Waiting – part 2 – Joseph

Edited by Kay Beam

In the last post [Waiting Part 1] I introduced the idea of trusting in the Lord and not depending on our view of the situation. These next two posts are going to deal with the subject of waiting. I am sure that there are more stories in the Bible than the two that I am going to share with you that deal with waiting. But I have had a renewed look at these two stories over the last couple months and that is why I chose to look at them.

In this post, we are going to be looking at the story of Joseph and focusing on how he had to wait on the Lord. If you are not familiar with Joseph’s story, you can find it in the book of Genesis 37-50 [make link] because in this post I am going to briefly tell his story.

Joseph was the youngest of 12 children. He was the favorite child in the family, and his father spared no expense in showing that. Jacob, his father, gave him a really nice coat that made Joseph’s brothers dislike him even more, and they decided that they wanted to kill him. But instead of killing him they decided to sell him as slave.

Joseph was found himself in the home of Potiphar where he was placed in charge of the household. Potiphar’s wife, however, found Joseph attractive and tried to seduce him. When Joseph would not betray Potiphar, Potiphar’s wife turned on him and said that he had attacked her. Joseph was thrown into prison.

  

In prison, God still looked out for Joseph as he succeeded in all that he did. He interpreted dreams for two guys, a cup bearer and a baker, in prison. The baker’s dream did not turn out too well for him, but the cup bearer’s dream had him regain his positon with Pharaoh. The cup bearer said that he would remember what Joseph did and put in a good word for him with the Pharaoh, but he forgot, so Joseph was left in jail.

This is where I want to stop with his story. I want to look at two verses in Genesis 40 and 41:

40:23 The chief cupbearer, however, did not remember Joseph; he forgot him.

41:1 When two full years had passed, Pharaoh had a dream:  

Joseph was left in jail and was waiting for the day when the cup bearer would come back with the word that he was freed from jail. But the minutes turned to hours, the hours to days, the days to weeks, the weeks to months and the months to years. As the time passed, I feel Joseph wrestled within himself. I believe that he had some trouble trusting God in this situation. I feel he doubted what God was doing. I wonder if he felt like God did not care. He had done nothing wrong, and yet, he was here in jail…. waiting. He waited for two full years.

I wonder if some of you might be waiting for something to happen in a situation that you are facing. You have done everything right. You have prayed and prayed and prayed for something to change, but it feels like everything you say is falling on deaf ears. The longer the wait goes on the more we begin to doubt and lose trust in God. The prayers begin to stop, and we give up. I know. It is a hard place to be.

But this isn’t where Joseph’s story ends. As we see in Genesis 41:1, Pharaoh had a dream (actually, he had two). This was a dream that no one could interpret for Pharaoh. All of a sudden a light bulb goes off in the cup bearer’s head, and he remembers Joseph. The Pharaoh immediately calls for Joseph, and he tells Pharaoh what the dreams mean. Pharaoh is so pleased and thankful that he puts Joseph in charge of the land of Egypt. He was second in command under Pharaoh.

We can all agree that Joseph’s life was anything but smooth. He was betrayed by family, then sold to Egypt, accused of something that he did not do, and was thrown in jail and forgotten about for two years. But you see, Joseph was right where God wanted him to be.

God has a plan for us. But sometimes it doesn’t look like we think it should. I bet Joseph had some different thoughts about how his life would go, and because he was a human, I bet he had some trouble trusting God’s direction. I bet he had some heated conversations with God while he was in prison.

It is usually the dark times and confusing times that cause us to question what God is doing. I had a bout with that over the summer. I began to doubt what God was doing in the situation that I was (and still am) facing. I gave up on trusting God with the situation for a season. But through preparing a lesson on this topic and the memory verse for the month, I began to see that doing this on my own was never going to help. I needed to turn that back over to God. I needed to trust Him.

Maybe that is what we all need to do. We need to turn something over to God. We need to let it go because it is slowly taking us out. We need to give it to God or back to God and let Him show us where this trail will take us.

We just need to trust in the Lord.