The third thing solitude did for these guilty brothers of Joseph's was to cause them to reason spiritually. They were not godly men and probably not even converted men before the events of these chapters. They did not reason spiritually. They thought as most worldly people do, mainly that this is a mechanical world and God does not exist, or at least that He does not intervene here. It is such a world where it is every man for himself. They say, “Who is to say that I’ve sinned? Who has the right to hold me to an accounting?” Then God intervened and suddenly the brothers changed their tune.
They imagined that they were in an impersonal and immoral universe, but now, with their sin before them, they realize that the universe is moral after all because it is God's universe, and every sin must and will have a reckoning.
