Word Live: The Unavoidable Truth
Use Psalm 139:23–24 as a prayer. Invite God to reveal truth to you as you read his Word.
Bible passage
Genesis 42:25–38
25 Joseph gave orders to fill their bags with grain, to put each man’s silver back in his sack, and to give them provisions for their journey. After this was done for them, 26 they loaded their grain on their donkeys and left.
27 At the place where they stopped for the night one of them opened his sack to get feed for his donkey, and he saw his silver in the mouth of his sack. 28 ‘My silver has been returned,’ he said to his brothers. ‘Here it is in my sack.’
Their hearts sank and they turned to each other trembling and said, ‘What is this that God has done to us?’
29 When they came to their father Jacob in the land of Canaan, they told him all that had happened to them. They said, 30 ‘The man who is lord over the land spoke harshly to us and treated us as though we were spying on the land. 31 But we said to him, “We are honest men; we are not spies. 32 We were twelve brothers, sons of one father. One is no more, and the youngest is now with our father in Canaan.”
33 ‘Then the man who is lord over the land said to us, “This is how I will know whether you are honest men: leave one of your brothers here with me, and take food for your starving households and go. 34 But bring your youngest brother to me so I will know that you are not spies but honest men. Then I will give your brother back to you, and you can trade in the land.”’
35 As they were emptying their sacks, there in each man’s sack was his pouch of silver! When they and their father saw the money pouches, they were frightened. 36 Their father Jacob said to them, ‘You have deprived me of my children. Joseph is no more and Simeon is no more, and now you want to take Benjamin. Everything is against me!’
37 Then Reuben said to his father, ‘You may put both of my sons to death if I do not bring him back to you. Entrust him to my care, and I will bring him back.’
38 But Jacob said, ‘My son will not go down there with you; his brother is dead and he is the only one left. If harm comes to him on the journey you are taking, you will bring my grey head down to the grave in sorrow.’
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Explore
In this epic story, the brothers are sometimes like the chorus overshadowed by the ‘bigger’ characters of Joseph and his father Jacob. The refrain they sing is, ‘We are honest men’ (see verses 11,31,33,34). They keep chanting this refrain even though they know the truth is different (see v 21).
Their father, Jacob, is on the one hand the same self-pitying, selfish man he has always been. All he can think of is his own loss. On the other hand, this scene dramatically shows that he may be deserving of more sympathy.
Like the older brother in Jesus’ parable of the two brothers (Luke 15), the brothers present themselves as loyal, dutiful sons, especially Reuben (v 37). But the reality is that beneath that veneer, they have treated their father abysmally, and Reuben has treated his father worst of all (see chapter 49:4).
They have deliberately deprived him of Joseph, his beloved younger son, and put him through the unnecessary suffering of bereavement. Now he faces the possibility of losing his new ‘baby’, Benjamin. This wrong will have to be confronted and falsehoods exposed.
Author
Steve Silvester
Respond
It is wise to look beneath our ‘theme tunes’, the words and phrases we use to describe ourselves. Are they true? Or does the refrain we sing betray an uncomfortable truth that we are trying to hide?
Deeper Bible study
‘How long, Lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me?’1
After leaving Simeon behind, on Joseph’s insistence, as a guarantee of their return with Benjamin, the brothers’ journey home to their father was never going to be easy. Bad rapidly became worse when, en route, they discovered a payment they’d made for the grain in one of the sacks. Panic ensued. On arriving home, they discovered it was even worse, since all their silver had been returned. Joseph, already suspicious and hostile to them, would surely take this as certain proof of guilt. Furthermore, they’d never be received back at the Egyptian court unless Benjamin, who could immediately be taken hostage, was with them. Worst of all, they had now to tell their father, who must have felt that every time they went away they came back ‘minus a brother’!2
The pervasive emotion in these verses is fear – a fear that God is going back on his promise to Abraham to make them a great people. It’s palpable. The brothers fear that God is punishing them for their past misdeeds (v 28). The father fears he’s going to end his life with all his hopes and dreams shattered (v 38). Believing that Joseph is dead, he fights to keep Benjamin under his close protection. He’s lost two children; he does not want to lose a third. Some accuse Jacob of being self-absorbed and simply seeing everything from his own selfish viewpoint, but the hurts of life surely make that understandable. He seems almost suicidal.
Sometimes we hit patches where we too want to cry out, ‘What is God doing?’ Dreams are shattered, hopes are unfulfilled, challenges mount, suffering invades and chaos lurks – but the story hasn’t ended yet. That’s the time to hold on and let God have his way, which always proves good in the end.
The deepest faith is trusting God, not just when he gives us what we want but when he appears to say no – and still believe him to be good.
1Ps 13:1 2 Victor Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18–50, NICOT, Eerdmans, 1995, p535
Author
Derek Tidball