I Went to Church Yesterday

The thirteenth of an undetermined number in a series on the character and need for corporate worship.

I went to church yesterday.

Preaching through the book of Genesis has been exciting and rewarding. Exciting because it reinforces our need to view the earliest accounts of recorded history from the perspective of God's unfolding his redemptive purposes in history for his own glory through sinners like you and me. It is rewarding because it is a reminder of God's faithfulness to his own Name and of his hesed, his steadfast, unbreakable covenant loyalty to those he chose unto himself. It is a comforting reminder that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, is our God, the trustworthy covenant-keeper who is the same yesterday, today and forever. As the Holy Spirit applies the preached word to our hearts, we joyfully affirm with the prophet Isaiah, "Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." Isa 25:9.

Yesterday's sermon was from Genesis 40, the story of the imprisoned Joseph's service to the Pharaoh’s chief cupbearer and baker. In his marvelous Providence, the Lord God placed Joseph in the same prison unit with these two former confidants of Pharaoh. In his marvelous Providence, the Lord God caused them to have equally imposing and disturbing dreams, both needing immediate interpretation, on the same night. In his marvelous Providence, the Lord God enabled Joseph, disparagingly called "the lord of dreams," 37:19, by his brothers, to provide them with the requisite, separate interpretations. But how did Joseph, a Hebrew from the land of Hebrews, 40:15, end up in Egypt?

Briefly, Joseph was a daddy's boy and a spoiled brat. His brothers despised him because he continually taunted them with the fancy coat his father had given him and with his boastful claims of future lordship over them, predictions that he had dreamed. His offended siblings conspired against him, stripped him of his contentious coat, sold him to Midianite traders who took him down to Egypt and who later sold him to Potiphar, Pharaoh's captain of the guard. There Joseph quickly incurred the favor of Potiphar who entrusted all that he had to him. 39:5-6. Joseph was extremely successful and for his sake, the Lord richly blessed Potiphar's estate, vv. 2-5. All of this took place according to the marvelous Providence of God. Indeed, the Scripture affirms the hands-on Providence in this way, “The LORD was with Joseph,..” v. 2.

However, Joseph's lot suffered a swift, radical reversal. The scorned and scheming Potiphar's wife, whose brazen sexual advances Joseph consistently parried, viciously accused him of attempted rape. Potiphar believed his treacherous wife and summarily placed Joseph in the prison in which the king’s prisoners were kept. Yes, there he was, in the words of Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Alone Again (Naturally)" but also there he was, with the Lord. “The Lord was with him ".. and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.” As a result, Joseph was appointed a trustee supervisor over the other prisoners and the warden placed everything under his charge ".. because the LORD was with him. And whatever he did, the LORD made it succeed." vv. 21-23. In the marvelous Providence of God, all these ups and downs, these good times and bad times, were ordered for Joseph. The Lord was with him when his brothers sold him, when Potiphar bought him, and when Potiphar's wife persecuted him. The Lord was with him. This very Lord is with us now as he was with Joseph.

How often we tend to think that our suffering is in direct consequence to our sin. While it is true that the holy God cannot wink at iniquity and must punish evildoers, sometimes there is not a one-to-one correspondence between our sin and our suffering. This is one of the lessons of the book of Job – sin is not necessarily causal of our suffering; it may be a possible cause but is not always a necessary one. Sometimes the Lord God providentially orders our suffering for his own glory. This truth is amply verified in both the story of Job and of the blind man in John 9. From Job's experience we learn that God is often pleased to withhold the reason for our travail and will keep it in store for display in his heavenly trophy among the many cloud of witnesses in heaven.

Returning to Genesis 40, Joseph's interpretations of the chief cupbearer's and baker's dreams proved that the Lord was with him – they were true. Pharaoh "lifted up" the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker, a very poignant pun, in different ways. The former was reinstated to his position in the king's court while the latter was ignominiously hanged. But the chief cupbearer did not ask Pharaoh to release Joseph as Joseph had requested of him. He did not remember Joseph… but the Lord was with Joseph. There he was again in familiar territory, imprisoned, disappointed, desolate and dejected, alone again (naturally). But the Lord was with him.

In the deep, dark night of Joseph's soul, the Lord God was working all things together for his own glory and for his good. The sovereign God was silently preparing him for his exaltation to the position of second-in-command in all Egypt, a position from which he would bring the Lord's covenant family into Egypt from which the Lord would later stage the greatest redemptive act in the Old Testament, the exodus. The Lord was with Joseph. Through the life of this individual, the Lord was sovereignly using secondary causes to effectuate his greater purposes of redemption in history. As he himself would later enlighten his brothers, "So it was not you who sent me here, but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt… As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." 45:8; 50:20. God used his brothers’ sins against him sinlessly to promote the Lord's greater purposes of redemption that would expand from the confines of sibling rivalry to the dank prison cells in a foreign land to the palace of the world's reigning superpower to the stage of redemptive history. The Lord was with Joseph.

One great lesson from this story is this:
God moves in a mysterious way;
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm. William Cowper, 1774

When God is with us, we rejoice that the mysteries of his providence and the inscrutability of his ways are not occasions for doubt but are causes for worship. True faith (not perfect faith)in the covenant loyalty, the hesed, of the Triune God, impels us, not to seek explanations but to remember his character, to adore him and to praise him for his goodness, wisdom, beauty, etc. In times of darkness, in times of profound pain and intense suffering, our greatest comfort is not in the provision of answers but in the assurance of the presence of our great covenant God and King with us. The Lord was with Joseph. The Lord is with us. Christ our King is with us. He is Immanuel.

I learned this in church yesterday.