Genesis 45

God sent you.

I want you to capture this beautiful phrase in Genesis 45.

Genesis 45:7.

Joseph speaks to his brothers and he says, "God has sent me ahead of you to keep you and your families alive and to preserve many survivors." Here's what happened.

Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery, but what they, they did not know, and Joseph did not know at the time, is that a great famine was coming.

Amen.

Keep your Bibles open there in Genesis 48, because we're gonna go around that story.

You know, one of the aspects of the relationship with God is that he gives us promises.

And fasting is a good period for us to reflect on those personal promises.

There is family breaking, and now our hearts are feeling that grief before we even know the whole truth.

And we tend to embrace those news as factual, permanent realities.

In Genesis chapter 37, the Bible tells us that the brothers of Joseph brought the famous colorful cloak that his father has put together for him with stain of blood, and they lie to his father, to their father, saying, "Joseph is dead." And because of that, the Bible tells us that Jacob, when he got those garments, he cried.

Look what he says.

Genesis 44, we have the trap.

And finally, Genesis 45, the reveal.

The reveal.

And the heart of this really is that Joseph finally shows them who he is.

And I say that because one of the extraordinary things that marks Joseph's life is his location.

It's how he saw his life in the context of the big story of what God was doing, not just with him, but far beyond him.

And it's there three times in Genesis 45.

We read it today, okay? As he, as he tried to do the reveal and to his brothers and reassure them of what his plans were to do, okay? Verse five, verse seven, verse eight, he says this: "And now, do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you." Verse seven, "God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance." Verse eight, "So then it was not you who sent me here, but God." You sold me, but God.

In his faith in God, he realized that he is a favored son.

When we look at the story of Genesis 45:3, when Joseph first revealed and unveiled himself to his brothers...

Well, you must understand the context.

They have not met for a many, many long years.

Joseph must forgive his brothers, otherwise he will never s- get to see the second half of his life or the second part of the story.

If that is true of him, that is true of us, all of us in this room.

In Genesis 45:1-4, "But his brothers could not answer him, for they were dismayed when he asked, 'Is my father still alive?' So Joseph said to his brothers, 'Come, come near to me.' And they came near and he said, 'I am your brother, Joseph, whom you,' say with me, 'sold.' Whom you sold into Egypt." Two points here.

What is forgiveness? Let me not just define, but to demonstrate and to describe it to us here this morning.

See up here on the screen.

Genesis 45 says Joseph recovered from his shock.

1 Samuel 30, it says this, David recovered all the Amalekites had taken from him, all his family and everything valuable to him.

What's been taken from you? What have you lost in the process? Genesis 14 says this, Abraham recovered everything that had been stolen.

um cool all right then let's uh move on to genesis and we're back with joseph um obviously i think the it's been chosen here to link back to sort of forgiveness

yeah it's curious because uh yeah we talked i think when we looked at genesis 45 a few weeks ago uh and they're very closely linked genesis 45 and genesis 50 um and and that was in the continuous reading now it's popped back in the in the linked reading But this is even sharper on the same themes we talked about a few weeks ago.

This classic line that Karl Barth makes so much of in the first volume of his church dogmatics, even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good.

I mean, that's like a signature shooting through the whole of the Old Testament, that God does have a plan.

He is my Lord and Savior.

You see, when you read in the book of Genesis, chapter 43 and onwards, You'll see when, you know, Jacob had 12 sons.

One of them was Joseph.

The brothers wanted to kill Joseph.

Judah said, this is the blood of Joseph that is haunting us now.

We deserve imprisonment.

That prison which is in Genesis is the great tribulation of the 21st century.

When the Israelites are thrown in prison of the great tribulation, Judah will cry out and say, this is the blood of Joseph which we have to pay for.

But Joseph's heart did not stay bitter.

Fast-forward to Genesis 45.

Joseph had hidden his identity from his brothers for as long as he could stand.

He had played all the tricks he could play.