Brotherly Hate

So it came about,

when Joseph reached his brothers,

that they stripped Joseph of his tunic,

the varicolored tunic that was on him;

and they took him

and threw him into the pit.

Genesis 37:23–24

How cruel can brothers be to brothers? How cruel can man be to man? These ten grown men grab their seventeen-year-old little brother and strip him of his tunic and hurl him into a pit. They did so and then sat down to eat, as though they had done nothing wrong.

I am reminded of the cross when Jesus was also stripped of His garment: “Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His outer garments” (John 19:23). Just as the brothers sat down to eat as though they had done nothing wrong, so these soldiers sat at the foot of the cross of Christ and gambled for His garment as though they had done nothing wrong.

We read this part of Joseph’s life, and this part of the life of Christ on this earth, and it is so evident how desperately we need a Savior. We read in Ecclesiastes 7:20 that “indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.”

We all need a Savior.

I finally understood the full depravity of man when I was in Poland. I walked through the gates of Auschwitz and Majdonek and stood in the court of the Warsaw Ghetto while hearing from the lips of Holocaust survivors what they had experienced in these places. What shocked me the most was not just what they experienced by the hands of the Nazis, but what they experienced from those whom they had once called friends.

As a child, my friend Irving Roth, a survivor of Auschwitz, watched his father’s best friend betray his father. As a child, Irving experienced his own friends’ betrayal, as they turned their backs on him simply because he was a Jew. He experienced people who had been in his life always—those he had cared for, laughed with, played with—not just disassociate with him, but turn to hate toward him and his family.

Have you experienced this, my precious one?

The betrayal of a friend, of a family member?

Oh, my friend, know that you have One who understands,

“for consider Him

who has endured such hostility

by sinners against Himself,

so that you will not grow weary

and lose heart”

(Hebrews 12:3).

Oh Father,

Help me to never forget that I am my brother’s keeper. That I am to regard others as more important than myself (Philippians 2:3). Help me, Father, to remember that I am not to hold my faith in Jesus Christ with an attitude of personal favoritism (James 2:1). Oh Father, you tell us in 1 John 4:20, “If someone says, ‘I love God’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” Oh Father, forgive me when I hold bitterness in my heart and spite toward another, even if they are not my brother or sister by flesh or through Christ. Open my eyes that I might see when my attitude is not what it should be that I might seek Your face and go before Your throne of grace and receive forgiveness and an attitude adjustment. Oh Father, guard my heart from hate and help me to love others with the love with which You have loved me.

My Jesus, it is in Your name I pray,

Amen.