Now therefore, when I come to your servant my father, and the lad is not with us, since his life is bound up in the lad’s life, it will happen, when he sees that the lad is not with us, that he will die. So your servants will bring down the gray hair of your servant our father with sorrow to the grave. For your servant became surety for the lad to my father, saying, “If I do not bring him back to you, then I shall bear the blame before my father forever.” Genesis 44:30–32 NKJV
Joseph’s intention in speaking harshly to his brothers, and demanding that they return with their youngest brother, was to draw their thoughts to the time more than twenty years before when, beside the pit, they had remained insensitive to his distress when he was begging them for mercy (Gen. 42:21). He also wanted to make them remember the grief of their elderly father when they had cruelly told him of Joseph’s death. And Joseph wants to see whether they are able now to understand the suffering of their young brother and of their father.
Well, Joseph succeeded in stirring his brothers’ hearts. How touching it is to hear Judah speaking of their aged father and their young brother, the son of his old age! What lessons this teaches us too! We should put ourselves in the other person’s place, understanding their joys and particularly their sorrows. Still more, we should enter in spirit into the Father’s thoughts of love for His Son, into His grief when He saw His beloved Son in the hands of wicked men, and when He heard His cry and could not reply to Him.
Finally, we should try to enter a little into the suffering of the Son when He was carrying the weight of our sins under divine judgment and when, in infinite distress of soul, He went through the experience of being forsaken by God for us. Are we not often sadly without feeling on these matters with which the Spirit tries to occupy us?