Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #8 in Genesis 37, and we will read Genesis 37:5-8:

And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more. And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed: For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf. And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.

I will stop reading there.  Here, we can see that Joseph is telling his brethren about his dream.  It says, “And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they hated him yet the more.”  It says they hated him “yet the more” because they already hated him, as we read in Genesis 37:4:

And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him.

This is definitely letting us know that Joseph’s own brothers (who would be the ones the tribes of Israel would come forth from) hated Joseph.  So in a real way it is as though Israel hated Joseph, but it was not really Joseph.  Yes, historically, these brothers hated Joseph, but spiritually, Joseph represents the Lord Jesus Christ, and Israel and its tribes represent the New Testament churches and congregations.  Spiritually, the fact that Joseph’s brothers hated him is informing us of the professed Christian’s hatred of the Lord Jesus Christ despite the fact that his mouth might proclaim that he loves Him.  It is hypocritical, but it is also very common for people to shout their love for the Lord Jesus Christ, praising and thanking him aloud, but they actually hate Him in their hearts because Christ fully identifies with the Word of God.

A lot of time with professed Christians…and I will speak about that because we are much more familiar with modern Christianity and with those that profess to be Christians in our modern apostate churches.  We find they will say, again, and again, how much they love the Lord.  They will say their hearts are His, and whatever He wants them to do, they will do, and yet they have doctrines that are contrary to the truths of the Bible, and contrary to the teachings of Christ.  They are not the doctrines of Christ, and they are not abiding in the doctrines of Christ, but in the doctrines of men.  And when the true doctrines of Christ are brought forth and proven from comparison of Scripture with Scripture (and the Holy Ghost teaches), we know, for example, that when free will churches hear the truth of election, they despise it.  They turn from it, and they want nothing to do with it, and they are actually despising the Word, and despising Christ, who is the Word.

And that is really the true test.  It is not what comes out of man’s mouth that determines whether he is a true Christian, or not, but it is what comes from the heart.  And what comes from the heart is proven in response to the Word of God; Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”  And God’s elect have been given a new heart and a new spirit to do just that, and we are given an ongoing desire to do the will of God.  We can hear His voice, and we can discern and know the will of God.  We can hear true doctrine and realize it is the voice of Christ and, therefore, must be obeyed.  Then there is a further moving of God’s Spirit in us to will and to do of His good pleasure, and that is true love for Christ – keeping His commandments, and abiding in His doctrine.

This is in contrast to those that have sort of a “mushy, sentimental feeling,” and they say, “Oh, I love the Lord!  I feel so warm and fuzzy toward the Lord, and I will proclaim all the day long my love for Him!”  Words.  And words are fine if they are accompanied by works, and that would be if the work of Christ performed on their behalf which produces that new heart, and then the Spirit of God works within that individual to accomplish the work that he or she was ordained to perform.  But words alone are worthless.  Ultimately, they are of no value.  They do not deceive God who looks upon the heart.  The Bible does not say that God looks upon the tongues of men, but God looks upon the hearts of men to see what is truly going on within them.

In this historical case of the family of Jacob beginning to live their lives, with all the sons growing up, the hatred of Joseph’s brothers toward him is very revealing spiritually about the hatred of Israel of old, and the hatred of many in the New Testament churches, toward the Lord Jesus Christ.

Notice the tie-in between telling the dream to his brethren and the hatred of his brothers toward him.  Again, it says in Genesis 37:5:

And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren…

He “tells” it to his brethren, and that relates to declaring, or proclaiming, the Word of God.  And they hated him all the more.  Then he told them his dream of the sheaves, the binding of the sheaves, and how their sheaves made obeisance to his sheaf.  That was very offensive to them, and it says in Genesis 37:8:

And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.

And that is key.  That is letting us know that these dreams identify with the Word of God, and we are going to prove from the Bible that when the Bible speaks of dreams, it points to prophesying the Word of God.  We see this, for example, in Deuteronomy 13:1-3:

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams:

We see that God first refers to this individual as a prophet, but then He gives an alternative way of referring to him as a “dreamer of dreams.”  Then it goes on to say in Deuteronomy 13:3:

… and giveth thee a sign or a wonder…

And this is said once in verse 1, and once in verse 3, and also in Deuteronomy 13:5, as it goes on to say in Deuteronomy 13:4-5:

Ye shall walk after JEHOVAH your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from JEHOVAH your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which JEHOVAH thy God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee.

So three times we see a reference to prophets, quickly followed by “a dreamer of dreams,” and it becomes clear that to be “a dreamer of dreams” was equivalent to being a prophet.  What is interesting here is that God says that if there is a prophet, or dreamer of dreams…

And by the way, why would a prophet be linked with a dreamer of dreams?  It is because this was happening in a time when the Bible was still being compiled.  God had not finished His Book, and it would not be finished for many hundreds of years, so He was still bringing divine revelation to His true prophets.  But mixed among them, there were multitudes of false prophets.  It would have been similar to today, but not quite as bad.  However, there would have been many false prophets, perhaps hundreds of false prophets for every one true prophet of God.   Just think of Micaiah, a true prophet, and the many hundreds of false prophets that prophesied before King Ahab and King Jehoshaphat.  Or we could think of Elijah versus all the hundreds of prophets of Baal, but only Elijah prophesied the truth.  So there would have been multitudes that claimed to be prophets, but few actual true and faithful prophets of JEHOVAH. 

So God laid down the Law for a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams.  How did God get His Word to the true prophet?  How did He deliver the information that the prophet was to prophesy?  He would do so through a dream, or a vision.  In the book of Isaiah, it starts by saying, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amos…”

In the New Testament, it included speaking in tongues, but only for a short period of time.  But mostly it would be a vision, or a dream.  Occasionally, God would speak in person like He did to Moses, but it was very common for God to reveal divine truth to a man of God through a dream, and that is why it was equivalent to refer to a “prophet, or a dreamer of dreams.” 

So a prophet or dreamer of dreams put forth the statement, “This was a dream I had last night, and God came and gave me this information.”  And in this case, the information included going after another god, or something that would lead the hearer astray to worship another god.  That is what the prophets of Baal would do as they prophesied, but their prophecy was false prophecy (and many of them probably said they received it in a dream). 

So God built in a “safeguard” for that time.  They did not have the safeguard we have today of the knowledge that the Bible has been completed, and when anyone tells us they had a dream, vision, or tongue from God, we immediately know it is false.  There is no further divine revelation outside the Bible.  The Bible is completed, and God will not break the barrier of the supernatural.  So back then they did not have that safeguard, which was at times a dilemma, but what they did have was the idea of “harmonizing Scripture.”  If the prophecy or dream that the prophet said he received from God disagreed, or did not fit with the other Scripture of the Bible, it was like being led to worship a false god.  It was not following the Law that two or three witnesses must agree together for it to be a true witness.  That would have been the safeguard for the Old Testament believer.

But in the New Testament times, we have two safeguards.  We still have the safeguard of “harmony,” fitting all conclusions with other Scripture. Also, anything that adds or subtracts from the Word of God we can dismiss, knowing it is not from God.

Lord willing, in our next Bible study, we will discuss this idea of “dreaming dreams” and its relationship to prophets, and how it ties into Joseph’s brethren hating him for it.