Well, we’re going to begin tonight our series of studies in the life of Joseph. I’ve entitled the series Severe Mercy, and I’ll explain that in a moment, but we’re going to base our study tonight just on one verse because we’re going to just do an overview of Joseph and make the main point, and that is that God works all things together for good, even the bad in the life of His people. There is such a thing as severe mercy. So, here’s what Joseph says in summary of all that took place in his life here in Genesis 50 and verse 20.
But, as for you, speaking to his brothers who had sold him into slavery and who had triggered a chain of events that were tragic and traumatic in his life, but ultimately led to the triumph of God’s providence and sovereignty, he says to them, but is for you. You meant evil against me. But God meant it for good in order to bring it about as it is this day to save many people alive.
In the summer of 2000, a friend of myself and myself traveled to Orlando, Florida, to go to a leg and ear conference under the auspices of R.C Sproul. We were treated to some of the best preaching in the country under John Piper and Sinclair Ferguson and Al Mohler. But, for me, probably one of the most striking sessions of all was a session we enjoyed with Joni Eareckson Tada. You know something of her story. She’s a quadriplegic. She’s been in a wheelchair almost 40 years now. She was swimming in the Chesapeake Bay, dove off a pontoon and broke her neck. She related her story and told of that tragedy and the trauma that it was in her life and how in those early days, as she lay on the bed face down in the hospital, wondering where her life was going from this point, she was mindful of that scene in John 5, the Pool of Bethesda, the man who always wanted to get done but could never get done. Others got done before him and ultimately Jesus passes by and heals him.
As she thought about that, she trusted that the Lord wouldn’t pass her by. She says if you read anything of her story, she would often sing, lying in her bed in the hospital, “Passed Me Not Oh Gentle Savior.” She didn’t want to be passed by. She hoped for healing. She hoped that she would wake up from this nightmare and things would be different.
But, she told us of the ministry that God had given her. She told us that she thanked God for her chair. She has an international ministry called Wheels to the World. She has spoken to ambassadors, political figures across countries and continents. She has distributed tens if not hundreds of thousands of wheelchairs to people in poor and impoverished countries, and God has used her in a marvelous way. She relates how many years later on a trip to Israel, she was wheeled right up to the iron rod fences that cordoned off the Pool of Bethesda, and she thought back to how she had often prayed for healing and for God to change her circumstances. But, as she wept there, she didn’t weep in regret. She wept in thankfulness for this, as she said to us, severe mercy that God had trusted her with and God had brought great glory to himself and worked all things together for good.
As we left that session, I was struck by her authenticity. I was struck by her faith. I was struck by her tenderness. I was struck by her honesty. She didn’t say it was easy. She said many a day it was a struggle, but she had come to embrace this severe mercy. As I left that session, I was grabbed by that phrase severe mercy. What a thought, what a truth that there’s such a thing as a good bad. There’s such a thing as a good bad. From the vantage point of her wheelchair, Joni wanted those at the conference to know that the bad we experience can be redeemed by God for good. As we’ve said, Joni travels throughout the world bringing the gospel to dark places. Today, she thanks God for her chair. Here is a woman at peace within the ways and the walls of a sovereign God who has ministered to her and who continues to minister through her by means of a severe mercy.
Get this phrase in your head, severe mercy, and that’s my question to you tonight. As we begin this series in the life of Joseph, do you believe that there’s such a thing as a severe mercy? Joni challenges us to get to a place where we can trust God and thank God for his strokes, for those difficulties, for those troubles that he either places in or sends our way. Can we get to a place where we thank God for bringing us to a place in life where there is no healing and where there is no help because it’s there and it’s then that we learn most clearly and most convincingly that all things including the bad things can work together for good? Let me qualify that verse so familiar to so many of us. It’s not that the bad things are good, but it is that in the hands of a sovereign God, they serve good ends and they lead to good places and they add up to good experiences.
The man or the woman who puts their trust in God can make sense of the senseless, can even gain in pain because they believe in severe mercy. Joni Erickson Tada later said God permits that which he hates to achieve that which he loves. That’s a powerful statement. Wrung out of her bitter experience, God permits what he hates to achieve that which he loves. Listen to these words by Martin Luther. These are rather striking and telling words. Here’s what he says. “There is so much blindness in a sinner that he misuses what is given to him for his good, thus causing his own ruin. On the other hand, there is so much light in a righteous and religious man that he uses for his good, that which is given to him for ill.”
You see what he’s saying? He’s saying this, that the unsaved are so blind and distrusting of God that they cannot even acknowledge his kindness and love in the good things of life, but the saved have so much light and insight that they see intended good even in the darkest of days. The unsaved see no good in the good, while the saved see plenty of good even in the bad.
That’s what Joseph is going to teach us. The saved believe in severe mercy, that there can be an upside to down. In fact, that’s the title of the message tonight, the Upside of Down. Maybe you’re upside down tonight in so many ways physically, financially, circumstantially, but there is an upside to down, and we’re going to see this as we study the life of Joseph. We’re going to come to believe in such a thing and such a truth as severe mercy. So, tonight, I want to begin this character study, but let me say this by way of qualification. Maybe you’ll be in a conversation this week and talk about the service and invite some friend and you’ll maybe say something like, “You’ve got to come to Kindred next Wednesday. The pastor just started a character in the life of Joseph.”
You wouldn’t have said anything wrong, but you wouldn’t have said the full truth because in all reality, this isn’t really a character study of Joseph. This is a character study of a sovereign God who can be trusted, as Joseph will show us, a God who can be trusted in the midst of mind-numbing, heart-wrenching suffering, the Jew in I can trust his heart even when we cannot trace his hand. Hopefully, you got the outline tonight. Two simple points that we’ll just hopefully build a doorway into the life of this colossal, biblical character who will simply speak into our lives about a great and a sovereign God who works all things, even the bad things, to good ends.
Want us to look first of all at the man and then we’re going to look at the plan. Want to wrap up here for about 8:00. Let’s look at the man. Joseph is a colossal biblical figure. He’s a dominant personality in the Book of Genesis. If you look at the Book of Genesis proportionately, he occupies more space in Genesis than Adam, Noah, Abraham and even his own father Jacob. He is a very significant figure. He is a colossal biblical character, and I want us to look at him from a number of angles, three things as quickly as possible. I want us to place him historically, I want us to trace him typologically, and I want us to face him personally.
Let’s place him historically. The Book of Genesis is an important book historically. You know that it’s a book of beginnings. History begins in the Book of Genesis. God’s work among man begins in the Book of Genesis. The first promise of the coming Messiah in the Book of Genesis. This is a book of weighty historical significance and, in fact, in the sweep of its chapters, it covers a huge chunk of world history. I don’t know if you’ve ever grasped this before, but the sweep of the Book of Genesis covers more time than the rest of the Bible put together. This is a very historically significant book, and when we come into the story of Joseph in chapter 37, we’ll begin that next week, we’re about 1,900 years before Christ and we’re about 300 years before Moses.
What we want to do is place this man historically within the flow of this book and the unfolding of God’s purposes. His story takes place in the second half of the book, Genesis 12 through 50, and we’ve got to view his life against backdrop of that significant passage, and that passage begins with the call of Abraham out of the Ur of the Chaldees, the beginning of the people of God and the nation of Israel. Back in Genesis chapter 12 and verses one through three, we might want to turn there and read it. Here’s what we find.
“Now, the Lord has said to Abraham, get out of your country from your family, from your father’s eyes to a land that I will show you and I’ll make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. I will curse him who curses you and then you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Keep that in mind.”
Similar thought in Genesis chapter 13 and verse 16. God says to Abraham again, “I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants could also be numbered.”
The story of Joseph, if we’re going to place it in terms of its historical significance, is part of this unfolding promise to Abraham. God is keeping covenant when we get to Joseph. God has been faithful to Abraham, he’s been faithful to Isaac, and he’s about to be faithful to Jacob and his descendants, the 12 sons of Jacob that will ultimately be the seed pod for the 12 tribes of the nation of Israel. We know from the story, that a great famine happens across the earth and Jacob’s family comes to the edge of starvation. They find themselves in dire straits. So, the significance of Joseph’s story is that we learn how God keeps his promise to Abraham and continues to grow the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, because the story of Joseph is the bridge into the book of Exodus.
We’re going to learn how a small nomadic people come to possess one of the richest provinces in Egypt for generations and grow almost to the size of 2 million people, and ultimately in God’s time, will exodus out of that country and then go and attempt the conquest of the land of Canaan. That’s the significance of Joseph. You see it in his words to his brothers back in Genesis chapter 45 in verses five through seven. We might want to read it and again, I think this is the place him historically.
Joseph says of his brothers, they have now been found out, that they’re fearful that Joseph’s going to repay them for their evil deed. “Do not therefore be grieved,” verse five, chapter 45, “or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. For these two years, the famine has been in the land and there are still five years in which there will be nothing, neither plowing nor harvesting, and God sent me before you to preserve what a posterity for you and the earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”
That’s how God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham. The numbers will increase as they settle down into the land of Egypt. That’s to place Joseph historically. That’s the macro level. If I could just place him historically on the micro level, if you look at his life, and we will across many chapters in the Book of Genesis, there’s really three chapters, three stanzas to the life of Joseph. I’ll quickly go through them for you. The first section would really be from birth to age 17, takes you from chapter 30 to chapter 37. During this time, his mother will die, the family will go through transition. Because of Jacob’s love for Joseph’s mother, there’s a certain favoritism towards this young son along with Benjamin, which starts to percolate and creates some low-level antagonism that brews within the family that will ultimately lead to the event in chapter 37 where his brothers will sell him into slavery. That’s the first section, birth to 17.
Then, he is sold into slavery, chapters 37 through 42. That’s from age 17 to 30 years. He comes to par in Egypt at the age of 17 … or 30, but for 13 years he will go through experiences of enslavement, unfair accusation and imprisonment, and we will see him blossom. We will see him survive and thrive in withering circumstances, and he’ll be our real challenge to us.
Then, the last stanza or chapter of his life is from 30 to his death. That stretches for about four score years, 80 years, and those are the years of prosperity where he gets to take care of his father, sees his own children grow up and things are good. Then, Joseph dies, and we read in Exodus chapter one verse eight, I think it is, that a Pharaoh comes to par that what? That knew not Joseph, and we begin to pick up the story of the Exodus.
So, we want to place him historically, put him into his biblical contact. Secondly, we want to trace him typologically. Some see in the story of Joseph a type of Christ, and they draw some parallels between his life and the things that he went through to Jesus’ life and Jesus’ experience, and there may be some merit to that. One of the most intriguing verses in the Bible is what? Luke 24 and verse 27, Jesus chastises the two on the road to Emmaus. They haven’t made sense of his death and he says, Hey, do you not know what the prophets said about the Messiah, his death, the suffering servant of Isaiah, the one whose hands and feet would be pierced in the Psalms? Come on guys, you’re slow of heart to believe. Then, what do we read? Beginning with Moses and the prophets, he went on to tell him all the things concerned himself.
Who wrote the Book of Genesis? Moses. He wrote the Pentateuch. So, we know that Christ is to be found in Moses’ writings, and some would argue Christ is to be found in the story of Joseph, and that may well be the case. I’ll qualify it, but somebody like an A.W. Pink, who’s an old but a very respected writer. If you read his book on Genesis called “Gleanings in Genesis,” he draws and traces 101 parallels in 68 pages in his book on the life of Joseph and the life of Jesus. The basic thesis is that, like Joseph, Christ was loved by his father, rejected by his brethren, put into humility and humiliation, but comes out of that and is exalted and reigns, and you’ve got this parallel of Christ, loved by the Father comes unto his own, his own receive him not. We see our Lord Jesus Christ subjected to humiliation and rejection, the cross. But, through that trauma, through that terror, he’s exalted and is made a prince and a savior over his people.
Franz Delitzsch, the great Old Testament commentator, says of this thesis that Joseph is a type of the pathway of Christ, because as with Christ, from lowliness to exaltation, from slavery to liberty, from suffering to glory. Here’s what I’ll say about that. That’s possible. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say Joseph is a type of Christ for a couple of reasons. Nowhere in the New Testament is he said to be a type. In fact, interestingly, although he occupies more space than Moses and Abraham in the book of … or, sorry, Moses and Abraham in the Bible, he’s hardly talked about in the New Testament. There’s only four mentions of him. Christ doesn’t speak of him or draw any parallel between himself and Joseph, and I’m always hesitant to find Christ in places that the New Testament doesn’t point me to. I’m not going to take you into a theological debate, but there’s a debate about were Christ is to be found in the Old Testament, and I am hesitant to find him where the New Testament doesn’t tell me he’s to be found.
I think we’ve got to be careful. There’s a form of teaching called typology that I think reads as much into the Bible as it reads out of the Bible. I grew up under it. Many Irish Baptist pastors were great at typological preaching, and they could find Christ in every nook and cranny of the Solomon’s Temple. They found the four Gospels and the four rings and the Ark of the Covenant. I used to sit there and go, “Where do you guys find this stuff?” It reminded me of an old poem that said wonderful things in the Bible we see most of them put there by you and by me, and we have got to be careful with that.
So, I’d step back and say if we’re to trace him typologically, if Joseph isn’t a true type, and I’m not sure that he is, since I have no New Testament justification for that, he’s certainly an outline of Christ and he’s certainly an example of godliness ultimately embodied in Christ, because what do we read in Romans 14 and we read in First Corinthians chapter 10, isn’t it? That these things were written for our learning and the Old Testament saints are there for our example.
One last thought, and we’ll move on to the plan, but I want you to see the thought here of facing him personally. We have placed him historically. We’ve traced him typologically. What about facing him personally? For some months now, we’re going to walk in the company of Joseph, and I think here’s a life pregnant with lessons. I just referred to Romans chapter 15 and verse four. Romans 15 and verse four, we are reminded that these Old Testament saints have something to say to us. Paul says this, “For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” In First Corinthians chapter 10 and verse 11, I believe it is, we find this encouragement to again study the life of men like Joseph. Now, all these things happened to them as examples, that they were written for our admonishment, upon whom the ends of the ages have come.
So, we want Joseph to speak to us. We want to get to know him personally. We want to allow him to meddle in our thinking and in our lives because his life is rich in faith and pregnant with example. Here’s a young man who lost his mother in childhood. Here’s a young man who had to wrestle with rejection and envy in his family. Here’s a young man where life brought him down. Here’s a young man who had to resist illicit sexual advances. Here’s a young man who had to wrestle with executive responsibility. Here’s a man who had to deal with forgiving those who had harmed him. Here’s a man who had to learn to trust God in the most difficult of circumstances. It’s a great life to look into. Adversity did not sour him, and prosperity did not spoil him. Surely, Joseph’s worth studying.
Montgomery Boice said that Joseph was a man for all seasons. Joseph was a perfect candidate for anger, right? Perfect candidate for hopelessness, a perfect candidate for self-pity. But, he stays strong, he stays sane, and he stays sweet. Across 110 years of his life, he possessed and he expressed a heart that was fixed on God. That’s what the psalmist says of himself in Psalm 112 and verse seven through eight. Bottom line here is a faith that overcomes the world. I’m sure many of you have got challenges. You are climbing an ever-increasing hill. You’re upside down, but Joseph wants to remind you there’s an upside to down, that if your circumstances find you in God, you can find God in your circumstances and you don’t have to become a victim. You don’t have to wallow in self-pity. You can triumph in the midst of tragedy. Your faith can overcome the world.
Joseph was not sinless, right? But, it’s interesting, the text in no explicit manner anywhere in his life, ever apportions any major wrong to Joseph’s life. We know that doesn’t mean he was sinless, but I think it hints at the fact here is an exemplary Christian or an exemplary believer whose life bears is looking into. Someone said that about Hudson Taylor. His was a life that bore looking into, and it’s the same with Joseph.
Thomas Edison was 67 years old at the pinnacle of his career when his laboratory facility caught fire. His son shouted for his father not knowing if he was being engulfed in the flames or trapped inside the laboratory. But, as soon as he cried, his father came running toward him shouting, “Son, go get mother and bring her here. She’ll never see another fire quite like this one.” It is said that as the fire engulfed his laboratory, he leant up against the table and fell asleep. The next morning, he gathered his workers together. He said this, “We’re starting over. This time, we’re going to make it better than before. We’re going to build it from scratch and do it right.”
As he sifted through the ashes of his destroyed office, Edison found a picture of himself. Frayed, charred round the edges, but the image was still intact. He picked it up, ran towards his son, showed him it, and then he said this, “See, the fire never touched me.”
I think we could write that over the life of Joseph. As his life burns down around him, remember 17, carted off into slavery, imprisonment, accusation, rejection, but the Bible sets before us the example of a young man who is more than a conqueror, who doesn’t allow the fire to touch him. In adversity, he’s not soured in prosperity, he’s not spoiled.
Let me give you a couple of things to think about, and this will really be what we’ll develop throughout the series. But, here’s three thoughts just to think about in answering the how, how does he do that? What contributed to his endurance? I think, number one, he had the promise of God behind him. Over in Psalm 105 and verse 17 through 19, here’s what we read. Psalm 105, 17 through 19, we’re given this insight into the life of Joseph. “Speaking of God, he sent them on before them, Joseph who was sold as a slave, they hurt his feet with fetters. He was laid in arms until the time that his word came to pass. The word of the Lord tested him.”
I think that’s going back to the word that God gave him, the dream that God gave him early on, that his brothers would bow down to him. God had given him a word. God had given him a promise. God had outlined a future, and Joseph held onto it. He did believe God when everything conspired to cause him to disbelieve God. There was the promise of God behind him. There was the presence of God beside him.
In Acts chapter seven, Acts chapter seven and verse nine through 10, here’s what we read again of Joseph. “And the patriarchs becoming envious sold Joseph into Egypt, but God was with him and delivered him out of all his troubles and gave him favor and wisdom in the presence of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house. He had the promise of God behind him. He had the presence of God beside him, and he had the providence of God before him.”
We read that in Genesis 50, verse 20. He comes to see that what they meant for evil, God meant for good, that God sent him ahead of them. The go-ahead God, a sovereign God had cut a path for Joseph from the pit through the prison and to the palace. I think elements of that, in increasing degrees, became apparent to him. He had the promise of God behind him, the presence of God beside him, the providence of God before and all around him. That’ll make a survivor out of you. So, we see this man historically, typologically and personally.
Let’s move on to the plan for the last 10 minutes or so. We’ve touched on the plan, right? It comes out of that whole historical placement of Joseph. He’s part of God’s unfolding purposes towards Israel and God’s promise towards Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In the story of Joseph, God moves the chains up the field in relation to redemptive history. The amazing thing is it all stems indirectly from the terrible events of Joseph’s life. We read it a few minutes ago in Genesis 45, five through eight, when his brothers eventually get down there and Joseph eventually tells them who he is, and they are shaking in their boots thinking that you know what they’re going to get, what’s coming to them. He tells them, “Don’t be grieved, don’t be angry. God sent me ahead to preserve the posterity of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
That’s the plan. The plan is to keep covenant with Abraham and his descendants. The amazing thing about this plan is that it incorporates Joseph’s loss, Joseph’s tragedy, all the things he went through. Let’s think for a few moments of the dark threads that God wove into the tapestry of his life, and maybe right now, God is weaving some dark threads into your life. It’s not all sunshine. Your life’s not what it once was. Things are being taken away, things are being jumbled up, things are being messed around with. But, if you look at his life, God took the thread of rejection. That first stanza, that first chapter, he gets to age 17, his brothers have had enough. We’ll look at that next week. Envy’s a terrible thing. Jealousy is a terrible thing, and they sell their brother into slavery. They even thought about murdering him, their jealousy was so strong, but one of the brothers talked him out of it. We have this thread of rejection How heart-wrenching must that have been?
Joseph gets to Egypt and he’s sold into the house of Potiphar. Things are looking up a little bit until Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him. He refuses and she tells a tissue of lies about him. God weaves in the strand of defamation and deceit. Again, his life takes another downward turn, and he’s thrown into jail. The amazing thing is in the providence of God, the front door to that prison is the back door into the palace, but we’ll see that in a moment. When he’s there, he meets the butler and the baker and he tells them his story. These are officials within the Egyptian government. His hope is if they get released, which was their hope, that maybe they could bring some justice to his life.
The butler is released, but what do we read? We read that he forgets Joseph, and for two more years, Joseph languishes in prison. We’ll look at that, and the timing of God and the providence of God in the events of life. The interesting thing is, as he languishes there for two more years, God is preparing a propitious moment for Joseph to appear in the court of Pharaoh. If he had actually got out two years early, he’d just gone home. But two years later, there’s a dream. There’s events that God has put together, sovereignly and mysteriously and marvelously. But, in the middle of all of that, you have this thread of rejection, this strand of defamation and this yarn of inattention.
They’re very dark threads, but God uses them and weaves them into this wonderful tapestry. You see that God uses those horrible events in the life of Joseph, and Joseph reminds us in the middle of all of that, and his life challenges us to think through that you and I need to be very careful about making any immediate evaluations of our situation because they cannot always be accurate. Imagine him, at the bottom of the pit. Imagine him in the caravan down to Egypt. Imag ine him in Potiphar’s house. Imagine him in the prison, rejected, lied to, lied about, forgotten. At any moment, he could have tried to put it all together and make some sense of what was going on. From the human level, it would’ve all been very dark and foreboding and discouraging.
But, we’re learning that God had a plan for this man, and God would take him from the pit and to the prison to get him to the palace, and God would weave all those dark threads into his life. We’re reminded not to make any immediate evaluations of our situation, that God often permits that which he hates to accomplish, that which he loves in our lives, that this is all severe mercy, that all things are working together for good, even the bad things that are not good in themselves, but God will use them to good ends. That’s why we’ve not got to judge the Lord by feeble sense. Let’s hold our judgments in reserve and trust God’s wisdom in our confusion and trust God’s love in the midst of our despair.
What he was later to see by sight, I believe Joseph held onto by faith throughout his experience. Remember, he writes this at the end of his life, and looking back, he says, what you meant for evil, God meant for good. It was very clear, then. You could actually see it. He could literally put it together, but I don’t think he could put it together as he was going through the experience, and what he didn’t see by sight, he grasped by faith, and he doesn’t charge God with wrong. We don’t see him swallowed up in self-pity. We see him persevering by faith and trusting God in the midst of the most despairing and difficult of circumstances because, compared to God’s perspective, our perspective is the blink of an eye.
We’ve got to be careful. In fact, some time ago, we treated our youngest daughter Beth to a 16th birthday party. It was a surprise party. June had done a lot of work to get her friends all set up to come to the house. So, we had decided it was my job to get her out of the house so things could get set up and her friends could arrive. So, I can attract her into saying, “Hey, come on Dawn. I’ve got to go down to Best Buy and get something.” So, we went down to Best Buy, and I basically went up and down every aisle in the shop and by this stage she was like, “Come on dad, I want to get home.” Like all high schoolers, there’s a ton of homework, and she had things she wanted to get done and other things she wanted to get on with, and we get out of the Best Buy. She sensed a bit of relief.
Get into the car and I said, “You know what, I think we need to get the car washed.” So, I took her around to the car wash, and by that stage, she was getting a little hot under the collar, as all girls can get, she got rather flustered and pretty emotional. It went on for about an hour and a half or more, to be honest about it. She really got quite emotional and got pretty teary and says, “Come on dad. I got to get home.” Beth can be a little bit like that. So we got her, got her .. I said, okay. Got her up home.
To be honest about it, I realized everybody was in the house. She was red eyed and had been crying a little bit. I said, “You know what? You need to clean yourself up before you go into the house.” She cleaned herself up, went into the house and was mobbed by our friends and was embarrassed, looked at me like, “Dad, I thought you were the worst, but you’re the best,” and all of that, which was a lot of fun. But, you know what? Later on that night or the next day, I started to reflect and I said, “You know what? How like Beth can I be? How like Beth can you be?” We can so easily become petulant children fighting God’s good and surprising providences and purposes in our life. Beth didn’t know what I was up to. She thought, “This is a waste of my time. This is not what I would plan. This is not what I want. Come on, dad, get with the program.”
All the time she doesn’t realize that mom and dad has devised something for her enjoyment, for her good, in an expression of our love towards her. I think that that is a parting and closing challenge that comes out of the life of Joseph. The life of Joseph, we find a sovereign God, a God who acts providentially and works all things together for good. That God without error and without effort graciously oversees and overrules all living things as manifest in the life of Joseph, even to the degree that he both rules and overrules the evil acts of man. That as they act, he acts. He super intends his will in the free expression of their will, even when it’s in violation of his moral law. God is not the author of their sin, but in the sovereignty and mystery of his providence and concurrence and sovereignty, he’s able to work all things together, even the bad things that are not good things in themselves towards good ends.
That is our Father, and God calls us not to victimization or fatalism, but the faith in his character and promises. We must believe the fact and rest in the truth that everything that comes into our lives, even the evil and even the suffering. Listen to this little phrase, it’s in Randy Alcorn’s book, is “Father-Filtered.” It’s that a beautiful little phrase? God doesn’t want any one of us becoming party to victimization or fatalism. There’s nothing fatalistic about life. God out of a heart of love for you, out of a desire to glorify himself, is up to something in your life that you perhaps in a given moment can’t grasp, but where you cannot trace his hand, you’ve got to trust his heart. God was not diminished by Joseph’s suffering because he acts sovereignly and righteously, incorporating the free will actions of man who act against his moral law, but in a sovereign way and a mysterious fashion.
He weaves their will into his will without validating theirs or corrupting his, and he weaves it all together, all those dark strands. God is not diminished by our suffering, and if we look to him and trust him in the midst of all, we don’t need to be diminished by his purposes or our suffering. We need to express a willingness to trust him. We need to give him the benefit of the doubt in our confusion. We need to hold on to hope.
C.S. Lewis, it’s in Randy Alcorn’s book, lost his wife to cancer. Her name was Joy. He wrote to a friend these words, “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering, however, how painful the best will turn out to be.” That’s a powerful statement. God’s best for you may be painful, very painful, but in the end, God does all things well.
I was talking to our brother and sister, Carl and Liz, just recently over lunch. They lost their daughter to cancer at age 48, I think. They watched her fight with that for many years and lost her. Over lunch, June and I just asked him, I asked him, how did you get through that? And Carl said to me two things. He says, “I think we always need to live with the expectation that we are going to die, maybe sooner than we think, and that’s just a part of life and we need to be more realistic about that.” But, he says secondly, “God does all things well.”
Here’s a man who was willing to trust God in a painful situation. God was still working out his perfect pleasure and purpose for himself and for us.
Let’s pray. Lord, we come to you tonight. We pray that you will cement the great lessons of Joseph’s life to us, and as we begin this journey with him, Lord, may we be confronted by him personally, challenged by him individually. Lord, here’s a young man who went through more than any one of us will ever face in a lifetime, and yet he comes out the other end of it, undiminished and undaunted, and he’s left praising a sovereign God who administered severe mercy. Oh God, we’re challenged by the Jonis and we’re challenged by the Josephs, and ultimately, we’re challenged by Jesus himself, who became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, who endured for the joy that was set before him. These things we ask and pray in His name and for our help, Amen.