(Gen. 45:3-153And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him; for they were troubled at his presence. 4And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. 5Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. 6For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. 7And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. 8So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. 9Haste ye, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Thus saith thy son Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down unto me, tarry not: 10And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me, thou, and thy children, and thy children's children, and thy flocks, and thy herds, and all that thou hast: 11And there will I nourish thee; for yet there are five years of famine; lest thou, and thy household, and all that thou hast, come to poverty. 12And, behold, your eyes see, and the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaketh unto you. 13And ye shall tell my father of all my glory in Egypt, and of all that ye have seen; and ye shall haste and bring down my father hither. 14And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept; and Benjamin wept upon his neck. 15Moreover he kissed all his brethren, and wept upon them: and after that his brethren talked with him. (Genesis 45:3‑15). 1 John 4:1818There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18).)
LAST month we were speaking about Joseph’s brothers being in his “presence,” and so afraid of him that they could not even tell him whether their father was alive or not. We now see in vs. 15 that they are enough at home with him to talk with him. It was not only that he talked to them; he might have done that and they have been all the while quaking with terror. As we read in Deut. 5, about the giving of the law, God did “talk with man,” but they could not talk with Him; and even as to His speaking to them, they begged Moses to go near to hear what God had to say, and come and tell them, for they said, “If we hear the voice of the Lord our God any more, then we shall die.” But it is said about Joseph here, that “his brethren talked with him;” the very same thing that is said about those two men, Moses and Elias, when they appeared in glory, at the side of the Lord Jesus, on the top of “the holy mount.” It does not say He talked with them, though no doubt He did so; but He might have done that without their being so free with Him as to talk with Him. But this is what we are told about them, and we even read what it was they talked with the Lord about. Moses had died all alone on Mount Pisgah; Elias had gone to heaven in a chariot of fire without dying at all; but Jesus would come down from the hill of glory, to suffer and die at Jerusalem, and these two friends of His talked with Him about it all.
But how was it that Joseph’s brothers could thus be happy enough with him to talk with him, when just before they had been so afraid of him that they could not say a word? It was not that they had undone the thing in which they had wronged Joseph. That could never be; we can never undo a thing we have once done. Pilate said, when they found fault with something he had written, “What I have written, I have written,” and if he had taken it down and torn it up, still it would have been true that he had written it. So Judah and the rest, could not undo what they had done against Joseph when he was a lad; neither had they now done anything for him, to “make it up” with him. It would have been no use for them to try to love him, or to tell him how much they did love him. Even if their love to him was perfect, it would not cast out their fear; but what did cast it out was that they saw and believed the love that he had towards them!
It was not that he did not know or did not remember all the wrong they had done to him. In one sense he told them all things that ever they did, for he said, “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt;” and he now had both the power and the right to punish them for their cruelty to him. But, instead of that, he talked to them with words of love, and kissed them with kisses of love, and wept on them with tears of love; and, although he did not say in words he had for given them, he showed by his actions that he had, as the kind father with the prodigal never told him he had forgiven him, but he showed that he had, like no words could have proved it to him. So here with Joseph, he had his brothers before him, and did not forget a single thing they had done against him more than twenty years before. They too remembered it all, and were afraid, but he was not angry with them, and he told them not to be angry with themselves, for it was God who had made all things work together for good. He knew that Jacob his father had sent him after them on an errand of kindness, and that they had sent him from them to be a slave; but he says it was God who had sent him before them to be their saviour! Twice over he says it: “God did send me before you to preserve life,” “God sent me before you.... to save your lives by a great deliverance.” God had, as it were, made him a prince and a saviour, as it says in the book of the Acts about the Lord Jesus, that God had exalted Him “with His right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour.” Indeed Joseph says, “So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God;” and this was true in the way he meant it, though of course it did not a bit take from the great sin they had been guilty of in serving him as they did; as it is said again of Jesus that He “was delivered for our offenses,” and it was God who delivered Him. “He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all,” yet this did not make it less sinful for men to say, “This is the Heir, come, let us kill Him.” It was “by wicked hands” He was taken to be crucified and slain, and all those who reject the Lord Jesus will have to answer to God for it.
It is very nice to see how Joseph takes all that had come upon him as having come from God Himself. He did not think so much of his brothers having sold him, and Pharaoh having exalted him, as he did of God having brought him to the place he was in. He says, it was God who sent me here, and “He hath made me... ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.” And you will remember that we read this same thing about the blessed Lord Jesus. When cruel men were going to mock and murder Him, He said, “The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” And then, as to His glory, He would not take it simply as a thing He had a right to, but He said, “And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me;” which He did, as Peter said on the day of Pentecost, “God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified both Lord and Christ.”
Coming back now to this chapter about Joseph, what a good thing it was for these poor trembling brothers of his that he should set their minds at rest at once about their sin against him! They might be afraid for him to speak about it, and yet, suppose he had not done so! They would have still been in suspense and fear, would they not? It was the very thing that was on the top in their minds, and, whatever else he had talked to them about, they would still have been thinking, “Ah, but what will he say or do when he has it over with us about putting him into that deep pit, where there was no water, and then selling him for twenty pieces of silver?” But he soon settles that matter with them, for he puts it almost the first thing “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt;” so they would know that all the kind things he afterward told them he fully meant, and was not forgetting their unkindness. It is a good thing, too, for us, dear little reader, to know that all our sins are naked and open before God; the very worst is out, and yet God shows His love, not in covering it up and saying nothing about it, but in putting it all away through the death of Christ. It is the greatest folly to try to hide it or excuse it, but, “if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:99If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)). See Psalms 32:1-51<<A Psalm of David, Maschil.>> Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. 2Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. 3When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. 4For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. 5I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah. (Psalm 32:1‑5).
What else Joseph said and did to give his brothers peace in his presence, I must tell you more about next month, if the Lord will. I will only ask you now to notice that when Joseph said, “Come near to me, I pray you,” they came near. Has not the Lord Jesus said more than once, “Come unto Me”? Is it not for you as well as for others Have you come to Him? If not, can you give Him any good reason why you have not?
W. TY.