A Kairos Moment

This is a recap of Sunday’s message at First Baptist Fernandina Beach. If you missed it, you can listen to the full sermon on the Maximum Life+ app or at coderedtalk.com.

We’ve arrived at the final and most important section of our study through Genesis. Fourteen full chapters — roughly 25–30% of the entire book — are dedicated to the life of one man: Joseph.

John Phillips makes a striking observation about that. God used only three words to create the stars. Two in Hebrew, three in English: “and the stars.” Consider what that means — the sun alone releases more energy in one second than humanity has used in our entire history, and the universe is filled with such stars. Yet God gave their creation half a verse.

Joseph gets fourteen chapters.

Phillips concludes that God is more interested in making saints than He is in making stars. And if there’s any saint God was personally invested in making, it was Joseph.

There are two Greek words translated as “time” in the Bible. Chronos means a sequence of moments — the ticking of the clock. Kairos means a season of divine opportunity — a moment in history when God moves. When Jesus told Mary, “My time has not yet come,” He used the word kairos. It wasn’t a time on the clock. It was a moment ordained by heaven.

How do you know when you’re in a kairos moment? In Genesis 37, three things align — and they may be aligning in your life right now.

Joseph was the son of Rachel, Jacob’s beloved wife, and Jacob made his favoritism visible. He gave Joseph a multicolored tunic — a symbol of patriarchal authority. It wasn’t Joseph’s fault that he was favored. It wasn’t his fault that he was given the coat. But it was his fault that he wore it.

Solomon warns us: “Wrath is cruel, anger is overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?” (Proverbs 27:4). Anger is dangerous, but it’s short-lived — it cools. Jealousy doesn’t. Jealousy grows. It becomes a lens through which one sees the world. It is cold, calculated, and sustained — it compares, fixates, and plots.

The brothers hated Joseph. They couldn’t even speak peacefully to him. Providential favor had arrived — but it came wrapped in opposition.

If God is giving you increased responsibility, internal clarity about your calling, or a shift from obscurity to prominence, pay attention. You may be stepping into a kairos moment.

Joseph had two revelatory dreams. In the first, his brothers’ sheaves bowed to his. In the second, the sun, moon, and eleven stars bowed before him. Both pointed to the same reality: God was going to place Joseph in a position of authority.

The brothers interpreted the dreams immediately and correctly. The meaning was unmistakable, and it infuriated them. But here’s what they missed — this wasn’t Joseph’s ambition speaking. It was God’s agenda being revealed.

I wonder if God has spoken a word over your life. Maybe through a teacher, a mentor, an older saint at church who said something you’ve never forgotten. God tends to speak to the church through the church. And sometimes we miss it because we weren’t there that day.

Jacob sent Joseph to check on his brothers near Shechem — a journey of nearly sixty miles. When Joseph arrived, the brothers had moved to Dothan, an even more remote location. A stranger pointed the way. Every one of these “coincidences” was the invisible fingerprint of God.

Then comes one of the most chilling lines in Scripture: “They saw him from afar.” How did they recognize him at a distance? The coat. That multicolored tunic, visible across the open terrain, marked him like a target. The very symbol of his father’s love became the thing that identified him for destruction.

“Here comes this dreamer,” they sneered — literally in Hebrew, “the master of dreams.” They mocked the very thing God gave him. “Let’s kill him,” they said, “and we will see what will become of his dreams.” Do you hear the arrogance? They thought they could murder the man and thereby murder God’s plan. They thought a pit in the ground could cancel a prophecy from heaven.

The Hebrew word for “stripped” means to skin an animal. They didn’t just remove his coat — they tore his identity from his body. The word “threw” is not generic; it’s the term for dumping a dead body into a grave. And then the text gives us five devastating words:
“Then they sat down to eat.”

Their seventeen-year-old brother was screaming in a hole in the ground — Genesis 42:21 later reveals he was begging them — and they spread out a meal. The casualness of their cruelty is staggering.

Judah proposed selling him instead of killing him. But listen to his reasoning: “What profit is it if we kill our brother?”Profit. Judah wasn’t moved by conscience; he was motivated by commerce. They sold their own brother for twenty shekels of silver — the price of a slave.

And yet, while Jacob wept and the brothers lied, God was already at work. Joseph landed exactly where he needed to be. The persecution was real, but Providence was never absent, and the prophecy was still unfolding exactly as God promised.

Here’s where the story gets personal.

Joseph was being turned — involuntarily — into the savior of one human family. But centuries later, another came to His own, and His own received Him not. Another was sold for silver. Another was stripped naked. Another cried out in the dark.

That was Jesus. And He came voluntarily to be the Savior of us all.

The pit Jesus fell into was vastly deeper. His cry was vastly greater. His sense of abandonment went infinitely beyond anything Joseph experienced. On the cross, Jesus was not merely physically naked — He was stripped of His Father’s love, punished in our place for our sin.

Here is the One who lost the Father’s coat so you can be assured you have it. Here is the One who lost the Father’s love — paying our penalty — so we could know, in spite of our imperfect lives, that God loves us.

Christianity is the only religion that even claims God has suffered — that God has gone into the pit, that God is there in the dark beside you. He knows what it is like.

Where is the place God has sovereignly positioned you for such a time as this? Does it align with words spoken over your life? Are you feeling the heat of persecution?

If so, you’re in good company. Joseph has been there. And by the way — Jesus has been there, too.