Go down and buy grain for us there, that we may live and not die. So ten of Joseph's brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt. But Jacob did not send Benjamin, Joseph's brother, with his brothers, for he feared that harm might happen to him. Thus the sons of Israel came to buy among the others who came, for the famine was in the land of Canaan. Now Joseph was governor over the land. He was the one who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph's brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke roughly to them. Where do you come from, he said. They said, from the land of Canaan, to buy food. And Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them, and he said to them, you are spies. You have come to see the nakedness of the land. They said to him, no, my lord, your servants have come to buy food. We are all sons of one man. We are honest men. Your servants have never been spies. He said to them, no, it is the nakedness of the land that you have come to see. And they said, we, your servants, are 12 brothers, the sons of one man in the land of Canaan. And behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is no more. But Joseph said to them, it is as I said to you, you are spies. By this you shall be tested. By the life of Pharaoh, you shall not go from this place unless your youngest brother comes here. Send one of you, and let him bring your brother, while you remain confined, that your words may be tested, whether there is truth in you. Or else, by the life of Pharaoh, surely you are spies. And he put them all together in custody for three days. On the third day, Joseph said to them, do this, and you will live, for I fear God. If you are honest men, let one of your brothers remain confined where you are in custody. and let the rest go and carry grain for the famine of your households, and bring your youngest brother to me. So your words will be verified, and you shall not die.' And they did so. Then they said to one another, in truth, we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us, and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.' And Reuben answered them, did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood.' They did not know that Joseph understood them, for there was an interpreter between them. Then he turned away from them and wept. And he returned to them and spoke to them. And he took Simeon from them and bound him before their eyes. And Joseph gave orders to fill their bags with grain, and to replace every man's money in his sack, and to give them provisions for the journey. This was done for them. Then they loaded their donkeys with their grain and departed. And as one of them opened his sack to give his donkey fodder at the lodging place, he saw his money in the mouth of his sack. He said to his brothers, my money has been put back. Here it is in the mouth of my sack. At this their hearts failed them, and they turned, trembling to one another, saying, what is this that God has done to us? When they came to Jacob their father in the land of Canaan, they told him all that had happened to them, saying, The man, the lord of the land, spoke roughly to us, and took us to be spies of the land. But we said to him, we are honest men. We have never been spies. We are 12 brothers, sons of our father. One is no more, and the youngest is this day with our father in the land of Canaan. Then the man, the lord of the land, said to us, by this I shall know that you are honest men. Leave one of your brothers with me, and take grain for the famine of your households, and go your way. Bring the youngest brother to me, then I shall know that you are not spies, but honest men. And I will deliver your brother to you, and you shall trade in the land.' As they emptied their sacks, behold, every man's bundle of money was in his sack. And when they and their father saw their bundles of money, they were afraid. And Jacob their father said to them, you have bereaved me of my children. Joseph is no more, and Simeon is no more. And now you would take Benjamin. All this has come against me. Then Reuben said to his father, kill my two sons if I do not bring him back to you. Put him in my hands and I will bring him back to you. But he said, my son shall not go down with you, for his brother is dead and he is the only one left. If harm should happen to him on the journey that you are to make, you would bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol. May God bless the reading of his word. You may be seated. In submission to the Lord and in recognition that If I get up here without the power of the Holy Spirit, you'll hear babbling. You do not want to hear what I have to say. You want to hear from the Lord. Let's go to the Lord one more time. Heavenly Father, I thank you that you have given your revealed word. You have given me the opportunity to study this by the power of your spirit this week. I pray that you would now give me by the power of the Holy Spirit the unction to preach this with power, power meaning that it's your spirit that gives the words, your spirit that does the work in our hearts, that we might be changed, that we might be made humble, that we might recognize who you are. In Christ's name we pray, amen. Well, the message titled this morning is recognizing our sin by our admission. And as you just heard, we're taking on all of chapter 42, we're not actually going to Although we read all of chapter two, we're not going to take it all on. We won't be able to if we did so. We would be here for quite a while. But this morning, I'd like to change it up a little bit. Normally, I start off with a question that allows us to kind of get into the shallow end of the pool and kind of wade into it and then get a feel for what's going on and then figure out how God is applying this to our lives. Well, this morning I want to walk you to the deep end of the pool with the question I ask, and see if we can't go a little deeper than normal in my question. So the question I pose you is, what does it usually take for you, you personally, not anyone else, you personally, to recognize and admit your sin? And what I'd like to do as you're pondering that and you're thinking about your own personal experiences, to give you an escalating idea of what it looks like. There are internal mechanisms that God has given us as human beings, and then there is external things that are placed upon us that God brings into our lives to bring this to bear, to bring us to a place where we recognize our sin. So see where you land, and if you're like me, you've hit these at different times. Unfortunately, you've gone way down the list a couple of times, and sometimes you've done well, and by God's grace, you've hit it right away. So let's start off with three internal means. You know and love God's law and immediately recognize that your sin is in opposition to it. So boom, got it. I'm out of line. I need to get in line. I need to repent. How about this one? The next step. You sense the shame. Shame is the feeling associated with the guilt. Guilt is a legal standing. Shame is an emotion tied to the legal standing. Shame is God's pursuing grace in the form of an emotion. If the cognitive doesn't take place, typically they're together, but if it doesn't, then God works in and through us by way of the shame that it brings us to the point where we go, ah, I feel the weight of this. I feel the shame of this. How about number three? That you see the hurt you caused in someone else. So you may not recognize it, but you look into the eyes of the ones you injured and you go, ah, whether it's a child, a best friend, a spouse. And so those are all the internal mechanism guides give us, and there's more. How about let's take a look at four external. Someone explains to you that you've sinned. You don't realize it, you're ignorant to it, and someone comes up to you and says, hey, do you realize that you did this? And you're like, wow, I did not. Please forgive me. How about, you know you did it. And so now the person comes confronting you. Hey, this is a rebuke. You did it, and you need to ask forgiveness. And that's a good and gracious thing, because it draws us back to God. as well as reconciling our relationship with the individual. Now the heat starts to turn up a little bit. What about when God brings a set of circumstances so you have to live in the mess you made by your way of your sin? Or maybe you live in the mess that you've made for the other person when you sinned. You start to experience some of the shame you foisted upon them by some means, and you start to realize, wow, I really didn't see this, but man, now that I'm walking this path, whew, I am way out of line. And lastly, the worst part of this, I mean, just to rock your world, when you start to feel the consequence in the form of God's punishment, his disciplining grace, where you start to feel the weight of it. And we're gonna see what that looks like today in our story. Today is a sanctification message. It's a message that God is bringing to us so that we can better know his heart as a loving father. And we better know our own hearts as people that are prone not to recognize our sinfulness. And we need to learn to do that. And hopefully we'll do that more and more quickly as we move through this beautiful opportunity we have to live on this earth with Christ. imaging Christ, and that is the power of His Holy Spirit working in and through us. So if you've got your bulletin on the back, I put down some of the processes that God is going to use on an external level to walk Joseph's brothers through this. But there's a, you can see there that there's the main point there, and the main point is this, of this passage. And this is why we need to take the whole passage, because the whole passage is dealing with this. It is, God will use whatever means necessary, internal and external, to bring his children, that's key, his covenant children, to the acknowledgement of our sins, and it's for the purpose of reconciliation. It's not punishment. It's for discipline to bring us back into reconciliation with God, and we're gonna see today with Joseph and his brothers. So our first point that we're dealing with here is we see God is using a famine. So if he's using a famine, famine's not within, famine is something external. The sons have had 20 years to deal with the internal guilt of their sin. And there's been no indication of any confession. And now God is bringing about the external. So we find it interesting that God's famine providentially drove Jacob to send his sons to Egypt into the hands of Joseph. Now this is fascinating because 20 years earlier, When Joseph was a 17-year-old kid, Jacob sent Joseph into the hands of his brothers, and we know how they dealt with him. They brought him into slavery. So we're seeing a reversal. We're starting to see the consequences of what they've done. Now they are in Joseph's hands, though they don't know it. After carrying the guilt of their sins for 20 years, Joseph's brothers are about to be forced to face their sins. And they're being driven there by a sovereign God using his sovereign means. They are ultimately in the hands of God. And when we see what he is doing, the orchestration of the events, you can't help but realize, oh, this is definitely the hand of God. It's ironic that God would use the beginnings of a physical famine in the land to drive his brothers, Joseph's brothers, to a place where they would recognize, interesting, God is so amazing. All of this play back and forth with the words. The brothers are in a spiritual famine, 20 year long spiritual famine, never having dealt with their sins. And this is what he is doing. He is driving them again to deal with it. I have to wonder, first I start with myself, but how many of us are self-deceived or blind in some area of our life? Sin. Self-deceived, we don't want to look at it. We like whatever that sin is. Or blind, we don't even realize that, you know what, that really doesn't line up with God's word. And if it doesn't line up with God's word, that's called lawlessness. That's called sinning. And I've taken a sin and made it a respectable sin. I've said, oh, it's okay to do that because X, Y, and Z, my buddies over here are doing it, or what culture says I can do that. Where have we done this before? How have we fallen short? What will be required of God in our situation? What kind of famine-like hardship or difficulty would be the loving thing for God to bring into our lives, to break us of either those hidden sins that nobody knows and only you know, or those respectable sins that we have come accustomed to and we just accept in our lives. Well, we see next here, God is bringing about a ruse. And for those of you who may not be familiar with that word, we used to use ruses in law enforcement. You would set up a situation where a criminal would think that there's an opportunity to do something bad, and they would They would take that opportunity to do something bad, all the while the purpose was to catch the guy doing what we know he's been doing, we just haven't caught him yet. So we've created a circumstance, an opportunity, just an opportunity, we haven't entrapped him, an opportunity for him to demonstrate his propensity in this area. A ruse is something that paints itself to be, it looks one way, but it's actually something else going on. That's what we see God doing here. It's a cleverly devised set of events designed for a purpose. And we already know what the purpose is. The purpose is to change the heart of the brothers. So let's take a look at, see how God does this through this ruse. I'm actually going to read some more of the verses now because this particular area is packed with, this paragraph is it. This is where it lies in identifying everything that's going on. So let's dig in a little more deeply than we did in the first five verses. It says, now Joseph was the governor over the land. He was the one who sold all the people of the land and Joseph's brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. All right, so we see, again, it starts off with, wait a second, this is the fulfillment of the dream. Joseph is raised, he's exalted. The dream said he'd be put in a place where he would rule and reign over his brothers, and his brothers would bow to him. Okay, so this portion starts off making sure the Israelite listening audience recognizes this isn't happenstance. This isn't random. These are orchestrated events for a purpose. And we go, okay, we're starting to see the fulfillment. And really, we sit there and we go, wow, 20-year gap here. We've been tracking with Joseph during the 20-year gap, and we know what he was doing. Now, we've got the brothers back in the picture. Okay, let's see how God uses all of these moving parts to bring about this change, this recognition of their hearts. One of the things we have to get in mind, or we're gonna miss the value of this portion of the scripture, is if I back up, and don't try to turn in there, you won't get there in time, because I'm just gonna say the verse, and then you can look it up later if you'd like, but it's Genesis 37, 29 to 32. And this is the actual dealings with Joseph at the pit, when his brothers are betraying him. So listen to this, Genesis 37, 29 to 32. When Reuben returned to the pit, and saw that Joseph was not in the pit, He tore his clothes and returned to his brothers and said, the boy is gone and where shall I go? It's interesting that even there it was all about him. He's trying to be restored in his father's eyes, not change his art. be restored in his father's eyes. I need to be back in the top of the order that I lost. I lost my primary position as the brothers. My pecking order has been lost. My birthright has been lost because I've disgraced. So we see that lost. And interesting, we'll see at the very last verse how you see the shallowness of Ruben's attempt to right the situation with his father. And it just misses. Basically, here, I'll give it to you. I'll let you kill my two sons if I don't bring him back. Really? That's your idea of a good plan? You can kill my children as a father? Uh-uh. No. So you can see how twisted Reuben still is. He's still missing it this whole way through. This continues on. Then they took Joseph's robe. Let me make sure I'm in the right place. And let me start with 30. And we turned to his brothers and said, the boy is gone and where shall I go? Verse 31. Then they took Joseph's robe. Remember, this is a robe of many colors, or this is a robe, we looked at it, possibly means that it's a full sleeved robe. That would be what royalty would wear. In any case, it's a very identifiable robe. They took Joseph's robe and slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. And they sent the robe of many colors and brought it to their father and said, This is like they're holding out to him. This we have found. Please, Nikar, please identify. Please identify whether it is your son's robe or not. Well, this is the verb we're going to get into here that would have taken the Israelites back immediately. They're sticking this in front of their dad and saying, they know exactly whose it is. What a cruel act. Identify if this is your son's, not our brother's, if this is your son's robe or not. Please recognize it. Now we have that picture going on. Now you'll start to understand what the recognition and what's going on in our passage today. So Joseph's brothers had tricked their father Jacob into recognizing a lie for the truth. Because what does Jacob say when he sees a robe? A wild animal must have torn my son. They said they just found it. They came upon it and it's there and there's blood, it's gotta be a wild animal. So now they have made a lie appear as the truth in Jacob's mind. Jacob may have properly identified Joseph's robe, but he did not recognize the truth of the matter. There is a hidden lie going on. Jacob's sons had sold their brother and the consequence, in other words, the appropriate suffering for the sin, is actually upon their father. They don't experience the consequences of their sin, their father does by the incredible, think about this, anyone who's a parent, the incredible loss of a child. That's what he is grieving. The mother that bore the child, he has already grieved her death and now he grieves. He only has one of the two children left from this mother to carry the memory of his mother and now this lost child. This is what they project on their father. They take the consequences of their sin and they bring the shame of that and they place the shame on dad. Dad is overwhelmed with grief. Dad is lost to figure out why is this happening? Now it is God who will bring about the recognizing of the truth. Jacob didn't recognize the truth. God's going to bring the recognizing of the truth upon the brothers. So let's see how this happens. Verse seven, now armed with all this information, Joseph saw his brothers and recognized, your text says, niqar, the same thing. He recognizes, okay, he's getting an idea of what's going on. And then your Bible, if you're tracking with the ESV, says he recognized them, but he treated them like strangers. Not a big fan of that translation. Not a big fan of that translation because what happens is it's verb, niqar, verb, niqar. And the car has really, we have a few words in our language that do this, it has opposite end meanings. One means to recognize, there's a few meanings in between, acknowledge, identify, we saw that earlier. But on the far end of the spectrum, it means to disguise. So listen to it this way, Joseph saw his brothers and he disguised himself. He's dressed like an Egyptian. He's already disguised. So what is he disguising? He's disguising his demeanor, and we're going to see that. In fact, I like the way the King James Version says it. It says, he made himself strange. So the King James Version, takes that word disguise and synthesizes it a little bit so we can figure out what he's doing. He's made himself, his demeanor, strange so that they can't know it. He recognizes them, they don't recognize him. That's the key going on here. In fact, I just wanted to give you one other. The new English translation reads it this way. He pretended to be a stranger. So you get the idea of what's going on here. I like that it emphasizes what Joseph is doing versus the ESV seems to emphasize the stranger's kind of a version of it. Okay, let's continue on. And how did he describe himself or how did he make himself strange? He does so by speaking roughly, in other words, in a strict, harsh manner to them. Remember, last time he's seen him was a 17-year-old kid in a patriarchal family. Pecking order, where you stand is a big deal. Think the little brother's ever able to talk that way to his brothers? Uh-uh. And they'd put him in his place that fast. So they haven't seen this, or if they have, they dealt with it right away. So this will create distance so that there's a misunderstanding of identity, which is on purpose. In God's timing, they will recognize. So we continue on here. Now I'm going to project the, I'm going to do some voice inflection to give you the idea of the harshness and the strangeness. Where do you come from, he said. They said, from the land of Canaan, to buy food. Keep in mind, we're going to keep seeing that, buy, buy, buy. Why are they saying buy? We'll continue on. And Joseph recognized his brothers, but they did not recognize him. What is Moses doing? He's saying to the Israel listening audience, if you didn't catch it by way of what our language does by putting the verbs together, right next to each other, there's no words in between them in the Hebrew, then you're gonna see it. You're gonna recognize that recognition is the gist of this passage, is what I'm trying to get across to you by way of putting that verb twice in the sentence. That's what's happening here. So it's again, it's a reminder. We can look at this passage and go, oh, this is really about recognizing and who's doing the recognizing, who's making the recognition possible. So we continue on. And Joseph recognized his brothers and they did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them. And he said, you are spies. I want to pause here for a second. Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dream. There's like a pause. It's a paragraph break, but we get the idea that it's one of those pauses where Pharaoh's looking at Joseph. He's looking around and none of his magicians, none of the people who are supposed to be able to interpret can do anything. Who's he going to go to? Where is he going to turn to to bring about a change in the famine situation that he's looking at. And he looks and he says, Spirit of God is in you, as he's pointing to Joseph. God has shown you what's going on here, two references to God. It is because of this that you are able to discern and of your wisdom or you are wise, he says. He recognizes all that. Joseph has the Spirit of God in him. What I want you to catch is, don't think this ruse is a human-led ruse. He, Joseph, is working under the unction, under the power, under the wisdom, under the driving wisdom of God to create a ruse that will do what God intends it to do. So we go, okay, God's fingerprints are all over this. And we're kind of heightened to go, okay, How does this connect now? I want to see this. This isn't just something he whipped up, and this is not revenge. That's a biggie. The harshness isn't, hey, you treated me, you know, poor. I'm going to treat you that way. Uh-uh. Remember, we just saw. It was to disguise. So we get this. I don't know about you, but I'm wanting to attract this and say, man, what are you going to do next? What is God going to have you do? And Joseph remembered the dream that he had dreamed of them and said to them, you are spies. You have come to see the nakedness of the land." Interesting. There's a metaphorical statement right there, the nakedness of the land. The idea is you've come to scout out the vulnerability of the land. The land is vulnerable because it's under famine. There is a lack of food. And where is the food now? It's all in storehouses. If you can get the storehouse as an enemy, you got the goods. And you're in a good place. So we start to see that the accusation of spies isn't how we think of espionage. We want to take over Egypt so much, although there is a disloyalty to Egypt in that statement of spies. It's, no, no, no. We want to steal your resources. And you're going to see that theme of stealing work its way through here. So let's continue on. You have come to see the nakedness of the land, verse 10. Then they said to him, no, my Lord, your servants have come to buy food. Do you hear that buy again? You're kind of suggesting by us being spies that we've come to steal. We're backing this up. We're justifying our actions by saying to you, no, no, no, we've come to buy, which by the way, it's true. It is true, but there's something going on at a deeper level. It's not this event that is only in focus. It's the event from 20 years prior. And he's aligning them. He's causing them to overlap so that they see some things. They see, they're drawn back into the similarities. They said to him, no, my lord, your servants have come to buy food. We are all sons of one man. We are honest men. Now, this is where, if you're the Israelite listening audience, This is the laughable moment, where honest men, first they plotted the murder of their brother, and then one of their brothers said, eh, let's just sell him. What kind of wickedness is that? I guess if you're trying to use relativism, it's a little better. But really, the evilness of your heart, let's get a little profit off this. We don't need to kill him. That'd be too much weight on us, as far as guilt goes. We'll just sell him. We're talking, really? We are honest men? And that's what we are supposed to do in this. And this is the hypocrisy of where we find them. Do you see what God is doing to their hearts by having these questions posed on them? They have to process their hypocrisy. It's the same thing God does with us in our sin, when he has to bring the external situations. We hear from our mouth something stupid. Have you ever done that? And you go, or you might get the look from your wife or your spouse or whatever it happens to be, and like, did you just say that? And you're like, gosh, I can't believe the ramifications of those words. If I could just get them back, that's stupid thinking. This is what God is doing in their hearts. Let me give you Genesis 40, 14 to 15, to give us a little more context of what's going on, to bring out the richness of the passage. It says this, and this is Joseph pleading, and I say pleading, he's just, it is a plea, but it's not like he's down on his knees or anything. He's pleading to, he's making a plea to the cupbearer. He has just told him his dream. He knows that his head is going to be spared. while the baker's head is not going to be spared. And so he is making a case for him to do something. So let's listen to this. We pick it up here. Verse 14 of Genesis 40, only remember me when it is well with you. In other words, when you're restored back into the kingdom, and please do me the kindness to mention to me, mention me, excuse me, to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house. He's talking about Potiphar's house and a section of Potiphar's house, which is the prison area. It's not pleasant in the prison area. Verse 15, now listen to this, this is so key that you understand the spies and the spies are not espionage spies. These are spies looking to scout out, to steal from the storehouses. For I indeed was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews. Who was he stolen by? His brothers. Interesting, he sees his brothers of having stolen him out of the land and sold them to the traitors who brought them to Egypt. So now we started to see the connection with spies and the thinking of the stealing. For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews and here also I have done nothing that they should put me in the pit. A ruse is being created here. A set of circumstances is being orchestrated by God that they're going to be charged, they're going to be accused of doing something they didn't do. Do you see the connection back to what Joseph? They would start to make these connections slowly. It's going to take a little bit of an imprisonment. A few days in prison might get you thinking just right. So let's look at the objective of the ruse. The elements, we saw harshness or strictness in the way he interacted with them. We saw him questioning them. Where'd you come from? When he says that, and they say, Canaan, he's basically saying, you're not one of us. You're probably one of our enemies. He's challenging their loyalty, which is something that a brother should be loyal to another brother and maybe not sell him. Tracking here with me? OK. So they've got harshness, they've got, as part of these elements of this ruse, harshness, questioning, and then the accusation, you're spies. That's what you are. All of these are designed to draw the brothers' minds back to their mind-boggling betrayal. That's what this is all about. And what does he do? He says, okay. You're spies, and I'm looking now in verses 12 through 17. We start to see the test. We're spies. I'm going to put you through a test. And in verse 15 it says, by this you shall be tested by the life of Pharaoh. You shall not go from this place unless your youngest brother comes here. Send one of you and let him bring your brother while you remain, the plural you. You all are going to be there. You're going to stay in prison, confined, and I'm going to let one brother go. And it's interesting, I've read this so many times and thought, you know, this is Joseph figuring this out. He's kind of figuring it out on the fly. He kind of, oops, got that one wrong, so he changes it. No, no, he doesn't get anything wrong. This is God working sovereignly to bring about things in the hearts of the men. There is no mistake. He's going to flip it, the numbers. He's going to end up in a minute here and say, okay, I've changed. One stays and the rest of the brothers go. But right now, you guys have to pick one and everyone else is going to stay. So that's what we see as far as the initial part of the test. He's going to test to see if there's any truth in them or else you are all spies. And then he puts them in custody for three days. And now think about this. This is a pack of lying, betraying thieves. They're going to be in the same cell, the same dungeon area together for three days. They don't know how long it is, but they're going to be there. They're going to be squabbling. They're going to be trying to figure out, get this, remember only one's going to go. Okay, who's the most righteous among us that's actually going to go home and get Benjamin and come back to save everybody else. You're looking around at your brothers that you came up with, you plotted with a plan to murder and then you plotted with a plan to sell. I'm gonna trust you? I'm going to trust you?" Everyone would be back in their corners, kind of back by the wall going, I don't trust any of you actually. Anyone that could do what I did is not trustworthy. This is the dilemma that they're faced with, with all of them being in there. It's a pack of thieves having to agree on who is going to go free to save everybody else. Yeah, my bet's not on that one. But you can see what God is doing in the midst of this. The futility of this. Think about how many screaming arguments, I don't trust you. Oh, I'll go, I'll be okay. You can trust me, wink, wink. It would have been, what an event in there in that time. And three days of it. It's interesting. It says three days. We know that Joseph, after Potiphar's wife accusation, went in prison. And then it says for some time. And then we learn that all of a sudden we've got the baker and the cupbearer show up. And they're there for two years before the cupbearer remembers because of Pharaoh's dream, the birthday party, and all that other stuff, and he goes and gets them. I have a sneaky suspicion, this is just speculation, that that first section of time before the cupbearer and the baker show up is actually a year. I think he pulls a situation where one day in prison, for every year of my imprisonment." We've seen that before. It sounded like the land of Exodus, their unfaithfulness when they had to represent the 40 years, one day for each year. Anyway, I don't know that very...it just...when I was reading this, I thought, that's interesting. All we know for sure is that it was more than two years, sometime plus two years. Okay. So we continue on. Now we see the driven to an acknowledgment of sin. And we're getting in verses 18 to 26. And it says there, For I fear God." Well, this is big. This is important. Don't blow this over, then think, oh, well, they're looking at this going, big deal, you're an Egyptian. That means nothing to me. Remember, Abraham, he goes to the land of Egypt, he's with his wife, and he fears that they did not, because of his fear that they didn't fear God, he says, oh, yeah, she's my sister. Isaac shows up on scene, he's in Gerar, he sees Ambimelech, the king over the Philistines, he sees that there's no fear of God here, and he says, eh, my wife's actually, he doesn't say my wife, but he tells them she's my sister. Same thing his father does. They are terrified of people that don't have the fear of God. Joseph just said I have the fear of God. In other words, what Joseph is saying, you can trust me, Now, I don't know how they process that, but the Jews, the Hebrews, the Hebrew listening audience, the Israelites would get that. This is a twist as they start to see, really? Okay, so we continue on. If you are honest men, let one of your brothers remain confined where you are in custody. Ah, okay. Now we get to stage two of the ruse. Not a mistake that all the numbers are switched. No, no, no, no. Now he says, OK, let one of your brothers remain confined while you are in custody. The idea there is we're going to leave someone. You guys are going to decide who's going to be left behind. And I'm going to let all you go. In other words, he's testing the heart. Are you going to come back? Are you trustworthy? You betrayed me 20 years ago. You were willing to betray a brother unto Egypt. Are you willing to allow this other brother to die? Wow. And he's also, interestingly enough, we see an act of grace because he says, and let the rest go and carry grain for the famine of your household. How much more grain can the other brothers carry versus one brother carry back to the family? Isn't that an interesting act of grace that is going on here? So we sit there and we go, wow, look what's going on. And then we see that Simeon is left behind, he's bound up. We see just right before that, Joseph weeps. What does Joseph weep about? Listen to what they say right after they receive the act of grace that the majority of brothers are going to bring back grain. It says this, in truth, these are the brothers, it says, in truth, we, plural, all of us, they were all talking, Where am I? In truth, we are guilty concerning our brother in that we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us. And we're left realizing that Joseph, when he hears this, because he understands their words spoken in Hebrew, he weeps. Joseph is not a brother that is outside of the ability to express the love again for his brothers, the forgiveness of his brothers. All the chaos of the emotion, the betrayal, the fact that they finally admit what they did, that had to overwhelm him. He turns so that they can't see him. And he weeps. Put yourself in that situation. Are you willing to forgive even the deepest of cuts, of wounds? And finally, we see that they are driven to tremble at God's righteous wrath. For when they unload their donkeys, they see that one of the brothers has their pack that is now got money in it. Why is that such a big deal? My pack is here with money and all the grain is here with money. If I'm a police officer and I come to you and you got the booty and you got the money to pay for the booty, you got a problem. You got one too many things. You can't have the money. You're a thief. All of a sudden they realized they have been framed They now stand in the position as thieves. And oh my goodness, what a scary place to be. And they even say to this, what is this that God has done to us? In other words, they recognize that they are going to be identified as thieves. They recognize that it's God's hand in orchestrating all this. They're not gonna be able to get out of this. They are perceiving that God is bringing righteousness on them. That's why it says that their hearts failed. Everything just spins all of a sudden into focus, and they realize this is an imprisonment sentence to us. We either abandon him as dead, Simeon, or we're going to have to come back and face imprisonment for the rest of our lives. Do you see the test that's now going on in their hearts? The brothers finally recognize, different than the way we Christians do, but they finally recognize what it means to fear God. This is a God that is not blind to their sin. This is a God that will deal with their unrighteousness. We don't fear God because Jesus Christ has already dealt with our unrighteousness. We see this and we see the terror that enters their hearts. After 20 years of their failed internal means of recognizing their sins, God's steadfast love, his covenantal love, his loyal love was exercised through these external means. He brings a famine, he brings a ruse, he brings a test all into their lives to bring his children to a place that they recognize their sin. He's doing it out of covenantal love. He's not doing it to punish them. We need to make those connections in our own life. God's intent was to reconcile this family back to each other and ultimately reconcile this family to himself. He has promised to make a nation of them. Interesting, he's promised to make a nation. God has never broken a promise. Do you see the importance of knowing God's promises? He will make sure that his promises are fulfilled. He is making sure that now he needs the family reconciled so the family will be a nation eventually. So let me ask you this question. What is the depth of our Father's love? And I'm talking about our heavenly Father's love. How far would he go to reconcile us back to him? He's willing to have his son, his only begotten son, die for us. And it is a gruesome, the most gruesome death that was known to the civilized world at that time. This is how far God would go. What about Jesus? How far is he willing to go? Well, what's interesting is we see Jacob unwittingly, he doesn't know that he's taking on the consequences of the son's sins. Jesus doesn't go into this unwittingly. Jesus goes into this knowingly. He knows. He is just like Jacob. The Bible refers to him, Isaiah calls him a man of sorrow. Jesus knows before he goes into his role as Savior that he will be a man of sorrow. Listen to this, Isaiah 53.3, he was despised and rejected by men. Sounds a little bit like Joseph being rejected by his brothers. a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as one from whom men hide their faces. They are shamed by him and what he has done. The world has created a lie against him. He deserves to be crucified. He doesn't deserve to be crucified. Everyone else deserves to be crucified. And as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised. And listen to this, Isaiah says, he changes the, the pronoun here and says, and we esteemed him not. And yet Jesus is the covenant-keeping Son of God who kept his promise to the Father. Listen to Revelation 5.9. Listen to this promise fulfilled. And they sang a new song, saying, worthy are you to take the scroll, to open its seals, for you were slain. Who was slain? Jesus Christ. For you were slain, and by your blood you have ransomed people for God, for your Father. You fulfilled the promise you made to your Father, for every tribe, excuse me, from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. Praise be to God. This is the love of God the Father towards us when we stray, when we aren't willing to recognize our sinfulness. God, through the person and sacrificial work of his only begotten Son, Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the appointed one, the Savior, has gone to the ultimate extreme in order to pay the price for our sin, that we might recognize our sin, and I'm speaking to Christian and non-Christian alike, if you're not a Christian, you need to repent, and if you are a Christian, you need to repent. One is unto salvation, the other is unto staying without a hindrance of sin in relationship to our God that has done so much to us. Both of us need to repent of our sins and believe afresh, anew, the promise of salvation that Christ brings us. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Oh, Heavenly Father, what a beautiful picture. What a beautiful picture of your love despite the rebellion of our hearts, our proclivity to run, our proclivity to want what we want, to define happiness, to define delight outside of you, our Savior, you, our Creator, and yet you pursue us. You pursue us internally, you pursue us externally, you will not allow us to go on. We may backslide for a season, but you pursue. It is your faithfulness that gives us the joy, the gratitude to say, please, sanctify us. Do the work that you intend for your glory, and ultimately I can say, and we can say, for our good. It's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.