December 7

Come Near

The year gets counted in its last weeks. Some months make sense now in a way they did not while we were inside them, and some still do not.

Joseph had more than twenty years to account for, and Genesis gives us the numbers: seventeen when his brothers sold him to traders, thirty when he stood before Pharaoh, then seven years of plenty, and two years of famine gone by before he told them who he was. In between lay slavery, an accusation he had no way to answer, and a prison where the man who owed him a favour forgot him for two more years.

Now those brothers are standing in front of him and they do not know him. He sends every Egyptian out before he speaks. Then he weeps loudly enough that the house of Pharaoh hears it anyway, and he says his own name.

Joseph said to his brothers, "I am Joseph! Does my father still live?" His brothers could not answer him, for they were terrified at his presence. Joseph said to his brothers, "Come near to me, please." They came near. He said, "I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. Now don't be grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. So now it wasn't you who sent me here, but God."

Genesis 45:3-8 (selection)

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.

Genesis 50:20

Joseph calls them his brothers, says plainly that they sold him into Egypt, and in the same breath asks them to come near. The fact and the welcome are held together in one short speech, spoken by the only man in the room with power to do otherwise.

Then he gives those years an author. God sent him ahead of them to preserve life. He has just named their guilt aloud, and over the top of it he sets God's purpose, which was rescue the whole time.

Joseph was standing in a house he had been given when he named what God had been doing. Genesis records no such explanation offered to him in the pit or in prison. He was given the meaning at the end and kept his integrity through the middle without it. Most of us are somewhere in that middle, where the sentence is unfinished.

This first week has followed a promise planted in ground that showed no sign of it, and here it survives as a family kept alive by the brother they threw away. An angel spoke to another man named Joseph about the child Mary was carrying, and said the boy would save his people from their sins. Both times the purpose God names is rescue, and the child was given the name Jesus because of it.

If you are living through years that have not explained themselves, Scripture asks you to trust that God's hand has not left the story and that his purpose is to save, without ever asking you to call the wrong in them good. Do the small obedience in front of you today. And if there is someone you have not been able to have in the room, Joseph's two words are worth borrowing. Come near.

Lord, you were at work in years I could not read as I lived them. Where I cannot see your purpose, hold me steady. What others meant for harm, you have used for good. Bring me near.