Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Can Christians Be Cynics? | Torah | Genesis 37:12-36

Episode Date: April 4, 2022

Does the corruption in the Bible validate cynicism? Is cynicism the natural response to the world we live in? Keith explains how Genesis 37:12-36 is an early example of human trafficking and abuse of power. Listen to find out how to have hope in the midst of corruption. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Genesis 37:12-36 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're going through the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Let me share it with you two things that don't seem to fit together, and yet somehow I find them both active in my life. The first thing I see in my life is cynicism. I'm far more cynical than I wish I was. A cynic believes that all people are selfishly motivated. So a cynic has hard time, believe. that anyone is really telling them the truth because they believe that everybody has an agenda. To put it mildly, cynicism doesn't offer much hope. It says that the world is broken, so deal with it.

Some cynics even stop working to improve things in the world because they're not sure that anything really can't be improved. So, for example, cynicism might keep someone from voting because they don't think their vote matters or because they think that it doesn't really matter which candidate wins an election. On top of that, cynicism erodes trust. How do we work together if we don't trust each other? Cynicism is dangerous both to an individual person, but also to a whole society. So I'm cynical, but I don't want to be cynical. But that leads me to the second thing I find in my life, and that is that I'm shocked that more people aren't cynical.

Cynicism seems like the natural response to the broken world we live in. It seems to me that we see the same problems over and over and over. the same sinful patterns over and over and over, and yet everyone always acts surprised. We never really learn much from history, do we? Right now, Vladimir Putin is waging a deadly destructive war in Ukraine, and everyone was shocked that he would do such a thing. And yet history is full of people, full of rulers, full of kings, full of presidents, full of tyrants, full of authoritarian, who have used their power for their own

selfish gain without regard for other people's well-being. Think of Stalin, think of Hitler, think of many world leaders even in our own day who use their power to benefit themselves instead of the citizens of their own nation. Last night, I went home and read an article in Christianity today about how its own leadership, the magazine's own leadership, had abused their power. It was men abusing their power and their relationship with women employees. And what's so remarkable about that is that Christianity today is the flagship magazine of conservative Bible-believing evangelical Christianity. And Christianity Today had come out against the abuse of power, especially against men abusing their authority over women who worked for them. They came out for the Me Too movement and for the church too movement.

And yet while they're coming out publicly and saying that men should not abuse power over women, the men in power at Christianity today were abusing their power over their employees, especially the women. We see the same kind of abuse of power in social media, where social media capitalizes on anger and outrage in order to pad their bottom line. We see corporations posturing in order to increase their sales. So they say buy our product because we are good people. The problem is that it seems like they care more about appearing good than actually being good.

So how does all this intersect with the Bible and specifically the Book of Genesis, which is what we're working through? Well, one of the things I love about the Bible, and just to be honest, gives me confidence that it is a divine book, is that the Bible explains what I'm seeing in the world. The Bible explains why we see the patterns of corruption in human nature. The Bible explains not only why we see the corruption, but it also gives us hope that things can really change, that things will change. So in one sense, the Bible affirms that there are reasons to be cynical,

but in another sense, it offers hope that triumphs over cynicism. All right, we're in Genesis 37. And as I tell you this story, I want you to listen for patterns of behavior that we've seen in the book of Genesis. And I'll point them out as we go along. Genesis 37 starts with Joseph, who is then a 17-year-old kid, or as we're getting ready to find out, kind of a 17-year-old punk. He's got 11 brothers, but he is his dad's favorite, and the problem is he knows it. So Joseph has a dream, and the dream is that all his brothers and his dad are going to bow down to him. So essentially, Joseph's dream is that he's the greatest of the family.

And because he's a 17-year-old punk and very full of himself, he tells his family about the dream. Now, his brothers, as you might imagine, they're not impressed. Even his dad thought the whole dream sounded kind of weird. So in Genesis, have we seen this pattern before? Have we seen dads playing favorites? Why, yes, yes we have. Abraham favored Isaac over Ishmael. Now, Isaac favored Esau over Jacob, while his wife Rebecca favored Jacob over Esau.

Whether it's in Genesis or in our own personal life, when a parent favors one child over another, it never turns out well. Now we see that pattern repeating itself. Jacob, evidently not learning anything from his own personal experience, favors Joseph over his other sons. Well, Joseph's brothers were shepherds, and they had taken their flocks out to graze. Jacob sent Joseph out to check on them and make sure they're okay. So Joseph has to travel a long way from home, but he finally catches up to him, and when his brothers see him coming, they decide to kill him. So listen to what they say. We pick up the story in verse 19. Here comes the dreamer, they said to each other. Come now. Let's kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him.

Then we'll see what comes of his dreams. Thus far in Genesis, have we seen any brothers turning on each other and trying to kill each other? Why, yes, yes we have. Here's another pattern being repeated. Because remember, Cain killed Abel and he was motivated by jealousy. Notice that the brothers plan on killing Joseph and then lying to Jacob their father about it. There's another pattern, isn't there? Have we seen a son lying to his father?

Why, yes, yes we have. Jacob lied to his own father, Isaac, in order to steal the birthright from his brother Esau. Now Jacob's sons are lying to him. The patterns just repeat themselves. Well, Rubin is the oldest of the boys. And he tells his brothers, look, we shouldn't kill Joseph. Instead, we should just throw him into a cistern, which was an underground tank that held water. So we pick it up in verse 21.

When Rubin heard this, he tried to rescue him from their hands. Let's not take his life, he said. Don't shed any blood. Throw him into this cister in here in the wilderness, but don't lay a hand on him. Ruben said this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. So the story started with Joseph having a dream about his own exaltation so that even his family bowed down to him. But now his brothers throw him into a pit. He's going from one extreme to another.

Joseph is on a different path than he planned on. So after they throw Joseph into the pit, verse 25, says the brothers all sit down to eat a meal together and they look up and they see a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were loaded with spices and they were heading down to Egypt. Now who were the Ishmaelites? Where do they come from? Well, the Ishmaelites trace their heritage back to their father, Ishmael, who was the son of Abraham and Hagar. Do you remember that story? God had promised Abraham and Sarah a son, but as they continued to grow older, they didn't think that God could do it.

So instead of waiting on God to provide, Abraham and Sarah took things into their own hands. Sarah encouraged Abraham to sleep with Hagar, her servant. Hagar is an Egyptian who is some sort of household servant or slave. That union between Abraham and Hagar produced Ishmael, and now Ishmael's descendants, the Ishmaelites, are heading down to Egypt and the brothers sell Joseph to them. So first, Joseph was thrown down into a pit,

and now he's going down to Egypt. Joseph is getting further and further away from his family, further or further away from the promised land. That's where the chapter ends. Now remember I told you that one reason I'm cynical is because of the repeated patterns I see in my life and in the world. We just repeat the same mistakes over and over and always ex-surprised. And that's exactly what we see in this story,

whether it's the sin of pride or favoring one child above another or jealousy or murder or abuse of power, we see it all right here in the first book of the Bible. Human beings do not get better over time. Our technology gets better, but not our morality. From Adam and Eve's first sin to Cain murdering Abel to Noah and the flood, Abraham and all of his failings, to Isaac's poor parenting and Jacob's deception, we see all these sins passed down to Jacob's sons who formed the 12 tribes of Israel. Before we leave this chapter, though, I want to point out two contemporary sins and give you

a little bit of hope. So the first contemporary sin is the abuse of power. Sarah and Abraham use Hagar and then discard her and Ishmael. They abused their power. Now that comes back to bite them with the Ishmaelites carrying Joseph off into slavery. The second contemporary sin is human trafficking. That's what's happening to Joseph. This brothers wouldn't have called it human trafficking, but it's the same thing. They were profiting from selling another person made in the image of God. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. But we also see some hope in the story of Joseph, hope that triumphs over its cynicism. In order to see the hope, you've got to know the rest of Joseph's story. And I hope you'll listen to the next several episodes as we tell you that story. But

let me jump to the very end of the story. And what we find is this. Joseph goes down into Egypt, but God uses Joseph to save his father and his brothers and all their families from a deadly famine. See, these brothers sinned against Joseph, but God was working through their sins. God redeems their sinful patterns. God even uses those sinful broken patterns for his good purposes. He saved many lives through their foolish choices. Through faith, we can trust that God will redeem the brokenness we see in our life, the brokenness that we see in the world around us. So when I feel that dark tug of cynicism that tells me to give up

and that what I'm doing doesn't matter and that nothing will ever change, I need to remember that God raised Joseph out of the pit and he raised Jesus out of the grave. In the end, God wins. So never give up on God. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week.

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