God Meant It for Good

The story of Joseph is filled with jealousy, deception, and sorrow. Yet in the end, Joseph says, “God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). Today, Sinclair Ferguson begins to examine this case study in God’s surprising providence.

The Bible is actually a book, a whole book, about the providence of God. From Genesis 3:15 onwards, it tells the story of how God works to provide salvation for His people in Jesus Christ. And with a view to that, He governs everything so that this will happen.

I think I’ve probably had a sense of this since I was a very small boy, although it was some time before I really began to understand the gospel itself. Our family didn’t go to church, and we probably only had a few shelves of books in our home. But one of them was my maternal grandmother’s old Bible. I remember it was bound in black leather. It was small and it was thick, and it had really small print. My memory’s a little hazy, but I think I’d learned to read before I went to school. My mother taught me. And since we didn’t have any central heating in the house in those days, in the winter months, I used to get into my parents’ bed once they’d got up and enjoy the warmth they had left behind—my own central heating system—and I would read my grandmother’s Bible.

Well, to be honest, there were two stories, more or less, I read all the time. One of them was the story of Daniel, which took me quite a while to find because it was so far on in the Bible, and the other one was a bit elusive, too, since the hero didn’t have a Bible book named after him, but he was tucked away in the last quarter of the book of Genesis. Yes, it was the story of Joseph.

And sometimes when I look back, I think maybe this was one way God was preparing me to be a minister, a pastor, because one of the big questions in Joseph’s life must have been the very question people often ask their ministers: Why is this happening to me? Where is God, and what is He doing? It’s worth reflecting again on the story and pausing here and there to ask that same question: What is God doing?

The story of Joseph really begins with Jacob, with Jacob making the same mistake of favoritism his own father and mother had made. We’ve no sooner read the words, “These are the generations of Jacob,” in Genesis 37, than we come across this: “Now, Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons.” Not only that, but he made it obvious by making the special robe for him. It isn’t at all surprising that Genesis goes on to say, “His brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers,” and then it adds, “and so they hated him.” And then to make matters worse, Joseph had his dreams and seems to have been both naive enough, and maybe even self-absorbed enough, to actually tell his family about them.

I can hardly imagine what would’ve happened if when my parents and brother were tucking into their breakfast corn flakes, I’d said at the age of seventeen, “And by the way, I had this dream last night about four sheaves in a field, and your sheaves gathered around my sheave and bowed down to it,” and then came down the next morning and said, “I had a dream about the sun and the moon and a star last night, and all three were bowing down to me.”

Well, the rest, as they say, in Joseph’s life, is history. You notice how Jacob had repeated his own parents’ sin of favoritism, and there’s an echo in this story of his deceitfulness, too, isn’t there? Remember how he deceived his father Isaac in order to get his brother’s blessing? And then you remember that Jacob’s sons repeated that father-deceiving sin, so that now it was Jacob who was being deceived. What a mess it all seems.

But here’s the curious thing, something beyond wonderful: when you turn to the end of the book of Genesis to see how all this ends, Joseph himself tells us, he says what happened in their family was sinful and harmful, but God meant it for good. Now, that doesn’t really fit our logic, I don’t think. It’s surely one or the other: our sin or God’s purpose for good. Surely, God doesn’t use a mess like this; He’s a God of order. But no, God works everything together for the good of His people, and it sure takes a lot of working. It takes divine wisdom. It takes divine power, and it takes time. But think about the story of Joseph this way: He would never have ended up as prime minister of Egypt and preserver of nations in the ancient Near East had it not actually been for this mess in which they were all involved.

The older Christian writers used to illustrate the way God’s providence sometimes works by thinking about the mechanical clocks with which they were familiar, and the way the cogwheels moved in opposite directions in order to drive the hands of the clock around the clockface to tell the right time. That’s surely how God sometimes works, how He advances His purposes.

So, William Cowper was right: behind a frowning providence, there hides a smiling face. And that’s part of the mystery of God’s gracious providence.