You ever feel like God has forgotten you? Maybe it seems like everyone else is moving forward with their lives, but you're stuck in a rut. If that's the case, you're not alone. And today on Truth for Life, Alastair Begg shares a message of hope about a man who patiently trusted God despite being wrongfully imprisoned for two years. Bye.
Now to Genesis chapter forty one. The story we're dealing with is the story of Joseph, the historical record of one man. And we have Discovered to this point a number of things. First of all, we recognized that he was the object of his father's special interest. Hence the multicoloured coat that he was given.
He was also the object of his brother's jealous and cruel hatred of him. And he was at all times and remains the object of God's providential care. We have tracked him as he was sold to a group of Ishmaelite traders. who were heading towards Egypt. He was sold into their captivity as a result of the intervention of one of the brothers because the early plan had been to do away with him, and his life had been spared, and he was strapped into the custody of these Ishmaelites and dispatched.
as a slave to Egypt. Once in Egypt, he was resold. They presumably turned a profit on him, selling him into the custody of a gentleman who was a high-ranking official in the Egyptian government, a man by the name of Potiphar. And so this 17-year-old boy finds himself divorced from all that had represented security to him, removed from his culture, his language, his people, his family, and now a slave in the house of someone whose conversation he cannot even understand. But instead of bemoaning his circumstances, instead of simply crying the blues, we discover that he gives himself wholeheartedly to making the most of it.
And as a result of making the most of it, he is advanced in usefulness and service within the home of Potiphar. Indeed, to the extent that Potiphar cared only for the food that was on his table, and at the same time, he was going to look after his wife.
So he said. Unfortunately, he didn't do as good a job of looking after his wife as he thought because she came increasingly with seductive. Interest in this young man, Joseph, and when she was spurned by him, she was stung into the response of animosity. choosing to accuse him falsely of some advances upon her, the result of which was that Joseph finds himself incarcerated. thrown into a dungeon.
And left there. In the course of the early days, he encounters two other fellows who are part and parcel of this experience of bondage. interprets dreams for them. One of them ends up hanged, the other one ends up released. The one who is released, Joseph is asked if he might put in a good word for him in the hope that Joseph in turn might also be discharged.
But in actual fact, the chap forgets him. Whether he ever planned to remember him at all, we don't know. But the fact is that he forgot all about him. And that is the end of chapter 40 and the beginning of 41. The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph.
He forgot him.
Now to forty-one. There are fifty-seven verses, I think, from memory. And so We need to have sun plan of action in Breaking into the chapter. And what I'd like to do is just identify for us one or two key phrases in order to help us through. In this morning we'll probably get no further than uh maybe three phrases that will I think Do justice to the text and allow us to understand God's Word together.
The first phrase is the first phrase. Genesis 41:1, when two full years had passed. Or if you like, Two full years had passed.
Now, whether we date this from the time that Joseph was first of all put in prison, or whether we date it from the time of the cupbearer's departure. The point Clearly, is that Joseph was in this situation for a lot longer than he would ever have reckoned himself to be, or Would have imagined that it was right for him to be. He was too long there for someone who had done nothing to deserve it. Because after all, it wasn't that he was in jail because he had actually violated some code of ethics or had disobeyed his master. He was in jail on a trumped-up charge.
And the little glimmer of human hope that he had in the release of this cupbearer. was now dimming Very, very quickly. And so he was living, had lived. for two years with disappointed hopes. Any human ground for his release had long since been removed.
And as he stacked the hours upon the hours and the days on days and weeks on weeks and months on months, he had occasion to. Say to himself, Goodness gracious. What is going on here? He certainly had all the time in the world to do it. to replay in his mind the video of his life.
And it would be surprising if we Looked inside his thinking, not to discover him way back in the giving of the coat and saying, you know, maybe if I hadn't had the coat. Maybe if I hadn't had the dreams, and yet those dreams seem to be so significant. And yet the dream seemed to suggest that I would be exalted. And so far, I haven't come close to being exalted. I got strapped to the back of a camel.
I got sold into somebody's house. I got accused of rape. I got dumped in a hole. I've been stuck here for two years. How in the world is this playing out?
Oh, God, he might have said with a psalmist, how long will you forget me? Forever. How long will you hide your face from me? Psalm thirteen, you can look it up. Not with you.
You ever Had those kind of thoughts? That your life is nothing more than the stacking of one hour on top of another hour. The fellow who lives two doors up now, he's got a life, but you're looking for a life. That the girl who sits at the other desk, she has a life, but You'd like one, but for you... It's just routine.
as monotony. It's the same thing all the time. with no apparent human hope of change. And they can't get enough weekends into the week. To lift your fallen spirits.
And you say to yourself, God, what are you doing with me? Joseph. God, I don't even have a girlfriend. Let alone a wife. The only Situation that I've been in in recent days is one that has ended in disaster.
I'm going to be 30 years old and I'd like to have children. What are you doing? Over the years. Seems so long.
Well, isn't there just a lesson in this? That we might learn with Joseph patience. In the awareness of the fact That he is a life-sized illustration of Romans 8:28, as we've been saying. Of the fact that In all things, God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose. And that although the days may seem dark, and although there seems to be no potential for change, nevertheless God is working everything out in conformity with the purpose of His will and He makes everything beautiful in His time.
Surely, that's what the heroes of the faith were to discover as the writer to the Hebrews chronicles it in chapter 11. These individuals, we have mentioned for us some of the big names, you know, like Abraham and Noah and so on. But there were other people. Who are described in verse thirteen of Hebrews 11 in this way? All these people were still living by faith when they died.
They did not receive the things promised, they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. A wonderful group. A commendable group. They did not fall foul of our preoccupation with nanoseconds.
With everything happening right now. With it all being fulfilled instantaneously? Can it be that in such a short period of time, We have become so frustrated with these ATMs and how slow they are to discharge our cash. There's one at the corner of 91 and Wilson Mills Road. That has a Scottish lady in it.
I don't know if you've got money there. But she actually talks to you. And she's very slow. I'm not talking about a teller. She's behind there or something.
Or maybe it's a tape recorder. But it's slow. I want to bang on it and say, hey, Scarty, speed it up. This is Thursday. If you could get it to me today, that would be helpful.
Point of fact, I haven't stood there more than 27 seconds for the whole transaction. How did I get so impatient? And when I apply that to Christian living, And to the expectations that I bring to God in the fulfillment of his promises, I think I need definitely to learn from Joseph. In the two full years that passed. I need to be reminded from the word of God that God knows what is best for each of his children.
And we do well to wait upon him. He will never give us anything too soon, nor will anything ever arrive too late. There is no good thing which the Lord withholds from those whose walk is blameless. We delight ourselves also in the Lord, and He will give us the desires of our hearts. When?
See, isn't that the first question? When? We believe that, but we are not so sure that we want to believe it if it's not going to happen soon. We were in the airport. The other day just passing through somewhere, and my son pointed out to me a little child who was wandering around and having one of these absolute fantasy conversations.
I can't remember it exactly, but she was saying, And then we'll get the thing and Tomorrow, it'll be Christmas. And then, I said, Christmas, goodness gracious, we've only just had Easter, but for her, Christmas is tomorrow. It has to be. She's just a kid. It isn't Christmas tomorrow.
And it's not everybody's birthday tomorrow. And God hasn't pledged himself to take us out of the dungeons of our monotonous lives. You say, well, my life's not monotonous. I don't mean it in a totally disparaging way. Your life is fairly monotonous.
You do largely the same thing every morning when you get up. You hit the same button, you go to the same place, you take the same toothbrush, you comb the same hair, you put on the average same clothes, you make the same journey, you get to the same place, you say the same stuff, you go out to the same place, you come back, you drive home, you do the off-routine in the same way, and then you wake up and you do it all the next day. That is called monotony. And God is sovereign in those kinds of days. It's very important that we understand that.
In our marriages, And in our parenting. I probably get short for this, but marriage is monotonous. But the idea that uh four nights in Hawaii is going to sort it all out. is bogus. Because it is in the routine.
That the real gains are made. The real joy is discovered. And that the reality of God's provision. becomes most obvious.
Now, this came home forcibly to me at an even deeper and more significant level when I took my favorite little magazine, which comes to me on a monthly basis of last month. And I opened it to discover the opening article By a fellow by the name of Maurice Roberts, had a most striking title. It is entitled The Christians Post-Humus Joy. I don't know if you've ever put joy and posthumous together in the one sentence. But if it has a kind of flavor of death and joy, then you're right.
And what the chap is saying quite wonderfully is this, and I'll just give him a quote or two. The present world is and always has been for God's children. A difficult place.
So long as error and falsehood are on the world's throne, we must expect truth and righteousness to be pilloried and placed on the scaffold. This is not to deny that there are joys along the way to heaven. But we must expect them. to be much marred by the inward pain which we feel at the presence of countless evils. Till Christ our Redeemer comes on the clouds, we must make up our minds to expect this to be a world where all the wrong people are laughing.
And that's not a comment on what just immediately happened. But all the wrong people are laughing. And he who laughs last Laughs best. And there is a realistic sense in which the Christian will always laugh last. Not in a disparaging way over the souls of those who are lost, but we may cry now and laugh then.
or choose to laugh with the world now and cry then. And we've got to understand. That in these years, however long they might last. God is not slow concerning his promise.
Now, he then illustrates this idea of our greatest joys being later on. And I'll just give you two of his illustrations, they're quite wonderful. Take the example, says Roberts, of a Christian father and mother. They brought up their children in this world in the ways of God. But both died before they heard of the salvation of any of their family.
Their children, we may say, brought down their parents, grey-hairs, with sorrow to the grave. As Genesis 42, we'll come to that. To all outward appearances, the parents' labor of love was lost. Their sons and daughters saw no need of God or of the Saviour and with a sigh both parents closed their eyes at death on a family whose only religion was worldly pleasure. Imagine then their joy.
in the glory of heaven. to see their once rebellious children coming one by one to Zion. Picture their ecstasy as they hear the story of how a Holy Spirit graciously and sovereignly arrested them with the recollection, years after their parents' death, of truths taught by them and exemplified in their lives. What happy, happy! Post-humus joy.
Or he says, let's suppose a poor mother in England during the darkness of the Middle Ages. God had opened our eyes by some means to see the superstition of the church in her day. With inward sighs, she sees how ignorantly the people around her venerate their saints, pray to the virgin, adore the wafer, confess sin to the priest. It is clear to her that the vast bulk of her parish, not to say the whole of the land, are going to hell with a lie in their right hand. And so she prays to God for the church, for her land, and for a brighter day to dawn upon the whole world.
But she lives not to see one spark of that glorious reformation that is to come. She dies pre-16th century. And she goes to heaven.
Now she's in heaven. Picture then. Her posthumous joy. When at the last day she is informed that her many prayers on earth came up for a memorial before God, in answer to her lifelong yearning for revival, God had given her a male descendant, John Wycliffe by name, who was like the morning star to all the world. In due course, the light of the gospel broke out, which she vainly sought on earth, not over the British Isles only, but over all Europe and mankind.
Not in this brief Life here below, surely. Are we to discover that God answers prayer? exceedingly abundantly above all that we could ask. or even think. You see In our pains sometimes, to explain to our pagan neighbors That, you know, we are just like them.
I'm afraid we are. Just like that. And so The statistics of teenage pregnancy. are the same in or outside the church. And so the statistics on divorce.
Are the same? And so much It's the same.
So why then would a pagan Ever want to become a Christian? Because they don't like church services. And they simply do not want to relieve themselves of one external mode of life for another external mode of life. No, dear ones, there's going to have to be something more. There's going to have to be about us that which is absolutely otherworldly.
That we are saying to our world, yes, we enjoy these pleasures which God has given to us. But in the midst Of our pain, and in the midst of our illness, and in the midst of the apparent non-success of interventive surgery, we still do not live without God and certainly not without hope, because we know that there is yet to come out of the dungeon of this experience. All the glory. of a father. Who knows best?
Do you know God in that way? Joseph did.
Well, that's the first phrase I wanted to turn your attention to. Let's turn to the second one in verse 8. First of all, we noticed this little phrase: two full years had passed, and we learned the importance of patience in the midst of monotony. And the understanding of the fact that God will give things as He chooses in His time, and in certain cases, His time may involve us in waiting until eternity. Second phrase then is his mind was troubled.
And in the morning, after he'd had these two striking dreams, His mind was troubled.
Well, the dreams were troubling, were they not? We were told that we all dream a significant number of times in a week or in a night or whatever it is. I don't know, I'm no great expert on dreams. They say the average dream lasts about 30 seconds. Although it would seem to me when I'm having one, it seems to last forever, I can't get out of it.
But these dreams were extraordinary dreams. These were, as in other dreams, a foreshadowing of God's intervention in the life of an unbeliever.
Something stirring into this person's existence that awakened him in the morning with something a wee bit more than, that was a strange dream. And he's troubled. He wakes up. And he wakes up concerned. And he looks around for help.
And so, like Humpty Dumpty, who's falling off the wall, he sends for all. His horses and all his king's men. In verse 8. The wise men, the magicians. And he told them his dreams.
But what could they do? Yeah. Presumably, all they did was look down at the floor in embarrassment. Look around at one another shamefacedly. And finally, look Pharaoh straight in the eye and say, I'm sorry, Pharaoh, you've stumped us on this one.
You're listening to a message titled Pharaoh's Dream on Truth for Life with Alastair Begg. We'll hear the conclusion tomorrow. As we heard in today's message, God is sovereignly working behind the scenes even in our mundane days and our darkest nights, even when we can't sense His presence. It's not easy to patiently trust God, as Joseph did, if we don't understand what the Bible teaches. That's why our mission at Truth for Life is to teach the Bible clearly every day, in a way that is relevant to contemporary life.
We believe that God's Spirit works through God's Word in and through His people, so that unbelievers will become committed followers of Jesus and believers will continue to grow in their faith. All of the teaching at Truth for Life is made possible because listeners like you pray for this ministry and give financially to cover the cost of making this daily program possible.
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Thanks for listening. Is your mind troubled? Do you find yourself wondering if your life has any real meaning or purpose? Tomorrow we'll consider the comfort that comes from God's Word. The Bible teaching of Alastair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life.
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