Meant for Good

Read it: Genesis 37; 45; 50

Jacob, now called Israel, has twelve sons. These sons will become the twelve tribes of Israel. But right now they are a deeply messed-up family, and the story of the last fourteen chapters of Genesis is mostly about one of them: Joseph.

The dreamer

“Now Israel loved Joseph more than his other sons, because Joseph had been born to him in his old age; so he made him a robe of many colors” (Genesis 37:3). Favouritism is poison in a family, and the brothers “hated him and could not speak a kind word to him” (Genesis 37:4).

It doesn’t help that Joseph has dreams, and tells everyone about them: dreams in which his brothers’ sheaves of grain, and then the sun, moon and stars, bow down to him. At seventeen, he’s not exactly tactful.

One day Jacob sends Joseph to check on his brothers, who are grazing the flocks far from home. They see him coming. “Here comes that dreamer!” they said to one another. “Come now, let us kill him and throw him into one of the pits” (Genesis 37:19–20). The eldest, Reuben, talks them out of murder, and they throw Joseph into a dry pit. Then, while Reuben is away, a caravan of traders passes by on its way to Egypt, and they sell their brother “for twenty shekels of silver” (Genesis 37:28). They dip his famous robe in goat’s blood and take it home. Jacob, sure that a wild animal has killed his son, refuses to be comforted.

Down, and further down

The years in Egypt are a long fall. Joseph is sold as a slave to an Egyptian official, Potiphar. He works hard and is trusted, until Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him. He refuses, she accuses him of attacking her, and he’s thrown into prison for something he didn’t do.

But there is a sentence that keeps coming back like a refrain: “the LORD was with Joseph” (Genesis 39:2). Even in prison, “the LORD was with him” (Genesis 39:21). God doesn’t stop the bad things from happening. But Joseph is never alone in them.

In prison Joseph explains the dreams of two fellow prisoners, and eventually Pharaoh, king of Egypt, hears of him. Pharaoh has had two troubling dreams, and Joseph, giving God the credit, explains them: seven years of plenty are coming, then seven years of terrible famine. Pharaoh puts Joseph in charge of the whole country to prepare. At thirty, the slave from the pit is second only to Pharaoh. When the famine comes, “every nation came to Joseph in Egypt to buy grain” (Genesis 41:57).

“I am Joseph”

Including his brothers. They come to Egypt, bow down before this powerful Egyptian official, and don’t recognise him. Joseph recognises them. Over several chapters he tests them to see whether they’ve changed. The test comes to a head when it looks as if Benjamin, Jacob’s new favourite, will be kept as a slave. Judah, the brother who first suggested selling Joseph, steps forward and begs to take Benjamin’s place: “let your servant stay here as my lord’s slave in place of the boy” (Genesis 44:33).

Joseph can’t hold it in any longer. He sends everyone else out and weeps so loudly the Egyptians hear him. “I am Joseph! Is my father still alive?” (Genesis 45:3). His brothers are too terrified to speak. Then Joseph says something that turns the whole story inside out: “do not be distressed or angry with yourselves that you sold me into this place, because it was to save lives that God sent me before you” (Genesis 45:5). And again: “it was not you who sent me here, but God” (Genesis 45:8).

Jacob comes down to Egypt with the whole family, about seventy people, and God promises him there, “I will make you into a great nation there” (Genesis 46:3).

Meant for good

Years later Jacob dies, and the brothers panic. Maybe Joseph was only being kind for Dad’s sake. They send a message begging for forgiveness and fall at his feet. Joseph weeps again, and says the words that sum up the whole of Genesis:

“As for you, what you intended against me for evil, God intended for good, in order to accomplish a day like this—to preserve the lives of many people” (Genesis 50:20).

Joseph doesn’t pretend what they did was fine. It was evil, and he names it. But he sees a bigger hand at work. God took the worst thing his brothers ever did and wove it into the rescue of the very family He had promised to bless.

Genesis ends with Joseph, about to die, making his family promise to carry his bones home one day: “God will surely visit you and bring you up from this land to the land He promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Genesis 50:24). The family is safe, but they’re in the wrong country. The story isn’t finished.

Where Jesus is in this

Stephen, the first Christian martyr, told Joseph’s story as a pattern: “the patriarchs were jealous of Joseph, they sold him as a slave into Egypt. But God was with him” (Acts 7:9). The one rejected by his brothers became the one who saved them. Jesus was rejected by His own people and handed over for silver. And Peter, preaching in Jerusalem, says of the cross exactly what Joseph said: Jesus “was delivered up by God’s set plan and foreknowledge, and you, by the hands of the lawless, put Him to death” (Acts 2:23). Human evil, God’s good purpose, in the same event.

And like Joseph, Jesus forgave those who wronged Him, even while they were doing it: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). That’s why Christians can hold on to the promise that “God works all things together for the good of those who love Him” (Romans 8:28). Not that bad things are secretly good, but that God is never beaten by them.

Think about it: Is there something painful in your story right now that you can’t imagine God using for good? What would it mean to trust Him with it anyway?

Go deeper: He Holds My Tomorrows by Gareth Evans — Evans starts from Genesis 50:20 and asks why Hebrews remembers Joseph not for his rise to power but for his dying request about his bones, and finds there a man whose real hope lay beyond Egypt in a future deliverer. Start with chapter 15, “Joseph”.