Let us turn to Genesis 45, the chapter in which Joseph makes himself known to his brothers. Genesis 45, beginning at verse 1, Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him, and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud, and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph. Doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him, for they were troubled at his presence. And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved nor angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither, for God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land, and yet there are five years in the which there shall neither be earing nor harvest. And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth. and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God, and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and Lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. his tea, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Dost thou thy son Joseph? God hath made me lord of all Egypt. Come down unto me, tarry not, and thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou shalt be near unto me, thou, and thy children, and thy children's children, and thy flocks, and thy herds, and all that thou hast. And there will I nourish thee, for yet there are five years of famine. lest thou and thy household and all that thou hast come to poverty. And behold, your eyes see in the eyes of my brother Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaketh unto you. And ye shall tell my father of all my glory in Egypt and of all that ye have seen. And ye shall haste and bring down my father hither.' And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck and wept, and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover, he kissed all his brethren and wept upon them, and after that his brethren talked with him." Amen. Beloved congregation, you will have noticed from the bulletin perhaps that my theme is not the doctrine of providence, but the doctrine that drives away sadness. And the bulletin I think refers to three points, and I think there is a fourth point too, but I may just touch on that at the end and we'll mention it at the end. Now many biblical doctrines have comforting aspects. Whether we preach on the sovereignty of God or we preach on the atoning work of our Lord Jesus Christ, his blood and righteousness, his resurrection, his ascension, whether we preach on the perseverance of the saints Each of those doctrines have comforting angles, especially as believers go through tough, sometimes very sad times. But if there were no doctrine of providence, then we would go through life very sad every day if there were no doctrine of the providence of God. But the Bible teaches this doctrine. We can know this doctrine and by faith embrace this doctrine. and find that this doctrine, or by this doctrine perhaps I should say, the Lord drives away the sadness that would be there day after day. My first point is the doctrine itself. You know that many people do use the term Something happens and they say, well, that's providential. And then they mean something very special. You think of, imagine you planned a vacation and something happened and you just couldn't make it that day and so you changed plans, cost you lots of money, and you flew a day later. And then you find out on that next day that the plane of yesterday was crashed. And you say, how providential. But you know, everything in a certain sense is providential. So the doctrine of providence is different from what people mean when they say, oh, that was providential. The Bible teaches, right from page one on through page, what is it, the last page of the Bible, that God is the God who rules. He controls all events of all of history. God's providence is not something occasional, but it is God controlling, guiding all events. I heard of a catechism in Lord's Day. Ten asked the question, what do you mean by the providence of God, and the answer is, The providence of God is the almighty and everywhere present power of God, whereby, as it were, by his hand he upholds and governs heaven and earth and all creatures. The shorter catechism speaks the same way, answer 11. What are God's works of providence? God's works of providence are his most holy, wise, and powerful, preserving and governing all his creatures and all their actions. Now, saying it like this and then saying Amen in Yogo Homa, you say, wow, he was up in the sky. so lofty, and you say, I just don't experience it like that in my everyday life. Everything is controlled. My husband gets home from work, I get upset. He comes home, he says, honey, this was also in the provenance of God. Now you need to be careful that you don't say that flippantly. But reading it from The Genesis account, as we have tried this morning, particularly the section of chapter 45, Joseph's life and his brother's lives, illustrates it, does it not? And you and I, we all know the story. I'm going to tell the story briefly, but even if I didn't tell it and I would just say, let's leave it, oh, you know it all, then you would still be able to follow it. This can make it a little more clear, but you think of the fact that Jacob, the patriarch, had twelve sons. His youngest sons, Joseph and Benjamin, he loved them in a very special way, because they were sons of Rachel, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. and more than the two other slave girls with whom also he had children. And he actually had been loving Joseph as a favoured boy. And his ten older brothers didn't like that and they hated Joseph more and more. And the day came, sure enough, that Joseph was a boy about, or a teenager, seventeen years of age. And his ten brothers were kind of far away from home and dad had said, why don't you go visit them and bring me news back. They had no email in those days or any way of communication that really kept them daily in touch. And there came the moment that Joseph was walking there and these brothers said, who's coming there? Don't tell me Joseph. Let's kill him. That's what they were going to do. They threw him into a pit and then there were a number of merchants coming by at a certain moment from Midian, Midianites, and then somebody said, let's not kill him now, let's sell him. Okay. And that's what they did. They sold their brother Joseph. He was taken away and they had to tell their father, Jacob, something. So they took Joseph's coat, drenched it in some blood of a goat and presented it to their old father. Jacob viewed it and he just saw that picture, some wild animal has devoured my son. torn him to pieces and ate him. And he was so down, so sad that he said, I'll go down mourning to my grave. That's what happened. That's the, you could say, the story from the angle of the ten brothers. When they talked about what had happened to Joseph, they didn't say, oh, that was providential. They didn't believe in the doctrine of providence. To them it was a coincidence that Joseph was in that pit and they were going to kill him a little later. And those merchants came by and, well, somebody said, let's sell him. OK. And they did. And Joseph never came back. succeeded in deceiving their father Jacob. That's part of life. We're happy to get rid of Joseph. That's their picture. And then you know the rest of the story. Twenty years went by. A great famine came upon Canaan. The crops failed. the water holes dried up and the cattle died. And it was around that time that Jacob heard that there was grain in Egypt, or corn. And so he sent his ten eldest sons to Egypt and they found their way to the court of Pharaoh and to, we might say, the prime minister in those days, the chief officer of the government, and his name. Do you know his name? I haven't mentioned his name yet. His name was not Joseph. Well, it was his name, but his name was Zdavnath Paneer. That was his Egyptian name given to him. And that man, he spoke so harshly against these ten He said, you're spies and they have a story to tell and he said he didn't believe their story. And so he spoke harshly and he let nine of them go back. He kept Simeon, put him in prison and he said, I'll believe your story if you bring your youngest brother back. Because they had told him about their younger brother, Benjamin. And they had told that man, a chief officer in Egypt, that they had an old father at home. And so that man had said, well, he didn't say, bring your father here to prove, but bring your brother here to prove. And then when these nine boys came back home and they told their father their story, then Jacob, in trembling disbelief, listened to these men, his sons. What a terrible blow it was to him. And he burst out to his sons. He said, you have believed me. Joseph is no more. Simeon is no more. And you want to take Benjamin. All these things are against me. That's how Jacob put it. And then as you follow the story in the Bible, then you get the other story, not the story of the ten brothers. But you get the other story when you, as it were in the scriptures, trace the steps of Joseph. The Midianites took him to Egypt and there his adversities increased, was sold as a slave, became a servant in a household, and then things went well for just a little time But then the owner of that household accused him falsely. He was thrown into prison and left there for several years. And the Bible says that his feet they hurt with feathers. He was laid in irons. No comfortable confinement there for Joseph. And yet in all those circumstances of adversities, Joseph maintained his childlike trust in the God of Providence, the God of his father Jacob and Isaac and Abraham. The Bible does say that when all this was happening, God was testing Joseph. That is to say, as one psalm puts it, the word of God tested him, his faith. But as he was being tested, his faith did not fail. You know what happened to his faith? It grew. And then there came a great change. In the prison, he met other prisoners, and remember he also listened to this cub-bearer, a pharaoh. Let's not get into the background and make it too long, but that man had had a dream, and he told Joseph the dream, and then God enabled Joseph to interpret the dream, and it turned out to be true. And he went back to his job with Pharaoh, and Joseph had said, well, you think of me when you are back at Pharaoh's court, and if you have an opportunity, tell him maybe he'll get me out of the prison. Well, he forgot about Joseph. Then God gave Pharaoh a dream, or two dreams, and nobody could interpret those dreams. And then that cub bearer says, wait a minute, I know somebody. Remember I was in jail? There was a man by the name of Joseph, and he interpreted my dream exactly the way it turned out. And Joseph came before the Pharaoh, and he says, I hear you are able to do this. No, he says, God is able to tell me and to tell you through me the interpretation. I remember that the interpretation of the dreams was that there were going to be seven golden years of plenty of harvest and crops and and fruitfulness. And then, according to that dream, there would be seven years of famine. And then Joseph counseled the Pharaoh that in the seven years of plenty, preparation needed to be made for the next seven years of famine. This is exactly what happened. Pharaoh asked Joseph, to do the work, gave the authority to Joseph to do it. And Pharaoh gave him that new name, Zafnath-Pa'aniah. And he became, as it were, the prime minister, or the lord of the land under God. And the years of plenty passed, the famine began, One day Joseph saw his ten brothers at his court. He knew them well, but they did not know him. They didn't know the language he spoke, and these ten brothers didn't dream even that this Joseph was still alive in Egypt. Joseph didn't say, Hi, my name is Joseph, you and I have a little thing to talk about. No, none of that. He wanted to test them. He wanted to see if they had been humbled for their sin. and therefore dealt harshly with them. And he sent nine of them home to father Jacob, gave them corn, and told them he wanted to see their youngest brother about whom they had told him, Benjamin." Do you see that here you have two sides of the same story, as it were. The side of the brothers, that's the way they looked at it, what they had done, And the side of Jacob too, Jacob said, all these things are against me. But there is also this side that Joseph tells in this passage. And what's the difference between the story of the ten brothers? What's the difference? The story of the ten brothers and the story of Father Jacob, all these things are against me. And the way Joseph tells the story, the difference is faith. Same events were happening and there were these ten men and they saw nothing in there other than, we can't stand Joseph and we got to get rid of him and we will. And Jacob, somewhat similarly, though loved Joseph, but he said, all these things are against me. And the other side of the story is Joseph. Seeing what? What did Joseph see that Jacob didn't see? And that his brothers had no clue about. It was, do you see? The hands of God. That's what Joseph saw. And in this chapter 45, Joseph made himself known to his brothers, and he said it very plainly. What did he say? He said, God sends me before you. That's the key. Joseph said to his brothers, God, our God, is so controlling, is so governing, he's so direct. every event here, big and small, that he is working out his plan. That's what Joseph said. God sent me. What a perspective that is! To be able to see it, and to be able to say it. The things they had not seen, the things his brothers had not dreamt of. And Joseph saying to them, these things are the very doings of God, our God. And it's still true today, congregation. We can look at the same events. When you read the Stratford News tomorrow, I don't know what you read, maybe on the web, It's the one way of looking at things. And here in the scriptures you find the other way of looking at things. It's the difference of unbelievers looking at the things of everyday and believers in God and in his Christ. And they look at things totally differently. Let's for a moment look at the life of Paul, the apostle. And let's, as it were, try to picture how unbelievers looked at Paul the Apostle. And they said, well, yeah, once this man was a good Pharisee, great leader, very potential man, Saul of Tarsus. But then, yeah, he changed his views. joined the people of the way about Jesus. And you know what happened? The man lost his home. He lost his good name. And he became a wandering preacher and is doing a lot of damage. And how often he ended up in prison, was beaten, stoned, half starved. And finally, you know what they did with Paul? They put him to death. Deserved it too. That's the side from the unbelievers. And you can take the story of any unbeliever describing the things of the world. And they would say, let me tell you the story of Paul the way people look at it. And a non-believer would say, huh, that was an unfortunate man. Or some people would say, he was an unlucky man. But listen to what Paul himself says. Romans 8 verse 28, Paul says, we know that all things work together for good. for those who love God, who are called according to God's purpose. That's the point, you see. The doctrine of the providence of God is a confession of faith. How does that confession start? It starts with, I believe in God, the Father, Almighty, Maker, of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell, but the third day He arose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and is sitting there in His God has given all things into his hand in heaven and on earth. That's what Joseph says here. What did he say? He put it in two words. He said, God sent. Through it all, God has been working, been directing. and fulfilling his own word, his own promise. Now these ten brothers, in their unbelief, saw nothing of that, until in the end Joseph looked them in the eye and told them, as we read it this morning, did they see it then too? Did they see the hand of God? No congregation, that's the doctrine that drives away sadness. Let's look at the details. The details. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And he said, let there be light. And there was light. That God That God, day by day, night by night, governs this whole creation with everything in it. Sun, moon, stars, oceans, and the smallest details of creation of molecules and electrons, DNA, lilies of the field, the sparrows of the air, or as our Heidelberg Catechism says, so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, all things come not by chance, but by God's fatherly hand. That's what the Bible teaches congregation. That's exactly what Jesus said when he was on the earth and he talked about the sparrows. He said, Are not two sparrows told for a farthing, and yet not one of them falls to the ground without your heavenly Father? Behold, the birds of the air, they sow not, neither do they reap, they do not gather into barns, but your heavenly Father feeds them. Jesus says. It doesn't mean, congregation, that the Bible rejects what we have come to call natural laws. No, we also speak about laws in creation, and over the years, indeed, God has given us to discover the various branches of science, in physics, in meteorology, agriculture, medicine, whatever else. There is a discovered, a certain discovered uniformity of principles as we have discovered them and we know how to use them. We've made great advance But it's like this, when we pray every day, hopefully we do, give us this day our daily bread, we don't mean to say, we don't need to do anything. You can just sit on your chair and you just need to pray and God will give it to you. No. We need to do some work. And we have discovered all kinds of things, how to grow in the fields vegetables and we know how to use fertilizers and all the other things. It's all in the hands of God. And when there are what we call in God's creation calamities, disasters, What does the Bible say? Shall there be an evil in the city? Amos the prophet said, shall there be an evil in the city and the Lord has not done it? Not to accuse God of sin. The famine in Egypt and in Canaan, how did that come? From the hand of God. who sustains, but also who may withhold. And Joseph, when he speaks of this famine to Pharaoh, then he tells Pharaoh what God is about to do, and he says, this is what you are to do now, Pharaoh. And you know congregation in God's providence is not only general and universal, but also it concerns the specific, the little things in our lives. And Joseph puts it like this to his brother, he says, God sent me before you. What a remarkable confession. Provenance is not simply that God guides the stars in their courses and the big things in history, but is down to the me and the you of life. Don't you think of that when you think, you look at your wife and you've been married for 5 years or 15 years or 50, and you look back and say, I remember the day I walked into this shop and I met this girl. We grew up in the same church. And God made us get to know each other. And God made me fall in love with her. I beg your pardon? Yes. And she loved me. And then your studies and your job. They fired you for some reason or the businessmen. What happened? God in everything directing, controlling. If today we would have, we don't have a picnic as a congregation today, but imagine that we would have a picnic here on the parking lot and we could spend six hours together. We could sit together and you could tell me your story and Sid Vander Heide, well you probably need more than a half a day to tell your story. This is how it goes in our life. And we would all speak, it's too much about me, but talk about it as there is God's hand in that me, in your life. We'd be so surprised by the end of the six hours, God sends me before you. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, He at one time, chapter 10, verse 23, says, O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself, it is not in man who walks to direct his step. Proverbs 19, verse 21, there are many plans in a man's heart, nevertheless the counsel of the Lord that shall stand. Or Proverbs 21 verse 1, the king's heart is in the hand of the Lord as the rivers of water and he turns it whithersoever he will. God is in the most specific things and in a remarkable, often we don't see it, but he directs He guides the lives of men and women and young people and children before birth, at birth and after. You go to the hospital like Holly and they open your brain. And the surgeon, he knows what he's doing, but it's God who makes use of a surgeon. There's an old hymn, actually initially written by a Puritan, Samuel Rutherford, and then there was Mrs. Cousin who put it into a more readable hymn, with mercy and with judgment, my web of time he wove. And ah, the dews of sorrow were luster'd with his love. I'll bless the hand that guides it, I'll bless the heart that plans, When thrones where glory dwells in Emmanuel's land. Don't you agree? This doctrine removes sadness. The depth, our third point. I need to move on. You know, the remarkable thing, and it's kind of a mysterious thing to us, that it even includes in its compass the evil deeds of men. That's what Joseph says. It was not you that sent me hither, but God. Now Joseph does not deny the evil of his brothers and the hatred of his brothers. He says in verse 4, he says, you sold me into Egypt. It was an act of great wickedness. You meant it for evil. You can't be excused for that. But God sent me. So, let's remember that too. Later on, Genesis chapter 50, he repeats that he says, as for you, you thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good to bring to pass as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now don't you think, Harangueche, that this is a wonderful doctrine? and a comforting doctrine. I can make it transparent to you as maybe I would like to and in a sense I don't want to do because God does not do that to us in the Bible. The Bible doesn't say that there are two opposite wills in conflict and collision. The will of God and the will of men and sometimes God's will Well, that's how it is. People say that sometimes God's will gets thwarted, frustrated by man's will. That's not what the Bible says. But the Bible says that man's will is like a wheel. It moves freely. But around that wheel, there is a greater wheel, an invincible wheel. And as the will of man moves, it accomplishes, unknowingly perhaps, the holy will of God. Without God being the author of sin, God's will is carried out without God ever condoning the evil. the wickedness of man. That's the depth of the providence of God. And you say, Pastor, I don't understand that. I hope you don't understand it. I hope you don't understand it. When these ten brothers sold their brother Joseph into Egypt, God hated their sin. And yet the Bible teaches that God rules all things. but that even the most wicked men may carry out God's holy, sovereign will, without God being the author of sin. I was reading yesterday morning in my study Romans 9, beginning at verse 15, where Paul teaches the same thing. He says, God rules over all. God has mercy on whom he will have mercy, and he has compassion on whom he will have compassion. So then it is not of him that wills, nor of him that runs, but of God who shows mercy. And then he illustrates it with Pharaoh. of whom the Bible says that God raised up Pharaoh for this purpose, that the Lord might show his power in Pharaoh and that his name might be declared throughout all the earth. And then Paul says, I know what you want to say now. Paul says, you will say unto me, why does God yet find fault for who has resisted his will? That is, if evil men are doing the will of God, How can God then complain about them doing something wrong? That's what Paul says. Why? Why does God yet find fault? For who has resisted his will? And then the Apostle says, Nay, O man, who are you that you reply against God? That is to say we are frail and mortal creatures. We see in tiny glimpses, we see in fragments and we are speaking about the infinite God who is able to work in ways that we do not understand it. But if you want to know the proof that this is true, you only have to think of the worst evil thing that ever happened in the world. What was it? The death, not of Joseph, but of the Son of God, Son of Mary, Jesus. How did that come about? And the Bible makes it clear. Judas betrayed him. And the wickedness of the high priest Caiaphas was involved. And the envy and the malice of the Jews and the weakness of Pontius Pilate, they took Christ and they put him to death. And the Bible says also that those men did exactly what God had ordained. should be done. Peter put it like that on the day of Pentecost, when he said to him, that is Jesus being delivered by the determinants, counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain. So there, through Simon Peter, Christ, just like Joseph, was telling his brothers, and he is telling Peter was telling the Jews there, you did it and what you did was evil. But God ruled and God controlled in such a glorious way. God sent me before you, Joseph said. And he's saying that to us this morning, congregation. Each one of us has done wickedly, me included, you included. And yet God's providence has guided everything in such a way that Christ today from heaven says, God sends me before you. The wondrous doctrine of providence that removes sorrow, that God works even in the depths and the heights. And there is no depth too deep in your life, but the hand of God is in it for the believer. That's what Paul says in Romans 11. Oh, the depth of the knowledge and of the riches of the wisdom of God, especially on the cross. Our sin, God's purpose. Our sin, God's salvation. But God raised His Son and in Him saves. And then the thing with which I'll close, and I'll try to do it, that it includes deliverance. Because Joseph said, he sent me before you for what reason? To preserve your posterity and to save your lives by a great deliverance. That's the wonder of this truth. And Joseph even says to his brother, don't be angry now, don't be grieved, for it's God that sent me. What a type Joseph was in this regard of Christ's congregation, who through his Holy Spirit teaches us these very things. And he says to you and to me, in whatever circumstances we may ever be, that we feel so down, he says, let not your hearts be troubled. Ye believe in God, believe also in me, Jesus says. Be of good cheer. God is working all things. for good. Be gone sadness, come gladness. Believe this truth. Embrace this comfort and have your fill of souls. No hair can fall from your head without the will of my Heavenly Father. Your fiery trial is producing some good. all things ordered by God's fatherly hands. It may be that you don't see it today and that you drive home and say, well, he can preach this afternoon too. I'm not coming to church because I just don't see it. But Joseph said, God sent me to preserve you. That's what Christ is saying to you at the close of this sermon. There is this doctrine that drives away all sadness. But this doctrine belongs to the believers in Christ. If you are not a believer in Christ, it won't help you. Repent and believe. Come to the Lord Jesus and learn this lesson. Be not grieved. God sent me, Jesus, to preserve your life. And then you'll look back and you'll begin to see it. And you'll submit to the providence of God. And you need not be grieved, but you may be joyful. in the Lord. And you may trust His wisdom at every inch of your life, today, tomorrow, unto all eternity. His wisdom, says the hymn writer, ever waketh. His sight is never dim. He knows the way He taketh. and I shall walk with him. Amen.