Genesis 37:20-38:1

1. The birth of Joseph was miraculous in that it was by the intervention of God as an answer to prayer. The Lord Jesus is virgin born. His birth was certainly miraculous!
2. Joseph was loved by his father. The Lord Jesus was loved by His Father, who declared, “This is My beloved Son.”
3. Joseph had the coat of many colours which set him apart. Christ was set apart in that He was “separate from sinners.”
4. Joseph announced that he was to rule over his brethren. The Lord Jesus presented Himself as the Messiah. Just as they ridiculed Joseph’s message, so they also ridiculed Jesus. In fact, they nailed the words: “THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS” to His cross.
5. Joseph was sent by his father to his brethren. Jesus was sent to His brethren by His Father. He came first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
6. Joseph was hated by his brethren without a cause, and the Lord Jesus was hated by His brethren without a cause.

As we return to the story now, remember that Joseph is approaching his brothers, and they’re plotting against him. He’s wearing that coat! The coat of many colours or the coat with the sleeves, which was a mark of his high position in the family. We must remember that Joseph was younger than his brothers yet he was in a position above them. He’d been sent out to the brothers as an overseer to report back to Jacob on the state of things with the brothers and the flocks. So there’s all this hatred and jealousy which has now reached the point of murder!

We take up the story today from Genesis 37 and verses 19 and 20 where we left off last time.

Then they said to one another, “Look, this dreamer is coming! 

Come therefore, let us now kill him and cast him into some pit; and we shall say, ‘Some wild beast has devoured him.’ We shall see what will become of his dreams!”

How they hated Joseph! Here they’re probably about a hundred miles from home, and they say to each other, “Let’s get rid of him now, and we’ll see what’ll become of his dreams!”

See how the brothers didn’t oppose Joseph’s plans, his hopes, and dreams for the future. They opposed the dreams that came as a revelation from God. There hatred wouldn’t allow them to see God working in Joseph’s young life. They wanted, in effect, to see if they could defeat God’s Word, God’s announced purpose.

Joseph’s life tells us a lot about how God fulfills His word. The brothers may have been determined to defeat God’s revealed word but God’s Word never fails.

What God said about Joseph was true and it would come to pass despite these brothers just the same as what God said about Jesus is true and will come to pass despite the world, satan, the anti christ or any other force in the universe.

We shouldn’t lose our sense of shock about this plot against Joseph’s life. They didn’t conspire to mock or tease or bully him a bit; they conspired to kill him. They were so serious about it that they plotted the excuse they would make to their father, knowing full well how it would devastate old Jacob.

Notice that with these boys the sin was in their heart before it was ever acted out? Our sin problem begins in our heart and must be dealt with on a heart level. Our goal is not simply changing our behavior, but letting God change our heart. Christian transformation works from the inside out.

Now, we come to the oldest brother, Reuben. Reuben’s already lost his position as the firstborn. However, in this scene, he stands in a pretty good light. He has a more mature judgment than the others.

Verse 21,

But Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands, and said, “Let us not kill him.” 

The brothers would’ve killed Joseph right then and there if Reuben hadn’t intervened.

We think of all ten brothers (leaving little Benjamin out), and wonder how they could all be so evil, well, there was one spark of good among the ten. They wanted to kill Joseph first and then throw him into a pit but Reuben suggested that instead of that they throw him in the pit first and let him die in there instead. And he got the brothers to agree to it.

There’s something good in this move from Reuben because earlier (Genesis 35) he did a terrible thing – he had sex with one of this father’s wives/concubines (Bilhah).

From now on Reuben wouldn’t be defined only by the worst thing that he ever did.

Verse 22,

And Reuben said to them, “Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit which is in the wilderness, and do not lay a hand on him”—that he might deliver him out of their hands, and bring him back to his father.  

You see, the other brothers had their plan and Reuben had his plan. Reuben didn’t try to stop his brothers; he tried to out-smart them.

Reuben’s idea was that after Joseph had been put into the pit, he’d sneak back again and take him out of the pit and take him home to his father.

Reuben could have simply risen up and said, “This is wrong! We can’t do this!” But, although Reuben wanted to be merciful to Joseph, he also wanted to please the other brothers who hated Joseph. This failure to do the right thing meant that the good Reuben wanted to do (bring him back to his father) wouldn’t happen.

Now verse 23,

So it came to pass, when Joseph had come to his brothers, that they stripped Joseph of his tunic, the tunic of many colors that was on him.

That coat was like waving a red rag to a bull.

They hated it because of what it represented, it set him apart from them. According to the law of primogeniture, which is a fancy word for the right of succession belonging to the firstborn child, the older brothers had a prior claim to the position that Joseph held in the family; so in their jealousy and anger, they stripped off that hated coat from Joseph.

We picture this scene and think of how Jesus was stripped of everything before He was crucified.

Jesus went up on a cross and Joseph went down in a pit, but each was stripped, cursed, and put into a place they could never rescue themselves from.

We think first of Jesus, but we also think of the righteousness of God that clothes every believer, and how the enemy of our soul wishes us to feel naked, cursed, and helpless.

None of that was true for Joseph. Neither was it true for Jesus, and it’s not true for the believer today. No matter how naked, cursed, and helpless we might feel God’s intentions for us will prevail and no force in the universe can stop that happening.

Genesis 37:24-25 now

Then they took him and cast him into a pit. And the pit was empty; there was no water in it. 

And they sat down to eat a meal. Then they lifted their eyes and looked, and there was a company of Ishmaelites, coming from Gilead with their camels, bearing spices, balm, and myrrh, on their way to carry them down to Egypt. 

The heartless character of the brothers can be seen here.

They could eat a meal with Joseph nearby in the pit with his screams ringing in their ears. They could sit down and enjoy their food before completing the murder of Joseph.

Later, in Genesis, in chapter 42 verse 21 we see that there was, in fact, the conviction of sin within their consciences but they ignored it at that moment. The hatred overtook the tiny spark of good in their consciences. In that passage they said to one another, “We are truly guilty concerning our brother, for we saw the anguish of his soul when he pleaded with us, and we would not hear; therefore this distress has come upon us.”

When Joseph was cast into the pit, he pleaded with his brothers, and they ignored his cries as they just carried on and ate their meal.

What utter cold, callousness this was.

The great preacher Donald Barnhouse once wrote; “A physicist could compute the exact time required for his cries to go twenty-five yards to the eardrums of the brothers. But it took twenty-two years for that cry to go from the eardrums to their hearts.”

Now, we see that there was a caravan of traders going by.

Verses 26 and 27,

So Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is there if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? 

Come and let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother and our flesh.” And his brothers listened. 

Now Judah intervenes as he sees some traders (actually, slave traders) going by and decides there’s a buck to be made here. Joseph could provide a bit of extra cash as well as satisfy the desire to have him gone for good. So, he suggests they sell their brother to the trsders and the other brothers are satisfied with this suggestion. What they wanted was to get rid of Joseph for good and this idea was a win win for them.

They fully realised that the Ishmeelites would take him down to Egypt and sell him there as a slave, but at least they’d be rid of him. Slavery in most places was a living death anyway, and they knew they’d certainly never hear from him again.

Reuben is not present at this time.

To verse 28 now,

Then Midianite traders passed by; so the brothers pulled Joseph up and lifted him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty shekels of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt. 

At this point, you’re probably thinking that Moses (who wrote this Genesis record) should make up his mind.

First, he calls them Ishmeelites, then Midianites, and then he calls them Ishmeelites again. So who are they? Is this an error in the Bible? This has often been used by those who attack the authenticity of the Bible to try and prove that it contradicts itself.

They do have an interesting point, and it deserves a closer look.

First of all, it reveals how the critic and those who hate the Bible can interpret as an error something that actually shows the accuracy of the biblical record.

Who are the Ishmeelites? They are the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham. Who are the Midianites? They are the descendants of Midian, a son of Abraham. Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar, and Midian was the son of Abraham by Keturah who he married after the death of Sarah. They’re actually all brethren. They’re relatives of this group of boys who are selling their brother!

So let’s ask who was an Israelite at this time.

Well, there were only twelve of them. How many Ishmeelites might there have been by this time?

Ishmael was older than Isaac, so maybe there were one hundred or more. How many Midianites would there be? Well, Midian was born after Isaac; so there couldn’t be too many of them.

These were little groups, and in that day travel was dangerous. They were going across the desert to Egypt. They simply joined together for protection, and they joined together for a common interest. They were going on a business trip to Egypt, and, since they were related, they understood each other and joined together.

Ignorance adds a great deal to what people consider as contradictions in the Bible. You can see that Moses perfectly understood what the situation was, and he wrote it down accordingly.

The brothers probably laughed as the Ishmaelites went along on their way to Egypt. They probably felt good that they didn’t kill Joseph and that they made a little money in the process. Best of all, they thought they’d defeated the dream, the revelation from God.

It wasn’t so.

God’s word about Joseph was proved true – no matter what his brothers did to Him.

God’s word about Jesus was proved true – no matter what others did to Him.

And, God’s word about you will be proved true – no matter what others do or have done.

Genesis 37:29-31

Then Reuben returned to the pit, and indeed Joseph was not in the pit; and he tore his clothes. 

And he returned to his brothers and said, “The lad is no more; and I, where shall I go?” 

So they took Joseph’s tunic, killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the tunic in the blood. 

Scripture doesn’t tell us whether the brothers told Reuben what they’d done, but they may have. And they may well have said it was no use chasing after the merchants because they were a long way off by now; so he might as well help them think up a good story to tell Jacob.

Reuben tore his clothes as an expression of utter horror and mourning because his weak stand for righteousness accomplished nothing. Joseph might as well be dead because his father who loved him so much would never see him again.

This showed that the cruelty of the sons of Israel was not directed towards the favourite son alone, but also towards the father who favoured him.

Now we see the heartless way they bring the news to old Jacob and it’s an evil lie.

To verse 32,

Then they sent the tunic of many colors, and they brought it to their father and said, “We have found this. Do you know whether it is your son’s tunic or not?” 

These blokes are pretty clever are they not?

They acted as if they’d not seen Joseph. They pretended they just found this coat which just happened to be lying in their plain sight. Believe me, they knew that hated coat very well, but they pretended they didn’t recognise it and asked their father whether he recognised it.

Jacob knew whose coat it was. He came to the natural conclusion and, of course, the conclusion to which the brothers intended, that Joseph was dead.

To verse 33,

And he (that’s Jacob) recognized it and said, “It is my son’s tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph is torn to pieces.” 

Let’s pause and take a closer look at this.

They killed a kid of the goats and used that blood on the coat. This should immediately remind us of another father being deceived by using a goat.

Remember when Rebekah and Jacob were conspiring, they used a kid for the savoury meat dish, and they took the skin of the goat and put it on the hands and arms of Jacob to deceive his father. Now the brothers of Joseph are using the blood of a goat to deceive their father, who is none other than Jacob himself.

They hand the coat to him and say, “Do you recognise it? We just found it up there in the mountains. It looks like a wild beast must have got to him.”

Old Jacob came to the conclusion that his son Joseph had been killed.

Notice this carefully. Jacob is deceived in exactly the same way that he had been deceived.

We simply can’t deny the truth of Galatians 6 verse 7 “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. ” Not something else, not something similar, but the same thing.

This man Jacob did some bad sowing. He used deception, and now that he’s a father, he’s deceived in the identical way that he’d deceived his own father years before.

When we sow corn, we reap corn. When we sow weeds, we reap weeds. We get exactly what we sow. This is true in any realm you wish to move in today. It’s true in the physical realm, the moral realm, and the spiritual realm. It’s true for the believer as well.

If we think we can get by with sin because we’re a child of God, we have another thought coming.

God is no respecter of persons. He said this is the way it is going to be, and none of us is an exception.

No matter how much we try to justify our sin we’re not a special case to the Lord no matter how important we think we are. None of us can operate on a different plane and by a different rule book than anyone else. As we’ve said, God is no respecter of persons.

Now notice the grief of Jacob’s grief in verses 34 and 35,

Then Jacob tore his clothes, put sackcloth on his waist, and mourned for his son many days. 

And all his sons and all his daughters arose to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and he said, “For I shall go down into the grave to my son in mourning.” Thus his father wept for him. 

We can only imagine the pain of the father losing his beloved son, and the strange pleasure the brothers had in concealing the crime.

Joseph’s brothers decided to live the rest of their lives with this terrible secret.

Jacob tore his clothes in an expression of horror and mourning because his beloved son was gone. His grief was understandable, but his failure to see the truth of eternal life was not.

This is also a powerful illustration that shows that if we believe something to be so, it may as well be. Joseph was not dead, but as long as Jacob believed he was, as far as Jacob was concerned, Joseph was dead.

In the same way, the Christian has been set free from sin, but if Satan can persuade us we’re under the tyranny of sin, we may as well be.

All Jacob’s sons and all his daughters arose to comfort him, but at least as far as the brothers were concerned it was a pretended comfort from those who both did the crime and covered it up. Their comfort was of no help to poor Jacob at all.

We think Jacob’s grief is a demonstration of how much he loved his son Joseph.

Well, he certainly did love this boy. But it also reveals that Jacob still hadn’t fully learned to walk by faith yet.

Remember the experience he had at Peniel. It was the deflation of the old ego, the self. The flesh collapsed there, but now he must learn to walk by faith and he hasn’t learned that yet. In fact, the faith of Jacob is mentioned in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews in verse 20, but only when he was dying. Nothing of his life is mentioned there as an example of his faith until the time of his death. Only then faith is shown.

Compare his grief here to the grief of a man like King David.

In 2nd Samuel 12:15-23, David desperately sought after the Lord for healing for his baby boy by Bathsheba. He loved that little boy just as much as Jacob loved Joseph, but David was a man of faith.

On learning that his little boy had died he raised himself out of the dust of the ground where he had laid prostrate all night, bathed himself and ate a meal, ending the fast he’d been on.

You see he knew the little one couldn’t come back to him, but he also knew that he was going to the little fellow someday. What faith! You see, Jacob’s not walking by that kind of faith. He didn’t have the faith of his grandfather Abraham and his father Isaac when they were obedient to God’s command that Isaac should be sacrificed. They both knew that God had promised that there’d be a multitude of descendants that would come through them and they trusted and believed God. That was faith, friend.

Jacob’s grief is grief without hope. The grief is so great because he’s lost sight of God in the midst of the situation.

My friend, perhaps you’ve lost a loved one. Perhaps you just can’t get over it. May I say to you in the kindest possible way, learn to walk by faith. You manifest faith when you recognise that you can’t bring that one back by grieving. It does no good at all. If you’re a child of God and you’re grieving over another child of God, then walk by faith. You’ll see that one again and never be separated. The world has no faith and so they grieve as those without hope. But, my Christian friend, you can walk by faith.

Now the final verse of this chapter, verse 36, follows Joseph to Egypt.

Now the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh and captain of the guard. 

There are deep meanings to this story of moral failure.

Genesis 37 closes with an account of Jacob’s sons selling their brother Joseph unto the Midianites, and they in turn selling him into Egypt and to Potiphar, the Pharoah’s captain of the guard.

This is one of those incredible pictures or types, and speaks of Christ being rejected by Israel and delivered to the Gentiles.

From the time that the Jewish leaders delivered their Messiah into the hands of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, they have, as a nation, had no further dealings with Him. Many individual Jews have, of course, turned to Christ but as a nation, they’ve rejected the Messiah. This is not a permanent situation and God has never forgotten His covenant to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It’s an eternal unbreakable covenant and one day the nation will turn to Christ after a period of unbelievable suffering.

So, we leave Joseph right there for now and we’ll pick up his story again in chapter 39.

But now we take another interlude as we begin Genesis chapter 38, and we see Judah the oldest of the 12 brothers, and in particular his sin and his shame.

We may wonder why this chapter’s included in the Word of God because it’s one of those chapters in the Bible that tells of sordidness and it’s laced with wickedness and immorality. This chapter is sometimes known as the Judah interlude, but its purpose is to give us some background on the tribe of Judah, out of which the Lord Jesus Christ came.

This fact makes it important that it be included in the biblical record. In this chapter, we’ll read names like Judah and Tamar and Pharez and Zerah. They probably sound familiar, and they will be for anyone who’s read the first chapter of Matthew because they’re in the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is an amazing thing! Our Lord came into a sinful line. He was made in all points like as we are, yet He Himself was without sin. He came into that human line where all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

In this chapter, Joseph is now in the hands of the Gentiles. But before we’re told what happened to him in Egypt, the Holy Spirit traces for us, the history of the Jews, while Joseph is absent from the land.

It’s no accident that the story of Joseph is interrupted by chapter 38. The disreputable behaviour of other members of Joseph’s family makes his conduct shine like a bright light in a sorry world.

Chapter 38 of Genesis is interesting because of what it contains. It’s not a diversion from the story of Joseph if we know why it’s included. In fact, it’s as important as the life of Joseph itself is. Joseph’s life and his ordeal are recorded to show how the Israelites ended up in Egypt and how they were cared for when they got there.

At the same time, everything about Joseph also provides pictures of the coming Messiah.

The story of Judah and his family on the other hand, here in chapter 38, is given to show us about the main line which leads to the Messiah. Jesus will come through Judah. Because of this, the story of Judah relates directly to the ancestry of Jesus.

So, this is where we’re going in the next episode my friends and so, until then may God’s grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.