Well, we’re carrying on tonight our series in the Life of Joseph entitled Severe Mercy. We kind of introduced the series last Wednesday night by looking at Genesis 50:20 and reminded ourselves while this is a story about Joseph, in reality, it’s a story about God who sovereignly orders the affairs of Joseph’s life, the good, the bad and the ugly, and he makes something of it.
I used to watch my mum bake cakes. Sometimes I would dip my finger into the mixing bowl, especially towards the end when it was starting to taste good. But if you watch the process, if you were to separate all the ingredients of the cake out separately, you wouldn’t want to eat that much of it. But put it into the mixing bowl and something very sweet and tasty comes off it. And God takes some of the bitter elements of Joseph’s life and he mixes it into the recipe that he has for Joseph in his sovereign care and providential wisdom. And out of it comes this life, this beautiful tapestry where all things work together for good.
And we saw that last week. I think one of the telling quotes that come out of last week was Johnny Erickson as she looks at her own life and the severe mercy that God inflicted her with in terms of her crippling disability. She looks over her life. She thanks God for the wheelchair by the pull of Bethesda, if you remember. And then later on she looks and reminds us, you know what? Sometimes God permits that which he hates to achieve that which he loves, and we started to look at that.
Now we come tonight to really begin the narrative of Joseph’s life, and so I invite you to take Genesis 37 and bring your heart and mind to it as we read some of the opening verses. We’re going to try and cover most of the chapter and that tonight’s message is entitled One Deadly Sin.
The church has historically noted seven deadly sins, right, which include pride and gluttony and lust and so on. One of those deadly sins is envy, and we’re going to see that that dark thread is woven into the tapestry of Joseph’s life and we’re going to see that. We’re going to see how God uses that and we’re going to do something of a study in the definition and danger of envy, which is that work in all of our hearts. If we’re not careful, can be a work in many of our homes, one deadly sin.
Genesis 37:1, now Jacob dwelt in the land where his father was a stranger in the land of Canaan. This is the history of Jacob. Joseph being 17 years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers and the lad was with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah. Those are two of Jacob’s concubines or wives, his father’s wives as the text tells us. And Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father. Now, Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, please note that, because he was the son of his old age. Also, he made him a tunic of many colors.
But when his brother saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. Now Joseph had a dream and he told it to his brothers and they hated him even more. So he said to them, “Please hear this dream, which I have dreamed. There we were binding sheaves in the field. Then behold, my sheaf arose and also stood upright. And indeed your sheaves stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf.” And his brother said to him, “Shall you indeed reign over us or shall you indeed have dominion over us?” So they him even more for his dreams and for his words.
Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers and said, “Look, I have dreamed another dream and this time the sun, the moon and the 11 stars bowing down to me.” So he told it to his father and his brothers and his father rebuked him and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?” And his brothers envied him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
Now, what follows in Verse 12 is that his father sends Joseph on an errand towards his brothers who are in Shechem some 50 miles away from their home. Their anger towards their brothers now has come to boiling point. They are seething in terms of their indignation, their envy, their hatred of their brother. They see him coming at a distance and they decide, you know what? Let’s put an end to this dreamer and they decide to kill him. Initially, that’s their thought. There’s murderous intent in their heart.
Verse 18, they conspired against them to kill him. So they cast him into a pit or a cistern, and our research tells us that the cistern is kind of bottle-shaped hole that was dug or shewn out of rock, and it was often used as a collection point for water and it was a kind of bottle-shaped hole. And as you can imagine when you’re in it with the concaved shape, it’s almost impossible to get out of it. If you’re in there and nobody helps you get out of it you’re in there for good, and you either drown as water comes in or you’ll starve or whatever. So they throw him in that.
The intent is to murder him. Ultimately, they don’t do that, and a passing caravan of camels comes on their way down to Egypt, Verse 25, and the brothers are talked into selling him into slavery by Judah in Verse 26, and that’s exactly what they do. Verse 28, they lift them out of the pit, they sell him for 20 shackles of silver. That was the going price. They didn’t look anything more, anything less. They wanted rid of this thorn in their side, this pain in the neck called Joseph.
Then we read in Verse 31 how are they going to get away with this in terms of their father. So they took Joseph’s tunic, killed a kid of the goats, dipped the tunic in the blood. 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?” And he recognized it and said, “It is my son’s tunic. A wild beast has devoured him. Without doubt Joseph “is torn to pieces. Then Jacob tore his clothes, put sackcloth on his waist and mourned for his son many days and all his sons. The apocracy of this. It’s galling, isn’t it?
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.” He anticipated the dying of a broken heart. Thus his father wept for him, for Joseph. Now the Midianites had sold him in Egypt to Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, interesting, and a captain of the guard. One deadly sin, that’s what envy is. The story is told of two men who lived in a certain city many, many centuries ago. One was envious and the other was covetous. And the ruler of the city sent for them and he wanted to grant one wish to each with this proviso that he who chose first would be given exactly what he asked for, but the second man would be given exactly twice what the first man asked for.
Now you understand the quandary. What do you do if you’re envious? What do you do if you’re covetous? And so one man was picked to go first. Then he was caught on the horns of a dilemma because he thought to himself, okay, there’s much that I would want, but here’s the problem if I get it, he gets twice as much as me. The man thought for a while. He turned to the king and he said, “Here’s my request. Put one of my eyes out.”
Tonight I want to open your eyes and my eyes to the blinding destructive nature of envy. According to Proverbs 14:30, envy is rottenness to the bones. It’s death, it’s cancerous, it can damn a man’s soul, it can kill a man’s compassion and it can murder a man’s testimony. It eats like a canker. It’s stings like a serpent and given a toehold, it will advance like an army.
Proverbs 27:4 says, “Who is able to stand before envy?” This is one deadly sin, and I wish I could tell you that what we’re reading about here in Genesis 39 as it relates to the envy of Joseph’s brothers towards Joseph, I wish I could tell you that… Sorry, Genesis 37. I wish I could tell you it was an isolated incident, but it’s not. This green-eyed monster has broken many a heart and has demolished many a home. Think about Cain and Abel. Think about Saul and David. Think about the woman and during Solomon’s time who stole the baby of another woman. Think about the fact that Herod wiped out an entire generation of boys because he was threatened by the news of the coming king. Why was Jesus Christ delivered up to crucifixion? Because it says in Matthew 27 that the leaders of Israel were envious of him. They gave him over out of envy.
You’d like to think that this stuff stays outside the walls of the church, but even there that’s not true because in Philippians Chapter 1, Paul tells us while he is in prison, others are seeking to add to his chains. There’s some young upstarts in the church who want to get out from under the shadow of Paul and it says that they preach the gospel out of selfish ambition, out of envy seeking to make his life all the more difficult. The implication may be some of them may be saying, “You know what? You know why Paul’s in prison? Because he tends to push the envelope. He really preaches in people’s face. He provokes unnecessarily. We need a new style of leadership if the church is going to move forward.”
That may be a scenario, but the fact is they preach the gospel out of an envy, this passion towards Paul, this is not an isolated incident. What is envy? W.E. Vine, the Greek commentator put it like this; it is the feeling of displeasure produced by witnessing or hearing of the advantage or prosperity of others. That’s what envy is. I like a definition given by someone else. Envy is the art of counting another’s blessings instead of your own.
If you were to get to the heart of envy, maybe it could be summed up in two short sentences that were uttered by a thief when he held up a pharmacy in Gulfport, Mississippi some time ago. He put the gun to the pharmacist’s head, demanding money, demanding drugs, and he shouted these two sentences, “You’ve got it, and I want it.” That’s envy. You’ve got it. I want it. In fact, I would go one step further. Envy might even express itself in this since you’ve got it and if I can’t have it, I intend to make sure you don’t enjoy it. That’s envy too. This is a green-eyed monster that eats away like a canker in the heart of a man. It destroys and demolishes homes. It turns to shred testimonies, it divides churches. It crucified the Son of God. It’s one deadly sin.
Some have argued that envy is the flip side of pride and that well may be the case because both those sins are based on comparison, one looking up and the other looking down. Pride comes through feeling superior towards other people. That’s looking down. Envy comes through feeling inferior to other people looking up. But this is one deadly sin and I want to help you think through its capital and cardinal nature. It’s the faucet for other sins, rivalry, hatred, and violence.
Now, there’s three things you want to say about the text tonight and I’ll get there, but before I do got a little bit more homework to do. I just want to place Genesis 37 into its context and within its theological framework. Let’s look at it just textually and theologically. In terms of the text within the context and flow of this book, I think we are being introduced here to some of the mega themes of Joseph’s life.
The strands of this story are beginning to be tied together. The crisis between his brothers and the dreams that hint at a final solution. They’ll all come full circle in Genesis 45, right through to Genesis 50, okay? So textually it’s important. The narrative under Moses is kind of setting out the stall. How do we get to Egypt? Why do we get to Egypt? What triggers that? What’s behind all of that? All the threads are being tied together here.
That’s what we could say textually but I also think it’s important to understand this passage theologically. We can look at it from ground zero and the characters that are involved, but then we can get up above it. Let’s look at the 33,000-foot view and understand God’s perspective here. God is up to something here and it’s important to see that, but you won’t recognize that at your first look and I’ll tell you why. Because God’s name is not mentioned in the whole of this chapter. God’s name is not mentioned. His work is not referenced. His providence is not pinpointed. He seems to be absent rather than present. Joseph doesn’t feel him, doesn’t see him, and the narrator doesn’t mention God, not seen, not felt, doesn’t look like he’s present.
But we saw last week, right, Genesis 50:20, what they meant for evil. The evil of envy and jealousy and rivalry and violence against their brother, what they meant for evil, God meant for good. We see the text contextually but we want to pinpoint it theologically. There is a sovereign God at work here. There is a hidden hand manipulating and maneuvering in the midst of all of the envy and jealousy of the brothers’ hearts. It is God who is tying these strands together and will weave them into a beautiful tapestry of his unerring providence.
What they meant for evil, God meant for good. The brothers’ envy triggers a chain of events that will lead to their ultimate deliverance by their brother, Joseph. By the time we get to the end of the chapter already in this first salvo of events, Pharaoh’s name comes up, all right? Pharaoh’s name comes up while the brothers are feigning. And it’s galling, they’re feigning this sympathy towards their father. We’re reading down in Egypt, Joseph’s getting sold into slavery and he’s sold into the custody of a man who works for Pharaoh. Later on, we’ll realize who did that. Joseph will tell his brothers in Genesis 45, we saw it last week, “Hey guys, God sent me ahead of you.”
God works. This is a nice thought. God works in dysfunctional families. Amen. And you’re glad to know that because we’re all dysfunctional to some degree or another, some worse than others. But we kind of get a sense today, and as a pastor, I’ve counseled people and again, I come from a dysfunctional family and you get the impression, I’m crippled for life. Look what my parents did to me. I’ve nowhere to go. I didn’t get launched properly. I’ll never get into the orbit of success.
God works in a dysfunctional family. Praise the Lord. God uses evil man to good ends and God makes a future out of a broken past. That’s all good stuff. It reminds us of the sovereignty of God. I think I’ve maybe told you this story before. When you think of B.B. Warfield and I trust he’s in name familiar to many, the great Presbyterian theologian, world-renowned, taught at Princeton for almost 34 years until his death in February 16th, 1921. When I think of him, I think of a great defender of the authority and inspiration of scripture. He went up toe to toe with the liberals of his day and the fundamentalist liberal controversy.
But what we don’t often know about him and what we tend to forget about him is the human side of this great erudite theologian. The love of his life was Annie Pierce Kinkead. They married at age 25, 1876. They went on a honeymoon to Germany, but during their honeymoon, a fierce storm came down on them when they were up in the mountains and lightning struck his wife and paralyzed her permanently the rest of her life. Talk about a short honeymoon.
According to the reading I have done, Warfield devoted himself beyond his theological pursuit and prowess. He devoted himself for 39 years until she was laid to rest in 1915 to taking care of her. In fact, it is said while he taught at Princeton and went from one session or one class to another, he never left her. Listened to this, he never left her for more than two hours during 39 years of marriage. It’s the kind of theologian you can trust.
Here’s what he said in Romans 8:28; “The fundamental thought is the universal government of God. All things working together for good, all that comes to you is under his controlling hand. The secondary thought is the favor of God to those that love him. If he governs all, then nothing but good can befall those to whom he would do good. Though we are too weak to help ourselves and too blind to ask for what we need, we can only groan in un-uniformed and un-informed longings. He is the author in us of all these very longings. He will so govern all things that we shall reap only good from all that befalls us.” That is the theological background painted into Genesis 37. This is not good, right? Envy, a divided home rivalry, violence, murderous intent, but you got to paint in the background all the time. It’s all working together for good.
Three things quickly as we look at this one deadly sin. We’ll start out by looking at what I call the passion of envy. The passion of envy. Envy, according to the Bible is a passion, a desire, a lusting that comes naturally to the hand of man from the heart of man. There’s a debate among commentators whether James 4:5 references the Holy Spirit or our spirit. If for a moment we’re willing to buy into the idea it’s the spirit with a small S, in James 4:5 what do we read? The spirit that dwell within us lusteth to envy.
We are the product of the fall. We are governed and guided apart from grace by our Adamic nature, which leaves us predisposed to the sins of the flesh, which includes envy and anger, and disputation. In Romans 1:29, we read these words, “And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave man over to his debased mind to do those things which are not fitting, being filled with all unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, malice, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, evil-mindedness.”
Man has a disposition towards this passion apart from the grace of God and sadly, we see the passion of envy visit the home of Jacob and we see it visit the life of Joseph. And what I want to do for a few moments is just to look at the anatomy of envy, to look at some of the contributing factors, at least in this story. They won’t be universal in all circumstances, but I think they are transferable in many. Joseph does something, Jacob does something, the brothers do something that plays into an explosion of this passion.
Envy is nitroglycerin. It’s a powder keg of emotions ready to explode and we find that it exploding in this home with devastating effects. In some sense, what I’m saying, I want to get to the seed of the fire. We have watched with great sadness many of the fires that have devastated the beautiful landscape of California. We know that after those fires, the fire service goes in and they try to find out where the seat of the fire was. What were some of the accelerants that were used? Were they just natural accelerants or were there some criminal intent?
So let’s get to the seed of this fire, this passion, this burning anger and indignation that leads to violence on the part of the brothers. Three things, we’re going to move through them very quickly. We’re just kind of getting a handle on what’s going on and maybe learn some practical lessons. I want you to see the indulgence of Joseph’s father. Jacob’s favoritism is an accelerant in this criminal scene. He was his father’s pride and joy. Jacob doted on Joseph to an unhealthy and an unholy extent.
Now, I want to paint in a little bit of the background here. You need to understand, and I don’t say this callously, but to some degree at times this family resembles the Adams family and it’s a bit of a mess and it starts with the father. Jacob is a passive man. In many regards he’s a very poor father. I say that and I want you to understand something of the family context here because this is a family that has been touched by rape, has been touched by violence and murder and incest.
You can read about that back in Genesis 34 when the sister of Jacob’s brothers is raped by some man in Shechem and there’s certainly a righteous indignation and they go and rescue their sister. But there’s an overreaction in terms of what they pay back and they basically torch the place. They murder left, right and center.
And when Jacob hears about it, all he’s worried about is his reputation among the Shechemites. Or you know what guys? You’ve started a fire here and it’s going to turn around and burn us. You can read about one of the sons actually sleeping with one of Jacob’s wives, Bilhah and Jacob does nothing about it. He’s passive towards the others and he’s indulgent towards Joseph. And I think that plays in at least to the possibility of envy taking root in hearts and in homes in this family in a way at least it may be protected against in others. This family was a disaster zone.
Jacob’s first two wives were rivals. He’s got two concubines to boot. So what you’ve got here in this family is one father, four mothers, 12 sons, which all adds up to trouble with a big T. And into the mix of this, into the mix of this dysfunctionality and rivalry and pressure points comes the indulgence of Joseph’s father. We read in Verse 3, what do we read? Joseph loved… Jacob, loved Joseph more than all his children. I say Jacob because Israel is simply another word for Jacob. Because he was the son of his old age also, he made him a tunic of many colors.
Jacob’s love for Joseph was hardly hidden and you know what? There are some reasons for it which would justify an element of it. In fact, when I preached on this many, many years ago at a camp up in northern California and talked about the danger of favoritism, one woman came up to me quite angry after it and said, “You know what pastor? You’ll find that you know what, life sometimes throws a parent and a child together and there’s a certain bond that’s unique sometimes between a parent and one of the children.” And I says, “Well, you know what? I can maybe concede to that to some degree, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about an unholy favoritism, an unhealthy favoritism that was expressed here by Jacob.”
Now, he loved Joseph for some reasons. To some degree, I think Jacob at this stage was on to the brothers and he wasn’t expecting an awful lot of them. I think he had higher hopes for Joseph. I mean Joseph comes back with a bad report about his brothers and I don’t think we want to read into that, that Joseph was a stool pigeon, some kind of grass on his brothers, a snooty little brother. I want to tell Mommy on you, I’m going to tell daddy. No. There was reason for the bad report because these guys were bad.
And so there was something in Joseph, I think Jacob found admirable that this young man had a certain innocency to him. He was to some degree guileless. He was Rachel’s firstborn and Rachel was Jacob’s true love, no doubt about that. Remember, he was hoodwinked into Leah. Can you imagine waking up next morning with the wrong woman in bed? But you know what? He serves another seven years and it said it was like no time to him. He gets Rachel and Joseph is the firstborn of the wife he truly loved. So there was a bond.
The others were up in age. The Bible tells us here that Joseph was the son of his old age. While many of the boys were out of the home, Joseph maybe spent a little bit more time in the home and because he loved this woman, I think he saw often her in him. I don’t have the verses in mind, but I know this if you go back into the story of Rachel, it tells you that she was beautiful in form and in face.
And it’s interesting in Genesis 39 we’ll read when Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph. It says that Joseph was very handsome in form. I think he had the looks of his mother. And so all of this kind of pushes Jacob towards loving Joseph a little bit more. But he takes it to a place that’s unholy, unhealthy. It’s very clear that he makes the distinction between Joseph. I mean the text says Israel loved Joseph more than all his children and they knew it. It wasn’t like he slipped them an extra chocolate bar under the kitchen table and nobody knew anything about it. He was walking about in what, a coat of many colors.
Now, sorry ladies, we’re not going to get into the stitch and the design of the coat because it really is irrelevant. But I’ll tell you what, it was a symbol of Jacob’s love and it was a status symbol. We at least know it was a long flowing coat. Whether it was stripes like you might see in Joseph’s Technicolor Dreamcoat musical, we can’t totally be sure about that. It may just mean it had braids on it. It was an ornamental coat, which meant it wasn’t a working coat. It was the coat of a manager. It connoted status. It may even have inferred that Joseph perhaps was first in line to Jacob’s inheritance.
And you understand it that way, you understand why the brothers kind of get really upset about it. We won’t turn to it, but the same word is used in second Samuel 13:18 to describe the daughter of a king and her coat. So this certainly was a beautiful garment and the indulgence of Jacob was seen as rubbing salt into an already open wound, okay? And we’ll come back to this, but we see here that Jacob was setting Joseph up unintentionally. He was marking a big X on the back of Joseph. He was making him a sitting duck for his brothers’ envy and ire and indignation.
We’d have the indulgence of Joseph’s father. Then we have the indiscretion of Joseph’s forecast. The indiscretion of Joseph’s forecast. The brothers’ envy was fanned into a greater flame when Joseph related the dreams. That takes us from Verse 5-9. We won’t get into the nuances of the dreams. Certainly dreams are a significant factor in Old Testament life. They are a means by which God spoke to his people of old and Jacob himself had been spoken to in a dream. Remember he’s lying down, he sees the staircase, the ladder to heaven somewhere descending somewhere. And so Joseph one day shares with his brothers, “Hey, I’ve got something to tell you. I had a dream.” He has two dreams and they actually may be separated by time, which actually would play into this whole thought of the brothers getting angry and angrier.
Let’s say there is a separation of the two dreams. The first dream, the sheaves, all their sheaves bowing down to his sheaves. Hey Joseph, are you telling us we’re going to bow down to you? Yeah, we get that every day with your coat. We get that every day with dad indulging you and looking on you like the sun rises and shines on you. You know what? You better watch it buddy.
I think Joseph to some degree is oblivious to this. Some commentators have argued, why did he share the dreams? He certainly wasn’t told by God to do that, text his silence, so we’ve got to be careful. He was maybe just caught up in the moment, right? I mean, if you have a sense God has given you a dream about your future I think you might want to share that. So we want to cut him some slack. Maybe he was awkwardly trying to impress his brothers and gain their acceptance.
Or, here’s where I can lean, and I got to be careful. I don’t want to impugn Joseph to a degree I don’t need to, but I think he was so used to favoritism. He’s the star child. He was so used to favoritism, it never crossed his mind that this would really get up the noses of his brothers. He was naive. And so you’ve got his father’s indulgence and you’ve got his indiscretion. And to be honest about it, he comes back sometime later probably with another dream.
“Hey, part two, you’re going to bow down to me. I’m the sun on the moon and an 11 stars,” and by this stage you tell me how incendiary this is because, right, Jacob dotes on him. But even by this stage, according to Verse 10, the father says, “Hey, you telling me mom and me are going to bow down to you too?” And then the inference says, you know what? In success, I’m going to supersede my own parents and my own brothers are going to acknowledge it and bow down to me.
Now we know with hindsight, it’s all pointing to the fact they will come and pay homage to him in Egypt. This is not a threat. This is their very salvation. This is their very deliverance, but they’re blinded by their envy, their jealousy. And I’m in no way excluding their culpability in this, but their indignation, their hatred, which escalates more and more and more as they see the coat and they hear the dreams, I at least want to get to the seat of the fire.
As we look at this passion, this lusting, this burning desire which is envy, which is destructive and deadly and demonic, we see two contributing factors. We see Joseph’s forecast and we see the father’s indulgence. These things were just putting fuel on the fire, which is something you don’t want to do, right? The brothers are culpable, but we’ll come back to some of this. Jacob and Joseph I don’t think helped. It’s not a good thing to throw fuel onto the fire.
I’ll tell you somewhat of a humorous story. One morning when we were living in Welston Drive up in Saugus in Santa Clarita, Beth came in and said, “Mom and dad, there’s an awful noise in my wall.” And we went in and we put our ear to the wall and there was this buzzing. I mean it was unbelievable. And then we looked outside. We’re about to go to church at Placerita, and we looked outside and there were some bees under the eaves of the roof and they were swarming around. I thought nothing of it. I said, “You know what? Maybe something’s going on inside the wall.”
We headed off to church. We come back. But this stage, literally there were hundreds of bees around her bedroom window and they were coming and going. And I put my ear to it and you could tell there was a nest being built in there. So I’m not good with bees, know nothing about them. I call this guy in the church I think is a bit of walking encyclopedia. I says, “Hey Jim, I’ve got some bees outside the house. What do you do?” He says, “You know what? Something tells me if I remember, they don’t like gasoline.” So he says, “You may want to go and get some gasoline and throw it out the window and they’ll scurry.”
So I went, got some gasoline and kind of opened the window briefly with my hand. I was kind of flicking some gasoline onto the wooden eaves of the house and they went berserk. And I am not kidding you, within 30 minutes, there were literally thousands of bees that initially swarmed over our swimming pool to the point where we called our neighbors and said, “Hey, you better stay indoors. The plagues of Egypt are visiting Saugus.”
And so we watched this for a while and out of fear, we actually called the fire brigade. They arrived and by this stage they’d attached themselves to the chimney, the outside brick work of our chimney. And the fire service guy said, “You know what? We can’t touch these,” because if they attach them to your house, it’s not ideal. You have to call pest control or something going, there you go, government bureaucracy.
But the guy says, “Tell me the story.” So like a fool. I told him the story. “Hey, I threw some gasoline,” and the fireman looked at me and he said, “That’s not a good idea,” he says, “for two reasons.” He says, “That just irritates them.” And he says, “It’s never a good thing to douse your house in gasoline.” So I didn’t tell him I was a pastor and had a master’s degree in theology. I just acted like a buffoon. And later on, a guy did come and actually killed them and told us it was upwards of 10,000 bees inside the wall and around the home. That was the home of the queen bee and they were nesting and all sorts of crazy stuff. But point of the story is don’t don’t add fuel to the fire. Don’t irritate where you don’t need to exacerbate.
And so we move on quickly to a second point and to a final point, and I know time is moving on. Let’s just notice the price. We’ve noticed the passion of envy and we’ve seen it worked out in the brothers. They didn’t like Joseph’s blessings, they didn’t like his standards, they didn’t like his looks, they didn’t like his dreams, and they’re culpable for that. They are counting another’s blessings. But I don’t think Jacob’s favoritism helped, and I don’t think Joseph’s youthful, naive, boasting or braggadocio helped either. We’ll come back to that.
But what’s the price? You’re going to pay a price if you allow envy to enter your heart and your home, there are three prices to be paid. We’re going to move through this very quickly. Because we want to get to the prevention. But just make yourself aware of this, it deprecates a man’s honor, envy, deprecates, a man’s honor. That’s what it did to Joseph. We read in Verses 23 and 24 of this chapter that the brothers stripped him. 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’s a very interesting Hebrew term. It was used to speak of the skinning and the flaying of a sacrificial animal in Leviticus 1:6.
It wasn’t like, you know what, Joseph, take your clothes off. They tore the clothes off them. Imagine what they did to that technicolor dreamcoat. I mean they ripped that thing to shreds. They were angry, they were venting. Remember, envy is the faucet of rivalry and hatred and violence. They tore at their brother symbolically, but also they were nigh on a path to bringing him down. Metaphorically, we’re going to bring you down. Hey buddy, you’re going to get off your high horse and we’re going to knock you off your pedestal. You think someday we’re going to buy down to you, we’re going to sell you into slavery. What do you think of that?
We’re going to bring you down. And that’s what envy does. Remember what we said, envy can be defined, hey, you have got it. I want it, but it can also be defined you know what? If you’ve got it and I can’t have it, I’m going to make sure you don’t keep it. And that’s what’s going on here. They’re stripping him of his dignity, they’re bringing him down. They’re going to turn this rising star into a lowly slave, and that’s what envy does.
It not only deprecates a man’s honor, it devastates a man’s home. This is in relation to Jacob. Envy broke the heart of an old man. Now to some degrees, he may have been a foolish old man, but it didn’t warrant this. Remember, there’s some justification for his love for Joseph, but it went too far. He wasn’t very discerning. Given the brother’s ability to murder violently and shack him, did he not think about this open display of love towards Joseph and what it might provoke, what it might trigger?
He didn’t deserve it nevertheless. And it brought devastation to his home. This was a home divided right down the middle. Memories were sullied, scars were inflicted. Happiness was taken away, relationships were fractured. And there are homes like that today all around us, even within our church and the fringes of our church where envy and jealousy and rivalry has come in, stripped people of their dignity, robbed people of their honor and divided homes right down the middle for years and generations.
And it goes right to the end when the estate is being divided up. Just noticed this week, didn’t you, some of the siblings of Martin Luther King fighting over his estate, and that’s not just them. That happens again and again and again. In fact, in Luke 12, we one man coming to Jesus saying, “Hey Jesus, you need to get involved. I told my brother to give me my part of the inheritance.” Family feuds. And that’s not a game show where you’ll find joy. This is something more serious.
It desecrates a man’s heart. That’s the third price that you’ll pay. It desecrates a man’s heart. I mean, just go to Verse 25 and 26 more could be said, but this will be enough to be said. Isn’t it unimaginable? We saw the gall of them can a mourning with their father. I mean, how calloused can a heart get? How calcified can a spirit become? You see it then, you see it earlier. Verse 25, they throw Joseph in this pit where there’s no water, right? It’s this bottle necked cistern. It’s an ugly place to be. Joseph’s no idea they’re going to leave me here. He’s no idea they’re going to pull him out and sell him. In fact, remember their initial intent is to murder.
But what do we read in Verse 25? And they sat down to eat a meal. You see what envy does? It blinds. It puts your eyes out, not only your physical eyes where you don’t see what you’re up to. It puts out the eyes of your heart. It imprisons your soul. It calcifies the heart’s ability to show the milk of kindness and it’s a terrible thing. It twisted their tongues where they go back and tell a lie to their father, bare-faced deception. It desecrates a man’s heart.
In fact, one commentator argues that the reason we’re told that they sat down to eat… And one commentator says, you know what? There’s a message being sent subtly through the text. They’ll eventually go back and tell their father, “You know what? He was eaten by wild beasts.” But the only eaten that took place in the text was done by who? The brothers, they sat down and ate. They were the wild beasts. And envy turns man made in the image of God into wild beasts, and they devour others and they destroy themselves.
In fact, that’s in a sense one of the points of the text. Envy is like acid in a container. It does more damage to the thing that holds it and to the thing it’s applied to. Envy is a boomerang sin. Whatever you set out to do to another person, worse will be done to you. I mean, what they did to Joseph was terrible and horrible, but you know what? What they ended up becoming was just worse. They’re liars, twisted their tongue, calcified their hearts, darkened their souls. You see the same, don’t you, in the story of Haman and Esther, where Haman ends up swinging on the gallows he had constructed for Mordecai. This is a boomerang sin.
The story is told of a Greek athlete who was envious of a famous athlete and a statue that was erected in his honor. And so in the middle of the night, he would often go out with a chisel and a hammer and he would chip away at the base to weaken its foundation. And finally he succeeded. The statue fell, but it fell on him, and that’s what envy does. For a few minutes, what about the prevention? There’s three things quickly that comes out of it. Three things. And we’ll look at Jacob, Joseph, and the brothers. Let’s get some good lessons from a bad example.
If we’re looking at Jacob, he would teach us in terms of the prevention of envy, not to play favorites, okay? Don’t play favorites in your family. Don’t be unduly biased in the way you live or in the way you act. And you know what? If anybody should have known that, who should have known that? Jacob. Remember the home he grew up in? Remember Jacob and Isaac? Remember how the father and the mother didn’t act very wisely?
That, it’s Jacob and Esau, it’s Isaac and Rebekah and how Isaac likes Esau, the outdoors guy. Jacob seems to be a little bit more of a home bird. So he’s in the kitchen with his mom and Esau is out in the fields with the father. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but there’s something wrong with it when you know what, you play up the strengths of the kid you like and pit them against the other child. And ultimately it leads to deception and division in that home. The two brothers will have to reconcile years later and one will live in the fear of the revenge of the other. Jacob should have known favoritism is a bad, bad thing.
And you and I need to honor our kids and honor people around us for who they are, not for what we want them to become, not for what God has allowed them to become, either we don’t like or wish we could be. Don’t play favorites. That’s what Jacob teaches us.
Don’t flaunt your gifts or abilities. That’s what Joseph teaches us. Don’t act with airs and graces and a sense of superiority. I want to be careful with the text, but I have a feeling that Joseph didn’t act with discretion. He could have toned it down, he could have dialed it down. He knew his brothers hated him and by the time he told his dreams, they hated him even more. Now, that’s partly because of their own hearts, but I’m not sure he didn’t throw fuel on the fire. And this is one of the things that’s important.
When God gives us gifts, those gifts must be governed by grace or else the gifts become competitive, right? We saw that in First Corinthians 12, and then as we looked at First Corinthians 13, the whole issue of love. Here’s a church bejeweled with gifts at Corinth, and some of them flaunted the gifts and made it a thing where the attention was on them. And Paul has it right. Hey, first of all, the gifts are sovereignly given, and secondly, they’re given for the good of everybody. They’re a tool, not a toy. They’re not about you, they’re about other people.
And I think Joseph reminds us, you know what? If God blesses you with gifts, if God blesses you with money, if God blesses you with good looks, physical prowess, whatever that gift that blessing may be, you better be careful that you don’t flaunt it because you’ll provoke the ire of other people. And while they’re culpable, you’ll also get into the mix of their sin because you provoked them. And we’re warned about that, aren’t we?
And I think that’s the issue. Joseph had gifts, but at 17, he’s a brash young man. Let’s be fair to him, to some degree. He’s 17. You know what? A 17-year-old has done something good. It’s hard to live with. They’ll let you know all about it, and they need to have grace added to the gifts. That’s why we’re told that a novice can’t be an elder. Why? Because he’ll fall into the destructive pit of pride.
The story comes out of Scotland of the young guy who knew he was good at preaching, well-trained. He’d got a silver tongue, he went bouncing up into the pulpit. And you know what? Everybody knew he thought he was God’s gift to that church. And he began to speak. He was a couple of minutes into it. He got cotton-mouth. The word seemed to disappear on him. And you know what? He ended the sermon a lot earlier than he expected, and he put his head down and like a beaten dog, he came out of the pulpit. An old woman said to him, “Laddie,” at the end of the service, “if you’d have gone up the way you come down, you’d have come down the way you went up.”
Here’s the last thought. If we look at this situation, what can prevent envy? This isn’t exhaustive, but it’s helpful. Don’t play favorites. Be discerning. Be fair in how you treat people. Don’t give occasion to competitiveness or comparison. Don’t flaunt your gifts or abilities. Express them humbly with great thankfulness to God and use them towards other people.
And number three, accept God’s right to assign you your place and others theirs. This was the brothers’ problems. It was God’s sovereign purpose and choice and elective grace to say, you know what? I’m going to pick Joseph and want to send him ahead of you. Now, they didn’t know that, but they will come to know that. But even in the smallest details, they needed to accept that if God has got something for Joseph, they need to let God be God and assign that blessing or allot that place.
They were threatened by his dreams. They were intimidated by his gifts, and they weren’t willing to accept their lot in life. They weren’t willing to accept the degree to which God’s grace had blessed them or graced them. In fact, but Joseph had got it. As we close, Genesis 50:20, what you meant for evil God meant for good towards the end. And if you remember, and I think it’s the verse before Verse 19, he says to them, “Am I in the place of God?” They think Joseph’s going to wreak vengeance on them. “Am I in the place of God?” He’s basically saying, “Hey, it’s not my place to judge you, that’s God’s.”
But here’s what’s interesting of my Hebrew studies have served me well, and some of the commentators I consulted. There is a possible rendering of that Hebrew phrase where Joseph’s actually saying to them, “I’m in God’s place.” And what he means by that is, guys, I’m here because God sent me here and I understand that. And therefore, even though you meant evil, God used it for good. So I’m not bitter. I’m thankful to God and I hope you’ll understand I’m actually where I need to be because that’s what the dream pointed towards.
And towards the end, I think the brothers will get it. They will accept God’s appointment for Joseph, but they didn’t initially. And if you’re going to live a sweet and a blessed life, you’ll need to watch how you act towards others and act with discernment and equality and fairness. That’s not to say you can’t recognize particular good in someone or heaps some praise on them, but not in an imbalanced way. Make sure if you’re blessed or gifted by God, you give him the glory and you share that with others.
And did you allow his gifts to be governed by his graces and don’t flaunt his goodness or become proud? And you know what? On your part except what God has given you. And as you look around, accept what God has given others. That doesn’t mean you have to stay where you are. That doesn’t mean you can’t seek a better job or wish for a better thing, but only if God wishes it, only if God allows it. And you certainly don’t lose your peace or your contentment in the pursuit of it.
I know I want to get Jeff up, but you got to hear this story as I close. I’m standing in the elevator at Masters Seminar. It’s my first semester. I’m a greenhorn, just come in from Ireland, June’s back up in our little apartment in Santa Clarita with the girls. I get into the elevator one particular morning, the door closes, two other, three other guys are in there. And one of the guys turns to me and says, “Who are you?” Before I could get a word out, there’s another guy in the elevator and he says “He’s MacArthur’s pet.”
Now, you know something of my story where John and his kindness had invited me to come to the seminary, had in God’s providence been party to help me come out and get something of a scholarship there. So I’m kind of flawed and I said nothing. The guy’s lucky I didn’t punch his lights out. But I’m standing there going… I went home that day and I was kind of discouraged. I said, “June, I hope that’s not the thinking of everybody.” As I go about, does everybody think I’m kind of John’s pet and I’m being better treated than anybody else? And I was under a lot of pressure and I wasn’t feeling too good about it, and I wasn’t sure how others then would perceive me. And I’m new to The States. I’m trying to cut my groove and find my place in the seminary. So it knocked me for six for a little while.
A few weeks later, I’m with John and I’m with Pat, and I’m not being a stool pigeon and I wasn’t bringing a bad report about my brothers, but I shared that. And I think I shared it for… I didn’t mention the student, didn’t want to get anybody into trouble, but I shared the basics of it and I never forgot it. Pat MacArthur said to me, :You know what Philip, his problem is he’s not willing to accept God’s sovereign choices in your life and in his. That’s his problem. He hasn’t accepted what God wants to do in your life and what God is doing in his.”
And that’s always a challenge, isn’t it, to accept God’s sovereign choices for us. The families we’re born into, the opportunities we’re given, the things that are ours and is the Lord’s purpose and choice to raise some and pull down others. Everything’s a grace to a larger or greater degree in all of our lives. And so one of the keys to preventing envy is indeed accepting God’s appointments and allotments in life and being content with what we have in God’s goodness.
Let me pray, and then Jeff’s going to come up and lead us into some more prayer. Lord, this has been a stimulating scintillating sermon and study tonight on the subject of envy. It really is an arrow to the heart. How petty, how envious, how jealous we can become apart from grace. Oh, may we lay hold tonight of the doctrine of grace. May we understand that everything is given to us as a gift and comes as the good and perfect will of God. Help us to accept our allotment in life, our appointments, even our challenges as from you.
But help us to be careful in how we treat each other. Help us not to be proud our braggadocio about the way we act or behave. Lord, help us to learn lessons. Help us to slay this green-eyed monster that barrels and burrows its way into our heart like a cancer and like a canker, and is nitroglycerin in a home, explosive and destructive. For we pray and ask these things in Jesus name. Amen.