Joseph No.9 God's Goodness and Severity

Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before him with joyful songs.

Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us and we are his. We are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and praise his name for the Lord is good and his love endures forever. His faithfulness continues through all generations.

His holy kingdom, the law eternal reigns. The preachers and the children have sung the fleshly praise. All the nations around them are singing the hymn of love.

And the Lord, the Lord, the Lord, the Lord is God. He and he, angels one, the Lord is nice and good. The sheep's wine and the holly, the wine of the Lord is good.

And there is nothing wrong with the Lord, the Lord is nice, but that which shall be nice shall come to thankful hearts. All the nations around them are singing the hymn of love. Give thanks to him and praise his name for the Lord is good and his love endures forever.

His faithfulness continues through all generations. His faithfulness continues through all generations. When he had shaved and changed his clothes, he came before Pharaoh.

Pharaoh said to Joseph, I had a dream and no one can interpret it, but I've heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it. I cannot do it, Joseph replied to Pharaoh, but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires. And Pharaoh said to Joseph, In my dream I was standing on the bank of the Nile when out of the river there came up seven cows, fat and sleek, and they grazed among the reeds.

After them seven other cows came up, scrawny and very ugly and lean. I had never seen such ugly cows in all the land of Egypt. The lean, ugly cows ate up the seven fat cows that came up first, but even after they ate them no one could tell that they had done so.

They looked just as ugly as before. Then I woke up. In my dreams I also saw seven ears of corn, full and good, growing on a single stalk.

After them seven other ears sprouted, withered and thin and scorched by the east wind. The thin ears of corn swallowed up the seven good ears. I told this to the magicians, but none could explain it to me.

Then Joseph said to Pharaoh, The dreams of Pharaoh are one and the same. God has revealed to Pharaoh what he is about to do. The seven good cows are seven years, and the seven good ears of corn are seven years.

It is one and the same dream. The seven lean, ugly cows that came up after they did are seven years, and so are the seven worthless ears of corn scorched by the east wind. They are seven years of famine.

Just as I said to Pharaoh, God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land.

The abundance in the land will not be remembered because the famine that follows it will be so severe. The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon. Now dropping down to verse 53.

The seven years of abundance in Egypt came to an end, and the seven years of famine began just as Joseph had said. There was famine in all the other lands, but in the whole land of Egypt there was food. When all Egypt began to feel the famine, the people cried to Pharaoh for food.

Then Pharaoh told all the Egyptians, Go to Joseph and do what he tells you. When the famine had spread over the whole country, Joseph opened the storehouses and sold grain to the Egyptians, for the famine was severe throughout Egypt. And all the countries came to Egypt to buy grain from Joseph because the famine was severe in all the world.

God will bless the public reading of his words. Living under the shadow of his wing We find security Standing in his presence we will pray A worship, worship, worship to the King Glorification as we speak Voices joining together as we speak In his power, in his purity Soaring in my spirit like a dove Well, we've been for a little while in our Sunday morning addresses, and I want to home in on the 53rd verse of the 41st chapter, where you get this rather stark statement. The seven years of abundance in Egypt came to an end, and the seven years of famine began, just as Joseph had said.

One of the advantages of expository preaching, that is working your way through a passage of Scripture Sunday by Sunday, morning and, in our case for the last few months at any rate, morning and evening. One of the advantages is that you have the curriculum, the syllabus dictated by the Holy Spirit. You don't just go on your particular fancy, your particular theological hobby horse as a preacher.

You have to deal with subject matter that is not perhaps as popular in your own choice. It's not what you would opt for, but because it's there you have to preach it. One of the disadvantages is that it might well be in the church calendar that your subject matter is utterly unrelated to the special event that you may be celebrating or bringing before the people on that specific day.

Now, here we are, Harvest Sunday, and I've been working my way through Genesis. But in the providence of God, you find that what we're looking at this morning couldn't be more relevant than to the particular thing that we have in mind, because there in Genesis is reference to dreams of good crops and poor crops, reference to abundance, reference to great need. Now, you're thinking people, and you must come to Scripture wanting God to speak to you in regard to your responsibility to other people today.

You want to discover from Scripture some of the answers to the problems, or at least a promise of an answer to some of the problems that must often be cloud your mind when you see starving people and you think of great natural disasters like the flooding in Bangladesh, like earthquakes and hurricanes and so on and so forth. After all, as Christians, we should be out thinking other people. Christianity never surrenders the mind.

It sanctifies the mind. Well, as I come to try to handle this particular passage of Scripture, I do so reminding you also of a verse of Scripture that's found in Romans chapter 11 and the 22nd. Consider, therefore, the kindness and sternness of God, or as it's put in the authorized version, consider, therefore, the goodness and the severity of God, the goodness and the severity of God.

Consider it. Now, back to Genesis 41, 53, and you'll see why I link in that particular statement from the New Testament. The seven years of abundance in Egypt came to an end, and the seven years of famine began.

The goodness and the severity of God. You see, there are many people today who are very pleased to accept the concept of the goodness of God, but the notion of the severity of God is never within their orbit. It's never within their grasp whatsoever.

You find this, those of you who are in school teaching, look at your educational philosophy. Wherever God gets any place at all, and it's less and less frequent as more modern philosophers get together and undergird education principles in our country, wherever God comes in, he's always a God of love. He's always a God who's doling out blessings to people.

And as far as people are concerned, they're always perfectible. They're always originally good. Now, the Bible comes across those two conclusions and pronounces them as being inaccurate.

It says that God is definitely a good God, but he's also a severe God. He's a God of love, and he's also a God of justice. And it says of man, far from being perfectible, man actually is born with a bias towards evil.

Now, when you read the scriptures, you can't but come to those two conclusions, which are very much against the modern grain. And where scriptures are present today that seem to be unpalatable, the tendency is to suggest that those scriptures actually aren't inspired. So you pick and choose in the Bible as to what you really think that God is like today.

And the net result is you finish up with a distorted view of God and a distorted view of man. Now, evangelicals in some respects have the same tendencies of reading the Bible and coming to different conclusions from what the Bible actually demands them arrive at. You say, what do you mean? Well, let me quote to you the words of a great German theologian who died at the hands of Adolf Hitler just before the conclusion of the Second World War.

His name was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And Bonhoeffer wrote this, and he died as a very young man, but he had a very great brain and a great spirituality. He said, the problem is that so often when you read the Bible, you always read the Bible for yourself.

You never read the Bible against yourself. In other words, you just come in on those more soothing, helpful verses, and you pass on one side those that are disturbing. Now, I've used this as an illustration before, but you remember the old-fashioned promise box? Some of you older friends will recall this box.

It was like a box of Cadburys chocolates. But instead of chocolates, you had a hundred little scrolls carefully wound up and folded up and placed in the box. The box looked like a honeycomb.

And you got a pair of tweezers. This sounds quite corny, actually, but it did exist. Some of you will remember.

Maybe they're still available today. I haven't seen them for a long time. And each day, you got your tweezer, and you plucked out one little scroll.

And inside the scroll was one of the precious promises of Scripture. And there were always Scriptures that were for you. There were never Scriptures that were against you.

There were always the pleasing, consoling Scriptures. There were never the ones that reminded you that our God is a consuming fire and that sort of thing. It wasn't so palatable, so you pushed those on one side.

That's what I mean, you see, when I say that even evangelicals to some degree can distort the Bible in just focusing on certain things rather than the whole teaching. So it's good for us today to consider from this passage of Scripture when God is for us and when God is against us. Because God is not, in every circumstance, for man.

God is not, and the Bible is not, in every circumstance, for man. Behold the goodness of God. Behold the severity of God.

What's this to do with Joseph? It's got a great deal. And even more, it has to do with Pharaoh. The man has dreams.

The dreams are replayed. Two particular versions, you recall. Seven thin cows preceded by seven fat cows.

The picture is naturally Egyptian, but it could be Nepali. It could be the buffalo in Nepal. Who almost baptizes himself in water.

Or in other areas of the world where you get buffaloes. They love to stand in water with just their head exposed. It's nice and cool.

And in this particular dream, the cows had been in the waters of the Nile. And they came out. Seven of them.

And they are followed by seven thin cows. And when Pharaoh gives the rerun of the dream, the second account of it to Joseph, as opposed to the account that he gave earlier on in the chapter to his wise men, he emphasizes that he'd never seen such lean, ugly cows in the whole of his experience in Egypt. And though those lean cows ate the fat cows, they were not improved.

And he wanted to know what the fallout was in terms of interpretation. And of course there was the parallel part of the dream of the ears of corn. The fat, luscious ones, which you often find to this very day in Egypt by the banks of the Nile.

They're consumed by the thin ones. And apparently they're not improved, the latter, by the eating of the former. Now, what's it all about? What does it all add up to? And Joseph comes, does he not? You remember, he sprung from jail because, well, the dreams of Pharaoh have stimulated the memory of the butler.

No one else can help Pharaoh, but the butler can. He tells the Pharaoh that there is, in the dungeon there, languishing for two years. He's forgotten all about him, this strange Hebrew who has remarkable wisdom.

Bring him on the scene, Pharaoh, and he'll help you. And so Joseph, with hardly time for a quick wash and a shave, comes in front of Pharaoh. And he starts to talk to Pharaoh about God.

You see, you can say one thing about Joseph, can't you, that stands out more than anything else. He is theocentric. You say, what does that mean? Well, theos is God.

Centric means central. Central to Joseph is God. Incidentally, is God central to you? You see, this guy's been in jail for a long time, but he hasn't forgotten God.

And what's more, God hasn't forgotten him. And his senses have been sharpened down those months. And when he has an audience with Pharaoh, the first thing he does is testify as to the power of God.

I find that truly remarkable, don't you? Pharaoh gives him the accolade of saying, you're the one who can interpret dreams, verse 15. Joseph puts in a corrective, verse 16, I can't do it, but God can. And so this troubled Egyptian monarch gives the gist of the dreams to Joseph.

And once more you see the theocentricity of God in the estimate of Joseph. God is central. Verse 28, God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do.

Verse 32, the reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God. And God will do it soon. Now remember, because you're thinking people or else you wouldn't come and listen to a half an hour's address on a Sunday morning.

Remember that Joseph is reckoning as a responsibility of God. What is going to happen in the realm of nature in the next 14 years? There's no explanation here for what God does. But there is this recognition that behind the cycles of nature and all that occurs, there is the sovereignty of God.

You might find that hard to understand. And if you come knocking at my door for intricate explanations, then unfortunately I will not be able to give them to you. But one thing remains clear, as was illustrated humorously in the children's talk and in the songs that we have been singing, that behind the whole of providence, behind the whole of the universe, there is the power of God.

Behold the goodness of God. You'll do that so easily, won't you my friend? And I understand it. I'll do it myself.

I look around. I see these flowers. They're beautiful.

And I know the argument for the existence of a good God. I've used it many times in London when I taught in Haringey. How can you say that God is not when you look at the beauty of a flower? But if people are thinking and perceptive, they will say, alright, but what about the hurricane and the earthquake? If God is so good, then where is he there? What about the deformed child? You see, we do have these reverse situations in our world.

Not everything is so lovely. A lot is. The beauty of a sunset, it never fails to amaze me.

But I was in a Catholic retreat a little while ago, a Catholic center, where the nuns there dedicate their lives to looking after grossly deformed people. And it's not so easy there to see the goodness of God. So you see how necessary it is for me to take this particular scripture from Romans and to place it alongside what Joseph is saying to Pharaoh.

Behold the goodness and the severity of God. The goodness is easy. The seven years of good crops, that's no problem.

It's no problem to you, is it? Forget the agricultural metaphor. Home in on the principle. When everything is going right, it's easy to come to the tab or some similar church.

It's easier to pray. It's easier to sing praises. Of course it is.

I'm not criticizing you. I'm in exactly the same situation. There are times when I'm elated.

It's not difficult for me at that point to sing these lovely ancient hymns and these modern songs with full verve and enthusiasm. The seven years of good are here. Ah, but what about the severity of God? What about the severity that comes and he doesn't give you an explanation as to why there is severity? You see, this is what Joseph has in some senses to speak to.

And that's why I say that it's particularly relevant and providential in God's timing, at least for the syllabus from this pulpit, that on Harvest Sunday that we look at these two particular factors, the goodness of God and the severity of God. You see, what Joseph said came true, didn't it? Just as Joseph had said, the latter part of verse 54, there's seven years of abundance, verse 47. The land produced plentifully.

The earth brought forth fruit by the handfuls. They gathered corn like the sand of the sea. The computers so-called of Egypt couldn't cope with the task of weighing in the amount of grain.

Joseph, I'm anticipating that you were listening very carefully to the readings. We've had three or four attempts at chapter 41, so you should have some of the information that's relative. Joseph has been made the second person in authority in the whole of Egypt.

His incisive administrative skills have been employed to their limit. In the cities they have great granaries, great storehouses, and they've got clerks who are assessing, computing the amount of grain that's being brought through. But there is such an abundance that it's impossible to compute it all.

These seven years presented absolutely no problem whatsoever. They are a testimony to the goodness of God. The apostle Paul, when he arrives at a place called Derbe and Lystra, the story is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

He finds that the men who receive him do so in a very welcoming fashion. They look upon himself and Barnabas as being extensions of the Godhead, as incidentally the Egyptians looked upon Pharaoh as being an extension of God. And if you think that's a very strange, old-fashioned idea, they were saying that of the emperor of Japan only 20 years ago.

This man, I didn't pick the news up this morning as to whether he's died or not, but he's obviously in his death throes. He was reckoned to be just a representative of God on earth. He got sort of sacked from that description after the Second World War concluded not only with the putting to flight of the Nazis, but the clearing out of the same political obscene tendencies in the Far East represented by the Japanese armies.

Well, here is Paul and Barnabas. They are wrongly conceived as being gods, and Paul rejects the idea. Pharaoh hasn't at this moment as far as Joseph is concerned, but maybe by implication he's moving towards that.

But Paul here says in verse 15 of Acts 14, Men, why are you doing this? We too are only human beings like you. Why we have come here is to tell you the good news. Well, what good news have you got to tell them, Paul? Well, he goes on, We want to tell you about the God who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them.

In the past he let all nations go their own way, yet he has not left himself without testimony. He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their season. He provides you with plenty of food and fills your heart with joy.

You see the point? It's the seven good years, isn't it? If you're a thinking person, alas, a lot of moderns are not thinking people. They think they are, but they're not. That's why you have television and radio and noise wherever you go, anything to stop people thinking and asking fundamental questions.

But when you do, you know that the bread that you eat, the air that you breathe, the clothing that you wear, it testifies to the goodness of a creator out there. You may not know him, but at least you've got evidence of that, at that level. This is what Paul is saying.

He's using this argument, you see. The years of good, the years of provision. And here is Joseph and the Egyptians are basking in those seven years.

They've never known anything quite like it before. I think there's reason to make that conclusion. To quote Harold Macmillan, they never had it so good.

But then the reverse sets in. What Joseph has to say about the goodness of God is also balanced by what he has to say about the severity of God. Verse 54, Genesis 41.

The seven years of famine began, halfway through the verse, there was famine in all the other lands. Verse 56, when the famine had spread over the whole country, latter part of verse 57, because the famine was severe in all the world. So now you've got the pictures, haven't you? Obviously they didn't have them as you have them today, in terms of your newspapers and your magazines, but they're there of the gaunt children, with their wide eyes and their pot bellies.

They're there of older people, struggling for food, hoping that somehow or other something's going to happen to help them in their dilemma. The seven years, it's bad, it's awful, as it is in the Sudan, as it is in the aftermath of the flooding in Bangladesh. Why? Why, oh my friend, I'd give everything I got to be able to satisfactorily answer that question.

I try and think, but my mind's not razor sharp, and I ask the Lord for things that my hundreds of textbooks give me very little insight into. Somewhere at the heart of our world, there's a great tragedy, and if you read the opening chapters of Genesis, you get a little information as to what has brought that tragedy about. You see, at the end of the chapter that I've just read, it's famine and severity, hunger, that's described, but not in Genesis 1, not in Genesis 2. The earth is good.

Adam enjoys the fruits of what God has brought into being, but by Genesis 3, the world is cursed. Not just man, not just woman, but the earth. There's a spillover.

In terms of the penalty that man has for disobeying God, so the earth too is cursed. The thorns come up where there've been flowers. The luscious land gives place to the barrenness and the sterility of the desert.

And there is, even within nature, a pain that the Apostle Paul doesn't blush to make mention of. When in Romans 8, and halfway through that chapter, he speaks about the whole earth groaning. Have you heard the earth groan? Have you ever seen its groan? I remember in an earthquake in Los Angeles, listening to the earth move.

The Americans who are good at euphemisms don't refer to earthquakes, they call it an earth correction. That could only come from Los Angeles. There's a groaning, isn't there? The whole world groans, the whole earth groans, says the Apostle Paul, waiting for its redemption.

As though the very cycles of nature indicate that the world reckons there's something wrong. The springtime, a wonderful season, gives place to summer, which in turn gives place to the golden tints of autumn, and then winter comes with all its deadness, but the world doesn't want to stay dead, and so it leaps forward into a fresh spring. Ah, says the Apostle, but if you listen very carefully, that earth is groaning.

It has within it the marks of the sin that the original man and woman were responsible for. But the day will come, and this is what makes Christianity so wonderful, the day will come when the earth, as it now is, shall be returned to its former pristine glory, for God did not intend planet earth to be as it now is. Now somewhere within that explanation, within those insights, you have at least some idea as to why at times there are famines and disasters, and God doesn't seem to do anything about it directly.

The goodness of God, but there is the severity of God. God reminds men and women in the 20th century, as he reminded the so-called God-Pharaoh of Egypt, that he, the Lord Jehovah, is a supreme controller of the universe, and that men and women are like grasshoppers before him. There is fine dust in the balances, and outside of his mercy and outside of his goodness, there is utterly no hope.

And the severity of God is very often an audio-visual lesson to underpin this particular conviction so that men and women recognize that all that they are, all they will be, all that they have ever been, is due to this great God. Seven years of awful famine. Behold the goodness of God and the severity of God.

But the passage doesn't stop there, does it? It shows you, if you've got eyes to see and if your ears are listening to the voice of the Spirit, it shows you that during the times of the severity of God being allowed to fall out in this world, there are good people who can in some way ameliorate, lessen the severity of what is happening. And so, Joseph, he who has been so singularly recognized by God in this remarkable promotion from being a prisoner to being a prime minister, he sets up a principle that you and I must, I emphasize, must follow. You store up in the good years a reasonable excess and make it available for the poor years.

The idea that when you become a Christian you no longer have any concerns for the well-being of your family in the future is not biblical. When Jesus told his disciples not to take thought as to script and purse, when they moved on an evangelistic tour, it was because of that special exigency that they were moving out in evangelism. When Paul speaks to Timothy, he speaks of those who are Christian people who ought to be ensuring that they have provision for their loved ones in the years to come.

To do less than that is, in effect, to deny the Christian ethic in terms of having regard to the well-being of others. So Joseph ensures that two-fifths of the abundance of Egypt is stored for the seven years when the severity of God falls across the land. Take the principle, put it in the 20th century.

Some of us have the seven years of goodness while others at the same time are having seven years of severity. What you have in abundance you transfer to those who have not so that the severity is lessened and the goodness of God is displayed within the severity of the conditions of the people who are in such need. He who lends to the poor, says the word of God, gives to the Lord.

If any man has this world's goods and does not pass on the excess of what he has to others, how shall the love of God be said to be in him? A paraphrase from John's epistle. So here is Joseph and he begins to show by the very nature of his own responsibility how you and I are also to cope when the world is going through a period of the severity of God. He shows also to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians because the dreams were set around the Nile which was reckoned to be a divine river that there is no power in Egypt that is greater to the power of the God of the universe and Pharaoh recognizes that.

And what's more, he gives us a visual illustration. The famine was over all the known world and there was only salvation in Egypt because Joseph was there. And there is more than just a physical famine affecting our world today.

There is a spiritual famine. A famine of the word of God and there is only one resource whereby that hunger can be satisfied as the people of the world in those days had to come to Joseph who had been recently released from prison. So today and yesteryear the only means of salvation in terms of relief from the spiritual famine is to come to our Lord Jesus who was not incarcerated in a jail but suffered far more hideously on the cross of Calvary for you and for me.

God teaches, as you see, in his severity and in his goodness. We're not here forever. Physical need needs to be ministered to but beyond and above that does spiritual need and Jesus Christ comes to satisfy the spiritual needs of everyone.

And the knock-on consequence of the gospel ethic is that those who have been saved help to ameliorate, lessen the physical needs of those who are without by ensuring that their surplus is directed to these unfortunate people. And God gives you a bonus. He says this that if you do that this you can be assured of that nothing will ever separate you from his love.

Not famine, not war not worries about the future nor the past. Nothing will ever separate the man, the woman who deals honorably with others in communicating his wealth in communicating, passing on his knowledge. Nothing shall separate you from God's eternal love.

Behold the severity of God. Behold the goodness of God. The seven years compensated by the other seven years.

My friend, let's respond to the practical challenge of this message in the monies that we give for Bangladesh, Sudan and elsewhere. Let's pray. Just a moment of thought for those less fortunate than ourselves.

In all these things we're more than conquerors, says Paul through our Lord Jesus. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword. For I'm convinced that neither death nor life neither angels nor demons neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Thank you Father for the illustration from Joseph. Thank you for your word and for its encouragement and also for its more somber passages enable us to live up to the biblical ethic because we ask this of you in the blessed name of Jesus our Saviour. Amen.

Praise ye the Lord so long and glory ever. Father thank you for your goodness to us enable us to show our gratitude to you in the way that we live and handle our affairs for the Saviour's sake. Amen.