“Under The Sun” Week 2 June 21, 2020
Pastor Tim Patoka Good from Evil Genesis 37:3-11
1) God Works All Evil for Good 2) God Assures Us He Will Always Do This When bad things happen to us, we usually try to find a silver lining in them. Something that helps us see the hidden good in the midst of a sea of evil. When we were under stay-at-home orders two months ago, one silver lining I often heard from our church’s young families was the extra time they had together as a family. Just as their schedules were about to be overrun by end-of-school activities, the coronavirus shut everything down. And at least for the few first weeks, they had found a silver lining. But silver linings don’t make everything roses and daisies; they don’t change the fact that evil is still happening. Instead, silver linings mostly help us grin and bear the reality of our situations. But the Christian has something else, another tool to help them endure evil. They find it in God’s Word where God promises to work good from evil. That’s exactly what we’ll see happen with our Old Testament account of Joseph through whose evil God worked immense good. And God will continue to do exactly that for he works all evil for good and assures us that he will always do this. 1) God Works All Evil for Good Joseph was no stranger to evil and its devastating effects. He came from a dysfunctional family with at least 1 brother, 10 half-brothers, and 1 half-sister. As their father Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph’s half-brothers could not even be civil with him in casual conversation. Joseph didn’t help the situation at all when he, insensitive to the wedge he was further driving down, told his half-brothers the two dreams he had about their sheaves of wheat and the sun, moon, and stars all bowing down to him. We hear their father Jacob correctly interpret both dreams saying, “What kind of dream is this that you have dreamed? Will I and your mother and your brothers really come and bow down to the ground in front of you?” (Genesis 37:10) While it seemed preposterous to them at the time, this bowing down is exactly what would happen 20 some years later! And as we’ll see in a little bit, it’s when this dream was fulfilled that God reveals the good he worked from Joseph’s evil circumstances.
1