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That's connectwithskip.com. Now let's get into today's teaching from Pastor Skip Heitzig. And Joseph said to him, this is the interpretation.
He knew it right away. Three branches are three days. Now within three days, Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your place. And you will put Pharaoh's cup in his hand according to the former manor when you were his butler. So the dream is a positive interpretation. It's a good dream. It's a dream of being restored back to the previous place. Your head's going to be lifted up. That's a biblical idiom of restoration and favor. You may remember Psalm 3, the Lord is the lifter of my head. When you're down and you're dejected like a little kid, head down, the Lord comes and lifts your head up, lets you see things correctly. So you will find favor and you'll be restored back to your former position.
But, he says, remember me when it's well with you. And please show kindness to me, make mention of me to Pharaoh and get me out of this house. Joseph saw this not only as a chance to serve the prisoners, but he saw this as the first ray of hope in getting out of prison.
This was his get out of jail free card, quite literally. He thought, great, I know this is going to happen and when it happens, if this guy puts in a good word for me to the Pharaoh, I might get out. So remember me, put in a good word for me when you're in the Pharaoh's house.
For indeed, verse 15, I was stolen away from the land of the Hebrews and I have also done nothing here that they should put me into the dungeon. And when the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he said to Joseph, I also was in my dream and there were three white baskets on my head. The baker's been listening to the butler tell his dream.
He didn't speak up first, he's just sort of waiting. He's troubled by his dream. But, in hearing the dream and the interpretation, he thinks, great, that was a positive outcome. And no doubt, he's thinking that Joseph's going to say, well, you're going to be sprung out of here and serving it up at the Pharaoh's table in no time. But his dream turns into a nightmare as he hears the interpretation. Verse 17, in the uppermost basket were all kinds of baked goods for Pharaoh and the birds ate them out of the basket on my head. And Joseph answered and said, this is the interpretation of it.
The three baskets are three days. Within three days, Pharaoh will lift off your head from you and hang you on a tree and the birds will eat flesh from you. See what I mean by nightmare? The dream turned into the nightmare on Pyramid Street. It's not what he expected to hear.
He thought it would be favorable like the first guys. Notice the difference in the dreams. In the first dream, he sees the Pharaoh's cup in his hands, the Pharaoh's drinking out of his cup. In the second dream, though the bread basket is for Pharaoh, birds are eating out of that basket. Now, let me just throw this out at you so you can keep it in your mind. In prophetic scripture, in parabolic scripture, prophetic scripture, birds are often a symbol that portend evil, not good. I'll give you a few examples that come to mind.
There are more. In Matthew chapter 13, Jesus gave the parable of the sower and the seed. And the seed fell upon rocky soil and the birds of the air came and snatched it up.
Speaking of how Satan removes the word of truth from a person's heart as soon as they hear it. Also in Matthew 13, Jesus gave a parable of the mustard seed that is the smallest seed in the herb garden, but this huge tree grows from it and the birds of the air lodge in its branches. The follow-up parable to that is the parable of the leaven. And leaven is the symbol of evil and birds was also a symbol of the evil that would lodge within that organized community throughout church history within the church. Then there's Revelation chapter 18, Mystery Babylon. Babylon is fallen is fallen, which has become the habitation of every foul bird and unclean bird. So here's another example of how they don't portend good but evil. So, yep, three more days. Your days are numbered. Your head's coming off and you're a dead dude and birds will eat your flesh off of you.
Ouch. Now it came to pass on the third day, which was Pharaoh's birthday, that he made a feast for all of his servants. And he lifted up the head of the chief butler and of the chief baker among his servants. But in two quite different manners, he restored the chief butler to his leadership again and he placed the cup in Pharaoh's hand. But he hanged the chief baker as Joseph had interpreted to them.
Yet, now watch this, yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph but forgot him. Hey, remember me when you get out of here. I shouldn't be here.
I didn't commit any crime. Tell Pharaoh, I want to get out of here. Remember me. But he didn't remember him.
He forgot him. There are certain experiences in your life that you cannot control. They happen to you. You wish they wouldn't happen to you. But they happen to you.
Jesus said the sun and the rainfall and the just and the unjust. You can't control all the things that happen to you in life. However, you can control your response to all the things that happen to you.
That's in your control. How do you take it? What is your response to it? Imagine what it was like for William Sangster, a great preacher in England a century ago. When he went to doctors and the doctors told him that he had a progressive muscular atrophy disease. That his muscles would waste away. Eventually he would lose his voice.
Even he would be unable to swallow at the latter stages of the disease. That's what he was told. He went home and he wrote down four things he was committed to. Four little things that he wrote on his pad.
And he kept them to the day of his death. Number one, he said, I will never complain. I'm not going to say, poor me, woe is me. I'm going to trust in God. I'll never complain, number one. Number two, I'm going to make my home a bright place.
Instead of a, you know, sad, horrible, because people, kids, grandkids, they're not going to want to visit me. I'm going to make the home a happy and bright place. Number three, he said, I'm going to count my blessings.
I'm going to think of all the things God has done for me, through me in my life. And fourth and finally, he said, I'm going to try to turn this horrible situation into something good. He knew that he wouldn't always be able to speak and so he took to writing books, articles, pamphlets. He got involved in the British Home Missionary Group, which had home fellowships around England.
And started prayer fellowships around England that prayed for missions and got involved. And to his dying day, he kept those four commitments. You can't control what happens to you.
You can control your response. Joseph was hoping that he would hear news any day. Disappointment.
Look at verse one of chapter 41. Then it came to pass at the end of two full years. Stop right there. Whoa.
Two full years. Can you just picture Joseph? He didn't know what was coming. Three days later, after the interpretation was given, he thought he would hear keys clinging down the hallway of the prison thinking, great.
This is my great escape. But those days passed and a week passed and another week passed and a month. Six months and 12 months and 24 long, lonely, uneventful months. Two full years passed.
Nothing happened. If I were to write a proverb, a scripture at the beginning of chapter 41, I would write Proverbs 21 verse 1. It's that proverb that says, the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord. And like the courses of water, he pushes it wherever he wants it to go. God is doing that here. Why did God wait two years? I can't answer that. If I were to give you some fancy theological answer, it would be so shallow.
I don't know why. I think I'm safe, however, in saying God was still, let's say, putting some finishing touches on Joseph. God was working some deep things, a heart of trust. If you remember when Joseph first started, he was pretty brash, naive, pampered, spoiled.
He didn't have to work. He had the coat that says, you're the supervisor. You might be the youngest brother, but you're in charge of your brothers. Go spy on them for me.
Tell me if they're doing something bad. That's the lifestyle he was used to, pampered. God is working something deep in his life. The end of two full years that Pharaoh had a dream, and behold, he stood by a river.
Now it's the dream that's going to call for Joseph's unique skill set in interpreting the dreams. You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we return to Skip's teaching, in his powerful book, Beyond the Summer of Love, Pastor Skip Heitzig helps you understand God's plan and his rules for relationships that flourish and reflect his own love. And when you give a gift of $25 or more this month to support the Worldwide Ministry of Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you Beyond the Summer of Love. This resource is for anyone interested in having a successful relationship, whether you're single, searching for love, planning to get married, or already married. This book is a helpful guide to help your relationships flourish as God intends.
Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy when you give $25 or more. Now let's get back to Skip for more of today's teaching. Here's a thought I want you to put in your mind.
We'll kind of capitalize on it throughout this study and at the end and probably next week. You have no idea what God is preparing for you right now that won't come to pass for maybe two years. You have no clue.
Oh, this is horrible. You don't know what God is preparing you for, what work God is preparing you for. You ever think that way?
You ever think when you're deep and down in the muck, wow, God's preparing me for something great. That takes a little bit of foresight by faith to think that way. But how about it? How about that attitude?
A.W. Tozer was right, I believe, when he said, I doubt that God has ever blessed anyone greatly before he has hurt them greatly. What if Joseph would have just gone from this spoiled kid watching over his brother's favored boy with the coolest coat in town to second in command over the world? What would his story be? Well, you know, I was always that special child and people saw it in me since I was a kid, from my dad all the way up to Pharaoh. Now he has no room to boast.
It's all the Lord. So after two full years, Pharaoh had a dream. Suddenly there came out of the river seven cows, that's the Nile River, fine looking and fat, and they fed in the meadow.
Behold, seven other cows came after them out of the river, ugly and gaunt and stood by the other cows on the bank of the river. The river in Pharaoh's dream is the only river in Egypt, the Nile River, the longest river in the world, by the way, 1,640 miles long, 47 miles long. It begins in equatorial Africa, goes all the way to the Mediterranean, and when it hits the Mediterranean, it fans out into this massive delta. And because of that Nile Delta with all of the silt and all of the water, they made Egypt the breadbasket of the world. And they capitalized on what was called the flooding of the Nile every year in Egypt. From time immemorial, consistently, regularly, every year the Nile floods, and they capitalize by diverting the water to different little rivulets, through rivulets like there is in the valley here with the Rio Grande, but on a more massive scale. And cows in Egypt would feed in the river.
They would submerge themselves up to their necks to avoid the flies and the searing heat that is in Egypt and feed on the reeds of the river. And so it's not an uncommon sight. Now they're coming out, and they're big fat cows. That's a good sign, but then there's these ugly, ugly, thin-looking, emaciated cows.
And the ugly and gaunt cows ate up the seven fine-looking and fat cows, so Pharaoh awoke. Boy, that troubled him. You know, dreams are weird, right? You know, there's things in your dreams, and if you try to tell it, you think, oh my goodness, this sounds really bad. Because things don't connect well.
They don't connect logically. But it's a dream. It's what your mind is producing, what you're dealing with.
In this case, what God is speaking to them about. But it was the troublesome dream that woke him up, and if you ever have one of those dreams that you wake up and go, man, that was a weird dream. I'm going to go back to sleep. I hope I don't have that dream again. And then you do. And it's worse. I used to have those all the time growing up.
Well, it gets worse. He slept and dreamed a second time. Suddenly, seven heads of grain came up on one stalk, plump and good. Behold, seven thin heads blighted by the east wind sprang up after them, and the seven thin heads devoured the seven plump and full heads. So Pharaoh awoke, and indeed, it was a dream. Can you see him sweating on his bed?
Man, that was weird. Just a little insight into the topography and geography of the land. See, it says blighted by the east wind. There's a phenomena in the Near East, in the Middle East, called the hamsin.
The hamsin is the east wind, or the southeast wind. About every spring, this wind blows through and it heats up everything. I have been in those hamsins where one day it's cool, the next day it's blistering hot overnight. It can wither crops overnight. They say that the temperature can go 50 to 60 degrees higher than it was before during the hamsin in a few hours.
In Egypt, the temperatures in the spring will suddenly rise up to 105 degrees during one of these blighting east winds. And I remember working on a kibbutz, and I would say, what happened last night? Because you get up in the morning and there's this yellow smog over the earth and bugs everywhere, everywhere, in everything. And they say, oh, that's the hamsin. That's the east wind.
It's a regular occurrence during the springtime. He sees that in his dream, wakes up. It came to pass in the morning that a spirit was troubled. And he sent and he called for all the magicians of Egypt and all of its wise men, and Pharaoh told them his dreams, but there was no one who could interpret them for Pharaoh. Pharaoh was troubled for a good reason. His dreams focused on the two greatest assets of ancient Egypt, cows and grain.
His entire economy, supported by the Nile River, hinged on those two things. Moreover, the cow, to an ancient Egyptian, was the symbol of the goddess Isis, the goddess of agriculture, of fertility, of the land, and the cow symbolized all of the earth. They believed in Mother Earth.
They believed that the earth, symbolized by the goddess herself, gave them all of these things. And now the earth was blighted. And that's what this dream is portending.
Now we know something. We know that God is orchestrating this. This is all part of God's master plan. Give the Pharaoh a dream. Bug the Pharaoh with a dream. Have the Pharaoh wake up in cold sweats and call everybody saying, Man, I had a bad night's sleep.
Interpret this dream. And then enter Joseph, who will tell the dream. It brings Joseph into the court of Pharaoh.
Why is that good? Because he's going to bring his family down to Egypt. The children of Israel are going to grow in a land, fulfilling Genesis chapter 15. For 400 years, your nation, this nation, will be down in Egypt and will populate. And then, after that time, send them back to the land of Canaan, giving the Canaanites a chance to repent, like God had said earlier in Genesis. And then giving the children of Israel this land and having it subsidized by the Egyptian government.
Now listen to what I just said. God's going to give them the land of Canaan. He's going to send them back to the land subsidized by the Egyptian government. They're going to spoil the Egyptians and take their loot with them when they go. I love God's economy.
And I believe God is interested in economy. You know that Paul always wanted to go to Rome, right? He wrote to Rome and said, I'm coming, I'm coming.
By God's grace, I'll be there. Well, he didn't anticipate how the Lord would arrange for him to be in Rome. How did he get there? He was arrested. He became a prisoner for two years. Standing trial before Festus, Felix, and Agrippa, he finally says, I'm done with this nonsense. I appeal to Caesar. And the procurator said, you appeal to Caesar, to Caesar you will go. So now Paul is placed on a prison ship, an Egyptian grain ship hired by the Roman government, paid for by the Roman government. Paul is placed in custody of the Roman government. He gets an all expense paid trip to Rome, paid for by the Roman government. He doesn't have to raise missionary support.
It allows him to give his defense before the king, King Caesar Nero, strengthen the church in Rome, write letters from the church in Rome, strengthen the churches even to this day. All a part of God's plan. God has an interesting economy. You'll notice in verse 8 that he was troubled, but it says no one could interpret these dreams for Pharaoh. Now this is puzzling. It's not puzzling that they couldn't interpret it because it was a dream from God, but you would at least think they would make something up.
You know, give it a try. Well yes, actually what this means, Pharaoh, is just sort of like, I got to guess because I don't want to die. Those who interpreted dreams in ancient times were of the priestly caste. Now it was believed in ancient Egyptian thinking that the gods gave people dreams, but would not give them the interpretation. They had to figure it out. There were clues and so these dream seekers would read the hieroglyphics and tombs and ancient dream literature for keys on dream interpretation. It was quite a science. They couldn't figure it out. It's a setup. Then the chief butler spoke to Pharaoh saying, I remember my faults this day.
Like, oh yeah. When Pharaoh was angry with his servants and put me in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, both me and the chief baker, we each had a dream in one night. He and I. Each of us dreamed according to the interpretation of his own dream. There was a young Hebrew man with us there, a servant of the captain of the guard, and we told him and he interpreted our dreams for us to each man he interpreted according to his own dream.
As the day came to pass, just as he interpreted for us, so it happened. He restored me to my office and he hanged him. Now Joseph, meanwhile, is back in jail. He doesn't know this is happening. His whole world is about to change. You know, Joseph got up that morning, maybe looked around the walls of his cell and thought, another day in the dungeon.
He had no clue what was coming. Now his story so far has been from riches to rags. Now it turns from rags to riches. We're glad you joined us today. Before you go, remember that when you give $25 or more to help reach more people with the gospel through Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you Beyond the Summer of Love, Relationships in the Real World by Pastor Skip Heitzig to help you build biblically healthy relationships or repair ones that have been damaged by sin. To request your copy of Beyond the Summer of Love, call 800-922-1888.
That's 800-922-1888. Or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. For more from Skip, be sure to check out the many resources available at connectwithskip.com slash store. Come back next time for more verse by verse teaching of God's Word here on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Make a connection, make a connection at the foot of the crossing. Cast your burdens on His Word. Make a connection, connection. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.
