A dream is a wish your heart makes when you're fast asleep. If wishes were fishes we'd all have a pot full to fry. Star light, star bright make my wish come true tonight. We all have dreams, some big, some small, some seemingly impossible, some that just take rolling up your sleeves and tackling to accomplish. We all have wishes that we hope will come true, but might need something magical to accomplish it.
Joseph, the eleventh child of Jacob, had a couple of dreams where he saw his family bowing down to him. I wonder if he ever thought about being greater than his older brothers. You know how brothers can make a younger sibling suffer and Jacob, his father, evidently made no effort to hide the fact that Joseph was his favorite. That would make for a dysfunctional family and lead to jealousy, which it did in this family and I can imagine Joseph got the brunt of all that hostility, so it might be that he had a wish to be greater than his brothers.
Whether or not the dream came first or the belief, God did give Joseph that dream and I believe there is evidence that Joseph believed God gave it to him and he believed it just might happen. A wish is so flimsy because it has nothing real to base it on. It strikes me that Joseph was able to keep believing God and what God had given him, the dream, because he knew God. There was something solid to base his belief of God on. The accounts that his Granddaddy, Abraham, told of being led by God from Ur to Canaan and about Sodom and Gomorrah and his uncle Lot and how he became a father at the age of 100 and Sarah, a mother, at the age of 90 gave facts that Joseph could see God working in.
Joseph needed a strong belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because his brothers sold him into slavery and while in Egypt was accused of rape and then imprisoned for 13 years before the fruition of that dream he was given when he was a teenager. Joseph hung in there and always gave his best, whether as a slave or a prisoner, and just kept trusting his God.
Belief is much more than a wish. Some people don't like to think that God created a hell for the devil and his angels and people who refuse to believe what He says about sin and His dear Son's payment for sin are ensured of being there forever might wish that since God is love that all will go to heaven. That is just wishful thinking because it has absolutely nothing to base it on except for a wish.
The Bible tells it like it is and you have the choice to believe it or not, but the consequences of unbelief are intact whether you believe or not.
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