These are the very mechanisms by which we live in the story that God is writing.

Faith, hope, and love shown to us in Christ.

Are there any questions today, Matthew?

No questions about dream interpretation?

I was hoping somebody would be like, last night, I had the crazy, all my teeth fell out at a job interview.

A dream that I like frequently have is I'm preaching and this chord starts to like wrap around me.

And it and it then like I look at all of your faces and you just like grow disgusted and then just start to leave.

And I'm like, no, no, wait, wait.

Once again, don't have to be Sigmund Freud to interpret that one.

I think that one's that one's pretty clear.

Interpretation belongs to God.

The interpretation of your life belongs to God.

You may not be able to see it right now, but you can hold to it by faith because the maximal example of meaninglessness is death.

And Jesus entered that so that there is no place you might find yourself, which is hopeless.

You see that in Christ.

Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

What a hopeful proclamation.

I'm going to keep reading, because I think this will be a helpful reminder.

Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.

Let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.

That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.

But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined, so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

We come to the table as a proclamation of the Lord's death.

And we approach the table with an examination of our hearts.

This is why I give that warning each week where I say, if you are a Christian, we welcome you to the table.

If you've been baptized into the family of Christ, come eat.

If you have not, don't.

This is a proclamation of the death of our Lord, in which we have our hope.

So come and partake, Christian.

And if you are not a Christian, this is free.

The death that Christ died is for you to claim.

For you to have a hope in.

Otherwise, I think there is no interpretive framework which can account for the death that is coming towards you.

But Christ can.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, we pray that you would give us give us minds and imaginations to see the goodness of the story that you are writing.

To even in the in those places where it seems like we just can't interpret it and we can't understand what you're doing, that we would not lose hope there, but that that would be the very place that our hope is refined, that all of that desire that we have for my interpretation of my life to belong to me, that that might be burned off, and that we might develop a real hope in you.

One that looks to the cross and sees hope is inevitable now.

There is no place that is hopeless anymore.

Because death is dead in Jesus Christ.

I know the depths of your love towards me.

Lord, thank you for inviting us to your table.

Let us remember where we're headed.

The hope that is coming.

As we get a little taste of the meal that we will one day share with you.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.