Joseph's life exemplifies enduring suffering and injustice without being defined by it, serving as a model for the life of faith. The sermon traces his journey from betrayal by his brothers and false accusation to imprisonment, highlighting his faithfulness and resilience. The core lesson is that God's purpose can be seen even in the midst of intense hardship, and that a believer's response to suffering is crucial. Ultimately, Joseph's story encourages trust in God's sovereign plan through painful circumstances.
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Verse twenty-two. By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel and gave commandment concerning his bones. That's all that's said about Joseph in the book of the Hebrews, the letter to Hebrews. But the study, as you'll notice by your notes in Genesis, runs through from Genesis chapter thirty, the middle of the chapter, verses twenty-two and twenty-four. right through to chapter thirty seven perhaps we could look at a verse or two there in Genesis chapter thirty Genesis chapter thirty verse twenty two and God remembered Rachel you will remember the story of course of Jacob's two wives and this beloved Rachel now is before God.
And God remembered Rachel and God hearkened to her and opened her womb and she conceived and bore a son and said, God hath taken away my reproach. And she called his name Joseph and said, The Lord shall add to me another son. which of course he did and we remember the name of that son and the story that followed right through the youngest son of all, Benjamin. Now we don't want to go in merely to a detailed study of Joseph's life in a general way. We're trying to see these patriarchs as examples of phases and facets of the life of faith.
We looked at Abraham in the first lesson as an illustration of the obedience of faith, because of those very important words by faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out and so on, obeyed. He went out, not knowing whether he went. We followed that life through and saw it in a context of eight great revelations of God, conversations between God and Jacob and Abraham, I beg your pardon, conversations between God and Abraham. in each one of which God revealed something more of himself and his plans to Abraham and each one of those revelations demanded on Abraham's part a response and this lifted him up we saw his life as a kind of passing grades in the school of God each new revelation asked for more obedience asked for a profounder knowledge of God himself and his ways.
And as he responded to each test, given in each revelation, he was raised up into the next grade. And of course, things became steeper and steeper. This is the way we looked at it. Isaac we saw to be an illustration of the patience of faith, a much less spectacular man than either his father or his son, possibly because He was learning and exemplifying in himself patience, not just passive patience, but active patience, which is perseverance, endurance, and activity and progress in the face of discouragement. Everywhere we look, we see the man's parents waiting twenty years for him in patience.
He waiting twenty years for his firstborn in patience, as the Philistines plugged those wells, he very patiently unstopped them. And if they stopped them again, he unstopped them again. He wasn't to be put down. And we saw a good many phases of that patience. Jacob was neither a very obedient man, nor yet a very patient man in himself. But we saw God taking up the raw material of perhaps a rather carnal, precipitate man, and certainly a self-seeking man. in the beginning of his days, and bit by bit in a process of great disciplining, bringing Jacob to be the man that God really wanted.
Fulfilling that word, I will not let thee go until I have performed the things that I have spoken to thee on. And God, in wonderful grace and patience, dealt with this headstrong man and molded him and broke him bit by bit in a series of disciplining. So we see Abraham, his life, looked at in a framework of a whole series of revelations and communings with God. Isaac's life looked at in a whole series of enduring perseverance going on, refusing to be stopped, refusing to be done, refusing to become discouraged.
Jacob, we see his life in the context of a whole series of disciplining. always more severe and we looked at those disciplines of course one by one now the life of Joseph as we see was a whole series of experiences in suffering and now we're into a very mysterious era area of the life of any child of God one that perhaps causes us more questionings of heart than maybe any other and one that it pays us to turn to the Word of God and find out what God says about this whole mystery of suffering in all its angles.
Now, we can't possibly look at it in all its angles tonight, but we have given you at least some suggestions of references, and we may touch on some of these as we go along. Not that they're all illustrated in the life of Joseph, for they're not, but we have linked them up with other scriptures. We wonder why some of God's choicest saints, for example, are us. to go through oceans of suffering. We wonder why very young Christians find themselves as soon as they accept the Lord, just deluged with problems and cares and physical as well as mental and spiritual sufferings as well.
Why couldn't God make it easier? And this is all the more mysterious since in our day it has become quite popular to preach the gospel as a kind of bag of solutions for our problems and so we tell people man you've got problems as a matter of fact the word problem has become one of our nineteen seventy three cliches fellas uh having some kind of mechanical trouble this car he's got a problem he's got a wife that he can't get along with he's got a problem man up on the moon have got problems Getting back and everything's a problem. It's just one of those words, you know, that bobs up every once in a while.
So we come to people and you say, you've got problems. But if you come to Jesus, and that's a quotation, not my way of saying it. If you come to Jesus, he'll solve all your problems. Now, the plain fact of the matter is that if you come and accept the lordship of Christ in a world where that lordship is rejected and repudiated, I believe the Bible teaches you are going to increase your problems instead of cutting back. Now you will have problems solved. You will have a piece of heart. You will have the matter of your sin settled. Your eternal destiny settled. You will know where you're going. You will have the compass of the Word of God. You will have the assurance of God's guidance. But your problem certainly won't stop.
I venture to suggest that in one sense at least, the children of Israel had far more problems after they were liberated from Egypt than they ever had while they were there. For a while they were in Egypt, they were just simply told what to do, and they did it and got on with it. They didn't have too many decisions to make, did they? But when they got out, they found themselves faced with a different story. And so we wonder why God stirs up so many problems. Now we'll look at some of these as we go along. Your notes say Joseph is, so far as the Bible record goes, one of the most perfect characters described therein. There seems to be Hardly a flaw, if indeed any flaw, mentioned in them.
We do not mean by this that Joseph as a man was perfect, for we don't believe that any man is perfect down here. But of all the characters in the Bible, here we have one that so far as the record goes is one of the nearest to perfection. Obedience in abundance. in Joseph. And yet that's not the outstanding characteristic, for he's not always put to tests of obedience. Patience, yes, abundance of patience. And yet that's not the outstanding characteristic, simply because it wasn't so much patience that he required as to do the right thing at the right time and be God's man in God's place no matter what the consequences.
As in Jacob, disciplining, yes. Here were disciplining beyond measure. And yet, somehow or other, that's not the particular thing that stands out. It's just sheer suffering from beginning to end. You will remember that his father, in blessing the tribes, referred to him as being harried by the archers. What a wonderful picture. He sees him almost like an animal fleeing for its life, innocent and fleeing. and the archers are harrying it from behind, shooting arrow after arrow into it. And so this seems to be the picture. He is the man of suffering. He is the most perfect, as the characters described, yet his life history is largely made up of a series of experiences in suffering.
Now his verses mentioned, of course, as we read in chapter thirty, but the beginning of this story goes over to chapter thirty seven that is as we are going to look at it because of the gap in between chapter thirty seven verse four and when his that is Joseph's brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren they hated him and they could not speak peaceably to him. Now this wasn't Joseph's fault, if indeed there is fault at all.
Joseph, of course, is a marvelous picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are not in these lessons taking these men up, really, as types or pictures of the Lord Jesus. It has been suggested that we take an evening and gather up these men and the stories of these men and show how the Lord Jesus Christ prefigured perhaps in many of them if not all of them. The Lord Jesus Christ is the one who totally and completely fills the picture in every way. But for the moment we're looking at him as a man and we're looking at all of these men as men because we're dealing with the problems and the questions of the life of faith.
And they were all men walking by faith. The Lord Jesus Christ of course did too while he was here on earth. in complete unquestioning trust and obedience in the father but here we have these two words hatred and they couldn't speak peaceably to them a wrong-headed perverse antagonism that even when the very circumstances would have required them to speak in a decent way they didn't they find it impossible to do so and we have suggested that this is the suffering of unmerited hatred and antagonism. Now I don't want that we should go flying through this at a high altitude as planes go over the top of the clouds and the storms.
I think we should look at how this might apply to us. Maybe there are those here who, because of one circumstance or another of life, you find yourself faced with hatred. maybe even with downright active antagonism because hatred can be a thing stored up in the heart but this other business was the outflow of hatred it was an active antagonism it wasn't merely that they couldn't that they couldn't speak peaceably to him and therefore didn't speak is that they couldn't speak any other way but the very opposite of that they find it impossible to be decent There are times when some of the Lord's people find themselves perhaps at work, perhaps in the area of witnessing, perhaps somewhere in school, you will find such a violent antagonism.
As a matter of fact, it may even be that some of us have suffered this in our own homes, because we read in the Word of God that a man's enemy shall be those of his own household, and that's spoken in connection with loyalty to Christ. that a sword was coming, that he wasn't going to just unite and plaster everything over with a wonderful white plaster, that God's word was going to plow deep and challenge man and require them to make decisions in loyalty to him or in rejection of him, and that he was going to be like a sword dividing man, that some would be for him, some would be against him, and that those who were for him would be hated by those who were against him.
And so sometimes this actually comes into the home. I never experienced this myself because by the time I was led to the Lord Jesus Christ, my parents were both Christians. Therefore, in the home I met nothing but joy and excitement and love and health when I told them I was a Christian. But I know of people who haven't. I have seen Africans standing against an absolute whirlwind of downright hatred. I have known fathers back in this country of ours, or at least in our western countries, who perhaps we'll say have one of the family, a Christian, or maybe two, and they have one or two who are not Christians.
And things that they never paid the slightest attention to or bothered about in the non-Christians, they picked and pecked and tore apart in those who were Christians, objecting, obstructing, persecuting in the home. and some of them perhaps known to you, though you may not know the circumstances. It may be that some of us have found ourselves in these. How do we react to dislike? How do we react to people who somehow or other, as soon as they know that we're a Christian, they just become like a hedgehog, just a mass of prickles. And every time we come near them, perhaps a supervisor, a superintendent, a boss.
I ran into this in my work. Only years later did it dawn on my very naive soul what was going on. I didn't realize the kind of person this man was. I didn't realize I was too innocent. Some of the things that he was trying to push me into and that he wanted me into so far as he was concerned. I didn't even know them. Only later was I able, in the light of other things that I learned later in life, did I know to interpret what was going on. And so this man who was my immediate boss in the place where I worked, he quite literally made life hell for me as an apprentice. Day in, day out, and believe me, a boss can do it.
Everything went wrong. Everything was wrong. If there was late work to be done, I had to do it. If there was blame, I had to bear it. If there was something nasty, cutting, abusive to say in front of people, it was said to me. Every kind of epithet, every kind of remark was indulged in. just sheer spite. Now I rankled, or rather it rankled in me, and I simply roiled under it because I am not a very patient person in myself. Any I have, I had to learn by very hard lessons. But much later, as I look back, the similar circumstances that I had to face on the mission field and in foreign countries, I thanked God for that early apprenticeship in learning how to handle hatred and active antagonism.
And then I said, Lord, I'm so grateful that in a totally different context while I was young and while I couldn't do anything about it, because what can you do to a boss? I mean, he was there. He had the leverage. Anything I would have done would have made the thing ten times worse. The only thing I could do Let's keep telling them that I was a Christian and accept that position. Not a thing in the world could I do, absolutely defenseless. Now I will round these things up and perhaps make them into a completed whole, but these are very real things. Let me remind you also that the Lord Jesus Christ said to his own disciples that they were not to marvel if the world hated him. As a matter of fact, he said, the world will hate you.
Not it may, but it will. Well, why? Because it hates me, and you are mine. Now, I know that people are forever quibbling about this and asking about it because it's a very popular theory in our day that the Christian can somehow buy six easy lessons or by buying some book or other and reading through it and learning the key that you can make the gospel acceptable. to the unconverted man, that you can put this thing across, that you can learn not to antagonism, that not to antagonize him, that somehow or other there's a way around this.
And of course some Christians seem to find this. And they don't seem to get too much persecution or antagonism. But I wonder if we were totally true to the Lord's in every phase of light, even to the rebuking of wrong for Christ did this. And he requires it in us that we do it. There are many scriptures that speak of this. And if we were his witnesses as light in a dark place, rebuking by our very attitude, by our very abstinence from it, every evil, and standing up for the Lord, and reminding men of the judgment of God on the things they are doing, we would certainly see the teeth and claws of the world around the body.
We don't because we don't. We don't get the hatred because we do not stand up as these men did for Christ. I see in the very beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, Peter and John, they cured a man. What's the end of it? They're in jail. And they're getting rough treatments. And they're told, no more of this. Silence. Stop preaching. But they had just been told a matter of days before. Go ye into all the world and preach. Now who are ye going to obey? They're going to obey God these men because they're courageous men. But they don't say, don't say anything about it now. Don't roil the waters. Don't stir these men up. We'll just go out and preach anyway. That wasn't Peter's way of doing it because he had a witness to bear to those leaders of the Sanhedrin.
And so he said, would it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye, but as for us, we cannot but speak. He didn't say, we're going to lead a revolt. We're going to tear your people off the places of judgment and the places of rule. We'll go out on the street and we'll stir up so much trouble that we'll rip this government apart and get a government that will let us preach. That is never the path of a Christian. They did say, you men nailed our master to the tree. He never raised a hand to stop you. But he continued to witness, and he being dead yet speaketh. And in the footsteps of that unresisting one, we are quite prepared to be nailed to a tree as well.
But to deny him, the answer is never. And Peter, we're told, was finally crucified. We don't know. It's not revealed in the Word of God. But traditional history of the church says that he, too, was crucified, except that he was crucified upside down at his own request. because he felt he was unworthy to have even that likeness of the Lord in his sufferings. And so these men went on and on, and of all the apostles, only one, John escapes a violent death. The world will hate you because it hates me.
Now the world has not changed for the better since then. The commands of Scripture have not changed since then. There has been no watering of them down. God has not changed since then. And if we are not getting this kind of thing, who do you think has changed? I leave that for you to answer. But you will, if you are faithful, meet with the suffering of hatred and antagonism. How do you handle it? How do you react? You can deal with this, I'm sure. Verse fifteen. The suffering of wandering. A certain man found him, and behold, he was wandering in the field, and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou?
And he said, I seek my brethren, and so on. I don't want to take up time, because we're already running away behind time. The suffering of wandering. There's something in us in humankind down here that would like to be settled quietly. We don't like to be disturbed. I'm not taking this as any very great suffering, wandering around looking for his father, though it was quite a chore. That was a very rough, bad country. If you're looking at any of the pictures in the war news these days, you'll see what desert is like when the temperature goes soaring up to a hundred and twenty and a hundred and thirty.
And this young fellow, still a young fellow, probably around seventeen years of age, he's wandering around looking for his brethren. But I think that maybe that word wandering might perhaps be just a little a preview of a far greater wandering. Just think of this man. He leaves his father's side and he comes looking for his brothers. He leaves the comfort of home and he's zigzagging around and wandering. He is then taken and thrown in a pit. He's taken up out of the pit and sold to some Ishmaelites. They take him down into Egypt. He goes into Potiphar's house. He goes into the prison. He comes out of the prison and he's up in the governor's palace.
And then finally, presumably, he moved at some time or other into the land of Goshen where his brothers were. Nothing very settled about it. Now God asks the Christian sometimes, to suffer being uprooted. Would you be willing? There's something very nice about being settled. There's something very nice about ancient ivy on beautiful old walls. There's something nice about having one's neighbors there that we know them and they know us. There's something nice about being able to put down roots and develop strong, healthy, beautiful friendships with people.
But you know we are pilgrims. We are strangers. And sometimes we are required by God to move. Now I'm not advocating that every Christian should be a foot-loose, rootless, wandering kind of gypsy at all. This is something which characterizes our age in a drifting kind of way in a certain part of our society. I'm not advocating that. I am advocating that the Christian should always be prepared at the command of God to leave wherever he is, no matter how comfortable, no matter how much he may like it, and to be prepared to move out into uncertainty, into movement, into wandering if necessary.
We would all like, I would have liked, for example, in my life to have been able to settle down and make the kind of friendships that most people are privileged to make. Unfortunately, up to the present time, God has always kept saying in His work, somewhere else, there is something else. Not all have been called to do that, thank God, but still perhaps it's part of the pilgrim's suffering, and we suffer it for God. Now, I know that a lot of our movement down here comes from the whims of the corporation for which we work or rezoning or something rather like this. I'm not talking about that. I am talking about the readiness of a Christian to shoulder the suffering of moving from the comfortable place to wherever God wants them in service.
God wanted this man, this young man. He wanted him down with his brothers. He wanted him in Egypt. He wanted him in Goshen. Wherever he put him, God wanted him there, and this man suffered and went wherever God wanted him. Look at chapter thirty-seven, but back up a little bit at verse eight. And his brethren said to him, Shall thou indeed reign over us? Or shall thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet more for his dreams and for his words. And he dreamed another dream, and so it goes on. about these dreams of his.
And look down at verse eleven. And his brethren envied him, but his father observed the saying. So here we have the suffering of rejection and envy connected to the same part of his life. Are you going to have dominion over us? Now God had said this. God had revealed it to him. And this brings in this very ugly word in the book of the psychiatrists and the psychologists and the students of these things, rejection. This one word is almost enough to get to save a man from the gallows today.
If he goes out and shoots somebody or cuts their throat or carves them up in inch pieces, they say, well, you see, they'll call half a dozen psychiatrists. The trouble about this fellow is that somewhere way back as a youngster, he suffered rejection by somebody. And this rejection that he suffered by somebody did something awful to him inside, and if he shot this policeman's brains out, well, it really wasn't his fault, because you can't expect anybody to put up with rejection without being scarred. You mustn't give your child a sense of rejection. Now, I'm not saying that we should reject our children because these characters say, that this is part of a whole big story.
Not at all. But I am saying that we've got to face something which is in the Word of God about this business of rejection. True, there is nothing hurts so much as to go to someone and say, how are you? And find that he or she turns their back. That's a form of rejection. They are rejecting your movement of friendship toward them. Your offer of friendship and so they either pretend they didn't see it or they just turn their back and walk away you offer to be nice to someone and give them a ride or do something for them and they very curtly say that they don't need it thank you and of course even a little thing like this hurts no matter what in what area we may be rejected at school they say this is enough to drive anybody clean out of their mind If a youngster is rejected by his peers at school, no way he can be a normal child.
Because this rejection by his peers will warp and twist him. He will end up with a feeling of inferiority and hatred and bitterness. He will end up as twisted as a corkscrew. There's nothing you can do for him. When I got saved, my parents said, you're going to school tomorrow morning and you're going to tell them that you got saved because if you don't, It'll be harder the morning after. It will be harder the next week. And it will be almost impossible the next month. So you should go to school. And you should tell them right away. That you are Christ. That you belong to him. Now they're not going to like it.
And you are going to find yourself cut out of many things. And they were so right. They didn't say. Now your poor little darling you. We're awfully sorry. Maybe we can ease this bit about rejection because we don't want you to be rejected by your peers at school. And so maybe we shouldn't even be saying this to you. They did say, the moment you accepted Christ, you voluntarily accept kind of thing, turn your back on that cross and forget it. Turn to the cross and walk away. That's all. But don't for a moment think that you can be Christ's disciple and escape rejection. The moment you confess his name, you accept a plate of rejection.
Now what are you going to do about that one? Warp your little personality. Take it to the Lord. Not on the throne, but at the right hand of the throne, there is one interceding part of the Tested in all points. And that was wonderful. That was wonderful. You know what he said? In the world you shall have tribulation. Be not afraid. I have overcome that. Going into all the world and do what I've been doing. And I am with you always. And as God be far as Luke can be in heaven. Let us be done with this rubbish that you can't expect a child to accept rejection. If a child is God, he is going and she is going to meet rejection at every turn.
Maybe not totally in the context of the psychologist's jargon, but certainly again and again. For when I got saved, immediately all and supposedly comical little nicknames were brought up. And of course, from that day on I had to sit up with someone and work and everywhere else, because I was a Christian. They thought them up. They thought they were very clever and very smart. The clergymen. Goody-goody. Lazarus backed from the dead. One fellow said, Come over here, David of Arimathea. That's a fellow with the cool of many colors, wasn't it? He wasn't much mixed up.
But this was a mockery, the sheer mockery of it all. And of course, you have to take it. And I don't know that it was what my personality predicted. Did you notice this session in after that? I think that when we take these things in the Word of God and we look at them straight in the face, be ye man. learn from Christ, share his rejection and glory in it. For those very men in Acts chapters two through four, sorry, three through five that we were talking, we identified that we were talking about this now, when they went back to the prayer meeting, they didn't clamor, gather around and say, oh, you poor things, it's just awful what they vowed.
We'll have to pray that this heat may be turned off as we might have a little easier. It says they rejoiced, but they were kind of worthy to suffer from Christ. something has gone wrong with our attitude to this kind of thing. We're not the same kind of people. We do not rejoice that we are kind of worthy to suffer for Christ. We don't thank God in prayer. We pull the house down and we say God ought to stop it. And if he doesn't stop it, he isn't even a just God. This is what we need. But those early Christians said, oh, my privilege, what a joy, what an honor. And of course, Peter and so on and so on, sitting there, the ones who have stopped us and so on.
However, if so, envy is a very hard thing to put up with do, isn't it? Some of us, of course, myself principally you don't suffer too much from it I suppose because there's not much about it than anybody who wants to envy me but I think this is a different kind of envy this is that playful envy when you try to teach a Sunday school class the best you can and some wrong-headed person starts in with this niggling false finding wrong-headed kind of thing can you take it quietly and say the Lord even in this is bringing out some of the character of Christ in me When you find people blaming you in the wrong just out of a sense of, well, envy in this sense that it's used here, can you take it?
Chapter thirty-seven, verse twenty. Come now therefore and let us slay him and cast him into some pit, and we will say some evil beast has devoured him. And we shall see what will become of his dreams, the suffering of the pit. A pit's a rather nasty place to be. I've never been thrown into one, but in Africa I have gone down with the fellas. They got frightened of it. We were digging wells, or at least we were digging holes, hoping they would turn into wells, and we dug and dug and dug, and dug, and we got a way down. At least they got a way down. These were men that I was paying, and they got a bit frightened. It was all going to cave in on them, and I was done. There's something not nice about getting a way down a hole like that.
There's a feeling of isolation being cut off, some kind of claustrophobia, maybe, I don't know. But when you're being put in the pit by your brothers, when you're down there in the heat, and believe me, if it's hot up above, it's hot or still down there, because all the rays of the sun are going down, but there's no air, no breeze, no anything. Everything's just stuck right down in that hole. This is one of the horrible experiences, so horrible that the Samus uses it as an illustration of the deliverance of foundation. He took me up out of a horrible thing. The word really I understand is a pit of horror. Horror gets into a person down there.
Even the first time you go down into a mine, even though it may be electrically lighted and you're going down in a car, when you slide a mile below the surface, there's something about it that isn't quite comfortable. Here he was, but this is a pit of rejection, going down, down, down, cut off. It was physical suffering. Now, he cried down there because years later, almost twenty years later, when he was the governor of Egypt, the man standing before him and not realizing that he was a Hebrew and therefore he understood their mumbling, they said, you know, we're to blame and God is punishing us for we remember the crying of the lad in the pit.
We were eating, he was hungry. We were drinking, he was thirsty. And we remember how he cried and we didn't pay attention. God sometimes leads his people into rather dark places of depression and they cry. And there are others maybe who could help them if they wanted to take the bother to do so and they don't. It is a very acute form of suffering. and he went through it for God and he came up and as the sequel shows he said God turned it into your good and your blessing God put me through it all to bring blessing to you and Paul says in second Corinthians we went through these tribulations that we might be able to console and comfort all who have been through any kind of tribulation.
And I think that's one great lesson that comes out of it apart from any other. Then in verse twenty-eight he sold his slain. And they, then they're passed by Midianites, merchantmen, and they, his brothers, drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty feet of silver. and they brought Joseph into Egypt. You possibly do not know the feelings involved in being a slave. I don't know from being one, but I lived most of my adult life in a country where a great many people are slaves, not taken slaves by white people, but domestic slavery is something which was not invented and sent into Africa by white people.
Slavery, domestic slavery among tribal Africans is common in almost every part of the continent. Almost a quarter of the people of Ethiopia are slaves among themselves. The Pygmies are mostly slaves. The thing is dying off now because of the economic situation in the country. but they never had any freedom. The Bushmen usually were under the domination of Bantu tribes. They simply clung to them like ticks on the body of an animal and they were fed by them and they did the dirty work kind of thing. But there is something in these people that makes slavery a horrible thing. They hate it. The worst thing you can call a man, the worst insult that you can hurl at a man in our part of Bantu Africa is your slave.
If it's true, he will break his heart. If it isn't true, he'll probably not be glad, either one or the other. Now here is a man, freeborn, loved by his father, everything going well. And finally, he finds himself in a place lately. He was prefiguring the Lord Jesus Christ, of course, who voluntarily took upon him the form of a servant. So I don't want to labor that. In chapter thirty-nine, verse twenty, he goes into prison. Joseph's master took him and put him into the prison place where the king's prisoners were bind, and he was there in the prison. Now, being in prison is bad enough, but being in prison wrongfully charged is a lot worse.
And being in prison, charged by some evil scorpion of a woman like Potiphar's wife, is something else again. He was pure and she was impure. He was a man of God, and if ever there was a child of the devil, she was one of them. A woman who seems to have cared nothing for him or his feeling, and part of her, of course, was a very poor man anyway, who grabbed Joseph, never even asked him a question, didn't investigate the thing, just threw him into the prison. Many, many, many of God's people have suffered imprisonment for the sake of Christ. We may not be, we may not have suffered it, but maybe before our generation that we could very well be doing something.
Would we be prepared to go into the dawn jail just to make it realistic rather than deny the name of Christ? Untold millions of God's people through the ages have gone into prisons, the prisons of the Romans, the catacombs, the prisons of the Inquisition, the prisons of almost every government in the world have reached with... the people of God at one time or another. Here it is, the suffering of prison, restriction. In thirty-nine, thirteen to eighteen, and of course this is tied up with the story of the prison, is the suffering of slander.
Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again? To take the word of false accusation, the word of slander, the word of hurt and not to throw it back again and then in chapter forty chapter forty and verse twenty three the suffering of neglect yet did not the chief settler remember Joseph but forgot him surely this is one of the sharpest keenest suffering that anybody can get himself into now we leave these for a moment and look at suffering in general because I think possibly this is where a good deal of the discussion will come up and in the following paragraph we have written by the way that compare Philippians to seven to eight that is the practical passage that speaks of the seven downward steps of the Lord Jesus Christ in suffering for you and for me and they parallel very evenly the sufferings of Joseph as he was done done done and then of course there are steps upwards and that are the final consummation of that story.
These eight areas of special suffering through which Joseph passed cover many phases and levels of the life of any individual in spirit, soul, and body because there are sufferings on all phases level. The body is where we feel and endure physical suffering. The soul is perhaps the emotional the place of emotional hurt in our likes and dislikes in our ambitions and desires and yearnings in our affections this that's the soul the spirit is deeper still for here is the god conscious part here is the seat of the will here is that deep and profound difference between man and the beast Now, even a dog, it can be hurt physically, and it can be hurt emotionally.
We have a little dog at home, and if she's scolded, she can show you how hurt emotionally she is, even if you haven't touched her. She can put her head down and look up at you, and you know perfectly well that she's telling you loud and clear, I'm deeply offended. She can pout and pout. and you haven't touched her and I'm sure you've all noticed it in animals so they can suffer in body and in soul that is they can be hurt they can be hurt physically and they can be hurt emotionally they can't be hurt spiritually but the Lord Jesus was hurt spiritually for he was a true man and we can be hurt spiritually in that death of our beings that belongs to God.
Not nearly our animal feelings and affection, desires, likes, dislikes, passions, ambitions, and so on. But we can be hurt and grieved and mauled by the ungodly behavior of others, as even that man, and his name comes up a little later in the lesson, that man that we wouldn't have thought was a child of God at all. Lot. And yet the scriptures say, and I know that the word is soul there, but there is a difference in the way of its use, because I think it went beyond that. He vexed his righteous soul. His whole personality was hurt day by day with the evil and the vile conversation of the man around about him.
This was something more than a mere feeling. This was a hurt through godless behavior. This was a hurt in the area of the will and its responses to God. So in all of these there is suffering. God not only permits but actually sends suffering and testing to develop the kind of character in us that he wants. But since there are also other causes for suffering, these should be thought about. I'm just going to read them down to you. Suffering is seen in Scripture in at least five categories. A. the result of sin and the consequent curse of God. And then you have references to that.
Romans eight, nineteen, Genesis three, sixteen and so on. Now, in Genesis three, God puts a curse on the earth and a man. He says man is going to find suffering in cultivating the earth, thorns and sizzles, sweat and agony and everything that goes along with that. The woman is going to suffer the results of sin in childbirth. and in travail and I think that these stand for all kinds of suffering that come as a result of sin coming into the world. Then be the physical and mental results of violating the laws of God. Now that is sin but it's in a different level. There is a great deal of suffering in the world today at every level and in every area because there is sin in the world.
The world is a rebellion against God. But there are certain specific things that come on man because they violate the laws of God's universe, God's order, God's holiness. Men go in for a life of debauchery. A man plunges into drink. And it isn't going to be very long until he directly, as apart from sin in the world, by violating God's regulations, he will suffer the consequences. People go in for sexual immorality, and it's no time at all until they're suffering directly the results of their own violations of God's laws in his creation. Men go in for violence, and they end up suffering this.
Men and women go in for drugs, you name it, whatever it is. any specific violation. God says there's a path to happiness. Men say, oh, happiness. Happiness is to do this and this and this and this over the weekend. And then you take a look at them on Monday morning and you see the answer to the paragraph C. They're suffering the results of their own violations of a benevolent creator's love. C. Suffering is the result of direct judgment of God on both believers and non-believers. The flood. Sodom, Korah, the sons of Aaron, Achan, Ananias, and Sapphira, Bar-Jesus. That's for a reference to first Corinthians, eleven and thirty.
That is God sent him in and judged him to sin. That is some direct intervention in the affairs of men. When God overwhelms them in judgment, something which is judgment directly from himself. I believe that some nations have suffered violently in war, not all, but some because of certain things that they have engaged in, which were unholy and unjust, and they get themselves into a trap, and God's judgment and our righteous judgment is going to fall in the whole world. Men are going to gnaw their tongues for pain. Is that just sin, the curse from Genesis three? I think it's much more because we have suffered the results. All of us, even Christians, we are in a world and we suffer along with that world in a groaning creation and we simply have to accept that but not the judgment yet the judgment lies ahead that's different the experience suffering is experienced by believers simply because they have to live in a world marred by sin and sinfulness now this isn't persecution i'm talking about in romans eight twenty three that's the groaning creation in first peter two seven I'm talking now about the fact that if you live near to a bunch of hooligans, you're going to suffer.
You've got to suffer their bad manners, their boorishness, their noise, the thin cans they throw around. You've got to suffer when they smash bottles on the pavement and you run over them with this car. You see, the very fact that you're living in proximity to lawless people in a world which is all wrong, apart from God's discipline on you or on them, apart from future judgment, there is suffering by the Christian simply because he lives in a godless world apart from persecution. We have to put up, for example, with pollution as well as anybody else, right? That's not judgment. That's not any kind of persecution and that's not something which comes to us as Christians.
It comes to us as people who are living in a world which has all gone wrong. And we simply live in it and we have to accept that. We too suffer heat and cold. We too suffer sicknesses that just get around, epidemics and so on. It's experienced by believers because of association with Christ. That's persecution. That's something different again. It's experienced by believers being trained by God. Hebrews twelve five and James one one. Now that's reference to the disciplining hand of God. You can take up the others and look at them yourselves because the time has gone I want to stop.
We won't go into any of it except to draw your attention to the last paragraph reasons and purposes for suffering. To make us more suitable for God's purposes. Second Corinthians twelve. Hebrews twelve eleven to train us as children. It's there called no that's the word in Hebrews in Hebrews twelve no when I've forgotten the word in time all right it's child training in Greek the word that's used there for the moment in English it is to teach and correct us as in Psalm a hundred and nineteen and sixty seven before I was afflicted I went astray and so on there are many references to this in the Psalm God's corrective that corrective suffering sent to us by God.
It's to enable us to feel for and to help others. Second Corinthians one, four. And, of course, it is also the judgment of God in a believer's life if he refuses to judge himself. For this cause many are conflicted among you, and many sleep. There's many areas of discussion in this, and I hope and believe that there will be some good discussion.