Lessons from the Dungeon (Part 1 of 4)

Music playing Can I invite you to take your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis and the 40th chapter? You will recall that we left Joseph in the dungeon. We learned a number of lessons from his response to his circumstances and finalized our study last time by paying attention to the fact that he seized the opportunity, even though his own predicament was grave, to look out for the well-being of others. And he did not miss the chance to help others.

He could so easily have done so as a result of some selfish preoccupation. But he exercised his responsibilities and his privileges with great care and compassion—and particularly, as we're told here, in the lives of two individuals—individuals who are identified as being a cupbearer and a chief baker. Now, these two chaps found themselves in the jail, and indeed, they were in the same dungeon as the one in which we discovered Joseph. And in the course of time, we're told that they had these dreams. And in the course of Joseph's response to these dreams, we are going to discover a number of lessons. Lesson number one—living life with a God-centered focus.

What does that mean? Well, let's consider it here as we see Joseph's response. It comes forcibly in verse 8. When these two characters come to him and say, We both had dreams, but there is no one to interpret them. Now, notice Joseph's response there in the second half of verse 8. He says, Do not interpretations belong to God? Do not interpretations belong to God? He is about to offer an explanation as to what has taken place, but before he steps to the fore with this explanation, with this interpretation, he explains the fact that his perspective is very clear.

It is God who is able to do what is about to happen. He doesn't boast of his own quickness. He doesn't boast of his own clear-sightedness.

He doesn't seek the opportunity to draw attention to himself. He merely wishes to be known as a servant of God. Now, there is an obvious and immediate lesson in this, especially for those who have been given unique gifts from God.

Such individuals need to make sure that since they have become excellent by God's hand, they'd better not ascribe too much attention to themselves, for in doing so they may well obscure the grace of God. Now, this principle is not a principle that is earthed simply in Genesis 40. It runs the whole way through the Bible, and there is perhaps no more classic statement of it than is made by Jesus in John chapter 15.

I'd like for you to turn there, if you would, just to see that to which I'm referring. John chapter 15. And Jesus makes it clear to his followers, I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.

You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself. It must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Now, here's the crucial phrase. Apart from me you can do nothing.

Apart from me you can do nothing. Now, Jesus means exactly what he says there. If we understand the statement in Colossians 1.17 as being an all-encompassing statement, where it says of Jesus that in him all things hold together, the fact is that none of us can even breathe without his enabling. We are absolutely impoverished without the divine help. And when a man or a woman begins to live life with that kind of focus, they are no longer living with a self-centered focus or with a circumstance-centered focus, but they are beginning to live with a God-centered focus.

And the way in which we react to circumstances reveals our focus. And Joseph, from the many-colored coat to the pit to the back of the camel to Potiphar's home to the dungeon, is completely God-centered in his focus. You don't have a litany here of Joseph feeling sorry for himself. No.

Why? Because he has a God-centered focus in his life. Isn't that what we saw in Genesis 39? Verse 9. How does he respond to the temptation when Potiphar's wife comes at him?

In a God-centered way. He doesn't respond by saying, I don't think this is an expedient thing to do. He doesn't respond by saying, Oh, I think we might get caught. He does not respond in any of the ways. He responds by immediately introducing God.

How could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God? Chapter 41. When Pharaoh dreams his dream, and he comes to Joseph and he says, verse 15 of 41, I had a dream. No one can interpret it. But I have heard it said of you, that when you hear a dream, you can interpret it.

Great opportunity for Joseph to say, Oh, glad you heard, Pharaoh. Yes, I am quite an interpreter of dreams, I must say. Yes, I interpret my own dreams. I've interpreted the cupbearer's dream, the baker's dream, and I'm really a dream machine, all-round dream machine. Now, what would you like me to do for you, Pharaoh? No, it's nobody says.

I have heard it said of you, that when you hear a dream, you can interpret it. Look at the next four words. I cannot do it.

That's the first thing you have to know. I cannot do it. If you think you can, step aside. If you think you should, sit down.

If you think everyone's waiting to hear from you, take a hike. But if you think you can't do it, you may just be the person God is about to lay his hand on. What a strange way of operation.

I can't do it, Joseph replied. Now notice the next two words. These are the next two crucial words. But God. I can't, but God.

That's what Jesus is saying to his disciples. He says, Guys, I want you to understand. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Your need of me is not partial. Your need of me is total.

You flat-out can't do it. Now, when you're prepared to understand that, then we can talk from there and move forward. That's what it means to have a God-centered focus. And it is all about motivation of heart. For God, who tests and knows the motives of our hearts, deals with us according to the motivation of our hearts, and he will reward us according to the motivation of our hearts.

And yet, still, we continue to judge people on the external activities and even may try to judge one another on the basis of the motives of our hearts. Time will reveal all, as it did here in the dungeon with Joseph. He doesn't draw attention to himself. He says, I can't do it, but God will give the answer he desires. Later on in the chapter, in verse 51, when his two children are born to him, his first son is named Manasseh, and Joseph gives the explanation as to why he called him Manasseh. He said, It is because God has made me forget all my trouble in my father's household. And when his second boy was born Ephraim, he said, It is because God has made me fruitful. So whether it is facing the temptation of Potiphar, whether it is in his experience of being dumped in the pit, whether it is in the interpretation of dreams, or whether it is in the fathering of his children, at every point along the journey, his center is God. God-centered. He realized that God's not going to share his glory with anybody else.

I tell you, there's a lesson from the dungeon here, loved ones. And do you see, the whole issue is that he looks at life from the bigger picture. He looks at life from the scheme of eternity. He looks at his unfolding circumstances in the light of history. And he knows that he is simply a blip on the horizon, that his day will end, and he also will be a figure of history. But while life's little day ebbs its way out, he says, I will live to the honor and praise of God. I will live my life with a God-centered focus. How about you?

How about me? You want to live with an us-centered focus? Disappointment. You want to live with a circumstance-centered focus?

Confusion. The only way to live is with a God-centered focus. For that is the only time we can be sure we're all looking in the same direction. And where do we see God? In Christ. And how do we have him described in Hebrews 12? The author and the finisher of our faith. And what are we to do? We are to run the race that is set out before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith. Now, there's another element to this beyond the matter of the purely devotional.

Because a God-centered focus in our lives this morning cuts across the view of our contemporaries. Men and women throughout all of time have wrestled with the question posed in the psalmist's words in Psalm 8, What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that you should visit him? What is man?

That is the great question. And any of you who have taken anthropology at college or university know that there is a tremendous amount of ink that has been spilled on trying to answer the question about our humanity. Who are we, and why do we exist? And all of those anthropologies end in confusion. Indeed, in the sixties, when Lennon and McCartney wrote Nowhere Man, they were not simply describing an individual. They were essentially describing a whole corporate consciousness in a generation that was asking the question, Who am I? Why do I exist?

And where am I going? And was coming up dry every time they tried to answer. And so they wrote, He's a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody.

And it was an expression of total futility. And that's why in our university campuses today, across some of the great campuses brim full of young human potential, there is a dust of death which settles over scientific investigation and between the production of great literature and great art. And the absence of great art and great literature is directly related to getting the wrong answer to the question, What is man? And that is why so much contemporary art, when you see it, is so confusing to understand. You don't know whether to stand on your head or lie on your side or whatever to do. What in the wide world is this? And some curator will tell you, Sir, it is whatever you would like it to be, you know.

It sounds really sort of trendy, but it's just bogus. And that's why you have to keep going back to a different centered perspective before you can get order and structure in art and before you can get order and structure in literature, because the people wrote from a different focus. Now, I'm speaking to some young people who are gonna go off into university. I'm speaking to others who are here, and you are reading books all the time, and you sit down there, and you're getting these books from the self-help section, and you're trying to find yourself. You're looking for yourself.

I want to say, You're there! You know. But no, I'm looking for myself. I keep having these conversations about people who are looking for themselves.

And I understand why. Because they don't have a God-centered focus. And I have to tell them, You're not gonna find yourself till you meet God. They don't know whether to view themselves in terms of spirituality, in terms of rationality, as has been taught in classical philosophy and in Eastern thought, or whether they should view themselves as a great combination of physicality and materialism, as Marx taught, and all materialists since then. And as they try and read this literature and find out who they are and what they are, they don't know whether to be pessimists with all the existentialists or whether to be optimists with all the hedonists. And so they're like the guy who fell out the thirty-five-story window of a building thirty-five stories up, and as he passed the twentieth floor, somebody heard him shouting, So far, so good!

And that's largely the way many people are living their lives. They're living from Friday to Friday to Friday, and it's So far, so good! Turn up the music!

Give me another shot of courage! And they check into the Hotel California, and they know they aren't checking out. Now, you see, the only answer is the answer that is provided here in the lesson from the dungeon from Joseph. It is a God-centered focus. The Christian view is the only answer. Listen to John Calvin, years and years ago at the time of the Reformation. He says this, Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself. He can never know who he is unless he has first looked upon God's face and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinizing himself. You see the vital importance of a God-centered focus in life. Without it, everything is turned on its head. Everything is upside down. The Bible is absolutely clear.

It's unashamed. Oh, I know it cuts across contemporary thought, but nevertheless, it is clear. Genesis chapter 1, just turn to it and look at it.

It rings out with striking emphasis in the contrast to what's going on around us. Then God said, Genesis 1 26, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over the livestock and over all the earth and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

Male and female, he created them. What does the Bible say this morning? Listen, this is fabulous. The average teenager thinks that he emerged from a pile of sludge, where his DNA introduced itself to itself, and he set on a course from there. And he doesn't like his school, and he doesn't love his friends, and he can't stand his parents, and since he was born without reason, prolongs himself with chance, and will die in oblivion, he says to himself, Why don't I just check out right now?

Well, I want to say, Hey, let me tell you something, young man. You exist because God made you. He made you purposefully, he made you with dignity, and he made you in order that you might glorify him. And at creation, God has vested man with the ability to rule over his world, to possess it and subject it to the rule, so that other creatures would serve him. That doesn't mean we abuse creatures. It doesn't mean we abuse our world. It doesn't mean we abuse the beauty of what God has provided for us. We are to be the stewards of his creation.

But we understand clearly that the bumper sticker that is increasingly flying around on the back of cars is absolutely wrong. It says, The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth.

As with every error, there is just that element of rightness about it to cause manifold confusion. But here's the deal, loved ones. That is pantheism. And the Bible says, Sorry, the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. And we are the stewards of God's creation. And the reason that we exist is because God has purposely fashioned us and made us for his pleasure. And Joseph understood that. My brothers can do this to me.

Potiphar's wife can try that with me. I can end up in the dungeon here. That may be my tomorrow, but I know that absolutely today his eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me. And that God-centered focus allows a man or a woman to go to bed at night, put their head on the pillow, and fall asleep and awaken to a new day and say, This is the day that you have made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.

I know I don't have a job, and I know that this is not so good and that's not so great, and these things have happened. But God, as long as God is God, will be okay. For the name of the Lord is a strong tower, and the righteous run into it, and they're saved. You go home for your lunch today, and you find that the table is already prepared for you, and the placemats are there, and the cutlery and the glasses and the little bit of floral arrangement in the middle. You say to yourself, My, what an amazing explosion has taken place while I've been at church, that all of this would just cast itself up on the table.

Such a silly idea! There is a greater chance of taking a million alphabets up in a small airplane and dropping them on the Sahara Desert and then forming up in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, than there is of the world evolving. Joseph understood it. You understand it too, unless you choose to deny it. Atheism is a lie. Agnosticism is confusion. And I say especially to those of you who are in search of yourselves.

You can go for a month of Sundays to sit and have people talk to you about who your granny was and your uncle was and your great-grandfather and all that stuff. You will never know who you are or why you're here or what you're supposed to be doing in the world until first you gaze into the face of God as revealed in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and acknowledge him to be who he is, and then you can discover who you are. Living life with a God-centered focus, a valuable lesson from the dungeon, from part one of today's message on Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. As Alistair mentioned, it's vital that we look on Christ as he's revealed in Scripture without adding to or subtracting from what the Bible teaches. Today at Truth for Life, we're excited to offer a double-featured documentary film that explores this idea. Now, this offer includes two full-length feature films titled American Gospel. Each film takes an in-depth look at how the gospel has been altered, even distorted, in America to the point where many have adopted their own man-made beliefs. I'm concerned that people today don't know who God is. And the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.

How does that go together? You'll find these American Gospel documentaries simply fascinating. As you watch, you'll learn more about the watered-down version of Christianity that has taken root in our country, and even around the world. You'll gain a deeper insight into the false teaching that has become popular, a teaching that removes the hard parts of the gospel, like God's judgment, sin, or the reality of hell. Our team considers these to be must-see films. They feature interviews with dozens of biblical preachers, including Alistair, and we are thrilled to offer them packaged together on DVD for our cost of only $5.

And that's along with free shipping and a link for streaming. Order American Gospel when you go to truthforlife.org slash store. And when you do, please consider adding a generous end-of-the-year donation at checkout to support the teaching you here on this program. Your giving upholds our mission to teach the Bible in a way that is clear and relevant to everyday life. We teach from the scriptures 365 days of the year so that God's word will go out and be heard by as many people as possible. And it's our hope and prayer that many who listen will come to trust Christ for salvation. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to listen tomorrow as we continue learning lessons from the dungeon and find out how Joseph handled delivering some devastating news. It's part of our series called My Times Are In Your Hands. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.