Cover to Cover
Reading: Genesis 42:1-43:34
Focus: Genesis 42:1-9
You’ve been betrayed, you’ve been burnt, but you move on in life and you start a new life with the past behind you. But then, somewhere down the line, the past catches up… often at the most inconvenient times and you have to deal with it in the face of your new environment with all your friends, who are at a loss as to what is happening and what they can do to help. You find yourself stuck between the past and your glittering future, which is slowly slipping out of your grasp… until a glimmer of light shines through.
Imagine what must have been running through Joseph’s head when he saw and realised that his brothers were standing before him, now, the second-in-command, the governor of Egypt. The betrayal almost twenty years ago, sold into slavery, sent away from his father and all that he loved. The moment he saw their faces, the pain, the torment, must have all come flowing back in that instance. Yet, he managed to hold himself together and, more impressively I think, clear-minded enough to remember the dreams he had in his teenage years.
The famous dreams of Joseph where his brothers’ straw bundles would bow down to his bundle, how the celestial beings would bow down to him… now, fulfilled, as his brothers bowed before him. I wonder what his reaction would have been were it not for these dreams. Prison? Torture? Yet, rather, Joseph started to get a glimpse of the visions that God gave him and how God had placed him where he was. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier reading, this story of Joseph is more than Joseph, but rather the preservation of God’s Promise to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and, now, Jacob.
It was in the midst of this difficult situation where God’s light, planted in Joseph’s heart a long time ago, shone through. God’s grace in Joseph’s life allowed Joseph to move forward shrewdly, ultimately releasing him from all the years of pain and hardship, and saving his family ancestry from annihilation. Yet, without God’s grace and protection in Joseph’s life, things wouldn’t have turned out the way that they did. Likewise, how has God shone through in your life?
Next Reading: Genesis 44:1-47:12
