Thirteen years is a long time.  Two or more of those years in prison: that’s a long time, too.  A long time to let resentment grow, to be reshaped and molded by grief and anger.  I can almost hear Joseph’s thoughts as he stands there, looking at his brothers, with them not recognizing, not knowing him—did they ever know him?  He stands there, now with the power of life or death over them, thinking, “My life is messed up because of you!  You ruined my life!”  Their fault.  Oh, Joseph had his success, his prestige and power, but it isn’t hard to believe that, underneath it all, stewing there in the heat of his angry, resentful heart, what matters to him most is that he is miserable, and he knows the reason, it’s so clear to him: he sees it, right there in front of him.  Their fault.  Their fault his life is a mess; their fault that he is a mess.

That’s dark thinking.  Why hold onto resentment, anger, to be deformed from within, all those years?  It’s not healthy; it’s not a way to health.  It’ll kill you, Joseph!  All that dark stuff you’re holding onto, in there!  Get rid of it!  Cast it out!  Consider what God has given you and is giving you, and not what you keep telling yourself others have taken away.  Why hold on to that?  Why let yourself think and live that way?  Is that life?  Is that a way to life?

If he holds onto his anger and resentment, his deeply rooted conviction that others have ruined his life, then he will always have a ready alibi for his failures, his faults, and his frustrations.  Them.  Their fault.  They did this to me.  I am this way because of them.  And as for any sense of his own responsibility, his own possibility, or the power of God?

That is one way Joseph might have felt, might have responded, standing there, with his ignorant, hungry, begging brothers before him.  That’s not the way he does respond.  He is no longer the seventeen year old sold into slavery by his jealous, hurt, resentful half-brothers.  Their presence before him now is like the dreams he had all those years ago, those insistent, strange dreams he told to his brothers—why?—dreams that drove his brothers to seething indignation, on top of their confusion and jealousy that their father loved Joseph more than any of them, or even all of them together, and made no secret of it.

Joseph says, “do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here” (45:5).  Joseph sets before them the truth of what they did.  He isn’t forgetting it.  They hurt him, betrayed him.  Their actions against him had undeniable consequences in his life.  He doesn’t forget, but he does forgive.  Who have you forgiven?  And who haven’t you forgiven?  Who can you never forgive?

Joseph is not the seventeen year old sold into slavery.  That’s the last his brothers saw of him, how they remember him.  That was at least thirteen years ago.  In significant ways, I am not who I was thirteen years ago.  Are you?  How has Joseph changed?  We aren’t told, yet I believe all that Joseph has been through has had a cumulative effect, an effect overall for good, for maturity, resilience, determination, and for faith.  His brothers sold him: that memory, that knowledge, has a sting that will never go away.  His brothers hated him so much that they were happy to sell him and be rid of him.  Joseph had a lot of time to think about that.  You can be sure his thinking went through the full range of emotions, yet I believe all that thinking about what his brothers did to him began to turn, by some hand, some wind, began to turn Joseph’s thoughts to himself, to what he had done, to what he still could do.  How had he so offended them?  Where was his fault, his own failure?  As he saw himself more clearly, the sting of what was done to him began to sting less than the sting of what he saw in himself.

Unflattering, unsparing, and so true—painful as such thinking was, Joseph followed it.  He came to know himself, to see himself, not just to feel sorry for himself: he knew that did no good and got him nowhere.  He recognized that self-pity landed him in a different sort of prison.  He pursued self-knowledge not to feel sorry for himself but to understand the measure of his own responsibility for what had happened to him, to recognize his arrogance, his immaturity, his vicious glee that he was the special one in his parent’s eyes.  Joseph came to lament his lack of humility.  He reached the resolve to make the pursuit of humility his aim.

Unexpectedly—miraculously?—as he pursued humility, success in this life came . . . and reversal, frustration, and confusion.  What got him through the bad was humility, yet Joseph came to realize that there was something more, underneath the humility, at the root of it, or maybe the soil out of which humility grew, richly fed: faith.  Not faith in himself.  Faith in himself had gotten him sold by his brothers for twenty shekels of silver.  I don’t know what the value of silver was in that place in that time.  Today, those shekels work out to about $200.  Joseph closed his eyes and could see the coins, could still hear each metallic clink: $200, all his earthly value.

Now, eyes open, he tells his brothers that though they are indeed culpable for selling their own brother, and though Joseph himself also had a real part in their mutual alienation, something greater, magnificent, glorious, and holy, was also at work the whole time, within it all: “it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you” (45:5).  You sold me, but God sent me.

Sent by God.  Not in an auspicious way.  Not with power or authority.  Sent in a humiliating way!  A terrible and terribly sad way, yet sent nonetheless.  Joseph saw it, now, only now, after much pain, sorrow, and reversal, years of unflattering work to leave resentment behind, difficult work to leave anger behind, struggling to emerge into an open place, a place of humility, of faith, a place of forgiveness.  Joseph had worked at it.  God had been at work, too: with Joseph, through it all, working God’s purposes through it all, as though everything was part of a larger plan, beyond Joseph’s imagination, beyond his dreams.  And even if it wasn’t, even if what had happened to him was no part of God’s plan—neither the terrible things nor the happy things—God still used all that happened to further God’s plans, to accomplish God’s way.  How mighty, how great, is our God!

“It was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you” (45:5).  “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance” (45:7).  Maybe that word remnant might have gotten your notice.  The first one to use that word in Scripture is Joseph, but God has had His remnant in view from before the beginning.  That remnant is near to the heart of God.  Time and again in the Bible, we see God at work for His remnant: in the days of Noah, in the time of the kings (2K 19:30-31) and the prophets who warned them (Jer 23:3, 50:20; Am 5:15, Mic 2:12, Zeph 3:12), in the times of Ezra (Ch. 9), and in the way Paul speaks of the Church (Rom 11:5).  Jesus consistently makes a distinction between those who will hear and be saved, and those who refuse to hear at all costs.  Does the vision of Revelation not make this same distinction plain?  God works for His remnant.

Who is this remnant?  The ones who keep faith, whose devotion is to God above all, through all circumstances, devotion in times of blessing, by humility, and devotion through times of distress, by humility.  Joseph understands that now, so clearly.  He didn’t before.  He didn’t think that way, before.  He didn’t think to think that way.  Before, he was just hurt, confused and angry, resentful, and envious, and vain: no one had anything to tell him, not even God.

But God had mercy.  Joseph, who had done nothing that God should be impressed, who was nothing that would impress God, God preserved Joseph, kept Joseph safe; God delivered Joseph and made him a power in Egypt.  For Joseph’s own glory?  By way of revenge for Joseph upon his wretched brothers?  No.  God made Joseph a power in Egypt so that, through Joseph, God would save His faithful remnant, save them by a great deliverance.

Here is God’s purpose, His plan and aim: salvation.  Through all that happens, God’s plan does not change.  How difficult for us to accept!  How hard to see!  How our own actions obscure it!  How the actions of our fellow men obscure it.  All that resentment, anger and envy, all that hatred, out there for all to see.  Out there?  Beloved, it’s in here.  What we see there is a reflection of the fires, the ugliness, the brutality within.  Joseph knew all about it—he had lived it, and, by the grace of God, by God’s strong deliverance, Joseph had walked away from that kind of living.  He wasn’t going to live for death: Joseph was going to live for God.

God is the one who accepted Joseph despite his ugly flaws and failures.  God is the one who offered forgiveness, who made it possible to receive that forgiveness by breathing faith alive in Joseph: faith, despite all that happened to him, all that was happening to him, faith that God was all powerful, good, and leading Joseph through the wilderness of this world, leading him to the promised land of salvation by a great deliverance.

Many times Joseph had wondered why.  Why, God?  Why is this happening?  Why is this happening to me?  Why this evil?  Why this suffering?  If you’re good and great, why?  For years, Joseph was convinced he was ready to hear what God would say, whenever God wanted to say something: there had been only silence.  Then, at some point, by some power, he began to consider that the hardened heart does not listen.  At some point, by some power, Joseph began to consider, seriously and with some grief, the stubbornness of his own heart.  He may have been circumcised, dedicated in his flesh, in his life-making ability, devoted to God—outwardly—but in that life-making ability that counted, the inner ability, the ability given by the Spirit, Joseph realized his heart was uncircumcised, and his realization began to humble him.  He wanted to say to anyone who would listen, “Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer” (Dt 10:16).  As he looked through the bars of his dark prison toward the light of the day he could not see, it occurred to him, and shocked him, shook him, as he realized “A person’s own folly leads to their ruin, yet their heart rages against the Lord” (Pr 19:3).

As he rediscovered prayer, discovered prayer was something different from what he had thought, he felt as if he heard God say, “Because your heart was responsive and you humbled yourself before the Lord [. . .] I also have heard you” (2 K 22:19).  He trembled, there in prison, as he began to realize that “as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you” (Dt 8:5).  Joseph used to think Jacob was just being mean and ugly to him on those rare occasions when he criticized Joseph, or raised his voice, those few times Jacob struck him, his favorite.  When Joseph began to perceive the real love behind these things, and as he recognized and confessed his own pride and foolishness, he would sit there in his cell and weep.  And he began to hope, and seek, and reach the arms of his soul out for his Father in heaven.

Then, one night, a cold night, in prison, Joseph found himself repeating in his mind, then silently with his lips, over and over, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” (Pr 3:5).  He had tried to live his life, organize and control his life, by his understanding, his own standards, his own goals and preferences: this prison cell was the sum of all his works.  Yet, as he spoke those words into his heart, into his soul, he began to feel lighter, and full.

Now, with his hungry, desperate, begging brothers before him, and he with the power of life and death over them, Joseph remembered that whole-hearted trust.  He remembered words of wisdom that had recently come to him from God through it all: “the cheerful heart has a continual feast” (Pr 15:15).  A great deliverance.  Salvation.  God’s ways, plans and purposes, God always continually at work, through it all, through all the mess and all the joy, the challenge and the blessing, all the happiness and all the pain.  Humbling.  Glorious.  God.

And it may just be that God is using you to help save a remnant, too.

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.