Sunday School: Johnny Drama, Joseph, Exodus, and the dangers of the family deal
Are your people set up for success after you’re gone? Or does the family deal expire when you do?
Johnny Drama drank and worried, and had reason to worry.
Ari Gold, Hollywood super agent — brother Vinny Chase’s agent — was fired from his agency. This was season 2 of Entourage, at the height of its powers.
Johnny woke up with a simple question nobody would answer: was Adam Davies still his agent?
Davies took Drama on as a favor to Gold, when they worked together. And they no longer worked together.
After several phone calls and unreturned voicemails, Johnny confronts Davies in his office and asks what’s what.
“You were a family deal, Johnny,” Davies explains. “If Vince isn’t a client, I’m afraid you’re not a client.”
That family deal was dead the second Ari was fired.
Johnny Drama was the only one who didn’t get it. He had to learn the hard way.
In Exodus, Joseph’s family, the Israelites, learned a much harsher lesson about overstaying their welcome, and mistaking a package deal for a covenant.
Their lesson ended not in embarrassment, like Johnny Drama, but in slavery. Exodus 1:8 tells that “a new king, who did not know about Joseph, came to power in Egypt.”
And he was not honoring old arrangements. Pharaoh became the first national leader to speak of the Jewish Problem, treating the group as a self-interested fifth column, either disloyal or unreliably loyal.
“The Israelites have become much too numerous for us,” Pharaoh said. “Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”
In Genesis 46, Jacob and his sons, the people of Israel, move to Egypt on Joseph’s meal ticket.
Jacob’s long-lost son did well for himself since his brothers sold him into slavery in Genesis 37. Joseph was self-aware and drew lessons from his own life. As he told his brothers multiple times, when they questioned whether he’d seek revenge, the lesson of Joseph is: what the world means for ill, God will use for good.
Joseph had become governor of Egypt, second-in-command to Pharaoh, for his skill in interpreting dreams. What he augured were 7 years of famine.
In Genesis 47, Joseph uses that state of emergency to buy nearly every home and piece of livestock in Egypt. Only when the Egyptians have nothing left to give but their bodies, and the fruits of their labor, are they offered seeds.
It’s a bad time. But not for Joseph’s family.
Joseph moved them to Goshen, a land of shepherds, “for all shepherds are detestable to the Egyptians” (Genesis 46:34). Which is to say: out of sight, out of mind.
But the Israelites thrive in Egypt’s time of famine. Genesis 47:27 tells that they “acquired property” in Goshen and “increased greatly in number.”
This is a country, remember, where most Egyptians had just sold their land and cattle both to the government. And the outsiders were thriving.
Israel came from Canaan to Egypt for one reason: survive the famine on Joseph’s meal ticket. There were only five years of famine left when the entire family arrived in Goshen.
So why were the Israelites in Egypt many years later?
In Joseph’s final words before death, in Genesis 50, he hints at the untenable dynamic. The Israelites were in Egypt, yes. But it was never come and could never be.
“God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land, to the land he promised on path to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” Joseph says in Genesis 50:24.
The prime time to return the family to Canaan would’ve been after the death of Jacob, the patriarch, in Genesis 49.
At great expense, with great manpower, Joseph and his brothers fulfilled Jacob’s dying wish and buried him at the Cave of Machpelah, alongside wife Leah, father Isaac and mother Rebekah, and grandfather Abraham and grandmother Sarah.
Why not move the family back at that point? The Israelites were in Goshen on Joseph’s dime, with Pharaoh’s blessing. They thrived as the people of the country slid into serfdom. In the event Joseph or Pharaoh died, their situation would change, and for the worse.
Joseph is the son of a deceiver. He is a man who devised the theft of a nation’s wealth. He was a dreamer of unusual insight.
It strains the brain to think Joseph didn’t know his family would suffer in Egypt without him. His final words indicate he at least considered it.
Joseph was a rich and powerful man. And the second he died, the wolves came for his family.
In their painful, eventual Exodus from Egypt, and creation of Israel, what man meant for ill, God used for good.