I. "God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth." Joseph referred the whole order and purpose of his existence, all that had been adverse to it, all that had been prosperous in it, to God. He knew that violence and disorder had been at work in his life. What temptation had he to think of them as God's? Imputing to Him a distinct purpose of good and blessedness, what a strange perverseness it would have been to think that anything which had marred the goodness and blessedness, anything which had striven to defeat the purpose, was His! It was the great eternal distinction which a heart cultivated, purged, made simple by God's discipline, confessed nay, found it impossible to deny.
II. Joseph starts with assuring his brethren that God had been the orderer and director of his history, and that He had a purpose in it. He thinks that the special work to which he has been appointed is to preserve for them a posterity on the earth. Joseph had no notion that his preservation meant anything, except so far as it served for the establishment and propagation of the covenant family. For the sake of his family he was sent there; he must act for it, whether he puts his brothers to torture or himself.
III. And so he was indeed "saving their lives by a great deliverance." He was providing against the immediate destruction which the famine was threatening them with; he was providing against the more thorough and permanent destruction which their own selfishness and crimes were working out.
IV. "He hath made me a father to Pharaoh," etc. Joseph was maintaining, as he believed, a seed in which all families of the earth were to be blessed. But though this obligation was first, it did not exclude the other. God, who had sent him to save his own family, had surely just as much proposed that he should be a father to Pharaoh and a lord of his land. So Joseph judged; on that faith he acted.
F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,p. 137.
I. The dreams. Joseph's dreams reflected in the quiet of the night the aspirations and ambitious forecasts of the future which haunted his daily life.
II. The discipline. Joseph met with misfortunes, and this experience taught him: (1) independence (e.g.,of his father); (2) to serve that lesson so needful to power; (3) enlarged ideas; (4) the lesson that would be at once the strength of his life and the correction of his vanity viz., his absolute dependence on God.
III. The fulfilment of his dreams. (1) He met with outward success. (2) Two great changes passed over his character. He learned to ascribe all his success to God, and he perceived the object for which he had been elevated: "God sent me before you to preserve you,"etc.
Bishop Boyd Carpenter, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. v., p. 217.