Lesson 12: “Joseph, Prince of Egypt”
COLLEEN TINKER
Problems with this lesson:
- The author trivializes the eternal themes of repentance and forgiveness by focussing on word plays and superficial accounts of the brothers’ meetings.
- Spending a whole day’s lesson on Joseph’s “divination cup” reveals Adventism’s fascination with the supernatural—a fact demonstrated in the religion’s annihilationism and in their general assumption that Satan is their personal foe.
The story of Joseph’s dealing with his brothers when they came to Egypt to buy grain for their starving clan reveals God’s sovereign oversight of Joseph’s life from his early dreams foreshadowing his brother’s bowing to him to their eventual move to Egypt. The lesson manages to trivialize the deep themes of God’s sovereign direction of events and His intervention in true repentance and forgiveness. Instead it makes the point that God managed to bring good out of all their bad decisions.
Joseph was able to do what he did with his brothers only because he had already given his situation into God’s hands. Meeting them brought up his old feelings of loss and mistreatment, and he cried after meeting Benjamin—but the reason he was able to interact with them so adroitly and without vindictiveness was that he had already forgiven them by giving up his right to be understood.
Joseph had trusted God with them, as we will see when he finally tells them that they meant what they had done to him for evil, but God meant it for good and for the saving of many lives (Gen. 50:20). He had given up his right to get even and had entrusted them to God as he also entrusted himself.
The profound reality of God’s sovereign intentions, of Joseph’s careful testing of his brothers to see whether they had really changed their attitudes over the years, and his ability to cleanly forgive them all stand as eternal instructions to us from the Lord about His faithfulness to redeem our lives and to give us His perspective even when we have been cruelly treated.
At the same time, his brothers had lived with their lie for decades. Joseph chose not to get revenge but to “lance their wounds”. He created crises that would reveal his brother’s long-buried emotions and guilt.
God doesn’t ask us to embrace dangerous people—just as Joseph didn’t embrace his brothers until he found out that they had become concerned for their father and also for their youngest brother. But God does take care of us and gives us what we need, enabling us to let go of what OUGHT to be our right to be treated properly from those who mistreat us.
Joseph forgave because he knew God was His God. He had identity and security because God was leading his life.
Divination cup
It was typical for people to attempt to seek out hidden knowledge, but this practice was strictly forbidden to Israel. To be sure, Israel did not yet have the law, but Joseph already knew the Lord was the One who gave him the knowledge of the dreams he interpreted. Joseph was not depending upon supernatural powers from dark spiritual forces.
It’s likely that Joseph was not divining with his cup, but he likely let his brothers believe the cup was supernatural and special in order to create a crisis that would reveal his brothers’ hearts.
The story in Genesis is straightforward, and the emphasis is not on that divination cup, whatever it was and whatever it meant to Joseph. We know that Joseph trusted and believed God. Yet the lesson took a whole day to explain it away and to use EGW to reassure the readers that Joseph did not practice divination.
By focussing on this cup that way, the bigger account of Joseph with his brothers is eclipsed. Once again, Adventism has to obfuscate its own commitment to darkness. Adventists fear Satan above all. They fear he will deceive and tempt them, and they fear he will haunt them if they believe humans have immaterial spirits that survive death.
We worship what we fear, and Adventists do not fear God, as Scripture says we must. It fears Satan. In fact, at the heart of Adventist soteriology is Satan the scapegoat who carries away the sins of the saved in the end!
Adventism does not love and cherish the blood of Jesus and His breaking the curse of death. Rather, they fear that Satan may read their thoughts or hear their prayers and deceive them. They fear that they will honor Satan if they don’t keep the Sabbath.
And here, in the lesson on Joseph in Egypt, they spend one full day’s lesson out of seven on Joseph’s divination cup. In context, the divination cup is a small piece in a large picture of Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers. The energy spent to take people’s thoughts away from the idea that Joseph divined the unknown reveals Adventism’s need to explain this story of God’s sovereign direction.
Once again, the lesson misses the fact that this is God’s story, the story of His accomplishing His sovereign will by placing Joseph in Egypt where he not only saved the nation during famine but provided a way for the sons of Israel to have a long-term home in Egypt where God built them into a great nation.
This is, again, a story of our God, not a story of men. This lesson again approaches this account from an inside-out perspective. †
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