'Then
he sent his brothers away, and as they were leaving he said to them, 'Don't
quarrel along the way!' Genesis 45:24
I
love the little incidental verses we find in the bible, the tiny throwaway
remarks that seem at first sight to have little importance in the story. At the
end of the story of the healing of Jairus's daughter we read how Jesus, 'told
them to give her something to eat,' (Mark 5:43). Swept up in the joy of
witnessing the miraculous, her parents seem to have so easily forgotten the
obvious, the ordinary, the fact that their young daughter had not eaten....
probably for days. To God, the small things are as important as the sensational
big things that we are so easily impressed by; the detail is always as
important as the big picture.
When
the Children of Israel were desperate for water a second time, God told Moses
to speak to the rock, (Numbers 20:8), and water would pour out. Instead, Moses
hit it with his stick as he had on the previous occasion, (Exodus 17:6), and,
although successful in man's eyes, (that is, water flowed as it had before),
Moses had failed as far as God was concerned.
I love the way, as his brothers are
leaving to return to their father, Joseph tells them, 'Don't quarrel on the
way.' He knows his brothers. He heard them when they did not know who he was or
realise that he understood Hebrew, when Reuben took the moral high ground and
blamed the others for what they did to Joseph all those years before, (42:22).
Two thoughts on this.
First, although we might not be aware of
it, God knows everything about us, even our thoughts and motives, (Psalm 139:2,
Jeremiah 17:10). In fact, they concern him more than what we then say or do,
for if they are pure and good, the words and actions that flow from them will
be right.
Second, as we follow him, the Lord does
not want us to 'quarrel on the way,' as the disciples had a tendency to do,
(Mark 9:33). He longs for us to live in harmony and not acrimony with each
other. Joseph loved his brothers despite what they put him through. As I read
Joseph's words as his brothers depart for home, I hear an echo of another, 'As
I have loved you, so you must love one another,' John 13:35. God bless you all.
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