Deserts: God’s Provision in the WildernessSample

Resentment to Forgiveness

Resentment eats away at our souls and undermines our well-being. Like unforgiveness, resentment doesn’t just happen—no one becomes resentful unless they’ve been treated unfairly. But when we keep a record of wrongs, the person behaving unjustly doesn’t suffer. We do.

Resentment occupies space we need to be free to worship God and love others, clouding our judgment with suspicion and making our insides sour with bitterness. Once we’ve been treated unjustly, unresolved resentment starts a chain reaction like a trail of dominoes tumbling over.

Like the desert in Hagar’s story, Joseph’s desert represents the hard places in life we have to go through to get to better days. In between Hagar’s experience with rejection in the Deserts of Shur and Beersheba and Joseph’s experience with resentment in the Desert of Dothan are many chapters (Genesis 22–36) summarizing two generations in Abraham’s family: Abraham to Isaac and Isaac to Jacob. The theme of this section of Genesis is schemes.

• Isaac schemes to pass off Rebekah as his sister instead of his wife. (Sound familiar?)
• Rebekah and her son Jacob scheme to deceive Isaac for Esau’s birthright.
• Laban schemes to deceive Jacob by replacing Rachel with Leah on Jacob’s wedding night.
• Dinah’s brothers, Jacob’s sons, scheme to deceive the people of Shechem with circumcision after Dinah is raped by a man named Shechem.

The first faith family was messed up. There’s no denying it. But through it all, God was faithful to this family who’d been commissioned to bless all people with God’s love, which shows us that their dysfunction is not the main point of the book of Genesis. The point is that God can restore brokenness. Whether the brokenness is inside us, being done to us, or shared through family dynamics, God can heal and restore.

While Joseph was the one who was thrown in a literal pit, his brothers were left to climb out of the metaphorical pits they’d all dug for themselves by betraying their brother and lying to their father. Unchecked resentment had led Joseph’s brothers to set a death trap for their brother in the desert. Later, when Joseph had more power than his brothers could dream of, he could have let resentment fester and rule him as well. But instead, he chose forgiveness and offered them a lifeline.

Like Joseph with his brothers, God wants to get you through resentment to get you to forgiveness.

Prayer: Dear God, It is so tempting to hold on to resentments. Help me to see when I am letting the past keep me from worshiping you in the present. In Jesus’ name, Amen.