Joseph’s brothers weren’t good people. Jealousy had transformed them into monsters with no qualms about killing Joseph, or letting him die a slow death in a waterless cistern, or selling him to strangers as a slave with no glimmer of concern as to what might happen to him. They also lied to their father to cover up their brother’s disappearance, with not a twinge of conscience when their Dad “mourned for his son many days,” Genesis 37:34.
Joseph’s brother Judah, meanwhile, married a Canaanite woman (a cultural ‘no no’, Genesis 24:3), and unsurprisingly produced a son so evil that “the Lord put him to death,” Genesis 38:2 and 7. Judah then unwittingly slept with his dead son’s wife, Tamar, who’d deceived him into thinking she was a prostitute (13-26). And several years earlier, Judah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, had murdered an entire town full of men and stolen everything they could get their hands on (34:25-29).
And in so doing they’d put their own families at risk of a revenge attack, which could have spelled the end of Jacob’s entire family too, and the collapse of God’s promise to save the world through Abraham’s descendants. But none of this crossed the minds of these idiots. They had no grasp at all as to what God had called them for.
And when famine threatened the lives of their families, the brothers were clueless. “Why do you just keep looking at each other?” Jacob angrily asked them (42:1). Not a spark of initiative in the lot of them. Just gormless, stupid dolts.
But in how Joseph dealt with them we see Jesus. The first thing Joseph does with these cretins is get their attention. He accuses them of being spies and throws them all in jail. That woke them up – especially Reuben who castigated his brothers for what they’d done to Joseph, and now their own lives were at risk (42:22). Joseph then gets them doing some serious soul searching as to what their motives really are, but it works brilliantly because after having their motives severely tested by Joseph they become totally changed individuals, humbly offering themselves to Joseph as his obedient servants (50:18).
And Joseph loves them for it, providing us with a marvellous picture of Jesus loving us despite what our personalities are like, as we see in “The personality types in Jacob’s 12 sons”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 