Can You Ruin God’s Purpose for Your Life?
The story of Joseph is unique among the matriarchs and patriarchs of Genesis because, like you and me, Joseph never hears directly from God. Unlike his fathers before him, he must learn to overcome the challenges of his life without a promise from God that everything will work out ok or even that God is with him. Joseph must navigate the uncertain middle of his life in the silence of God. God promises Abraham that He will "show" him where to go, but Joseph receives no such reassurance. Many of the paths his life takes will not be his choice. Joseph begins his story in Genesis 37, where the future God had in store for him seemed optimistic.
But Joseph also struggles with the demons that have chased his family for generations. Favoritism, entitlement, manipulation, and deceit destroyed his father's family, and now, like all dysfunctional family patterns, they have found their way into Joseph's life. Joseph becomes both a victim and a perpetrator of the brokenness in his family. Joseph has been his father's favorite since he was born, creating a rift between him and the rest of his siblings. However, Joseph only aggravates the delicate dynamic as his entitlement and superiority toward them grows unchecked. In a tone-deaf announcement to his brothers, he proclaims that he will rule over them based on a dream he had (Gen 37:5-9).
But Joseph also struggles with the demons that have chased his family for generations. Favoritism, entitlement, manipulation, and deceit destroyed his father's family, and now, like all dysfunctional family patterns, they have found their way into Joseph's life.
Without any sensitivity or humility, Joseph insists that his brothers will bow down to him as the greatest among them in their futures. While God will use Joseph in the future to interpret dreams and preserve lives, there is no evidence that these dreams are necessarily from God. Scholars agree that their description is oddly "secular." In other words, they could be from God, or they could very well be Joseph's internal projections of himself. Either way, he mishandles them. If they are gifts from God, he uses very little discernment on how to communicate them in such a way as to bring hope and unity to his family. If they reflect his growing sense of superiority, he demonstrates an arrogant lack of self-awareness when he assumes his brothers will be excited by his dreams.
Either way, Joseph's interpretation of his dreams pushes the family over the edge, and his brothers want to kill him. At the admonishment of the older brothers, however, they settle on selling him as a slave in Egypt. And just like that, the purpose Joseph thought he would have is gone. And this is where many of us, like Joseph, often find ourselves. Flemming Rutledge asks in her magnificent work The Crucifixion, "Is there anyone alive over fifty who would not want to live his or her life over again in order to correct the mistakes, avoid the wrong turns, undo the damage, maximize the opportunities, recover the wasted time, repair the broken relationships, restore the lost future?"
Now condemned to a lifetime of slavery, Joseph, like his father before him, must face the reality that entitlement and favoritism have once again destroyed his family and their futures. God had promised this family through Abraham that he would bless the whole world through them. What happened? Joseph thought his life would change the world, but now he is bound as an Egyptian slave. Judah, one of the brothers involved in Joseph's betrayal, was to be in the direct line of Jesus, but all he has to show for his life now is deception and coverup.
Is there anyone alive over fifty who would not want to live his or her life over again in order to correct the mistakes, avoid the wrong turns, undo the damage, maximize the opportunities, recover the wasted time, repair the broken relationships, restore the lost future?"
What Joseph probably would not have given to go back and do things over again. You can almost feel the weight his brothers felt when they came to their senses and had to come to terms with the fact that they had just turned their own flesh and blood over to a lifetime of suffering to appease their jealousy. Joseph's father, Jacob, had been the victim of favoritism growing up, and it had pushed Jacob to deceive and manipulate his own family until he had to flee for his life. The guilt of his mistakes hangs over his head as the story wonders if God will ever redeem Jacob's broken past (Genesis 37:2;11). Could this group of people have ruined God's purpose for them? Have they stepped so far out of God's plan for their life that there is no way back in?
Joseph's story is a human story -
It is a story for those who struggle to hear from God in the uncertain, scary middle of their lives and wonder if they ever will.
It is for those who fear that the demons in their past will always find them.
It is a story for those who find their marriages, jobs, futures, and children in a place they never thought they would be.
It is for those who find their lives upended through no choice of their own and now live with the shadow that their story may not have a happy ending.
It is a story for the "deconstructing" who thought they knew who God was and what He wanted but now aren't so sure.
It is for those who live with the guilt that they may have crossed a line that could ruin God's plan for their life forever and never find their way back.
Joseph's story offers hope to us on the paths of life we would never have otherwise chosen for ourselves while we wait to hear from God. It reassures us that "even when God seems hidden, his power is operative whether we recognize it or not," as Flemming Rutledge declares in her Advent sermon series. The power of the gospel is that it often works "incognito" and does not need to be recognized by us to transform us or bring about God's purposes for us. In other words, put more radically, God's purposes for your life require less of your initiation than you think. And this is a good thing as we rarely initiate what is truly redemptive for our souls! We need a savior who knows us better than we know ourselves. Joseph needed a God who could see into his future and know that Joseph did not have the character to rule over anyone yet. Jacob needed a God wise enough to know that if the family didn't hit rock bottom, they would never take the steps to reconcile with one another and finally overcome their divisive pasts.
The power of the gospel is that it often works "incognito" and does not need to be recognized by us to transform us or bring about God's purposes for us. In other words, put more radically, God's purposes for your life require less of your initiation than you think.
When Jesus "emptied himself" (Phil 2:7) to bring about our redemption, much of God's work in our life in Christ will not feel familiar to us or take us down the roads we would choose. The greatest act of faith we can offer to God is not to prove to him how brave or heroic we can be for Him but to "recognize that we have come to the end of our human resources" (Rutledge, Advent). It is where God finds Joseph and his family. It is where Jesus finds us (Rom 5:8). If we can bring ourselves to this place of total dependence on the unfamiliar journey of grace, we will never ruin God's purpose for our lives. We can't. It's impossible to. And the most beautiful and freeing part of this news is that no matter what our circumstances are, how far we've gone, what we've done, or how long it's been, we can always find this place. And if you don't know how He will show you. God will never withhold it from you. Because of God's unconditional grace in Jesus, you can never ruin God's purpose for your life.
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Genesis 37
Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.
This is the account of Jacob’s family line.
Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate[a] robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”
His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.
Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
Now his brothers had gone to graze their father’s flocks near Shechem, and Israel said to Joseph, “As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I am going to send you to them.”
“Very well,” he replied.
So he said to him, “Go and see if all is well with your brothers and with the flocks, and bring word back to me.” Then he sent him off from the Valley of Hebron.
When Joseph arrived at Shechem, a man found him wandering around in the fields and asked him, “What are you looking for?”
He replied, “I’m looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks?”
“They have moved on from here,” the man answered. “I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’”
So Joseph went after his brothers and found them near Dothan. But they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him.
“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.”
When Reuben heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. “Let’s not take his life,” he said. “Don’t shed any blood. Throw him into this cistern here in the wilderness, but don’t lay a hand on him.” Reuben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father.
So when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe—the ornate robe he was wearing— and they took him and threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty; there was no water in it.
As they sat down to eat their meal, they looked up and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices, balm and myrrh, and they were on their way to take them down to Egypt.
Judah said to his brothers, “What will we gain if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him; after all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood.” His brothers agreed.
So when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for twenty shekels[b] of silver to the Ishmaelites, who took him to Egypt.
When Reuben returned to the cistern and saw that Joseph was not there, he tore his clothes. He went back to his brothers and said, “The boy isn’t there! Where can I turn now?”
Then they got Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. They took the ornate robe back to their father and said, “We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe.”
He recognized it and said, “It is my son’s robe! Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.”
Then Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and daughters came to comfort him, but he refused to be comforted. “No,” he said, “I will continue to mourn until I join my son in the grave.” So his father wept for him.
Meanwhile, the Midianites sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard.