God Planned This for Good.

This is our final message in the book of Genesis for this series.

We have spent eighteen of the last nineteen weeks walking through Genesis 12-50.

Our theme for the series has been A Faithful God and Flawed People.

We have highlighted how God has worked in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their families.

Through all of their flaws and failures, we have seen God carry his promises along faithfully.

We are going to use 49:29-50:26 as a way to summarize the key truths God has taught us through this series.

The final accounts in Genesis have the deaths of two great men as their bookends.

While we saw Jacob, also called Israel, blessing his sons last week, this week we see the final words he gave them before he died.

At the end of chapter 50, we see Joseph’s final words.

These accounts frame the center section that is a fitting conclusion to what we have seen throughout the book.

In 50:15-21, Joseph has a painful interaction with his brothers where he makes a powerful theological statement.

We are going to start by looking at that section and then see how Joseph’s words help us think about Jacob and Joseph’s deaths.

Since we are starting in the middle, we are picking up after Jacob has died. Remember, Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery years before this.

They have a concern in verse 15, and they decide to address it indirectly in 16-17.

Interestingly, we have no other record of Jacob saying this, so we don’t know if the brothers are making it up. Joseph responds as if it is a real request, though.

That last phrase in verse 17 is a powerful detail. We have already seen Joseph openly displaying emotion several times, but here again, we see him weeping again.

The text doesn’t tell us exactly why, but given the context, I can think of two options:

He was crying tears of relief because they finally acknowledged that they had sinned and sought forgiveness and could now be reconciled completely.

The other, which I think is more likely, is that he is heartbroken because they think he might still hold a grudge.

Up to this point, Joseph has done everything he can to show his love for his brothers, so their request opens up old wounds.

Joseph’s brothers needed assurance that Joseph had really forgiven them.

They even offer to become his slaves in verse 18.

However, in what is essentially the final clear statement of theology in the book, Joseph reminds them of our key truth.

Listen to what he says in verse 19-21...

“You planned evil against me; God planned it for good.”

He had forgiven them long before this moment. God sent Joseph there to preserve his family’s lives and the promise he made to bless the nations through Abraham’s family.

Let’s lean into this idea for a bit as we think about the rest of what we see here.

If nothing else, what we see in this passage is that God is so powerful that he can even use evil for good.

In fact, here’s the statement I want you to take with you this week:

Faith says, "God planned this for good.”

That doesn’t mean that everything is good; only that God is able to take even the worst things in our lives and use them for good.

Also, keep in mind what “good” means here. It doesn’t mean that we will have everything we want or an easy life.

It doesn’t even mean that we will one day understand why God did what he did.

It means that God can use even wicked actions to further his purpose and his plan, which is the ultimate good.

We see that in Joseph’s words here: the good God intended wasn’t to prosper Joseph; it was to preserve lives.

Specifically, it was to preserve the lives of Jacob’s family, showing that God was faithful to keep his promise to Abraham and would one day keep his promise to send the Messiah to save the world through this one family and nation.

Let’s use that idea, then, to think back through what God has taught us over the last 19 weeks.

We have seen a lot of evil actions. Abraham’s family has sinned, and others have sinned against them.

However, as we read Jacob’s final words, we are reminded that...

1) God has been faithful to keep his promises.

After blessing his sons, which we looked at last week, Jacob instructed them on how they should bury him.

Look back at 49:29-32.

Jacob is asking his sons to bury him in the cave that has become the family tomb. The tomb holds the bodies of the patriarchs and some of their wives, including his own wife Leah.

We know these names, and we know some of their stories.

Over our study, we have seen their flaws and God’s faithfulness.

We have seen Abraham, likely an idol worshiper, leave his home country because God promised to give him a family in a new land. God promised that Abraham would father many nations and bless the world through his family.

We have seen Abraham lie and come up with his own plans to get ahead of God. We have also seen God be patient toward him and give him a son to carry on his line.

We have seen how his wife Sarah laughed bitterly at God’s promise to give her a son, and we have seen how she laughed with joy later because God had given her a son.

We saw Isaac, the son God promised them, grow up and repeat his father’s lies. We saw him play favorites between his two sons, and still we saw God faithfully fulfill his promises again and again.

We saw Isaac’s wife Rebekah manipulate her husband and yet God’s promises kept moving forward.

We have seen how God used unloved Leah to give sons to Jacob, one of whom would be the one whose line would be the physical line that brings the Messiah into the world to save us from our sins.

Throughout all these stories, we keep seeing over and over that God can even use wicked actions for good.

That doesn’t excuse any of these people for what they did—the actions were still sinful! Instead, it demonstrates the goodness of God who is able to take even the wicked things people do and use them for good.

Our faith, then, is built on the reality that God has shown himself faithful time and time again in the past.

These stories are given to us to look back at and see God’s hand moving through flawed people.

That is one major advantage we have over people who came before us.

We have the inspired, infallible written record of how God worked in and through his people in the pages of our Bibles.

We all have physical copies of the Bible in our homes. If you don’t, by the way, please feel free to take the one in the pew or see me afterwards and I can get you one that looks a little fancier.

Even when we aren’t near our physical Bibles, we have smartphones with apps that we can use to access the stories of God’s faithfulness at any time.

As we read those, we see that faith looks at our circumstances and says, “God planned this for good” because we have thousands of years of God’s activity in these pages.

If you have been walking with Jesus for long, you probably have your own stories of God’s faithfulness in your life.

There may be times when you can look back and see God’s hand taking hard, even wicked, situations and using them to grow you to look more like Jesus or equip you to help others or glorify him in some other way.

That is one of the reasons why it is so important for us to get together with other Christians.

Scripture is the greatest source of stories to strengthen our faith, but we help each other by sharing ways God has worked in our lives or even gently helping others see ways God may be working in their situation.

Faith looks back at what God has done and sees that his faithfulness in the past proves that God planned this for good.

Jacob’s desire to be buried with his family points us back to God’s faithfulness to take evil and bring good from it.

As we fast forward to the end of Joseph’s life, his final words remind us that...

2) God will be faithful to keep his promises.

Joseph lived out the rest of his life in Egypt.

He was able to live to see his great grandchildren and died at 110 years old.

During his lifetime, we have seen the way God keeps his promise to Abraham’s family shift.

It isn’t tied to one particular son anymore; God has now expanded the promise out to the sons of Israel and their families.

They aren’t in the land God promised Abraham, but this is still a part of what God revealed to Abraham back in chapter 15, where he told Abraham that his family would be out of the land for 400 years.

Listen to how he leads his family in his final words in verse 24-26...

Like Jacob, he points back to what God has done in the past, but only briefly.

Joseph spends most of his time pointing the family forward to what God will do.

He is going to take them back to the land they came from, and when he does, he wants them to take his bones back with them.

We read these passages too quickly. Think about what this would mean.

For them to keep their word to Joseph, someone was going to have to keep up with his bones for longer than the length of time that America has existed as an official nation.

I don’t know if they put them in a tomb or if they had a special place to keep stuff like this or what they did with them, but keeping up with that box of bones was a constant symbol to the nation that God was going to take them home some day.

Remember when this was written: Moses wrote these words down at some point during the time he was leading Israel out of Egypt and toward the Promised Land.

The final words of Genesis are being carried out as Moses is writing them.

In fact, Joseph’s bones are still somewhere in the camp, waiting for the fulfillment of this phase of God’s promise.

Between the time Joseph died and God let his bones be buried in the Promised Land, though, the Israelites endured some evil things.

Some of those were outside of their control—they would be enslaved by the Egyptians and their sons murdered by an evil Pharaoh.

Other evil actions came from within the tribe of Israel as they disobeyed God, worshiped idols, refused to trust him to take them into the Promised Land, and more.

God’s promises cannot be stopped, though.

After they conquered and divided the land, we read this:

Joshua 24:32 CSB

Joseph’s bones, which the Israelites had brought up from Egypt, were buried at Shechem in the parcel of land Jacob had purchased from the sons of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for a hundred pieces of silver. It was an inheritance for Joseph’s descendants.

Did you catch that? God didn’t just have them take Joseph’s bones back to the land of Canaan; he had them bury Joseph at Shechem.

Remember, that’s where the family lived when he was younger until his brothers murdered all the men of the town and they had to move.

That’s also where Joseph went first when he was looking for his brothers before heading to Haran where they sold him into slavery.

Joseph didn’t know all the specifics of what would happen between his death and the time when Israel would bury his bones in Shechem.

In the same way, we don’t know everything that will happen to us while we wait for the promises God has made.

For Christians, God has made promises like Jesus’s promise to come back to earth to fully set up his kingdom forever. There are promises of heavenly reward and comfort that we don’t see yet. There are promises of us knowing fully, even as we are fully known.

We don’t know what heartaches and pain and evil things will happen to us between now and when God fulfills those promises completely.

Like Joseph, though, we can look through the lens of faith and know that God will keep his promises.

That lens enables us to look around at the pain, the disorientation, the frustration, the heartache, and in faith say, “God planned this for good.”

That isn’t blind faith; it is based off the testimony of God’s word and the millions of people who have shown him to be faithful throughout their lives.

Also, this isn’t about suppressing the pain you are going through or feeling like it is no big deal.

Instead, I want to give you a clear truth from God’s word for you to hold onto during the difficult times.

Can I be brutally transparent with you, though?

There will be days when the pain is so severe that this truth seems hollow. There will be moments when you say these words with tears in your eyes or a lump in your throat.

In those moments of heartache, you are going to want to run far away from God and hide.

Can I challenge you that those are the moments where we need these realities the most?

That is where we join with Job when he said,

Job 13:15 CSB

Even if he kills me, I will hope in him. I will still defend my ways before him.

Why? Because God means this for good.

Somehow, in ways you and I may never understand, God is redeeming this.

As John Piper says,

At any point in time, God is doing 10,000 things in your life and you may be aware of three of them.”

There are some days that you might not even know three!

But even and especially in those moments, faith says, “God means this for good.”

How do we know? Because we serve a God who knows what it is to endure wicked, unjust actions.

Not only has he not wiped all humanity off the face of the earth because of our sin, he came to earth and endured hatred, lies, and accusations from jealous people.

Ultimately, that hatred built to the point that they beat him and nailed him to a cross.

While hanging on the cross, he didn’t just endure the physical pain of the beatings and the nails. He didn’t just suffer through the emotional pain of being mocked by the people he created.

In what no one could see and what we can hardly perceive, he endured the spiritual pain of suffering the punishment that you and I deserved.

He did all of that so that he could defeat death on our behalf and make a way for you and I to have life instead of to take the punishment for our sin.

If he was willing and able to take the evil actions of wicked men and endure the punishment that we deserve for all the wicked actions we commit and use that for our ultimate good and to redeem the world from the power and stain of sin, then we can, in faith, look at whatever we endure and say, “God planned this for good.”

That echoes the encouragement given by the writer of Hebrews when he says,

Hebrews 12:3 CSB

For consider him who endured such hostility from sinners against himself, so that you won’t grow weary and give up.

As we conclude our time in Genesis, we see that God has been faithful through the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph and the other brothers in spite of, and even through, their flaws.

That should fill us with wonder as we look back at how good God is.

It should fill us with humility as we see ourselves in these lives.

It should fill us with hope as we look forward in faith to how God will fulfill his promises.

May we, like Joseph and so many who have gone before us, faithfully say, “God planned this for good.”