A Strange New World - The Test of Moral Temptation - New Horizon 5 August 2025

 

NEW HORIZON 2025

BIBLE READING 5 AUGUST 2025 - JOHN LENNOX

“A STRANGE NEW WORLD”

The Test of Moral Temptation

Genesis 37 verses 1 to 11

“These are the generations of Jacob” – with these words we come to the last section in the book.

This is an account of the development and growth of hatred within a family, hatred that in the end that led to the brothers getting rid of Joseph. He was 17 and it is interesting that the Hebrew scholars point out “he was pastoring his flock with his brothers” is ambiguous. It can also mean he was “pastoring his brothers with the flock” In other words he was looking after them in some sense given that responsibility by Jacob. We saw how Israel that is Jacob loved Joseph more than any of his other sons and made him this robe that distinguished him and they were constantly reminded by it of his superiority in his father’s eyes. And we find that not only did the father give him this coat but Joseph brought a bad report to his father about his brothers. Now here again is a topic of great deal of controversy. Was Joseph a tell tale, a snitch? That is the view particularly of some Jewish scholars. The curious things about that is that there is no other indicator in the entire story that Joseph had that kind of sneaky character functioning as a spy to bring a bad report to his father. Now, the interesting thing about this is, of course, Joseph was not sinless. He was not like the Lord Jesus and we must not presume that he was neither must we presume that he was necessarily a sneaky spy snitching on his brothers. “He brought a bad report” How do we understand that? What was the result of his giving this report – hatred. That brings us to a topic scripture does deal with – tale telling. I am sure we are familiar with that. From childhood it is very tempting for a favourite child to tell tales to enhance his position in the family pecking order.  Telling tales is a problem at every level of communal life, in families, in organisations, businesses, churches and the bible has a great deal to say about it.

Proverbs 11 verse 13 “A talebearer revealeth secrets; but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.”

Leviticus 19 verse 16 “You shall not go up and down as a slanderer among your people and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbour. I am the Lord your God.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”

“Love your neighbour as your yourself” comes in the context of tale telling. Tale telling and gossiping have virtually unlimited capacity to destroy relationships and families and churches and organisation of any kind. Tale bearing is framed in the context of loving your neighbour as yourself. What is tale bearing? We constantly talk about other people. How accurate is our portrayal of other people in what we say. Paul warns us we will be judged as we judge others “with what measure ou measure, it shall be measured unto you.” A challenging statement. If you think of all my conversations and all the statements I have made about other people in the past week have they accurate, 100%, 80% or maybe over 50% or less. All those judgments I have made, critical judgments maybe of other people reveal what principles I use for making those judgment. Here is the challenging thing – there is a day coming when God is going to use my measuring  principles on myself. Suppose God were to step in right now and evaluate my life and analyse it on the basis of the principles I have used to evaluate other people in the past week, month or year where would I stand? It is a powerful corrective. Gossip, tale telling destroys relationships. There are many younger people who long for an older person that they can confide in who will not tell it. It is a serious flaw. It only takes a word or even silence or even a negation – you know the kind of thing where someone says ‘I’m not saying anything’. That is a damning a comment as giving detail. We desperately need it within our churches to be known as people of integrity who can keep a confidence particularly of young people who are afraid to talk to us because they are afraid we are going to snitch. So the challenge of us is absolutely is absolutely straight. The word of a tale bearer are wounds and they go down into the innermost part of the belly. It says they are gut wrenching, hurtful and difficult to repair. Here is something else that is a consideration. Remember when our disciples said to our Lord he should go up to the feast at Jerusalem and he said your time is always ready but my time isn’t yet because I testify of the world that its deeds are evil. Is that tale bearing? No. The challenge of the gospel is painful in part because it exposes the evil in our heart, it is to bring us to repentance because he loves us and he must do it. Remember the woman at the well how he did it with her. Talking to her very gently but very pointedly to bring up to the surface the truth of the fact that she had a series of serial marriages and hadn’t even bothered to get married on the last account. So the message we have to bring isn’t tale bearing but its stating a fact about human nature that we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That is a real problem when we are witnessing to people because we realise that part of our message is to bring out into the light of the day the fact that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. So the Lord said ‘my time is not ready’. He had to choose it very carefully because part of his message had to do with what lies in the heart of human beings. The Lord pointed out that we have to deal with other people at this level but he was very clear in saying that before we point it out, the fault in someone else, we should take out the beam in our own eye and then we will see clearly to see the moat that is in someone elses eye. That is a powerful image. It is a beam versus a tiny speck of wood in the eye. We have to be so careful when doing counselling work. When we see something wrong with someone else we have to check ourselves in case there is a massive beam in our own eye that we can’t even see because it is so large. There are checks and balances in all of this. Of course the opposite of tale bearing is flattery. Here again Christians have problems. There is a danger among certain groups of people that they go so far in avoiding flattery that they have never learned to praise, never learnt to say thank you to people for their service done for the Lord. If you read Paul’s letters you will find he is constantly mentioning people by name. So they are there for the last 2000 years so that everyone can read how grateful he is for certain people for what they do. When was the last time that you said to a warm directed thank you to someone for what they have done. It is an oil that enables the Christian church to function much better. Avoiding flattery that will not get you anywhere but knowing how to praise and be genuinely grateful so that it encourages people in their ministry to the Lord. So first of all, Jacob gave his son this cloak and treated him as a superior child.

Secondly, he told his father stories about what they were up to. Reading later it is clear they were up to no good very frequently.

Thirdly the most telling of all he had dreams of supremacy over his brothers and even over his parents which in that culture would have been a horrendous thing to suggest. Joseph was 17 and in a way artless, he had a dream and it was important and told it without realising what its content was. The first dream concerned grain and a grain harvest. These were cattle men, had nothing to do with grain harvest. The grain harvest was grain harvest in Egypt. Then the sun, moon and stars bow down. It was Jacob, his wife their mother and the stars all bowing down to him. It was clear that this made an impact on Jacob. God does sometimes communicate in dreams. He did then and he does now. I have met quite a number of people particularly from a Muslim heritage have come to faith in Christ because of a dream. I have no reason to question those dreams whose result is in a clear cut conversion and a life for Christ. We have to be careful with dreams because it is one thing when God sends a dream, it is an entirely different thing when we try to conjure up a dream in our own thinking. In scripture God speaking in dreams and visions is very rare. Most of you Christians are here because of a dream. God gave Paul a vision in a dream of a man in Europe, in Macedonia asking him to come and help and he came and as a result Christianity reached Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We must not despise dreams God sends. We notice that Paul was careful to check up on the evidence that lay behind the dream. Here were 2 dreams and it is clear they originated in God. They were God’s word to Joseph in a form that he did not immediately understand. He would only understand it much later when it was fulfilled. Paul warns in Colossians 2 verse 18 against people who he says are puffed in up in their own minds who have not held fast to the head. Something’s going on in their head but they haven’t held fast to the head who is Christ. They are really seeing things but they are seeing things out of reality and out of touch with God. It is one thing when God sends dreams but it is completely different when people imagine that every dream they have has got to have some kind of spiritual significance so that they become unbalanced and become more interested in their dreams than in scripture. That can lead to spiritual and moral shipwreck. When in university there was a man who decided God was directing him in dreams. He sold his bible to a fellow student saying he didn’t need it because God communicated with him in dreams and visions and told him what to do. Very sadly this included telling him to leave his wife and his life ended in their complete spiritual and moral disaster. So it is very important to keep balance here. Now another consideration which is a much deeper thing – dreams occur in the Joseph narrative but what is striking thing is God could have saved many actors in this story from a great deal of pain and distress by sending another dream. God could have sent a dream to Jacob to tell him his son was still alive when his brothers sold him. He never did. God could have sent a dream to Joseph when he was in prison to tell him his father was still alive but he never did. And that raises some very interesting questions about the delicacy God deals with people even in dreams. Here at the start God sends a dream to Joseph and he told it to his family. If he had kept it to himself it is clear he might have saved himself a lot of trouble. But probably through innocent young naivety, he simply told it because he would have known from the stories of his family, his father and his grandfather that dreams had played a role, particularly in his father’s life on his first night out from home. So we can think about these things and the one blindingly obvious thing is that the basic thrust of the 2 dreams was very clear. They were both about people bowing down to Joseph. They predicted Joseph’s eventual rule over his brothers, his father and mother. An outrageous idea in the Middle Eastern culture. You can imagine that when Jacob said what he said it wasn’t in the most even of tones “Shall I and your mother indeed bow down to you?” But the dreams gave no indication about how and when these would be fulfilled. But they did make Jacob deeply thoughtful. Perhaps it reminded him on his first night out from home he dreamed a dream of a ladder that reached from by his shoulder up to heaven. And God made a promise to him to go with him wherever he went. Perhaps it was the memory of that led to Jacob storing this up in his own mind. It made the brothers madder than ever. It fuelled the flame of their jealousy and their hatred and the irony and the whole story is that their hatred and what it led to eventually spelt their salvation from salvation. They would never understand it until they willingly did what they swore never to do and that was to bow to Joseph. You can’t help thinking when you think of that projection into the future and them all bowing to Joseph of a greater than Joseph. “And he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even to death on the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow.” And because of that cross and the suffering of Jesus millions have bowed the knee. And out of those millions God has formed the Christian church. And many who comprise the church today first hated the fact that Jesus was special, that he made supernatural claims. In the end they claim to gladly bow because of who he is and what he has done. God spoke to Joseph in a unique way when he was young. We cannot necessarily expect that to happen to us. That is what happened to Joseph. But that does mean that God cannot speak to any of us. He has many ways to speak to us other than in dreams. He might well speak to you at this conference through his word and call you with unmistakable clarity.

Now the scripture goes on to tell that the brothers moved off pastoring their sheep to Shechem. And Jacob very foolishly sent him probably about 5 days walk. The impression is he went on his own and he was 17/18 at the time. A crazy thing to do because he was essentially an alien in the land and he sent him to see how the brothers were and bring back a report. He says so – verse 14. Joseph lands in Shechem and is wandering about, cannot find the brothers and a man he happens to meet tells them they have gone to Dothan – verses 17 to 27. What you are now beginning to see is the outcome of hatred and it is differentiated to a certain degree. The brothers begin to split off from one another in their attitude to Joseph. Reuben he wants to save the boy and he suggests putting him into a water cistern which was a deep hole in the ground that would contain a lot of water and would only have a relatively small entrance in the middle at the top so it would be impossible for anyone to crawl out of it in any way. And Reuben is interesting because he clearly didn’t keep watch and when he came back to the cistern, the text tells us that Joseph is gone. The brothers had already taken him out and sold him as a slave. Perhaps that is an indication of her character. He was labile, wasn’t consistent. Unfortunately he had a good idea, he wanted to bring Joseph back to his father but he missed it. He missed it by inconsistency. How much do we miss by being inconsistent particularly when other people rely on us to do a job and we don’t do it? So the brothers gang up on Joseph because of their hatred. It’s very curious to me and odd that Jacob who knew tht they hated Joseph would even send him there, would even risk it but he did and they in the end sold him and the cynical words of Judah – “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his brother. Come let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and let not our hand be upon him for he is our brother, our own flesh.” They did the next best thing to killing him, they sold him as a slave. Judah is showing the bare remnants of humanity and he stopped short of fratricide when he sees a way of getting rid of his brother without actually killing him. So Joseph becomes a commodity, a slave, one more in the countless line of men women and children who have been demeaned by their fellow men and consigned to the humanity of slavery. It will take amazing grace to rescue Judah and his brothers just as it took amazing grace to rescue the slave trader John Newton in 1748. The man who wrote the much loved hymn to celebrate that grace and who profoundly influenced through his preaching and friendship that wonderful liberator of slaves William Wilberforce. There is an interesting historical detail here – the price paid for Joseph to the brothers fit exactly with what is known from archaeology as the price of a slave at that time. It reminds us of another man Judas which is a Hellenised version of the same name Juda – Judas who betrayed the Saviour of the world for 30 pieces of silver. A Saviour who is known as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. But that sale was to ensure a death not to preserve a death. There are so many hints and forewarnings of what would happen again. The text tells us they stripped him of his lovely robe and they dipped the robe in the blood of a goat. They sent the robe of many colours to their father and said “this we have found, please identify whether it is your son’s robe or not. And he identified it and said it is my son’s robe. A fierce animal has devoured him. Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces. Then Jacob tore his garments and put sackcloth on his loins and mourned for his sons for many days. All his sons and daughters rose up to comfort him. But he refused to be comforted and said No I shall go down to Sheol to my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.” No there’s so many illusions in these few verses and we need to pick some of them up. This is the beginnings of years of deceit of the children binding themselves together to live by lies. Live Not by Lies is a work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974 just before he was kicked out of Russia having been a dissident “Therein we find neglected by us the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation, a personal non participation in lies. Even if all is covered by lies, even if all I sunder the rule, let us resist in the smallest way. Let their Rule hold not through me.” Do we participate in lies? Some of us have lived with lies for a evry long time and they are still there troubling us beneath the surface. The story of Joseph would encourage us to bring them to the surface and repent of them. The deceit is perpetuated by false evidence. They bring the coat that is dipped in the blood of a goat. They had no DNA sampling in those days. They had no scientific ability to separate and distinguish between the blood of an animal and a human being. Jacob was deceived by the blood of a goat. Does that make you think of anything? Years before this man Jacob had dressed up as a goat to deceive his father who couldn’t see. God will make us face the deceptions that we have perpetrated even though it may take years. That’s a humbling thing. “with what measure you measure it will be measured unto you.” Here it is being measured unto Jacob. His mother had dressed him in the skin of a goat so that his father who couldn’t see went by the next highest sense touch and touched him and what he felt was a goat. He mistook the goatskin for the skin of his brother Esau and he was decieved. He thought he had got away with it. Years later he is facing a deception that involves not a goat’s skin but a goat’s blood. It is immensely powerful as an illustration of the way God works behind the scenes. We talk glibly about God’s sovereignty and human responsibility but the way they intermingle and work, this is an example of it and it is extremely complicated. Live not by lies. We have seen Jacob called 2 things – Jacob and Israel. Yakov, Jacob means deceiver. His name was Deceiver. He lived by deceit. So Jacob the deceiver finds himself at the other end of a deceit. And what we are now seeing as Jacob starts to mourn the death of Joseph, his family is beginning to fall apart. He has lost one son. The next chapter of Genesis many people think it is interposed. The story of Judah – verses 1 to 9  of chapter 38. You can sense the pathos in the first words – “Judah went down from his brothers.” Not just geographical, it was in every other sense. And he doesn’t’ care tuppence for the family line. This was the family God chose to bring the Saviour into the world. We know the Saviour comes from the line of Judah. Here is the line the first born son dead because of sin, second one dead directly killed by God and the third son left. And Tamar the wife now bereaved Judah promises her his third son when he is grown up but he didn’t do it. The line of Judah is about to peter out. That is the pathos of this story. The whole purpose of what I call the seed project. Abraham seed Isaac who seed Jacob and on down. This seed project which would bring the Messiah into the world is in danger of faltering because of human sin. Here is this woman Tamar and the third son should have been given to her but wasn’t. What does she do? She dresses up as a prostitute and deceives Judah to sleep with her. An extreme ploy. Judah asked what he should give her and she asks for her staff, various things that identified him. When she becomes pregnant it is told to Judah who suggests she should be brought up and be burnt. Tamar said “the father of my child is the owner of this ID.” He couldn’t do anything. Jacob has been deceived by clothing dipped in blood. Recognise who are this – exact same phrase here. Clothing again is used to deceive Judah and he has to recognise the idea belonged to him. There are repeated ideas going through. The main topic is deceit.

When the Lord Jesus talked about his coming he warned his disciples that the greatest problem they would have to face is deception. We now live in a world where the capacity to deceive is beyond anything that has existed before in history. The capacity ability through AI to construct deep fakes has a potential to deceive not millions but billions and it scares the leading head of our secret agents of the countries of the world. It is interesting Jesus warns of deception – “many will come in my name.” We need to know about these things. Live not by lies. We are in a world that is living increasingly by lies