They are home again. The first thing is to break this strange secret to their father. They make just two points: “Joseph yet alive;” “Joseph Governor over all the land of Egypt.” It was too much—was too good to be believed. The English version has it, “Jacob’s heart fainted.” Better—“Jacob’s heart remained cold, for he believed them not.” It stirred no joyous and warm emotions, for he could not believe it. But when they told him all the words of Joseph, and especially when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry him, then his spirit rose; his heart waxed warm; he said: “It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive; I will go and see him before I die.”
Beersheba, the old home of his father Isaac, lay on his route. He stopped there and offered sacrifice to the God of his father Isaac. The night following the Lord met him in vision, saying, “I am thy God and the God of thy father; fear not to go down into Egypt, for I will there make of thee a great nation: I will go down with thee into Egypt and will bring thee up again; and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes”—i. e. to close them in death.——How tenderly appreciative of the circumstances and of Jacob’s need was this vision of Beersheba! Such are God’s blessed ways with his children. He can not send them into scenes of special danger or of critical interest, without some special manifestations of his presence.
II. We are to notice the hand of God in this history in its twofold bearings:
1. As active in the sufferings and moral trial of the virtuous;
2. As manifested in his overruling control of the wicked to bring forth from their wickedness abounding good.
1. As active in the sufferings and moral trial of the virtuous.——The most cursory reader of this story will see in it a striking case of the sufferings of innocence. Joseph, envied and hated for no fault of his; coming near to being murdered by his own brothers, and really sold into slavery—a slavery prospectively life-long and in a distant, unknown land; torn away from every thing dear in home, at the age of seventeen:—this surely was innocence subjected to the sternest suffering.
How do such things happen under the government of God? When they do happen, what do they prove?
a. Negatively: They prove that all the suffering in this world can not be retribution for sin. There may be great suffering which can not in any true sense be the punishment of great crime. The greatest sufferers are not necessarily and always the greatest sinners. Suffering is not graduated to crime.——This lesson Job’s three friends were slow to learn. Even Job himself seems not to have learned it thoroughly, but was groping toward it, under the lessons of his own conscious experience. It may not be amiss to suggest here that Job and his friends reasoned without the light which this history of Joseph would have given them if they had ever heard or read it. They either lived before Joseph, or too remote from these scenes to hear or in any way learn the lessons they teach.
b. Positively this case illustrates some of the ends which God aims to secure by permitting the sufferings of the good; e. g. to discipline them to patience under suffering, and to trust in God in the midst of darkness and in spite of it. Joseph’s slavery and prison-life in Egypt would have been simply miserable without this patience and this trust in the Lord his God. Suppose he had given himself up to fretting and chafing and dashing his head against the strong walls of his prison and to wrenching off the fetters with which they “hurthis feet” (Ps. 105: 18);—What could have come of such adjustment of one’s self to dark providences? Certainly not the sweet and blessed discipline which he did in fact get from his afflictions; certainly not the favor and the blessing of his God. Every thing in the future as before his eye was dark enough; but he knew there was a God of loving kindness above—a God who made no mistakes, yet whose purposes were often too deep for afflicted man to fathom, and therefore a God whom his children should learn to trust as certainly doing all things well.
Again; the case serves to reveal God’s pity and his love in that he goes with his children into their slave-life and into their prison-life with such smiles of favor, such tokens of his presence, as may well make them joyful in the most terrible affliction. As Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises within the cold, desolate walls of a prison while yet smarting under the Roman scourge, and with perhaps some prospect of sufferings more severe when another day should dawn; so Joseph found the Lord with him when he reached Egypt a slave; with him when cast into prison because he virtuously repelled a foul temptation to crime. God was there, proving to his servant Joseph that no surroundings are so dark that God’s manifested presence will not make them light—that no sufferings and no bereavements are so severe that God can not throw his smile upon the sufferer and fill his soul with overflowing joy!