This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 6: “Finding Rest In Family Ties”
This week’s lesson uses the story of Joseph to say that “our relationships are miniature reflections of the great controversy between God and Satan that is raging through the ages” (p. 77 of the Teacher’s Bible Study Guide). It emphasises this double point (as articulated in the Teachers Comments):
“This week’s lesson focuses on two eternal truths. First, though we may go through trials and face difficulties, this does not in any way mean that God has forsaken us or loves us any less. God’s love reaches us where we are, no matter what life throws at us. Second, the challenges we face are often preparing us for something far greater than we can imagine. God has a plan through it all and is working to accomplish His ultimate purpose in our lives. The story of Joseph is the story of a young man who was faithful to God amid a dysfunctional family relationship, but God eventually used him to save his family and restore the relationship he had lost.”
Once again, Adventism appropriates the biblical accounts to prop up its great controversy worldview. From the perspective of the lesson, Joseph and his dysfunctional family were all suffering with sin and self-serving attitudes, but God helped Joseph and redeemed him because Jospeh stayed faithful to God.
The lesson quotes Ellen White in Patriarchs and Prophets saying that on his trip to Egypt as a slave, Joseph “gave himself fully to the Lord, and he prayed that the Keeper of Israel would be with him in the land of his exile.”
This detail simply is not in Scripture. What EGW and the Adventist authors of the lesson missed is the fact that God is sovereign! He chose Abraham and made a unilateral, unconditional covenant with him—a covenant which He renewed with Isaac and then again with Jacob, the father of Joseph. God had chosen those men based entirely upon His own sovereign will, and His covenant did not depend upon responses from them.
We are not told that Joseph “gave himself fully to the Lord”, but we learn that God blessed Joseph, and Joseph believed God and honored Him. In other words, God’s blessing did not depend upon either Joseph’s choices or upon his circumstances. Joseph honored God, and God blessed Joseph—both by the sovereign will of the One God!
The lesson does not deal with the fact that God allowed Joseph to believe in Him far, far away from the family of his youth. In fact, Joseph is not reunited with his estranged brothers and father until later in his life when he already had two sons of his own.
When Joseph’s brothers showed up to buy grain from Egypt during the famine, Joseph recognized them and reconciled with them. Afraid, they thought Joseph would punish them for what they had done to him, but he did not. Rather, he identified with them and ultimately told them that what they had meant for evil, God meant for the saving of souls and for the saving of many lives.
God used Joseph to save not only the huge nation of Egypt but also the lives of his own family—and in so doing, Jacob’s children settled in Egypt where they grew into the huge nation that, 400 years later, was led by Moses and the Pillar of Cloud and Fire out of Egypt into the desert—the very gateway to the Promised Land.
The lesson does not deal with the fact that true faith in God—in the finished work of the Lord Jesus and His completed atonement—yields new family connections: the Holy Spirit’s unity between those who are born again through faith in the Lord Jesus. The blood of Jesus is a stronger bond than is the tie of human genetics.
Jesus is the sword that comes between the closest family ties when some believe and others do not. Yet Jesus said that He would gives us 100 times as much as we lose in this life PLUS eternal life!
God asks us to trust His Son, to believe that He has died for our sins according to Scripture, that He was buried, and that He rose from death on the third day according to Scripture (1 Cor. 15:3, 4). He asks us believe in the One whom He has sent (Jn, 6:29).
When we do believe, trusting Jesus with all our sin, He seals us with the indwelling Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13-14), and we are never alone again. We have true family in Jesus, and the bond of the Spirit holds us in a relationship that surpasses anything we have merely from flesh. †
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