Genesis 40

Hey, welcome back.
This Tuesday, as we continue through Genesis,
going deeper into the Joseph
stories in Egypt.
So just a recap of yesterday,
Joseph had been taken to Egypt,
he’d been sold into service to a man named Potiphar where he managed his household,
very effectively was rewarded with more and more responsibility.
But Potiphar had this wife who had her eye on Joseph
and after rebuffing her many, many times,
saying no to her,
she kind of set him up.
She grabs his
robe,
his coat,
and tells her husband that he attacked her.
And so Joseph then at the end of
chapter 39 is in the prison where again,
he rises to the top.
He ends up kind of managing the prison
for the prison official.
And we were told explicitly several times in yesterday’s narrative,
his success is credited to the fact that the Lord was with him and had blessed him.
So we move on today,
chapter 40,
where I think…
Yeah,
so this entire chapter takes place in the prison.
So let me start here,
chapter 40, verse 1.
Sometime after this,
the cupbearer of the king of Egypt and his baker offended their
Lord, the king of kings.
Pharaoh was angry with his two officials,
the chief cupbearer and the
chief baker, and he put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard in the prison where Joseph was.
The captain charged Joseph with them and he waited on them and continued for some time in custody.
One night they both had dreams.
The cupbearer and the baker,
who were in confined in
the prison, each had his own dream and with each dream its own meaning.
When Joseph came to them in
the morning, he saw that they were troubled.
So he asked the officers who were with him,
“Why are your faces downcast?”
They said to him,
“We have had dreams and there is no one to interpret
them.” And Joseph said,
“Do not interpretations belong to God,
please tell them to me.”
So a couple of themes we’ve seen here.
Joseph doing well,
he’s managing the prison.
There are people that work for Pharaoh.
They offend the Pharaoh or they disappoint the Pharaoh at some level.
For some reason the Pharaoh becomes upset with them and it’s a grievous enough offense,
at least in his eyes,
that he sends them to prison.
And so there they meet Joseph who is in charge of them.
The
chief of the prison tells Joseph,
“Keep an eye on them.
You take care of them.” And they
then have dreams, which connects us, if you’ll remember, back to the very origin of the Joseph
story when he offended his brothers and then even his father by having dreams.
And in that case,
we didn’t get interpretations necessarily,
but we have this theme that we’ve seen before.
And
in this case, they say, “We don’t know.
We know the dreams meant something.
We don’t know what they mean.
We wish someone could interpret them.” And Joseph says,
“Well, interpretations are God’s business.
Why don’t you tell them to me?” So,
Clint, I want to just sort of tie all that
together.
I think you’ve put all the pieces on the table.
I just want to make sure that we all sort
of see what’s happening because this story has been intentionally including these elements from the very beginning.
And we now see it sort of starting to emerge.
We talked yesterday about
this idea where the cloak was taken from him by his brothers.
That was a big moment.
Then it was again by Potiphar’s wife.
So the cloak has become this controlling theme.
Well, we had the dreams,
except as you write to point out,
the dream that Joseph had,
he shared with the family,
the interpretation seemed to be sort of shared by all.
There wasn’t any need to interpret the dream itself.
It just stood on its own face what it meant,
and the family was appalled by it,
or at least the brothers were.
Now here again, we return back to this idea of dreams.
And in this case,
Joseph is the one not having the dreams,
but the one who is interpreting them.
And he attributes explicitly this ability to God’s own work.
So what started in this story way back at
the beginning for Joseph as a kid who was really on the outs with his brothers,
a kid who maybe we
could even say was a snitch.
We didn’t really have much God talk.
We didn’t have any giving of the
blessing, no sort of profession that this young man was going to carry the mantle.
And yet now, as this story progresses,
we now see Joseph literally at the bottom of the barrel.
He went from being a slave to being a prisoner.
We find in this moment that he has faith in God.
He believes that God is working for him.
He believes that God is able to offer this interpretation if these men
are to give it to him.
And so we’re beginning to see a kind of depth to his faith that the story
didn’t include in the beginning.
And as it does this,
I think we discover a man who’s incredibly
moral.
We saw that yesterday.
Now we see a man whose faith in God is clear and explicit,
and that’s going to mark sort of the ascendancy that comes on the backside of the descending
we’ve seen thus far.
And this gets us into territory that is mysterious,
the idea of dreams,
the idea that they mean something,
the idea that somebody could look at a dream and sort of figure out the future.
It’s not clear that,
first of all, Genesis is okay with all of that.
Genesis
is perfectly fine accepting that.
But this isn’t teaching us about that.
This is teaching us about
Joseph’s ability to do that.
Joseph is able to hear these dreams and at God’s guidance
sort of put them into context and make sense of them.
So the text really takes us away from the
idea that Joseph has some sort of amazing gift.
Joseph attributes this ability to God himself.
But having said that,
he is able to give these men the flavor of their dream.
So verse 9, “The chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph.
He said, ‘In my dream there was a vine before me,
and on the vine were three branches.
As soon as it bubbled its blossoms came out and the clusters turned into grapes.
Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand and I took the grapes and pressed them into the
cup and I put the cup in Pharaoh’s hands.’
Then Joseph said to him,
‘This is the interpretation.
The three branches are three days.
Within three days Pharaoh will lift up your head
and restore you to your office and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand as you used to do
when you were the cupbearer.
But remember me when it is well with you.
Please do me the kindness to
make mention of me to Pharaoh and get me out of this place.
For in fact I was stolen out of the
land of the Hebrews and here also I have done nothing that they should have put me in the dungeon.'”
So dream number one,
it’s a good dream.
The cupbearer says, “I had this dream.
There was grapes.
There were three branches.” Joseph says,
“Yeah, I get that.
Three days you’re going to
have your job back.” And we introduce another theme that becomes fairly important throughout
the rest of this narrative,
remembering and forgetting.
Those two things, we’ve seen those before in Genesis.
In some ways those are a scripture,
a scriptural theme woven throughout
the whole Old Testament,
even to some extent the New Testament.
But here he says,
“Look, you’re going to get your job back.
When that happens,
remember me.
Tell the Pharaoh that I told you
that would happen.
Tell him that I can be helpful to him.
Tell him that I shouldn’t even be in this
prison.
I shouldn’t even be in this country.
I’m a victim and you can help me out.
I’ve done you this courtesy.
Pay me back.” So looking here at verse 15,
there’s two things I want to point out.
Note the language here.
“I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews.” Interesting wording when in
reality he was sold by his brothers.
So there’s a sense in which, yes,
he was taken out.
He was certainly stolen in the sense that he was forcibly removed from the land.
But there is this back
story that we know where this has been done to him by the very people who he would call his
brothers.
The Hebrew people are the ones who committed this act.
And so this has already set
up the great reversal that we’re going to see at the end of Joseph’s story,
but that’s coming down
the road.
The second thing I want to point out is at the end here, verse 15,
where he says that he’s
done nothing, that they should put him in the dungeon.
A word that connects back to the very
pit that he was thrown in by his brothers.
Another reminder here that he too did not necessarily
deserve that action, that he didn’t deserve to be killed.
He didn’t deserve to be sold by his
brothers.
Yet here he is once again a man who has unjustly had harm that has been done to him.
And Clint, you mentioned this in the previous conversation.
I just think it’s relevant here today
that Genesis doesn’t do this extremely often.
Most of the time people get what they have coming.
In a story like Joseph,
we have an individual where that is not the case,
where this has been
done to him and God is being faithful through it.
But we’re given no reason to believe here that
Joseph somehow is getting his just desserts here.
And that makes this story both somewhat unique,
but I think it’s also particularly instructive because in the pantheon of figures that we have
as the fathers of Israel,
here we have a critical link,
an important person for the next generation
of the people.
And he’s not getting there by his wit.
He’s not getting there by his
wealth, by his prestige.
He’s getting there at the very grace of God.
Yeah, and he’s getting there by pretty rocky road.
Joseph particularly is a character whose
opportunities come on the heels of hardship.
He undergoes, and we’re not told,
we have no reason in the story to think that he deserves it,
but we are always told of what good
happens to him after we’re told of what bad happens to him.
And we’ll see that today.
We’ll especially, I think, see that tomorrow as we continue the story.
But let me finish this, verse 16 here.
“When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was a good one,
he said to Joseph,
‘I also had a dream.
There were three cake baskets on my head,
and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked foods for the pharaoh,
but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.’ And Joseph answered,
‘This is the interpretation.
The three baskets are three days.
Within three days, pharaoh will lift up your head from you and hang you on a pole,
and the birds will eat the flesh from you.'”
So,
a much less favorable.
The baker may have been excited when he heard that the other guy
was getting his job back,
and it was going to turn out good.
And he’s like, “Hey, wait, I had a dream.” And Joseph said,
“I got bad news about your dream.
Three days, you’re getting hung by the pharaoh,” which,
again, it’s probably a measure of Joseph’s integrity that he’s honest
about what the dream means.
It couldn’t have gone over well,
I would guess. I would point out,
Clint, that that’s not an accident,
the ordering of these.
The good comes first.
That does, as the reader, put us in the position of anticipating,
like the baker would,
what’s the news that’s about to come?
And hearing good news first makes one think,
well, hopefully the reading is going to be good for the second.
And so,
this very, very, very, very difficult interpretation of that dream then stands as a sharp contrast to the first.
So, let’s not sort of pass by without saying that is carefully chosen and I think really well done. Now, we now just get the aftermath,
which is essentially the fulfillment.
On the third day,
which was Pharaoh’s birthday,
he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the
cheap cup bearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants.
He restored the chief cup
bearer to his cup bearing,
and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hands.
But the chief baker, he hanged
just as Joseph had interpreted to them.
But the chief cup bearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.
So,
a relative amount of stuff happening here in these last few verses,
it’s Pharaoh’s birthday.
There’s no reason to think Joseph would have known that,
although it’s very possible that that’s essentially a national holiday.
So, maybe dream interpretation is mixed with a slight bit of shrewdness for Joseph.
It’s a little bit hard to say.
However,
it comes to pass just as he said that it would.
The cup bearer is restored,
the baker is hanged,
no explanation given of what they did or didn’t do or why that’s the case.
But it happens exactly as Joseph said it would.
And then we finish this story with the chief cup bearer
did not remember Joseph.
He, in his excitement to have his job back,
not be in prison,
the possibilities of the future sort of ran off and forgot that he was to command Joseph to the Pharaoh.
And so,
Joseph has again done the right thing.
He’s done a good thing.
He’s been right.
He’s worked the discernment of God into a situation and has almost nothing to show for it.
He’s still, at the end of the day,
sitting in the prison,
which is not what he had hoped.
So, I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of a period of life where it felt like you’re going
through a valley where things weren’t going well,
where you felt consistently that God felt far
away.
There’s a kind of experience of God forsakenness that is deeply embedded in a story like this, because here,
Joseph has clearly been cared for by God.
Yet,
he finds in this experience someone
who does not remember him, right?
This idea,
“God, do you remember me?” Yeah,
God has been faithful
to him.
But this person who Joseph clearly had some hope might be able to help move the equation,
get him on the other side of this imprisonment.
He completely forgets him.
And we discover in this,
and this is especially relevant for the people of Israel,
who later carried this book as the
account of their genesis.
And it, for them, provided comfort in seasons of exile,
of being sent away from their homeland and really literally disconnected from their homes and from their way of life.
This story became for so many generations a reminder that even in prison,
even in a place
where you may feel forgotten,
that God has not forgotten.
Though here, we have that interplay
with the idea that the person who Joseph really hoped would remember didn’t remember.
So, you know, that theme, though it may seem on its surface small,
I think it has significant implications for
the future of Israel and what they might remember about this story.
Yeah, and just as it is in life,
it’s mysterious because you would think,
if God is going to lead him to interpret the dreams,
why would he not help the cupbearer remember him?
But that’s not the way these stories work.
God moves on his own volition
according to his own time for his own reasons.
And that leaves Joseph, again,
innocently stationed in a place he doesn’t want to be.
Though he’s doing okay there,
he doesn’t have his freedom.
He is a prisoner,
and it’s not deserved.
And his hardship
precedes his sort of being blessed,
or at least the culmination of his blessing, which are coming,
but they’re coming slowly,
particularly when he spends each and every day and night
in house arrest or in the prison.
And so, we leave Joseph today at probably a kind of down
point as he wishes and wonders if he will ever hear from this thing that he did that he hoped
would bear some fruit,
but at least initially does not.
Well,
Joseph’s question may be our
question, so I hope you join us as we continue on with his story tomorrow.
But thanks for being with us today.