Sermon Nov.14, 2010

BUT GOD MEANT IT FOR GOOD
Sermon by Judy Turner
Genesis 50:19-21

The Bible tells the stories of many people, and how God was in their lives, through good and terrible circumstances, so we can know how God will be for us, as we go through all the days of our lives. Let’s consider this morning one of the most intriguing characters of the Bible. I’ll start describing him, and you see when you recognize who I’m talking about. He started life with a lot going for him, the favorite son of a doting father. He knew he was destined to be a leader, and was perceived by those around him as an arrogant braggart. He experienced a great reversal early in his life, at the age of 17, an unspeakable tragedy. He was captured by his jealous brothers, thrown into a pit, and sold to some slave traders passing by. And it seemed to go from bad to worse. He was taken to Egypt, and bought by an Egyptian officer, but was falsely accused of sexual misconduct and ended up in jail. You probably know by now that I’m talking about Joseph, whose amazing story is told in Genesis chapters 37- 50. I read the story again in preparing for this sermon, and was still utterly taken with it, with tears in my eyes at the most tender, touching moments of the story. Read the details. You will be blessed.

But we’ll give a quick summary this morning. A line repeated throughout the hard years of Joseph’s life in slavery and prison was, “The Lord was with Joseph.” And his Egyptian master and the warden of the prison saw Joseph’s abilities and his integrity. And he was given responsibility. In prison, he was put in charge of the other prisoners. God gave Joseph the ability to interpret dreams, and he told two of the prisoners what their dreams meant. His interpretation proved to be right, and later, when the Pharaoh, the ruler of all Egypt had a dream, Joseph was brought from prison to interpret the meaning. Joseph said, “Pharaoh, this is what the dream means. There will be 7 years of great abundance in all the land of Egypt, then the land will be ravaged by 7 years of famine. And this is what you should do. You should put a wise and discerning man in charge of storing grain during the good years, so there will be plenty to keep the people alive when the famine comes.” Pharoah says, “Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom the spirit of God dwells?” And Pharoah made Joseph second in command in all the land, and put him in charge of this system of storing and then distributing the grain. Talk about a reversal! But still there had to be an empty, aching place in Joseph’s heart. He was separated from his family, not knowing even if his beloved father Jacob was still alive.

The seven good years came, then the bad years. The story then switches back to the land of Canaan, with Jacob and his family. Those years of famine affected a much wider geographic area than just Egypt, and people in other countries were going to Egypt to buy food. Things were getting desperate for Jacob’s family, so he sent his sons to Egypt to buy grain, and who did they encounter? None other than their brother, Joseph, who years earlier they had sold into slavery. Joseph immediately recognized his brothers, but they didn’t recognize him. He decided to test whether they had changed through the years, a test that involved bringing their little brother Benjamin to Egypt. When the brothers demonstrated that they would lay down their lives for their little brother rather than abandon him or sell him out, as they had Joseph, Joseph was convinced of their change of heart. In one of the most touching scenes in all human history, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and then arranges for his father and the whole extended family to move to Egypt so they can live. There is another very moving scene when Joseph is reunited with his father, Jacob. So the family prospers in Egypt, and Jacob dies there. Then the brothers become afraid again. Has Joseph only been kind to them as long as the old man was alive, and now he would get revenge for the evil they had done to him years ago?

Our text this morning is what Joseph says in response to their fear: (Genesis 50:19-21
19 But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? 20 You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. 21 So then, don’t be afraid. I will provide for you and your children.” And he reassured them and spoke kindly to them.

This is certainly the story of an amazing man named Joseph, but it is more the story of an amazing God. As John Claypool says in God The Ingennious Alchemist, God can take the bad choices made in human freedom and somehow transmute them into experiences of growth and blessing. The book of Genesis begins with God, the being of ultimate goodness, love, and joy creating the world and everything that lives to share the sheer abundance of that goodness with those He created. But the Creator wanted children who could choose to love Him back and walk in His ways, rather than puppets. So he put in His human creatures the freedom to choose. Claypool says, “It is ultimate absurdity, but, tragically, this is the response that the earliest humans made to God’s primal generosity. They proceeded to unmake creation. God started with nothing and moved through chaos to form and beauty, but ungrateful creatures reversed that process and turned form and beauty back into chaos, toward the nothingness from which it all came.” This is how the book of Genesis begins, with creation, and then sin entering the world. But the book of Genesis ends with the story of Joseph. And Joseph saying to his brothers, “You chose evil, but God meant it for good. And all this has resulted in fulfilling God’s purpose of saving many lives.” So the book of Genesis ends with a powerful story of redemption, a marker along the way to what God was ultimately going to do in Jesus.

What an amazing God! Without robbing human beings of freedom, God has within God’s being the ability to take bad things or events and resourcefully bring good out of them. So what does this mean for us? It means first of all, that there is nothing bad that we have done and nothing bad that has been done to us that is beyond the power of God to redeem and somehow bring good. Of course, to personally experience that good, we need to repent of the evil we have done and forgive the evil done to us. Joseph had to repent of being the spoiled, arrogant child, and be willing to grow and change through the hard experiences. God was with him through it all, but Joseph had to choose each day in that prison to walk with God. His brothers had to repent of their wrong response to their father’s favoritism, and their brother’s annoying self-centeredness (both of which were wrong, but so was their response of resentment, and letting that resentment grow into taking action to destroy the favored one and then lie to their father about it.) Joseph’s brother’s had to repent of their wrong response to the evil done to them, and instead grow into people of Godly character who could love their father, even with his imperfections, and lay down their lives for their favored younger brother Benjamin. And Joseph had to choose to forgive, to let go of any desire to retaliate or get vengeance or harm the brothers who had harmed him. I think his reaction in first encountering them again after all those years said that he had forgiven them in his heart. He didn’t want to hurt them. That is forgiveness, to drop the charge we have against someone. We can always forgive, even if the other person has not changed. But, if they had changed, Joseph knew he could move beyond forgiveness to reconciliation, reestablishing relationship. He had already forgiven. He wished them no harm, only good. But he set up the tests to know if they had changed. And, by the grace of God, he saw they had changed. And God redeemed and healed the broken relationships in this family, making them better and stronger than ever before.

What we must do if we want to see how our amazing God can redeem absolutely anything? At any point in time, no matter how bleak things seem is never lose hope in God, never give in to despair. This must have been a choice Joseph made every day, even when there was nothing visible, nothing he could see on the horizon to give him hope. Claypool quotes a rabbi who says, "Despair is presumptuous. It is saying something about the future that we have no right to say. If God can make the things that are out of the things that are not, and can make dead things come to life again, who are we to set limits on what that kind of power might yet do with what we have done?" The scriptures invite us to get to know this Holy One who in the worst of times can do the best of things.

Gert Behanna lived a life of deepening despair. Although she was the daughter of a successful, wealthy man, and had lots of money, she had nothing to guide her life. She married three times, only to have each marriage end up in divorce. She had two sons, whom she had no idea how to handle and who wound up causing her all sorts of problems. In the midst of all this pain, she became increasingly dependent on alcohol until, finally, her life became so unworkable that she said, “I cannot stand it any longer.” One night she took a massive overdose of sleeping pills. Imagine her dismay when, eight hours later, she woke up in the Intensive Care Unit of a hospital and had to face that fact that she was such an inept failure that she could not even succeed in ending her life. She lay alone in the darkness of the night and the dark despair of her soul. She looked up at the ceiling and stammered out, “God, I don’t even know whether you exist. I have never had anything to do with you, but if you do exist, and if you can help me, please, please come. I am absolutely at the end of my rope.” A warm light began to move toward her, enveloping her in a sense of love that she had never experienced before from anyone. She was given a sense that her life somehow mattered to the Source behind all reality and that there was a meaningful future for her in spite of her past. This healing embrace lasted for several minutes and, when the intensity began to subside, even though it was by then the middle of the night, she picked up her phone and called her business manager and said breathlessly, “Bring me a copy of the Holy Bible as quickly as you can!” Her manager knew her quite well and could not contain his shock. He blurted out, “My God, Gert, what has happened to you?” To which she replied, “My God has happened to me.”

At any point in our lives, especially when we come to the end of ourselves, our God can happen to us. And we discover a goodness much bigger than all the badness in this complicated world. And knowing this God and walking with Him day by day, we move from a life of fear and despair to a life of courage and hope.
May this amazing God who can redeem absolutely anything happen to us today!