Thirty-four months. Over a hundred sermons. One book. In opening our ears and hearts to the word of God in Genesis, we peered behind eternity's veil to behold a Triune God of Love beyond space and time, fully blessed, fully joyous. We heard Love speak a world into existence, crafting the universe like a temple, filling it with the richness of his creatures and finally installing his sacred image in his sanctuary. He appointed humanity rulers of the earth, protectors of the garden, priests mediating creation's love for her Creator. We learned the wisdom of the way all things were meant to be, and were tutored in the original law. But then we heard the voice of the tempter, and with the introduction of sin's disorder, we watched in dismay as all things fell apart, and as we left our first home as exiles, stripped of our original grace and derailed from our destiny.
We studied the birth of a new generation, the escalation of greed into violence, the emergence of conflict and civilization, and the descent of a world speeding towards its doom. Our idylls of a heroic golden age were rent asunder, its myths disrobed and despoiled by Noah's vision. And though none heeded his preaching, yet in the grand judgment of the world that then was, we saw the paradigm of creation's deconstruction and rehabilitation, a pledge of new creation to come. In the first covenant of God's peace toward creation, we received further law, yet continued to show our disgrace in the new garden. Our lofty boasts were toppled, and Babylon's ideology was debunked; scattered as unintentional missionaries, the family tree of the nations seemed hopeless under the sway of deceiving fallen powers. But amidst the morass, we met the mystery of divine election: one simple man, with no merits to claim, plucked from the heart of Sumerian paganism and called to sally forth in faith, encouraged and enticed by the promises of Babel's work's failed fruit being made fruitful in him as a grace.
Abraham was tested over and over by barrenness of land and body, by comfortable customs and sensible schemes, by the outlandish extravagance of divine promises and the weighty burden of divine commands. But step by step, through covenants committing God to this family's welfare and this family to God's fight with the principle of fleshly power, Abraham was forged into a man of immense merit, embodying his faith in the height of worship, surrendering his beloved son, his sole hope of a future, into God's hands on the mountain. That son, returned to life, would be the carrier of the covenant. His own sons, twins at war from the womb, would wrestle over birthright and blessing until, through a pedagogy of painful payback, Jacob at last understood what it was to wrestle with God and man and be Israel. Gifted with sons, he would struggle all his life to prevent his family from flying apart, to preserve for God this brotherhood as the basis for the great nation his seed was meant to become, a nation able to at last inherit the land of promise and to shine as a light in the world, a beacon of blessing for all nations to cure the curse. Generations had risen, generations had fallen asleep, returning as dust to the dust whence they came, yet being gathered to their people in hope of something more. It was in such hope that Jacob died, and was buried in Canaan as a testimony even in the pregnant silence of the tomb.
Now, as they return to their families in Egypt, it occurs to the ten older brothers that their father's absence from this earthly scene might have consequences for the relationship among his sons going forward. In the previous generation, when Jacob had seized his brother's blessing, Esau had so loathed Jacob as to scheme, “The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob” (Genesis 27:41). Esau was willing to delay his vengeance until after Isaac's funeral. It occurs to the brothers that Joseph could have been doing the same thing all this time: playing nice for their dad's sake while he lived, patiently delaying until after his demise to exact his revenge.1 The brothers wince to recall how skilled Joseph proved at putting on a false face before.
They spoke their worries among themselves, “still haunted by guilt and fear because of their crimes.”2 For “if Joseph will hate us and will surely return to us all the evil that we dealt to him...!” (Genesis 50:15), they “now suspect Joseph will retaliate for their mistreatment of him those many years ago.”3 And now, to make matters worse, their dad's last moments had been spent in bestowing the royal blessing not on Joseph but on Judah; so, if Joseph's at all like they were, he'll resent the insult and lash out to protect his privilege.4 So now, they fear, “Joseph will have them killed,” them and their families; and what could they do to stop him?5
The brothers send a messenger to Joseph, someone acting at their command to represent them;6 later Jews took it to be “Bilhah, Joseph's foster-mother,” as the person he'd be most willing to hear out.7 The message contains the late Jacob's final wish and command – or so they say (Genesis 50:16). We could take them as telling the truth, quoting something he'd really said to them.8 Then again, Joseph was there as Jacob died, and if he had a last message for Joseph, he could've said so then and there,9 suggesting “these fabricated words of their father.”10 The brothers frame their own appeal as if Jacob's to cast their cause as the survival of his legacy; his dying hopes would be retrospectively tainted if his faith in their shared future were nullified by bloodshed.11
Supposedly, what Jacob left instructions to tell Joseph from beyond the grave is: “I pray you, please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they dealt evil to you” (Genesis 50:17). Before, we've caught the brothers privately admitting they were “guilty concerning our brother,” having “sinned against” him (Genesis 42:21-22); when Joseph had accused them of repaying evil in place of good, Judah lamented the indefensible “iniquity” in them all which God had exposed (Genesis 44:4, 16). Now, they more forthrightly and directly confess their wrong. “How powerful is the accusation of conscience!... Under pressure from no one, they turn their own accusers.”12 They say they dealt evil to him, identify it as a sin, and even call it trespass or transgression or rebellion, a criminal act crying out in the name of justice for punishment.
To their father's alleged words, the brothers append their own plea: “And now please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father” (Genesis 50:17). They don't and won't appeal to Joseph on the basis of brotherhood, which would ring hollow after they ignored his brotherhood back then. Instead, they try to turn Joseph's attention to the God of Israel, “not 'of your God' or 'of our God,' but of 'your father's God.'”13 Posing themselves as this God's humble servants, even if they no longer deserve for Joseph to see them as brothers, he may still be gracious to them as an act of piety for his father's God's sake; they pile all their hopes here on “the consciousness of God as the most powerful factor controlling human behavior.”14 So, in their own voice, they ask him to pardon their rebellion against God, their trespass against him, their grave crime and mortal sin. “For the first time perhaps, they confront the dastardly betrayal of brotherhood in its enormity and ask forgiveness.”15
Hearing their message, “Joseph wept when they spoke to him” (Genesis 50:17). Why? “Did Joseph break into tears because he was distressed that his brothers must assume that it was he who revealed their crime? Or did the whole trauma come rushing back to him?”16 Or “he realizes that they still do not trust him,” or maybe “he is disappointed that they resort to a deceptive scheme to win his favor,” echoing the deception in the garden.17 How could they still harbor suspicion of lurking resentments and lethal intentions, how could they fear him as duplicitous? How, “despite years of living together,” can “Joseph's brothers still fear him”?18 Don't they know the law's already written on his heart: “you shall not hate your brother..., you shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people” (Leviticus 19:17)? How could they think him an Esau to them?
The brothers' messenger returns, relaying to them the account of Joseph's wordless tears. This, it so happens, is “the seventh and last time that Joseph is said to have wept.”19 Now “his brother's also came,” ushered into his halls, to the same room where, seventeen years ago, Judah had pleaded unknowingly with his lost little brother. Then, in fear for their youngest brother Benjamin, they “came to Joseph's house... and fell before his face to the land” (Genesis 44:14); now again, “they went and fell before his face” (Genesis 50:18). Then, Judah insisted that, “behold, we are servants of my lord” (Genesis 44:16); now again, they all together say to Joseph, “Behold, we are your servants” (Genesis 50:18), like Egyptians pledging to “be servants to Pharaoh” (Genesis 47:25).20 But this time, they can see it's Joseph. In pleading for their lives, they knowingly fall before their brother's face and offer up their present and future liberty as a sacrificial reparation for the wrongs of their pasts.21
In service of symmetry, in this penultimate scene of Joseph and his brothers, Joseph can't help but remember his dreams shared back in his second scene with his brothers. In the first of two dreams he'd dreamed, the eleven of them had been present in person, binding sheaves of wheat in the field, “and behold, my sheaf arose and even stood upright, and behold, your sheaves circled and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). This was what they'd mocked first, scoffing at the notion Joseph could ever reign or hold dominion over them (Genesis 37:8). But in fact we've seen this fulfilled: Joseph's sheaf of wheat stood upright in its fullness to show Joseph would have the grain supply; theirs bowed down to it because, in their emptiness, they'd be in need of his fullness.22
But then there was that other dream: “Behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me,” he'd boasted (Genesis 37:9). It seems, in this dream, that Joseph's got the heavens at his beck and call; his father had then rebuked him before his brothers: “Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow down before you to the land” (Genesis 37:10)? Ludicrous! But now the opportunity to finish living out its promise of divine power over his family seems to be before him. He's been lord of the land, master of the palace, a father to the king of Upper and Lower Egypt (Genesis 45:8). He's seen his father and brothers all bow down to him at one point or another, and now here are those brothers, face-down on his floor, offering him all he's ever dreamt of; they “submit to Joseph's dominion” with full awareness and conviction, and “the second dream is about to be realized” in the very way they'd all understood it all those years before.23
The ball is fully in Joseph's court. He's shown wisdom and discernment in interpreting dreams, he's reunited with his family these past seventeen years, he's loved and lost and found again; so what does the dream mean to him now, in the years of his maturity? We'll want to listen carefully to every word Joseph speaks. And he starts in a promising way: “Don't be afraid!”, so often a message of divine encouragement. But he follows it with a rhetorical question: “For am I in the place of God?” (Genesis 50:19). Well, Joseph, that's just the substantial question we've been asking for years! In your second dream, you sure did seem to assume the place of God, receiving the adoration of the heavenly host.24 But now he treats the thought as absurd. After years of posturing like an Egyptian god on earth, he renounces standing the pose of the divine. He won't profess to sit on the Most High's throne, won't pretend he can weigh the human heart so as to judge the lives and souls of his brethren.25
What does this mean for Joseph's dream? Is it abandoned, canceled, returned to sender? Or is Joseph realizing his dad and brothers, and no doubt he himself, took it all wrong from the start? Think of the other five dreams in Joseph's stories. They all featured food and drink – grapes on a vine, bread in a basket, meat and wheat at the riverbank; even Joseph's first dream was at harvest. This alone seemed to stand apart. But in the dreams he had told to him in Egypt, any time something was counted – three grape clusters, three baskets, seven cows, seven ears of grain – Joseph's wisdom was taking it as a measure of time. So why, as he remembers recounting a dream with sun, moon, and eleven stars, wouldn't he count? If God made those lights in heaven “for signs and seasons and days and years” (Genesis 1:14), why not count them as thirteen years, the length of time from his sale as a slave at age 17 to his promotion over the whole land of Egypt at age 30? Or why not even multiply the sun and moon by the stars for the twenty-two years until Joseph sees his family again?26 Taken this way, the cosmic dream is already fulfilled: he was elevated after thirteen years, and provided grain for his brothers and father after twenty-two; Joseph's second dream can be a confirmation of the first dream.27
What does this mean for Joseph's story? He asks, “Am I in the place of God?” (Genesis 50:19). Only one other time does anybody in the Bible ask that, and it's Joseph's future dad reproaching Joseph's future mom. Speaking in envy of her sister Leah, Rachel had demanded of Jacob that he “give me sons, and if not, I'll die!” (Genesis 30:1). His anger sparking at the immature love of his life, Jacob had retorted to her, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2). It wasn't Jacob's prerogative to create life at his whim; it was God's, to give or withhold from Rachel the fruit of her womb – who would be Joseph. Joseph now borrows his father's phrase to confess that, if creation was God's business and not Jacob's, then judgment of creation is God's business and not Joseph's. And the same God who held back and then gave Rachel her Joseph is the God who purposed Joseph, from that once-barren womb, for the ups and downs of the life that followed.28
And what does this mean for the big picture of Genesis? Joseph won't aspire to seat himself on the throne of the Most High, won't imagine himself Lawgiver and Judge, won't enslave his brethren to himself, won't wield his power as a law unto himself. Joseph won't, in other words, heed the Serpent's hiss.29 Remember that, so long ago? “You will not 'surely die'! For God knows that, in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God!” (Genesis 3:5). With such a vision, with such a dream, did the Serpent tempt humanity, to will ourselves into the place of God, that we might by our wisdom and might decree all things, decide all things, claim all things, judge all things. Joseph now mocks the folly of the Serpent's version of 'opening' the eyes.
Turning back to his brothers, “as for you, you planned evil upon me” (Genesis 50:20). Joseph isn't sugarcoating anything. He isn't denying or excusing the motives out of which his brothers had acted; he isn't supposing they meant well and just got confused or misguided. He agrees with their characterization of what they'd done, that they plotted harm for him and intended an evil outcome for him. The word Joseph picks suggests scheming, plotting, thinking, inventing evil, like with “the evil of Haman the Agagite and the scheme that he schemed against the Jews” (Esther 8:3). The psalmists are constantly contending with “evil humanity... who plot evil things in their heart” like serpents (Psalm 140:1-3). And it seems, in those cases, that our best hope is that God “frustrates the plots of the peoples” (Psalm 33:20), so that, when “they plot a purpose, they will not be able” to carry it through at all (Psalm 21:11). Even better is when the “evil scheme that he had schemed... should return onto his own head” (Esther 9:25), so “let them be caught in the purposes they have plotted” (Psalm 10:2).
But Joseph now adds that this isn't even half the picture. Because “you planned evil upon me; God planned it unto good!” (Genesis 50:20). Joseph, seeing “even in human sin the opportunity for divine providence,”30 has a faith that “God knows how to turn to good account the evil deeds of others.”31 The brothers, yes, “planned harm..., but God reconfigured their evil and produced good from it.”32 In God's hands, their scheme brought an unwitting good to Joseph: through the crucible of Egyptian slavery, he matured and prospered in ways he'd never have in Canaan. But their scheme also brought unwitting good to themselves. They'd meant to rid themselves of an annoying little brother; instead, rather than frustrating their plot in its tracks or returning it onto their own heads, God harnessed it “to preserve for you a remnant..., to sustain lives for you” (Genesis 45:7), so that “remedies for a future famine would be made ready for those who plotted their brother's death.”33
So Joseph assures his brothers that, in a way, “it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:8). God worked through their actions, through their scheming – not by inspiring the wicked thoughts of their hearts, nor by endorsing the cruelty of their hands, but by operating through it from above and within. God, as universal cause, is “intimately present and active in all created being,” enabling his creatures to act in every action insofar as it's action,34 so “it is impossible for anything to occur outside the order of the divine government.”35 “Many are the plans in the heart of man, but it's the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21). Weaving their plans and schemes into his grander tapestry, even the darkest and foulest human choices “are somehow subsumed under God's sovereign will, are even used by God for the good of Jacob's family.”36 “God meant past betrayals for good and will resurrect their failures into surprising new life.”37 They sold Joseph, but God sent Joseph: the very same deed that was, in its human aspect, a great and cruel evil was in fact plotted by divine providence to a very different end. So “their crafty sale of Joseph became the Lord's errand.”38
Initially, Joseph thought of this as a special gift for his brothers: “God sent me before you,” to prepare a place for this one chosen family in the midst of a crisis (Genesis 45:7). But now he sees an even broader perspective. Their scheme brought unwitting good to the world as a whole, because the peoples of Egypt, Canaan, and other lands were able to survive the famine precisely because Joseph was where God had sent him.39 God purposes all this “to bring it about, as it is this day, that many people be sustained alive” (Genesis 50:20), all “thanks to the creative God's wisdom transforming all their wickedness into good,” blessing all the families of the earth.40
This right here is “the theological stance that has helped [Joseph] make sense of his life,” and the very same key unlocks more doors than Israel could count.41 Through the prophet, God assured his people that, when the years apportioned to their imperial captors were completed, “I will visit you and will fulfill toward you my good word and will bring you back to this place, for I know the plans I plan toward you..., plans for peace and not for evil, to give you future and hope” (Jeremiah 29:10-11). “The actions of most-wicked men are transformed by his dispensation to a successful outcome,”42 “untwisted, cleansed, and turned around for good, life-giving purposes” in the hands of a God of Love.43 Laban plotted evil, to exploit his son-in-law, but God planned it unto good, returning Jacob wealthy and free. Jacob schemed many a scheme against others, but God planned them all unto good, wrestling Jacob into a new calling. The builders of Babel planned their project of pride, but God planned it unto good, filling the earth. Cain plotted his brother's murder out of envy, but God planned Abel's martyrdom for good, a lasting testimony. Adam and Eve plotted their fruit-filching for selfish gain, leading at first to a curse and an exile, but what were God's plans in it? A wise woman assured a king that, though death holds sway in the world, yet God doesn't lift away life from his creation, but “he plans plans such that the banished one isn't banished from him” (2 Samuel 14:14). “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”44
We're getting far ahead of ourselves. But it's no coincidence that here, so close to the end of Genesis, Joseph's words, contrasting divine good and human evil, echo the early chapters' Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:9). The Serpent's very temptation was for us to grasp for ourselves at such privilege, to become “as gods, knowing good and evil,” deciding on it for ourselves (Genesis 3:5). But Joseph confesses here that, however skilled we are at corrupting good into the evils of our choosing, God alone is wise to transmute our very evil choices into the gold of his goodness.45 And a world governed by such a divine alchemist is one where godhood doesn't need our grabby, grubby fingers – a world where a Joseph can release the weight of good and evil back into the hands of the Creator, who is wiser than we to visit or forgive the iniquities of his creatures.46
So Joseph “refuses to give evil the final word..., refuses to bow to the plans, the intentions, or the ways of evil,” but, “neither succumbing nor retaliating, he yields place to God and cooperates with God to turn evil into good, chaos into order, and potential death into spared life.”47 He urges his brothers not to be afraid he'll take matters into his own hands, that he'll return evil for evil. Their evil intent was superintended by God for his good plan, their repentance for their transgression is evident, and they mustn't grieve themselves with pains and toils for it like the pains and toils, the griefs and sorrows, of laboring for bread on a cursed ground (Genesis 3:17; 45:5).48
But Joseph will cooperate with God's transmutation of the base into the noble. Imitating God, Joseph “strives to reward with kindness those who are maliciously disposed” to him.49 “Do good to those who hate you,” says the Lord (Luke 6:27), and if even “your enemy is hungry, feed him” (Proverbs 25:21; cf. Romans 12:20). So, says Joseph, “I will provide for you and for your little ones” (Genesis 50:21; cf. 45:11; 47:12). Even now that the famine's twelve years gone and the Sons of Israel are nestled in Egypt's most pleasant and fruitful nook, Joseph will provide for them in an ongoing way. That makes him the polar opposite of Cain, because Joseph, quite consciously, commits to being his brothers' keeper – their protector and provider, who uses his power not to harm or control but to strengthen and sustain his brethren and their families.50 He just wants them to know and see and understand how he “loved them beyond measure,” as if to tell them that “their life was my life, and every pain of theirs was my pain, every ailment of theirs was my sickness, their wish was my wish,” and that, rather than claim them as his slaves in perpetual penance, in love he'd be “among them as one of the least.”51
With “words of peace” like these, Joseph “comforted them and spoke to their hearts” (Genesis 50:21).52 Joseph doesn't speak the word in our hearing, but it's plain to see he affirms here his forgiveness of the past, imaging the God who parades before Moses a glory “merciful and gracious..., abounding in kindness and faithfulness..., forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). The brothers need to be persuaded. Isn't that too good to be true? Is it possible either God or man should be so faithful and kind, so gracious and merciful, as to forgive so freely? They struggle with “believing that one wronged can live without retribution,” hence God's later gift of an “economy of sacrifice... showing the way in which the rupture of human sin can be overcome.”53 But here and now, Joseph speaks comfort, speaks the 'Noah' language of covenant peace and new creation, to lift up his penitent brethren's fallen faces and “to finally end the saga of jealousy and distrust.”54
And when we come to the final moments of Genesis, to whom does Joseph speak his dying words of assurance and promise? “Joseph said to his brothers” (Genesis 50:24) such things about “the destiny of a family chosen by God for a mission... waiting to be fulfilled since the beginning of creation.”55 In the thrill of his message, don't neglect to see its hearers: his brothers.56 The first brothers in Genesis parted by cold-blooded murder. Abram and Lot's brother-like tension could only be resolved by separation into different lands before spiraling out of control. In the next generation, Ishmael's mockery and mistreatment of little Isaac was resolved by banishment to the desert; then, Esau was determined to deal out lethal vengeance on his brother, and while Jacob appeased Esau by humility and offerings, their teary reunion fell short of reunification; Jacob talked his way out of it, leery of Esau's might. Here, we've had more brothers than ever, who nearly all united in a conspiracy of Cainite violence. But it didn't end with the shedding of blood, as it could have; it didn't end with a quick separation of territory, or with exile of the persecutors, or with an uneasy appeasement and a lingering estrangement. Instead, Joseph forgave. In the wake of evil schemes, Joseph plans to continue as his brothers' keeper. Joseph rebuilds his relationship with them, and, to his dying day, he'll live as one community with them. This long story that “begins in hatred and envy... ends in harmony,”57 letting brothers at last “become a single community.”58 “Behold, how good and pleasant” is this resolution of reconciliation (Psalm 133:1)!59
And so here, at the closing of Genesis, Joseph offers us a glimpse – however partial – of a man who protectively keeps the brothers and the land around him, who works to sustain the lives of others and to freely feed the world of creatures, who wields his dominion as a servant of the servants of God, who cedes God's place to God alone and presses forward in forgiveness and reconciliation. Such a man ties a preliminary bow in the many plotlines that unraveled into chaos in Eden.60 But for ultimate resolution, we need not just a new Adam but a Last Adam. And that's our great and glorious Redeemer sent from above, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself” (Philippians 2:6-7). Though really and truly in the place of God, he emptied himself on earth, forswearing the prerogatives of his heavenly throne.
He ministered, he taught, and he rode into Jerusalem as the promised holder of Judah's scepter, acclaimed there by adoring crowds of pilgrims who sang their hopes of salvation: Hosanna, “hosanna in the highest,” please save us now (Mark 11:10)! But “the chief priests and Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin..., and from that day on, they plotted to put [Jesus] to death” (John 11:47, 53). And three days from now, as “the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him..., Judas Iscariot, who was one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them” (Mark 14:1, 10). Thursday night, after washing his disciples' feet and providing them his body and blood for food and drink, “the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners” (Mark 14:41). The next morning, a crowd incited by these leaders “shouted all the more, 'Crucify him!', so Pilate... delivered him to be crucified” (Mark 15:14-15).
But this was “the ultimate expression of God using the evil actions of wicked men” – Pharisees and Pilate, chief priests and chief traitors and crowds of crucify-him chanters – “to accomplish redemption.”61 St. Peter preaches that Jesus was, in fact, “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” so that, “by the hands of lawless men” who “crucified and killed” him (Acts 2:23) and did “whatever [God's] hand and [God's] plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:28), God might provide thereby for “the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 1:7), and “gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (John 11:52), and “destroy the works of the devil” from Genesis 3 on (1 John 3:8). Oh, scribes and soldiers and disloyal disciples, Jews and Gentiles and sinful hearts today, all schemed evil against the Son of God, to “kill him, so that the inheritance may be ours” (Luke 20:14); God planned it all unto our good, to make us “fellow heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17).
Because, God be most mightily praised, “God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death” (Acts 2:24), that Jesus might be both “delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). “After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3), but not before giving his promise to be with us and provide for us and our little ones “always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). And to reassure us of this, just as Joseph “comforted [his brothers] and spoke to them in the heart,”62 so Jesus supplied “the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in [Jesus'] name... Peace I leave you, my peace I give to you.... Let not your hearts be troubled,” he speaks still to our hearts, “neither let them be afraid” (John 14:26-27). This same Comforter “helps us in our weakness” and “intercedes for us with groanings inexpressible” (Romans 8:26), so that “no one will take your joy from you” (John 16:22).
And “the mystery of Christ... has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (Ephesians 3:4-5). Almighty God “provides universally for all being,” so “it belongs to his providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the universe may not be hindered.”63 But more than that, if it belongs to his love to permit and even plan the death of his own beloved Son for sinners, then “how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). For “we know that, to those who love God” as Joseph did, “all things he works together into good, to those who are called according to purpose” (Romans 8:28). If we “cleave to [God] with total loving devotion, all things... collaborate and help” us toward “the good that is never subject to change,”64 and “these evils” of our lives “are turned to good by their good use.”65 If hearts love God – and “God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5) – then such hearts, like St. Augustine says, “find God good in all circumstances, whether he is chastising them or consoling them, whether putting them through their paces or crowning their efforts, whether purifying or illuminating,”66 because “all things he works together into good” (Romans 8:28).
In that faith, “if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life; more than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5:10-11), since the plan of God all along was that Christ “might reconcile us... into one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility; and he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Ephesians 2:16-17). Freed from the anxieties of Cain and the contempt of Ishmael and the wrath of Esau, we “aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace” (2 Corinthians 13:11), “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” as “one Body... called to the one hope that belongs to your call” (Ephesians 4:3-4).
Joseph's final witness to reconciliation, wrapping up the Book of Genesis with a brothers' keeper who refuses to enslave his brethren, points us to that “hope that the creation itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption,” the futility of Genesis 3, “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). And with such hope, and faith in the God who plans unto good even all the evil that sinners and Satan ever could scheme, “the sufferings of the present time aren't worth comparing to the glory that's to be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18), by the hand of the Jesus who's been preached by every line in Genesis, from 'in the beginning' (the first word) to 'in Egypt' (the last word).
For if God works into good even the evils invented by betraying brothers and pharaonic tyrants, seducing serpents and famine's curse, and even trespasses now transfigured by forgiveness, then “who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). If faith in such a God can hurl mountains to the heart of the sea, who can successfully stand athwart the mission entrusted to Man and Woman in Eden's Garden? Who can stem the tide of “all the earth” being “filled with the glory of the LORD” (Numbers 14:21)? Who can chainsaw the Tree of Life and salt its stump? Who can cast down for eternity the humble in heart who, by God's word, are finally exalted (James 4:10)? Who can silence creation's loud hosannas, who can dethrone the King of Love, who can give death the final word when death is predestined to die away and be forgotten? Who can cling to grudges in paradise, and who can separate brethren from our God's bond of peace? Who can deny blessing to any of the families of the earth? Here's the hope of Genesis, the certitude of the saints: that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). Amen!
1 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 2.197, in Loeb Classical Library 242:249; Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 444; Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 425-426.
2 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 192.
3 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 387; cf. Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 349.
4 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 655-656.
5 Kerry D. Lee Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26 (Brill, 2015), 210.
6 Jeffrey Pulse, Figuring Resurrection: Joseph as a Death-and-Resurrection Figure in the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism (Lexham Press, 2021), 141.
7 Targum Neofiti Genesis 50:16, in Aramaic Bible 1A:229.
8 Kerry D. Lee Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26 (Brill, 2015), 212; Andrew E. Steinmann, Genesis (IVP Academic, 2019), 471.
9 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 192; Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 426.
10 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 387.
11 Kerry D. Lee Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:20 (Brill, 2015), 210-211.
12 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 67.18, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 87:275.
13 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 656.
14 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 350.
15 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 410.
16 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 410.
17 James McKeown, Genesis (Eerdmans, 2008), 192.
18 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 328.
19 Andrew E. Steinmann, Genesis (IVP Academic, 2019), 471.
20 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 388.
21 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 410.
22 Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (Yale University Press, 1993), 166; Jonathan Grossman, “Different Dreams: Two Models of Interpretation for Three Pairs of Dreams (Genesis 37-50),” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 729.
23 Jonathan Grossman, “Different Dreams: Two Models of Interpretation for Three Pairs of Dreams (Genesis 37-50),” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 731.
24 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 518.
25 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 388.
26 Ron Pirson, The Lord of the Dreams: A Semantic and Literary Analysis of Genesis 37-50 (Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 56-58.
27 Jonathan Grossman, “Different Dreams: Two Models of Interpretation for Three Pairs of Dreams (Genesis 37-50),” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 731-732.
28 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 444-445.
29 Stephen B. Chapman, “Food, Famine, and the Nations: A Canonical Approach to Genesis,” in Nathan MacDonald, Mark W. Elliott, and Grant Macaskill, eds., Genesis and Christian Theology (Eerdmans, 2012), 328.
30 Mark J. Boda, A Severe Mercy: Sin and Its Remedy in the Old Testament (Eisenbrauns, 2009), 31.
31 Cassiodorus, Explanations of the Psalms 104.17, in Ancient Christian Writers 53:55.
32 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 388.
33 John Cassian, Conferences 13.11.2, in Ancient Christian Writers 57:477.
34 Matthew Levering, “Eternity, History, and Divine Providence,” Angelicum 88/2 (2011): 409.
35 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q.103, a.7, in The Works of St. Thomas Aquinas 13:502.
36 James Chukwuma Okoye, Genesis 12-50: A Narrative-Theological Commentary (Cascade Books, 2020), 411.
37 Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Cornell University Press, 1999), 189.
38 Cassiodorus, Explanations of the Psalms 104.17, in Ancient Christian Writers 53:55.
39 Brent A. Strawn, “From Imago to Imagines: The Image(s) of God in Genesis,” in Bill T. Arnold, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 229.
40 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 67.19, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 87:276.
41 David W. Cotter, Genesis (Liturgical Press, 2003), 328.
42 Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms 104.17, in Ancient Christian Writers 53:55.
43 Ingrid Faro, Evil in Genesis: A Contextual Analysis of Hebrew Lexemes for Evil in the Book of Genesis (Lexham Press, 2020), 193.
44 Exsultet prayer at the Easter Vigil, in The Roman Missal (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2011), 355.
45 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 656; Bill T. Arnold, Genesis (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 388.
46 Matthew R. Schlimm, From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis (Eisenbrauns, 2011), 177.
47 Ingrid Faro, Evil in Genesis: A Contextual Analysis of Hebrew Lexemes for Evil in the Book of Genesis (Lexham Press, 2020), 187.
48 Ingrid Faro, Evil in Genesis: A Contextual Analysis of Hebrew Lexemes for Evil in the Book of Genesis (Lexham Press, 2020), 185.
49 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 67.19, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 87:276.
50 Matthew R. Schlimm, From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis (Eisenbrauns, 2011), 178.
51 Testament of Joseph 17.5-8, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1:823.
52 Targum Neofiti Genesis 50:21, in Aramaic Bible 1A:230.
53 R. R. Reno, Genesis (Brazos Press, 2010), 291.
54 Berel Dov Lerner, Human-Divine Interaction in the Hebrew Scriptures: Covenants and Cross-Purposes (Routledge, 2024), 92.
55 Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 447.
56 Kerry D. Lee Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26 (Brill, 2015), 227-228.
57 Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 262.
58 Kerry D. Lee Jr., The Death of Jacob: Narrative Conventions in Genesis 47:28–50:26 (Brill, 2015), 228.
59 Matthew R. Schlimm, From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis (Eisenbrauns, 2011), 179.
60 Stephen B. Chapman, “Food, Famine, and the Nations: A Canonical Approach to Genesis,” in Nathan MacDonald, Mark W. Elliott, and Grant Macaskill, eds., Genesis and Christian Theology (Eerdmans, 2012), 329.
61 Tremper Longman III, Genesis (Zondervan Academic, 2016), 564.
62 Genesis 50:21 LXX, in Susan C. Brayford, Genesis (Brill, 2007), 201.
63 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q.22, a.2, ad 2, in The Works of St. Thomas Aquinas 13:248-249.
64 Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Romans 7.7.3, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 104:84.
65 Augustine of Hippo, Letter 131, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century II/2:200.
66 Augustine of Hippo, Expositions of the Psalms 124.9, in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century III/20:65.
No comments:
Post a Comment