13. Christian Manhood: What Your Strength Is For

The story of Joseph in Genesis 37 to 50, explained: betrayal, forgiveness, and what Genesis 50:20 says about God and suffering. It’s a room in a great house in Egypt, and the most powerful man in the land after Pharaoh has just ordered every servant out. In front of him stand eleven terrified shepherds from Canaan, and one of them, Judah, has just offered to stay as a slave so his youngest brother can go home. The official starts weeping so loudly that Pharaoh’s household hears it, and then he speaks to them in their own language: I am Joseph, the brother you sold into slavery twenty years ago. Come near to me, please. What does it take for a wounded person to say come close to the people who wounded him, and what is God doing underneath it all? In this episode, Graham walks through Genesis 37 to 50, the story of Joseph and his brothers. He follows it from the robe and the pit, through Joseph’s fall and rise in Egypt from slave to prisoner to Pharaoh’s right hand, to Judah’s offer to take his brother’s place, the great recognition scene, and the last chapters of Genesis, which end with a coffin and a promise. Along the way he traces three threads the storyteller weaves through every chapter: garments, recognition, and weeping. He takes on the hardest passages directly, including the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 and Joseph’s famine policy in Genesis 47, where a whole nation sells itself to Pharaoh for bread. He also asks what Genesis 50:20, “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good,” says about God and suffering, drawing on John Calvin, Thomas Jay Oord, Robert Alter, Gerhard von Rad, Aaron Wildavsky, Leon Kass, and Desmond Tutu. Reading the story against a culture fluent in the language of trauma and thin on forgiveness and providence, he offers a three-week reading plan and a practice for anyone carrying an old betrayal. And he asks how the one who was wronged comes to be the one who says come near. This is the third and final episode on Genesis, part of a series on the podcast that takes whole books of the Bible one at a time, following episodes on Genesis 1 to 11 and Genesis 12 to 36. If you’d like to go through Scripture this way day by day, the companion devotional series, Dwelling in God’s Word, walks book by book from Genesis to Revelation. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHWR9FRX Book recommendations: “South Asia Bible Commentary” edited by Brian Wintle, “The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18–50” by Victor P. Hamilton, and “The End of Memory” by Miroslav Volf. Email us at [email protected]

Christians still grieve, and Scripture gives us lament, the tears of Jesus, and a resurrection hope that carries us through loss. It’s ten past three in the morning on a palliative care ward, and the only sounds are the hum of an oxygen machine and an old man’s breathing. His daughter has been holding his hand for nine hours when a night nurse leans in and says, “Keep talking to him, love. Hearing’s the last thing to go.” At twenty past four his breathing stops, and three days later a kind young funeral director slides a brochure across the desk for direct cremation: no service, no fuss. What does it look like to grieve with hope in a world that’s slowly forgetting how to mourn, and when we let go of the hand we’ve been holding, who’s holding us? In this episode, Graham explores grief, lament, and the Christian hope of resurrection, starting with what sociologists call the sequestration of death, as dying moves into hospitals, mourning moves into private life, and grief tech offers chatbots and virtual reality versions of the dead. He traces how the early church called its burial grounds sleeping places, how Cyprian of Carthage buried the dead through a plague, and how Augustine wept for his mother Monica, and he sets today’s griefbots beside the spiritualism that boomed after the First World War. He walks through Abraham mourning Sarah, David’s cry for Absalom, the psalms of lament, Lamentations, Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, and Paul’s call to grieve with hope in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15. He engages with voices like Martin Luther, C. S. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kwame Bediako, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, George Bonanno, and Margaret Stroebe, and faces the hardest objections directly: the platitudes that wound grieving people, Freud and Ernest Becker on hope as wish fulfilment, and the question of loved ones who die without faith. Drawing on mourning traditions from Ghana, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Philippines, and Tonga, along with Jewish shiva and Orthodox memorial prayers, he offers practical steps for churches and individuals, from lament services and a three-month, six-month, and one-year pattern of care to saying aloud the name of someone who’s died. And he asks what it means to be held by the risen Jesus once we’ve let go. If you’d like to go further on faith and mental health, Graham’s earlier episode, Depression, Anxiety, and Faith: The Weight, makes a good companion to this one. Book recommendations: “Lament for a Son” by Nicholas Wolterstorff, “A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss” by Jerry Sittser, and “Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church” by N. T. Wright. Email us at [email protected] See my Substack: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/ Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

God promised Abraham a future and wrestled Jacob into blessing, and Genesis 12 to 36 shows grace working through deeply flawed people.

How social media and algorithms capture your attention, and a Christian response grounded in Scripture and spiritual practice.

What do Genesis 1 to 11 teach about creation, the image of God, sin, and the flood, and why does it matter for human dignity today?