“So the chief cupbearer told his dream to Joseph and said to him, “In my dream there was a vine before me, and on the vine there were three branches. As soon as it budded, its blossoms shot forth, and the clusters ripened into grapes. Pharaoh’s cup was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s cup and placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand.” Then Joseph said to him, “This is its interpretation: the three branches are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your office, and you shall place Pharaoh’s cup in his hand as formerly, when you were his cupbearer. Only remember me, when it is well with you, and please do me the kindness to mention me to Pharaoh, and so get me out of this house. For I was indeed stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, and here also I have done nothing that they should put me into the pit.” When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was favorable, he said to Joseph, “I also had a dream: there were three cake baskets on my head, and in the uppermost basket there were all sorts of baked food for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating it out of the basket on my head.” And Joseph answered and said, “This is its interpretation: the three baskets are three days. In three days Pharaoh will lift up your head—from you!—and hang you on a tree. And the birds will eat the flesh from you.” On the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday, he made a feast for all his servants and lifted up the head of the chief cupbearer and the head of the chief baker among his servants. He restored the chief cupbearer to his position, and he placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand. But he hanged the chief baker, as Joseph had interpreted to them. Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.”
Genesis 40:9-23 ESV
I’m going to be blunt with you: my life completely changed when I finally understood the sovereignty of God over every little detail.
I was in a coffee place once in downtown Greenville, near that little river called the Reedy, the inchoate day still pale in the morning, foot traffic scarce along Main Street, and meeting with my mentor who was a pastor at my church. He left not too long after that day and is now pastoring another flock in another city and they are most blessed to have him. I wasn’t a young man then, nor was I unsaved. I was in my late 30’s and had been a Christian for a long time. As it went, Billy Graham was preaching a sermon once on TV in 1983 and I stopped to listen. My parents always had him on whenever one of his crusades was on national television. I was 13 at the time and that was the day I came to Jesus Christ and eternal life.
But my walk was no straight one. In some cases I wandered off the path, took my little hand from the Lord’s mighty but gentle one and went wandering in the dark woods without Him. I would see something moving out there in all that mystery and I looked away from the Way. There’s always the pride of life moving out beyond the true path. There’s always the temptation of the eyes lurking in those woods, and the desire of the flesh…a lust here, a greed or envy there.
And so at times I wandered off, climbing a steep bank way out there over which I thought I’d find some treasure or another. I never knew exactly what it was, but it beckoned. You’re never able to name it; you never dare because to say it leaves a man naked in that way that truth works. We seek things outside of God in a world that’s full of mystery to our mind. We can know many, many things, but the interpretation of them, the comprehensive philosophy of it all, was in that hand that held us that must be held tight in return.
Deception starts in one’s heart. The sweet lies of sin call and carry us away from Him. From the Way and the Life. For me, and I suspect for you too, it was in not knowing that I was trying to interpret the mysteries by a false standard.
Me.
What do I want? What if I’m missing…you know, something. Sin’s lusts always play off the pride of our minds. All I needed to do was look at the world I didn’t create and want to find my way in it…without Him.
Sin is crouching and she’s a terrible tiger with great claws of deceit. She brings us away from Him and His people, from true love and loyalty and faith, and we find ourselves indulging in fleshly pursuits, in greeds and passions, and then she rips us to shreds.
What we chase outside of Him is always an illusion.
I never lost Jesus in a way in which there can ever be said to be a failure on His part. His leadership was never and can never be the issue. But the path He leads us down winds and twists and it passes many parts of life that befuddle us just like Joseph’s friends in prison. Life is, indeed, like a dream that needs to be interpreted.
“Should I go here and do this or that?”
“Should I pursue this thing?”
“What’s the meaning of this? Why did it happen?”
Pulling my hand from His wasn’t His fault. He never lost me. I lost Him. My hand slipped from His loving one because I was distracted and, horrifically, I loved things more than I loved Him. This is what sin is and does.
That newly saved young man that I was so many years ago, reading Scripture and not understanding it as I should have, was like the cupbearer. Life was this big and weird dream and in my youthful vanity I was seeking meaning but the meaning I sought, unbeknownst to me, placed me on the center of the stage. I sought the Lord and yet I sought my own glory too, but I didn’t understand that yet. I had so much to learn.
So, the cupbearer went to Joseph and wanted to know the interpretation of the dream.
Perplexity is our state of mind in every way in a world in which sin has clouded all things. It’s Christ alone, and His Word alone that illuminates our lives just like Joseph’s sweet counsel did in that desolate little prison so long ago. The question is always before us. Whom will we serve? What counsel do we keep? To what will we be conformed, this world or to Him as we seek to understand.
As it dawned on me back in the coffee shop as I looked out the window at Greenville’s new day, my pastor’s words faded into the background of my mind and it all became new. It was like Joseph interpreted a dream. And Van Til’s point about there being no “brute facts” in life suddenly made sense in a way that was intensely personal. All facts, Van Til taught, get their “fact-ness” from their place in God’s created order.
Ah!
God’s sovereignty was epistemically necessary and, I dare say, as rich and lush and sweet as the beauty and mystery of any new morning. Gobsmacked, I said to my pastor as he looked at me with a quizzed expression, “That’s it.”
“What is?”
“He’s sovereign.”
He hadn’t even been talking about that at the moment.
“Of course he is,” he replied with a little smile.
This I’ve learned, when God’s men and women see with their own eyes the Spirit humble another soul, and bring it to Truth, there’s always that smile and even a laugh at the wonder of it all. As the Lord taught Nicodemus one night, there’s always a lovely mystery upon the winds of the Spirit’s ways. He moves the hearts of men in great but quiet romances of the soul, revealing Truth, and pointing there to Christ, one person at a time. Pointing there to the One who was tortured for our trespasses. Pointing there to the One who breathed a shuddering last breath and went to death in great physical agony because He loved us though we were but an unthankful rebel full of arrogance. And pointing to the One who was raised for our justification and who will lead us through this wilderness of life and on to the Promised Land, by the hand…by the hand…personally.
He’s sovereign.
He’s Savior.
He’s Lord.
He calls you His friend.
It’s a truth that breaks a heart so tenderly that there’s no pain, only love. Only Him.
I learned that even though I’d wandered from Him, I’d never found my way back under my own efforts but that it was always Him. When I made my bed in Sheol, even there he covered me with a blanket of His kindness (Psalm 139:8) and protected me. The mystery of our salvation, our justification as well as every stumbling and wayward step of our sanctification, is interpreted only in Him.
The mystery of the cupbearer’s dream was only interpreted aright by God’s man, Joseph. Likewise, the mystery of our lives are only interpreted by God’s word. My epistemic prison was a life of the mind in which I wrestled to find unity in the diversity of life’s many facts. But I never did know it. I studied and I sought. I went here and there. I turned over this rock and that. I accumulated facts upon facts but the interpretation of all things was, alas, in Him alone.
He’s sovereign. And He’s beautiful. And He’s Lord.
So, I say, go to Him with your cares and worries and mysteries, and be in awe of Him. Let Him make straight your paths and trust it all to Him. He’ll interpret your life for you. This will change it utterly and then, as you look back and understand it, you’ll see. You’ll see the perfections of God’s hand upon you. Then there will be wonderful tears of love, not the anguish of regret, nor condemnation. The mysteries of your soul that you hide should be brought to Him, lest you try and find the interpretation of them in sin’s way. Perhaps you’ve already done that and now find yourself deep in some dark wood, down in a ravine, full of bloody scratches from sin’s thorns, having chased some vain thing or another.
Call. Call Him.
Cry out to Him.
“Dear child,” He’ll say, “come…follow Me…walk in the way with Me.”
Humble yourself and you’ll be exalted.
Seek to understand Him and only then will you understand yourself because nothing can be rightly understood outside of Him. Including and especially ourselves.
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