November 23, 2022

Passage Read: Genesis 41-44
Meditation Verses: 44:33-34

Thought

The brothers didn't think about their father when they got rid of Joseph. Now that they had lived so many years with the lie that Joseph was dead and seen how gravely it affected their father, they were changed. They would rather live as slaves far from their father than return and face his grief over the loss of another son. They would be willing to live with their brother Joseph and put up with his dreams and special status than put their father through another tragedy. Joseph had no idea what it was like for them to live with their father in his perpetual mourning. Their deception had not been found out, but they were tormented by their own evil deed and the need to keep it secret.

Application

If they had truly repented, there perhaps could have been healing. They would have needed to confess their evil deed and further incur their father's wrath. They would have needed to search everywhere for Joseph, and eventually discovered him as prime minister of Egypt. Instead, Jacob the deceiver suffered for years under the greatest deception of his life: that it was his own sons who sold Joseph into slavery and pretended he'd been killed by wild animals. There's no evidence that Jacob ever came to know the truth, so the fiction was guarded all his remaining days. Sin has consequences that last for a long time, that keep showing up in our lives. Better not to sin than to sin and keep suffering at the hands of my own sin.  Better to confess and repent than to live trying to keep it hidden.