God Reveals His Plan
Engage with the Lord: Joseph’s Story • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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God is the Hero
God is the Hero
Genesis 37:1–11 (NIV)
Jacob lived in the land where his father had stayed, the land of Canaan.
This is the account of Jacob’s family line.
Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them.
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age; and he made an ornate robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him.
Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, “Listen to this dream I had: We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field when suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it.”
His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.
Then he had another dream, and he told it to his brothers. “Listen,” he said, “I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”
When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?” His brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.
The word used for dream is halom and is the same word used in reference to the dream of Abimelek in Genesis 20 when the Lord revealed to him that Sarah was Abraham’s wife, of Jacob in Genesis 31 as Jacob received special sheep breeding instructions, of Laban in Genesis 31 as he is instructed to let Jacob and his family return home. This same word will be used to speak of Pharaoh’s dreams of abundance and famine later in the story. It is a word specifically used in Genesis to mark the intentional intervention of the Lord to direct and guide the movements of people in accordance with His will.
Joseph’s life is marked at the beginning by the evidence of the Lord’s hand at work. The account of the dreams, coming at the outset, makes God, not Joseph, the “hero” of the story; it is not a tale of human success but of divine sovereignty.
Jospeh places his faith in the One who bestowed the revelation upon him even in the face of ridicule of those around him and the lack of understanding on how this will come to be.
God is the Hero of Our Story
God is the Hero of Our Story
Ephesians 2:1–10 (NIV)
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
God has made Himself fully known to us through the precious gift of Jesus Christ. The reason why we celebrate this season is because God drew near to us. He pulled back the veil and gave us what the patriarchs and the prophets of the Old Testament pleaded with the Lord for, to look upon the fullness of the Lord. Jesus is God in His fullness, drawn near and intentionally intervening in all of our lives. This wonderful picture of the fullness of God is then perfectly and completely accentuated by the gift of the Holy Spirit, God in us. God is the hero of our story. He has made Himself known from the outset of our story so that God, not us, might be the “hero” of our story; a life not of human success but of divine sovereignty.
We live in a culture of self-made humans and we have allowed that to permeate the church and the hearts of believers. If God is dependent upon us for anything, what does that say about the Lord? But if we are dependent upon God for everything, what does that say about us? More importantly, what does it say about God?