Reflecting the Image

Scripture:

Genesis 44:34

“For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me?”

Observation:

A moment of reckoning has come for the sons of Jacob. The brothers who had sold Joseph into slavery are now faced with a new challenge. Benjamin has been found with a cup that did not belong to him. Joseph is testing his brothers to see whether they have changed. Would they be willing to give up their younger brother in exchange for their own freedom?

It is Judah who pleads for his brother’s life.

Years earlier, these brothers had seen Joseph’s anguish and heard him pleading with them, but they would not listen. They had also failed to consider what the loss of Joseph would do to their father.

But now something is different.

They are concerned about Benjamin, and they are concerned about their father. Judah is even willing to offer himself in Benjamin’s place.

He cannot bear the thought of returning home without his younger brother.

“For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me?”

The test has revealed something about Judah. This is not simply confession for what happened years ago. His behavior has changed.

He is willing to sacrifice himself to bring the boy home.

Application:

I had to stop at this verse today because it was one my mother had underlined in her Bible.

My oldest brother spent many years wandering far from the Lord. This verse became the cry of my mother’s heart as she prayed for him.

“For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me?”

She didn’t want to come to the end of her life without knowing that her boy had come home to the Father.

My parents both modeled sacrificial love when it came to my brother. No matter what was happening in his life, good or bad, they loved him.

And they never stopped praying for him.

Now, be careful when you pray, “Whatever it takes, Lord.”

My brother became deathly ill with a very rare lung disease. He needed a lung transplant to live, and still my parents prayed.

Eventually, he was constantly on oxygen and confined to a wheelchair because he no longer had enough energy to walk on his own. He had to go to St. Louis to await a possible transplant.

And it was there, as he struggled for every breath, that he gave his life to Christ.

A local pastor, Mark Bane, visited with him regularly and became part of the team of people who never gave up on him.

How could any of us go to the Father if the boy wasn’t with us?

My brother had been placed in my parents’ arms when he was less than a week old. They loved him as completely as if he were their own flesh and blood, and they would love him until he took his last breath.

God gave him fourteen more years after his transplant, and he lived those years following Jesus.

My brother went to the Father before our mother did. And when her own time eventually came, she could go knowing that her boy was already there.

Joseph’s brothers were willing to do whatever it took to bring Benjamin home.

There are a lot of prodigals in our world who may need that same kind of tenacious love.

They may need someone who refuses to give up on them.

They may need intercessory prayer.

They may need fasting.

They may need someone willing to walk beside them for a very long time.

What will it take for the boy—or the girl—to come home to the Father?

Prayer:

Lord, thank You for parents who modeled the tenacious love of Christ, and help me never to take that gift for granted. Teach me to pray faithfully for the prodigals within my sphere of influence and never to give up on them. May they come to know the love of the Father and find their way home. Amen.