How many of you have a big family? My family isn’t that big - it’s just me and my mom and my dad. But one of my uncles and aunts have 7 kids! And I’m sure my cousins could tell you that being part of a big family isn’t always easy. Everybody has a different idea of what they want for dinner or how they want to use their free time. Now that they’re older and have families of their own, it can be really hard for everyone to organize their schedules so that they can all see each other. And I’m sure not all of them got along all the time when they were growing up.
But if you think 7 kids is a big family, imagine you were
part of the family we’re going to be talking about for the next few weeks. In
this family, there were at least 12 brothers and 1 sister. That’s right – we’re
going to start the story of Joseph and his family today!
If there’s one thing that Joseph’s family teaches us, it’s
that being part of a family isn’t always easy. Sometimes it can be good. We
laugh together, play together, don’t fight all that often, and just get along.
But sometimes, how we act towards our parents or our siblings, and how they act
towards us, can lead to a lot of anger and a lot of problems. And in Joseph’s
family, those attitudes and actions made things really messy!
But first, let’s get a bit of background. Joseph and his
siblings were the sons of Jacob, who was the son of Isaac, who was the son of
Abraham. These people are really important in the Bible, because they are the
family that God chose to start the people of God, the Israelites. This was the
people that God was going to bless the world through, and way way WAY later,
that came true when Jesus, one of Jacob’s great-great-great-great (and a whole
bunch of other great’s) grandsons, was born.
But when Jacob and his twin brother Esau were born, there
was no such thing as the Israelites yet. They were still only a small family,
and it would be 100’s of years before there were enough great-great-grandkids
for this family to basically become a small country.
Anyways, Jacob had lots of kids throughout his life, but the
Bible tells us that Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons because
Joseph had been born when Jacob was really old (Genesis 37:3, NIrV). And because Jacob loved Joseph so
much, Jacob made Joseph a special robe. We usually say that this is a coat of
many colours, but we don’t actually know what this coat looked like. But if the
rainbow coat will help you picture it better, let’s go with that.
What matters more than what the coat looked like is that, by
giving it to Joseph, Jacob wasn’t being fair to his other kids. It was like
Jacob was saying, “Yeah, I love you Reuben and Issachar and all you other kids,
but I love Jacob more.”
And sadly, that happens in some families. Sometimes, even
without meaning to, it looks like parents love one of their kids more than the
others. That doesn’t mean that it’s true or that our parents love us any less,
but it can look like it.
So that was the first problem in Joseph’s family: Jacob
loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. And this led to some bad attitudes
in the rest of the family!
First, let’s talk about Joseph himself. We like to think
that Joseph was this kind, happy son who never did anything wrong, but that’s
not really what the Bible shows us. We learn that while Joseph’s brothers were
out in the fields taking care of their father’s sheep, Joseph was out watching his
brothers. And one day, he brought back “a bad report” about his brothers to his
father. (Genesis 37:2).
Now we don’t know exactly what happened here. Maybe the
brothers weren’t doing all that good a job of shepherding. Maybe they were
goofing off instead of watching the sheep. But when Joseph brought back this
bad report, it only made Jacob love Joseph even more and the other brothers
even less.
This attention started to go to his head. You see, one of
the reasons that Joseph is special in the Bible is because God gave him dreams about
what would happen in the future. In one of the dreams, Joseph and his brothers
were out in a field bundling up grain so that the family could make bread.
Then, suddenly, the bundle Joseph had made stood up straight while all of his
brothers’ bundles turned and bowed to Joseph’s bundle (Genesis 37:7).
In the second dream, Joseph dreamed that he and his brothers
were stars, while his mom and dad were the sun and moon. And just like in the
last dream, the sun, the moon, and all the other stars bowed down to Joseph’s
star (Genesis 37:9).
Now I need to make one thing clear. It’s not that Joseph
necessarily did something wrong by going to his dad and saying his brothers
weren’t behaving properly while out watching the sheep. One of the sheep could
have run away or gotten killed if the brother’s weren’t paying attention! Similarly,
Joseph’s dreams were visions of what would happen in the future. And we’ll see
in the weeks ahead how Joseph’s brothers actually did bow down to him one day!
But the problem is that the way Joseph was acting didn’t
help things. Joseph knew that he was his father’s favourite son, and he milked
it. Rather than trying to help his brothers, he told on them. Rather than
asking his dad for advice about the dreams, he bragged about how everyone was
bowing down to him. The things Joseph did weren’t necessarily wrong, but the
way he did them wasn’t always kind and only made things worse between him and
his brothers!
So let’s recap. So far, we’ve seen that Jacob wrongly loved
Joseph more than his brothers and that Joseph wrongly thought too highly of
himself. Now I want you to imagine how you would feel if you were one of
Joseph’s brothers. Would you be sad? Angry?
Well, the Bible tells us that Joseph’s brothers hated Joseph. Hate is a strong word, I
know, but I can almost see why. Day in and day out, Joseph was treated the
best. They saw Joseph wearing his fancy robe and heard him telling his dreams
at breakfast in the mornings and they got sick of it.
Who does that Joseph
think he is? they probably thought. Does
he think he’s better than us? And the more they thought these things and
talked together about it, the angrier they became. In fact, they eventually
became so angry and so jealous of Joseph that they hatched a plan to get rid of
him once and for all. But more on that next week.
For now, what we should see is that there were lots of
problems in Joseph’s family. We often blame Joseph’s brothers for causing all
the trouble in the family, and yeah, they definitely deserve part of the blame.
But Jacob’s favouritism and Joseph’s pride were just as much part of the
problem as the brothers’ anger was.
But sadly, this is how lots of problems in families start.
People get mad at their siblings because of something they do or say, and
before you know it, things get really bad. And sometimes, the anger between
siblings or parents doesn’t get fixed. It just gets worse and worse and, if it
gets really bad, families might even stop talking to each other.
God doesn’t like seeing that. He created families so that they
could love and support each other, not so they could be angry with each other.
He created families so that we could build each other up, help each other when
things got difficult, and teach each other about life and about Him. He calls
us to love all people, but especially our families!
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to love our families.
But that’s just one of the many reasons that God sent Jesus! When Jesus died on
the cross and rose again from the dead, he made it possible for our sins to be
forgiven. Believing in Jesus wipes away all the bad things we’ve ever done and
fixes the broken relationship we have with God.
But more than that, believing in Jesus can help us fix our
broken relationships with others too! When we believe in Jesus, he starts to
change us. He makes us more loving, more patient, more willing to help and
forgive others. And that includes members of our family.
In fact, you could even say that We need God’s help to love our families. You might be really mad at
your brother or your sister or your parents for something that has happened,
and you might not be able to imagine how you could possibly forgive them, but
having God in our lives makes that forgiveness possible.
It doesn’t mean that our families will be made perfect. We
might still get mad when our siblings hog our parents’ attention or when they
break something of ours or tattle or whatever. But with God’s help, we’ll be
able to love the members of our family better and stronger than we ever could
on our own.
That was a lesson that Joseph’s family could have used then.
And sadly, it took them years before they learned. But thankfully, God used
this difficult family situation to save a lot of people, but more on that in
the weeks to come. So I hope you’ll stick with me for those stories too as we
learn more about families and more about God.
~Brentagious
No comments:
Post a Comment