#13 Joseph Series - A Lesson in Forgiveness

December 27, 2009

Dr. Ron Sumners

Genesis 45:7-15

One of the amazing lessons in Joseph’s amazing story is the genuine forgiveness that Joseph extended to his brothers. What do you think that they were expecting when they heard from this Egyptian official, “I am Joseph?”

The Bible says they were terrified. I am sure that they didn’t imagine that he was going to follow that announcement by saying, “Do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here.” (v.5)

Such a blanket statement of forgiveness must have stunned Joseph’s brothers. To be honest, it strikes us as strange. After all, shouldn’t people who have sinned, as these brothers had, be made aware of their guilt and be punished? That is the premise of so many movies and television shows today. The hero is one who has been wronged and the plot consists of him getting revenge for the offense against him; usually by leaving an impossible number of bodies in the wake of his vengeance! Was Joseph just brushing aside the wrong done to him twenty years earlier? Was he saying, “It doesn’t really matter?”

That’s not what Joseph was doing. He had already discovered through his testing of them that his brothers had repentant hearts; a process he could see was underway in their admission of guilt.

Joseph wept on that occasion, I believe, because he realized his brothers were actually coming to an acknowledgement of their sin. When he had no reason to believe they were facing up to their guilt, he had treated them with severity so that they might awaken to their sinfulness.

That is why the law of God is preached to us, that we might be brought to an awareness of our sin and guilt and be moved to repentance and faith!

In Joseph’s case, when we realize that his brothers were deeply humbled and overwhelmed with guilt and confusion, he was concerned that they not carry their grief to excess. Their crime was not too great to be forgiven by God, or by Joseph! The same is true for us. Our sins are not too great to be forgiven by God, or by the brother or sister we have offended.

The fact is, sometimes it is much easier to forgive the injuries done to us than to believe that the injuries we have caused are really forgiven. I have spent much time through the years trying to convince people that they are really forgiven. God may have forgiven them but they cannot forgive themselves! Jeremiah 31:34 tells us that God will “remember our sins no more.” He means exactly what He says!

It is not that Joseph let his brothers off the hook or gave them some easy way out so they would not have to answer for their hatred and jealousy of him. It is, that having seen their repentance; he didn’t want them to be burdened with undue sorrow.

Having forgiven the men, Joseph threw his arms around Benjamin’s neck and wept, and Benjamin hugged Joseph and wept also. That is understandable, because these were two full brothers. Benjamin hadn’t been involved in hating Joseph and wanting to get rid of him.

But then Joseph reached out and “kissed all his brothers and wept over them” (V. 15). He embraced the ten men who had wished Joseph dead and had had no mercy on him as they sold him into slavery. This was not a Judas kiss of betrayal, but a kiss of complete forgiveness.

So, we must face the question: Can we embrace and forgive those who have wronged us as Joseph did his brothers? Or, are we still holding grudges over things that happened long ago and are microscopic compared to what Joseph went through?

If so, it could be that we do not understand the true nature of forgiveness. Or the reason may be that we have made the choice to turn off the path of righteousness, and now our wheels are in the ditch. If we are harboring resentment, hatred, and lack of forgiveness toward someone, we’ll find that we cannot truly worship or witness and our usefulness to the kingdom is sadly diminished. Can we, who have been forgiven every debt by God, honestly tell him that we cannot forgive our brother or sister over what might be some marginal, minimal offense?

The church is to be people of forgiveness. Isn’t that part of our Lord’s Prayer? “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors?” (Matt. 6:12)

If we were to ask people what they consider the hardest things to say to someone else, I suspect that two recurring answers would be, “I am sorry,” and “I forgive you.” Our pride is so great that we are reluctant to admit to being wrong; and perhaps even sadder, we are slow to grant forgiveness to those who seek it from us.

To return evil for good is devilish; to return good for good is human; to return good for evil is divine! Forgiveness is not some little extra part of the Christian experience; it is at the heart of it. Forgiveness is not optional; intended for extra credit but not really required; it is an absolute essential if Christ is in your heart! The events in Joseph’s life demand that we grapple with the implications for our own lives!

Joseph’s brothers had driven him as far away as they could. When it was his time to be in control, he did just the opposite, he said, “Come close to me.”

Joseph’s brothers had sent him off as a captive to Egypt on the back of a mangy camel. He gave them fine Egyptian carts for their journey back to Canaan. Joseph’s brothers had sold him for money, but he gave them their money back. He gave them wise advice, “Do not quarrel on the way home.”

Joseph returned their every evil, cruel and merciless act with goodness and kindness and mercy. Centuries before Paul’s words were ever written. Joseph was a living illustration of Romans 12:20-22, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink…Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Jesus revolutionizes lives by His forgiveness in order that forgiven lives might be revolutionary in their impact. This is the impact that the church is to make on the world. We are supposed to be the forgiving ones. But do you think that conservative, evangelistic churches are viewed by the rank and file of people in the United States as an example of this kind of revolutionary forgiveness?

Not a chance! We are known as the protesters, the sign wavers, the shouters – and even sometimes, the shooters. Our culture has us pegged as a bigoted, self-righteous special interest group. We have largely done it to ourselves by trying to make our impact in the economic and political scenes at the expense of Kingdom living.

Jesus did not come to set up a political or economic kingdom. Of course, there are justifiable concerns in the culture that we must address. And sometimes that requires taking an adversarial role. But have you ever considered what might happen, if, instead of trying to beat the world with the world’s tactics, we chose to overcome evil with good? If we took the time and the people and the money and resources at our disposal to open our hearts to the homeless, the drug addict, the AIDS victim, and the casts off of society, how differently the world might see us!

That is letting your light shine before men in such a way that they will praise your Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16). That is exactly what is happening in Genesis 45. The brothers saw the carts, clothes and cash Joseph provided. They heard his counsel. And they headed home mystified that they, who had offended their brother so greatly, should be on the receiving end of such dramatic, tangible forgiveness.

Joseph provides a wonderful illustration of Christ like forgiveness. In Matthew 18, we discover Jesus providing crucial principles on the subject in response to a question by Peter. Peter asked the question, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me, up to seven times?” That’s a good question. We can imagine Peter thinking so also and being proud of it. Maybe he was expecting a pat on the back for being so generous with his forgiveness.

Jesus told Peter, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” That does not mean that after forgiving 490 times we can seek revenge! The number is not the issue, because forgiveness is a matter of the heart not a matter of calculation.

Jesus was saying, “Peter, if you understood forgiveness you would not be asking if you could limit it to seven times.” Then Jesus told a story to explain what the forgiveness of the Kingdom of heaven is like.

The story involves a king who forgave a debt that a man could not pay. The man went out and put another man in debtor’s prison who owed him a debt.

When the king heard about it, he imprisoned the man that he had forgiven that would not forgive another.

The lesson of Matthew 18 is this: Prompted by gratitude, forgiven sinners must always do everything in their power to forgive because they have already been forgiven so much more! Here are some truths about forgiveness:

1. We are all God’s debtors. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We have all missed the mark, in terms of the target of His righteousness. If you doubt that, read the Ten Commandments and see if you can get past number one without acknowledging that you have fouled it up.

2. We cannot do anything to repay our debt. Paul says in Romans 3:20, “No one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law, rather, through the law we become conscious of sin,”

3. By means of Christ’s atoning sacrifice, the debt had been paid for all who believe in Him. First, we must see the bad news that we are all in debt to God. Then comes worse news: There is no way that we can get ourselves out of debt. But the Good News is that someone has done something on our behalf so as to make possible a radical transformation in our circumstances.

Romans 3:24 says, “We are justified freely by His grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” When Jesus died on the cross, He was not simply offering us a nice example of selflessness. He is paying our sin debt.

This is crucial to understand because many people want to sentimentalize the gospel. “Look what those horrible people did to that nice man Jesus,” they say. “Maybe I should do something for Jesus. Maybe if I go to church, Jesus will see me and it will make him happy and he will take me to heaven one day.”

So, driven by sentimentalism, people respond for all the wrong reasons and hope to end up in heaven one day – and it’s never going to happen! We are hopelessly in debt to God, and our only hope is the wonderful news that God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin so that we might have righteousness through him. (2 Corinthians 5:21) This is the Gospel. This is what we must believe in order to be saved and have our debt to God cancelled.

4. We must forgive the debts of those who are indebted to us in order to experience the assurance of our forgiveness. Don’t get this the wrong-way-around. Jesus said, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12).

Most people think that this means that if we forgive others, then God will forgive us. That is not the meaning here. It is the forgiveness of other people’s sins against us that we reveal the fact that we have been forgiven by God.

That is the message of the parable in Matthew 18. The ungrateful servant did not understand forgiveness. He did not appreciate the enormity of the debt from which he was released. Otherwise, he would not have responded with harshness to the one who owed him.

The treatment of Joseph toward his brothers illustrates he understood forgiveness in a profound way.

5. It should not be too difficult for those who have been forgiven to forgive in return. The reason is that what we owe God is infinitely more than any person owes us.

The key here is to understand how utterly bankrupt we are before God. If I live my life thinking that I am quite a good person and that God is fortunate to have me on his side, then I will never understand my need.

The Bible tells us that we can never really feel good about ourselves until we feel bad about ourselves. When you do this, you turn to the One who died to forgive your debt. Any time I feel animosity toward someone, it is because I have diminished my sense of the debt I owe to God.

Have you ever acknowledged the enormity of your sin and responded to God’s invitation to come to Him and be forgiven? Have you faced your bankrupt condition before God and thrown yourself on His mercy?

If you have been forgiven by God, are you taking seriously Jesus’ instruction to forgive others from your heart? If we are going to be the Church of Jesus Christ, His love has to flow through us. If there are Christian brothers and sisters who live with animosity and unforgiveness of each other, the Love of God is blocked and we cannot be the church he desires for us to be.

Today, we need to learn from Joseph – forgive!