'On
the third day, Joseph said, “Do this and you will live, for I fear God.' Genesis 42:18
Joseph's testimony that he was someone
who feared God should have reassured his brothers. If someone truly fears God we have nothing to
fear from them. They will not be a danger to us, they will not treat us
unjustly. Even if they do at times seem a little harsh they will have our best
interests at heart, 'Wounds from a friend can be trusted,' Proverbs 27:6.
Joseph now reverses his earlier decision
(see v16) and decides to keep one brother in prison and send the other nine
back to Canaan with grain for their starving households, insisting that they
return with their youngest brother to prove that they are telling the truth. They
are distressed. They haven't forgotten what they did to Joseph all those years
earlier and how he had pleaded with them for his life and how they had ignored
his pleas. They see the predicament that they are now in as justice catching up
with them for what they did back then, (v22,23).
It
was and still is, 3,700 years later, natural to think that there is a reason
for the times of calamity that we experience, a feeling that in some way we
must have deserved it. People are heard to say, 'What did I do to deserve
this?' wondering where the blame for something horrible lies. Seventeen hundred
years after this event we see the disciples asking Jesus, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his
parents, that he was born blind?' (John 9:1). Sometimes we do suffer because of
our foolishness, carelessness or sin, but as Jesus pointed out on that
occasion, suffering is not necessarily caused because of the victim's sin or
indeed the sin of his/her relatives. We only have to look at the cross to know
that. God bless you all.
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