Scripture Reading: Romans 11:1-2, Romans 11:29-32, Genesis 45:1-15, Matthew 15:10-28, Psalm 133:1-3
There are moments in life when we simply do not understand what God is doing. We pray, we try to make wise decisions, we attempt to follow where God is leading, and yet things still do not work out the way we expected. Sometimes the door we thought was going to open stays closed. Sometimes a relationship changes. Sometimes a plan falls apart.
Sometimes we find ourselves dealing with circumstances that we never would have chosen.
It is difficult to see the bigger picture when we are standing in the middle of one painful piece of it.
That is part of what makes Joseph's story so powerful. When we read his entire story, we already know where it is going. We know Joseph will eventually rise to a position of leadership in Egypt. We know he will help prepare the nation for famine. We know his family will eventually come to Egypt and that Joseph will be in a position to save them.
Joseph did not know any of that when his brothers threw him into a pit.
He did not know it when they sold him into slavery. He did not know it when he was falsely accused. He did not know it when he was sitting in prison. For Joseph, those were not interesting plot points in a Bible story. They were his life.
That is important because our lives usually feel much more like Joseph's story from the middle than they do from the end. We know what has already happened, and we know what is happening today, but we do not know what is coming next.
Paul deals with something similar in Romans 11. He is looking at the history of God's people and asking whether their failures somehow mean that God has abandoned His plan. His answer is no. God remains faithful even when people are not faithful. Human disobedience does not cancel God's mercy or somehow derail His purposes.
Joseph gives us a picture of what that looks like in a person's life. His brothers made terrible decisions. They betrayed him, sold him, lied to their father, and created years of pain for their entire family. Yet their actions were not powerful enough to stop God from working.
That does not mean everything that happened to Joseph was good.
It means God was still good in the middle of it.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
Sometimes we find ourselves dealing with circumstances that we never would have chosen.
It is difficult to see the bigger picture when we are standing in the middle of one painful piece of it.
That is part of what makes Joseph's story so powerful. When we read his entire story, we already know where it is going. We know Joseph will eventually rise to a position of leadership in Egypt. We know he will help prepare the nation for famine. We know his family will eventually come to Egypt and that Joseph will be in a position to save them.
Joseph did not know any of that when his brothers threw him into a pit.
He did not know it when they sold him into slavery. He did not know it when he was falsely accused. He did not know it when he was sitting in prison. For Joseph, those were not interesting plot points in a Bible story. They were his life.
That is important because our lives usually feel much more like Joseph's story from the middle than they do from the end. We know what has already happened, and we know what is happening today, but we do not know what is coming next.
Paul deals with something similar in Romans 11. He is looking at the history of God's people and asking whether their failures somehow mean that God has abandoned His plan. His answer is no. God remains faithful even when people are not faithful. Human disobedience does not cancel God's mercy or somehow derail His purposes.
Joseph gives us a picture of what that looks like in a person's life. His brothers made terrible decisions. They betrayed him, sold him, lied to their father, and created years of pain for their entire family. Yet their actions were not powerful enough to stop God from working.
That does not mean everything that happened to Joseph was good.
It means God was still good in the middle of it.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
God Is Working Even When We Cannot See It
When Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers in Genesis 45, it is one of the most emotional moments in his story. Joseph sends everyone else out of the room and begins to weep. His brothers are terrified when they realize who is standing in front of them.
That reaction makes sense. The brother they sold into slavery is now one of the most powerful men in Egypt. They are in a foreign country during a famine, they need his help, and suddenly they realize that their future is in Joseph's hands.
Joseph could have responded in many different ways.
Instead, he tells them, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve life.”
It would be easy to misunderstand what Joseph is saying. Joseph is not pretending his brothers did nothing wrong. He knows exactly what they did. In fact, he reminds them that they sold him into Egypt. He does not rewrite the past and call their actions good.
His brothers sinned against him. Their actions were cruel. They rejected him as their brother and removed him from the family. Joseph experienced years of suffering because of what they chose to do.
Yet Joseph had come to recognize something else at work in his story. His brothers were responsible for their actions, but God had not stopped working because of them.
That is an important distinction.
God working through a situation does not mean God approves of the situation.
There are things people experience that are simply wrong. Abuse is wrong. Betrayal is wrong. Cruelty is wrong. We should never tell someone that God somehow wanted another person to hurt them so that He could teach them a lesson. That is not the picture Scripture gives us.
God does not need evil in order to accomplish His purposes, but evil is also not powerful enough to prevent Him from accomplishing them.
Joseph had been treated terribly, but his brothers did not get the final word over Joseph's life.
God did.
The interesting thing about Joseph's story is that God's work becomes much easier to recognize when Joseph looks backward. None of the individual moments would have made much sense while he was living them.
The pit looked like rejection. Slavery looked like defeat. Prison looked like another setback. There was nothing about those circumstances that would naturally cause Joseph to say, “God must be preparing me to help save an entire nation from famine.”
Yet that is exactly what was happening.
We often recognize God's faithfulness the same way. Looking backward, we can sometimes see things that were impossible to recognize while we were living through them. We see how one experience prepared us for another. We see how a closed door redirected us. We see how something difficult changed our priorities or helped us grow.
There are probably things in your life today that you understand differently than you did five or ten years ago. At the time, you may have wondered what God was doing. Today you can look back and see that He was present even when you did not understand Him.
Remembering those moments matters because some parts of our stories are still unfinished.
There are still questions we cannot answer. There are still situations we are praying about. There are still things we wish God would explain.
Faith does not mean pretending that we understand.
Faith means we can trust God even when we do not.
Joseph also shows us that trusting God's bigger story does not mean sitting around doing nothing. Joseph continued to live faithfully wherever he was placed. When he served in Potiphar's house, he worked faithfully. When he was in prison, he used the abilities God had given him. When Pharaoh placed him in leadership, Joseph did the work necessary to prepare Egypt for the coming famine.
Joseph could not control his circumstances, but he could choose how he lived within them.
That is often where we find ourselves.
We may not know exactly what God is doing with our lives five years from now, but we know something about what He has called us to do today. We can follow Jesus. We can love the people around us. We can use the gifts God has given us. We can make wise choices. We can bring life into our homes, workplaces, churches, and communities.
Sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out God's plan that we overlook what God has already placed in front of us.
Joseph simply kept being faithful.
He took life a day at a time. He used the gifts God had given him, even in some very difficult places. Eventually those same gifts were used to help an entire country prepare for disaster and make sure people had food during the famine.
God had been working behind the scenes long before Joseph understood what He was doing.
The same can be true in our lives.
You may be in a season right now where you cannot see how the pieces fit together. You may even wonder whether some of the pieces belong in the picture at all.
You do not need to understand the whole story in order to faithfully live today's chapter.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
God's Grace Moves Us From Revenge to Reconciliation
When Joseph's brothers finally stand before him, the power in the relationship has completely changed. Earlier in the story, they had power over Joseph. Now Joseph has power over them.
If Joseph wanted revenge, nobody could have stopped him.
Yet instead of using his power to hurt his brothers, Joseph uses it to help them.
He tells them to return home and bring their father and their families to Egypt. He promises that they can settle nearby and that he will provide for them during the remaining years of famine. Joseph embraces his brother Benjamin and weeps. Then Genesis tells us that Joseph kissed his brothers and wept over them.
Joseph chooses restoration rather than revenge.
That does not mean Joseph simply forgot what happened. Forgiveness is not pretending that the past never occurred. Joseph knew what his brothers had done.
Grace does not require us to call evil good.
There are times when forgiveness will still require healthy boundaries. There are relationships where trust has to be rebuilt. There may even be circumstances where reconciliation is not immediately possible or where restoring a relationship to what it once was would not be wise.
But Joseph demonstrates something incredibly important.
The past was still part of his story, but the past was no longer controlling his story.
Joseph could have lived the rest of his life through the wounds his brothers had caused. Every decision could have been driven by bitterness. He could have made sure they paid for what they had done.
Instead, Joseph trusted God with the story.
That freed him from needing revenge to finish it.
There is an important lesson there for us because most of us know what it feels like to be hurt by someone. Sometimes the wounds are significant. Other times they are smaller disappointments that simply accumulate over time. Someone says something. Someone lets us down. Someone treats us unfairly. Someone fails to show up when we thought they would.
If we are not careful, those things begin shaping how we treat people.
We keep score. We become guarded. We replay conversations in our minds. We imagine what we wish we had said. We wait for the other person to finally admit they were wrong.
Grace offers another path.
Joseph had experienced the faithfulness of God through his own life, and that grace changed the way he responded to others.
The gospel should do the same thing in us.
God has shown us mercy. We have been forgiven for things we cannot go back and undo. Jesus has welcomed us into God's family, not because we earned our place there, but because of His grace.
When we truly understand how much grace we have received, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold tightly to bitterness toward everyone else.
The grace we receive from God is meant to flow through us.
That does not mean forgiveness is easy. Sometimes it is a process. Sometimes we forgive and then discover the next day that the anger is still there, so we have to surrender it again. Sometimes healing takes much longer than we would like.
But we do not have to allow the wound to become our identity.
Joseph was more than what his brothers had done to him.
You are more than what someone else has done to you.
Joseph's response becomes even more powerful because he does more than simply say that he forgives his brothers. He uses what God has given him to bless them.
The brother they rejected becomes the brother God uses to preserve their lives.
There is something beautiful about that part of Joseph's story. The things he experienced did not have to make him bitter or smaller. God used those experiences to prepare Joseph to serve other people.
God can do something similar with our stories.
An experience you have gone through may eventually help you encourage someone who is going through it now. A difficult season in your marriage may allow you to come alongside another couple who is struggling. A parenting challenge may give you compassion for another parent who feels overwhelmed. A professional disappointment may give you wisdom to share with someone whose plans have suddenly changed.
Even some of our failures can become places where God uses us.
When we have experienced God's grace ourselves, we tend to have more grace for people who are struggling.
When we know what it feels like to be afraid, we can sit beside someone who is afraid.
When we know what it feels like to grieve, we can be present with someone who is grieving.
When we know what it feels like to have plans fall apart, we can encourage someone whose life suddenly looks very different than expected.
God does not waste the chapters we would rather have skipped.
That does not mean we become thankful for every painful thing that has happened. It means we can become thankful that pain does not have the final word.
God can take what has happened and bring something life-giving from it.
Joseph would probably never have chosen his path. Nobody asks to be betrayed by family, sold into slavery, falsely accused, or imprisoned. But by Genesis 45, Joseph can look backward and see that God has been faithful through all of it.
Maybe you are not at Genesis 45 yet.
Maybe you are still somewhere in the middle of the story.
That can be a difficult place to live because the middle rarely gives us all the answers we want.
You may have expected life to look different by now. Maybe a prayer has gone unanswered longer than you expected. Maybe a relationship did not turn out the way you hoped. Maybe a dream changed. Maybe you are simply trying to determine what comes next.
You do not have to force an explanation onto your circumstances.
Keep trusting God.
Keep doing the good that is in front of you.
Keep allowing the Holy Spirit to shape your heart.
Keep remembering the places where God has already proven faithful.
One day you may look backward and recognize things you cannot see today.
And while you wait, remember this: God can redeem what we cannot understand.
Questions for Reflection
Joseph's story is powerful on its own, but it also points us toward Jesus.
Jesus knew what it was like to be betrayed by someone close to Him. He was falsely accused. He suffered despite being innocent. Eventually He was placed on a cross and killed.
For the people who loved Jesus, the cross must have looked like the end of the story.
Everything they hoped for seemed to be gone.
Yet what appeared to be history's greatest tragedy became the place where God accomplished redemption. Jesus died for our sins, and three days later He rose again.
The disciples could not see the resurrection while they were standing at the cross.
They only knew the chapter they were living.
We have moments like that too. We cannot see what comes next because we are still living today.
But the cross and resurrection remind us that God is able to bring redemption from circumstances that appear completely hopeless.
That is why we can trust Him with the parts of our own stories we still do not understand.
Some things will make more sense later.
Some things may never completely make sense to us in this life.
Our hope is not that someday we will receive an explanation for every painful experience. Our hope is that the God who holds our lives is faithful.
Joseph could finally look backward and see that God had been present through the whole story.
We can trust that same God today.
The chapter you are living right now is not the whole story.
Your disappointment does not get the final word. Your failure does not get the final word. Someone else's actions do not get the final word. Even the things you cannot explain do not get the final word.
God does.
You may not understand the story today, but you can trust the Author.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
When Joseph finally reveals himself to his brothers in Genesis 45, it is one of the most emotional moments in his story. Joseph sends everyone else out of the room and begins to weep. His brothers are terrified when they realize who is standing in front of them.
That reaction makes sense. The brother they sold into slavery is now one of the most powerful men in Egypt. They are in a foreign country during a famine, they need his help, and suddenly they realize that their future is in Joseph's hands.
Joseph could have responded in many different ways.
Instead, he tells them, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve life.”
It would be easy to misunderstand what Joseph is saying. Joseph is not pretending his brothers did nothing wrong. He knows exactly what they did. In fact, he reminds them that they sold him into Egypt. He does not rewrite the past and call their actions good.
His brothers sinned against him. Their actions were cruel. They rejected him as their brother and removed him from the family. Joseph experienced years of suffering because of what they chose to do.
Yet Joseph had come to recognize something else at work in his story. His brothers were responsible for their actions, but God had not stopped working because of them.
That is an important distinction.
God working through a situation does not mean God approves of the situation.
There are things people experience that are simply wrong. Abuse is wrong. Betrayal is wrong. Cruelty is wrong. We should never tell someone that God somehow wanted another person to hurt them so that He could teach them a lesson. That is not the picture Scripture gives us.
God does not need evil in order to accomplish His purposes, but evil is also not powerful enough to prevent Him from accomplishing them.
Joseph had been treated terribly, but his brothers did not get the final word over Joseph's life.
God did.
The interesting thing about Joseph's story is that God's work becomes much easier to recognize when Joseph looks backward. None of the individual moments would have made much sense while he was living them.
The pit looked like rejection. Slavery looked like defeat. Prison looked like another setback. There was nothing about those circumstances that would naturally cause Joseph to say, “God must be preparing me to help save an entire nation from famine.”
Yet that is exactly what was happening.
We often recognize God's faithfulness the same way. Looking backward, we can sometimes see things that were impossible to recognize while we were living through them. We see how one experience prepared us for another. We see how a closed door redirected us. We see how something difficult changed our priorities or helped us grow.
There are probably things in your life today that you understand differently than you did five or ten years ago. At the time, you may have wondered what God was doing. Today you can look back and see that He was present even when you did not understand Him.
Remembering those moments matters because some parts of our stories are still unfinished.
There are still questions we cannot answer. There are still situations we are praying about. There are still things we wish God would explain.
Faith does not mean pretending that we understand.
Faith means we can trust God even when we do not.
Joseph also shows us that trusting God's bigger story does not mean sitting around doing nothing. Joseph continued to live faithfully wherever he was placed. When he served in Potiphar's house, he worked faithfully. When he was in prison, he used the abilities God had given him. When Pharaoh placed him in leadership, Joseph did the work necessary to prepare Egypt for the coming famine.
Joseph could not control his circumstances, but he could choose how he lived within them.
That is often where we find ourselves.
We may not know exactly what God is doing with our lives five years from now, but we know something about what He has called us to do today. We can follow Jesus. We can love the people around us. We can use the gifts God has given us. We can make wise choices. We can bring life into our homes, workplaces, churches, and communities.
Sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out God's plan that we overlook what God has already placed in front of us.
Joseph simply kept being faithful.
He took life a day at a time. He used the gifts God had given him, even in some very difficult places. Eventually those same gifts were used to help an entire country prepare for disaster and make sure people had food during the famine.
God had been working behind the scenes long before Joseph understood what He was doing.
The same can be true in our lives.
You may be in a season right now where you cannot see how the pieces fit together. You may even wonder whether some of the pieces belong in the picture at all.
You do not need to understand the whole story in order to faithfully live today's chapter.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
God's Grace Moves Us From Revenge to Reconciliation
When Joseph's brothers finally stand before him, the power in the relationship has completely changed. Earlier in the story, they had power over Joseph. Now Joseph has power over them.
If Joseph wanted revenge, nobody could have stopped him.
Yet instead of using his power to hurt his brothers, Joseph uses it to help them.
He tells them to return home and bring their father and their families to Egypt. He promises that they can settle nearby and that he will provide for them during the remaining years of famine. Joseph embraces his brother Benjamin and weeps. Then Genesis tells us that Joseph kissed his brothers and wept over them.
Joseph chooses restoration rather than revenge.
That does not mean Joseph simply forgot what happened. Forgiveness is not pretending that the past never occurred. Joseph knew what his brothers had done.
Grace does not require us to call evil good.
There are times when forgiveness will still require healthy boundaries. There are relationships where trust has to be rebuilt. There may even be circumstances where reconciliation is not immediately possible or where restoring a relationship to what it once was would not be wise.
But Joseph demonstrates something incredibly important.
The past was still part of his story, but the past was no longer controlling his story.
Joseph could have lived the rest of his life through the wounds his brothers had caused. Every decision could have been driven by bitterness. He could have made sure they paid for what they had done.
Instead, Joseph trusted God with the story.
That freed him from needing revenge to finish it.
There is an important lesson there for us because most of us know what it feels like to be hurt by someone. Sometimes the wounds are significant. Other times they are smaller disappointments that simply accumulate over time. Someone says something. Someone lets us down. Someone treats us unfairly. Someone fails to show up when we thought they would.
If we are not careful, those things begin shaping how we treat people.
We keep score. We become guarded. We replay conversations in our minds. We imagine what we wish we had said. We wait for the other person to finally admit they were wrong.
Grace offers another path.
Joseph had experienced the faithfulness of God through his own life, and that grace changed the way he responded to others.
The gospel should do the same thing in us.
God has shown us mercy. We have been forgiven for things we cannot go back and undo. Jesus has welcomed us into God's family, not because we earned our place there, but because of His grace.
When we truly understand how much grace we have received, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold tightly to bitterness toward everyone else.
The grace we receive from God is meant to flow through us.
That does not mean forgiveness is easy. Sometimes it is a process. Sometimes we forgive and then discover the next day that the anger is still there, so we have to surrender it again. Sometimes healing takes much longer than we would like.
But we do not have to allow the wound to become our identity.
Joseph was more than what his brothers had done to him.
You are more than what someone else has done to you.
Joseph's response becomes even more powerful because he does more than simply say that he forgives his brothers. He uses what God has given him to bless them.
The brother they rejected becomes the brother God uses to preserve their lives.
There is something beautiful about that part of Joseph's story. The things he experienced did not have to make him bitter or smaller. God used those experiences to prepare Joseph to serve other people.
God can do something similar with our stories.
An experience you have gone through may eventually help you encourage someone who is going through it now. A difficult season in your marriage may allow you to come alongside another couple who is struggling. A parenting challenge may give you compassion for another parent who feels overwhelmed. A professional disappointment may give you wisdom to share with someone whose plans have suddenly changed.
Even some of our failures can become places where God uses us.
When we have experienced God's grace ourselves, we tend to have more grace for people who are struggling.
When we know what it feels like to be afraid, we can sit beside someone who is afraid.
When we know what it feels like to grieve, we can be present with someone who is grieving.
When we know what it feels like to have plans fall apart, we can encourage someone whose life suddenly looks very different than expected.
God does not waste the chapters we would rather have skipped.
That does not mean we become thankful for every painful thing that has happened. It means we can become thankful that pain does not have the final word.
God can take what has happened and bring something life-giving from it.
Joseph would probably never have chosen his path. Nobody asks to be betrayed by family, sold into slavery, falsely accused, or imprisoned. But by Genesis 45, Joseph can look backward and see that God has been faithful through all of it.
Maybe you are not at Genesis 45 yet.
Maybe you are still somewhere in the middle of the story.
That can be a difficult place to live because the middle rarely gives us all the answers we want.
You may have expected life to look different by now. Maybe a prayer has gone unanswered longer than you expected. Maybe a relationship did not turn out the way you hoped. Maybe a dream changed. Maybe you are simply trying to determine what comes next.
You do not have to force an explanation onto your circumstances.
Keep trusting God.
Keep doing the good that is in front of you.
Keep allowing the Holy Spirit to shape your heart.
Keep remembering the places where God has already proven faithful.
One day you may look backward and recognize things you cannot see today.
And while you wait, remember this: God can redeem what we cannot understand.
Questions for Reflection
- Where have you seen God's faithfulness in a chapter of your life that you once didn't understand?
- How has God used an unexpected experience to shape you for something good?
- Who could be encouraged this week by hearing how you have seen God at work in your story?
Joseph's story is powerful on its own, but it also points us toward Jesus.
Jesus knew what it was like to be betrayed by someone close to Him. He was falsely accused. He suffered despite being innocent. Eventually He was placed on a cross and killed.
For the people who loved Jesus, the cross must have looked like the end of the story.
Everything they hoped for seemed to be gone.
Yet what appeared to be history's greatest tragedy became the place where God accomplished redemption. Jesus died for our sins, and three days later He rose again.
The disciples could not see the resurrection while they were standing at the cross.
They only knew the chapter they were living.
We have moments like that too. We cannot see what comes next because we are still living today.
But the cross and resurrection remind us that God is able to bring redemption from circumstances that appear completely hopeless.
That is why we can trust Him with the parts of our own stories we still do not understand.
Some things will make more sense later.
Some things may never completely make sense to us in this life.
Our hope is not that someday we will receive an explanation for every painful experience. Our hope is that the God who holds our lives is faithful.
Joseph could finally look backward and see that God had been present through the whole story.
We can trust that same God today.
The chapter you are living right now is not the whole story.
Your disappointment does not get the final word. Your failure does not get the final word. Someone else's actions do not get the final word. Even the things you cannot explain do not get the final word.
God does.
You may not understand the story today, but you can trust the Author.
God can redeem what we cannot understand.
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