This should be a lot shorter than past blogs. You can read the chapters and get most of the details. We all know Pharoah’s two dreams: the fat cows that came up first, then the skinny cows came up and ate the fat cows. The same with the 7 full ears of grain followed by 7 withered ears that ate the full ears. We need to notice that Joseph gives full credit to God, not himself, for interpeting Pharoah’s dreams. He constantly says that God is the one who will cause the 7 years of plenty followed by 7 years of famine. Giving credit to God is typical of the character and integrity of Joseph. So Genesis 41:39 Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Since God has informed you of all this, there is no one so discerning and wise as you are. ⁴⁰ You shall be over my house, and according to your command all my people shall do homage; only in the throne I will be greater than you.” ⁴¹ Pharaoh said to Joseph, “See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt.” Joseph then set about with a plan to store excess grain during the 7 years of plenty and then sell it to people all over suffering from the 7 years of famine. BTW Joseph is 30 when he stood before Pharoah 41:46. He was 17 when his brothers sold him to a caravan. He spent 2 years in prison false accused by Potiphar’s wife. The restored butler forgot Joseph for 2 years so that means he spend 4 years total in prison. That means he spent about 9 years as a slave in Potiphar’s house. That’s longer than I thought!

I’m not going to give all the details of Joseph’s brothers two trips to Egypt to buy food. That’s fairly easy, plain reading. I am going. to focus on chapter 45. Joseph is moved to tears as he hears Judah make a very passionate appeal to Joseph not to keep Benjamin in Egypt. Judah said that would kill Jacob, their father. He offered to take Benjamin’s place and stay in Egypt as a slave if Joseph would let Benjamin go back to his father in Canaan. Joseph heard that plea and realized that that his brothers had changed. Joseph wept so loudly that Pharoah’s household heard him weeping. He then revealed to his brothers that he was Joseph. He then said, “Genesis 45:⁵ Now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. ⁶ For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. ⁷ God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. ⁸ Now, therefore, it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his household and ruler over all the land of Egypt.” We could call this an epiphany (a sudden moment of clear understanding or a great realization). It finally dawned on him that everything that had happened was part of God’s providential working to get Jacob’s family to move to Egypt where they would end up enslaved but multiplying to over a million people so that God’s promises in Genesis 15 could come true, i.e. that Abraham’s descendants would be slaves for 400 years and then come out to go possess the promised land of Canaan.  They would never have grown so much if they had stayed in Canaan. Joseph told his brothers that it wasn’t them that sent him to Egypt: it was God. It actually was his brothers who sold him into slavery in Egypt but was in control of making that happen. We don’t know how God works behind the scenes to make His plans happen. He uses the free will choices of people but He also directs circumstances to make things happen. Joseph forgave his brothers and they had a tearful but joyous reunion. Joseph, with Pharoah’s help and wagons, had Jacob moved from Canaan to Egypt, about 75 people.

Life Lesson: When bad things happen, you never know what good things God might make happen out of the bad. You have to trust God. Romans 8:28 God causes all things to work together for good to those who love him. That’s called the “behind the scenes providential working of God. It’s a mixture of God allowing people to make good and bad choices but sill making things work out like He wants them to. Usually there are no Bible miracles involved. The story of Joseph and the story of Esther are ttwo great examples of the providence of God working. The book of Esther doesn’t even have the name of God in it, but the hand of God is seen throughout the book and the events in the book. I will close with my example. I have only been fired once in my 76 years. It wasn’t for anything bad I had done. The elders where I was preaching just decided to tell me to move on since I had been telling them that I was probably going to take another job in Huntsville at Madison Academy when it came open. But they did fire me. It was very rough making the move to Huntsville. I took a 50% cut in pay to come to Madison Academy and my wife lost her new, very good paying teacher job in Vernon Alabama. But God blessed us, my wife found a good job, and I became principal of the school a year later which doubled my pay. I also started preaching part time with a church in Huntsville. But the greatest blessing of getting fired was my 3 children finding their mates in Huntsville over the next few years after we moved. I truly believe that God was working to get us to Huntsville. I believe that He was behind our firing. He did not make the elders fire me. They did so on their own, but God somehow influenced them to make that decision. Before they fired me, I had just decided to not move to Huntsville, but after they fired me I had no choice since I no longer had the preaching job in Vernon. That was rough on us at the time, but I look back and it was one of the best things that has ever happened to my family. Do you have a story of God working in your life? Of God making bad things work for good? Have you ever had an epiphany like Joseph did and it just hit you that God had been working all along even though you didn’t realize it?