The "S" Bomb

At the end of the book of Genesis, Joseph drops a bomb. Really. He tells his brothers that what they had meant for evil, God had meant for good. It's the most jawdropping description of God's sovereignty that I have ever heard.

He doesn't condone what they did and say that "it was meant to be" or that "everything happens for a reason". He gives the reason: "you meant evil against me". What his brothers did sucked and he didn't make excuses for them or paint them as pawns in the hand of a God who was hell-bent on getting his own way.

Joseph is telling his brothers that God's omnipotence is so unequivocally complete that His good and pleasing and perfect will is accomplished in our lives--in all lives--without any compromise of our free will. We--with our smallish, finite minds, trapped in time and space and unable to comprehend things which do not begin nor end--have missed the boat that Joseph was on. We understand only that if a thing turns out the way it is planned, it is because something compelled it to be so. The only way we know to determine the outcome is to play with a stacked deck. And so we ascribe to our Creator the same brand of tyrannical power we find in a dictator--power derived from dominance and coercion. Or we cheapen His authority by labeling it simply "foreknowledge" as if He were looking in His infallible crystal ball without being involved.

His purposes, which are fixed and have been fixed since the dawn of time, stand and stand and stand and continue to stand. They stand and they will not be moved and man is free. He is free and his choices are real and his will is his own. And yet the purpose of God will stand. And we cannot comprehend a dimension in which these two true things can exist simultaneously. But they do. And He is.

Joseph got it. And so he dropped a bomb on his brothers that hopefully sent them spinning. Hopefully. Hopefully they got a sense of the Staggering Goodness that was thick enough and broad enough and wide enough to swallow their evil intentions whole and blaze all the brighter.

My Redeemer lives.