Introduction:
I want to talk to you this morning about a mysterious and often abused part of the inner life of every human being. It frequently gets lampooned in the media as the prudish leftovers of another era. Some people think of this part of the human psyche as something to suppress, to trick, or to ignore.
I want to talk with you this morning about your conscience. We’ve spent some time on this before, but it comes up again as we resume our study of the OT man of faith, Joseph.
What is the conscience? It is the soul’s automatic warning system, hard-wired into every soul by God. Your conscience is switched on all the time, actively assessing the rightness or wrongness of what we are considering or experiencing. And then, having made that judgment, knows how to get our attention.
Someone compared the conscience to a sundial, which is able to give fairly good time by day when the sun is shining on it, but is incapacitated at night. In the same way, the conscience is designed by God to function in the light of the Word of God. But subtract that light, and the conscience is left in the dark, completely dysfunctional.
As we open to Genesis 42, we meet the brothers of Joseph, who long ago put the sundial of their soul in the dark. They are a study in what happens when you cross the line with your conscience, when you ignore its warnings and shake off the guilt it inflicts on you. Long decades have past since their jealous hatred of Joseph had boiled over and in a moment of incredible wickedness, they sold him as a slave to a group of passing merchants. Years had been come and gone since that lie they told their father to cover their foul deed--about how a wild animal attacked and killed Joseph.
As far as we know, these brothers never repented of the terrible evil they had done—not to God, not to their father, and certainly not to Joseph. They just did what we tend to do—pretend like nothing has happened, suppress all thought of past actions, press through the guilt, and live a lie.
Now here’s the question: What does God do when we act that way, when we talk down our conscience until it goes silent?
How does He penetrate the hardened heart?
Maybe you have a child who has abandoned the Lord and prodigaled himself or herself in this world?
Perhaps you’re married to someone who is lost and has no interest in the Savior that you love?
Or could it be that you yourself have a skeleton in some inner closet that you have taken pains to keep locked away—unrepented sin that you work diligently to contain and conceal?
What can you expect from God when your conscience has been seared, dulled, or deadened?
I want to point out three tools God uses when we mute our conscience, three devices that shake us awake and bring our calloused conscience to life again, and us to a point of repentance, cleansing and a new life. And it is my prayer that God will use His word to bring us back to purity, to give us hope, and to lead us back to Himself.
God and Your Conscience
1. Barrenness.
In Gen. 42, the entire known world was experiencing a famine. We have already studied how God, in His wisdom and power, had positioned Joseph as the Prime Minister of Egypt, assigned with organization and oversight of the distribution of grain.
But as Chapter 42 opens, we are back in Canaan with Jacob and his sons, and their cupboards are thinning out. When Jacob learned that there was grain for sale in Egypt, he said to his sons, ‘Why do look at one another?’ And he said, ‘Behold, I have heard that there is grain for sale in Egypt. Go down and buy grain for us there, that we may live and not die.
Verse 3 says, So ten of Joseph’s brothers went down to buy grain in Egypt. But Jacob did not send Benjamin, Joseph’s brother, with his brothers, for he feared that harm might happen to him. Thus the sons of Israel came to buy among the others who came, for the famine was in the land of Canaan. (v. 1-5)
There it is, the first and perhaps most common tool God uses to stir a deadened conscience: He makes us needy. He sends barrenness into our lives at some point. He makes us empty. Have you ever been there? I have. I will have defied my conscience and sinned against God, counter-arguing with my conscience until I had subdued it. And then, God kicks the props out from under me.
That’s how He awakens our conscience. He deprives us of something. He subtracts from our lives that which we are depending on for comfort or ease. He visits upon us a grinding need, the affect of which is to stir a sense of spiritual lack.
There is a harrowing verse in Psalm 106 in which the psalmist describes how Israel forgot the works that God had done for their good, and forged ahead with their desires and plans rather than waiting on the Lord. They pushed God’s will away and wanted their own way. Verse 15 declares that God gave them their request, but sent leanness to their soul. One of the things that the Lord will do to get our attention and awaken spiritual hunger is make life hollow and unsatisfying.
In the case of these brothers in Canaan, it was a famine. The comfort of food and home was taken from them. They must journey to find a solution. And where must they go? Of all places Egypt, the very country to which those slave merchants took Joseph after they sold his freedom. When Egypt came up, Jacob said, Why do you look at one another? Because the mention of it brought up old sins, long buried, that’s why. God was using physical need to quicken a sense of spiritual need.
This was exactly Jesus’ point in the story of the prodigal son, who squandered his inheritance in a far country, distant from his father’s scrutiny and (he thought) from His father’s God? The story says, And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14-15)
Jesus tells us that it was right there with the pigs that God penetrated his conscience. He came to himself, the Bible says, and remembered that even the servants in his father’s house had it better. This was the turning point for him, when he rose in repentance and went home.
I wonder if God has sent a famine into your life as well, where He has dried up the satisfaction you once derived from a hobby or sport? Maybe for you it’s a financial famine or a relational famine. All neediness is not owing to sin, but when barren times come into your life, look carefully. God may be knocking on the door of your soul, wanting you to come clean and let Him in.
2. Pain.
Go now to the fateful day when these hardened brothers face Joseph in Egypt. Verses 6-7 tells us that Joseph’s brothers came and bowed themselves before him with their faces to the ground. Joseph saw his brothers and recognized them, but he treated them like strangers and spoke roughly to them.
Verses 8-11 add that Joseph’s brothers did not recognize him. And Joseph remembered the dreams that he had dreamed of them. And he said to them, “You are spies; you have come to seek the nakedness of the land.” They said to him, “No my lord, your servants have come to buy food. We are all sons of one man. We are honest men. Your servants have never been spies.”
Let me ask you, were they spies? Of course not. Then why was Joseph doing this? He will maintain this accusation, put his brothers in prison for three days, after which he orders them to select one of their number to remain in custody while they other nine return home to bring the youngest son before him as proof of their honesty.
There’s more details to this story, but let me stop here and ask the question again: Why the elaborate ruse? Why did Joseph hide his identity, drum up these charges, and go to all this trouble? Why didn’t he just turn the tables and cut to the chase? We’re not told all Joseph’s motives, but here’s what I think rides in between the lines.
Joseph was speaking and acting as a prophet from God, just as he had many times before. He was being lead of the Lord in every step, replaying the very words and reenacting the scene at that empty well 22 years before. His accusation of them being spies might well have been the very thing they said to him when he came to see about them in Dothan: “You are here to spy for father, aren’t you?” The prison he cast them mirrored the pit into which they had thrown him.
I believe Joseph is being used of God as a tool to inflict pain on these brothers, but pain with a purpose. Think about it: the only way for real restoration of their broken relationship to happen, to move sin-hardened men to a place where they can begin again on a new, clean footing is to break down all their defenses and show them who they really are.
Look at how this time of suffering affected these brothers in v. 21-22: Then they said to one another, ‘In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us.’ And Reuben answered them, ‘Did I not tell you not to sin against the boy? But you did not listen. So now there comes a reckoning for his blood.’” All these circumstances aligned themselves to connect consequences to sin.
This is a second tool that God uses to turn up the heat on our sin. He will treat us harshly in order to mercifully convict us and lead us to repentance. King David made this connection when he said, Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey Your word (Ps. 119:67). David’s sin led to affliction, which turned him to repentance and a renewal of obedience.
Hebrews 12 speaks of God’s hard hand upon us when we sin. “Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by Him. For the Lord disciplines the ones He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives”…For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (v. 5, 11).
Hard circumstances are not always proof of past sin. Still, if they have come into your life and God has used them to bring the memory of wrongdoing to the surface, God’s Spirit has made the connection. Never mind that some suffer innocently. Don’t use the counter-arguments to try to turn off your conscience again. You know you are guilty. You know God is not going to let you escape without consequences. Trouble, heartache, loss, and pain can be God’s messengers to bring you to repentance. Don’t reject His messengers. Joseph’s brothers did. There’s no record that they ever mention Joseph or their guilt when they arrived home. So God tightened the noose with one more tool.
3. Testing.
God works in every person’s life to show him or her their true colors. The question is, Will we see ourselves through the eyes of God or not? One of those insightful verses of Scripture about how God brings out our true colors to lead us to repentance and renewed obedience is in Deut. 8:2, where Moses explains why God sent Israel through 40 years of wandering. And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that He might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.
The Bible reports that the famine worsened, and the brothers returned to Egypt, this time with their youngest brother Benjamin. They are vindicated as honest men, their brother is released from the Egyptian prison, and a feast is given in their honor. They must have felt pretty good about how things had turned out as their donkeys were loaded down with food the next day. Their word was proven good and was believed by Joseph. Their integrity was intact. Maybe they wouldn’t have to haul the old skeletons out of the closet after all.
But in Gen. 44:1, another curve ball was about to be thrown at them. Joseph gave these instructions in v. 1: “Fill the men’s sacks with food, as much as they can carry; and put each man’s money in the mouth of his sack, and put my cup, the silver cup, in the mouth of the sack of the youngest, with his money for the grain.” And he [the servant of the house] did as Joseph told him.
Once the brothers were a short distance away from Egypt, they were stopped and searched. When the Prime Minister’s silver cup was discovered in Benjamin’s grain sack, he was arrested and hauled back to Egypt. Here they are all over again: Once more, their youngest brother, the favored son of their father, faced the prospect of slavery. Would they save themselves and leave Benjamin to slavery, as they had with Joseph? Would they make up another lie to tell their father about Benjamin’s fate?
Thanks to the work of the Lord, none of these thoughts entered their thoughts. The brothers instead return to face Joseph on behalf of their brother. And then came this amazing statement of repentance in 44:16. It was voiced by Judah, who had been the most self-centered, immoral and cruel of the brothers. And Judah said, “What shall we say to my lord? What shall we speak? Or how can we clear ourselves? God has found out the guilt of your servants… For the remainder of this chapter, Judah, the very one who suggested selling Joseph into slavery 20 plus years before, pleads for Benjamin’s life. But the clincher comes in v. 33:
Now please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go back with his brothers. For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the evil that would find my father. For the first time in Joseph’s memory, Judah was concerned about someone other than himself and was ready to substitute himself for his youngest brother.
What happened? Barrenness and pain and testing circumstances made plain to these brothers the unbreakable truth from God about all our past sins and well-concealed skeletons: Be sure your sin will find you out. (Num. 32:23).
Next week, we close this magnificent story by looking at how this once dysfunctional, angry family is healed and set into God’s plan for the coming ages. But for this moment, I return again to ask you:
Do you have a wayward child, whose conscience seems to be so seared by sin that they won’t listen anymore? Pray with new confidence; God knows how to get their attention.
Do you have a spouse who is lost and shows no interest in the Lord? You can expect barren days for them, pain, and testing times to be used of God. Pray that they will have eyes to see it and come to Christ.
And then what about you? How long will you endure under the hard hand of God before you give Him all the keys to those forbidden rooms in your soul and let Him clean house? How long will you keep up the exhausting work of pretending? Come home.