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“Calling and Purpose”

The Almighty is working out His purposes for your life even if your present path appears to be a rabbit trail or even a dead end. Might there be something holding up your progress? In Joseph’s case, forgiveness was something he needed to learn before he could fulfill his purpose on earth.

When Joseph was a young buck, he had a series of prophetic dreams about his future. In the first dream, he and his brothers were in the field binding sheaves of grain. According to Joseph, his “sheaf arose and also stood upright” while his brothers’ sheaves “stood all around and bowed down to my sheaf” (Genesis 37:7). “How did his brothers like that dream?” you might ask. They didn’t. In fact, the Bible says they “hated him even more for his dreams and for his words” (verse 8). See, they already hated Joseph because he was his father’s favorite. A dream like that only served to stoke the fires of their anger.

Sometime later, Joseph had another dream. This time he told his eleven brothers and his father that “the sun, the moon, and the eleven stars bowed down to me” (verse 9). Look, if I were Joseph, I’d keep that one to myself. Sounds kind of arrogant, right? That’s what his family thought, too. By this point Joseph’s brothers were so mad that some of them planned to kill him. In the end, they settled for what they thought was a lesser evil—they sold Joseph as a slave to some gypsies. Then those rascals told their father a bogus story, about a wild beast eating him up (verses 31–35).

Meanwhile, Joseph ended up in Egypt, where his life took some wild turns. One minute he was a high-ranking servant (39:4). The next minute he was sent to prison under a false accusation of attempted rape (39:11–20). Now, if I’m Joseph sitting in that dungeon, I’m gonna be mighty ticked off at what my brothers have done to me—you know, for wanting me dead, for betraying me, for selling me into slavery, for probably badmouthing me to my dad and whatnot. I’m gonna have some serious resentment and forgiveness issues.

Well, several years later, while Joseph is still in lockdown mode in prison, Pharaoh has two back-to-back bizarre dreams. Nobody in Egypt can interpret them—except for Joseph. The next thing you know, Pharaoh makes Joseph the Number Two man in the whole kingdom (41:40, 41)! He’s in charge of feeding the whole population! Nine years into his new position—and two years into the famine that Joseph predicted from Pharaoh’s dreams—guess who shows up in Egypt looking for food? Joseph’s brothers.

Remember, Joseph is all grown up at this point, so his brothers don’t recognize him. Besides, he’s speaking Egyptian, he’s wearing swanky clothes, maybe sporting a fancy headdress, and maybe he has a sweet-looking chariot rig parked out front. But Joseph recognizes them as they approach . . . and bow down before him. You might say this was a key moment of Joseph’s life. He couldn’t help but remember his childhood dreams predicting this very scene (42:8, 9). What would he do? Rub it in their faces? On the contrary, after Joseph examined his brothers to see if their hearts had changed from the hardness of their youth, he revealed his identity to them with great love and forgiveness (45:1–8).

Actually Joseph was able to forgive his brothers because God’s purpose for his life was more important to him than what they had done. Joseph realized that everything that had happened to him—the good and the bad—was part of God’s plan to save his family. “God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth,” said Joseph, “and to save your lives by a great deliverance” (45:7). You see, God was preserving a remnant for Himself—a small group of Israelites who would grow into the Jewish nation of several million.

But hold on. It gets even bigger. Although Joseph couldn’t possibly have known this, God had placed him in Egypt in order to preserve the bloodline of the promised Messiah . . . who would be born two thousand years later (see Luke 3:23–38). All that could have been upended if Joseph hadn’t chosen to look beyond the mistreatment he received and forgive. Now consider this: what higher purpose might the Lord have in mind for your life, if only you could do the same?

By Phil Robertson