When Your Own Family Betrays You

When your life has come to a disastrous halt, part of you feels mocked by a world that keeps on moving. You’re sitting alone at home, grieving the loss of someone you love, while down the street a family parties it up on their daughter’s wedding day. While you’re getting ready for yet another dead-end job interview, your neighbors get in their cars and drive to work every morning. And as irrational at it seems, you can’t help but think, “Don’t they know, don’t they care, what I’m going through?” In such times of darkness, even the sunrise seems a slap in the face. Give me a night, or an eclipse, or at least a cloudy day. How can the planet keep on spinning when my life has slammed into a brick wall? That’s bad enough. What’s worse is when people kick us where it hurts, grind our face in the dirt, and go on with their lives as if they’ve done nothing wrong, while we’re left writhing in our own blood. The happier and more successful they become, the more the knife twists that they’ve planted in our backs. It happens all the time in divorces. It happens at school. It happens in the workplace and, yes, in the church. And deeper are the wounds when they’re inflicted by those we trusted, even loved, and whom we thought loved us.

Joseph could tell you all about this. His father had sent him to check on his brothers and the flocks they were shepherding. But inside the hearts of these brother-shepherds the wolf of jealousy howled and growled. “Joseph, our father’s pet. Joseph, and his coat of many colors. Joseph, and his despicable dreams of all of us one day bowing down to him. Let’s give this dreamer a taste of reality.” So there lay Joseph, naked, bruised, crying for mercy, at the bottom of the pit into which his own family had tossed him like a piece of garbage.

And what did the brothers do? They sat down to eat a meal. While the echoes of their brother’s cries from within the earth sounded forth? Yes. While their own flesh and blood lay bleeding in the bottom of a pit? Yes. For Joseph, it was like a twisted version of Psalm 23, in which Thou didst prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies, but it was my enemies who ate, indeed, who devoured my life, while I tasted only tears. This teenager, beloved of his father, chosen by God, on that day learned in the school of suffering just how callous people can be, including members of our own family.

What Joseph did not know, what he could not have known at the time, was that this was merely the beginning of the strange work of God in his life. From this time forward, and for many years to come, all evidence would point to the fact that the Lord had abandoned Joseph. Being thrown in the pit was but one of the many smoking guns that the prosecutor could bring forth as evidence in the court of Joseph’s heart that God was no longer active in his life, no longer loved him, no longer was with him, no longer cared one iota for him.

We’ve all had our Joseph-like days, or months, or even years. Some of you reading this are going through it right now. While you’re in a deep, dark pit the world above you goes on its merry way, enjoys its meals, has its parties, maybe even mocks your sufferings or says that you’re getting what you deserve. Not only do you feel the absence of God; it may seem to you that heaven has become your enemy.

As odd as this may sound, the one that you think has become your enemy is the only one in creation who knows perfectly how you feel. Because the very God you think has forsaken you is the person who once felt forsaken by God. When Jesus, the Son of the Father, was in the deepest, darkest throes of His own suffering, He gave voice to the ultimate cry of the human heart, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest,” (Psalm 22:1-2). Like Joseph lay in the pit while his brothers ate their meal; like you’re in your own pit while the world goes on as if nothing happened; so Jesus hung on His cross while the soldiers gambled beneath Him, His closest friends fled in fear, His enemies mocked Him, and His heavenly Father forsook Him. The Son of God dove headfirst into the pit of human suffering, lay bloody and bruised with us as we hit bottom, and joins His voice of lament to ours as we bewail our grief and loss.

But you do not only have a God who can sympathize with you, who is bound up with you in the midst of your sufferings; you have the same God as Joseph, the God who will lift you out of the pit, out of the prison, out of the gutter. He is the one who wiped the graveyard dust from His feet on a Sunday morning, who made that evidence of mortality the smoking gun of death’s demise. You have a resurrection God, who will not rest until you rest in life and hope once more. He raised Joseph from the pit, from the Egyptian jail, to newness of life. He raised Jacob from the sorrow of Sheol to joy in life once more when he was told Joseph was alive in Egypt. He is an Good Friday God, to be sure, a God whose strange work involves putting to death that in us which is contrary to Him. But He is also an Easter God, whose loving work is sustaining us, healing us, raising us up.

The life of Joseph is understood only within the life of Jesus. And your life is no different. Joseph and you and me, we’re all part of a larger story, the story of the God who became one of us, became intimately acquainted with our griefs and sorrows and losses, redeemed us to be His own by the most cruel death imaginable, then raised up on the third day to a life that will not, and cannot, end. Our lives—full of ups and downs, gains and losses, births and funerals—are hidden within the life of Christ, who suffers with us, rises with us, and goes to hell and back to make sure we make it to heaven with Him.