Genesis 37:5 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Genesis 37:5

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Matters get worse. ‘Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more.’ They are binding sheaves in a field and his sheaf arises and the other sheaves bow down to his, and that infuriates the brothers. They were herdsmen, shepherds, so the dream suggests this will be enacted elsewhere. How do you imagine he told this dream? Well, it is clearly an oracle. It isn't just a boy’s idle dream; a teenager perhaps a bit too vain, so that now his own vanity has got to him and he is dreaming dreams of superiority, and he can't keep his mouth shut about it even though it will make him unpopular. You read all that in some of the books. No, there is a tradition of divine oracles in the family. This has happened to his father, Jacob, several times. This is in the passed-down knowledge of the family, going right back to Abraham: revelations, visions, communications from God, appearances. Joseph knows when he has an oracle from the living God, and he thinks about it. What does it mean? Maybe he guessed some of it: that one day there's going to be a famine and somehow God will use him to be the means of delivering the others. Maybe he got it right and understood it to some extent. We cannot be sure of that; but anyway the dream was that they would all be indebted to him and recognise his authority over them. We can be sure that Joseph would have told this with great humility, and in such a way that it should not have aroused their fury and their anger, but all they could see in this dream was dominion. He's going to have dominion over us. They live for dominion, those brothers, their pride and their place and their being significant. This was the way they thought; they were not nice fellows, and so it infuriated them and they were even more angry with him. If they were more shrewd, they would have looked beyond the obvious. They only see the reign-over-them bit.Was it not wiser to keep it to himself? Maybe the dreams carried their own authority, and compelled him to tell. Joseph probably knew they would be furious and this is how they would take it, but he was a spiritual young man, and if you have an oracle from God, you have to speak it. Joseph knows it and probably told it not just for himself but for his brothers and his father also. They needed to hear this dream; they needed to hear the oracle of God so that when it was fulfilled, they would know that their whole live were in the hands of God and had been mapped out in advance. This would humble them deeply so that they came to true repentance – but that was far off in the future still. It required courage for Joseph to speak; probably he would have preferred to remain silent.

Application

Like the preacher, like any Christian engaged in personal witness, no matter how you put it, you know that sometimes people are going to be very angry with you, but you have got a duty to tenderly and sensitively speak for the Lord. So you do, and this was the burden which was upon Joseph. No he wasn't a silly fellow who was saying something he should have kept to himself. It was an oracle of God.

These dreams will hold him up through all the long years of hardship. He would hold onto the fact that God who cannot lie, who cannot be mistaken, had told him these things in advance, and until they came to pass, he could not perish. Whatever he went through God’s purposes in his life could not fail. Let Satan, the world, his brothers, do what they like. Who were they that they could overthrow the purposes of God? Many years later when he had been instated as ruler in Egypt, and when he saw his brother come down to buy grain, he remembered the dreams (Genesis 42:9). They had been constantly in his mind over all the years. They could not fail to come to pass, and now he was living out their fulfilment. How he marvelled at the wisdom of God!

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Genesis 37:5 Commentary and Bible Study