The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: At the end of Genesis, Joseph’s brothers, like their father before them (and like Jacob’s mother Rebecca before him), show themselves to be manipulators: they lie to Joseph, telling him that before he died, their dad “commanded him” to forgive them. While Jacob was alive, they had little fear that Joseph would do anything to settle the score (though what might take place after Jacob’s death haunted them continually…they knew well enough what they had coming!). They always concluded that the goodness they saw in him toward them was at variance with what was truly in his heart and just part of the treacherous way he purposed to set them up for a wonderful destruction.
As Jacob did in the case of Esau, so they also send a delegation (probably also made up of their young children as Jacob’s envoys had been) to carry their message and entreaty to Joseph before they themselves appear to prostrate themselves before him, confessing their sins, asking for pardon and announcing that they are henceforth and anon his slaves (they hoped he would prefer this arrangement to torturing them to death); their note (supposedly initiated by their father in their behalf) requesting his forgiveness at their father’s command, constituting their best hope, they suppose, of “softening him up” ahead of their personal appearance to acknowledge his awful lordship and their complete subjection to him.
When he gets their note, Joseph weeps not only because of their dissimulation but also because they do not yet know him (they never really have!) and most importantly because they are still not sure of their gracious standing with God (they’ve never really been sure of that either): every trouble that has befallen them since they sold their brother into slavery has persuaded them that God is poised to make their destruction wonderful and that the only reason he hasn’t destroyed them already is that he wants to make their ruin as perfect as possible and needs additional time to orchestrate it all to His full advantage…to display the absolute wonder of infinite and eternal wrath! Joseph must also be grieved that they fall down before him, not out of loving wonder, gratitude and satisfaction that they could actually be so blessed to have such a brother to enjoy and commune with, but out of abject fear.
When they appear before Joseph he tells them not to be afraid. He uses irony, deliberately or not: “Am I in the place of God?” (that is: as Judge and Executioner…he never wanted this prerogative, incidentally!). Yet he is in the place of God: he is Christ to his guilt-burdened, distracted and obsessed brothers (and a type of Christ to us)…the one who pardons them, turns their evil intentions against him to their own good and profit, blesses them and their families with the best of the land and continues (as he always has) to serve them, provide for them (and for their little ones) and to speak comfortable and kind words to their troubled hearts even as they continue to suppose the worst about him! This is his role; it’s who he is; it’s what he does…his divine appointment. It’s the real (and only) reason that his brothers should fall down in his presence (certainly not out of craven fear!): because he loves them so deeply and demonstrably. All Joseph wants from them (Christ-like) is their love (as he continues to lovingly care for them sacrificially…like Christ Who will come back to “be admired at by those who believe”…there is no greater blessedness for the people of God than this!)! All He’s looking for is their appreciation of who he really is and of how that has driven all that he’s done for them. It’s this appreciation of him (as it also is with ours of Christ) which is his glory…or at least would be if they truly knew him…and so they are, at this point at least, deprived of it by their unbelief (which is why unbelief is the greatest sin: it short-circuits the display of God’s glory essentially because it keeps us from knowing Him). In the case of Christ, our full acquaintance with Him in terms of Who He is as our Supreme Lover and of what that love has done and will forever do for us, is how He glorifies Himself (talk about unselfishness!). The glory of God, in other words, is our coming to know and enjoy Him as He is in Christ. It’s simply His total involvement of us with Himself as our Lover and of all the particulars of how that gets expressed to us in the present age and in the world to come. In the end, we will fully enter into that. THAT is His glory! That is how He manifests His Glory; that is EXACTLY how He is glorified: Its simply His being to us everything He is and His bringing us into the actual possession and experience of Himself as such forever.
Also, as his brothers feared Joseph as judge and executioner (which he could have been), so we are tempted to fear Christ in this same way. The irony is that Christ, in behalf of His people, really is The Judge and Executioner, not of His people, but of His and their enemies, and is, Himself, judged and executed by His Father in their place as their Substitute only that He may bless them.