Leading Questions
Leading Questions
Genesis 37:26-27
Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites…”
How has a Western society that’s been rooted in Judeo-Christian ethics, galvanized through reformations and renaissances and world wars, and purified through abolitionist bills and civil rights movements and great awakenings, come to the point where, now, current elections are being fought over whether women have the right to kill their babies and whether doctors, clinicians, and drug companies have the right to profit from the deaths?! Have we not learned anything from the bloodied pages of the past? Judah’s question to his brothers is exactly the sort of demonic rationale we hear ad nauseam today. Judah doesn’t care that Joseph’s life is God’s. It’s worthless to him. He just wants to figure out how he can profit from it, how he can exploit it, how he can make himself rich by it. “Forty shekels, anyone?—thirty-five?—thirty?”
Like so many in our world today, Judah was asking the wrong question. The question he should’ve asked is this: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?”