Thank you. Welcome to Truth for Life where today we begin a new series titled The Hand of God.

It's a study of the life of Joseph, as recorded in the book of Genesis.

If you ever wonder if your past is too messy to be forgiven, or you've thought maybe you weren't good enough to be used by God?

I think you'll find a great deal of encouragement in this dramatic Old Testament narrative.

Alistair Begg kicks the series off today by looking at the early stages of Joseph's life, his heritage, and his childhood experiences.

Let's take our Bibles and turn to the first book of the Bible, to the book of Genesis.

Now, before we look together at what is to be a whole new

series on the life of Joseph, then let us pause for a moment in prayer. Our gracious God and

our Father, we sense that Joseph would have been very happy with the words of the song that has just been sung,

that somehow in the midst of his days he had come to you in this very pressing and personal way

to say, Father, I offer my life to you, my days to you, all that I am to you. And we pray that as we begin to study his life today,

that you will use, as Paul says, what was written of old for our encouragement and for our

endurance, and that the lessons of the patriarchs may fuel our praise and channel our direction, quicken our zeal, correct our wanderings,

and set us in the very center of your choicest blessing. Free us then from every unhelpful

distraction. Help us to hear not the voice of a man, but your voice,

through your word, to the lives of those whom you have made. For we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

For those of you who enjoy stories, and I love stories, we are at the threshold of a classic,

indeed an epic, a saga. This story is as good a story as any that unfolds for us in the whole of the Old Testament record.

The biography of Joseph covers more space than any space that is given to any of the other heroes in the book of Genesis,

more than to Adam or to Noah or even to Abraham,

and actually more than is given to his father Jacob.

Even those of us who have only a scanty knowledge of the Old Testament will probably know of Joseph. And the reason we will know of Joseph is the same way that we know of Jonah because of the

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