God Meant It Unto Good

Joseph's story takes thirteen chapters of Genesis, more than Abraham's, and almost none of it is about Joseph doing anything. Things are done to him. He is thrown in a pit, sold, lied about, jailed, and forgotten, and the only sentence the narrator repeats is that the LORD was with him. Then, at the end, he says the one thing that makes the whole of it hold together, to the men who did it, and it is the sentence people have been saying at gravesides ever since.

The pit

"Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours. And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him" (Genesis 37:3-4). A father with a favourite, and ten brothers who knew it. Then the dreams, and the boy telling them, and the day they see him coming across the fields in the coat: "Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams" (37:20). We shall see what will become of his dreams. They will, and so will he.

"And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the pit was empty, there was no water in it" (37:24). Years later, when it all comes round, the brothers remember something Genesis 37 left out: "we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear" (42:21). He begged. A seventeen-year-old at the bottom of a dry well, begging his brothers, and they sat down to eat. Then a caravan, and a sale, "for twenty pieces of silver" (37:28), the price of a slave, and the coat dipped in goat's blood for the old man.

The LORD was with Joseph

In Egypt he is bought by an officer named Potiphar, and the narrator says the sentence for the first time: "And the LORD was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian" (39:2). A slave, and the LORD was with him. Then the master's wife, day after day, and the young man's answer, which is the first time in the story he speaks for himself: "how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?" (39:9). Against God. Not against Potiphar, though it would have been that too. He refuses, she lies, and for doing the right thing he goes to prison: "a place where the king's prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison" (39:20).

And the sentence comes again, in the next verse, in the dungeon: "But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison" (39:21). That is the pattern of the whole story. Pit, house, prison, and in each one the same five words. Not the LORD got him out. The LORD was with him, in it.

In prison he interprets a dream for Pharaoh's cupbearer, and asks one thing: "think on me when it shall be well with thee… and make mention of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of this house" (40:14). "Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him" (40:23). "And it came to pass at the end of two full years" (41:1). Two full years. The narrator wants you to feel them. Joseph has been in Egypt thirteen years now, most of them in chains, for a coat, a refusal, and a favour a man forgot.

It is not in me

Then Pharaoh dreams, and the butler remembers, and "they brought him hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh" (41:14). Hastily. Thirteen years, and then an hour. And the first thing out of his mouth before the most powerful man in the world, who has just told him he is a famous interpreter of dreams, is: "It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace" (41:16). It is not in me. The prison did not make him bitter and the throne room did not make him proud. By the end of the chapter he is governor of Egypt, and when his first son is born he names him Manasseh, forgetting: "For God, said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house" (41:51). He has not forgotten. The next chapters prove it. But he has been made able to.

I am Joseph

The famine comes, the brothers come, and Joseph, unrecognised, tests them across two visits. He weeps in private more than once; the text keeps telling us. What he is testing is whether they are the same men who sat down to eat by the pit. And when Judah, the one who proposed the sale, offers himself as a slave in place of the youngest brother, "let thy servant abide instead of the lad" (44:33), Joseph has his answer, and he cannot hold it any longer.

Come near to me. They are standing as far back as the room allows, because the governor of Egypt has just said the name of the boy in the pit, and every one of them is working out what it means. And he calls them closer, and says the thing twice, once with the wound in it and once without: whom ye sold into Egypt; God did send me before you. Both are true. He does not pretend they did not do it. He tells them what God did with it. "So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God" (45:8).

Ye thought evil, God meant it unto good

Seventeen years later Jacob dies, and the brothers panic. "Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him" (50:15). They had never quite believed the forgiveness; they thought it was for their father's sake. So they send a message, and "Joseph wept when they spake unto him" (50:17). Wept, because after seventeen years of feeding them they still thought he was waiting. And then the sentence the whole thirteen chapters were building to:

Am I in the place of God? That is the answer to revenge, and it is a question. Ye thought evil; God meant it unto good. The same event, two intentions, and the second one won without cancelling the first. He does not say it was not evil. He says God meant something else by it, and God's meaning is the one that came to pass.

Where this lands

Stephen, on trial for his life, told this story to the Sanhedrin in two verses: "the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but God was with him" (Acts 7:9). But God was with him. Stephen was about to be killed by men moved with envy, and he chose Joseph to tell them about, because he knew how the story ends. And Paul, who had stood holding the coats at Stephen's stoning, would later write the sentence that is Joseph's in other words: "all things work together for good to them that love God" (Romans 8:28). Not all things are good. Joseph's pit was not good. All things work together, and the One working them is the One who was with him in it.

The church has always seen the shape. A beloved son, hated by his brothers, sold for silver, handed to the Gentiles, counted dead by his father, and then raised to the right hand of the throne to feed the world, and the ones who sold him coming to him for bread and not knowing his face until he chose to show it. Ye thought evil against me. Men meant the cross for evil, and God meant it unto good, to save much people alive. And when His brothers come near, troubled at His presence, working out what it means, what He says is what Joseph said. Fear not. Come near to me. I will nourish you.

Related: The Word He Used Only Once, Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail, The Book of the Generations, and Joseph, a Type of Christ. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.