When the Bible describes men, it does not hide the warts. It shows us the failures of Abraham, the great sins of David and Solomon, the lapses of Peter, the breakdowns of Moses and Elijah. The Bible does not paint idealised portraits of people who then seem to us without fault. Apart from Christ Himself, there are two men in Scripture that the Holy Spirit chose to describe in ways that seem to show little to no blemish on their lives. We know these two men were sinners, but God chose to record them in such a way that we see no major flaws, falls or lapses in their lives. Those two men are Daniel and Joseph. A few years ago, we studied the life of Daniel, and today we embark upon a study of the life of Joseph.

Why study Joseph? For at least three reasons.

First, Joseph is a major step in the history of Israel and redemptive history. He is the key link between the desert tribe of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the nation of Israel of 3 million people. Just like the book of Acts gets us from Israel to the church, from the Gospels to the Epistles, so Joseph explains how you go from some nomads in Canaan, to an entire nation of people that God supernaturally delivers and leads. The Exodus is the moment which Israel looks back to as proof of their calling, the Passover to this day recalls that moment of miraculous intervention. How did God set that up, so that a nation could be separate from other nations, and yet grow strong in the womb of Egypt, and yet leave it and migrate all at once into another land? That has never been heard of in the history of the world. Joseph is the key actor in that move of God.

A second reason for studying Joseph is that he is perhaps the best illustration of how God sovereignly controls events, and yet holds man responsible for his actions. The verse that so many of us know in the New Testament, Romans 8:28, says And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. (Rom 8:28) But in Joseph’s life we have the Old Testament version of that verse, when at the end of the book of Genesis, he can summarise all that has happened to his brothers by saying, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive. (Gen 50:20) In other words, Joseph’s life is an illustration of providence: God ruling over all events, controlling, providing, protecting, preventing, permitting.

A third reason for studying Joseph’s life is that he is a wonderful picture of Christ. We have here a man disbelieved by his brothers, betrayed for the price of a slave, sent into Egypt, unfairly accused, condemned with two men, vindicated and exalted to the throne, and many others. As we study Joseph, we will see so many uncanny similarities between Him and the Messiah, Jesus.

So as we study the life of Joseph, we are actually studying three things. We are studying redemptive history, the story of how God has saved His people. We are studying the doctrine of providence and human responsibility. And we are studying our Lord Jesus Christ, pictured and foreshadowed in this remarkable man.

Today, I want us to begin by looking at Joseph’s beginnings – his family and upbringing, and influences. The world has a very contradictory and false view of how family shapes us. On the one hand, they want to tell us that we can create our own reality, and we can fly, if we just believe in ourselves. They want us to believe the myth of the autonomous individual. On the other hand, when we don’t fly, or we make a mess of our lives, suddenly everything shifts from our own autonomous wills to our families, and they become the reason we did what we did. He ended up in prison because his father was absent. She is chronically depressed because her mother was cold and distant. He is a dropout because his father never disciplined him. She is insecure because her father never showed her any affection. So which is it? Are we these perfectly independent creatures who can do anything we dream about if we simply choose to, or are we victims of our past, doomed to walk the course that was charted for us by the actions of our parents, our siblings, our relatives? Are we gods, or are we broken victims?

The Bible, in the story of Joseph says, you are neither. In the family life of Joseph, in his upbringing, we are going to see that our families shape us, they influence us in dramatic ways, they explain a lot of why we think and act the way we do, but our families are not determinative of our actions. We are still responsible for what we do.

22 Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. 23 And she conceived and bore a son, and said, “God has taken away my reproach.” 24 So she called his name Joseph, and said, “The LORD shall add to me another son.” (Gen 30:22-24)

Joseph is the eleventh son of Jacob by birth order, but his firstborn son by Rachel, the wife he loved most. His name means the “Lord will increase’ or ‘The Lord will add”. He was born during the time when Jacob worked for his uncle Laban in Haran, and spent about the first six years his life there, and the next eleven years in Canaan where Jacob settled. The rest of Joseph’s life, from age seventeen to 110, he lived in Egypt.

Now what kind of home did Joseph grow up in? Joseph’s home was characterised by three very negative traits.

First, the family of Jacob was filled with deception. This was a home of lies, deception and hypocrisy. And it began of course with Jacob himself, the heel-grabber, the trickster supreme. We know that Jacob began his wily ways when he manipulated Esau into selling him his birthright when Esau came in from the field starving. Jacob had no right to that, but used Esau’s empty stomach, and his profane and sensual attitude against him. Not a while later, he conspired with his mother to deceive Isaac into giving him the blessing of the firstborn by covering his arms with goatskin and impersonating Esau. When he succeeded, Rebekah has him simply run away from his problems, as a deceiver will do.

And once Jacob is working for his uncle Laban, God disciplines Jacob with a taste of his own medicine. Jacob works for seven years to marry Rachel. When Jacob thinks he is marrying Rachel, Laban slips in his elder daughter, Leah, and Jacob find to his horror that he has not married the woman he worked for for seven years. Laban smiles off Jacob’s protests and tells him he can have Rachel at the end of the week, but then he needs to work for another seven years. And then along the way, we find out that Laban changes Jacob’s wages ten times. After fourteen years, Jacob wants to leave, but Laban persuades him to stay for another six, in which time Jacob’s herds grow, and Laban’s resentment grows.

So Jacob decides to run away, again, to sneak out with his wives and children and flocks, again deceiving Laban. Joseph is six years old at this time, and you can imagine how he is processing all this undercover deception. And after Laban catches up with them, and they have a heated discussion, it turns out that Joseph’s mother, Rachel is deceiving her own father, by having stolen his idols, and she sits on them and says she cannot get up for reasons related to her cycle.

Not long after that, Jacob has another scheme as they hear that Esau is approaching with 400 men.

Genesis 33:1 Now Jacob lifted his eyes and looked, and there, Esau was coming, and with him were four hundred men. So he divided the children among Leah, Rachel, and the two maidservants.

2 And he put the maidservants and their children in front, Leah and her children behind, and Rachel and Joseph last. (Gen 33:1-2)

He puts the children of the maidservants in front, then Leah and her children, and then Rachel and Joseph at the back. So in case Esau and his men just begin slaughtering, the people Jacob cares about least will get it first, and the ones he loves most might have a chance of getting away. You can bet that Joseph had some idea of what his father was up to.

This deception doesn’t end with Jacob. His children pick up on it. When they are in the land, their sister Dinah is defiled by one of the princes. When they ask for an arranged marriage, the brothers agree on condition that the men are all circumcised. They agree, and when the men are all in severe pain the next days, the brothers go in and slaughter all the men, and carry off the women and children. Deception.

In chapter 38 we read of how Judah’s son Onan deceives Tamar, and then Judah deceives Tamar, and then Tamar deceives Judah.

And then, when Jacob’s sons sell Joseph into slavery, what do they do? Just as Jacob used the skin of a kid to deceive his father, so they kill a goat, and use its blood to pour on Joseph’s shredded coat to deceive him. This is a family of liars and lies. That’s why, many years later, when Joseph is ruler in Egypt, he sets up tests to see if they are still liars to the extreme.

Joseph, unlike his brothers, chose to love the truth, even though his father, his mother, and his brothers were liars and schemers. Even when Joseph had the opportunity to sin with Potipher’s wife, with the high chance that no one would know, and no one would find out, he lived with integrity. He wanted truth in the inward parts, being truthful even when no one is looking, even when it looks like he could get away with it. Joseph’s heart was controlled by something other than the flesh, other than his past, other than family influence.

Children who grow up in homes filled with double-standards, lies, masks, one face for church and another at home can become very cynical and dismissive of the faith. They are faced with a temptation to believe there is no truth, there is no one trustworthy because so much of life is shot through with phoniness. But even with such a home, no one is forced to become a liar and a hypocrite. No one is predestined to be cynical about the truth. If the grace of God is present, lying homes can still bring forth truth-tellers.

We think of someone else who lived among liars and schemers. Jesus told his brethren, the Jewish leaders,

44 “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.

45 “But because I tell the truth, you do not believe Me. 46 “Which of you convicts Me of sin? And if I tell the truth, why do you not believe Me? (Joh 8:44-46)

The second major attribute of Joseph’s family life was rivalry. Instead of a united family of mutual service, Joseph’s home was one of envy, competition, and bitterness because of the rivalry within it. Once again, it began with Jacob, with his own rivalry of Esau. But then it comes back upon him as Laban tricks him into marrying Leah. Leah has four children, so Rachel, who feels that her place is being supplanted, takes her maidservant Bilhah, and invokes a tradition that was present in the Ancient Near East – a woman could make her maidservant be a surrogate mother for her. Jacob has two sons by Bilhah. Well, not to be outdone, Leah who has stopped bearing children, gives her maidservant Zilpah to Jacob, and she bears two sons. And then Rachel and Leah are squabbling over who will use mandrakes to make conceiving even more likely. Leah has two more sons, and a daughter. And then finally Rachel has her own two children. Joseph is in a home with four mothers, six half brothers from Leah, two half brothers from Zilpah, two half brothers from Bilhah. Even if we added nothing more, this family is a complicated mess of competing wives, four mothers, half-brothers who no doubt knew the animosity and envy between their mothers.

Genesis 37:1 Now Jacob dwelt in the land where his father was a stranger, in the land of Canaan.

2 This is the history of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. And the lad was with the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives; and Joseph brought a bad report of them to his father. 3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. Also he made him a tunic of many colors. 4 But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him. (Gen 37:1-4)

Jacob made no secret of his special love for Rachel, and his special love for Joseph. Into this mix of rivalry, Jacob showed favouritism and partiality. Children are prone to see favouritism where there is none, but when it is explicit and obvious, it only drives the resentment, the bitterness and the envy.

Something else was added to it. Jacob’s firstborn son was Reuben, and so Reuben should have had the place of honour, the leadership role over the other brothers. But Reuben did something to disqualify himself.

22 And it happened, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine; and Israel heard about it. Now the sons of Jacob were twelve: (Gen 35:22)

Now part of this may have been Reuben’s plain lust and evil, But part of it may have been a deliberate act to usurp his father’s place. In that culture, one of the ways you showed that you had replaced a ruler, was by taking that ruler’s concubines. When Absalom revolted against his father David, he was counseled to lie with David’s concubines in the sight of all Israel, to show he had triumphed. Likewise, when Adonijah is trying to connive his way into defeating Solomon’s claim to the throne, he convinces Bathsheba to ask Solomon to give Adonijah King David’s concubine, Abishag.

So Reuben’s act is one of immorality, adultery and rebellion. And apparently, he lost his rights as the firstborn.

3 “Reuben, you are my firstborn, My might and the beginning of my strength, The excellency of dignity and the excellency of power.

4 Unstable as water, you shall not excel, Because you went up to your father’s bed; Then you defiled it– He went up to my couch. (Gen 49:3-4)

So what happened when Reuben lost his rights? It did not pass the the second born. Instead, it passed to the firstborn of Jacob’s originally chosen wife, Rachel. That firstborn was Joseph.

1 Chronicles 5:1 Now the sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel– he was indeed the firstborn, but because he defiled his father’s bed, his birthright was given to the sons of Joseph, the son of Israel, so that the genealogy is not listed according to the birthright; (1Ch 5:1)

So with ten half-brothers older than he, Joseph becomes, by right, the firstborn. Yes, he was the favourite, by Jacob’s sin of partiality, but he was now the firstborn by Reuben’s sin of immorality. This probably explains the coat of many colours, or more likely the coat of many parts. This was a robe worn by the firstborn, it signified his special place, his place of honour, and his place of authority over the others. He is the prince heir. It explains why he is sent to check on the others, why he is not herding and shepherding with the others – it is because he had become the manager of the household, the firstborn.

So how do you think that went down in the home? The second youngest boy, only Benjamin was younger, is made the ruler over men. When he is seventeen, Reuben is around thirty-one. All ten of his half brothers are men. How do you think they took to the seventeen-year-old, who was already the favourite of his father, becoming the first-born prince-heir, ruling over them, and managing them? Genesis 37:4 tells us:

4 But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peaceably to him.

Have you ever been in a household or a relationship where someone could not speak peaceably to you? Or sadly, have you been in that place, where the bitterness in your heart is so deep that when you speak to this person, the only tone, the only words are bitter, harsh, aggressive, cutting, rough words? What did James tell about the result of continual self-seeking, rivalry and envy?

16 For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. (Jam 3:16)

In fact, this rivalry went all the way to brutality and even attempted murder with Joseph. A heartless, cruelty was in this home.

What kind of people come out of a home filled with rivalry and envy? Without the grace of God, self-protective, contentious, suspicious, scheming, cynical people. People who continually think everyone has an agenda, people who rust nobody, people who are always ready to elbow others out the way to get theirs, people who treat relationships like strategic wargames, always manipulating for advantage. But what do we find in Joseph? When years later, Joseph is in a position of power as the ruler of Egypt with his brothers bowing before him, what should have been his response if he were controlled by the flesh, and dominated by his family’s influence? Something like revenge, gloating, rubbing his brother’s noses in the dirt, forcing them to grovel and do penance. But that is not what controlled Joseph’s heart. Joseph had chosen the path of forgiveness.

Christ was hated by his brothers, both his brethren the Jews, and his physical half-brothers. The Jewish leaders too, hated him out of rivalry. Matthew 27:17 says that Pilate knew this.

18 For he knew that they had handed Him over because of envy. (Mat 27:18)

A family of lies and deceit. A family of rivalry and envy. But Joseph’s family was also characterised by something else. Joseph’s family was a family of spiritual double-mindedness. How spiritual was Joseph’s home? How much was God brought into the picture? How deep did the devotion go?

Well, picture Joseph as a young boy watching his father’s responses to various trials. He is spiritually passive when he should be active. He lets his daughter mingle to freely with the pagans of the land. He lets his sons massacre a nearby town. He lets his sons Reuben and Judah commit immorality. He knows about the rivalry and animosity in the home and does not stop it. This is because while Jacob is a changed man after wrestling with God, he is still spiritually double-minded.

Joseph lived in this spiritually lukewarm environment.

Jacob did not consistently have God in his thoughts, because of his double-mindedness. Joseph watched as his father is controlled by fear when trying to get away from Laban. He is controlled by fear when Esau approaches. And when Jacob is confronted with loss, read some of his responses:

35 And all his sons and all his daughters arose to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted, and he said, “For I shall go down into the grave to my son in mourning.” Thus his father wept for him. (Gen 37:35)

When Jacob sends the brothers down to Egypt, look at what he says:

4 But Jacob did not send Joseph’s brother Benjamin with his brothers, for he said, “Lest some calamity befall him.” (Gen 42:4)

When they come back and say that Pharaoh’s second-in-command demanded to see Benjamin, look at the response:

36 And Jacob their father said to them, “You have bereaved me: Joseph is no more, Simeon is no more, and you want to take Benjamin. All these things are against me.”

37 Then Reuben spoke to his father, saying, “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.”

38 But he said, “My son shall not go down with you, for his brother is dead, and he is left alone. If any calamity should befall him along the way in which you go, then you would bring down my gray hair with sorrow to the grave.” (Gen 42:36-38)

Many years later, Jacob appears before Pharaoh, and look at the way he sees life:

8 Pharaoh said to Jacob, “How old are you?”

9 And Jacob said to Pharaoh, “The days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty years; few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” (Gen 47:8-9)

A chronically pessimistic man is someone who does not see life with God in the picture. He does not take the promises of God into account. He does not consider past grace, and therefore count on future grace. Joseph grew up in a home where the spiritual leader was passive, fearful, and pessimistic.

Joseph’s home was deceitful, but Joseph became a man of truth and integrity. Joseph’s home was full of envy and rivalry, but Joseph became a man of contented humility. Joseph’s home was one of compromise and spiritual double-mindedness, but Joseph became a man of deep devotion and sincere love for God.

Sometimes we assume that if someone is walking with the Lord, it is because the family was super-spiritual. And sometimes we make the excuse that someone is immature in the faith because his home was so ungodly. But that only goes so far. Joseph’s brothers did not have a great example of consistent godliness in their father, and that no doubt encouraged them to live for the flesh. But Joseph had that same example and chose instead to live by grace through faith.

It is true that godly homes are more likely to produce faithful Christians. But godly homes are not sufficient to produce godly Christians because individuals must choose to live godly lives, keeping God in front of them. It is true that ungodly homes are less likely to produce godly Christians. But ungodly homes are not lethal to godliness because individuals can still choose to live godly lives, as Joseph did.

Our Lord Jesus Christ no doubt had godly parents in Mary and Joseph, but he experienced rivalry, the small-mindedness of Nazareth, the envy of his brothers and hometown. The prophets Isaiah paints the picture that he was different from his environment and unusual when he prophecies that Messiah

He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. (Isa 53:2)

Your family shapes you, but it does not force you into a mold. Your family influences you, but it does not decide for you. Your family points you in certain directions, but then you choose if you are going to go in those directions. Your family creates certain habits and routines, but you can choose to keep them or abandon them. Your family shapes your expectations and your grid to interpret the world, but you can hold that grid against Scripture, or simply accept it.

On the day of judgement, if any man or woman begins using family as the excuse for not believing, not obeying, not being Christlike, God will bring out Joseph as the material witness. And Joseph’s life will say, by the grace of God, you could have been different to your family. Where God gave you a spiritual advantage through your family, then you are responsible to use that advantage, and improve upon it. Where God gave you a spiritual disadvantage through your family, then you are responsible by the grace of God to resist and oppose that disadvantage and become like Christ.

Joseph, like Christ, was a root out of dry ground. By grace, each of us can be, too.