Genesis 50:20
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
Where this sits
Joseph says this to his brothers after their father's death, when they are afraid he has only been waiting for Jacob to die before taking revenge for being sold into slavery.
Reflection
This sentence is spoken about a real crime by the man it was committed against, to the men who committed it, decades later.
That matters, because the verse is often quoted at a comfortable distance from anything. Here it has none. Joseph's brothers had thrown him in a pit, sold him to traders, and lied to their father for over twenty years. He lost his youth, his freedom, and a stretch of his life to prison on a false accusation. When he says you meant evil against me, he is not being generous. He is being accurate, and he says it to their faces.
What he does not do is soften it. There is no suggestion that it was not really evil, or that they meant well, or that it all worked out so let us not dwell on it. The evil is named and left standing. What is added is that a second intention was running through the same events, and that it was aimed at something they knew nothing about.
The verb is the same for both parties. You meant, God meant. Not God permitted, not God rescued the situation afterwards. The same word, the same events, two purposes — and only one of them was visible at the time.
And the good named is concrete: to save many people alive. Not Joseph's promotion. A famine, and people fed. He waited twenty-two years to find out what it was for.
- Theme:
- Providence
- Book:
- Genesis