Have you ever felt that God might have some great plans for your life? Ways he could use you to bring blessing to others. If it wasn’t for the fact it’s you we’re talking about.
I know I’ve felt that way at times. Mistakes made. Character flaws. Bad habits I can’t kick. I’m sure God could have used me. But somehow I disqualify myself.
Or perhaps you occasionally feel that way about our church. We’d love God to use us to bless the people of this area. Now, don’t take this personally. It’s not personal. Every church I’ve been part of has felt to its members like a slightly unusual bunch of people. Eccentric. Flawed. If God was going to hand-pick a group of people to take his love to a neighbourhood, it surely wouldn’t have been us.
Well if you’ve ever felt like that, I’d like to introduce you to Jacob. Jacob and sons. They were a unique family. But what we see with them does apply to us too – we’ll come back to that.
Thanks to Andrew Lloyd-Webber, many of us know the story well. It’s a long one, running through the last 14 chapters of Genesis. Our reading today is just the very beginning of the story. In it, we meet Joseph’s dreams and his coat. And both of them tell us something about God.
Joseph’s Dreams: The God who is in control
Let’s start with Joseph’s dreams.
Later in Genesis, Joseph will interpret the meaning of other people’s dreams. Here, he has two dreams that he tells to his family, and the meaning is quite obvious to them all.
In the first dream, the 12 boys were out gathering sheaves, perhaps of wheat. They’d each tied one up, when something strange happened. Joseph’s sheaf stood upright, all by itself. And the other 11 sheaves in the field bowed down in homage to Joseph’s sheaf.
You get what that dream means, don’t you? The brothers didn’t miss the point. Verse 8: Are you indeed to reign over us? Or are you indeed to rule over us?
But then he has another dream. This time he looked up into the sky. I don’t know whether it was a daytime sky or a night sky. Dreams can be a bit surreal. In the sky were the sun, the moon and exactly eleven stars. I don’t quite know what the next bit looked like, but from the sky they all bowed down to Joseph.
This time his father says what we’re all thinking. Verse 10: What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?
Now we might just take those dreams with a pinch of salt. They’re just Joseph’s wishful thinking. That’s what his family thought, and they didn’t take kindly to it.
Except that they’re exactly what happens. Turn over to chapter 42. Verse 6. Now Joseph was governor over the land. He was the one who sold to all the people of the land. And Joseph’s brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. Then verse 8. And Joseph recognised his brothers, but they did not recognise him. And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them.
These dreams are not the youthful ambitions of a naïve teenager. Throughout Genesis, God sends dreams to communicate with people. God is showing Joseph what will happen in the future. He announces the plan long before it comes about. Before you could even imagine it being possible.
I said Joseph’s dreams show us something about God. They show us a God who is in control. Who makes plans for the world, plans for people’s lives, and then brings those plans about with complete certainty. God is a sovereign God, a ruling God.
Joseph’s brothers take his dreams to show that Joseph will rule over them. They do show that. But more than that they show that God rules over the whole family, that God has a plan for them – even if it’s too fantastic to believe – and that God’s plan’s never fail.
Over the past few years, various sportsmen and women have been charged with match fixing. I remember the 2010 cricket test series against Pakistan. Some of the Pakistan bowlers were accused of bowling no-balls at exactly the right point in the game. Just before Christmas, police arrested 6 premiership footballers and charged them with match fixing.
There’s money in it. If you can pay one of the players to make sure a very unlikely event happens in the game, you can bet on it. But it’s also what gives the game away. Why are so many people betting on such an unlikely event, only for it to occur? It was so implausible. They must have had some control over the match to be so sure it would happen.
Of all his brothers, you’d never have Joseph as the leader. Certainly, his resentful brothers would never have bowed down before him. And even if his father had tried to set him over the other brothers, there’s no way the elder Jacob would fall prostrate before his eleventh son. It’s just not going to happen.
And yet God somehow knew before the event that it would. He must have had control over things. There’s no other way to explain it. By making his plan so clearly known, God is revealing that he is in complete control.
Joseph’s dreams. God is in control.
Joseph’s Coat: The God who uses flawed people
Now we need to turn to Joseph’s coat.
We’re inclined to think of Joseph’s coat as a good thing. Brightly coloured. It showed how much his father loved him. It’s a favourite of Sunday school teachers. We’ve got ten minutes left to fill, what shall we do? I know, let’s all draw a picture of Joseph’s coat. A chance to use every felt pen in the pot.
Actually, it doesn’t symbolise Jacob’s love, as much as his favouritism. And that’s not a good thing. Jacob sowed the seeds that eventually tore his family apart, by loving Joseph more than the other boys.
In fact this scene is the one in which this family starts to tear itself apart. This is the family God has made amazing promises to. This is the family God wants to use to bless the world. But it all starts to unravel. And we can’t place the blame solely at Jacob’s door. All of the characters are pretty flawed.
Take Joseph. He’s a 17 year-old, and don’t we know it. We’re told in verse 2 that he brought a bad report of his brothers to their father. He’s a tell-tale. “Dad, Simeon just threw a sheep in the river.” Nobody likes a grass.
Then Jacob makes him his special coat, but he has to flaunt it. We get the impression he wore it every day. Was it ever in the wash?
Then he has these dreams. That’s not his fault, but it may have been unwise to tell his brothers. He couldn’t keep it to himself. It’s classic sibling rivalry. “I’ve had this dream that shows that you’re going to bow down to me, and I just thought you ought to know!” And then the second dream gets told not once, but twice. He’s trying to wind them up!
Joseph’s a lippy teenager, full of his own self-importance, who loves boasting, telling tales and winding his brothers up.
Joseph’s brothers are no better. You can understand them getting wound up by him. But they hate him, and their hatred grows stronger as the story passes. We’re meant to be reminded of Cain. Here’s the younger brother, who’s found favour that they haven’t. Instead of getting on top of that jealousy, they let it take over, until in the next scene they’re plotting to kill Joseph.
And then there’s Jacob. We’ve already said he had his favourites. But he was also a weak father. His boys are hating Joseph more as the days pass, and he can’t see the problem. Joseph just gets told to wind his neck in. And he says nothing to the brothers. And in the next scene, he naively sends Joseph to go and find his brothers in the fields. If he knew the story of Cain and Abel he should have been wary. Just a few chapters back, those same young men had just slaughtered all the men in the city of Shechem. Jacob should have known they were a bunch of hotheads, and be more cautious. Instead he just stoked the fires of the boys hatred and jealousy.
Down to the last man, this is a flawed cast. Jacob’s family is largely dysfunctional. Frankly, most modern-day soap operas are boring compared to what this family gets up to.
And yet this is the family that God has chosen to bring his blessing to the world. Joseph is the one he’ll use to preserve this family through severe famine. This dysfunction family, full of highly flawed oddballs, is the raw material for God’s plan to save and bless the world.
It’s not where this family stays, by the way. As the story goes on, we see God mature these people. But this is the raw material.
That’s what we learn from Joseph’s coat. God is a God who uses flawed people.
They’re unique – but so is Jesus
Now, as we said Jacob’s family was unique. It would be really comforting to say that God used them with their flaws, and he can use us with ours. But we’re not them.
God had promised Abraham that he would bless the world through him. That promise was passed down to Isaac, to Jacob, to his twelves sons – the people of Israel And finally, it passed down to Jesus.
Jesus’ brothers weren’t too sure that they liked how popular he’d become. But God the Father promised Jesus that blessing would come to every nation through him. It’s in Psalm 2. It’s in Matthew 28. It’s everywhere.
So where do we fit in?
Some of you have been reading Acts. Luke wrote Acts, as the second volume to his gospel. Acts records what Jesus continued to do and to teach after he’d returned to heaven. Jesus is alive today, he does things today, and he teaches people today. But he does so through his church, through his people, through us.
God will bless the world. He’ll do so uniquely through Jesus. But more precisely, he’ll do so through the church that has Jesus as its head. As we show God’s love to those around us, Jesus is at work. As we tell our friends and neighbours of Jesus, Jesus is telling them of himself.
We are the body of Christ. We are the family of God in this place. God has promised that he will bless the world through Jesus Christ and his church.
And what we’ve just seen is that God often chooses to do this through dysfunctional church families. Through flawed individuals.
Every church I’ve known, there are times you look around and think: Us? We may look polished to the outside world, but we know the true story. There’s jealousy when people think someone else is more noticed than they are. There’s tale-telling. There’s gossip and tittle-tattle. There’s boasting, and showing off. Some people seem to get treated better. In fact, if we’re honest, most churches at times look rather like Jacob and sons. But maybe our church is an exception.
Conclusion
And yet the wonderful thing is that God is in control. He knows the end from the beginning, because he wrote the story. And in his control, he can use very flawed people indeed to achieve his purposes.
Which means that he can use us. We are the raw material that God wants to use to bring his blessing to this area. We are the people of the Lord Jesus Christ. God hasn’t finished with us yet. But in the meantime we can live as God’s people, we can love those around us, and we can share the good news of Jesus with everyone we know.