Genesis 49-50
“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.” Genesis 50:20
We read the entire book of Genesis and I hope it doesn’t come as a surprise to you that this book is filled with evil deed after evil deed. From the garden to Joseph's death, any horrible thing you could think of has probably been covered. Yet, still we see that even in evil, God is still in complete and absolute control. Human sin and evil intentions do not hinder God’s purposes, He is over all and He is continually working to bring salvation and healing to His people. What an amazing foreshadow to Jesus.
God could have left us all the way in chapter 3. He could have rightfully turned away from Adam and Eve in the garden, and yet He didn’t. Through every moment of this book God had eyes on His people and He promised to be with them. He worked through sickness, death, human fragility, familial struggles, jealousy, anger, love and friendship to show His people that He loved them and would save them. Have you ever felt like your circumstances were too far out of God’s reach? Have you prayed for things and given up in frustration when God hasn’t answered you?
We can trust God with the mess. We can trust God with our sin. We can trust God with the brokenness and the hardship, because His goal has always been to woo us back to Himself. God is God, and His timeline for redemption may look different than ours, but it ALWAYS comes. Through Jesus' death on the cross, and the power of the holy spirit our wickedly evil hearts are being renewed day by day and we are being shaped to look more like Jesus.
“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
