Devotional
Short Notes to Genesis 44 Is
experiential chit-chatting [ontology] in the presence of the Word of God
unrelated to the actual words in His text permissible? As Adventists our
thoughts [epistemology] are coming from the Word to our minds to our experience
to our thinking to our reflection and back to the chit-chatting. That is
permissible since that is what Sabbath-School reflections are all about. But
not the other way around or substituting God’s impact with our sidetracked
impact. We miss cardinal nuances built into His Word if we do that. Computer
technicians who place certain markers on people’s participation when they call
for primacy of the Word of God above private affairs just to delete it quickly
in a software “gutter” that they created, play also in the hands of Satan and
do not serve the church of the Lord. Reading
chapter 44 of Moses’ work, the following notes became apparent. The
literal expression of Genesis 44:4 is “why your peace is evil?” The
literal expression of Genesis 44:5 reads: “You have are evil which you have
done”. Keil
came to Genesis 44:15 and said that the expression in the original meant “to
whisper, to mumle out formularies, incantations, then to prophesy, in Latin divinare
(Keil 363). Joseph was indeed a prophet of the Lord and the Lord gave him the
ability to interpret dreams and future events of such dreams. He was not
participating in the local art of reading fortunes from water in a plate and
rimples made by coins dropped in it of future predictions. That is what they
did in the days of Strabo and Pliny, as cited by Keil, but between their days
in the Roman period and Joseph are nearly two millennia. Superimposition is not
much of a help here. Joseph was faithful and did to lapse into culture
honorification: “when you are in Rome you do as the Romans” – stuff. The
success of Joseph does not lie in compromise with the evil but in abstaining
from it and following the Word of God literally and absolutely. In our own
time, the global philosophy of Jurisprudence has made equality into a god so
that skew relationships and evil should be embraced with the good contrary to
the principles of the Bible. LGPTQH lobbying and Jurisprudence for them has
even led Californian Adventist Judges to follow after the world. It is not an
achievement to be an Adventist becoming a Judge when she/he compromise their
religion for gain of fame. Joseph did not although Keil was wondering if he
did. The
iniquity that they are talking about is not the goblet but their past guilt
related to the disappearance of Joseph in 1971 BCE and now it is 1951/1950 or
the first year of the famine or 21st year of Sesostris I according
to the reckoning of the Egyptologist J. von Beckerath in his article and
according to the very slightly adjusted reckoning of Edwin Thiele, the Dean of
Chronology of Adventists in the 1950’s. The modern chronologies of Peter James
and Eastern Europe scholars with a sliding of all chronologies by 250 years
should not be entertained at all. The agenda of Satan in using these scholars
or fad is to drain people’s confidence in biblical chronology so that they
speak no longer with conviction of the reality of history but just stories and
if stories then modern narratives can substitute easily in sensibility the
non-sense cultural habits of the past and the result? LGBTQH is a success
against the plain reading of the Bible. So with Women Ordination and Gay Ministries
or role of Gays in the modern society. Sin is no longer a sin but a permissible
honored choice. Permissive Jurisprudence is not Divine Jurisprudence and cannot
replace it otherwise the person has become a horizontalist [man to man person]
and not a verticalist [God to man and man to God person]. Joseph and his
brother was the last mentioned one. Benjamin
was no longer a young boy (Genesis 44:20) but one must remember that no matter
how old a mother becomes, her baby is her baby. In his mind the adult and grown
up Benjamin was still Jacob’s “little one”. Love, care, passion and memory work
that way with humans. It shapes them to the result that they get stuck with the
baby they had rather than the adult they now got. And the “babies” know it and
play together putting on the baby mask when they get to their parents for high
day holidays during the year. In
Genesis 44:30 it reads literally that “his soul is bound up with his soul”.
That is what happened in the mental condition of Jacob and that is what happens
always with parents and their last child as a rule of life. Dear
God To
Your Word and to Your Testimony, not to our sensibility or our reason, that is
what the rule of Your revelation. Help us against ourselves and Satan’s misuse
of humans to lessen the value of the Bible and replace it with our own whims
and feelings. In Jesus Name. Amen.