Genesis 37:31

They were guilty of cruel hatred both toward their brother and toward their father. They ask their father to examine the coat, to make sure it was Joseph's. Of course, in recognising it he assumed that a wild animal had killed and eaten his son. Apparently it did not occur to him to ask them if they found bones nearby or other pieces of clothing. A wild animal would not be so careful as to hide everything else and leave only a bloodstained coat.

His brothers avoided the telling of a plain lie, they only inferred it, and Jacob fell into their trap.

Jacob is only reaping what he had already sown. Thirty years before, Jacob had deceived his father with "the skins of the young goats." Now, after long years, his own sons deceive him with "a young goat." There may be long years between the sowing and the reaping, but at last the reaping time comes. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.

Esau's garment is called "fine clothing." As he was the elder, it may have been something very like Joseph's "coat of many colours." With fine clothing Jacob deceived his father; with fine clothing his sons deceived him. As he measured out, so it was measured back to him. God's government of His people works with great precision.

So when Joseph's brothers sell him into Egypt, they take his coat of many colours, kill a young goat and dip the garment into the blood. They show it to their father, who thinks a wild animal has killed his beloved son. In both these cases the deceivers used a young goat, not a lamb. We find goats' hair used the same way when Michal, Saul's daughter, tried to deceive her father. David had fled from him.

They dipped the favoured coat, the coat that the old father had put on Joseph, in blood. Then they sent it to their father with these words: "This we have found; please identify whether it is your son's robe or not." This is the language of Cain: "Am I my brother's keeper?" Cain was laying the burden of Abel's blood on the Lord, hinting that the Lord should have been Abel's keeper, since He had shown such respect to him and his offering. So these words of Joseph's brothers seem to lay the burden of Joseph's blood on the aged father. If he loved him as much as this coat seemed to say he did, he should have looked after him better than this blood seemed to say he had.

Do you remember that they stripped Jesus of His clothes? When Joseph's brothers stripped off his coat, they killed a little goat and dipped the coat in the blood... It was very, very bad to deceive their old father like that. Even so, God saw all those things, and did not forget. He says, "they do not consider that I remember all their evil." For more than twenty years they kept quiet about the goat's blood on the coat. Nobody knew about it — nobody but God.

How bad it is to try to cover up sin! God says, "be sure your sin will find you out." ... Now God has made a way to cover all the sins of those who confess them. There is no other way. Only the Lord Jesus' precious blood can cover people's sins.