Today’s Scripture Reading (August 10, 2018): Genesis 50
John Dalberg-Acton,
1st Baron Acton is most widely remembered for arguing that “Power
tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The rest of the
quote goes like this: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they
exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency
or the certainty of corruption by authority.” Acton was a politician and
British historian, and the quotation is found
in a letter that Acton wrote to fellow historian Bishop Mandell Creighton,
dated April 1887. The occasion of the letter was Acton’s opposition to the
doctrine of papal infallibility, a doctrine that was defined dogmatically by
the First Ecumenical Council of the Vatican in 1869-1870, during the reign of
Pope Pius IX. Acton argued that the Pope and the King were both men and both
subject to very human error. “I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge
Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong.”
It is a sentiment with which most contemporary readers would agree.
Joseph
argues that he is not in the place of
God. And there is no doubt that Joseph’s power was not absolute, but, at this
moment in time, he is the second most powerful person in Egypt and maybe even the second most powerful
person in the known world, and his power is absolute over his family. The
prophecies of the Dreamer have come true, and his brothers probably had cause
to worry. It was the power that the brothers believed that they had over Joseph
that had caused the disaster the day that they sold Joseph into captivity. But
that power did not compare with the power now possessed by their little
brother.
What
saved the brothers from Joseph’s justifiable wrath was that Joseph seemed to
have maintained a belief in the sovereign power of the God his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather. In the mind of Joseph, God had a plan, and
that plan had worked through the hands of his brother.
But
while Joseph had a belief in this God, it is unlikely that his brothers still
believed. Joseph had married in Egypt but
seems to have avoided beliefs in the Egyptian gods. His brothers, on the other
hand, seem to have been corrupted by beliefs in the gods of their Canaanite
wives. It was this confusion of gods that the Egyptian exile would hopefully
correct. And without a belief in a sovereign God whose purposes worked out here
on the earth, the brothers could only live in terror of their younger brother,
who they had misused, and who now stood in absolute authority over the family.
If absolute power corrupted absolutely, then the brothers of Joseph would be
lost, because nothing could save them from the one who now stood over them with
absolute power over their lives.
The
brothers now knew that Joseph was a great man in Egypt. The question in the
minds of the brothers could only be whether or not he was a bad man. And that,
only time would tell.
Tomorrow’s Scripture
Reading: Exodus 1
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