Description
Dr. Kurt Bjorklund looks at Genesis 45:4–10, where Joseph tells the brothers who sold him that God sent him ahead to save lives, showing that God works even through betrayal and long years of waiting. For anyone carrying a fear that won't let go, this message offers a way to move from believing God is against you to trusting that he is for you.
Summary and Application
Famine doesn't care how much money you have. When there's no food anywhere, the fear that your life might be over isn't irrational. It's simply true. That's the backdrop of Genesis 42–45, the stretch of Joseph's story where his brothers travel to Egypt looking for grain, and it's where Kurt turned this week as our series Navigating Life's Challenges continued through the life of Joseph.
Healthy Fear and Unhealthy Fear
Kurt drew a line between two kinds of fear. Healthy fear changes our actions in good ways. If you're in Florida and wonder whether a lake might hold an alligator, that fear is exactly what keeps you from diving in without checking. Unhealthy fear is different: a diffuse anxiety that something bad is coming, or that something good never will, even when there's no real reason to believe it. It nags, and it hangs over everything.
Most of us know which kind we're carrying. A marriage that isn't getting better. A child who's struggling. An addiction that won't loosen its grip. Loneliness, finances, a school decision. In Genesis 42–45, Joseph's family faces the same frightening famine that Joseph does, but they read it through two very different perspectives, and those perspectives show us something about our own fears.
God Is Against Me
When the brothers find their silver returned in their grain sacks, they panic. On top of the famine, they now assume the most powerful man in Egypt will accuse them of theft. "Their hearts sank and they turned to each other trembling and said, 'What is this that God has done to us?'" (Genesis 42:28). Back home, their father Jacob sums it up even more bluntly: "Everything is against me!" (Genesis 42:36).
Asking "God, where are you?" isn't wrong; the psalmists asked it too. The trouble comes when we never resolve the question. Then the fear spreads into every corner of life. Underneath it, Kurt said, are two doubts: that God can do anything about our situation, and that God cares whether he does. We picture him either as a frail grandfather ("thirty years ago I could have helped you with that") or as a celestial cop, watching for wrongdoing but unmoved by our pain. Herman Melville once observed that people fear God and quietly dislike him because they distrust his heart and imagine him as all brain, like a watch.
Often there's a kind of Christian karma beneath it all: I've done right, God hasn't come through, so God must be against me. That leaves us with twice the hurt: the hurt of what we fear, and the hurt of believing God has abandoned us in it.
God Is for Me
Joseph tells a different story. When he finally reveals himself to the brothers who sold him into slavery, he says, "God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God" (Genesis 45:7–8). Years later he says it even more plainly: "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good" (Genesis 50:20).
Where did that confidence come from? Genesis 39:21 offers a clue. Wrongly accused and imprisoned, Joseph was not alone: "the LORD was with him; he showed him kindness." The Hebrew word for kindness is hesed: lovingkindness, loyalty, covenant mercy. It's a word Scripture uses for God's disposition toward all his people, not just Bible heroes.
It's easy to read Joseph's story with the ending already in view. Joseph didn't have that luxury. Thirteen years passed between the pit and his rise to power, and roughly twenty-two before the moment in Genesis 45. He had to trust God's hesed through years when it didn't feel present.
Kurt described his boxer-lab mix, who whines and prances every evening as if dinner might not come, despite never having missed a meal. (He also doesn't understand daylight saving time.) What if that's what our fear looks like from God's side: anxious about what's in front of us, when he has told us again and again that he is for us? An old country song about thanking God for unanswered prayers makes a similar point: God's silence, or even his "no," is not the same as his indifference.
Bringing Our Fear to God
So how do we move from one perspective to the other? Philippians 4:6–7 is direct: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." Thanksgiving here means remembering God's past faithfulness and trusting his character. The promise is a peace that "will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
Jesus modeled this in Gethsemane, praying, "Not my will, but yours be done" (Luke 22:42). And the cross settles the larger question. Whatever we suffer, we can't say it's because God turned his back on us. He gave his own Son.
Kurt also offered a harder word: what we refuse to give God often reveals what we're demanding more than God. The thing on the other side of our anxiety can quietly become an idol. Freedom doesn't mean wanting that thing less; it means worshiping God more. And for anyone who has never trusted Christ, the invitation is open. God's covenant love, his hesed, is available through what Jesus did on the cross.
Questions for Reflection
What fear has grown into more than a passing concern for you, something you've quietly started treating as evidence that God is against you or has forgotten you?
What would it look like this week to open your hands and bring that fear to God in prayer, beginning with thanks for the ways he's already been faithful?
This post was developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence based on the sermon "Navigating Fear" by Dr. Kurt Bjorklund (Genesis 45:4–10, November 8, 2026). While every effort has been made to faithfully represent the content and intent of the original message, readers are encouraged to engage the full sermon audio or transcript for the complete teaching.
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Well, it's great to be together. Let's pray.
God, as we're gathered here around Pittsburgh online, I ask that you would speak to each of us. I ask that my words would reflect your word in content, in tone, and in emphasis. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Well, today we're continuing our series on the life of Joseph, looking at some of the narrative in Genesis, and we're going to talk about fear. We're looking at Genesis 42 through 45. It's a big chunk of the Old Testament, three chapters. We're not going to read it or go through all of the detail, but here's what's going on in this section of Genesis.
You probably know Joseph's story, even if you haven't been around church. There's a musical and all kinds of things about it. He was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers and goes to Potiphar's house. He is accused wrongly and thrown into prison. In prison, he is neglected and ignored by some friends he thought he'd made, and then ultimately he is remembered and placed in charge of Egypt, other than Pharaoh. So he emerges from slavery all the way to the pinnacle of the government.
In Genesis 42 through 45, his brothers come down to get food. The whole deal was that he had been put in a place to say, "There are going to be seven years of abundance, and I'll gather all the food, and then there will be seven lean years, and we'll have food to give." So the brothers are experiencing the famine, and they come to get food. Joseph doesn't reveal himself. And there's all this back-and-forth about him revealing himself but not revealing himself, and seeing them and crying, and putting cups in a sack and sending them home, and the whole thing.
At least if you read it like I first read it, you ask, "What is this about? What am I supposed to get from this?" But here's the thing: a famine is incredibly fear-inducing. Maybe you've dealt with food insecurity, maybe you never have. But when there's famine, it doesn't matter how much money or how many resources you have. When there's no food anywhere, there is a legitimate fear that your life may be over.
So today we're going to talk a little bit about navigating fear. There are two kinds of fear that all of us have.
There's healthy fear. That's when you say, "I'm concerned about something, and because I'm concerned about it, it's going to change my actions in a good, healthy way." For example, if you're in Florida and you think about going swimming in a lake and you say, "There might be an alligator in there," that's a healthy fear, because it keeps you from going swimming without vetting the lake.
And then there's unhealthy fear. That's a diffuse anxiety that says something bad might happen, even when I have no reason to believe that something bad is going to happen, or that something good isn't going to come true in my life. And therefore I live with a nagging sense of fear.
In Genesis 42 through 45, I think what we see is that the brothers and Jacob, Joseph's dad, had one perspective on their anxiety, and Joseph had a different perspective. I think those two perspectives show us something about how we can deal with our own fears.
I obviously don't know what fear you come with today, but I would guess that, represented around Orchard Hill today, there are almost as many fears as there are people. Some of our fears are similar. Maybe a fear that a marriage is not getting better, or that one of our kids who's struggling doesn't turn it around. Maybe an addiction that's not being pushed back or beaten in any way. Maybe the fear of being alone, or the fear of not getting into school, or the fear about our finances. There are so many fears, and how we deal with them directly impacts the quality of our lives.
Here is the first perspective, the one I'm going to say the brothers and Jacob had. It's the fear that says, basically, "God is against me."
We see this in two places in chapter 42. First, in chapter 42, verse 28, here's what it says: "'My silver has been returned,' he said to his brothers. 'Here it is in my sack.' Their hearts sank and they turned to each other, trembling, and said, 'What is this that God has done to us?'"
If you remember, I said a moment ago that Joseph had put silver inside the sack. They realized they were going to be accused of stealing. So now not only are they facing a famine with just enough food for a little while, and being told to bring their youngest brother back, but now they have the fear that this man with all the power in the world has something against them.
But notice what they say in verse 28: "Their hearts sank and they turned to one another, trembling." There's the fear. "What is this God has done to us?" God is against me.
Then a little later, in verse 36, they're home, talking with their dad, Jacob. It says this: "Their father Jacob said to them, 'You have deprived me of my children. Joseph is no more. Simeon is no more. And now you want to take Benjamin.'" And listen to his phrase: "Everything is against me."
The way I think about this is that, in a sense, they felt abandoned. Jacob felt abandoned by God, and the brothers felt like God was against them. So the thing they feel here is fear, because they say God is against us.
Anytime we feel sad or let down, maybe as a result of our own choices, maybe even our sinful choices, when we find ourselves in a place where we say, "Something's not going to work out for me," we can live with this sense of fear, especially if we believe that God is against us in some way. Sometimes I'm amazed that people who have been around faith for a long time, who have seen God in a myriad of ways in their lives, will still have something negative happen, and then they'll say, "Now my future is cooked."
It's really natural to say, "God, where are you?" In fact, that's not a bad question. The psalmist asked it. But if you don't resolve it, if you stick with "God is against me," your anxiety, your fear, becomes diffuse, and it permeates your life in many ways.
The essence of this is really asking two questions, and it leads to two doubts. The first question is, "God, can you do anything about this? Are you powerful enough?" This is where we doubt that God can do something. The second question is basically, "God, do you know? Do you care about what's going on?" That's the doubt that he cares.
I've often thought about it this way: our warped views of God end up in one of two categories, at least on this issue. When we doubt that he can, sometimes we think of God like a grandfather who's at the end of his life. Now, I have to clarify, since I'm a recent grandfather, I don't want to think of myself as this kind of grandfather. I'm thinking of the kind of grandfather who sits in a chair, you visit, you talk to him and ask for help, and he says, "Well, thirty years ago I could have helped you with that. But good luck."
Sometimes that's how we tend to think about God. "God, I can bring you my problems, but my problems are so deep, so real, there's nothing you can do about it." Or we end up with the opposite view: maybe God can do something about it, but I doubt that he will. Here we tend to think of God as a celestial cop, making sure everybody does the right thing, but without any real concern for where we are or what is going on in our lives.
Herman Melville once put it like this. He said the reason the mass of people fear God, and at bottom dislike him, is that they rather distrust his heart, and they fancy him all brain, like a watch.
When that happens, we end up with twice the hurt. We have the hurt of whatever it is we're going through, and we say, "Now I'm afraid." And then we have the hurt of feeling as if God has either abandoned us or is against us.
What's underneath this, in some ways, isn't just doubting that God can or doubting that God cares. It's almost this idea that our life of faith works like some kind of Christian version of karma. You know how karma works. Karma is the idea that if you do right, you get right. So sometimes our way of thinking is, "Well, I've done right. God isn't coming through for me. Therefore, God is against me. God has abandoned me. God is not with me." And we have twice the hurt: the hurt of our fear of what's ahead of us, and the hurt of saying, "And God is not with me."
As a result, our fear might be healthy at first, but then it becomes unhealthy, because we move into the zone where we hold this belief that whatever happens, it's going to go poorly.
So that's the first perspective. Here's the second: God is for me. We see this in Joseph, in a couple of places. The verses you heard read a few minutes ago in Genesis 45 give us the picture.
Now Joseph has revealed himself to his brothers. At first he was doing this whole thing where they didn't know who he was. They hadn't seen him in years. Maybe he looked a little like Joseph, but he couldn't be Joseph. How could this be Joseph? And now he has revealed himself. Here's what he says, Genesis 45, verse 6 and following: "For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will be no plowing or reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on Earth, to save your lives for a great deliverance. So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of Egypt."
Do you hear what he's saying? He says that even in the thing that happened to him, the worst thing, God had his hand in it. So he knows that God is for him in the midst of everything that happens. He reaffirms this idea in Genesis 50, verse 20, when he's talking to the brothers again. He says, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives."
At the heart of this is the idea that God has a disposition toward him that is for him. In Genesis 39, we see a little of what underlies this for him. It's not just "I think God's for me." Here's where we are in the story: Joseph has been wrongly accused and thrown into prison. But in prison, God is with him, and he rises through the ranks as a prisoner. Here's what we read in Genesis 39:21: "The Lord was with him and showed him kindness granting him favor in the eyes of the prison warden."
I realize that when you and I hear that, we say, "Okay, well, of course God granted him kindness. He's Joseph. He's a Bible guy, and Bible guys have things work out for them compared to my life." That's how we tend to read this. But the word "kindness" here is a rich word. It's the Hebrew word hesed, spelled H-E-S-E-D. If you want to say it like a Jewish person, you need to cough up your H. Hesed is a word that means loving-kindness, loyalty, acts of mercy. It has a wide range of meanings, and no single English word can capture it. The reason I bring this up is that it's a word used of God's care and disposition toward his people, not just toward Joseph.
It's the idea of saying, "I know that God has a loving disposition toward me." That lets me move from saying, "I don't know where God is. God has abandoned me. God's against me," to "God is for me." We know this because the Bible declares it. We can also know it because of our past experience. I know because I've seen the hand of God in different seasons of my life, so why would I doubt it now when it seems dark?
Again, it's hard sometimes when we read a text like Genesis, because we have the benefit of knowing how the story ends. We read it and say, "Well, yes, Joseph was in prison and forgotten, but we know that he gets reconciled, that he gets raised up, and that all these good things happen on the back end." As a result, we don't read it with the same tension. But for Joseph to live this, there were 17 years between when his brothers sold him into slavery and when he came to be at the top of Egypt's political hierarchy. Thirteen years, 17 years; and 15 at this moment we're referring to here. What does that mean? It means he had to believe in God's loving-kindness when it didn't feel like it was there.
I was thinking about this the other day. My wife and I have two dogs. We rescued them years ago, and I say "we" reluctantly, because the deal when we got the dogs was that they were 100% hers and 0% mine. You can ask me how that worked out for us, which means now they're our dogs. One of them is a boxer-lab mix, a big guy, and he's very expressive. We're told that boxers are smart. At night, when he thinks it's dinner time and we haven't fed him, he starts to whine and prance as if to say, "Are you going to feed me tonight? You better feed me tonight. Are you gonna feed me tonight? I want you to feed me. Make sure you don't forget about me. Feed me, feed me, feed me." That's my imagination of how he talks, except his voice is way dopier than what I just did.
Here's the deal: this dog has not missed a meal in his life with us. We have fed him every day, and yet he still gets whiny and irritated, going, "Where's my dinner? Why are you not feeding me? Are you gonna feed me? Don't forget about me." And again, we've been told boxers are smart, but I can tell you, he does not understand daylight saving time. He really doesn't get it. So now he's doing it an hour earlier.
Now, I realize that if you're walking through something hard right now, you may be thinking, "Did you just compare my difficulty to your dog not getting dinner?" Okay, I get that. But what if, as goofy as that story is, that's how it feels to the God of the universe, who says, "I have said I'm for you, and yet you're scared of what's right in front of you"? I wonder if that's how God sometimes feels when we have a fear that we don't turn toward him.
So what we need to do, in some ways, is be able to say, "I know that God is for me. I know that God is working." When we do that, it gives us confidence in hardships and challenges. It gives us comfort when it feels like things don't work out. And what we're able to do then is to say, "Okay, God, you're still at work, even if it hasn't felt that way to me."
There's an old country song about a guy who thanks God for unanswered prayers. The premise of the song is that he was in high school and prayed that God would give him this one girl to be his future, and it didn't work out. When he goes back to homecoming or something, he takes one look at her and says, "God, thank you for unanswered prayers." At one point his theology comes out, and he says, "So remember when you're talking to the man upstairs that just because he doesn't answer doesn't mean he don't care." Grammar wasn't the thing there.
But his point is one we actually need to hear sometimes. The way God chooses to work in your life and in mine might not be the way we think he should work. But if we had the advantage of his perspective, we'd be able to say, "God has not abandoned me. God is not against me. God is still for me in the midst of this."
So how do we make this transition? In Philippians 4, anxiety is addressed very directly. Here's what it says: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."
Very simply, it says, "Don't be anxious about anything." What does "anything" include here? Anything. Then some translations say "in everything"; this one says "in every situation, by prayer and petition." Prayer is probably more structured prayer, and petition is probably more spontaneous prayer. What he's saying is that whenever you feel any kind of anxiety, instead of sitting in it, bring it to God in prayer, with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving here probably means acknowledging that God has been good in the past and that you trust his character. And then he says the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts. So he's saying you can bring what you have and say, "God, I give this to you."
Jesus had something very similar when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion. Do you know what his prayer was? If you remember the story, he was praying tears of blood, and he prayed, "Father, if it's possible, would you take this cup from me? But not my will, but yours." Do you know what that prayer was? It was a lot of things, but in part it was, "I don't like the idea of this crucifixion. Do you think we could do this another way?" I don't know if I'd use the word fear, but there's at least, "I would prefer this another way." But what does he do? He says, "But not my will, but yours." I trust that in the midst of something I don't want, you have a better way.
One of the reasons you and I can navigate fear is that God chose to demonstrate his care through Jesus going to the cross. What this means is that if you suffer, if I suffer, the one reason we can't say we suffer is because God has turned his back on us, because he let his Son suffer for something he believed was even greater. So when we have fear, we can say: there's the revelation of God's love, there's my experience, and even more, there's the testimony of the cross of Jesus Christ that assures me that God is for me.
Anxiety, in many ways, reveals something. What I'm anxious about, what you're anxious about, and what I refuse to give to God reveals something that I'm actually demanding more than God. In a way, you could say that what's on the other side of my anxiety, your anxiety, is the idol that we worship. I realize you may say, "That doesn't feel very fair, the way you're talking about this." You might be right. But what I think does happen sometimes is that we say, "God, I want everything you want to give me, as long as it includes this." What are we doing? We're elevating that thing to say, "This is what I actually worship."
What we actually need in order to be free from fear is to worship God more than we're worshiping that thing. That doesn't mean we don't want the thing, or that we're not concerned about it, or that we want it less. It means we worship God more than the thing we're demanding. When we get there, we'll start to free ourselves from anxiety and from fear. Not all fear, but from it being compulsive and controlling in our lives.
I don't know how you come here today. Some of you may come here and say, "I have a lot of fear, and I do need to just say, God, I give it to you." Some of you may come here saying, "I'd love to believe that there's a God who actually cares for me." By the way, if you've never come into a relationship with Jesus Christ, then saying that God is for you in the sense of his hesed, his covenant love, would not be true. So you'd have reason, in some ways, to be afraid. But the good news is that it doesn't have to stay there, because the cross that Jesus went to is available. What you can do today is even say, "God, I believe that I have violated your standards, that I've sinned, but Jesus paid the way. I want to share in this covenant relationship with you and know that you are for me."
Or maybe you're here and there's something you recognize you've elevated, and you've said, "This is what I must have to receive life joyfully. I can't have a joyful life if this doesn't happen." Maybe for you it's just saying, "God, I realize that I've made that thing into a little bit of an idol." Maybe for you the solution today is to turn from that idolatry, to repent and say, "God, I trust you in a way that I've been running from."
I'm going to ask you to bow your heads and close your eyes for a moment. I just want to lead you in a prayer. Here's what I'd like to ask you to do: identify where your fear is. If you're comfortable, when you're ready, put your hands open in front of you in a way that says, "God, I'm opening my hands to give you what I've been fearful about, what I've been concerned about today, whatever that is." You're just saying, "God, I've allowed this to be something bigger in my life than it needs to be. But I know you're for me, so I trust you with what's in front of me."
Maybe it's hard for you to open your hands right now, and maybe that is because there is something you've elevated and said, "I can't have life joyfully without this." Maybe this is just a moment to say, "God, maybe I can't get there right now, but I do want to worship you above that thing, that person, that idea. And so I want to open my hands and release that to you."
Or maybe, as I just said, you're here and you're saying, "I would like to think there's a God who's for me. I'm not sure how all of that works." Today you can say, "God, I know that I've tried to do life on my own, and I would love to step into a relationship with Jesus Christ and with you by trusting what Jesus did on the cross."
God, I pray that you would help each of us who's gathered this weekend to live with open hands about the things that we fear, and in doing so, that you would help us navigate that fear. We pray it in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated and cleaned up by AI. Filler words were removed and grammar was updated, but the wording is kept as close to the original message as possible. Errors or omissions may remain, so please check it against the original audio or video before quoting or sharing it.
