SPEAKER_03 0:06

The following meditation is based on Tim Keller's sermon called Reconciliation, which he preached in year 2003. Let me share. According to Keller, uh if you ask the average person today why they're skeptical of Christianity, the objection is rarely intellectual. It's seldom I have trouble believing in miracles. What you're more likely to hear is this, why did God let this happen to me? If he's good, why did he allow this? In other words, the objections are personal, and the story of Joseph, all the way to its final chapters in Genesis forty seven through fifty, tackles those objections head on. What the narrative of Joseph shows us again and again is this with God, silence is not absence, and hiddenness is not impotence. Often when things look like they are going the most wrong, God is working the most for our good, and that is the claim we're going to examine today. Background Jacob, Joseph's father, is hundred forty seven years old, and he has lived in Egypt for seventeen years. Now that's significant because for twenty two years this man grieved his son Joseph, thinking that he was dead. Then God gave him seventeen more years of reunion before his own death. God is not stingy with mercy. In chapter seven, forty seven rather, Jacob is brought before Pharaoh, and what does he do? Jacob blesses Pharaoh. There is something profoundly ironic about this. The old shepherd, and shepherds were looked down upon by Egyptians, stands before the most powerful ruler on earth and bestows a blessing. Jacob has stopped striving, he is resting in God's promise, and it has made him more generous than he ever was in his younger years. In chapter forty nine, Jacob gathers his twelve sons and speaks prophetically over each of them. These are not sentimental farewell words, they are covenant words, carrying the weight of God's purposes across centuries of Israel's history, and then Jacob dies. The moment he is gone, Joseph's brothers panic. They send Joseph a message, and many scholars believe they fab they fabricated it, claiming that their father had left deathbed instructions. Tell Joseph to forgive his brothers. Then they fall before Joseph and say, We are your slaves. Now look at the picture here. These are men in their fifties and sixties. Joseph has already wept with them, embraced them and fed them and expressed forgiveness for what they did. And still they don't believe it it is real. Joseph weeps not from anger but from grief. Because you can declare forgiveness, but you cannot force trust to be rebuilt overnight. The reconciliation is not complete, and this shows how broken relationships take time to be rewoven, and Joseph's brothers have not yet found their footing in the grace they've been offered. That is the anatomy of a heart that has never fully received forgiveness. It waits, it watches, it keeps expecting the debt to be called in eventually. Joseph's response to his frightened brothers comes in three sentences verses nineteen, twenty and twenty one. The Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner, whose commentary on Genesis shaped much of this reflection, writes that each of the three sentences is a pinnacle of Old Testament and New Testament faith, and that is to leave all the writings of wrongs to God, to see God's providing hand in man's malice and to repay evil not only with forgiveness but with practical affection. Kidna calls these attitudes anticipating Christ likeness. Three marks of a heart changed by grace, three movements of a soul that has learned to live in this world with genuine peace, and that is avoid God's throne, avoid God's throne, take God's view, take God's view, and love with God's love. Let's take a look. One avoid God's throne. Genesis fifteen chapter fifty verse nineteen says Am I in the place of God? Now this question is incredibly rich in theology. Keller points out that putting oneself in God's place is at the heart of almost every human problem. Consider how we do this, how we put ourselves in God's throne, that is. We do it when we make ourselves our own moral authority, expecting others to fall in line with our standards, deciding what is right and wrong independently of God's word, as Adam and Eve did when the serpent promised that eating the fruit would make them like God. The modern version of this is subtler, and that is in the past people could accept the Bible in its entirety, but now we know that some of it is primitive and wrong. Now we know. You see the problem with that reasoning lives in the word now we know. We easily trade the authority of scriptures for the authority of our own times, our own era, and call it enlightenment. We also put ourselves in God's place when we let others look to us to meet their deepest needs. In Second Kings five, when Naaman, the Syrian general, came to the king of Israel seeking healing, the king tore his clothes and said something like this, Am I God? Can I kill or make alive? Now it was the right response, but let's think about this. Every therapist, every pastor, every politician, every well meaning spouse eventually reaches the place where they must do the same. Am I God? There are needs that no human being can ever meet, and to pretend otherwise, whether in the books we write, the promises that we make or marriages that we enter is to occupy the throne that belongs to God and God alone. And then there is the ordinary worry. Jesus addresses it directly in Matthew 6. Excessive worry, as you see, at its root is the belief that you know exactly what must happen and that you're afraid that God won't get it right. That's why you worry. The more we loosen our grip on that worrisome certainty, the more we acknowledge that we don't fully know what's best, the more manageable our anxiety becomes. We're not in the throne that surveys all of history and holds all outcomes, God is. And thank God for that. But the way Joseph uses this principle here, the way it applies to the brothers crouching before him is the most personal application of all. Every person who keeps a grudge, every person who nurses resentment towards someone who has wronged them, is sitting in God's seat. God says in Romans twelve, Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay. In other words, God saying get out of my chair. Only God has a right to sit in that judgment. The rest of us are sinners in need of our own. Only God has the knowledge a knowledge to judge. We don't know what someone has suffered. What has been done to them, uh what they've already paid, and so forth. But most critically, only God has the power to judge someone without becoming evil in the process. Um Secondly, let's take God's view. Genesis 50 verse 20. As for you, you intended to harm me, but God intended it God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. This is one of the most breathtaking sentences in all of Scripture. Notice what Joseph does not say. He does not say what you meant for evil, God cleaned up afterwards. No, Joseph says God intended it for good what you meant for evil. The same event, the same pit, the same slave traders heading down to Egypt, two intentions, both fully real, fully simultaneous. Joseph says in effect, life is terrible, life is hard, and my life was filled with pain. You meant evil. There is no way around that. But but what you meant for evil, God intended for good. Now you see both things fully true, held together at the same time. The Bible is unflinchingly honest about evil. The book of Job is an extended argument against the comfortable idea that faithfulness guarantees protection from suffering. The three friends who insist otherwise are the villains of the story, and yet the whole of Scripture is equally insistent that God is always, always working for good, even if it takes years or centuries or the very last day of history to make it visible. Consider Jacob's own life as evidence. He sinned, he deceived his father, cheated his brother, and his life fractured as a result. But only because of that broken path did he find Rachel, the love of his life, and only because of that path did he have the children that he had from whom the Messiah would descend. Does it mean his sin was fine? Absolutely not. He sinned. And it was his sin. But his sin did not put him on plan B. Because in God there is no plan B. The Messiah cannot be an afterthought. The point is simply this if you're a Christian, you simply cannot muck up your life. Even your worst failures, even your deepest betrayals of yourself and others cannot strand you in a divine plan B. Nothing can sink a life held in the hands of God. And thirdly, love with God's love. Genesis fifty, verse twenty one. Joseph says, So then don't be afraid, I will provide for you and your children. You see, Joseph does not stop the hostility and call it even or reconciliation. He moves towards his brothers. He provides for them, he reassures them. And the Hebrew is striking here. He speaks to their hearts, active, practical and other people directed affection for the very people who sold him into slavery and left him to rod in an Egyptian prison. But that history cannot be erased and yet grace abounds. This is the hardest thing on the list because loving someone who has genuinely wounded you requires two things to operate simultaneously. One is deep humility and the other is deep confidence. Deep humility because you must know in your bones that you are not standing before God on the basis of your own innocence. You have your own sins, you your own moments of cruelty, selfishness, and failure you'd rather not examine too closely. When that is truly alive in you, not as abstract doctrine but as felt reality, it becomes very difficult to maintain a posture of superiority toward someone who has hurt you. That's deep humility. And deep confidence, because you must know that God's love for you does not hinge on what this person did to you or what you now choose to do in return. His love is not performance contingent. Nothing they took from you and nothing you do from here changes what God has already declared over you. You're secure. You can you can afford to be generous. And that is deep confidence. Joseph had both because he had lived them. He had been through the pit and the prison and come out the other side, knowing that God's grace toward him was entirely unmerited and entirely unshakable. And that double knowledge is what made it possible for him to say I will provide for you and your children. Now Joseph is able to do that because of Christ, the greater Joseph. Joseph is a remarkable man at this time, one of the most admirable figures in Scripture, but he's not the hero of the story. He is merely a signpost. When Joseph asks Am I in the place of God? The answer is obviously no. But there is one who came who was in the place of God, who had every right to the throne of judgment, and who looked at the full weight of human betrayal, mockery, false accusation, crucifixion, and chose not to use it. He instead chose to absorb it all. On the cross the greatest act of human evil became simultaneously the great greatest act of divine love. You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. For the saving of many lives, Jesus did not merely illustrate that sentence. He lived it from the inside at the deepest possible cost. Anyone who truly understands the gospel of Jesus Christ has a resource beyond anything the great figures of the Old Testament possessed. Joseph had a general, hard won sense that God loved him despite what he hadn't deserved. But we have something far more particular we have the cross, the cross of Calvary. The cross makes us more humble than Joseph could ever be, because now we see that our sin was not a minor thing requiring minor grace. It required the death of God, God's own son, Jesus Christ. We cannot stand before anyone who has wronged us and claim moral superiority. We have none. And the cross makes us more confident than Joseph could ever be, because if God did not spare his own son for us, if God gave us his most precious possession when we deserved nothing, then what can that person ultimately take from us? What situation can derail a life held in those hands? Greater humility and greater confidence than Joseph, which means by grace the possibility of greater lives than Joseph is available for you and me today. God is not asking you to pretend the wound wasn't real. He is not asking you to manufacture feelings you don't have. He is asking you to trust that He is a better judge than you are, that His justice is more certain than yours, and that the life He has called you to, the life of active, costly, other directed love only becomes possible when the cross has done its full work in you. That work takes time, it takes returning to the same text, the same cross, the same faithful God again and again. But it is real. Joseph is evidence, and so is every believer who has chosen by grace to speak to someone's heart rather than collect a debt. So all who love the Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love, may God's grace abound in you today and forevermore. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

When I survey the wonder's cross on which the Prince of Gorita My Chair.