Two Full Years, and the Text Says No More

He has heard the sermon eleven times, and he could give it himself, and it always goes the same way.

Joseph in the pit. Joseph in Potiphar's house. Joseph in the prison, interpreting for the butler and the baker, and then the butler gets out and forgets him, and here is where the preacher always slows down and leans in, and says: and Joseph waited two more years.

And then comes the lesson. God was preparing him. The timing was perfect. If the butler had remembered too early it would have been the wrong moment. Everything was being positioned.

He is fifty two and he has believed all of that in a general way for about thirty years, and he is now in the thirteenth year of a situation he is not going to describe, and last week he did something that has cost him some sleep.

He read the text.

Not the sermon. The chapter. And what he found is that Genesis 40 ends with the butler forgetting Joseph, and Genesis 41 begins with this: And it came to pass at the end of two full years (Genesis 41:1).

That is it. That is the whole account of two years of a man's life. Two full years. And the writer, who has been telling us a very great deal about coats and dreams and doors, tells us nothing at all about what those two years were, what they did to Joseph, what he understood, whether he prayed, whether he stopped praying, or what God was up to.

The commentary that gets preached over that verse is not in that verse. It has been added, kindly and with good intentions, by people who could not bear a sentence that just says two full years and moves on.

He sat in the study last week with the lamp on and read it about four times. And what he felt was not disillusionment. It was something closer to relief with an edge on it, and he has not been able to say it to anybody, and it is this: nobody is going to explain my thirteen either, and the Bible does not seem to think that is a problem.

You have been living inside somebody's commentary. Somebody explained your stretch to you, gently, from a platform or across a table, and you have been trying to live inside the explanation, and it has never quite fitted. There is a phrase in Genesis that is one of the quietest and most honest sentences in Scripture, and it has been sitting there the whole time.

The text gives a number and withholds a reason

I have to be careful here, and more careful than usual, because there is a version of this that arrives with the explanation again, in a slightly better suit. God is positioning you. It is thirteen and not fourteen for a reason. I am not going to say any of it. Genesis 41:1 does not explain Joseph's two years, and I am not going to fill a silence Scripture chose to leave.

Look at what the sentence actually does. And it came to pass at the end of two full years.

It gives a duration. Full is doing work in there: not roughly two, not a couple, two full years, counted, complete, the whole of them. The writer wants the reader to feel the length. And then, having established the length precisely, he says nothing whatever about the content.

You are inside a stretch that Scripture would report the same way. That is not a low reading of the text; Genesis 41:1 measures the time and declines to interpret it, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that chapter had the whole of Joseph's story available and chose to say two full years and move on.

And there is something worth noticing about where the sentence sits. It comes immediately after the butler forgetting him, which is the lowest point in the account, lower than the pit, because it is the moment where the one plausible way out closes. The two full years are the years after hope ran out, and they get one clause.

And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed.Genesis 41:1

The commentary costs more than the silence

Now the thing that has actually been happening for thirteen years.

He has been trying to live inside an explanation. And the explanation is not cruel and the people who gave it to him were not careless. But an explanation you cannot verify becomes a test you can fail, and by about year seven he had started to wonder whether the reason he could not see the purpose was that he was not the kind of man who gets shown it.

You have never been failing an examination that God was not conducting. Deuteronomy 29:29 says the secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us, and that division is stated as a settled arrangement and not as a withholding; the Spirit who inspired it drew that line for a man's relief.

This is yours right now, with the lamp on and a Bible face down on a chair: the freedom to live in the text rather than in the commentary. Isaiah 55:9 says His ways are higher than our ways, and higher is a description of distance and not a rebuke of the one standing lower; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has never once required a man to produce the reason.

What he is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence under thirteen years, because it is not impatience.

It sounds like this: if there is a purpose and I cannot see it, then the not seeing is my fault, and the fault is probably some quality I lack. That is the fear, and it is the direct cost of a well meant explanation, and he has never said it out loud in this room or any other.

You were held through all thirteen and the holding never depended on your understanding it. Psalm 121:3 says He that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the keeping is His activity and not yours; the Holy Spirit who inspired that psalm has been awake through years a man has been trying to interpret.

Fruit is not output, and thirteen unexplained years are where the difference is sharpest. Output is what could be shown for them, and there is not much, and he would say so without being asked. Fruit is what has grown on a man who kept reading and kept turning up for thirteen years without a single confirmation, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that faithfulness, and it never once looked like anything from outside.

And I am not going to tell you the fourteenth year is the one. I do not know. What can be said, and only this, is that Scripture measured a man's worst two years, named their length exactly, and said nothing else, and the Spirit who inspired that was not being careless.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes before the lamp goes off, tell Him one plain thing about the thirteenth year with nothing asked for and nothing concluded. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that, and it does not have to arrive anywhere.