God Meant It For Good

Well, good morning to you. Please open your Bibles to Genesis 50. Genesis chapter 50, verse 20. This week we had VBS in which the discussion was Joseph, and I pretty much failed to finish my lesson each and every day, so I figured I'll just spend a good chunk of time on just one verse today to make myself feel better about that. Of course, this is a good verse to rest on for a moment this Lord's Day.

So let me read the text, and we'll go to the Lord in prayer. Genesis chapter 50, we'll read 19 to 21. But Joseph said to them, Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. So do not fear. I'll provide for you and your little ones.

Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. Let us pray. Oh, Father, how desperately we need you to speak comforting words to us and speak kindly to us, for we are sinners and we are plagued with sin. And God, we're so thankful that we gather together to celebrate the work of Jesus who conquered sin. And so God, I pray that you would help us to see this narrative here, to see the story of Joseph and to marvel at Jesus Christ our Lord.

Help us, God, to see this narrative and be overwhelmed with our sin, but then be overwhelmed with the mercies and grace that's found in Christ Jesus our Lord. Would you help me in my weakness now to speak something of value? And God, I ask that you would help the people before me in their weakness to hear and to respond by the mercies and grace of Christ to your holy word.

God in heaven, what a great day you have given to us to gather together and proclaim the excellencies of our Savior, Jesus Christ. May he be glorified now, and may it be for our good as we respond to you in faith. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, it is not hard to convince anybody that there is a lot of evil in this world. All you have to do is turn on the news or open up your phone to a news app and see that there's evil all around us.

In fact, just for the hay of it, whenever I was writing these very notes, I opened up my news app on my phone to see what was some of the articles that screamed out at me. And indeed, all of them were evil news, or most of them, I should say. One of them being a husband and wife were murdered on a hiking trail in front of their two children for no apparent reason at all.

Another one was 50 Christians were murdered overseas somewhere in a Muslim nation by Muslims for denying the false prophet Muhammad and affirming Christ as Lord. you don't need to look very far to see evil news, wicked news all around. And in fact, you don't need to look very far because deep within us, there's evil and wickedness. In fact, one of the testimonies of that is the fact that what sells is evil news.

If you want to sell newspapers, I guess you don't sell newspapers anymore, but if you want to sell clicks, I guess, you need to have evil news because that's what people are interested in reading. or consider your own body slowly decaying to its death, which is great evil of itself. It's amazing. We're on a slow decay down, and then eventually our bodies die, which is a great evil.

I remember waking up. I could have ran a marathon as a child. The next day I would have woken up with no soreness at all. Now if I were to do such a thing, well, later on I would feel a little bit of pain the next day, but now all I've got to do is take a nice walk in the park, and I wake up tomorrow with my back on fire, and that's what's going on right now, actually.

I'm having a hard time saying it up straight because I played a little bit of Ultimate Frisbee yesterday. But it's a great evil, right, that our bodies decay and die, death. Many of our days are filled with misery, which is an evil. All of us in this room can attest to one degree or the other, we've all dealt with misery in our own life. In fact, some of you may be dealing with a serious bout of misery right now, and that is evil.

Evil is anything that causes misery and death. That's what evil is. Anything that causes misery and death. And in a world that God made very good, or anything that causes joy in life, we know all too well that there is a curse that causes a lot of evil. Last week for VBS, we went over the story of Joseph, a man who experienced much evil, even though he deserved none of it. and the whole narrative finds its purpose the whole narrative joseph finds its purpose its culminating statement when after all the evil had been done to him by his own older brothers he makes a startling statement that seems to dry his every tear that he had shed and bring a surprising smile on the sufferer's face when he says as for you you meant evil against me but god meant it for good to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today.

And this morning, by looking at Joseph's life, the life of Jesus, and then our own life, we are going to see that this statement of Joseph this startling surprising statement of Joseph is true not only in his own life but it is true it a truth that dominates the scope of the scriptures and can even dominate your own life as you deal with evil and misery and death. God can and does use every ounce of evil we experience for the greatest good, period. Let's look at that by beginning with this text, looking at Joseph's life.

And again, look at your text in verse 20 of Genesis 50. He says, as for you, he says, Joseph is talking to his older brothers. He's talking to his older brothers. As for you, my older brothers. But this is not a typical conversation between a younger sibling, a brother, and his older brothers. This is a little bit different here.

This conversation was between the guilty and needy older brothers and a younger brother who was the second most powerful man in the world. And he had everything that the older brothers needed for their survival. You have the older brothers who were needy and guilty before their younger brother, who is the most powerful man in the world, who could provide everything they needed, all the good things they needed to survive. and these older brothers are scared for their father just died and now there seems to be no reason that their younger brother would do anything good for them yet joseph the younger brother the second most powerful man in the world says a startling statement to his guilty and needy older brothers starting with you meant it or you meant evil against me this underlines their guilt These are guilty older brothers.

He said, you did something evil. You meant evil against me. These older brothers were afraid because they were guilty. And they were guilty because they meant evil against their younger brother years ago. 30 years prior to this, when Joseph was just 17 years old, he was told by his father to check on his older brothers at a place that was quite the distance away.

And since Joseph was their father's favorite, and since Joseph had given their father a bad report about his older brothers before and since Joseph had been having dreams which said that he would be an authority and a power over his older brothers, they hated him. And this is not like regular sibling hatred like when a younger sister reads the older sister's diary and she says, I hate you, and they have a little skirmish going on there. These are people that hate Joseph.

They literally, a couple chapters before this, they murdered a whole town. So this is serious hatred that they can have within their heart, and it's directed at their younger brother Joseph, who's coming to see what is going on. They hated their younger brother and had evil to the fullest degree in their heart towards him. So as their 17-year-old little brother approaches them, who's simply just checking on their welfare and obedience to his father's command, they grab him, rip his robe off of him, and throw him in a pit to die.

Later on, they would describe the evil action that they did in this way. Just listen to my words. They said to one another, in truth, we are guilty concerning our brother and that we saw the distress of his soul when he begged us, and we did not listen to him. That is why this distress has come upon us. You see, they did such a wicked thing imagine hearing the cries of your younger brother, oh please don't do this evil thing to me, and yet the cry meant nothing to them.

The evil continued in that they sold their younger brother to traders as a slave and made a few bucks off of him, where he was sent to a land far away, a land of Egypt, never to see, so to speak, never to see seemingly his family again. And on top of all this, they lie about it to their father saying that he died so that he would not go looking for him and rescue him. This would have made quite the news headline, wouldn't it have?

People would have ate it up and read it with glee. And because of this evil, this man experienced more evil beyond this. He would be sold as a slave to a man with a wicked wife who would accuse him wrongly of sexual assault in which he would then end up in prison. And while in prison, Joseph would help an inmate, the cupbearer to the Pharaoh with a troubling dream he had, interpreting it, which was for his good fortune.

And he asked him, oh, please remember me when you leave. And the cupbearer forgets him and doesn't remember him, does not mention him to Pharaoh. And so he languishes in prison for years more. So 30 years later, or decades later, this powerful man now, looking at his brothers had every reason to throw them in the pit and let them suffer for the evil they had done to him and all the evil he has known because of it.

But in a strange turn of affairs before us in this verse he does not finish his statement you met evil against me by dwelling on their evil. but he continues by saying but God meant it for good you meant evil against me but God meant the very same thing for good to look at Joseph's life as just a big display of his brother's evil would be one dimensional of him it would be only half the story to describe the whole story joseph says god meant that same thing for good the same evil that we just saw we just talked about was actually god used by god to bring good and remember evil is something that causes misery and death good is something that causes joy in life two opposites and so where the evil had joseph wicked brother send him and change to a foreign land good was sending Joseph to Egypt Where evil had a wicked woman accuse a righteous Joseph of sexual assault Good sent Joseph to a particular prison that would get him close to Pharaoh's chief servants. Where evil had the prisoner forget the kindness Joseph did for him by interpreting his dream when he got out of prison, Good would have the prisoner remember two years later when Pharaoh was in distress over his own dream. A dream that Joseph interpreted by God's power to mean there would be seven years of famine, or plenty, seven years of famine, a large enough famine to kill all the population of Egypt, and even the population surrounding Egypt, Joseph's own family.

But God and his goodness had also used the experience of evil that Joseph had experienced as a slave and a prisoner to be able to execute a good plan to perfection that saved enough food to stop everyone from going hungry. So because God in his goodness had Joseph in the right place at the right time with the right plan, he saved Egypt and was now in our text in a position to save his family. And so when his brothers come to him, the most powerful man in the world, and are afraid that he will do evil to them to cause misery and death, Joseph says that he will do good to them because that has been God's plan from the beginning.

Look again at verse 19. Joseph said to them, do not fear, for am I in the place of God? What Joseph is saying there is, Am I God? And what he's about to get to is, God has done all this for good. Who am I to make this at all an evil affair? He says, I'm not in the place of God.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring about many people to be kept alive as they are today. So, since I'm not God and this is God's plan, do not fear. I will provide for you and your little ones. Thus he comforted them and spoke kindly, or to use an archaic word, goodly to them. Now, it is easy for us to think that Joseph is pointing to us, right?

We look at that story. It's wonderful. It's exhilarating to read. And it's easy for us to think that Joseph, this story, is pointing to us. That this story is meant to help us carry on when we are being mistreated with evil. That when evil is committed against us to want to make us miserable and even death, God can use it for good.

And to be honest with you, some of you right now may need to hear that. Some of you may be mistreated at work, school, and your home for no evil of yours. And you might need to know that basic truth, that God can turn it for good. But Joseph is not primarily a type or a shadow or an example of you or I. That's not the purpose, the main purpose here. He is an example of Jesus.

If we're not seeing Jesus in this story, we have missed the entire point. If all we can see is ourselves and we cannot see Jesus, you've missed it, beloved. No, Joseph is an example of Jesus. And since Jesus is the purpose of all the scriptures, we can say this statement of Joseph, who is an example of Jesus, is a theme of all the scriptures pertaining to Jesus.

So now let's look at Jesus' life in light of what happened here with Joseph's life. No one has ever been so righteous. So perfect. With perfect goodwill as his motivations for others than Jesus. No one has ever been more perfect. You can't be more perfect.

You're perfect. Jesus was, in every way, perfect. With perfect goodwill for others. And yet no one has ever experienced such evil by men as Jesus. From men as Jesus. Perfectly righteous with perfect goodwill for his neighbor always.

Imagine that just for a second. Perfect goodwill for your neighbor. always, and yet he experienced the most wickedness we could imagine by his neighbor. He was perfect in righteousness. First Peter 2, 22, he committed no sin, neither was deceit found in Jesus's mouth, and he had perfect goodwill for others. Matthew 20, 28, he says, even as the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve.

Son of Man, imperfect in power, came to use his life to serve others. perfect goodwill for others. Not one eye roll from Jesus, not one rude remark from Jesus, not one moment of wayward desires, thought, or deeds from Jesus. Perfect love for his father in heaven and perfect love for every single neighbor around him. Though he was true deity, he dwelled in true humanity, yet lived as a poor man on this earth for the sake of others, perfectly selfless and as joseph is portrayed as an innocent and righteous man in that narrative in genesis he is a shadow of the true perfect righteous jesus christ but joseph being a type of jesus continues it goes even further as joseph had dreams which revealed god's plan for greatness for himself jesus came with the scroll of the book the scriptures telling of great things for him as the chosen one.

And as Joseph's brothers rejected that, his dreams meant anything good for them, so Jesus' brothers, the people of Israel, failed to see God's Messiah was meant for anything of their good. As Joseph gave a bad report of his brothers to his father, so Jesus gave a bad report of his fellow man to the father. And as Joseph was sent by his father to a distant land to check on the well-being of his brothers, so Jesus was sent by the father from heaven to check on the well-being of his fellow man.

And as Joseph's brother said, here comes the dreamer, let us kill him and see what comes of his dreams. So Jesus's brothers, his fellow man said, here the son and the heir of the father let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours And so it was that like Joseph brothers stripped him of his robes and sold him to the will of foreigners so Jesus's brothers gave him into the hands of the Romans where he was stripped of his clothes and killed on the tree. And where the cries of Joseph was met by indifference by his brothers as they ate lunch. so the cries of Jesus on the cross was met by mockery and indifference to those who looked on on their way to Jerusalem and after 30 years Joseph's brothers would cower to him with great need that could only be fulfilled by the evil that they put their brother through so man is now to come to Jesus after the great evil committed against him in which their only hope for good is because of that action against them.

1 Peter 2, 24 says, He himself bore our sins, our evil in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed, for you were strained like sheep, but have now returned to the shepherd and overseer of your souls. Where the evil against Joseph led to the greatest physical good for his brothers, the evil against the Lord of glory leads to the greatest eternal spiritual good for humanity.

Look and behold the life of Jesus. Though he embodied the greatest good, was treated with the greatest evil so that those who were evil would receive the greatest good. What about your life then? You are not the primary thing Joseph is pointing to, Jesus is, as we just saw. but you are and I we both find ourselves in this story as a primary participant but just not as Joseph but we are his brothers the perfect law of God the same law that Jesus came and displayed by his fulfilling was the same law that gave a bad report to the father you and I are lawbreakers that the perfect revelation of Jesus has exposed every one of our lawless deeds from our desires in our heart, to thoughts in our heads, to actions by our hands is an evil that declares war against the goodness of Christ.

Whereas all glory and honor goes to Jesus the Lord, when we sin, we are saying instead loud and clear, here is the dreamer, here is the heir, let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours. For every act of disobedience to the majesty of his name is crying out, crucify him. It's a tearing off of Jesus' robe. It's a slap in his face. It's an indifference to the molestation of his pure and total goodness for us.

The history of humanity, the history of you, beloved, the history of me, is a history of crucifying the perfect goodness of God. It's a history of great evil, and we are the perpetrators. If you deny this fundamental reality, It's just the same as the brothers of Joseph casually having lunch, not caring about their sin after they sold their brother to the slavers.

And yet, the message of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ the Lord, is that though we meant it for evil to murder him, to crucify him with our lawlessness, God has meant it for good. it's interesting when peter preached to the people who physically killed jesus imagine that this is right after jesus ascended up to heaven this is when the spirit descended upon his church and peter preaches the first gospel message he was preaching to those who literally or physically killed jesus but yet it's the same message to us who by our lawlessness and hatred of what is good murdered Jesus as well. And he says in Acts 2.22, in fact, go there, Acts 2.22. Acts 2.22.

Peter says to the murderers of Jesus, men of Israel hear these words Jesus of Nazareth the man attested to you by God with mighty works and wondrous signs that God through him through him did in your midst as you yourselves know you've seen it this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But yet God raised him up, loosing the pains of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it. You see the judgment, you see the guilt, you killed the Lord of glory.

But yet it was by the perfect and good plan of God for it to happen. So as these Jews literally killed the Lord of glory, so we and our sin have killed the Lord of glory. And yet it's the same answer. In Acts 2, look at verse 37. When these same people, when they heard this message, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?

And notice the gospel message isn't you done evil and now you're going to receive evil. Good luck. But instead it is a despite the evil, there is good provided for you. And Peter said to him, repent, be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your evil, of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. And with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation. So we, who have killed Jesus, with our sin have the same offer of goodness extended to us. And to those who respond in faith in Jesus Christ, God promises to use everything in this world, in our souls, all the wickedness, all the evil, he promises to use it all for the good of us who are evil found in Christ.

In fact, there's that Romans 8, 28 through 29 text, a beautiful text that we should always meditate on, that we should never let get dull and boring, even though it's read often, because it is a glorious passage that is a mirror passage to where we're at now. In light of everything Christ has done, Romans 8, 28 through 29, and we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

So that the same evil that happens to you from without and the evil that exists within you, God promises to use it for good through the Lord Jesus Christ. As you trust in him God turns all the evil to look like his goodness so whether you have never truly believed upon this jesus or have done now for years the answer is the same for all of us we must be like joseph's brothers that came in fear and all of joseph trembling before the most powerful man in the world because his very the very life their well-being was in his hand who despite their evil he had good in his hand for them to take care of them and provide for their every need. And so for us, we are to come to our Lord, the righteous one, the one we have so offended with evil, and see that he has more than enough good at his right hand for us.

And as Joseph spoke to his brothers, so Jesus speaks to you now, beloved, do not fear, for I am in the place of God. As for you, you met evil against me, but God turned it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. So do not fear, Jesus says to you, I will provide for you. Thus he comforts you and speaks kindly to you.

Oh, that we would turn to Jesus today, even with our evil, that we would believe that he can turn our evil into good, that he has said he has done it, and he will do it. And that as we turn to Jesus seeing all our evil placed upon him and yet receiving all the goodness coming forth from him from the cross and his resurrection that we would truly believe that everything that is happening to us today is so that we would look more like this good Jesus that he is conforming us after his own image, using all the evil to do that very same thing. And so as we bemoan the evil that surrounds us, as we bemoan the evil that's within us, we look to Jesus, who has already said, I've done all things well.

I have turned all things into good. and I shall continue to do the same work in you. And so that evil that you experience becomes the echo of eternity, that he can turn it for good and will do so for you, beloved. May we have faith and trust in this, even in our darkest moments, that Christ Jesus is working for good. Let us pray. Oh, Father, thank you for Christ Jesus, our Lord.

I thank you, Lord, that he is the Lord of glory. Although he was treated with wickedness, Lord the greatest evil ever committed was against him and we know Lord that our lawless deeds our sin is a picture of his death Lord our sins is what's put him upon that cross our evil is what put him there but because he's merciful and loving because he has goodwill to men to even sinners he turns that evil and he makes it our good by giving us of his righteousness also God as we travel this dry and weary land as our bodies decay as we feel the effects of the evil of Adam, as we experience the sin of others, as they mistreat us, as we experience our own sin within our own hearts, our own evil, may we use that to look to Jesus and to see the good that he has done. and may we look to the promise that he is working all things for his glory and our good to conform us after the image of Jesus. So may we not be deceived into thinking that we should celebrate our evil or do our evil and not turn to Jesus Christ.

May we not be deceived into thinking that if we were to come to Jesus he would simply just give us evil or bad. But let us be convinced that as Joseph's brothers came to him and received good from his hand, may we be convinced that we can go to Jesus and despite our evil receive his goodness and may we be convinced of this each day that each time we're found in sin we'd be eager to go to Christ Jesus our Lord for he is good thank you for sending us your son to die and to do this work thank you for sending your son to rise up to new life and I thank you that you have called out a people your church to receive good from his hand. May he be praised now and into eternity forever and ever.

In Jesus' name, amen.