Hello again, and welcome back!  So, it turns out my plans to do three recordings last week didn’t work out… That’s life! Wednesday ended up being such a bad day that it took out part of Thursday on the way down, so this week I will hopefully be able to get back on my planned schedule.

Anyway, back to the Bible.  This chapter is interesting to me because of the changes we finally see in Judah.  This guy has been a bad, bad guy in previous chapters, but here he’s taking responsibility and doing the right thing for his family.  When all of the brothers thought that they would be made into slaves, instead of trying to fight or trick their way out they told the truth.  That’s behavior that we really haven’t seen from Joseph’s brothers very much in previous chapters.

The reason this is so interesting to me again has to do with the parallels between Joseph and Jesus, and the story of Joseph as a precursor to the story of the Gospel.  If Joseph foreshadows Jesus, the Judah foreshadows believers, and if God would turn Judah from the sort of person he was into the man we see in this chapter, then God would do the same with believers as well.  In the sort of world we live in with all of it’s faults and rotten places (which we have to admit that we’re responsible for in the first place…), that’s a comforting realization.  The world doesn’t have to be the way that it is.  It can be better.  It’s not through political maneuvers or legislation, though.  It’s through the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we can see this accomplished.