Killed By Their Dreams

 

I was reading Joseph’s story, you know the one in the bible, the guy who was his father’s favorite and got sold by his brothers for being a dreamer and a tattle tale, yeah that guy. It’s a bit unfair to call it a story because the idea of a story is something that did not happen when this one actually did, let’s call it a narrative. So as I was reading the narrative of Joseph I came to the part where he is in prison falsely accused of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. Anyhoo so Joseph is in prison falsely accused and soon finds favor in the eyes of the chief jailer and is given a role in the prison. It was though this role that he meets the two guys who this is all about.

 

The baker is almost always bald in pictures, this has always puzzled me

 

Enter Pharaoh’s Chief Baker and Cup Bearer, I’d like to call the first guy the Baker in Chief, it sounds a little more promising. These guys had pretty good jobs, one of them had a pretty sweet gig in my opinion, the cup bearer. He would go everywhere with the Pharaoh and make sure Pharaoh had a cup in his hand when he got parched, turns out it was a pretty high risk job because the guy was in prison as a result of the job. So both of these guys get the sack around the same period of time and probably stuck together because of their similar backgrounds. They probably stood out like sore thumbs among the general population.

So Joseph would probably meet up with them while doing his rounds and this one time he is walking passed and they are more sulky than usual, he asks what’s wrong, him being the helpful guy that he was and they open fourth like a fountain of words about their dreams. He helps them out with his interpretation, strictly speaking it was God’s, and they eventually come to pass, as all of God’s degrees do. The reason you my one reader are here is the ‘why’ of it all.

As you may know the narrative the Baker was killed and the cup bearer was restored. Logically speaking this is a stupid move. You kill of the guy who is more skilled, probably has more traction with the people in his field and has the more useful task, after all bread and all baked goods should be more essential than wine and even more than a guy whose very job is to hold a glass before it is taken from him. The baker was more useful than the cup bearer.

Which ever way you think about it, food trumps wine

These two guys had sucky lives after their demotion to prison. Serving a Pharaoh who sounds bipolar to me must not have been a walk in the park. The man would hire, fire, kill or pardon at a whim. So whereas their lives at this point sucked there was hope, small, but there was hope. Then came the dreams. I’m sure they struggled to think of the dream as a mere dream or something that should be taken seriously. I can personally imagine them meeting each other on the day post having the dreams and both would be absent minded, Around noon they would discover that the other guy was not looking spry either at which point they would spend the rest of the day denying anything was wrong. Only to confess the real deal to the other guy the next day. I figure the baker caved first, he strikes me as the softy.

Now each would have not just his own sucky dream to figure out but his friend’s too. SO when Joseph walked in with his solution things must have looked up a bit. Things changed very fast after Joseph told them the meaning of their dreams. You can imagine how tricky it was for the cup bearer, hoping that the prediction was true yet trying to convince his friend it was not. It must have been a weird wait. Come the day Joseph’s interpretation proved to be right. One was exalted and the other was demoted. Where am I getting with this? Well I’m glad you asked.

God’s choosing of who and what he wills is not based off of the human view of what is important. It is based off of what he wills, period. And what he wills always comes to pass. We all have our hopes and dreams and the world encourages us to dream “shoot for the stars”, they say. “Nothing can hold you back” uh…. Wrong. God owns and controls it all. Dream as you might there is a serious flaw in all you plan on doing if you do not make him paramount because at the end of the day he is paramount. It is he who says to this happen and it does or to the other do not happen and it does not, whether we think something is to our good and benefit or not.

Uhhhh... WRONG! Completely wrong!

It is the way of the sinful nature to have you think that you are the main determining factor in the way of your life but everything in the world is telling you contrary. You cannot change time, make it move fast or slow. You cant even determine all that you will do with your time, no one is that free, a lot of your movements are determined for you by people who have their moves determined for them. The student has his movement determined by the lecturers, who have their movement determined by some sort of chancellor, who has his movement determined by an owner of the institution, who have their moves determined by a government who have their moves determined by the people. It’s an endless cycle of a lack of power and control.

The illusion of control is sold at every corner by the world yet disproved by the world itself. God on the other hand is the determining factor of all. Knowing that God controls it all is only step one unfortunately. The main step is submitting to this and living with this, in the words of the song ‘At The Foot of The Cross’, forever in your view.