Now the famine was still severe in the land. So when they had eaten all the grain they had brought from Egypt, their father said to them, “Go back and buy us a little more food.” But Judah said to him, “The man warned us solemnly, ‘You will not see my face again unless your brother is with you.’ If you will send our brother along with us, we will go down and buy food for you. But if you will not send him, we will not go down, because the man said to us, ‘You will not see my face again unless your brother is with you.’ ” Israel asked, “Why did you bring this trouble on me by telling the man you had another brother?” They replied, “The man questioned us closely about ourselves and our family. ‘Is your father still living?’ he asked us. ‘Do you have another brother?’ We simply answered his questions. How were we to know he would say, ‘Bring your brother down here’?” Then Judah said to Israel his father, “Send the boy along with me and we will go at once, so that we and you and our children may live and not die. I myself will guarantee his safety; you can hold me personally responsible for him. If I do not bring him back to you and set him here before you, I will bear the blame before you all my life. As it is, if we had not delayed, we could have gone and returned twice.” Then their father Israel said to them, “If it must be, then do this: Put some of the best products of the land in your bags and take them down to the man as a gift—a little balm and a little honey, some spices and myrrh, some pistachio nuts and almonds. Take double the amount of silver with you, for you must return the silver that was put back into the mouths of your sacks. Perhaps it was a mistake. Take your brother also and go back to the man at once. And may God Almighty grant you mercy before the man so that he will let your other brother and Benjamin come back with you. As for me, if I am bereaved, I am bereaved.” So the men took the gifts and double the amount of silver, and Benjamin also. They hurried down to Egypt and presented themselves to Joseph.
—Genesis 43:1-15 (TNIV)
You have to love Jacob. Ever the deceiver. Today’s iteration of it consists of him complaining to his sons and chastising them for telling Joseph the truth about themselves and their family (read Genesis 41-42 for context). Apparently Jacob also taught his sons well because we learned yesterday that they were offended that Joseph had accused them of being spies. They protested that they were honest men. Uh-huh. The same honest men that were offended by Joseph’s dream and wanted to kill him? The same honest men who indeed threw him into a well and then sold him into slavery and then lied to their father about it? Yes indeed! Those honest men!
Now before we get all uppity and self-indignant over Jacob and Joseph’s brothers, I would suggest that we are just like them. For example, have you ever thought to yourself that you really aren’t all that bad? You know. After all, you probably aren’t a murderer. You haven’t sold anybody into slavery. You are likely not a terrorist or a pathological liar or an anti-social personality. The most you’ve probably done pales in comparison to all the heinous crimes we read about every day in the news.
And that’s just the point. When we start thinking like this, and every one of us has done so to one degree or another, we are thinking just like Jacob and his sons. Our human pride cannot bear the thought that we are not worthy of God’s love or deserve it. We might even be repulsed at the notion that God had to save us from our sins on the cross, that we can’t save ourselves. But the latter is true. The Bible reminds us that no one is righteous in God’s sight. All have sinned and sin leads to death. There are no exceptions except one man, Jesus of Nazareth.
Lent is a season where we are to examine ourselves and work to put to death these kinds of delusions. Today, ask God to show your pride clearly to you and then ask him to help you put it to death. This is not a quick, easy, or pleasant thing to do, but it is essential if you ever hope to appropriate the Good News of Jesus Christ and enjoy the kind of relationship with God he created you to have.