Genesis 37

The Making Of A Great Man

They took him, and cast him into the pit. Genesis 37:24.

I was reading the other day about an unusual custom which has been adopted by the American deep-sea fishermen.

In order to have their fish nice and fresh for the market they keep them alive in a tank until they are required.

Now there is one kind of fish which this sort of treatment does not suit. It is the codfish. The codfish is accustomed to a hard life. If it is taken away from the troubles of the ocean, which make it swift and strong, it becomes soft and flabby and listless.

When the fishermen used to put codfish into the tank they lay at the bottom and took life easy, and soon they were of little value in the market. Then one man had a brilliant idea. The codfish has an enemy called the catfish, and this man thought he would try the plan of putting a catfish in the tank. It worked beautifully. Whenever a codfish was just settling down for a nice snooze the catfish got up and chased it round the tank. The codfish had hard work dodging their old enemy. The exercise made them nimble and firm, and they came to market in good condition.

You may ask what a catfish and a codfish have to do with Joseph being put into a pit or rather a cistern, for it was a disused cistern, shaped like a bottle with a narrow mouth, into which his brothers cast him. You may wonder what that story of the fish has to do with Joseph. Well just this. Joseph was in many respects a very fine boy. He had high ideals and great sweetness of nature. But he had faults and weaknesses too. He was a tell-tale, he was a dreamer, and his father spoilt him. You can picture what kind of man he would have turned out if he had been left to grow up in his home. I can fancy his exaggerating these tales later and adding little bits of his own; for he was a boy with imagination. I can picture him dreaming his life away without doing much good to anybody. I can imagine Jacob's coddling him and petting him till he had little manhood left. He might have remained nothing better than a dreamer and a gossiper if he hadn't been put down into that cistern and afterwards sold to the Ishmaelites. The hard trials he endured brought out the best that was in him.

Now, you boys and girls have to submit to discipline too. You have to do things you don't like, and you are not allowed to do others that you do like. You have to get up in the morning and go to school, you have to be punctual, you have to be neat and tidy, you have to learn your lessons, you have to obey rules.

And sometimes you feel like saying, “Bother, what's the use of it all? Why can't I do as I please?” And then you have your difficulties, and disappointments too, and you sometimes wonder what good they do.

Well, all these things are there just to make fine men and women of you, if you only know how to take them.

A distinguished student wrote to a friend after a defeat in an examination “I ought to be thankful for the defeat, and I hope sometimes I am, because it lowered my pride.”

All our life, even to the smallest detail, is planned by God. Nothing happens to us without good reason. And if we meet our defeats and disappointments and the little things that irk us in the right spirit, then we too may become great and noble like Joseph.