NOTES for Gen 45:1-28
The most important thing Joseph took from the experience of Egyptian life was a whole perception of reality. This statement can sound strange, but that is how it is: God's great world opened itself to Joseph in the twists of his difficult fate, while his brothers remained what they had been when he parted from them. The best testimony to this is Joseph's words about his life and his adventures in Egypt. He perceives his life as a mission. He says directly to his brothers: it was not you who sold me into slavery; it was God who brought me to Egypt so that now I might save you yourselves.
This turn of thought and plot occurs so often in all kinds of moralizing texts that it has already become a commonplace; and yet many believers are ready to testify to something similar on the basis of their own personal life experience. Some spiritual pattern is clearly visible here. A pattern connected, above all, with where, in what dimension, events take place. More precisely, in what world. In that great world of God which from the beginning was and remains God's Kingdom, or in that small little world separated from the Kingdom, which appears wherever those who oppose God act. This is the main question.
Joseph and his brothers live and act in different worlds. Joseph, of course, also did not enter God's great world at once; this world did not open itself to him at once. It required the experience of life in Potiphar's house and time in prison, and then the office of first minister. It required "swings" - in life and in existence - he had to live through the complete collapse of all plans, hopes, and expectations, so that God's will would become obvious to Joseph precisely as a force acting in his own life, not "in general." Then, when everything described had taken place and God's will had become reality for Joseph, God's great world opened itself to him. In this world only one will acts - God's - and only one plan is fulfilled - God's.
Joseph's brothers' plans, of course, are also fulfilled, but in their own little world. There, in their little world, they can turn out to be winners, and almost certainly will. That is no surprise: it is their world, and they are its masters. But victory in one's own little world, separate from God's great world, turns into defeat in God's great world. It turns into defeat completely unnoticed by those living in their own little world, at the very moment when they themselves think they have won and achieved everything they wanted. It is then that it is often revealed that the victory was illusory and the defeat was quite real. The brothers sold Joseph into slavery and got rid of him, just as they wanted, but they still had to bow down to him. They had to because such was God's plan.