Joseph Spake Kindly Unto Them Is the Hardest Line in Genesis

There is a thing that happens in a family after somebody has been the problem for a long time, and nobody talks about it because it does not have a name.

The person changes. Genuinely changes. And the family does not.

Not out of cruelty. That is what makes it so hard to describe. They love the person and they are glad and they say so, and they also have a posture that has been in their bodies for years, and a posture does not update because a situation does.

So the meals are fine and slightly careful. Somebody changes the subject a half second too fast. There is a way people look at each other when the changed person picks up their keys.

I lived on the other side of that for a while and it made me angry for about a year, and then it stopped making me angry, because I did the arithmetic on what my sister had actually been through and understood that her flinch was not an insult, it was an injury.

There is a scene at the very end of Genesis that is about exactly this, and it is one of the saddest and best things in the book.

They had been safe for seventeen years and did not believe it

Here is the setup. Joseph has been governing Egypt. His brothers and their families have lived under his protection for seventeen years. He has fed them through a famine. Nothing bad has happened.

Their father dies. And this is what they do:

And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying, So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren. (Genesis 50:15-17, King James Version)

Read what they did. They sent a message claiming their father had left instructions, and there is no record anywhere that Jacob said any such thing.

They made it up. Seventeen years of being fed and protected, and when the one thing they thought was holding it together died, they invented a dead man's authority because they could not stand on the living man's character.

And the next line is the one that undoes me every time: And Joseph wept when they spake unto him.

He is not angry. He is heartbroken, because seventeen years of consistent kindness had not been enough to convince them, and there was nothing left to do that he had not already been doing.

You are looking at a family who could not believe a mercy they had already been living inside. Genesis 50:17 has them inventing a message rather than trusting a man who had fed them for seventeen years. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:15 called the Spirit of adoption rather than the spirit of bondage again to fear, who does what years of evidence could not.

What he actually says, and the two halves of it

His answer has two parts and people usually quote only the first.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. (Genesis 50:20)

That is the famous half, and it is enormous, and it is also theology. It is about God's providence and it does not touch the room they are actually standing in.

Then comes the second half, and this is the one I would put on a wall.

Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them. (Genesis 50:21)

I will nourish you, and your little ones. He answers their fear with food, and specifically with food for the children, which is what a frightened family is actually worried about.

And spake kindly unto them. The Hebrew is: he spoke to their heart. He did not defend himself, and he did not point out that he had already been doing this for seventeen years, which he was entitled to do and which would have been true.

You are able to answer a frightened family with a meal rather than with an argument. Genesis 50:21 answers fear with nourishment and words spoken to the heart, and it is His Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming kindness and gentleness among His fruit, who supplies what a person cannot produce while feeling wronged.

He had already told them, earlier and more plainly

The saddest detail is that this was not the first time. Years earlier, at the reunion, he had said it in the clearest language available:

Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. (Genesis 45:5)

Be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves. He is not only forgiving them, he is trying to get them to stop punishing themselves, which is a further step and a harder one.

And it did not take. Seventeen years later they were still waiting for the bill.

Which tells a person something important and slightly freeing: the not believing was not about Joseph. He did everything right, said everything right, and provided for everybody, and they still braced. Their posture was about their own memory of what they had done, not about his character.

You are not being disbelieved because of anything you failed to do. Genesis 45:5 has him saying it plainly years before. It is the Holy Spirit, John 14:26 who brings all things to remembrance, who does the persuading that a person's own record of consistency cannot.

What is yours in this, and what is not

Paul draws the line, and it is a mercy to the person who has been trying to fix a family for years.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. (Romans 12:18)

As much as lieth in you. He puts a boundary on it in advance, because he knows peace takes two and he refuses to hand somebody a job that requires another person's cooperation.

So the assignment is the meal, the kindness, the consistency, and the refusal to argue about it. What is not the assignment is producing the moment where they finally relax, because that is inside them and no amount of good behavior can reach in and do it.

And the instruction about how to hold them while they are still braced is one line:

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. (Ephesians 4:32)

Even as. The measure is not what they have earned. It is what was done for you.

You are responsible for the kindness and not for the moment they believe it. Romans 12:18 caps the assignment at as much as lieth in you. It is the same Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering, who supplies the years that the caps still require.