You Meant It for Evil

Jacob has died, and the funeral is barely over before Joseph's brothers panic. For seventeen years they have lived in Egypt under their little brother's protection — but the buffer between them was their father, and now he is gone. So they do what frightened, guilty people do: they invent a message. “Your father gave this command before he died,” they claim: “Forgive the transgression of your brothers.” Then they fall on their faces. “Behold, we are your servants.” They are sure the reckoning has finally come.

You have to remember what they did to feel the weight of the moment. Joseph was the favorite — the coat, the dreams, the father's obvious preference — and they hated him for it. They threw him in a pit, sold him to a passing caravan for twenty pieces of silver, dipped his coat in goat's blood, and let their father grieve a lie for twenty years. And Joseph's road down was long: a slave in a foreign house, falsely accused, forgotten in a prison. Then, by a series of “coincidences” no one could have engineered, he rose to the right hand of Pharaoh, and a famine drove his brothers to bow before the very brother they had sold — not knowing it was him.

Now, with their father dead and their guilt exposed, they brace for revenge. And Joseph weeps. His answer to their fear is the sentence the whole story has been climbing toward: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Notice he does not say it didn't happen, or didn't matter, or wasn't wicked. He names it plainly — you meant evil. But over the same event, the same pit, the same silver, there was a second and deeper intention: God meant it for good, to keep many people alive. Two hands on one deed. Their real guilt, and God's sovereign goodness, both true at once. That is what the old writers called providence — not the pretense that evil is fine, but the confidence that God is so completely in charge and so utterly good that he can weave even the worst thing done to you into the rescue of many.

We are slow to believe this, because we read our lives the way the brothers read that room — certain the story ends in wrath. We “judge the Lord by feeble sense.” The betrayal, the layoff, the diagnosis, the door that shut in our face — we stand in front of them convinced they are the end of us. But Joseph would tell you that the pit was the road to the palace, and that he could not have seen it at the time. Faith is trusting the hidden hand before the story is over.

And here is the reason a Christian can trust it: Joseph is a portrait sketched forward, and the face in it is Christ's. Read his name into the story. The beloved son of the father, hated by his own brothers, sold for pieces of silver, handed over to the Gentiles, stripped and thrown down into a pit and a prison — a kind of death — and then raised up to the right hand of the throne, from which he saves the very brothers who wanted him gone, and feeds a starving world with bread. Every line is true of Jesus. The beloved Son, hated by his own, sold by one of the Twelve for thirty pieces of silver, handed to the Gentiles, descending into death itself, raised to the right hand of the Father — and from that throne he saves the ones who killed him and feeds a starving world with the true Bread. Peter preaches Genesis 50:20 at Pentecost almost word for word: “this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up” (Acts 2:23–24). You meant it for evil. God meant it for good — to keep many people alive.

The cross is the darkest frowning providence in the history of the world, and behind it the widest smiling face. Joseph could forgive because he was finally allowed to see what God had been doing the whole time in the dark. We are not always given that sight. But we have something Joseph never had — we can stand at a cross and an empty tomb and know, for certain, that our God really does bring life out of the very worst that is done to us. So do not fear. He will provide.