“Honest men” don’t need a Savior!

But we said to him, “We are honest men.”
Genesis 42:31

Jacob’s sons were recounting to their father their communication with the number two ruler of Egypt, who, unbeknown to them at that point, was their brother, Joseph.  Years earlier, as you may remember, they had plotted to kill their brother but decided to sell him instead, leading their father to believe his beloved son, Joseph, had been killed by a wild animal.

When they faced Joseph in Egypt, who recognized them (but not they him), they insisted to Joseph that they were “honest men.”  Now as they filled their father in on what happened in Egypt, they told him how they had told the man in Egypt that they were “honest men.”

Ironic, isn’t it?  They told Joseph, who they sold, and then their father, who they lied to about what happened to Joseph, “We are honest men.”

Proverbs 20:6 says, “Most men will proclaim each his own goodness.”  And yet God tells us the truth about our fallen sinful hearts in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.”  And in Romans 3:10, “There is none righteous, no, not one.”  And again in Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

If we would be more biblical, we might ought not to think and speak “of ourselves more highly than we ought” (Romans 12:3).

Unless we know of our sinfulness, we have no knowledge of why we need a Savior.  “Honest men” don’t need a Savior!  Praise God that when we do acknowledge our sin, Jesus Christ is mighty to save those who trust in Him instead of their own imagined goodness.