Pharaoh's Steward

When the famine reached its peak in Egypt, the governor, Joseph, bought all the people's land in exchange for food. And so Joseph said to the people, indeed I have bought you and your land this day for Pharaoh. And so they said, you have robbed us of our land. You have exploited us with usurious rates. You have pillaged the land. No, it's not what they said. They said you have saved our lives. The famine was so severe that no one had grain or livestock.

The people of Egypt and the surrounding countries were literally starving to death. But Joseph planned wisely and ensured that they would eat, and they were grateful, no matter the cost. Today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul reminds us that God's sovereign hand provides for His people. We're moving now rapidly towards the conclusion of our study of the life of Joseph. We have today's message and one more, and we will be finished with this overview of the life of this great patriarch, the one who I believe models more than any other person in the Old Testament the character of Christ Himself. Now we've reached already the climax of the story in the meeting of Joseph with his brothers and Joseph revealing himself to them, and then of course the reunion with Jacob. But we have seen all along that Joseph has been supremely gifted by God, particularly in the realm of administration. We saw that emerge early on when he was placed in charge of all of the things of Potiphar's household, and later on in prison when the warden gave him charge over the entire population there, and then later on Pharaoh's appointing of Joseph as prime minister.

In the narrative that we encounter in chapter 47, beginning in verse 13, we get even more insight to Joseph's extraordinary gifts. Verse 13 reads as follows, "'Now there was no bread in all the land, for the famine was very severe, so that the land of Egypt and the land of Canaan languished because of the famine. And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan for the grain which they bought, and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house. So when the money failed in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came to Joseph and said, "'Give us bread, for why should we die in your presence? For the money has failed.'"

So we see that in the first place there was a storing up of the grain and so on, and people were able to purchase what they needed from the government to relieve their starvation. Obviously, money is only valuable as a means of exchange. You can't eat it. You can't wear it.

You can't build homes out of it. And then finally, the people were running out of money. And so Joseph said in verse 16, "'Give your livestock, and I will give you bread for your livestock if the money is gone.'" So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for the horses, the flocks, the cattle of the herds, and for the donkeys. Thus he fed them with bread in exchange for all their livestock that year. Now some would look at this program and say, here we have an example of Joseph being a ruthless tyrant, because while the people are starving and there still remains grain in the storehouses of Egypt, instead of simply giving the grain to the people, he first sells it to them through the use of currency and then trades with them with the bartering system of livestock, livestock that was not edible livestock basically, for the grain. Now, should Joseph have simply given the food to the people? Well, again, what Joseph was in charge of was the stewardship of the resources of the whole whole nation of Egypt.

And he was an able administrator, and people did have means by which they could purchase the necessary things that they needed, but they purchased them on a barter system rather than on the use of hard currency. And all of this shows is the fiscal responsibility of Joseph in his administration. The owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team is Richard DeVos, who many will recognize as one of the wealthiest men in America, who's the founder and chairman of the Amway Corporation. And he has to deal in the ownership of a sports franchise like this, not only with all of the aspects of competitive basketball and so on, but Mr. DeVos takes a personal interest in his players, and he serves kind of as a grandfather counselor to them. And one of the things that has happened in this venue is that some of his players have sought his counsel for how to handle their own finances. I mean, what you read in the paper all the time are all these labor negotiations and holdouts and the astronomical salaries that sports figures are making.

And we sometimes forget that for the most part, these are young men, hardly more than boys, who are catapulted from the college campus into a professional milieu where they're paid millions of dollars. I'll never forget the image of Joe Lewis, the heavyweight champion of the world, arguably the greatest heavyweight champion of the world ever, being reduced to poverty because he had no knowledge of managing the wealth that he acquired as the champion boxer. And we read that sort of thing all the time with athletes who have a short career span, make oodles of money, and then lose it all because they don't know how to manage it. Well, Mr. DeVos, as I said, takes a personal interest in his players, and he was telling me on one occasion about one of the players whose brother was unemployed and was kind of wasting his life. And so this basketball player who was making millions of dollars just simply put his brother on the dole and bought him everything he needed, bought him a new car, a new house, and all of that, and gave him a sizable portion of his income. And Mr. DeVos counseled this basketball player and told him, if you really care for your brother, if you really love him, what you are doing for him is not good because you're making him totally dependent upon you.

And what you need to be doing is setting up a system where there is a gradual weaning away from this dependence, where this other person learns that they have to become productive themselves. Now, there is wisdom in that, and I sensed from Mr. DeVos a legitimate concern for the well-being of these people, not just the wealthy ones, but for the poor ones. And he understands how debilitating it can be to people simply to give them things without any requirement of anything labor, time, or money in exchange. And I wonder if that was what was going on in the mind of Joseph as he is still protecting not only the integrity of the nation, but also the integrity of the people. Had the people had nothing, absolutely nothing, then perhaps he would have given them the grain. I don't suppose that Joseph would have watched anyone starve to death, but as long as they had a means to pay something in exchange for the goods that they were receiving, he required it from them.

And as I said, this is an example of his prudence in management. Now, in verse 18 of chapter 47 we read, "'When that year had ended, they came to him the next year and said to him, "'We will not hide from our Lord that our money is gone, and my Lord also has our herds of livestock. "'There is nothing left in the sight of my Lord but our bodies and our lands. Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants of Pharaoh.

Give us seed that we may live and not die, and that the land may not be desolate.' "'Then Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for every man of the Egyptians sold his field, because the famine was severe upon them. So the land became Pharaoh's. And as for the people who moved them into the cities, from one end of the borders of Egypt to the other end, only the land of the priests he did not buy. For the priests had rations allotted to them by Pharaoh, and they ate their rations which Pharaoh gave them.

Therefore, they did not sell their land. "'And so Joseph said to the people, "'Indeed, I have bought you and your land this day for Pharaoh. Look, here is seed for you, and you shall sow the land. And it shall come to pass in the harvest, that you shall give one fifth to Pharaoh, four fifths shall be your own, as seed for the field and for your food, for those of your household and as food for your little ones.' And so they said, "'You have robbed us of our land, you have exploited us with usurious rates, you have pillaged the land.' No, it's not what they said.

They said, "'You have saved our lives. Let us find favor in the sight of my Lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.' And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt to this day, that Pharaoh should have one fifth, except for the land of the priests only, which did not become Pharaoh's.'" Now again, what Pharaoh does through Joseph is that Joseph alleviates the danger to this people by selling them more grain, even when they're out of money and out of livestock to barter.

They still have two things left. They have their land, which now is desolate and worthless, because all of the land had already been harvested. And so what they have left is land, but at the moment it's of very little value, and their own labor of the workers, their own freedom. And they're saying, we're willing to enter into indentured servitude if you will simply feed us.

So we still have a free transaction going on here between Joseph and the people. Now we've seen in America something similar to this at one point. Right now, three percent of the population is able to produce enough agricultural goods and products to feed the whole nation and beyond that. Where it used to be some 80 percent or higher of Americans were farmers. Now that number has been radically reduced to three percent, and yet the three percent who are farming today produce a greater volume of goods than we used to be able to produce with a much larger labor force than we have today.

Why is that? Well, advancements in technology, advancement in techniques and fertilizers and all of that, and we've seen one of the byproducts of the crisis of that is small farmers find it difficult to compete in this arena with the big farmers, and so more and more of them are leaving the field of agriculture and going into other endeavors. We've gone through what historians call an industrial revolution where people were saying, how are you going to keep them down on the farm, you know, once they have seen Paree and so on. And so we have that phenomenon.

And so what do we do? We begin to subsidize people in their work because they're not able to compete and so on. And I remember being at a conference on economics in Chicago where they had three Nobel Prize winners in the field of economics dealing with an international crisis, namely the problem of hunger in the third world. As a Christian, I was interested and continue to be interested with that problem of feeding the hungry and the problem of starvation, which is an international problem. But what I remember about that meeting was that these scientists were saying that we had to be very careful when in our generous spirits we dump free food on a third-world country that is struggling agriculturally, lest we destroy the beginnings of an agricultural-producing nation. Now that's not that they were opposed to emergency relief, don't get me wrong, but they said you have to be careful with your emergency relief, that you have to be careful with your emergency relief, that in that process you don't completely destroy the nascent farming industry that's beginning by making the products of the local farmer worthless. Another issue that came up at that conference had to do with what was going on in another nation in the world where this one man objected. He said, in such and such a country, he said, what's going on over there is that the wealthy farmers, the big farmers, are buying up the farms of the little farmers, and this is terrible.

We have to stop that. And I raised my hand, and they said, what? And I said, I have a question. They said, what's that? I said, are these farms for sale?

And he said, yes. What's that have to do with it? Well, I said, if the big farmers come in there and steal the land of the little farmer, that's one question, ethically and morally. If, on the other hand, the small farmer decides that he can no longer earn a productive living by farming his little parcel of land and discovers that in the marketplace his land has now become more valuable than that which he can produce on the land competitively, what's that farmer want to do? He wants to sell his farm because the land is the most valuable thing that he has.

And I've been through that in the agricultural climate of western Pennsylvania where I know a lot of small farmers who went through this sort of thing, and when they said their prayers at night, they didn't say, now I lay me down to sleep. They were praying, dear God, please send a wealthy farmer my way who will buy my farm. That's what happens when you have the free exchange of goods and services in an open market.

And this is what Joseph is doing here. He's not confiscating the land. He's not exercising eminent domain. He's purchasing the land by barter. He's exchanging the food for ownership of the property, which is what the farmers have left. And yet at the same time he says, you can still farm the land and you pay 20 percent of what you produce back to Egypt, and the other 80 percent is yours. So this was a system of managing the economy where there was a partnership between the nation and the individual farmer that was entered to or into basically freely. He bought these lands because the people wanted to sell the land, and then they were able not only to get the grain to see them through the crisis of the famine, but now they were also able to grow future crops for themselves that would benefit themselves and the whole nation because they would then pay their taxes through produce to refill and replenish the surpluses of food that were held by Joseph.

Now, of course, that's the kind of system that later on emerged into an exploitive system when you have unscrupulous rulers and governors who then increase that tax and increase the demands upon the people and bleed their resources dry. But at this point when we see Joseph engaged in this, Joseph is acting in a humanitarian way. He preserves the lives of his people, he preserves the dignity of his people, and he preserves the production of the land for the future generations of the people.

This is not a raping of the land or a selfish consumption of the immediately available goods, but this is what I said at the beginning. Joseph is not a politician who's thinking about the next election. He is a genuine statesman who's thinking about the next generation.

He's meeting the needs of his people in this crisis now but establishing a procedure that will ensure continued productivity and a surplus of goods in the event of later disasters. And so rather than faulting Joseph for this procedure, I think he is praiseworthy. Now then, at the conclusion of this narrative, in chapter 48 we are told that Jacob becomes ill and is ill unto death, and all I'm going to say about this passage in passing is that Joseph comes to see his father seeking his father's blessing on his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. And Manasseh is the firstborn, the one who traditionally will receive the primogeniture, the birthright, and Ephraim is the younger. And so when Jacob goes to bless the children, he reverses them then and puts his right hand on Ephraim and his left hand on Manasseh, and Joseph says, wait a minute, father, you've got it wrong. You're blessing the secondborn rather than the firstborn. And Jacob continues the process.

And in the same way that Jacob received the blessing from his father, even though Jacob was not the firstborn, so God, to show the sovereignty of His electing grace in this human incident, again breaks the tradition and blesses the younger rather than the elder. That's Dr. R.C. Sproul on the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Lee Webb, and we're glad you've joined us today. This message was sort of an unexpected lesson in finance, wasn't it?

Joseph's prudent handling of his master's estate ended up saving thousands of lives. I hope you'll stay with us as Dr. Sproul has another comment about that, and we'll share it with you in just a moment. Our resource offer today provides you with several hours of teaching from Dr. Sproul. Contact us today and request the R.C. Sproul Teaching Collection. With your donation of any amount, you'll receive eight full teaching series, including the parables of Jesus, Knowing Scripture, Ecclesiastes, Galatians, Knowing Christ, and The Life of Joseph.

Today's message was from that series. You can reach us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us at 800-435-4343. Romans 10-17 says, Faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. Here at Ligonier, we provide many ways for you to hear the word of Christ. Here at Ligonier, we provide many ways for you to hear God's Word proclaimed 24 hours a day. For example, you can download the podcast of Renewing Your Mind and listen anytime, or you can listen to faithful teaching and preaching anytime for free on the RefNet app.

Just go to refnet.fm to learn more. Well, there are some very practical applications to Joseph's story, and with more on that, here's R.C. finished with our series on Joseph, which I trust will be tomorrow. The next series that I want to present will be entitled Stewardship Economics, where I want us to look at some of the foundational principles of stewardship that are given to us in the Scripture, because the Bible is very much concerned with how we handle our resources, how we relate to the poor, how we are engaged in business and so on. And I mention this now because we've had a little bit of a taste of it in the example of Joseph, who has been placed as a steward over all of the land.

And it raises questions, practical questions of application for our own lot. How do you exercise stewardship in your house? How do you teach and help and coach your children in the management of what they have? Are you helping them to prepare for the responsibilities of having to provide for their own families when they become adults? Joseph was teaching his people how to be responsible and to maintain their production and productivity for the future of their own families. We can learn something from that. Well, we will wrap up this series on the life of Joseph next Saturday, and I hope you'll make plans to be with us. This is Renewing Your Mind, the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Thank you.