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The Coat of Many Colors
The bad character of the brothers stood out even more in contrast to the character of Joseph.
“There was one, however, of a widely different character—the elder son of Rachel, Joseph, whose rare personal beauty seemed but to reflect an inward beauty of mind and heart. Pure, active, and joyous, the lad gave evidence also of moral earnestness and firmness. He listened to his father’s instructions, and loved to obey God. The qualities that afterward distinguished him in Egypt—gentleness, fidelity, and truthfulness—were already manifest in his daily life. His mother being dead, his affections clung the more closely to the father, and Jacob’s heart was bound up in this child of his old age. He ‘loved Joseph more than all his children.’ ”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 209.
Read Genesis 37:3, 4. How did this act by their father make the situation worse?
The costly coat, given to Joseph by a doting father and beautifully woven in a variety of colors, certainly was finer than any of his brothers’ cloaks and was a kind of garment usually worn by people of distinction. The brothers no doubt assumed that their father would bestow further honors upon this child, and that could mean that he would get the birthright. They easily could have read into it that Joseph would get the greater inheritance. Whatever the father meant by giving Joseph the coat, and it could simply have been a token of love and nothing more, it was a big mistake, for it fanned even more the flames of hatred in the brothers’ hearts toward Joseph.
In a sense, the coat symbolizes earthly honors, earthly distinction—earthly and, therefore, so temporal and superficial in the end. In writing the story, however, Moses placed the coat in the context of Jacob loving Joseph more than the other children, and thus it was also central in the context of their hatred for him and what that hatred led to.
Have you ever been given a worldly honor? How good did you feel at the time? How long before the euphoria or the sense of satisfaction or whatever good feeling you had wore off, and the honor came to mean little or nothing? What lesson should you take from that? See 1 Cor. 9:24–26.
| TUESDAY | April 19 |
The bad character of the brothers stood out even more in contrast to the character of Joseph.
“There was one, however, of a widely different character—the elder son of Rachel, Joseph, whose rare personal beauty seemed but to reflect an inward beauty of mind and heart. Pure, active, and joyous, the lad gave evidence also of moral earnestness and firmness. He listened to his father’s instructions, and loved to obey God. The qualities that afterward distinguished him in Egypt—gentleness, fidelity, and truthfulness—were already manifest in his daily life. His mother being dead, his affections clung the more closely to the father, and Jacob’s heart was bound up in this child of his old age. He ‘loved Joseph more than all his children.’ ”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 209.
Read Genesis 37:3, 4. How did this act by their father make the situation worse?
The costly coat, given to Joseph by a doting father and beautifully woven in a variety of colors, certainly was finer than any of his brothers’ cloaks and was a kind of garment usually worn by people of distinction. The brothers no doubt assumed that their father would bestow further honors upon this child, and that could mean that he would get the birthright. They easily could have read into it that Joseph would get the greater inheritance. Whatever the father meant by giving Joseph the coat, and it could simply have been a token of love and nothing more, it was a big mistake, for it fanned even more the flames of hatred in the brothers’ hearts toward Joseph.
In a sense, the coat symbolizes earthly honors, earthly distinction—earthly and, therefore, so temporal and superficial in the end. In writing the story, however, Moses placed the coat in the context of Jacob loving Joseph more than the other children, and thus it was also central in the context of their hatred for him and what that hatred led to.
Have you ever been given a worldly honor? How good did you feel at the time? How long before the euphoria or the sense of satisfaction or whatever good feeling you had wore off, and the honor came to mean little or nothing? What lesson should you take from that? See 1 Cor. 9:24–26.
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