The Message Their Father Never Sent

The funeral is over. The brothers go back to the house, and the first thing they do is send a letter.

They have been living in Egypt for seventeen years. The man they are writing to has been feeding them the whole time. They are writing because they think he has been waiting for their father to die.

Here is how they got there. Joseph was his father's favourite of twelve sons, and his brothers hated him for it. They threw him into a pit and sold him to passing traders for twenty pieces of silver (Genesis 37:28). He became a slave in Egypt, then a prisoner, and then — because he could explain the king's dreams — the man in charge of the country's food. When famine came, his brothers travelled to Egypt to buy grain and did not recognise him. He told them who he was, wept, and said, "do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life" (Genesis 45:5). He moved the whole family to Egypt and fed them.

Their father Jacob then "lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years" (Genesis 47:28). Seventeen years of eating Joseph's food. Then Jacob dies.

1. They had been forgiven for seventeen years and did not believe it

When Joseph's brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, "It may be that Joseph will hate us and pay us back for all the evil that we did to him."

Genesis 50:15

Notice what they think those seventeen years were. Not forgiveness — a delay. They assume Joseph has been behaving for their father's sake and is now free to do what he always meant to do. Every meal he handed them, they had been reading as patience before a blow.

That is not humility.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment.

1 John 4:18

John wrote this to Christians who were frightened of God. His point is a test you can run on yourself: if you are afraid, you are still expecting a punishment. Fear is a prediction about what the other person is going to do to you. The brothers are not being modest here. They are forecasting.

God describes his own forgiving differently.

For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Jeremiah 31:34

God says this through the prophet Jeremiah to a nation that had earned everything coming to it. "Remember no more" does not mean he misplaces facts. It is a promise about what he will never raise again. A debt that gets mentioned every year has not been cancelled, only rescheduled. The brothers are living as though Joseph runs the second system.

2. They sent a message their father is never recorded as giving

Your father gave this command before he died: "Say to Joseph, 'Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin...'"... Joseph wept when they spoke to him.

Genesis 50:16-17

Read the book through and you will not find Jacob saying this. Genesis records a great deal of what he said at the end — a long blessing spoken over each son, detailed burial instructions, his final words — and this is not among it. We are not told whether he said it privately or whether the brothers supplied the words. Either way, look at what they are doing. They are not asking Joseph. They are quoting a dead man at him, because they trust their father's authority more than they trust Joseph's.

It runs in the family. Years before, their father Jacob was about to meet the brother he had cheated, and sent herds of animals ahead of himself, thinking, "I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me" (Genesis 32:20). Soften the brother you wronged. Never simply walk up to him.

Jesus told a story about the same instinct.

I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants."

Luke 15:18-19

A son who has wasted his father's money rehearses a speech on the road home. The demotion to hired worker is his own idea — a deal he is offering so that he does not have to stand there and just be given something. In the story, the father interrupts the speech before he can finish it.

Proverbs says it in one line: "The wicked flee when no one pursues" (Proverbs 28:1). Guilt does not wait for a real threat. It manufactures one.

And Joseph wept. The text does not say why, so it would be dishonest to be certain. But the plain reading is that being managed hurt. Seventeen years of feeding them had not been enough.

3. He refused to sit in the judge's chair

Do not fear, for am I in the place of God?

Genesis 50:19

His brothers have just fallen on their faces in front of him and offered to be his slaves (Genesis 50:18) — which is almost exactly the dream he had as a boy, the one that made them hate him (Genesis 37:7-8). He could take it. He runs Egypt; he could have them killed before lunch. Instead he says that judging them is not his seat to sit in.

Paul gives Christians the same instruction, and he does not pretend the wrong was small.

Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."

Romans 12:19

Paul assumes something real was done to you. He does not say it did not matter; he says hand it over. Giving up revenge is not the same as deciding the injury was nothing. It is deciding you are not the judge — which is Joseph's sentence, centuries earlier, in different words.

That could sound soft. One of Jesus' stories makes sure it cannot.

You wicked servant! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. And should not you have had mercy on your fellow servant, as I had mercy on you?

Matthew 18:32-33

A man is let off an enormous debt, walks out, and grabs someone who owes him a little — and the master reverses the pardon. Forgiveness in the Bible has teeth, and it is expected to travel onward. Any reading of Joseph that turns this into "be nice about it" has to get past that story first.

4. The same word for what they planned and what God planned

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

Genesis 50:20

The Hebrew verb behind both uses of "meant" is chashab: to plan, to reckon up, to work something out on purpose. Joseph uses it once for them and once for God. He is not saying their scheme happened to turn out well. He is saying two plans ran through the same events, and one of them was God's.

Notice also what he does not say. He does not say the evil was good, or that it was all for the best. He calls it evil in the same breath. The pit was still a pit.

Peter said the same two things about the cross, weeks after it happened.

This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

Acts 2:23

Both halves stand in one sentence, to a crowd in Jerusalem: God planned it, and you did it, and you are guilty of it. That is Genesis 50:20 again, at the worst thing that ever happened. Centuries earlier Isaiah had written the hard version — "it was the will of the LORD to crush him" (Isaiah 53:10), LORD in capitals being how English Bibles print God's personal name. None of it was an accident, and none of it excused anybody.

What he did instead

So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.

Genesis 50:21

That is the second "do not fear" in three verses. Then food — the same thing he had been doing for seventeen years, said out loud this time so they could not mistake it for a delay. The verse adds that he comforted them and spoke kindly to them; the Hebrew is literally that he spoke to their heart, the phrase for a man calming someone who is frightened of him.

This is how God deals with people who have wronged him. Paul writes that the God "who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" is not about to turn stingy now (Romans 8:32). And from the cross, before anyone had asked, Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). Joseph had power over his brothers and used it to feed them. Christ had power over the people killing him and used it to ask for their pardon.

What to do with this

Stop auditioning. If you have already apologised for something and been forgiven, do not raise it again to check. Checking is not humility — it tells the other person their word did not count. Say thank you instead, out loud, once.

Name the thing without excusing it. Joseph said "evil" and "God meant it for good" in one sentence. You do not have to call what happened to you small in order to put down the job of sentencing. Write down what actually happened, and under it write: this is not my chair.

Feed somebody you could punish. You know who you have leverage over — the brother or sister who owes you, the friend who let you down, the person who needs something from you. Do one plain, practical thing for them this week without mentioning the debt.

Joseph's brothers spent seventeen years eating bread from a man they believed was waiting to kill them. The sad part of the story is not that Joseph was slow to forgive. It is that they were slow to believe he already had.