God Intended It For Good (Genesis 50:20)

Genesis 50:20 ESV 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.

God is absolutely sovereign. This means that he is in complete control over everything that happens in the world, down to the smallest detail. Thus, history plays out exactly the way God wants, and not one event deviates even slightly from his plan. But if God is absolutely sovereign and in control of everything, then why do bad things still happen?

There are many bad things which happen which, in my opinion, never needed to happen. Things would be just as good, if not better, if those things had not happened in the first place. Of course, bad things sometimes turn out for good in the end, and we praise the Lord for that. Even then, if the Lord wanted this particular outcome in the first place, then why did he not just cause the outcome to happen? Why did all those bad things have to happen until finally good comes out of it?

For example, why does God not just destroy Satan? Have you ever wondered about that? Satan is the cause of so much evil and pain in this world. Destroying him would solve so many problems! Of course, Satan will be destroyed in the end (Revelation 20:10), but why wait until then? Why not just destroy Satan right now and get it over with? Would that not be a better idea than allowing him to remain in the world to continue causing all kinds of unspoken evil and pain? If I were God, I would have destroyed Satan a long time ago! That makes so much more sense, right? Ha, God should make me God; I would do his job so much better than he is doing right now!

When we start thinking that God should have done this or that he should be doing that, we are actually thinking that we are wiser than God. Such an attitude is the height of arrogance! Who are we, fallen and finite human beings, to think that we know better than God? If we really believe that God is all-knowing, all-wise, and all-good, then that would not be our attitude.

Ironically, that is exactly the attitude of many Christians today. They deny the absolute sovereignty of God because they cannot understand how God would intend bad things to happen: “God cannot be absolutely sovereign because if he were, then things would not be happening the way they are. If God were really in complete control of everything, then things would be happening the way that I think things should be happening!” Such an attitude betrays an unwillingness to trust God. They demand that if God were absolutely sovereign, then he must run the world as they see fit according to their fallen and finite human perspective. They would only trust a god who conforms to them.

Notice how, for such Christians, their beliefs are based on their limited perspectives—what they think is right and good. Thus, they limit God to their limitations: “God could not possibly have intended this bad thing to happen because I cannot understand why God would do that. God could not possibly have a good reason for this bad thing to happen because I cannot think of any!” Therefore, whenever they encounter passages in the Bible which clearly express or strongly imply the absolute sovereignty of God, their minds go straight to work, desperately trying all they can to explain away the inescapable conclusion. That is not discernment; that is presumption!

We remember the story of Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery. Later on, he ended up in prison in Egypt, falsely accused of a crime. One night, Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, dreamed a dream which he could not understand. Because of what happened in prison, Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams became known to Pharaoh. Joseph interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to be a prediction that Egypt was going to face a great famine, and Pharaoh made Joseph his prime minister. Under Joseph’s leadership, Egypt survived the famine. If Joseph’s brothers had not sold him into slavery, he would not have ended up in a position to save Egypt during the famine.

After all this, what did Joseph say to his brothers? “You intended evil against me, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20) Notice that Joseph did not say, “This bad thing happened, but God made it work out for good in the end.” Instead, Joseph acknowledged that his brothers “intended evil” against him, and then in the same breath, using the same Hebrew word for “intended”, he said that God “intended it for good.” Did you catch that? God intended that Joseph’s brothers would intend evil against him!

But I say: If God wanted to keep alive the Egyptians during the famine, he did not have to do it at Joseph’s expense. He could have just caused food to rain down from the sky, just as he would do with the manna for the Israelites (Exodus 16)! Also, if God wanted Joseph to become the prime minister of Egypt, he did not have to cause Joseph to go through slavery and prison before that. How unnecessarily roundabout! Surely, there are other ways to achieve the same result. Why go through that roundabout way? Ha, see! I should be God! I would have done it so much more efficiently!

That is just how I think as a fallen and finite human being with a limited perspective. Even to this day, I still cannot tell you exactly why God planned Joseph’s life the way he planned it, or why he did not plan it some other way. Many Christians interpret the roundabout way that Joseph’s life turned out—bad things happening first before working out for good later on—as evidence that God is in control only to a certain extent, but not completely. However, the Scriptures draw the exact opposite conclusion in Joseph: “You intended evil against me, but God intended it for good.”