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God Tests Us To Bring Reconciliation

“Then they said to one another, ‘In truth we are guilty concerning our brother.’” Genesis 42:21

Dr. Tom Hawkes

One of the most common problems that I hear about as a pastor has to do with broken relationships. A child, grandchild, relative, or friend, who was once close, has broken off all communication. Icy silence reigns where there was once warm openness. The one cut off feels helpless and hopeless. 

Few relationships could be more broken than the one between Joseph and his ten brothers who sold him into slavery to make a profit and be rid of him forever. What chance is there that they would ever be reconciled?

Some twenty years later, when his brothers are standing before Joseph, who is then second in command of Egypt, they do not recognize him. Joseph does recognize them and makes an immediate judgment as to how he will proceed with them. Rather than reveal his identity or exact revenge, he decides to test them. Tests that are meant to see what kind of men they have become in the last twenty years. Tests that are meant to prompt their hearts toward repentance.  

The test required them to bring back their youngest brother, Benjamin, but first started with three days in prison. 

The test begins to have a good effect. They immediately sense that the test is from God himself and concerns the guilt of their long-ago sin against Joseph. “Then they said to one another, ‘In truth we are guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he begged us and we did not listen. That is why this distress has come upon us’” (Genesis 42:21).

They are exactly right. The test, the distress they are in, is directly because of their sin against Joseph, and is ultimately a trial from God. After twenty years of guilty silence the test has activated their consciences and loosened their tongue to confess their sin. 

Later when they do return with Benjamin, Joseph tests them further by ordering them to leave Joseph with him, for supposedly stealing a silver cup. Judah steps forward to intervene. Judah is the one who had originally led the others to profit by selling Joseph into slavery. Now, with this trial from the Lord working repentance in his heart, he offers to trade himself into slavery for Benjamin. 

“Now therefore, please let your servant remain instead of the boy as a servant to my lord, and let the boy go back with his brothers” (Genesis 44:33). Judah, who sold one brother into slavery for his own profit, now offers himself as a slave to redeem another brother from slavery. God has worked the miracle of repentance in his heart. 

Seeing this, Joseph immediately identifies himself, forgives, and reconciles with his brothers. “He kissed all his brothers and wept upon them” (Genesis 45:15). Notice how their repentance is not met with harshness from Joseph but with forgiveness and reconciliation. 

God had used the trial to stir their consciences, bringing them to a full repentance. An apparently hopelessly broken relationship, twenty years in silence, was reconciled. 

When God brings trials into our lives, no matter their nature—serious illnesses, financial ruin,  job losses—it is wise to take them as an opportunity from God. An opportunity to search our souls for wrongs done by us, left long buried. As John Calvin said: “Whenever we are afflicted, remembrance of our past life ought immediately to come to mind; so we shall doubtless find that we have committed something deserving this sort of chastisement.” (Institutes 3.8.6) 

Not that God means to punish us for past sins, for that is laid entirely on Christ. Rather he means  for the trial to serve as a correction, a chastisement for us, that we might walk more closely with him in the future. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11).Walking more closely with the Lord includes finding reconciliation with those we have harmed, as it did for Judah and his brothers.  

Allow God’s trials in your life to stir your conscience as it did for Judah. You may find that the impossibly broken relationship is merely one deep repentance away from full reconciliation.