Welcome back podcast fans!  Today’s chapter is the continuation of the cliffhanger story that we left off from in chapter 44 when we were wondering if Joseph would indeed make his brothers go home without Benjamin.  Would Jacob survive the shock?  Would Judah really go through with it?  Who knows!?

Turns out, Joseph couldn’t hold out any longer and he told his brothers the whole thing.  I suspect he had wanted to spill the beans the whole time, but he just had to know if they had changed or if they were still the same people he had grown up with.

There’s another issue at work here that’s very interesting to me and that’s the notion that sometimes God does things with our disobedience that end up being to our benefit in the end.  Notice that God doesn’t reward the brothers for the way they dealt with Joseph.  God does forgive them on the basis of grace, which was to be paid for later by Christ, but rather God does wait for them to take responsibility for their sin.  So, it’s not that God winks at what we do, it’s that sometimes God has better things waiting for us in the wings after we come clean.  Grace is pretty cool, right?

Thats all for now.  See you next time!