After the vision of the ladder Jacob humbled himself and relied on God’s love and trusted Him more than in his own self. God changed Jacob’s name to Israel which meant to let God prevail and gave him the same covenant blessings of his father and grandfather. Jacob (Israel) had many sons and daughters. They worked out in the fields tending to the flocks and the crops that they grew. One son was born to Israel in his old age. In Genesis 37:3 it talks about how Israel loved one of his sons more than the others because he was old when Joseph was born. He made Joseph a coat and taught him all about God and his unconditional, unchanging, uncontainable, unending, and unfailing love. He taught him to trust God, that God always keeps His promises.
Joseph was a good boy, but he had dreams that made his brothers mad. They also didn’t like that he got a coat, and they didn’t, and that he was the favorite son. They made a plan to get rid of Joseph by selling him to be a slave and tore up the coat and put goat’s blood on it, then they told their father that he had died. This made Israel very, very sad.
But we know that God is always looking after us. Even when we are going through very hard things He is always there. Joseph was made a slave and got put in jail and had some very rotten things happen to him. But he remained brave because of what his father had taught him about God’s love. He said, “What someone else meant for bad, God turns it to something good”, and that is exactly what happened because Joseph trusted God.
After a lot of struggle Joseph became the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. And the Pharaoh learned to trust Joseph, so when Joseph said there would be a famine and Joseph said to prepare for it, the king let him do that because Joseph had been trustworthy. They were able to feed many people during the famine, including Israel’s family which was affected by the famine too.
Joseph saved his family, and they all came to live with him in Egypt. We also learn from Joseph's story a similar story that happened to Jesus. He had his clothes torn and he was sold, yet God used this terrible thing and turned Jesus’ death into the greatest of all gifts. When we trust God, we see that even when things are hard or turn out to seem to be bad, God can use that for good and we can do good things wherever we are. God takes sad things and turns them into happy things because of Jesus. Just like Joseph being sold, it turned into a happy thing for his family.
This Christmas season make something colorful for a friend. Tell that person about God’s unconditional, unchanging, uncontainable, unending, and unfailing love that He has for them.
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