The Dream | Genesis 37:2-11; 50:20
Do you remember your dreams? What did you dream about last night? According to research, one out of two people have had lucid dreams (dreams they can remember) and about 10% of people experience those type of dreams once a month or more. Some of those dreams are sweet and some are nightmares. God has been giving people dreams since the beginning of time. The kind of dream I’m talking about is not necessarily what you get when you are sleeping, but it is a vision for your life or a gut sense of what your purpose is or an idea for your future in your mind’s eye that you cannot shake. Dreams play a vital role in our lives. Without dreams, we get sucked into the tyranny of the urgent and squander our lives on trivial things. Dreams are how God leads and guides His people in their calling, identity, and destiny. There is danger in a dream, because not every dream we have or every version we have in our mind is from God. There are dreams we have for our future that are not God’s dream for us. The life, house, career, relationship, fame, fortune, or business that we are dreaming of may not be God’s plan for our lives. Dreams are often hard to live with because there is a gap between the dream and the fulfillment of the dream. Within the gap is anticipation, hope, and patience but also pain, despair, disillusionment, and cynicism because often the fulfillment of the dream is not a straight line but a zig zag and long hard road. The dream often doesn’t happen how we think, or it doesn’t turn out like we imagined that it would. But what if we stopped focusing on our dreams for ourselves and started to pursue and trust God’s dream for us? What if we believed that God’s dream for us is better, bigger, and deeper than our dream for ourselves? Would that change how we live our everyday life and cause us to trust God more? We see this in the life of Joseph.
Genesis 37 marks the final section (fourth scroll) of the book of Genesis. The next 13 chapters will be devoted to Joseph. He gets more airtime in Genesis than the creation story, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Why? Because it’s importance in the story of redemptive history. Joseph was a dreamer. There are 21 dreams in the Bible and 10 are recorded in Genesis and 6 of those 10 are found in the story of Joseph. Each one of those dreams played a part in bringing God’s plans to fruition in Joseph’s life and his family. God had a dream for Joseph’s life that was not exactly what he would have thought, but it changed the world forever.