The last words we hear from Joseph are in Genesis 50:24: “Then Joseph said to his brothers, ‘I’m about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’” – adding in verse 25, that “you must carry my bones up from this place” when they left for Canaan.
But how could Joseph be so certain that his brothers would end up back in Canaan, especially when they’d “settled in Egypt in the region of Goshen” (47:27) and “acquired property there and were fruitful and increased greatly in number”? Why up sticks and move back to Canaan when living in Egypt for seventeen years (28) had given all of them a very comfortable life?
Well, Joseph had experienced for himself the “behind-the-scenes God at work.” It started when he was seventeen years old (37:2). He had a dream about “the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down to him” (9), which made his Dad ask angrily, “(Now look here my boy), are you saying your mother and I, and your brothers, will actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” (10). How absolutely preposterous; what on earth was the silly boy thinking?
And what could Joseph say in reply? Here he was, a mere teenager spouting ludicrous sounding predictions about his family’s future. But give Jacob his due, he “kept (what Joseph had predicted) in mind” (11).
And well he should because behind the scenes for the next 22 years God was at work putting all the pieces in place for the time when his brothers left Canaan for Egypt to buy grain in the second year of the seven year famine. And it was on meeting Joseph (but not recognizing him) that “they bowed down to him with their faces to the ground” (42:6), just as Joseph had predicted – which made him remember his dreams too (9).
So, on revealing who he is to his brothers in Genesis 45:4, he tells them in verse 5, that “it was to save lives (including theirs, verse 7) that God sent me ahead of you,” and “it wasn’t you who sent me here, it was God” (8). It was God all along, behind the scenes, working all this out for them (41:32), proving he was being true to what “he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” (50:24). And the same for us, 1 Thessalonians 5:24, “The one who calls you is faithful,” and behind the scenes he’s putting things in place to prove it, just as he did for Joseph – and for his brothers too, by giving them “A taste of their own medicine”….next blog
Buck To Basics 