2009 - Day 30 - Final Exam, Part Two

January 30, 2009 … Swindoll’s Topic for Today: Final Exam, Part Two

Passage of the Day: Genesis 44: 17 – 34 … Link available for your reading/study …

My Journal for Today: As Swindoll points out in Great Days with the Great Lives, yesterday reviewed Joseph’s test of his brothers’ vertical perspective, … i.e., how they viewed their past and present through God’s eternal view of life. And the brothers, especially the key older one, Judah, passed that vertical test with flying colors. Now, for today’s devotional, we see Joseph continuing his testing with one more angle of examination, this time focusing on the horizontal perspective of the brothers toward their father and the younger brother, Benjamin. And again, with Judah becoming the spokesman and focus of this test for the brothers, Joseph sees his long lost family as changed men.

To me, this scenario is an Old Covenant picture of how God’s saving and enabling grace brings transformation in any who are willing to surrender to God and allow His Spirit to bring about Godly change in the values, choices, and lives of a child of God. And Judah is a prime example of the transformational power of God for believers. Some 20 years earlier it was Judah’s jealousy and hatred for the sons of Rachel and indirectly for their father, which brought him to strike out at Jacob (i.e., Israel) by using Joseph, first planning to kill him … then deciding to lead the brothers to sell him into slavery so that they could benefit financially from his sin-driven hatred. And now, in Joseph’s testing and Judah’s response, we see a transformed man, Judah being very willing to unselfishly protect young Benjamin, also a son of Rachel, as well as to choose to protect his father, protecting him from the loss of “another” son (at least in what Judah imagined would be Jacob’s feelings).

Isn’t this a wonderful Old Testament example of the New Covenant truth and reality expressed in 2nd Cor. 5: 17, … that God produces changed lives from the reception of God’s grace (see also Eph. 2: 8 – 10)? Judah passed Joseph’s tests completely because Judah displayed God’s fruit of transformation, which shown through like a light in the darkness.

And we need to see that God will allow challenges into our lives, as those confronted by a man like Judah to help us grow into His fruitfulness and to be purged from our flesh-driven ungodliness, as we can read the Apostle Paul write about in Gal. 5: 19 - 23. That’s what Joseph saw in Judah; and I know that Joseph must have smiled with satisfaction, like God must when we pass His tests and shine our Godly light in the dark places of life so as to glorify our Father in Heaven (see Matt. 5: 16).

My Prayer Today: Father, as You test me, may I be prepared to pass with Your flying colors and grow in Christlikeness. Amen