Part 2 of Joseph and His Coat of Many Colors
Part 2 of Joseph and His Coat of Many Colors
Raising joyful children in an angry world, a podcast dedicated to faithful parents navigating their families through a stormy culture
This is raising joyful children in an angry world. I'm your host, Paul Osborne. Today, I want to talk to you about the inevitable habit of tattling in kids. It's not something we can simply ignore. And as we go into the next phase of this story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, I really want to talk about what happens when siblings begin to tell on each other, report on each other. When the motive is not helpful, when it's not constructive. And it doesn't get resolved. It can lead to the mother of all dysfunction and division under the umbrella of distrust. I hope to show you today how unchecked distrust leads to divisiveness and dysfunctionality with a family. And eventually it begins to even poison our trust in God. Faith is built on trust. The Hebrews say that faith is confidence in things hoped for. And those that feed on skepticism and relish the reasons not to trust eventually poison their families. We've been in the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors. We've talked about it as a dysfunctional family. We call it the fall and rise and the amazing grace that God will deliver. And we are borrowing from what I'm calling a catechismic Bible, where the Apostles Creed and the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the 23rd Psalm to help kids understand this story. this is a family, they're in the herding business, and they're dealing with favoritism and pride and jealousy. In our last. Section, you may recall, Joseph has given his father Jacob, who is now called Israel, a bad report, and the brothers didn't like that. It doesn't really tell us that it ever got resolved. they become jealous like what is he trying to pull? What's he trying to get away with when he, when he shares his dreams, and today I want us to look at this in the next section. We're going to talk about mainly is the commandment about false witness, that the Bible tells us not to do, not to bear a false witness. And we're going to catch up with this story as, Joseph has been sent by his father Israel to again report back to dad what's going on with those brothers who are herding the sheep. before we catch up on Joseph though, I want to share a story just to kind of give an indication of how this works in today's world. Here in the Brazos Valley, there's been a story going on for the past 10 years. You may have read about it in Texas Monthly. Oh, they put a very unique spin to it. But at the end of the Civil War in Texas, many slaves were given land by their, the plantation owners. There's just no way nice to say it. Some of these owners were actually married or had relationships with slaves. And so part of the way this all got settled was that descendants were given land. Property to farm and to live off of because the, the agricultural business that they were once all a part of no longer exist. Now what happened here is that there were no wills used and the deeds and the property boundaries and How all these titles got put together is a bit ambiguous. And for about seven generations, this inheritance understanding of these properties continues. No one takes the time to go and do the wills. And so now you've got, instead of a handful of people, you now have maybe 200 people. And under inheritance property laws, which are somewhat ambiguous, Everybody that's a descendant has a little piece of what that property's worth. Now for generations it wasn't worth anything, but all of a sudden they built a nice little toll road down to Houston. And now you're seeing where a couple of cousins find out about it. They hire a lawyer. The uncles that maybe have been paying the taxes on it for 30 years, they now hire their lawyer. And of course, we're going to have the lawyers being described as the villains. And lots of folks are going to feel that they got cheated, taken advantage of, and an unfair settlement. And in some cases, they probably did. But how did it all happen? Well, perhaps it's true in the beginning, they couldn't afford a lawyer on a will. But seven generations, wills are fairly, This is a story that's very affordable. They're one of the most inexpensive things that lawyers do. Why won't you do it? Well, maybe it is true that they didn't have money. But I suspect that people didn't want the rest of these families to find out about the land because of the consequences that might result from it. And eventually it all happened. The story of Joseph and his family is a story of distrust. In fact, If you think about Jacob's life, his life is built on distrust. He and his mother cheat his brother out of his inheritance. His father in law swaps his wife's sister into the marriage tent. Another trick. So this is a man that has a life full of distrust. And what ends up happening is this distrustfulness, this tattletale problem that gets ignored, it actually gets encouraged in this family. And while we'll see how God redeems the failures here, again, I want to go back to some of the things out of the catechisms, some of the creeds that help explain this story. So I believe in God is one. Hmm. That's a trust issue. Thou shall have no other gods before me. You That's in other words, don't take things into your own hand. Don't become your own God. And what happens is there's, there's a bearing of false witness. There's Joseph tattletailing back to Israel. There's all of this distrust. It's hard to see his motivation, but we do see the distrust and everyone's trying to harm each other's reputation. we're going to see God kind of hiding underneath all of this. He's going to redeem it eventually, but I want to get into this story now as to Joseph and his brothers. So if you remember in the first, sections in Genesis 37, in the first few verses, Joseph had come back and given a bad report on his brothers. Now we're in another section, verse 12, and his brothers have gone to graze the father's flocks in Shechem. And Israel, who is also known as Jacob, says to Joseph, As you know, your brothers are grazing the flocks near Shechem. Come, I'm going to send you to them. So this reporting back, this distrust of the brothers, and their herding, Israel wants to know what's going on again. You see his distrust. Go and see if all is well with your brothers, with the flocks, and bring word back to me. So he sends him off from the Valley of Hebron, and here we go again. Israel is not trusting the brothers. And we see this whole life now of distrust just continuing. So when Joseph arrives in Shechem, a man, has found him wandering around in the fields. And he says, what are you looking for? And in verse 16, he says, well, I'm looking for my brothers. Can you tell me where they are grazing their flocks? Oh, they've moved from here, the man answers. I heard them say, let's go to Dothan. And so immediately you think, well, wow. If you know anything about this area, or at least scholars tell us, Shechem is like a grassy plains. It's fields that are rich, perfect for feeding sheep. Dotham is hill country, so it's not as ideal. Well, we may not be sure why they moved to Dotham in the hill country, but it seems like it's a trust issue. So Joseph, in the next verse, went after his brothers and found them near Dotham. And here's what we find. But in verse 18, You go to the hill country in war and in distrust so that your enemy doesn't sneak up upon you. And here they could see him at the distance and they plotted to kill him. Immediately we see a violation of thou shall not kill. Matthew Henry says it's worse to plot evil than it is to do it. Because one deal with the devil leads to another. And that's what we're going to see. And so we hear them in verse 19. Here comes that dreamer, they said to each other. Come now, let's kill him. Let's throw him onto these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal has devoured him. Then we'll see what comes of his dreams. See, distrust has poisoned their faith. They don't trust the dream. They don't trust the brother. They have not even thinking about what God has to say about any of this. That's why we profess, I believe in God the Father, because it is a trust issue. And we want to prevent distrust from leaking into the souls of our kids. This is why tattletailing has to be something that you address. Verse 21. When Reuben heard this, He tried to rescue him from their hands. Let's not take his life. See, I shall not kill. Don't shed any blood. Throw him into the cistern in the wilderness, but don't lay a hand on him. See, Reuben says this to rescue him from them and take him back to his father. Reuben's going to try to come up with a plan, but he's trying to resolve this issue strictly by law and reason alone. God's not in the process. So, when Joseph came to his brothers, they stripped him of his robe, the ornate robe he was wearing. They took it from him, and they threw him into the cistern. The cistern was empty. There was no water in it. It's a well. And so they, as they sat down to their meal, in verse 25, they looked up and they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming to Gilead, where they were. Their camels were loaded with spices, bauman, mar. And they were on their way down to Egypt. So Judah, another one of the brothers, says what will it gain if we kill our brothers and cover up his blood? Come, let's sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him. After all, he is our brother, our own flesh and blood. So his brothers agree. Thou shall not kill is too much. But the stealing of his freedom and the selling of him and the lying, eh, And so when the Midianite merchants came by, his brothers pulled Joseph up out of the cistern and sold him for 20 shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites who took him to Egypt. So when I'm telling this story to my kids, I want to, I want to get into. Why tattletailing can be dangerous. Because we can start to enjoy seeing our brother or sister get into trouble. our motive isn't to benefit them, but it's to benefit us. And this then starts to poison our soul. And we start wanting to take matters into our own hands. When we ignore what God has told us regarding his laws. And we see that here in this family. It starts with the beginning of distrust as we saw in the first report. And now the second report, more distrust. And so the brothers then conspire against him. And so I think going back to our own children when they come and say, Did you know that Tommy just blah blah blah did this or did that or you know, my sister just hit me with the block in the head. We have to sit down and say okay, what really happened? Did you attempt depending on the age, of course, but did you attempt to resolve this? Did you confront your brother? Did you discuss this and then and then you've got to come to a place I think with all members of the family You To say, okay, we need a time of confession, we need a time of restoration, and we need to do this. other times, hey, so and so's not sharing or, or some more minor things. We have to be careful that we're not building a habit. And so, why are you telling me this? What is the motive here? And we've got to make sure, are you telling me the whole truth to this story? Am I missing anything? Are you leaving anything out? Are you saying this to make your brother or sister look bad? I think we have to ask these kinds of questions to our kids in order to deal with this issue of mistrust. Because when it goes out of control, when everybody in a family begins to distrust other members of the family, We're in trouble. We're going to find ourselves in a divided family. This is why sometimes when there is divorce in a family, it affects children. It creates an enormous distrust that they couldn't count on the promise of mom and dad. I want to close with this concept today. We have to make an effort to encourage our kids to trust one another and to trust in our family and to live up to our promises. We've got to teach them when we say we're going to do something, we do it. When we find somebody in, disobedience that can be harmful to them, our motive has to be that we're only telling our parents if and only when we can't get them to stop doing what they're not supposed to be doing that's harmful to the family and to the relationship. And no one should ever come and tell things that aren't truthful. That's called damaging another person's reputation. This is going to happen in their world. It's going to happen at their school, but it's not something that we can tolerate in our family. Feed too long at that, practice that, and you're going to find yourself a distrustful, divisive person eventually will begin to leak into your own trust in God the Father Almighty. The ultimate battle for the heart and soul is a fight for identity. Our king invites our kids to know who they are, what to believe, and where they belong. Until next time, let's remember the words for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.