God's Providence Amidst Family Dysfunction and Dreams

The Joseph narrative is a family saga. It's all centered around one family. And it is certainly not like squeaky clean people who are living perfect lives. It is very messy. It is very raw. It might give your own family drama a run for its money. It is a story of betrayal. And it's a story of lies and favoritism and jealousy and plotted murder and slavery and injustice, but ultimately about forgiveness and about redemption and about God's providential hand working through all circumstances. It is the stuff of real life. [00:01:48]

Stories don't just inform the mind, but they connect to the heart and we remember them. They don't just tell us what's right, they tell us why it matters. And stories ultimately let us see ourselves. You find people that maybe they've never been to church before. They come to recovery church and they listen to someone's story and they go, "Oh, that's me." or maybe there's hope for me because there was hope for that person. They let us see our choices and our consequences almost kind of rehearse them. [00:03:11]

Stories can help us to rehearse or practice virtue. They can help to warn us of failure. They can help us think about what kind of person we want to be and what kind of story we want to be part of. And biblical literature does this in an amazing way when we take the time to expose ourselves to the stories in the Bible. There are various barriers to reading the Bible well. And one of those barriers is that we've got a wee bit of a tendency to turn the characters into heroes. [00:03:42]

The reality is everybody is very flawed. It is the same with the Bible. There are no heroes really apart from Jesus in the Bible. Not Abraham, not Moses, not David, not even Joseph. They're all human. They're all flawed. They're all really fragile. Sometimes they're faithful and brave and they do amazing things. and sometimes they get things catastrophically wrong. So, we can take hope this morning. Joseph comes from an incredibly dysfunctional family. [00:04:44]

Despite this horrendous, horrendous behavior, God doesn't abandon the story and he doesn't abandon this family and he doesn't abandon these people despite their sin and their rebellion. He steps right into the mess and he begins weaving his story of redemption through this mess. He even uses it to achieve his purposes. One of the most fascinating things about the Joseph story is this. There's no burning bush. There's no thunderous voice from heaven. no angelic visitations. [00:05:46]

In some ways, God doesn't even really front and center in this story the way he is in other stories. It's a wee bit like the story of Esther. In the story of Esther, God's not even actually mentioned, but he's there. He's in the background. He's working in the shadows. He's working through dreams in the Joseph story. He's moving through brokenness. He's orchestrating events, even the worst of them, for good and for his plan and for the saving of many lives. [00:06:32]

This is what theologians call providence, God's divine care, right? He is guiding the events of human history and destiny and weaving out his purposes. It's not coincidence. It's not fate. It's not just random events happening. It is the invisible hand of God at work through human lives. And even when we can't see it and even when it doesn't make sense. And that speaks to us today, doesn't it? Right? Because even when we feel like God is silent, maybe things in your life this morning look broken. [00:07:11]

Maybe your family looks broken. Maybe things look beyond repair. But Joseph's story tells us that then even then God is not absent. God is not idle. He is working through the circumstances of your life to weave something greater than you can currently see. Tim Mackey from the Bible project describes a Joseph story like this. This is a story about a family fractured by jealousy, anger, and betrayal. But it's also about how those betrayals become the vehicle for the purposes of God. [00:07:51]

Our culture can be very individualistic. We tend to kind of place ourselves at the center of the story, don't we? As if we are like the center of everything. But the Bible reminds us that we are part of this giant narrative. That's what the genealogies in the Bible are all about. All those names, the kind of boring bits that you tend to skip, they are reminding people that they are part of a giant story. Joseph's story is part of a bigger arc, a divine drama that reaches from Eden to Egypt, from Canaan to the cross of Calvary, from the patriarchs of Israel to the promised Messiah and beyond, right into your life and my life today and into the future. [00:11:09]

Jealousy is a really horrible thing. It doesn't just burn up the person who feels it. It turns to fed like a fire till everything gets scorched. And unless God steps in, those cycles can repeat, can't we? We see that in our own life. Don't know if you noticed how Joseph's brothers are named, but they're actually not named. They are called, we're just told who their mothers are, right? And their mothers were Bila and Zelpa, who were servants, kind of secondary wives to their father Jacob. [00:13:19]

Maybe one sibling got the blessing and the other one got the leftovers. And that tends to be a recipe for bitterness, doesn't it? that can begin to simmer away and unless that's dealt with it causes huge problems in adulthoods, right? These wounds that fester over many years and then cause massive problems. If that's left to simmer unchecked, it can boil over into hatred as we're told in this story. And we get that, don't we? In our own lives, we haven't we've not turned up here this morning in a vacuum, right? [00:14:17]

You might have grown up vowing like I'm never going to be like my dad, never going to be like him. But then now and again, you see that temper, right? Or your mother's fears, I'm never going to be like my mom, but then your mother's chronic fears seem to have a grip in you as well. Why is that? Maybe you look around your family and there's generational cycles of addiction or poverty or silence or secrets or things that you don't want to be repeating but they seem to sort of automatically repeat in your life. [00:14:56]

And just like Joseph and his brothers, we carry the weight of where we came from. Generational pain that doesn't kind of knock at the door and ask to like come in, right? It just invades your life uninvited. And if we don't let God heal it, it can grow into something we never intended. Verse two tells us that Joseph brought a bad report about them to his father. Sometimes I've heard it said, you know, Jo, was Joseph just like a teenage snitch? He might have been, right? A kind of telltale. [00:15:28]

But we have to remember these brothers were really dangerous men, right? They are the same men who in Genesis 34 plotted a citywide massacre. They slaughtered the men of Sha as re revenge for what happened to their sister Dina. Right? It isn't small. Isn't like playground drama. It's cold bloodooded vengeance hidden under a thin veil of family loyalty. So, I wondered in this story when Joseph speaks up to his dad about what's happening out in the fields, like part of me thinks it could have been quite sinister. [00:15:59]

Talk for a moment about favoritism, that love that is not shared equally kind that blesses one child and breaks the others. Joseph was the son of Rachel who was Jacob's true love. He loved Rachel, but there is a big family mess. There's a whole lot of like history there as they say. Jacob had two wives that he chose and two that he didn't. It's very messy. Sort of like soap opera meets scripture. He was tricked by his uncle Laban into marrying Leah, who was the less attractive older sister of Rachel. [00:17:15]

He has to work another seven years to win Rachel's hands. And when she finally had Joseph, who was the miracle child, she was barren, but she eventually has Joseph, he became the son, the golden child, the absolute favorite. And Jacob didn't try to hide it. There's a slightly almost embarrassing quality about his like over-the-top favoritism of Joseph. He literally wraps his son in his favoritism with this robe. The robe wasn't just a gift. It was a statement. It was ornate. It was multicolored. It was expensive. It was more than a robe. It was a crown. [00:17:51]

The robe whispered, "This is the favorite one. This is the special one. This is the one I like the best. This is the chosen one. And every time Joseph wore it, it was like a flag, right? A walking reminder to his brothers that their father loved him more than them. So, we can imagine the brothers, they're out in the fields, they're doing their thing, and they see Joseph right swinging up with his robe on the much younger brother. So in the culture he would have been one down the pecking order, right? He shouldn't have been the favorite. [00:18:39]

But this robe wraps around him like royalty. And they felt the sting of being constantly passed over being the father favoring Joseph. That younger sibling being valued over them, him being the favorite. And the text tells us they hated him. They couldn't even speak a kind word to him. So, it's more than sibling rivalry, more than kind of like we probably all got a we bit of rivalry with our siblings, don't we? A little bit. Right. It isn't just It isn't just that, though. It is a soul deep resentment. [00:19:18]

It's decades of favor favoritism. It's like a festering wound boiling over into hatred. So, Joseph is young in this story. He's 17. And 17-year-old boys or teenage boys at the best of times are probably not famously known for their self-awareness, particularly maybe when it comes to matters of their own personal safety. He is brighteyed. He is naive. He's probably got a we bit of swagger. He's wearing this robe like a badge of honor, but not realizing he's got like a giant bullseye on his back with these dangerous brothers of his. [00:19:54]

Wounded people wound people, don't they? And when that jealousy is left to fester, it doesn't just sit there and do nothing, right? It plots and it poisons and it ultimately destroys. And this is the world of our young Joseph, 17-year-old dreamer, little bit naive potentially, and he's surrounded by these brothers who have blood, a lot of blood on their hands. family secrecy, family rivalry, favoritism and jealousy and cycles of pain that go back generations. And yet here is the hope. Even here, especially here, God is not absent. [00:20:34]

Right in the middle of this mess, God is setting the stage. Before the dream elevates Joseph, this family dysfunction will attempt to destroy him. And the story isn't just about these ancient shepherds in a far off land. It speaks right into the human condition. It speaks to us today. speaks about how our pasts might shape us and who who we're becoming. It speaks hope into the fact that God can break into generational pain. It speaks how the youngest and the lowest down and the social order can become an agent of redemption not just for his family which looks beyond saving but for a whole nation. [00:21:28]

It's a dream that didn't just disrupt his sleep. It disrupted absolutely everything. His brothers say, "Do you intend to re over us? Will you actually rule us? And they hated him. Hate is repeated so many times in this. They hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said. First a field of sheav bowing down, then the sun and moon and stars bowing down. These dreams were very provocative. They were not hard for anyone to interpret. The brothers understood. Right? This dream had substance. [00:23:06]

These are words that can flip history on its head. They're words that whisper, "Things won't always be the way that they are now." For the first time in Israel's history, those words reign in rule and attach to someone like Joseph, the underdog. And they become words with political weight for the overlooked, for the young, and for the powerless. We have a repeated theme throughout scripture that the last will be first and the first will be last. We see this. It's one of these echoes we see all the way through scripture. [00:23:44]

Joseph is a boy with a robe and with a vision that didn't make any sense to the people around him, but he was prophesied by God to become a great ruler. The words dream and power are two words that don't necessarily seem to easily fit together. Power can feel dominating. Power can feel heavy and weighty. Dreams are kind of, I don't know, if somebody's dreamy, you'd be like, you know, fragile and maybe a bit out there. But in God's economy, dreams are very, very important because dreams are the seeds of new realities. [00:24:17]

Dreams can threaten the old social order. Dreams can challenge the power structures of the way things have always been. And dreams can invite hope into places where hope has been long buried. But dreams are also dangerous. These dreams add another layer, as if it needed anymore, but they add another layer to the brother's hatred of Joseph because he dared to dream of a world where the last would become first. Those without power will lead, where the younger leads the older. [00:24:44]

Anytime God breathes a dream like that into someone's heart, it can shake up the power structures of the way things are. Talking about someone else who very famously had a dream, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a figure in some ways reminiscent of Joseph. He was a leader who dared to envision a future that the world around him said was impossible. He was an American minister and activist born in 1929 and died in 1968. He was born into a world shackled by racism and segre segregation where laws were unjust and where hatred ran very very deep. [00:25:31]

Yet in the middle of that brokenness, he carried a dream. A dream of unity. A dream of justice rolling down like a mighty river. A dream where all of God's children could sit together around the table as equals. And just like Joseph, that dream cost him. He was mocked and threatened and imprisoned and ultimately assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. walked through fire from the jail cells of Birmingham to the shadow of death in Memphis. But he never let go of the dream because the dream wasn't just his alone. [00:25:59]

The dreams that God gives to us and God gives to his people are not about like I'm going to be the special one. I'm going to be in charge. They are for others. That is the same in the Joseph story. It was for the salvation of many and the saving of many lives. God is in the business of giving kingdom dreams to his people. And that means me and you this morning for the outworking of his plans and purposes in the world. So what about you this morning? We're not spectators in the kingdom. [00:27:42]

What dreams of justice and peace and reconciliation might be beginning in your heart that might not fit the world that you see right now around you? Are you carrying a vision that maybe other people might not understand? Something that might make people roll their eyes a bit. Maybe it might be a dream of reconciliation in a family that has been ravaged by conflict and addiction. It might be a dream of breaking some of those generational cycles. Maybe it's a vision for justice, for healing, for something new. [00:28:23]

But if that dream has come from God, it will always seem impossible. It'll always seem too big for you. It may well threaten the status quo. It may get you thrown into some pits, right? Or misunderstood or silenced or ignored. But if God has planted the dream, no amount of jealousy or hatred or opposition can kill it. The dream will outlive the pit. It will outlast the prison. And in time, it will bring you to the place where God intended all along. [00:29:04]