The Call of God (Hebrews 11), Part 12

Faith Speaks.

“By faith Joseph,” continues the Hebrews 11 account, “when his end was near, spoke about the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about his bones.” An emigration and an exhumation is an unlikely pairing for a dying valediction. What was Joseph, great grandson of Abraham, thinking?

The end of life—like the end of a good novel—has a way of clarifying the most important things to us. To Joseph, it served to supply a final opportunity to speak hope to his loved ones—the descendants of his father Israel who were living in Egypt with him, far from their Promised Land. If Joseph had learned one thing in his long and challenging life, it was that God’s plans are for our good, even when everything around us seems to be stacking up against us. That’s a lesson some people would never learn unless someone like Joseph were to speak out.

Some ninety years earlier, Joseph had been bullied and sold into slavery by the brothers to whom he now spoke. Enslaved in Egypt, the angry treachery of his master’s wife had then sent Joseph to the pharaoh’s dungeon. Kindnesses to other prisoners were repaid to Joseph with thoughtless indifference. Joseph was forgotten by all.

But somewhere in the midst of the darkness of his life experience, Joseph remembered what God had said. He remembered the promise God had spoken to his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. It was a promise that God was working for his—Joseph’s—good and the good of all who honoured God from their heart. Like a piercing ray of light, this word, this call of God on his life, brought Joseph hope.

And later Joseph began to see God using him to bring hope into others’ lives, including those brothers who had begun the terrible chain of events Joseph had suffered. “You intended to harm me,” he would later summarize for his guilt-ridden brothers, “but God intended it for good.”

Now Joseph had one more opportunity to speak. He could have used it to bitterly berate his family members for their cruelty to him resulting in so many years of his youth being lost to slavery. He could have used it to take credit for the personal skills that led to his release from prison. He could have used it to flaunt the power and prestige to which he had eventually risen in Egypt. Rather, Joseph’s words reveal that his heart was set on something bigger, something much more important, something of eternal value. Joseph was now thinking of the distant future. He was visualizing God’s promises fulfilled.

God had promised the Israelites a land of their own. He had promised to bless them. More than that, He had promised to bless all nations on earth through them. And most notably, He had promised to send a unique Someone through the Hebrew family line who would reverse the ancient curse produced in Eden by humanity’s inaugural sin.

Although Joseph knew he would not live to see the day these promises would be fulfilled, he had two reasons in mind when he spoke the message captured in Hebrews 11. Firstly, Joseph believed God’s call on individuals’ lives to be authoritative—both practically and spiritually; Joseph understood every event of his life to be a concatenation—at series of connected events—through which God’s call and promise would be fulfilled. Without Joseph’s enslavement there would have been no inroad into an Egyptian prison. Without the prison, there would have been no opportunity to serve the Pharaoh. And without serving the Pharaoh, Joseph’s family back in Palestine would have perished when the years of drought wreaked their havoc. Looking back over his life, Joseph was able to see that God’s seemingly distant promises had influenced Joseph’s day-to-day opportunities to be faithful. So when Joseph’s final words reminded his people that God would be true to his promise to lead them to their Promised Land, he was passing the baton on, so to speak. He was encouraging them to remain hopeful, faithful and true to God.

Secondly, Joseph believed that God’s call involved inexplicable hints that life was designed to be eternal. He knew the oral tradition told by his ancestors. It spoke of death as a post-scripted addendum to God’s original plan for human life. Had there been no sin there would have been no death. So while Joseph knew with certainty that he, like his ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would die he wanted to make a final statement on behalf of God’s original plan for an undying humanity. He wanted his bones to be brought to the Promised Land because if God’s plan some day included reinstituting eternal non-dying life—if there was Someone who would initiate a resurrection—Joseph wanted to be in on it.

That is what faith in God’s call speaks. It speaks of God taking the difficult events of your and my faith-filled lives and turning them into good. It speaks of a resurrection to eternal life. It speaks of Jesus. This is how faith has and will speak. Are you letting it speak through you?

Thirty-one Ordinary Prayers, #27

Prayer of Refuge (Paraphrase of Psalm 141)

Great Father hidden from our eyes but not from our hearts, our prayer is a cry to You: reveal Your presence here with us. We need You now more than ever. With uncommon speed come into our conscious awareness and fill it with Your trueness and love.

Like fragrant incense bringing You a pleasing aroma, may our prayers proclaim our worship of You, God above all. May our hands lifted to You in praise fulfill our greatest purpose—accepting who we are today by admitting who You are in infinity.

We need divine help if we are ever to gain victory over our own mouths, LORD. We find ourselves saying false and hurtful words that cause conflict and injury when our words ought to bring life and light and hope. Be the guard over our mouths that we need, LORD. Keep the door of our lips under lock and key when in our passion the barbed remarks threaten to erupt.

Our words reflect our hearts, LORD, so we need Your discipline there too. Protect our hearts from being drawn to evil. Keep us true to You, to Your love and light that motivate godly living. Guide our eyes and ears, our hands and feet by hearts obedient to You, Holy One.

May we accept correction and rebuke from Your Word and from each other as a precious gift. May Your discipline fill our hearts and flood every aspect of our being so we are truly ruled by You and for You. We’ve seen the results of lives that reject You—bones scattered around open graves.

So we fix our eyes on You, O Sovereign LORD; we take refuge in You. Only You can spare us that end, You Who give life beyond earthly struggles and beyond the grave. Our lives are in Your good and faithful hands.

Twenty-eight Days With Jesus, Day 23

Reprimand.

William took the reprimand from his grandmother gracefully. Apparently leaning down to chat with his young son during the Royal Air Force demonstration could be construed as disrespectful. So William straightened up when he saw the flick of his grandmother’s hand, and all was well again. It’s not everyone, of course, whose grandmother is the Queen of England.

When Matthew records Jesus speaking to a crowd, we get a chance to eavesdrop in on a reprimand. It would have been an unforgivably embarrassing rebuke because it was directed at the religious rulers of Jerusalem of the day. They had clout. Their control over the Jewish people was undisputed. No one challenged the Pharisees and the teachers of the law because the people assumed their leaders had the backing of God. But Jesus saw things differently.

“Do not do what they (the Pharisees) do,” Jesus warned the people publicly, “for they do not practice what they preach.” Ouch. That was a public reprimand no one had ever dared to deliver to the Pharisees before.

“Everything they do is done for men to see.” But Jesus was not content to warn only the crowd. Seeing a band of Pharisees striding toward Him, Jesus began a scathing chastisement that would make Queen Elizabeth’s reprimand of William look like gentle kindness.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” Jesus began. Imagine how that went over. The crowd would have hushed. The Pharisees would have stopped dead in their tracks. There was no doubt the people were watching a delightful contest of power where the bullies were being put in their place for once.

“You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence,” Jesus challenged them. “Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.”

Jesus said much more of that sort of thing in that moment. Read Matthew 23 and gloat to hear the status quo being challenged by a voice of real authority. But we cannot read too far before we notice something beginning to happen. The relish with which we hear someone else being reprimanded begins to turn to dust in our mouths. Our smugness evaporates.

We, too, live much of our lives “for men to see.” We are experts at presenting our best face, going out in public looking the part, wearing a façade to make ourselves appear as we want to be seen: trendy, intelligent, exclusive, ethical, self-assured. Choose the adjective that fits.

But Jesus calls this fraud (see Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of “Woe to you…you hypocrites!” in The Message). God sees the interior. He knows each of us for who we really are, and He sees the mess we hide deep inside our hearts and minds. He is telling not only the Pharisees but us too that something must be done to clean up our interior or we’ll become nothing more than “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones…”

“Keep me from deceitful ways,” penned the psalmist David, “be gracious to me through your law. I have chosen the way of truth; I have set my heart on your laws.” The psalmist is not talking about the external law of Judaism, or about social laws, or about politically correct conventions. He is referring to God’s moral requirements for us as humans that we be authentically honest with ourselves and with Him. It means accepting the truth of God’s sovereignty not only in the vastness of this universe but also in our day-to-day lives. It means recognizing that we don’t make reality and we don’t make the rules. It means seeing ourselves through His eyes, humbling ourselves and asking His forgiveness for our misplaced pride.

Ultimately only God can clean the inside of our ‘cups’ and keep them clean. It takes the daily work of Christ’s once-for-all redemption and the Holy Spirit’s transforming power in us to do the otherwise impossible task. The reprimand is not intended to bring humiliation, but humility. Are we willing to listen to it? What better time than this to have an honest conversation with God…