June 18–24

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 13: “Israel in Egypt”

COLLEEN TINKER

Problems with this lesson:

• This lesson approaches the last chapters in the story of Joseph from a technical, analytical perspective that misses the sovereign provision of God in establishing Abraham’s descendants and God’s own nation, Israel.
• The lesson describes Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers by saying God turned evil into good instead of acknowledging that God sovereignly used all the evil for His glory.

The Teachers Comments contains a sentence that betrays the human-centric perspective of not only this last lesson from the book of Genesis but also of the whole book. The sentence occurs in the overview of the week’s lesson toward the end of this paragraph:

This last section of the book of Genesis takes us to the end of the patriarchal period with the deaths of Jacob and Joseph. The whole clan of Jacob is now in exile in Egypt. The last words of the book are “a coffin in Egypt.” The history of salvation seems to have no happy ending. And yet, this is the part of the book that is the most redolent of hope. The profile of Israel as God’s people looms on the horizon. The portentous number of “seventy” that constitutes the house of Jacob (Gen. 46:27) alerts the reader to the spiritual destiny of this people. Jacob blesses his sons (Gen. 49:1–28) and predicts the future of what will become the 12 tribes of Israel and the future coming of the Messiah, who will save Israel and the nations (Gen. 49:10–12). The last words of the book that are resonant with death are, in fact, words pointing to the redemptive future: they anticipate the return to the Promised Land in terms that echo the first words of Genesis, introducing the event of Creation and the planting of the Garden of Eden. The underlying theological principle is that God turns evil into good (Gen. 50:20). This is the lesson that Joseph shares with his brothers to comfort them and reassure them (Gen. 50:21), but, more important, to open their eyes to God’s salvation of the world (Gen. 50:20).

By way of contrast, compare the above paragraph with verses 15–26 from Genesis 50:

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.” So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, “Your father gave this command before he died: ‘Say to Joseph, “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, because they did evil to you.”’ And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.” Joseph wept when they spoke to him. His brothers also came and fell down before him and said, “Behold, we are your servants.” But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? 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. So do not fear; I will provide for you and your little ones.” Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.

So Joseph remained in Egypt, he and his father’s house. Joseph lived 110 years. And Joseph saw Ephraim’s children of the third generation. The children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were counted as Joseph’s own. And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die, but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” Then Joseph made the sons of Israel swear, saying, “God will surely visit you, and you shall carry up my bones from here.” So Joseph died, being 110 years old. They embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt (Genesis 50:15–26).

The warping of the message of Genesis in the Teachers Comments is subtle, but it is typical Adventism. Adventist doctrine examines Scripture from a human perspective, interpreting it to say something about human behavior and obedience and showing God to be the One who makes everything work out for His people. 

Scripture, however, is God’s story, not primarily humanity’s. This last chapter of Genesis reveals the end of the patriarchal period and the beginning of the 400 years during which God grew His promised nation, Israel, in what some have called “the womb of Egypt”.  The last two chapters of Genesis reveal Jacob’s blessings of his twelve sons and first introduced them as the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel. 

Furthermore, these chapters recall God’s covenant promises to Abraham which He repeated to both Isaac and Jacob, and they show that God is keeping those promises in spite of the passage of many decades since He first covenanted with a sleeping Abraham (Genesis 15). 

Perhaps most poignant of all is the exchange between Joseph and his brothers recorded in Genesis 50:15–21. The brothers, fearful that Joseph would punish them after their father Jacob died, begged Joseph to forgive them. Furthermore, they implicated their father in their plea—apparently in an attempt to appeal to Joseph’s sentiment and to manipulate him to let them off the hook. 

Joseph’s tears in verse 17 may have reflected his sorrow that his brothers still felt insecure enough that they attempted to manipulate him by bringing Jacob into their appeal. Or, perhaps, he was sorrowful that that they still did not understand that he had completely forgiven them. Perhaps his tears reflected a combination of these feelings coupled with long-suppressed deep grief of his own. 

At any rate, Joseph’s response to them is one of Scripture’s seminal revelations:

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 lesson uses this passage to make the point that God turns evil into good. Yet the account in Genesis does not hint that God turned evil into good. The evil the brothers did was EVIL. Their wicked hearts acted naturally to get rid of the brother they most resented, and that evil was never turned into GOOD. 

Rather, the exact opposite response is what we learn in Genesis 50. The evil that the brothers did WAS EVIL—and Joseph’s words acknowledged this fact. They meant evil against him! The evil of his kidnapping and salve to slave traders did not become good!

Yet God used their evil intentions and their evil actions for His purposes. God actually MEANT their evil for good! 

This reality is one of those inscrutable revelations that we can only hold in reverent tension. God is sovereign. He did not merely clean up the evil plans of the brothers; He INTENDED those evil plans for His ultimate purpose.

The brothers were unregenerate and ungrateful. They wanted what was not theirs—Jacob’s favor and attention—things which Jacob should have given them as readily as he gave them to Joseph. In fact, the brothers’ behavior was natural in young men who had a father who played favorites and protected two sons to the exclusion of the other ten. The dynamics of Jacob’s family were dysfunctional. He, in fact, was a weak father who played favorites and hurt his children.

Jacob’s own sin created resentful sons who found a convenient target in young Joseph—and their anger and resentment both toward Joseph and their father played out in a story of incredible malevolence inside the family. 

God was not surprised by their evil, however. He intended that their evil be for the purpose of ultimately saving countless lives—including their own—years later and in His time.

God faithfully kept His covenant promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as He brought about the events that took the seventy members of Jacob’s family into Egypt—exactly as He had told Abraham would happen. In Genesis 15 God told Abraham this:

Then the LORD said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:13–14).

This end-of-life story of Jacob and the final chapters of Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers brought the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s word that Abraham’s offspring would be sojourners in a land that was not theirs! 

This sequence of events was not God making good out of evil; it was God using flawed and selfish men to accomplish His purposes in a way that the entire future of humanity would be able to look back and see that, in spite of unforeseeable odds, God would keep His word and create His nation exactly on time in the way He said He would.

All of this story is about revealing God’s sovereign faithfulness. He doesn’t merely come in and do damage control; on the contrary, He uses the natural evil of humans to accomplish His purposes. Furthermore, God accomplishes His purposes among sinful humans who have forgotten what it means to honor Him as God. 

The lesson flattens the biblical account into a philosophical explanation for God’s ways, creating linguistic comparisons that sound erudite but fail to acknowledge God’s purposes. The book of Genesis ends in a most remarkable way. It is not a book ending in death with shadows of Eden—I’m frankly not sure how the authors got that idea. Rather, Genesis ends with our introduction to the twelve tribes of Israel, and it sets us up for Exodus, the next book of the Torah, which will reveal the story of God’s dealings with His nation.

God reveals Himself and His sovereign, unchanging consistent intervention and promise-keeping. The focus is not on man’s sin and evil but on God’s sovereign, electing power to bring about what He says He will do in the fulness of time. 

We do not determine when and how God’s purposes will be accomplished; rather, God determines how things will occur, and our participation in His story is His sovereign provision for our good and for His glory.

The story is not ours; it is God’s story! †

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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