Nancy’s Personal Blog

Jesus half brothers are James, Joseph, Simon and Judas. Before all of them travel with Jesus and with his other disciples to Capernaum, they stop at their home in Nazareth to pack the things that they need during their journey.

Capernaum is more prominently situated and is evidently a larger city and most of Jesus’s newly acquired disciples live near Capernaum.

During his stay in Capernaum, Jesus performed wonderful work and one day they are on their way to Jerusalem to attend the Passover Festival. During this time, the Israelities are required to make animal sacrifices. So for their convenience, merchants in Jerusalem sell animals or birds for this purpose.

They sell right inside the temple and they are cheating the people by charging them more expensive.

Fill with anger, Jesus makes a whip of ropes and chase the sellers out. He pours out the coins of the money changers and overturns their tables. “Take these things away from here and stop making the house of my father a house of merchandise!”

The Jews ask : “What sign you wanted to show us by doing this?” Jesus answers: “Break down this temple and in three days I will raise it up”. The Jews assume that Jesus is talking about the literal temple and so they ask: “This temple was built forty six years and you will raise it up in three days?”

The Jews and even his disciple do not know that Jesus is talking about the temple of his body. His disciples only realized his word after he was raised from his dead.
Reference word : John 2:12-22; /Matthew 13:55, Luke 4:23

Joseph wants to know if his 10 older brothers are still unkind. So he says: ‘You are spies. You have come to find where our country is weak.’ ‘No, we are not,’ they say. ‘We are honest men. We are all brothers. We were 12. But one brother is no more, and the youngest is home with our father’.

Joseph pretends not to believe them. He keeps the brother named Simeon in prison, and lets the others take food and go home. But he tells them: When you come back, you must bring your youngest brother with you.

When they return home to Canaan, the brothers tell their father Jacob everything that happened. Jacob is very sad. ‘Joseph is no more and now Simeon is no more’ he cries. ‘I will not let you take my younger son Benjamin’. But when the food begins to run out, Jacob has to let his youngest son go with them.

When Joseph sees his brothers coming he was very happy at the same time he also wants to test his brothers. What he did was he gets his servants to fill up all their bags with food and at the same time he also put his special silver cup into Benjamin’s bag.
After they leave and gone some distance on the road, Joseph send his servant after them. The servant say, “Why have you stolen our master’s silver cup?’ All the brother denies any the servant started to search through all their bags. Finally the servant finds the cup from Benjamin’s bag. The servant say, “The rest of you can go except Benjamin must follow us.”
What do you think the other 10 brother would have do now?

They all return with Benjamin to Joseph’s house, and Judah speaks up, “We can’t go back without my younger brother, my father loves him so much. Please keep me as your slave and please let my youngest brother go home”.

Joseph noticed that his brothers had changed and they are not unkind anymore. At that moment Joseph can’t control his feelings. Immediately he ask his servant to leave the rooms and he started to cry. All the other brothers were surprised and they do not know Joseph is crying. Finally he introduced himself and all his brothers were speechless. Joseph Throws his arms around his brothers and hugs and kisses them all.

When Pharaoh heard this news, he lets all his brothers to stay in Egypt and Jacob’s whole families shifted to Egypt. They were called Israelities and they became a God’s special people.

Pharaoh’s Dream

Two years past, and Joseph is still in prison. The cup bearer has not remembered him. Then one night Pharaoh has two dreams, and he wonders what they mean. The next morning Pharaoh calls all his wise man and tells them the things that he has dreamed. But all of them are unable to explain the meaning of his dreams.

Now the cupbearer at last remembers Joseph. He says to Pharaoh, “When I was in prison there was a man who is able to interpret the meaning of dreams. Pharaoh brought Joseph out of prison right away.

Pharaoh tells Joseph his dreams:-

“ I saw seven fat, beautiful cows, then I saw seven thin and bony cows. Then thin cows ate up the fat ones. Second dream, I saw seven heads of full, ripe grain growing on the stalk. Then I saw seven thin, dried out heads of grain, and the thin heads of grain began to swallow up the seven good heads of grain.

Then Joseph says to Pharaoh, both dreams bring the same meaning. The seven fat cows and the seven full heads of the grain means seven more years. There will be seven years when a lot of food will grow in Egypt. Then there will be seven years when very little food will grow.’
So Pharaoh advised Pharaoh to choose a wise man and put him in-charge of collecting food during the seven good years. By doing this the people will not starve during the following seven bad years.
Pharaoh likes the idea and he chooses Joseph to collect the food and to store it up. Joseph becomes the most important man in Egypt next to Pharaoh.

Eight years later his ten brothers came to Egypt to get some food because in Canaan they were running out of food. Joseph recognizes his brothers, but they do not. At that time Joseph remembers the dream he had when he was a boy.

Joseph was 17 years old when he was taken to Egypt. Joseph was alone and do not have any friends there. When the trader arrived in Egypt he was sold to Potiphar, captain of Pharoah’s bodyguard.

Joseph had enjoyed everything he wanted in his father’s house but now he is a slave. It must be very hard for him but he made up his mind to do his best in all circumstances. What ever he was asked to do he did well and this made Potiphar very happy. One day Potiphar call Joseph and gave him a surprised. He was given a big promotion to look after his house and estate.

All went well until Potiphar’s wife cause trouble. She tried to get Joseph to do something very wrong but when he refused to that, she seeking revenge, she told lies to her husband about Joseph and Potiphar ordered Joseph to be taken to prison.

Even in prison Joseph was very kind, thoughtful and helpful that made the jailer put him in-charge of other prisoners. What a fine young man he must be! Later Pharaoh the king becomes angry with his cupbearer and his baker and puts them into prison. One night they had special dreams but they do not know the meaning of the dreams. The next day Joseph asked them to tell him their dreams and with God’s help he explains the meaning of their dreams.

To the cupbearer, Joseph says: “In three days you will be let out of prison, and you will become Pharoah’s cupbearer again”. He continued: “When you get out from here, please tell Pharoah about me and help me to get out from here. To the baker, he says’ “In just three days Pharoah will have your head cut off”.

In three days it just happens just as Joseph said. But the cupbearer forgets all about Joseph. He did not make any afford to bring Joseph out from the prison.

In the town of Canaan lived a boy named Joseph. He had 10 older brothers and one younger brother. Their father Jacob liked Joseph very much. This made his older brothers jealous of him and there is another reason why they hated him.

Joseph had two dreams. In both dreams his brothers bowed down to him. When Joseph shared his dreams to his brothers their hatred grew even more than before.

Some time later the brothers had gone to Shechem, to find pasture for their sheep. Jacob began to worry and he told Joseph “Joseph, your brothers have been gone so long, please go and see if they’re all right.” When Joseph’s brothers see him coming, one of them say: “Let’s kill him!”, but Reuban, the oldest brother say, “No don’t do that”.
Instead they grab Joseph and put him into a pit.

At that time some Ishmaelite men come along. Then Judah says to his brothers: Let’s sell him to the Ishmaelites”, and that’s what they did. They sell him for 20 pieces of silver and Joseph was led away to Egypt.

Joseph just could not keep from crying. “Will I ever see my father and my little Benjamin again?’ wonder Joseph. Now, what will the brothers tell their father? They kill a goat and dip Joseph’s coat into the goat’s blood. This is to let his father know that a wild animal had killed his son. After hearing to his sons, Jacob cried out and no one can comfort him.

Even though Joseph’s brothers knew he was still alive and they saw how sad their father was they still didn’t tell the terrible thing they had done.

Deception is never the right choice. One lie leads to another. God can help to keep deception out of our lives if we ask Him.

When Noah and his family came out of the ark, the first thing he did was he made an offering to God. Noah offered this gift of animals to thank God for saving his family from the great flood.

Soon the land was all dried off, Noah and his family began a new life. God blessed them and told them: “You must have many children. You must increase in numbers until people live all over the earth”.

Later when people would hear about the great flood, they might be afraid that a flood would happen again. So God gave something that would remind people of his promise that he will never destroy the earth by flood again. Do you know what he gave to remind them? It was a rainbow.

Rainbow is often seen in the sky when the sun shines after it has rained with many beautiful colors.

This is what God said: “I promise that never again will all people and animals be destroyed by a flood”. When the rainbow appears I will remember my promise that had given”.

So when we see the rainbow what should it remind us of ?? Yes, God’s promise that will never destroy the world again by a great flood.

Outside the ark, the people live their life the same as before. They still did not believe that flood would come. They laughed more than ever. But they soon stop laughing.

All the sudden water began to fall down from the sky. Noah had been right! but it’s too late now for others to get into the ark. They door had been closed tight by God.

All the low land was covered with water. The water became like big rivers and pushed and rolled around big stones and made a loud noise. All the people were destroyed too. The rain continued to for 40 days and 40 nights until it covers the tallest mountain. It just had happened as God said, all the people and animals outside the ark died but everyone inside was safe.

The water lifted the ark up and it floated right on top of the water. Then one day, after the rain stopped falling, the sun began to shine. There was a big ocean everywhere and only the ark floating on top.

Then God made a wind blow and the flood began to go down. After some time the ark came to rest on top of the mountains. The water kept on going down. Then Noah let the bird called raven out of the ark. It would fly away for a while and then it would come back because it could not find a good place to land.

Next, Noah sent a dove out of the ark but the dove came back too because it did not find a place to stay. Then Noah sent it out for second time and it brought back an olive leaf in it’s beak. So Noah knew that the water had gone down. Noah sent the dove a third time and finally it found a dry place to live.

Then God spoke to Noah. He said: “Go out of the ark. Take your whole family and the animals with you”. Surely Noah and his family must be very happy to come outside and to be alive.

Noah is a very faithful man. He has 3 son’s and their names were Shem, Ham and Japheth. Each of these sons had a wife. There were eight persons in Noah’s family.

One day God told Noah to do a strange thing, he told him to build a big ark. This ark was large like a ship. God had advised Noah how the ark should be build.

God told Noah to fix up the ark so that no water could leak in. God said “I am going to send a great flood of water and destroy the whole world. Everyone not in the ark will die”.

Noah and his sons obeyed God and started to build the ark but the other people just laughed at Noah. Nobody believed Noah when he told them that what God was going to do.

It took a long time to complete the ark because it was big. Finally after many years the ark was completed. Now God told Noah to bring the animals, both a male and female. But of other kinds of animals, God told Noah to bring in all the different kinds of birds. Noah did just what God said.

Afterward, Noah and his family also went into the ark. Then the door was shut. Inside, Noah and his family total eight of them and the animals waited. If you are there in the ark, do you think there really will be flood as God said ??