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. ~ Genesis 50:19-21
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift. ~ Mary Oliver
Another dreamer would agree. His name was Joseph. He was
also a victim of poor parenting and childhood abuse, and shares Mary Oliver’s understanding.
At the end of his life, he says to the brothers who gave him a box of darkness:
“Don’t be afraid. Am I
in the place of God? 20 You intended evil, 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. ~ Genesis 50:19-21. What are the
implications of such a perspective? How might we view the boxes of darkness
that find their way into our lives?
1.
Evil
is real and hurts.
Joseph’s story, like Mary Oliver’s, doesn’t shy away from acknowledging
real pain and naming darkness. From a family system of deceit, favoritism and violence;
his is a story of particular generational pain which reverberates throughout
Genesis. From brothers who wish to kill him, then choosing to sell him into
slavery, being imprisoned for doing the right thing, then being forgotten in jail after he helps someone get
free – his story bears witness of real, human “evil”. And while Joseph will
acknowledge in the end that God was not thwarted by “evil”, he does confess
that it was evil nonetheless. Evil, according to Scripture, is not a mirage, a
trick, or a myth. Joseph’s spirituality is not some fantasy or name-it-and-claim-it
kind of faith that denies a real struggle with pain, suffering and wickedness.
A God who works through evil doesn’t make evil good. We can
call it out, rage against it, oppose it and pray for its end – as we have been
called to do and are want to do. And it’s important to recognize that the Bible
doesn’t give us a systematic theology of how God’s sovereignty works; rather,
it gives us stories (in the plural) that illustrate two seemingly dissonant
truths at the same time: 1. human beings have free will and are responsible for
their choices and those choices can be hurtful, harmful, shameful, fearful and
evil; and 2. that God is in control and determines our end.
This means that evil is a story we can tell in all its
rawness and pain. One of the reasons people avoid church is that they can’t
bring their stories of pain into this place. They feel like they can’t name the
“evils” of their lives. I once met a woman who had been a recovering alcoholic
and Christian for 13 years. I was broken-hearted to learn, however, that she also
struggled with a life-altering tragedy of having a child who had been sexually
abused by a relative. And I watched her weep as she painfully told me that she
couldn’t talk about that at church but would go to AA and talk about it where others
could accept her pain without embarrassment or glib advice. And I wept at the
thought that evil couldn’t be named. Joseph wants us to know that it can and it
should.
But friends, there’s also something quite powerful about
Joseph’s statement – it’s not simply that evil can be acknowledged and that God
is not thwarted by “evil” but that even when people do “evil” God provides.
Evil doesn’t have the last word over our lives. Maybe you’re not Joseph – maybe
you’re a brother. Maybe you have done evil to someone. And Joseph wants you to
know that you too are not outside of God’s plan, as if God only loves victims. You
can confess your evil, receive forgiveness, and hear the words spoken not once
but twice, “Don’t be afraid.”
2.
A
hidden God is not an absent God or a powerless One.
It’s interesting to recognize how often God seems absent in Genesis
only to appear in surprising ways. Timothy Keller points out that in Joseph’s
story it’s sobering to count all the “accidents” and “coincidences” that had to
happen for Joseph to become a slave in Egypt.
- · Jacob had to decide to send Joseph to see how the brothers were getting along with the herd (Gen. 37:13).
- · Jacob had to believe that his sons were grazing at Shechem (Gen. 37:12).
- · If he had known that they were in Dothan (Gen. 37:17b), which was quite a bit further away and much more rural, he would likely not have sent his favorite son.
- · When Joseph comes to Shechem, he runs into a stranger who knew where his brothers had gone and was willing to initiate a conversation (Gen. 37:15-17).
- · If Joseph had not met the stranger, or if the stranger had been less-than-friendly, Joseph would have never have gone to such an out-of-the-way place that his brothers could hide him in an empty cistern which would find him in the path of Ishmaelites traders, who made him a slave.
- · Even this last move – being sold into slavery – only happens because Reuben, the oldest who planned on rescuing Joseph, was absent at the time of the purchase (Gen. 37:29).
How many “coincidences” is that? It’s easy to lose count.
But here’s what seems obvious: at any point, even one of those things not
happening could have changed the outcome and thus kept Joseph from being sent
to Egypt. And that act of betrayal, scheming, viciousness, would never have
occurred. And then what would’ve happened? Enormous numbers of people would
have died of starvation – and Jacob’s broken family system of pride,
narcissism, and hatred would have continued.
“You intended evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers,
using a Hebrew verb that traces its meaning to “weave.” “You wove evil,” he was saying, “but God rewove it
together for good.”
I
can’t pretend to offer an answer that resolves all the problems of reconciling a
good God with evil. And the Bible itself never tries to clarify this fully.
Instead, it uses stories because, as we all know, where propositions may fail,
stories can succeed. The story of Joseph, therefore, can stand as a living
treatise that you can trust. And here is
the point: there is a purpose and narrator for your life. And the narrator is
good. This doesn’t mean that bad really isn’t bad or that God is some great
Puppet-master in the sky. No, you are free to rage against evil and call it by
name. You are also free to make choices and your choices can impact others,
powerfully so. Yet God is also sovereign and free and thwarts evil in
surprising ways. I want you to entertain the thought that though you can’t
always see the plot you can know the end. And the end is this: God works good.
God,
the Master Weaver, stretches the yarn and intertwines the colors, the ragged
twine with the beautiful yarn, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes
His reach. And the good news is that no event or person, not even yourself, gets
to write the conclusion. God is the one who narrates, as Paul Harvey used to
say, the “rest of the story.”
3.
“When one cannot see, one can at least still
know.”
The French writer Rene
Daumal said: “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down
again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is
below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One
descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting
oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one
can no longer see, one can at least still know.” ~ Rene Daumal
The challenge of evil, suffering and God’s providence is the
challenge, if not impossibility, of seeing and knowing what God is up to. It is
perhaps most striking of all to realize that if God had given Joseph the good things
he was likely asking for in prayer, it would have been a terrible tragedy.
And that brings us back to Dothan. In Genesis 37 we learn
that it’s Dothan where Joseph was grabbed by his brothers and sold into
slavery.
Imagine Joseph, a teenager, at the bottom of a well:
terrified, hungry, cold and afraid – imagine the prayers that he must have
prayed, the tears he probably shed, the panic he must have felt. Just imagine. He
doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He doesn’t understand how it’s all going
to work out and even though that understanding will come with time – it comes
only after sufficient heartache, anguish and pain. It seems, in that place, he
is utterly alone in Dothan.
Many years later, Dothan has changed. It became the site of
a good-size city where the prophet Elisha and his servant found themselves
trapped, besieged by Syrian troops, a hit squad sent by the king of Aram to
kill the prophet. In 2 Kings 6:15-17, we read:
15 When the servant of the man of God got up and went
out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the
city. “Oh no, my lord! What shall we do?” the servant asked. 16 “Don’t be afraid,” the prophet
answered. “Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”
17 And Elisha prayed, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the
servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of
fire all around Elisha. ~ 2 Kings 6:15-17
Now, we know that God was just as active in Joseph’s Dothan
as God was in Elisha’s. The difference is that one was given the grace to see
and the other wasn’t. Friends, when you can’t see you can still trust God,
Joseph tells us. When you can’t see, you can at least still know that God is
good.
“Trust God!”, Martin Luther King, Jr., shouts, amidst the
evils of racism and oppression. “Trust God.”, Mary Oliver whispers, after an
experience of terrible abuse. “Trust God.”, Joseph sighs, having been wrongly
sent to prison for doing the right thing. “Trust God.”, cries Jesus, in the
garden of
This song closed the sermon: You Reign, Chris McClarney
No comments:
Post a Comment