Part 1 of a series: Recognizing the Sovereign Grace of God in a Broken Family (Genesis 37–45)

Here’s an odd question to sit with for a moment: what have you inherited from your family that you never chose, and never noticed you were carrying?

Not the obvious things — not eye color or a last name. The quieter inheritances. A way of avoiding conflict. A habit of favoring one child’s approval over another’s. A reflex to lie small lies to keep the peace. 

We tend to assume that once we belong to God, these things get sorted out automatically — that being part of a “covenant family,” a family that knows and follows God, means the dysfunction stops with us.

Genesis suggests otherwise, and it does it in a strikingly deliberate way.

A pattern, repeated on purpose

Read through Genesis and you’ll notice the same sin resurfacing across four generations, almost line for line:

– Abraham lies to Pharaoh, claiming Sarah is only his sister (Genesis 12).

– Isaac does the exact same thing with Rebekah in Gerar (Genesis 26).

– Jacob deceives his own father, dressed in his brother’s clothes and animal skins, to steal a blessing (Genesis 27).

– Jacob’s sons deceive him — using a bloodied coat to convince their father that Joseph is dead (Genesis 37).

This isn’t coincidence, and it isn’t sloppy storytelling. The author is showing us a family passing down deception like an heirloom. Isaac and Rebekah’s favoritism splits Esau and Jacob apart. A generation later, Jacob’s favoritism toward Joseph does the same thing to his older sons — deep enough that they conspire to kill their own brother.

Here’s what’s easy to miss: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob each build an altar somewhere in their story — a physical marker of worship, of wrestling with God, of choosing to orient their lives around him. 

Scripture never records Jacob’s sons building one. The faith didn’t transfer. The favoritism did.

What we actually hand down

By the time we reach Jacob in his old age, he’s safe, comfortable, and no longer in crisis. And in that comfort, his attention narrows to what he loves most — his favorite wife’s memory, and her son. What does he pass to that son? Not a renewed vision of God’s promise. Not the story of wrestling with God at the Jabbok. A coat.

It’s worth asking ourselves the same question Genesis is quietly asking here: when life is calm and nothing is in crisis, what actually holds our attention? Is it God’s promises for our family, or is it the visible, material things we can hand our children — a house, a name, a comfortable life? Because whatever holds our attention is very often what we end up transmitting, whether we mean to or not.

The uncomfortable comparison

One more detail in this narrative stings a little. Look at who else shows up in Joseph’s story: the Ishmaelite traders who carry him to Egypt end up, in effect, saving his life. Potiphar, an Egyptian official, treats him well. The prison warden trusts him. Pharaoh himself is portrayed as wise and gracious. Genesis seems to go out of its way to make the surrounding, non-covenant world look more functional than Abraham’s own household.

That’s not an accident either. It’s a check against a very natural but false assumption — that God chose this family, and by extension chooses us, because we’re somehow better, more loving, more together than everyone else. 

We aren’t. Scripture is blunt about this: God chooses “the foolish,” “the weak” — not the impressive. If our families sometimes look messier than the world around us, that’s not evidence God has abandoned the plan. It’s the plan working on people who need it.

So what do we do with this?

Two things worth sitting with:

First, take an honest inventory. Not to spiral in guilt, but to notice. What have you inherited that you didn’t choose — and are you now, without meaning to, handing it forward?

Second, ask your family a hard question, if your heart can bear it. What do you most want to pass on to your children — a comfortable life, or a lived testimony of trusting God through hardship? And harder still: what do they say they’ve actually learned from watching you? Not what you intended to teach — but what actually landed.

That question alone can reorient a lot of prayer.

The rest of this story — how God works with a family that’s already this compromised — is where the real hope comes in. That’s where we’re headed next: into the life of the very son wearing that coat, and what it meant that God stayed with him anyway.

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Next in this series: “Forgotten but Fruitful — How Joseph Flourished Without Being Rescued.“

This article is a translated summary of a sermon preached in the Chinese Service. You can watch the full sermon here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UC-QRTbvoI