Podcast: Suffering and Sovereignty in the Story of Joseph (John Lennox)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

A Masterpiece of Story Telling

In this podcast Dr. John Lennox unpacks the story of Joseph, exploring the unforgettable ways that Joseph’s life portrays the relationship between forgiveness and repentance. Dr. Lennox also leads us in considering other themes in Joseph’s story, such as endurance, trusting God, and suffering.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

• The Story of a Dysfunctional Family Used by God
• The Theme of Sibling Rivalry
• The Silence of God in the Story of Joseph
• The Sovereignty of God

00:40 - The Story of a Dysfunctional Family Used by God

Matt Tully
John Lennox is emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University and an internationally renowned speaker on the intersection of science, philosophy, and religion. He’s a Senior Fellow with The Trinity Forum, has lectured around the world, and has written numerous books on apologetics, science, and the Bible, including Joseph: A Story of Love, Hate, Slavery, Power, and Forgiveness from Crossway. Dr. Lennox, thanks so much for joining us today on The Crossway Podcast.

John Lennox
It’s my pleasure to be with you.

Matt Tully
In this book that you’ve written about the story of Joseph, you call his story in the book of Genesis a masterpiece of storytelling. So maybe to start us off, why do you call it that?

John Lennox
It’s not only me that calls it that, it’s recognized (and has been for many years) as a masterpiece of Hebrew storytelling. Like many other narratives, particularly coming from a Hebrew source, it’s quite minimalist in the sense that it’s not like a contemporary historical novel or history where the author often attempts to paint in the moods, the emotions, and all that kind of thing. The key thing about Hebrew narrative, as I understand it, is it records actions and it leaves the reader to interpret the emotions and the motivations that lie behind those actions. So there’s a very broad field. And for that reason, it’s wonderful to see a story that’s told in a relatively limited number of words, but they are so carefully chosen—and, of course, I believe they’re inspired by God—that they become a revelation to us of God’s dealings with human beings. And as the title of my book suggests, it contains a lot of things that people can relate to. It’s not remote or distant except in time. It’s ancient Egypt, but nevertheless, the topics that are dealt with are topics that all of us have to face sooner or later in our lives.

Matt Tully
The story of Joseph is one of those biblical stories that, for those of us who grew up in the church, it probably feels very familiar. Familiarity can breed contempt sometimes in our own thinking. We just are so used to it. And yet as you were mentioning there, when you step back and think about the story in the broad sweep, it really is so archetypal. There are so many major themes that seem like they keep coming up in human history and in literature and art. All the great stories that we love to hear as humans, they’re all there in microcosm in this story. So I wonder if you can just briefly give us a quick summary of the story. Bring everyone back up to speed and help refresh our memory as we think about this amazing story of Joseph.

John Lennox
It’s a story of a highly dysfunctional family—the family of Jacob, with all its complications, in that he had two wives (we would call them two concubines), and there was a whole raft of children. Joseph was the oldest child of his favorite wife, and there was rivalry between the women that spilled over onto the children. So when we meet Joseph, he is clearly his father’s favorite. His father, not having learned from his own experience of favoritism in his own family, spoils Joseph and sets him apart from the others by giving him this beautiful and famous robe of many colors, which was extremely valuable, and it it simply showed the other lads that here was the favorite son and they were not going to be treated like this. Unfortunately, Jacob had learned very little from his own early experience and had to face all the bitter consequences of the hatred that was generated by the rivalry within the family. And the story is that Jacob then, rather foolishly, sent Joseph on his own, essentially (perhaps with the servant), many miles to see how the brothers were getting on. And Jacob knew full well that they hated him. They saw him coming from a distance and they decided to get rid of him. He was simply a thorn in their flesh. And there’s a complicated coming and going about the sons, one of whom tried to save him but didn’t follow through and didn’t manage it. But in the end, they threw him into a cistern in the ground that he couldn’t climb out of. And they were a callous group of men. They sat around the top of the cistern, eating their food while he screamed for mercy, which they were later to remember. And then just before they killed him, they saw this caravan of camels that was going down to Egypt, and they thought, Well, why don’t we sell him? So they sell him as a slave down to Egypt, and then they cover it up. They go to their father with Joseph’s coat, and it’s covered in blood. There wasn’t any DNA testing in those days, and the father, Jacob, couldn’t tell the difference between his son’s blood and the blood of a goat that they had killed, particularly, to deceive him. And with that, you reach another very big element, a very big theme in the story, and that is that of deceit. There’s the rivalry, there’s the hatred, but there’s also deceit. And that, of course, is very important for those of us who are followers of Christ, because one of the warnings he gave to his disciples was that as the centuries went on, deceit would increase. And we now live in an age where deceit, perpetrated by advanced technology (artificial intelligence), is such that you cannot distinguish the truth from lies. That’s a big subsection on its own which I’ve written about elsewhere. So Joseph goes down to Egypt and is bought by one of the leading commanders under Pharaoh. And the amazing thing is he doesn’t appear to be consumed by resentment or anything like that, and he very rapidly distinguishes himself and is put over the entire household. He becomes the chief steward, and everything is committed to him in his house except—and here comes his first supreme test—Potiphar’s wife. She was clearly beautiful, rich, bored, and on her own with Joseph. She eyes him up and thinks that she could possibly seduce him and have a bit of fun. And the amazing thing about that is that Joseph resists, and what you get, very interestingly, is a replay of the situation in the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 3 you have a beautiful garden, and you have a man and a woman being tented. And they give in and sin enters the world. They get the knowledge of good and evil, but it turns out to be something that you don’t want to have. In Joseph’s case, he’s in a beautiful palace and he is in charge of everything except one thing. He relates his rejection of her to the fact that it would be a sin against God. And this is hugely important because Joseph clearly understood that ethics are not relative. He determined his ethics by the God who was above him and outside his world. He wasn’t going to bend. He was not overcome by what we have learned to call situational ethics. That’s a hugely important story. He gets thrown into prison as a result, and in that prison he interprets the dreams of two of the servants of Pharaoh who’ve also been thrown into the prison. And that shows us how, quite remarkably, Joseph has not forgotten the dreams that he had as a young person in his early teens that one day, in some way, the rest of his family would bow down to him. He interprets to the men their dreams and they are fulfilled. One of them gets executed and the other is restored to be Pharaoh’s cup bearer. And of course, Joseph’s sitting in the prison. He told the cup bearer, IF you get your job back, remember me, but the man forgets. And two years go past, which must have been a colossally difficult test for Joseph, hanging in there until one day suddenly Pharaoh has a dream, and Joseph is called to interpret the dream. He does so brilliantly and Pharaoh has the courage to see that Joseph has access to knowledge that Pharaoh knows nothing about. And on the spot he makes him the minister for agriculture and fisheries, so he controls the entire food supply of Egypt. The rest of the story is what I call an anatomy of forgiveness. Here he is in this position, in a way, because the brothers wanted to get rid of him, but they are guilty men. And there’s a famine on the land, and Joseph has managed, by brilliant economic policy, to stuff the granaries full of food so that all the neighboring countries came down to buy food. And one day Joseph, he’s a hands-on minister, sees his brothers among them and they bow to him. And he recognizes that one of his dreams is, in part, being fulfilled. And the rest of the story I find quite electrifying because of what Joseph very cleverly does. He notices that his younger brother by the same mother, Benjamin, is not with the brothers who come. And he says, I’m going to test if you’re honest men. They tell him that the youngest one is with his father, which tells him immediately that his father’s still alive and so is his brother. So he says, You’ll have to bring your little brother with you. And what Joseph actually does, to cut a long story short, and I don’t want to spoil people reading the book, is in a very subtle and clever way, he makes the brothers face what they did to him so long ago by replacing himself with Benjamin, seeing what they will do if Joseph tries to remove Benjamin from his father. And there comes that wonderful scene where Joseph discovers that they have repented and sees the evidence of it, and he reveals himself. It frightens them stiff. And he forgives them. And what it does there is deal with a very important issue. It strikes me, and has done for many years, that there’s a lot of confusion, even among Christians, as to the relationship of repentance to forgiveness. And some people don’t quite realize that forgiveness, even on God’s part, is not given without repentance. And I analyze that and why it is so and how the story of Joseph spells that out to us, unpacks it in an unforgettable way. So that’s roughly a short version of what I’ve written in the book.

Matt Tully
As you walk through that, there are elements of it that it’s so easy to forget or downplay, but it really is an epic story. I want to go back to something you said a few minutes ago about the relative sparseness of the biblical text. We’re so used to, in modern literature, having very clear statements of what the main character is feeling and thinking, but we don’t often get that in the biblical text. Why might that be a good thing for us as we think about engaging with Scripture, both this story and maybe other stories in the Bible?

John Lennox
It’s an interesting fact, you see, because some people think, as you suggest, that this is a weakness in the story, but it’s not. It’s a strength because we don’t see people’s motivations. You can’t see a person’s heart. God can. But we can see their actions, and we can learn to reason from action to motivation, and exercising that capacity is a very important thing in our maturing. Often we come across stories like that of Joseph in childhood, and that’s wonderful, but we must remember they’re written for mature adults mainly. And most of the story has to do with Joseph as a mature adult. And these issues are all around us—in our families, in our churches, in the world at large—and we need to have them presented in such a way that we can recognize the principles that govern the situation, even if we’re not exactly in the same space. For example, Joseph suffers from being falsely accused. Now, that’s a major issue for many people. Many Christian believers among them in the workplace get falsely accused of something. And you know that when people get falsely accused of misdemeanors, especially in certain areas of life, they tend to stick. It’s very difficult to deal with them. And there was poor Joseph, accused by the wife of a very powerful military commander of sexual harassment and all the rest of it, and he couldn’t defend himself. And yet, as it turned out, God so worked in his life that he ended up being a far more important person in Egypt than her husband. And they’re told us in that way that we might think about them. In other words, the story doesn’t come with that chapter at the end saying, Now, what you’re to do on the basis of this is the following. No, it’s left for you to think about. Now, of course, there are other things to say about that because Joseph is not only mentioned in the book of Genesis. He’s mentioned elsewhere in Scripture. Not often, but he is mentioned elsewhere and we need to look seriously at those mentions. And one of the most important is when Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is defending himself. He goes back through the history of Israel and points out that they had a horrific tendency—a foolish tendency, really—to reject the saviors that God rose up to deliver them. And one of them was Joseph. And Stephen goes through a list, and in the end he points out that’s exactly what they’ve done to the Lord Jesus. So in that sense, Scripture itself tells us that we need to look beneath the story of Joseph to see it pointing forwards towards the Lord Jesus himself, particularly with reference to the fact that Joseph suffered before he entered into his glory. (To put it that way, that will remind listeners of a verse describing the Lord Jesus.) That journey that started with suffering and then ended up in him being exalted above everybody except Pharaoh reminds us of the much bigger descent and elevation of the Lord Jesus, who was obedient to death, even the death of the cross, and God highly exalted him. In other words, what we’ve got in this story, as well as the hard facts concerning his imprisonment, his attitude to his work, his attitude to temptation, and so on, we have his life aspects of it as a thought model of what will happen in the case of the Lord Jesus. And this is one of the wonderful things in Scripture is that it is multi-dimensional, and I try to bring out those dimensions in my book.

18:57 - The Theme of Sibling Rivalry

Matt Tully
I love at one point you really do emphasize that the story of Joseph is not just about Joseph, it’s about the nation of Israel. It’s about God’s plans in the world, bringing about redemption. And then ultimately, as you said, it’s about Christ. And I want to come back to Christ and his connection to this story and what we can learn about Christ through the story of Joseph in just a moment. But another theme that is just all throughout this story, but really it’s actually all throughout the book of Genesis, is this idea of sibling rivalry. We see in Genesis 4 the story of Cain and Abel, and then we see Abraham’s sons, Ishmael and Isaac, and then we have Isaac’s sons, Jacob and Esau, and then we get to Joseph and all of his brothers. What’s the deal with sibling rivalry in the Bible? Why is that such a recurring theme?

John Lennox
That’s a hard question to answer, but you’ve observed correctly that it is a recurring theme. Therefore, it’s an important theme. And there are quite a number of sibling rivalries even in the book of Genesis. And if you ask the question, What’s the deal with it? It’s wiser, I think, to ask several questions and say, What can we learn from each story? What is the nature of the rivalry? That would take us away past the story of Joseph to ask a very important question, In these rivalries, what was the basic issue? And it wasn’t the same in all cases. The rivalry between Cain and Abel was not the same as the rivalry between Joseph and his brothers. And the context is the much bigger story of transmission, that Abraham was called to be the founder of a new nation. And the thing that I find very interesting is hat he has children, and one is chosen above the other to carry the the line of promise, and so it goes down. One is chosen, the other is not. And the interesting thing about that is you come to a point in the life of Jacob where the transmission is not just going to go to one, it’s going to go to twelve. Which is an indicator that something different is happening, because the question’s obvious, How is it going to happen that this promise to Abram in the middle of the book, that in him all the nations of the earth are to be blessed, how could that possibly be fulfilled when he is just a head of a small nomadic clan wondering about a small piece of the Middle East? But you get a hint of this in the story of Joseph who ends up being at a very high level in control of the organization and running of Egypt. That gives you the hint. The nations are being blessed through a Hebrew, that is through Joseph. And that, again, is a thought model for what is about to happen. And surely, the number of sibling rivalries is like a drumbeat telling us that this is the kind of thing we are going to be up against. And it’s very easy to think, I am a father in my own family. I’ve got two children. I’ll be able to sort it out. There won’t be any sibling rivalry in my family. How many parents have thought that? And also it means, as an implication of that, that every one of us who are parents, we’re thrown in the grace of God in bringing up our children. There’s no guarantee that they will not turn against us or turn against each other, which means we all start at the same footing and we need the grace of God and his spin it in order to do anything. And even with that, people still can choose to go the wrong way. And we see that in the pages of Scripture again and again and again. So it’s very sobering. But nevertheless, there’s a flip side to it, where I get hope in the way in which God uses some of the minor characters who are almost rejected. Leah is perhaps the most famous one who wasn’t very good looking and Jacob didn’t like her, and yet she was the mother of Judah and she became an ancestor of the Lord from a human perspective. And God bringing in that kind of thing is a very important corollary and a very important thing to help us get things into balance.

24:01 - The Silence of God in the Story of Joseph

Matt Tully
Related to that is this theme of God’s providence, which really runs throughout the whole story. But one thing that I noticed about the story is that God never directly and explicitly speaks during the story of Joseph, even though previously, in the book of Genesis, he’s constantly speaking to the patriarchs. He’s constantly, directly interacting with his people. What do you make of the fact that there’s so little or maybe no direct speech from God?

John Lennox
I think it bears thinking about, because God could have saved a lot of distress by speaking. What I mean by that is Jacob spent many years grieving for the son he thought was dead. God did not appear to him in a dream and say, Your son is still alive. God could have appeared in another dream to Joseph to tell him that if he waited a certain number of years, God would vindicate to him. And so that silence of God, if I put it that way, becomes a very powerful thing, because there was Joseph in the prison, for example. And when he got out and was prepared to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, he knew that this was from God. God was speaking indirectly and he had huge confidence in it, which amazes me that he’d spent all this time, often in misery, being rejected, being treated as a slave, then getting some hope and getting a good job in Pharaoh’s house, and then being thrown at prison and all the rest of it. All of that must have messed his psychology up a lot, and yet the whole time there appears to have been a deep trust in the God, who we do not read ever directly spoke to him, as you say. And when I think about that, I find it a huge challenge. Here am I with the whole Bible and God speaking to me through his word, in that sense, directly, and yet do I really hold it as precious as Joseph did the few dreams he had? I think that is a major challenge, especially in these days, to hang on to what we understand and to believe God. Remember, these are the heroes of faith. And even though God is not recorded as speaking a great deal directly to Joseph, if at all, he was clearly a man who trusted God. And that becomes very clear towards the end of his story. And Genesis, after all, is the book of Abraham and his offspring who learned to trust God. And that’s the major message that the New Testament takes from Abraham. Therefore, it must be the major message we are to take from the story of Joseph.

27:13 - The Sovereignty of God

Matt Tully
And probably the verse in Genesis that really captures this so perfectly is in Genesis 50:20. Joseph says to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.” That verse is just so incredible because it sparks in all of us a reinterpretation of the whole story that we’ve already read. As you think back over Joseph’s story and all those decisions that were made about him (he wasn’t often even the primary actor in those decisions), which ones stand out to you as you think about God’s sovereign orchestration of his life?

John Lennox
To take that directly, what it is clear is it shows us that the way in which God rules is very complicated indeed. That’s the first thing. And that verse is very powerful because we don’t know when Joseph came to that conclusion. I suspect it may have been earlier than we think. God meant it for good, all these things. In other words, it is a comment on the whole of his life, that he could trace God’s providence and his guidance through life. And maybe many things had to happen in his life before he recognized that. In other words, it was perceived in retrospect. It’s a bit like the very brief story at the end of John’s Gospel, where there’s a stranger, as far as the disciples are concerned, on the shore who tells them to go out fishing. And they catch a lot of fish, and Peter then says, “It’s the Lord!” He recognizes it after it has happened. And that’s often true in life. We can look back in the complicated tangles of life, and yet we can detect God’s leading and guidance. And it’s a wonderful thing to lay hold of, that God can do things out of an apparently hopeless situation that not only save the people involved directly from disaster, but can have implications for the entire planet. It’s a very big story in that sense.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that even if Joseph trusted God in the midst of all of that for a long time and believed that God would in some way use all of these evil things that had happened to him for good, he probably didn’t know what that was going to look like in the moment. He didn’t know what good God might be able to work from that. I wonder if you’ve experienced things like that as well, where, in the midst of your suffering or your pain, you can’t see clearly actually what God is going to do with that. So often we want to know what he’s actually going to do. That’s what we feel like we need in order to trust that he is good.

John Lennox
That is correct. I haven’t got any experience like Joseph’s to put beside his, but I know exactly what you mean. A long time ago, my mentor, professor David Gooding, said to me, “Guidance is gospel; it’s not law.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Sometimes if you listen to me pray, you’d think God was in heaven, determined not to guide me.” But he said the basic Christian confession is Jesus is Lord. Not he wants to be or he should be, but he is, so that trusting him means assuming that he’s guiding me. And I think it works in something like the following way, that we gain experience of the Lord as we mature. And then we come to a point where God appears to be leading us beyond what our previous experience helps us to understand we can cope with. And we then have to trust him on the basis of his word. Not that we’ve no evidence of his guidance—we’ve got plenty—but not in this particular sphere. And that is a test that’s very important, that God will take us out on a limb, so to speak. Do you really trust me? And that’s a wonderful thing when he permits us to go through that kind of an experience, because it shows he takes us seriously.

Matt Tully
God gives us these stories in Scripture as a way to build our faith and give us examples of his faithfulness, of his plan, his providence. But he also shows that to us in our own lives as well. So as you think about your life, are there experiences that you’ve had where you yourself have seen God remain faithful and work good out of some of these difficult, painful types of situations?

John Lennox
I’d have to think a lot about that before I could match it accurately, but my initial response is to say that we’re called upon to be witnesses, and we haven’t mentioned that yet. What Joseph in the end was able to be was an impressive witness to Pharaoh because he introduced Pharaoh to a God that he knew nothing about—way beyond the gods of Egypt. And it’s that side—in you all the nations of the world will be blessed because you are going to be a witness. And that is taken up in the New Testament, and it seems to me that one of the real challenges for us, in these days particularly where there’s so much anti-Christian feeling around the world, is have we still got the courage to publicly witness? I’m old now, as you see, and I am afraid I know many people who go to church, they read the Bible, they say their prayers, but they’ve long since stopped being a witness for the Lord because it’s cost too much in public. And I think that is the area where reality will hit, that once we get into the public dialogue, then we soon learned very fast that God is real and he will support us in situations like that. But it’s a bit like swimming. You can’t swim unless you get into the water.

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, as you think about the story of Joseph and even your experience writing this book, what would be a big takeaway you’d want to leave people with?

John Lennox
I think it’s that we should not ignore promptings of God’s Spirit through his word. That’s the first thing. And have a hope within us that God can bring good out of apparent evil, as Joseph said to his brothers. Hang in there and trust the Lord. And above all things, do not give up witnessing. That’s the important thing that will absolutely transform your life if you get involved with witnessing. And by the way, if you’ve got a friend (that I hope you have) who’s asking you questions, just concentrate on the questions they’ve got. Work out answers to them from Scripture and from your reading. Share those answers. They will ask more questions and start from there. And very soon you will build up an armory of arrows that you can use in many different situations. But the key lesson, I think, is to trust the Lord and not your own understanding or your university degrees. Use them, but trust the Lord. That’s what Christianity is. Pagan attitude is to trust the degrees and your brain and use the Lord when you get stuck, but that isn’t a Christian attitude.

Matt Tully
Dr. Lennox, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today about this incredible story in our Bibles.

John Lennox
Thank you very much.

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