Salvation’s Path (Genesis 37-47)

“But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance”

- Genesis 45.7

Have you ever played that game, or at least seen it played on TV, where you see a photo of an object really close up and it slowly pans out and you have to hit the buzzer when you recognize what it is? That game is based on this idea that if you look too closely at something you might see a lot of detail in that particular spot, but you’ll miss a whole perspective on the object as a whole. In order to actually get the answer correct you need to see it from a distance. At times reading my Bible is a lot like this game.

The Bible is mostly full of a lot of stories, or testimonies for a more appropriate word. ‘Spot goes to the Zoo’ is a story, the life of Moses in Genesis is a testimony. Both are good but neither are the same. Testimonies need to be read and learnt from, and in order to read and learn, you often need to read the thing as a whole. I’m in South Africa at the moment and before I came out I read ‘A Long Walk to Freedom’, the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. It certainly opened my eyes to a lot of the realities of apartheid and precisely what Mandela did and went through to achieve his convictions. Reading the whole book allows you to build up the rhythm and pace of his life, the rises and the falls, the causes and the effects. Had I just picked one chapter I may have been able to learn more detail about a certain stage but I would have missed out on the whole collage of his great life.

The same thing happened to me again just the other night. I was at a church meeting and our leader said we were going to read from Genesis. We were to read the large chunks of Genesis 37 through to 45. That’s a lot of reading. I don’t think many of us (sadly) are excited by the idea of reading large chunks of the Old Testament but this night we were going to have to. But as we did read it all, something strange happened, the view panned out and I suddenly recognized what it actually was I was looking at.

Genesis 37 through 45, and a bit more actually, is the story of Joseph; Joseph of technicolour coat fame that is. It begins with him being seventeen and tending sheep on a hill and ends with him in second in charge of one of the most powerful nations in the world at the time. As we went through his life a number of things jumped out and me, and if I’m honest, took me aback.

The path to salvation sometimes comes through natural means

I have spent a lot of time around Christians (unsurprisingly, being one myself) and there is a very clear pattern of how we look to God to save us and solve our problems. The first is to ask him to save us now, and the second is that he save us in a flash and bang miraculous manner, preferably in a way that involves little or no effort from ourselves. So if we’re struggling with employment, or indeed unemployment, we pray for a job offer to land on our doorstep. If we’re struggling with being single, we pray for a wonderful man or woman to walk into our lives and fall in love with us. If we’re struggling with the weight of life, we pray for the skies to clear and the sun to shine on us immediately. Dear God please save me and save me now.

Far from it that I say I don’t do this because for sure I do it all the time. I look to the stories of both the Old Testament and New Testament, stories of how God turned up, clicked his fingers and the world smiled again. I read that faith can move a mountain and so if I just have faith and pray for a broken car then a new one will arrive quick sharp. This is precisely why the story of God’s salvation in Joseph took me back. There is salvation but it is not now. There is salvation but there is no flash bang.

The means by which God worked through Joseph to save His people from the famine was very, well, natural. Almost annoyingly so you might say. He obviously sees that the famine is coming but does He click his fingers and create huge amounts of food out of nowhere? Nope. Does he circumvent biological drives and prevent the people from feeling hungry? Uh uh. He picks a young boy of 17 and sets his course to bring salvation. Over the course of Joseph’s life God blesses him as he grows up, gives him the power to interpret dreams (which although miraculous, was not the ultimate key to salvation), allows him to be sold into slavery, allows him to impress his owner, sends him great temptation, gives him over to two years of unjust jail, brings him out of jail and to the Pharaoh’s attention, and then gives him responsibility over the food stores of Egypt and the vision to organize and ration sufficient food to survive the famine.

Gifting, jobs, temptation, unjust hard times, blessing, responsibilty. These are not spiritual jargon words. These are very real, very practical, very natural things. We all have them in our lives. Often we all resent them in our lives. Too often we don’t believe God is working unless there’s a flash bang here and there.

But why do we downplay the work we do in our jobs? Why don’t we think God can’t be working salvation through the hard work we do and the trials and temptations we face?

I sure don’t know, but I do know that I often think that way. So my first lesson from Joseph is this: we mustn’t resent the natural path, sometimes it is how God is bringing us salvation.

The path to salvation is not always an easy path

I am a person of great conviction (some people call it stubbornness. I reckon the answer is quietly sat in the middle of us waiting to be found) and often I have conversations with friends where I am left stunned by the opposing polarity of our opinions. One in particular was a conversation with a friend about a year ago. We were talking about relationships and I was saying how I thought that at times there is a need to fight for them and go through hard times to get to a successful end. However far from agreeing with me, she simply dismissed what my opinions and said ‘no, I don’t think anyone should ever fight for a relationship, I want my relationships to be entirely natural and straight forward. It shouldn’t be hard’ (or words to that effect). While at the time I was stunned at her utopian love story, I can now realize that she was simply saying outloud what we all often feel. The thought goes ‘I want to be happy and blessed, and I want it done in a pain-free manner and at a constant glorious rise’.

There’s a term in psychology, and indeed now common culture, known as ‘delayed gratification’. It is a concept used to measure the mental development of children. What psychologists do is they put a child in a room with one sweet, and say to the child ‘if this sweet is still here when I get back, then you can have two sweets’. The point being if the child can see a longer-term view and endure the trial of being alone in a room with a sweet and not eating it, they will gain much more. I’m not sure what age it happens but apparently at some point children do begin to be able to wait, and up till that point they simply go and eat the sweet as soon as the adult is out of the room. So the idea of ‘delayed gratification’ is being able to hold off your wants and desires for a period, enduring a temptation and trial, in order to receive later on.

While psychologists will identify an age upon which this capacity is available to us, I think even as adults we struggle to use this capacity to endure in order to gain. Whether it’s about relationships, as in my friend’s case above, or something entirely different, most of us want blessing and for it to come with no endurance and no struggle. I’ve heard it said that the Big Brother / celebrity phenomenon is simply this same issue, ‘I want to be rich and famous and I want it without any hard work’.

For me the life of Joseph shows that God does not hold this view for us. I think anyone offered the chance to be highly thought of and in supreme authority in a powerful nation would take it quickly, considering it a great blessing. While this is what Joseph was given by God, it was not handed to him and it was not a rapid incline. To begin with he was sold by his brothers into slavery. Slavery does not sound like fun to me, especially when it is through being betrayed by family and leaving home at 17. He then is faced with great trial and temptation at the hands of his master’s wife, and despite coming through that with flying colours, he is framed and thrown in jail for two years. Two years. That’s a long time, especially for someone who must’ve still been a relatively young guy. So now he’s far from home, not seen his parents in years, hated by his brothers and in jail.

That was not the end however, but merely a step in the journey. There is a promise in the Bible that says God works for the God of those who love Him, and that promise can be seen as clearly as day in Joseph’s life. In all the hard times, hard work and hard situations that Joseph went through, God was creating a way to great blessing and salvation.

So the second lesson I learnt from Joseph was this: we must stop demanding for the easy route to salvation, for God does not work always that way.

The Path to salvation can be blind

I was at a friend’s house a few weeks back and I was playing with their children. The two youngest decided they’d like to tie me up. So to begin with they just tied my hands, but thanks to some handy tricks I learnt back in the day, it was pretty easy to create space and come free. However turns out children are pretty determined when they want to be. So they began to step up their efforts and before long I was tied hands and feet, sat on the ground, blindfolded, gagged and with the lights switched off. Now when you can see the knots and see which knots are being tied and where to rope (or dressing gown waistband as it was) is hanging, it is very easy to stay calm and plan your route to freedom. When you can’t sense or understand what’s happening to you, it’s a lot more intimidating!

One of the most powerful biases in the human mind is known as ‘hindsight’ bias. I say most powerful because it has a significant impact on how much learning we can take from experience. Hindsight bias says that once we’ve come to the end of an event or experience, the ending will have a convoluting effect on our memory of the event. We will say ‘oh I wasn’t actually that scared, really’ simply because we ended up safe, or ‘ah, I was in control all along’ when actually it was somebody else that saved you from a minor catastrophe. Happy endings all too often create a guise over the experience we had and the valuable lessons we could take from them. While earlier I extolled the value in seeing stories as a whole, the same hindsight bias can rob us from valuable lessons unless we live the stories stage by stage, as if we didn’t know the ending. Only by doing this was I able to see that all along Joseph’s way to salvation, he was essentially blind, and like I was being tied up, had no idea what was happening to him.

But why is this significant? Well because as humans we like to know what’s going on. We like to be in the know. Knowledge is power, after all. Yet even, Christians, believing in an all-powerful God and all-serving humankind, have a deep demand to know and a frustration and confusion when we don’t. Yet the story of Joseph lets us see that that’s not always how God works. Joseph’s life went up and down like a child’s yoyo and surely he did not know what when and how. He was blind to salvation’s path in his life.

Now those of you clued up on Joseph’s life will say ‘but ha! He did have sight because of the vision he was given as a child that his brothers would one day bow to him’. You would indeed be right that he did receive such a vision and therefore he did believe in a promise over his life. But as far as we know, he did not receive it again, nor did he have friends and fellow Jews around him to encourage and remind him. And arguably worse than this, his life directly contradicted the promise he’d been given.

Joseph has a vision that his brothers will bow to him. Next thing that happens is his brothers have plotted to kill him and then sold him into slavery. Not exactly what you’d expect. So while Joseph had a promise over him, he was still blind to the path to it.

We too are in precisely the same situation. I have already mentioned one of the promises that God holds over us ‘I will work for the good of those who love me’ and there are many more; others of us too have other more specific passions and callings in our lives. Yet in both these cases most of us cannot deny that our lives so often don’t fit the pattern we expect. Why do bad things happen is God is working for my good? Why is my youth group struggling so much when I feel so called to working with young people? Why can I not find a job in healthcare when I feel so strongly about serving the sick?

Joseph’s life tells me that God’s plan to bring about salvation in our lives is not in our sight. The indicators of success that we use to ‘see’ if things are working out are not the same as those God uses. Sometimes the path to salvation for us will be essentially blind.

So my final lesson for Joseph is this: we must learn to live through trust in the faithfulness of God’s promises, not just the sight of our circumstance, thought and emotion.

When I am old and have worked hard to learn these things in my life I pray that I, like Joseph, will be able to say about the events of my life ‘God has done these things in my life to bring about salvation to His people’.