Countdown: 22... Any Dream Won't Do!

Joseph was the favoured son of Jacob's favourite wife. He received the most praise and the least censure. He had the seat of honour at the table and the soft hands of one who worked too little and did not earn his keep.  The molehills of his successes were lauded over the mountainous acheivements of his brothers.


Into this hotbed of jealousy and ill-judged and dysfunctional parental partiality Joseph (with the subtlety that can only be born of self-centred self-appreciation) announces dreams which herald a future day when brothers and father will bow before him as their lord and master.  It is no happy musical - it is deeply depressing and awakens murderous intent. (Read in Genesis 37 and following).


Joseph's dreams were from God.  Poor Joseph though, before he is the rescuing lord of his brothers, his death is faked and he is sold to slavery in a far distant land.  He must endure betrayal by his brothers, slavery to a hard master, unjust accusations of sexual assault, wrongly inprisoned, callously forgotten and eventually dragged before the Egyptian King as a last resort, when all else failed.


Only now, many years later, does he attain a lordly position but the winning of it was not in his own strength, not through the ambitious pampering of his father but rather through the path of suffering, degredation and abandonment.  But it is the making of the man out of the boy.


When Joseph is in the position to exact revenge and recompence upon his brothers for all that he had lost and all that they had done he offers them lavish grace.  Indeed the brothers bow before their once-favoured once-pampered sibling; they bow before him begging mercy, professing fealty in exchange for rescue.


How does Joseph respond? In anger and 'justice'? Not at all, but with tears, in love and glad of the reconciliation and also with hope.


Joseph's hope is the promise in the God had whispered in the night to his great grandfather of stars and people, a land to live in and a blessing to all peoples to impart. He looked to the God who had spoken the same promise profoundly to his grandfather Isaac and given to his own father Jacob (aka Israel).


Joseph, in his latter days, knows that he is only one man, and not the One of whom God had spoken.  He knows that Egypt is not the end of the line for his siblings and their descendants.  There is a land of promise, for the people of promise through whom the One True God had promised to bless the whole earth.  


Reflecting on his life and all that had happened; he encouraged his brothers, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today." (Gen 50:20)


On his deathbed his hope filled thinking is not diminished, Joseph speaks of that promise: 'take my bones with you'. He is looking to the land of promise.


Many generations there would be another Favoured Son (though justly so), who would know betrayal, enslavement, unjust charges and subjected to abject horror.  He too could reflect Joseph's summary of his life in Gen 50:22. He too would look to the promise God had made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and would deliver in ways they could not ask or imagine.


Joseph reminds us to look to Jesus.  Not the Joseph of musical fame: for him any dream will do. The Joseph of the Bible, the real man who is at least 4000 years distant from us in time, would not accept ANY old dream but only the dream that God could and would fulfill his promises.


Jesus is that fulfillment - any other dream won't do.