We come back to this 37th Chapter of Genesis.  If you have your Bible and will turn there, we’re going to put in at the 20th Verse.  We got down through the 19th last time.  This is a chapter that actually tells us about Joseph.  He becomes the very important one.  

The next chapter we come to, 38, which we’ll get into today, is a chapter that again seems not to be necessary for the Book of Genesis.  Some think they wish that it had been left out, but it’s very important to the story, and we’ll see why when we get to it.  It has nothing about Joseph, however.  

Now as we come back, we will recall I’m sure, we saw that Joseph at 17 years of age had become the favorite son of his father and that he’d had these dreams that caused his brothers to hate him.  They hated him before because his father was partial to him and he apparently told his father about them and their evil deeds, and apparently they were engaged in quite a bit of it.  This poor man Jacob really found out that God didn’t approve of this matter of plurality of marriage by any means, and it certainly caused sorrow in his home.

Now we find that Joseph is sent by Jacob, his father, to seek his brethren.  They had gone north—fact of the matter is they’d gone all the way from Hebron up to Shechem, and when he got to Shechem why he couldn’t find them.  And the reason was the grass there wasn’t too good that year, so they’d moved on up to Dothan, and a man there saw him wandering around and asked him who he was seeking.  He told him, and this man said, “Well, the thing to do is to go up to Dothan because,” he said, “I heard them talking it over, and that’s where they went.”  

And so when Joseph went to Dothan, he found them.  And they saw him coming with this coat that apparently had sleeves in it.  That set it apart; in fact, that gave him a position above his brethren, and he certainly was not the oldest one by any means or even next to the oldest.  And, as a result, we find that they are very jealous of him, and they’ve determined now to destroy him.  In fact, they want to kill him.  That’s how much they hated him.  And when he came up to them, they ridiculed, of course.  And they said, “Behold, this dreamer cometh.”  

And Verse 20:

Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.

Now Reuben here, who has already lost his position as the firstborn—it’ll be transferred to Judah—but Reuben actually stands out in a good light here.  He has more mature judgment than the others.  And Verse 21, I’m reading:

And Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands; and said, Let us not kill him.

They would have slain him right there and then.  But Reuben intervened, and he rescued him and said, “Look, brethren, let’s not kill him.” 

And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand upon him; that he might rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again.  (Genesis 37:22)

Now it was Reuben’s avowed purpose that when he was put in the pit that he would slip back and take him out of the pit and take him home to his father and tell him what had happened.  But when he was put in the pit it came to pass…Verse 23:

And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colors that was on him…  

In other words, that coat was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, because they hated him.  That set him apart from them, and they certainly didn’t like that by any means because several of them, according to the law of primogeniture, that is, that the elder has prior claim, why there were several of them that were older than he was.

…And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it.  And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.  (Genesis 37:24-25)

These were traders that were going by.

And Judah said unto his brethren, What profit is it if we slay our brother, and conceal his blood?  (Genesis 27:26)

In other words, Judah now intervenes.  It doesn’t seem to be a very good plan of his, but at least he doesn’t want murder to take place, and he doesn’t want the blood to be on the hands of the brothers of Joseph.  And he makes this suggestion:

Come, and let us sell him to the Ishmeelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content.  (Genesis 37:27)

“Well,” they said, “what we want to do is to get rid of him.  And if we sell him to these Ishmeelites, they’ll take him down to Egypt.  That’s where they’re going, sell him into slavery and that to us is just the same as getting rid of him.”  And slavery in many places was the living death anyway.  Certainly they’d never hear from him again.  And so we read Verse 28.

Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt.

Now I’m sure that at this point you’re saying, “Well, Moses make up your mind.  You called them Ishmeelites at first; then you called them Midianites, now you come back and call them Ishmeelites again.  What are they?  And isn’t this an error in the Bible?”  I was handed many years ago now by a student and it had been handed to him a little blue paperback book that showed, I think, a thousand or two thousand errors in the Bible.  I looked it over.  I never found any errors except in that little book.  And one of the errors was here; that one place it says Ishmeelites; another place, Midianites, which is accurate?  Well, let’s look at this for a moment because this is quite interesting, and it reveals how the critics and those that hate the Bible how they can manufacture actually that which reveals something of the accuracy of it.  

Now, who were the Ishmeelites?  Who was the father of the Ishmeelites?  Abraham.  Whose the father of the Midianites?  Well, Abraham.  You see Ishmael was the son of Abraham by Hagar.  Midian was son of Abraham by Keturah that he married after the death of Sarah.  Now these are brethren actually; Ishmeelites and Medianites.  And they’re kin to this crowd here, boys that are selling their brother too, by the way.  And after all, at this particular time, even an Israelite, there are not but 12 of them.  And how many Ishmeelites do you think there’d be at this time?  I doubt whether there’d be over 100 of them; that is, of all of them.  And Midianites, how many of them would it be?  Midian was born after Isaac was born.  So that there could not probably have been maybe a dozen Midianites.  Well, with the small groups like that, tribes in that day and their related and the desert was–their travelling to Egypt at least in that day was dangerous—so they just joined together.  

And what Moses is trying to make clear to us as we read this that the Ishmeelites and the Midianites had joined together, a small band of each.  It made them stronger, and they’re related; they understand each other, so they’re on the way down to Egypt to do business.  May I say that the Word of God makes good sense if you just let it make good sense!  We’re the folks that don’t make good sense with it and, of course, ignorance adds a great deal to the contradictions that people think they find.   The contradiction is not in the Bible, but it’s in the ignorance of people who read, and this, of course, is a good example.  You can see how whoever wrote this knew exactly what the situation was in that day.

Now, they sell Joseph.  And they’re taking Joseph down to the land of Egypt.  And Verse 29:

And Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in the pit; and he rent his clothes.  And he returned unto his brethren, and said, The child is not; and I, whither shall I go?  And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood.  (Genesis 37:29-31)

Now whether they brought Reuben in on this, I don’t know.  I’m of the opinion they did.  I think they said, “Well, we sold him into Egypt.  And he’s halfway down there now.”  So they’ve got now to get some sort of a “cock-and-bull story” to tell old Jacob about what happened to Joseph.  Now what do they do?  They took Joseph’s coat and they killed a kid of the goat and dipped the coat in the blood.  

And they sent the coat of many colors, and they brought it to their father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son’s coat or no.  (Genesis 37:32)

Pretty clever, isn’t it?  Why they act as if they never had seen Joseph.  All that they knew, according their story, which is a lie, they said, “Why we found this coat.”  And believe me, they knew that coat—they hated that coat.  And they say, “Why we don’t recognize the coat, but do you recognize the coat?  Could this be the coat of your son?”  Believe me, Jacob knew whose coat it was!  

And he knew it, and said, It is my son’s coat; an evil beast hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces.

This is a conclusion and the natural conclusion that he would come to and the conclusion that these other sons of Jacob intended for him to.  But let’s pause now a moment, and take a look at this.  Does this matter of deceiving the father with a goat, does that remind you of anything that we’ve had before?  Well, if you’ll just think about this for a few moments, do you recall that when Jacob was a young fellow, he and his mother connived together to deceive Isaac, and the thing they did was they killed a goat and they cooked it up, you know, made him savory meat to eat, and then they took the skins of the goat and put it on the hands of Jacob, and he went in and deceived his father.  And the thing has to do with a goat!  Now the brethren of Joseph, sons of Jacob now, they kill a goat.  They dip the coat of many colors in the blood and they come and hand it to old Jacob, and said, “Do you recognize this?”  Jacob said, “I sure do!”  They say, “Well, we found it up there.  Looks like a wild beast or something must have got to him; something happened to him.”  And old Jacob came to the conclusion that his boy had been killed.  He’s been deceived—will you listen to this—he is deceived in the very way that he had deceived!  Chickens come home to roost.  

The Word of God says and says it very specifically, “Be not deceived.  God is not mocked.  Whatsoever a man sows that shall he also reap.”  (Galatians 6:7)  Not something else.  Not something similar, but the same thing.  If you sow to the flesh, you will of the flesh reap corruption.  This man Jacob did some bad sowing.  He used deception and, in the same way in which he deceived his father, when he became a father, he’s deceived in the identical way.  You see when you sow corn, you get corn.  When you sow tares, you get tares.  You get exactly what you sow.  That’s true in any realm you care to move in today, and it’s certainly true in the moral and spiritual realm, and that’s true today of any believer.  If you think you can get by with sin and you’re a child of God, you have another thought coming.  In fact, you better take that other thought and not do the thing, because God is no respecter of persons.  He said this is the way it’s going to be and just because you are you, you don’t get by with it.  

I talked to a minister—oh, this has been now at least five years ago—that had got involved with another man’s wife.  It was a sorted story.  As I talked with him, he tried to justify himself on the basis that he was something special of the Lord.  That because he was who he was, he operated on a different plane and by a different rule book than anyone else.  May I say God’s no respecter of persons.  The very way in which this fellow had sinned did come home to him.  God says you don’t get by with it at all.  If you sin in this direction, the day will come—it took it a long time for the chickens to come home to roost, but they came home to roost for this man.

Now will you notice the grief of Jacob.  And this is something else to note at this point.

And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned for his son many days.  And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.  (Genesis 37:34-35)

And somebody’s going to say, “My, isn’t that a demonstration of how much he loved his son Joseph.”  Well, I’ll have to admit he certainly loved his son Joseph.  But this man has not learned to walk by faith yet, Friends!  You remember the experience he had at Peniel?  It was the deflation of the old ego; perpendicular pronoun “I”—the flesh collapsed there.  But now he’s got to learn to walk by faith.  And he hadn’t learned it.  And he hasn’t learned it at this point.  You will notice that when you get to the 11th Chapter of Hebrews and the example of faith of Jacob, you find nothing in his life—it’s not until you get to the time of his death that you find faith really exhibited in his life.  

And if you want to know whether this is an exhibit of faith or not, compare the grief of this man to David at the weeping for his son and also of his weeping over Absalom.  Now David loved his son Absalom and loved that little one that was born just as much as Jacob loved his son Joseph.  But he (David) also was a man of faith, and after he had grieved, he went on.  He knew someday—he said concerning that little one, he said, “That little one can’t come to me; that’s for sure.  My grieving won’t help there a bit.  But I’m going to the little one someday.”  What faith!  

Poor Jacob, you see, is not walking by faith, Friends.  This is abnormal grief.  And, Christian Friends—and I’m talking, I’m sure, to some folks—you’ve lost a loved one you can’t get over.  I want to say to you, not brutally, but kindly:  learn to walk by faith!  You manifest the Christian life when you recognize that you can’t bring that one back.  And your grieving is doing no good at all.  

But if the one you’re grieving of is a child of God and you’re a child of God, then walk by faith.  You’re going to see that one someday, and you’re going to see that one and never be separated.  Now, look can’t you walk by faith?  Don’t exhibit that lack of faith that is in the people of the world, and that’s the way they grieve today.

Now we read Verse 36, the last verse here.

And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh’s, and captain of the guard.

Now we’re going to leave Joseph right there, and we’ll pick up his story in Chapter 39.  But we come to Chapter 38, again another chapter that seems to be as about as necessary as a fifth leg on a cow.  We just don’t seem to need Chapter 38 at all, and after you read the story, you rather wish it was left out of the Bible.  I’ve had any number of people say, “Well, why is that chapter put in the Bible?”  

May I say Chapter 38 is the worst chapter in the Bible!  We’ll take this up next time and go into not too much detail, but some—but there are some names here.  It’s the sin of Judah actually; it’s the sin and the shame of Judah.  And Judah is going to be the one, the tribe out of which the Messiah is coming.  And there’s some names that appear here that are quite interesting, and you’ll find a name like Judas and then you find a name like Tamar, and you say, “My, I’ve seen these names before.  Wonder where it was I saw them?”  

Well, now if you would turn to the first chapter of the New Testament, the Gospel of Matthew, you read a genealogy there, and it’s the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ.   And you’ll find out that “…Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar” (Matthew 1:3) and of all things, you say, “Well, you mean to tell me this is the line of the Lord Jesus?”  Yes, Friends, this happens to be the line that leads to the Lord Jesus Christ.  An amazing thing, isn’t it—that this reveals the awful sin and the Lord Jesus came in that line, Friends.  He really took our place down here, didn’t He!  He came into a sinful line.  That’s what the Word of God’s trying to tell us.  He was made in all points like as we are, yet, He Himself was from sin apart, but he came into that line—that human line—where all have sinned and come short of the glory of God!  We’ll see that chapter next time.