When I was a little boy, the story of Joseph scared me, but good. His brothers stuck him in a hole and sold him as a slave, and then he was thrown into jail for something that he didn’t do. What if it happened to me?
R.J. Rushdoony touched upon a key element in the story of Joseph, in this essay reprinted first in 2007.
https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/the-vindication-of-joseph
It’s easy to waste a lot of your life, he warned, brooding over past injustices and vainly trying to win back what you’ve lost. Joseph never did get compensated for the injustices he’d suffered. He was too busy saving Egypt. “Trust in God’s ultimate and unswerving justice,” Rushdoony wrote. It’s the only real justice there is.
But God pity us! We’ve made a whole way of life out of obsessing over past injustices, some indeed long past, and demanding…um… “reparations.” Doesn’t seem to matter how long past, or who was actually affected.
Happiness and peace of mind–the world knows how to avoid attaining it.