Daily devotions

Wednesday

It´s Thursday - reflections on Genesis



'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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