The Future

Today, we're finishing our series on Joseph. It's been an eight-part series, seven or eight. I've lost track. But we come to our final chapter in the story of Joseph. It is also the final chapter of the book of Genesis.

It just so happens to be. And we've been exploring this series, which has been called Joseph series, When God Breaks, Shapes, and Makes His People. This theme, however, has always, if you think about it, had two elements that we see again when we come to our sermon today. Two elements. Firstly, we've seen how God's people have been highlighted to be Jacob's family.

Jacob's family is God's people. God's people is a single family unit, and how God has worked in the hearts and in the lives of a father and his twelve sons. How God worked in their hearts to bring about faith. How God worked in their hearts to bring about repentance when that was needed and salvation. But the breaking and the shaping and the making of God's people is not simply limited to this family.

It is also related to a far bigger picture in the story. And we've alluded to this in the past. Towards the end of the story, Genesis 49, we see Jacob now well into his final years. His children. Blessing his twelve sons with one of the oldest pieces of prophecy that we have in the Bible, Genesis 49, the first bits of prophecy. And he blesses his kids, and each brother receives a blessing that they would become tribes of a great nation. And he lists the characteristics of each of these tribes.

For example, Judah is going to be the tribe who has kings, who produces the kings for the nation of Israel. Zebulun would become a tribe known for their seafaring as they settle on the coast of the nation of Israel. Asher would be known for its fruitful harvests because of the fertile plains that they settle. And so we see that his people is not just a family now; it is becoming a nation. It is a big picture thing that God is also in the process of forming.

And so today, as we deal with the last chapter in Genesis, the final story of Joseph, we see these two elements happening again. So let's turn to Genesis 50, and we'll read the final words on Joseph and his brothers. We're going to read from verse 12 to the end of the chapter. Genesis 50, verse 12. Jacob has died.

Old man, the father of Jacob, has died, surrounded by his sons. So Jacob's sons did as he had commanded them. They carried him to the land of Canaan. He died in Egypt. They carried him to Canaan, the promised land, and buried him in the cave in the Field of Machpelah near Mamre, which Abraham had bought as a burial place from Ephron the Hittite, along with the field.

After burying his father, Joseph returned to Egypt together with his brothers and all the others who had gone with him to bury his father. When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, "What if Joseph holds a grudge against us and pays us back for all the wrongs we did to him?" So they sent word to Joseph, saying, "Your father has left these instructions before he died. This is what you are to say to Joseph. I ask you to forgive your brothers the sins and the wrongs they committed in treating you so badly.

Now please forgive the sins of the servants of the God of your father." When their message came to him, Joseph wept. His brothers then came and threw themselves down before him. "We are your slaves," they said. But Joseph said to them, "Don't be afraid.

Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. So then don't be afraid. I will provide for you and for your children." And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.

Joseph stayed in Egypt along with all his father's family. He lived one hundred and ten years and saw the third generation of Ephraim's children. That's his children. Also, the children of Machir, son of Manasseh, were placed at birth on Joseph's knees. He sees his grandchildren.

Then Joseph said to his brothers, "I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." And Joseph made the sons of Israel swear an oath and said, "God will surely come to your aid, and then you must carry my bones up from this place." So Joseph died at the age of one hundred and ten. And after they embalmed him, he was placed in a coffin in Egypt.

So far, the end of our reading, the end of Genesis. We see in Genesis 50 now again a wonderful overlapping of two different stories: a small picture story and a big picture story. We see the big picture of how Jacob, Joseph, and his brothers fit into the story of God's plan of redemption for the world. We remember back to Genesis 12, where God promised his forefather Abraham, "I will bless you and I will make you into a large nation. You will have many descendants, so much that it will become a race in itself.

And this nation, your descendants, will be a blessing to the whole world. You will bless. You will intercede for them. You will be like priests on their behalf." And Jacob and Joseph fit into this great picture story of what will happen now.

This is at the start of the Bible, and it carries through the entire Bible. We see glimpses of that happening. Joseph, remember, a Hebrew man, is sold into slavery into Egypt. As a Hebrew man, he is elevated to a position of Prime Minister, where he is able to save many, many lives through his shrewd, wise management of food. He says that in verse 20: it was for this reason that God sent me to Egypt, for the saving of many lives.

So God is already saving people through Abraham's descendants. He's saving Egyptians that aren't part of this nation. This small family of Israel is the beginnings of this blessed nation. And so we see that big picture starting to unfold at the end of Genesis. But we still go back to the small picture of a family who is still messy and is still in need of God's forgiveness and grace. And we see these themes coming out of a brother who needs to forgive his brother.

So our final passage in the series of Joseph deals with two main themes. Firstly, liberating forgiveness between brothers, and undeserving grace of God's election. Liberating forgiveness between brothers and undeserving grace of God's election. Firstly, liberating forgiveness. There's a story of three mean-looking guys on motorcycles who pulled into a truck stop, your typical sort of American truck stop, where a truck driver, a fairly small man, was sitting at the counter quietly eating his lunch.

The three thugs walked through the door in their leather jackets. They grabbed his food, laughed in his face, but the truck driver didn't say a thing. He got up, paid for his lunch, thanked the waitress, and left. One of the bikers, very unhappy that they hadn't succeeded in provoking the little man into a fight, bragged to the waitress. "He sure wasn't much of a man, was he?"

The waitress shrugged his shoulders and replied, saying, "No, I guess not. But glancing at the window, she added, I guess he's not much of a truck driver either. He just ran over three motorcycles." Getting even is one of the hardest struggles that we face when relationships go south. Ask any person in a close relationship. Ask anyone in a marriage: point scoring in terms of payback is a real temptation.

The story of Joseph is an incredible story about genuine forgiveness, and there are some wonderful examples for God's people to reflect on. We know in the story of Joseph that God had to develop Joseph to be a forgiving man. Joseph went through terrible moments of being repeatedly hurt, but he didn't let that develop into a trace of bitterness. Remember the story. His own brothers planned to murder him.

Instead, they sell him as a slave into Egypt, as if that's a little bit better. As a slave in a house with a master by the name of Potiphar, Joseph, who was completely faithful and upright as a slave, is falsely accused of a horrendous crime by Potiphar's wife. He winds up in prison and is forgotten by a man that he helped who had promised to plead his case with Pharaoh but somehow forgets. Yet in spite of all of this, we see Joseph never getting bitter, not towards God, not towards his brothers. But here we find this amazing final scene of forgiveness.

Jacob, their father, had died. They fear that the patriarch now, Jacob, who has sort of kept the family together perhaps, now that he's gone, it opens them up to all sorts of stuff. Like Joseph can now maybe bring out the punishment that he's been holding on to for years. Their father is dead. What will Joseph do now?

They start fearing this. So they send a message out to Joseph, putting words in their father's mouth. "Before he died, Jacob, our father, said, 'Please forgive your brothers for all the wrongs that they have done, all the sin that they have caused.'" But at this message, receiving this, Joseph does something very peculiar. Joseph cries.

Now that's not peculiar because we've seen him do it before. He's a pretty emotive sort of guy. He probably wears his heart on his sleeve. He's cried at least four or five times in this story so far. But commentators wonder why he would cry at this message.

Why is that his reaction? Now some have suggested that it's because of relief. It's like, well, I've been holding on to this pain for so long. This is the first time that my brothers have come to really apologise for what they've done. This is great.

Now restoration is finally available. But I think, as other commentators do, and as we've seen in the past, that Joseph had already forgiven his brothers. They had already asked and said sorry, and he said, "Come and live in Egypt. I will look after you guys. Come and bring our father from Canaan and live here."

He's forgiven them. And so why Joseph cries here is not of relief or happiness; it's because of sadness. It shows that his brothers actually didn't trust him. They didn't trust that he had forgiven them. They didn't trust at face value what he said was true. They may have thought maybe we've received some short reprieve from him, but seventeen years ago is a long time to wait.

Seventeen years had passed up until this moment, and they hadn't trusted him. They, in fact, say, "We'll try and earn his forgiveness and become his slaves." They throw themselves down before him and say, "We are your slaves now." But Joseph replies in these famous words, and you may have already heard them many times before, verses nineteen and twenty: "Don't be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You intended all those years ago to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."

Joseph reassures them. He reassures them. Verse 21 says, "And he spoke kindly to them." What an incredible relief this would have been for the brothers. But there are some significant lessons that we need to learn and can learn from this episode about forgiveness. And friends, this is one of the hardest things that we need to learn as human beings: forgiveness. People that live with one another hurt one another. Firstly, forgiveness may not be something that is finalised once. It is a process.

It may be that either the person who forgives doesn't quite forgive completely, or the person who receives it doesn't quite accept it completely. Forgiveness may not be a nice, neat little one-off transaction like, okay, that's done. Let's move on. It's a continuing process sometimes, and there can be residual bitterness. There can be residual resentment that needs to be worked through. That God, in His grace and His love and His discipline of us, may say, that kind of needs to be dealt with again.

You need to forgive perhaps for a second or a third time something that you thought has been dealt with. Similarly, and we see this in the instance of his brothers, receiving forgiveness may need trust to believe that we are truly forgiven, that we are in the process of being restored. We might need to remind ourselves to trust the other person for what they've said, really to take that forgiveness at face value and receive peace and restoration with them. Forgiveness might be a process, not just a one-off.

Secondly, forgiveness involves a third person: God. Joseph asked, "Am I in the place of God?" Why does he throw God into the mix here when it's just a tweet, a brother and his brothers. Joseph knows, however, that the ultimate judge of the evil, of the sin that these guys have confessed has been done to God as well.

In bitterness or unforgiveness, we tend to take on the role of judge. We take on the role of jury. We take on the role of executioner. In our minds, we replay and replay and replay the incident that caused our bitterness, that causes our resentment, and we hold onto that, and we entertain the thought on how we would punish, how we would react, how we will react when we see them again, how we will treat the offender for their offence. We put ourselves in the place where really only God deserves to be.

"Am I in the place of God?" Joseph asked his brothers. I'm sure it's a question that he asked himself many, many times over many years in that prison. All of these things, all of these people that have done these things to me: am I in the place to stand in judgement over them? This is why I believe Christians are the only ones who can forgive well.

Forgiveness doesn't simply take two parties; it takes three. The offender, the offended, and God. If we're able to direct our bitterness away and see God as the one who's ultimately been offended by this sin, if we see Him as the one who can ultimately restore our relationship, if we see that He is the one that can ultimately forgive by Jesus Christ as we have been forgiven by Him as well, we realise that we don't have to carry that burden of unforgiveness around. It is truly liberating as a Christian to forgive. Because we believe that God sees all the motives.

He knows both sides of the story. God also knows how the story is going to end. And frankly, and this is something we don't often admit, God also knows the contribution we made to the problem as well. But then finally, in the process of God being in this situation of forgiveness, finally, we also know from what Jesus had said about forgiving our enemies: if you find that you are able to pray to God and ask forgiveness for them, and that God will truly bless them, you will find that bitterness just starts dropping off. If you are able to truly pray for your enemy, that pain and resentment just disappears.

And so true liberating forgiveness involves God as well. And then the last thing we see in this liberating forgiveness that happens here, the small picture of this situation, is that forgiveness requires true humility. The core of the opposite of forgiveness, unforgiveness, comes down to pride. Unforgiveness is rooted in pride. Pride would have caused Joseph to repay his brothers with revenge.

He could have turned them back seventeen years ago and said, "Well, you guys threw me away. Go back home. I'm not giving you any food." Pride would have caused him to watch them starve. He could have put them into prison for attempted murder.

He could have executed them there on the spot, and as Prime Minister of Egypt, no one would have dared question. Pride could have caused any of these responses, but humbly, Joseph absorbs this offence and he forgives instead. And that takes incredible humility. A little while ago, I went to visit a regular visitor in our church who decided to leave our church. I spoke with them, and they said to me that the reason they are leaving the church is that they found our elders to be very unfriendly and wouldn't talk to him.

And I asked him which elders didn't speak to him, and he named one. And I went through the list of the other elders, and I said, "Have you seen or spoken to this person?" And they said, "Yes." "And have you spoken to this person? Have they reached out to you?"

And they said, "Yes." And so I said, "Well, I've discovered that out of our four elders, three have spoken to you, and one hasn't. But you say that the elders are unfriendly." I said to him, "Is it possible that on that particular day, this elder had something on his mind? I mean, I walk past people in church on a weekly basis and don't say hi to them because I'm going upstairs to get my PowerPoint sorted or whatever.

I know that that's not because I don't like them or I feel unfriendly towards them. Is it possible, or is it wise, or is it probably the Christian thing to go and ask them, 'Is there something wrong?'" What do you think the response was? Person left the church. If you choose unforgiveness, it comes down to pride.

It is far harder to be humble. It is much easier to hold on to pride and leave, or to pay back, or to hold on to bitterness. Forgiveness requires immense humility. But then the other thing, as we zoom out of this wonderful picture of forgiveness and restoration that truly happens, we come back to a bigger story: the story of God's people starting to unfold. We see the amazing love of God to a people group that truly do not deserve it.

Friends, if there was ever a reason to be humble, if there was ever a reason to forgive, it would be knowing how much you are loved and forgiven by God, that you are loved unconditionally by Him. The story of Joseph, the story of Jacob, is a story of undeserved grace. We started the story, if you remember, like I said, two months ago, with a very messy family. Remember a cold-hearted father that had one favourite son. Murderous, jealous brothers, terrible guys, and a brat named Joseph. A messy family.

We come to the end, and there is restoration and forgiveness. Jacob is surrounded by his loving sons as he passes away. Beautiful scene. A happy ending. Why does it end happily?

Is it because Joseph and his brothers and his father were such good men? No. Not at all. Is it because they were better than other people, that they were more righteous or God-fearing? No.

It was simply because God loved them. Simply because God saw this family, took them in, and decided to redeem them. And this is called God's election. Theologically, election: when we elect our Prime Minister or whatever, we choose him. It is God's choosing of a family to be the recipients of His grace, although none of them deserved it. This truth gives every believer the greatest hope.

It gives all of us the greatest hope because our salvation and our hope is as sure and as certain as the very character of God. Our salvation rests entirely on who God is. And so when God says, Coretta, Cornel, and Elise, "I love you. I will save you." We know that that is going to happen because it is unconditional on who we are. It is not based on how much we've loved Him.

It is not based on how kind we've been to our neighbour. It's not based on how good our track record is or what our future will look like. It is based on who God is, and God, He says, is love. God, He says of Himself, is merciful. Because of God's unconditional election, every believer's place in the family of God, our eternal inheritance that we read about before, our hope, our living hope, is as certain as the air that you are breathing right now.

The heart that is beating in your chest right now. That is how certain, friend, your salvation, your forgiveness, your love from God is. And so this gives us incredible boldness because nothing is more certain than what God promises. It will come to pass. And we see this in the final verses of Genesis 50. In the very last words, we find Joseph saying that when he dies, he doesn't want to remain in Egypt anymore. He wants his bones to be taken back to Canaan, back home.

Why does he say this? If he's Prime Minister of Egypt, if he settled there, if his descendants are going to grow up there, why does he say "Take me back there"? In the New Testament, Hebrews 11, that great passage that talks about the heroes of the faith: "Remember, by faith Abraham. By faith Moses. By faith Rahab." It talks about Joseph there as well. It says just in one line, "By faith, Joseph, when he was near his end, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.

And he gave instructions about his bones." By faith. Joseph knew that God had promised that His people will have a land, that His people would have the promised land of Canaan. And he was so sure about this that he made arrangements that he'll be buried here, but when, not if, when the people leave again, they need to take him home. He believed that God would send back His people and give them what He had promised.

How could Joseph believe that? Because God had shown him that because of nothing that he had done, despite every bad thing that he had done, despite everything his family had done, God chose to love them, and God chose to be faithful to them. And so friends, if God's faithfulness to us is not dependent on us, but on His character, then there is nothing that can get in the way of God fulfilling His promises to us. And so we find this last, these last words, setting up the scene that Joseph was embalmed. He was mummified.

Just like the Egyptians. He was placed in a coffin like the Egyptians. And it says he was in Egypt. The scene is set for the next book called Exodus, the story of how God, because of His love and because of His promise and because He remembered what He had promised, God would bring out His people again, and He would give them the promise. By faith, Joseph gave instructions for his bones to be taken back.

Friend, nothing you have done. Let me finish with this: nothing that you have done has warranted God's love of you. That is really, really humbling. It completely strips us of any entitlement we may feel. It strips away all pride. And so now we can forgive freely because we have received forgiveness and acceptance freely.

We have not done anything to warrant forgiveness, so why hold back on those who should receive our forgiveness? But if nothing we have done has warranted God's love, this is the incredible hope. Then if God has set His heart on us, nothing we can do can cause God to unlove us. This may shock you, but it's true. God will always find a way to bring him back to you.

God breaks, shapes, recalibrates us to be His people. God will never forget. He does not overlook. He will not hesitate in the life of His people. He will always find a way to make His people.

Out of His sheer unconditional, relentless grace, ultimately revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we need to hear a message of forgiveness even when it's hard. We need to hear how much we have been forgiven in order to be able to forgive lots. Father, help us in that. Help us to find not simply the courage and the discipline and the resolve to do that, to white-knuckle our way through that, but to have the love and the grace and the compassion to do that well.

Father, in the perspective, to rejoice and be so thankful for the forgiveness and the love that we have received in You because of Jesus and His death on the cross on our behalf as a complete sacrifice for our sin. Father, help us to find freedom and liberation in our forgiveness. Help us to feel lighter and freer because of it. And Father, the process that forgiveness might be, help us and remind us to keep going back to it until it's gone, until it's been dealt with, until it's in the past.

And Father, then we thank You for Your unconditional love of us, Your choice of us. And we don't know who those people are in our lives. We. It's not our job to know who You choose, who You love, who You desire to put Your love on. But Father, let us rejoice that we can be counted among those numbers. Let that give us a great hope and assurance that we cannot lose what You have promised to give us, and that is Your love and Your acceptance, an eternity with You. Lord, that warms us, that gives us hope for every situation, whether we are insecure about our situations or not, whether we trust that things will turn out well or not. This thing we know: that we have a Saviour who lives in me and who loves me.

Father, we thank You for this series of Joseph. We thank You for the man that he was. We thank You for the wonderful redemption that You showed in the lives of those people, and how that so vividly touches on our lives. We thank You that You've journeyed with us through this. We pray, Lord, that You'll impart all the lessons we've learned in this journey together on our hearts, that we will be changed people because of it.

We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.