Joseph and His Brothers, Part 4

16 So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, "Your father gave this command before he

died: 17 'Say to Joseph, "Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin,

because they did evil to you."' 39; And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants

of the God of your father." Joseph wept when they spoke to him. 18 His brothers also

came and fell down before him and said, "Behold, we are your servants." 19 But Joseph

said to them, "Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 20 As for you, you meant evil

against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept

alive, as they are today. (Gen. 50:16-20 ESV)

Today’s lesson is only meant to make you think. Well, maybe more, but that’s where I’m starting

at. What does it mean to be free? Do any of us really understand total freedom? I’d like to make

a case to you today that only God is free in the purest sense of the definition. As God acts, even

in the passage at hand, only He does as He pleases exactly as He desires, unconstrained by

the Egyptians, Joseph, Jacob’s wishes, or the brothers. There’s no one in Joseph’s story, or

ours for that matter, that ever could hold God in check, forcing Him into their plans. You see, for

God to be God, part of His character must be that He is free and unconstrained by His creation,

lest He be subservient to their wishes. If God is dependent upon others, if He can be held in

check by anyone for any reason, He is not God.

None of us makes God do anything He doesn’t want to do. No amount of praying or pleading or

sacrificial living ever makes God have to do anything in response. I think many people have

subtly come to the belief that prayer, though unstated, is some form of divine manipulation, and

if they pray enough times or have enough people join in, God not only might respond favorably,

but perhaps even has to respond favorably. How is this evident? When people pray much and

their prayers go unanswered on their timetable or outside of their terms and they abandon

seeking Him, what I think we have witnessed is a false theology of what it means to pray. This is

true not only with prayer, but even the whole Christian life. When people come to it wrongly, they

inevitably abandon it when the magic machine of a better life at their command doesn’t prove to

be how it works.

God is free in ways you and I are not. That’s what I also want to get at today. The concept of

free will needs to be tempered by conditions and constraints. No one freely chooses in the

sense that we all choose what seems best to us in the moment based upon our understandings,

our feelings, our past, our mental state, our sin, our idols of the heart and so forth. By the way,

that’s always changing, isn’t it? This is why people make different decisions at older ages than

they did in their youth; they learned. You’ve never made a truly free decision outside of a host of

influential elements in your life.

I say these things in lieu of this passage, because Joseph’s brothers made their decisions

against him early on because of an incredible amount of factors going into it. They had their

intentions in what they chose to do, but God overruled those intentions and guided even those

sins exactly into His overarching path. The freedom that the brothers had was not in doing

whatever they pleased outside of God’s control or sovereign plans, though they were breaking

His moral plans left and right; the freedom was in choosing what they intended. We will never

choose God and His version of good until that becomes more beautiful and sensible to us than

the sin we preferred.

Proverbs 16:33 tells us, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”

Joseph’s brothers may have done what they did with the hopes of what they held in their hearts

as an outcome, but it was God whose ultimate determinations were already at work in those

actions. It’s a very complex and deep, difficult thing to really speak into the “cosmic dance” of

divine sovereignty and human responsibility/ free will, but I would encourage you to think about

it (agree or disagree, again, I just want you to think critically and biblically). Additionally, and

here’s perhaps the rub today, we are often given so much to seeking what God’s will is for our

lives, as to where we should go, what we should do, whom we should align with (or marry), etc.,

but it all too common that we are not concerned with God’s moral will of how He would have us

live. You see, that’s where God wants us to focus, on how we live, and to trust Him as we obey

as He opens those doors of people, places, and events for us. Pray about them, yes, but don’t

make the careless mistake of only waiting for the milestones while failing to place your attention

on Jesus and your own life.

Be brave. Be blessed.

Sam Stringer