God’s Sovereignty

Living in the present with Joseph (Genesis 50:19-20)

My last post was about living in the present moment so that we can maximize our enjoyment of the Lord and can give ourselves away for the blessing of others. If I am dwelling in the past and lamenting things that cannot be changed, or if I am fearing the future and fixating on the threats that might come, then I am not living in the present. And the present is the only place where I can live and be faithful to my calling (Ephesians 4:1) and accomplish the works the Lord has given me to do (Ephesians 2:10).

In this post I wanted to further explore this idea of living in the present by looking at some biblical pictures of this and asking, “So, what do I do with my past? How do I handle thoughts and feelings about my past? Do I just pretend those things never happened?”

TWO ASPECTS OF THE PAST: MY OWN SINS AND THOSE OF OTHERS

It occurs to me that there are two aspects of our past that can prevent us from living fully in the present. First, there are my own sins and failures. There are the things that I have said and done in violation and rebellion against God’s moral Law and have thus wounded others, and these things now bring me the pain of shame and guilt and regret. How can I ever remove these black marks from my past when the sins are committed, and the words are said and cannot be taken back and are etched in history’s stone? Who will set me free from this guilt and shame (Romans 7:24)? The good news of Jesus Christ answers this question, because most of what the Bible has to say about our past and about how we are to deal with our past is focused on this aspect of our past. The Bible declares that, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they will be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they will be like wool (Isaiah 1:18).” The Bible proclaims that, because the Lord Jesus Christ died on Calvary’s cross, your sins can be forgiven and your guilt and shame can be removed if you will place your faith in Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior. The gospel, and only the gospel, offers forgiveness, full and free, from all your sins and failures (John 8:36).  

But the second aspect of our past that can prevent us from living in the present is the things that have been done to us by others. This second aspect has to do with dealing with how others have wounded and harmed us. People can often be thoughtless, and they can be intentionally cruel, and they can inflict deep and long-lasting damage to us. But regardless of who or how the damage is done, we are the ones who must mend and forgive and untangle and resolve and defang these deep pains from our past. These kinds of wounds can stay with us a long time and can leave us trapped in the wreckage of the past. How do we deal with this part of our past? How are we able to bury these specters from the past so that we can live and flourish in the present?

JOSEPH RECEIVED CRUEL AND EVIL TREATMENT, AND YET . . .

            Joseph was the favorite son of his father, Jacob. Then one day, while obeying his father’s instructions to find his ten older brothers (Genesis 37), his brothers conspired together to strip off his special coat and to throw him into a pit to die. Before they could kill Joseph, however, some slave traders come along, and the ten older brothers decide to sell Joseph to the slave traders heading to Egypt. When Joseph is gone, they dip his robe into goat’s blood and tell his father that he is dead. Meanwhile, as a slave in Egypt, Joseph is falsely accused and thrown into an Egyptian prison. Here is a man who should have been trapped by his past and by the evil that was done to him by others. Here is a man whose major hope for the future would be to get out of prison so he can take revenge on his brothers.

            But that is not what we find. Through God’s providence and God’s plan, Joseph is dramatically promoted from prison to the palace and is made second in charge to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt. And what does he do with the pain of his past?

MANASSEH AND EPHRAIM

            Pharaoh gives Joseph a wife and through her, Joseph has two sons. He names the firstborn Manasseh, for “God has made me forget all my hardship and all my father’s house (Genesis 41:51).” The name of the second he called Ephraim, “For God has made me fruitful in the land of my affliction (41:52).” Joseph is able to break free of the poison of his past because he focuses on what God is doing, and he focuses on God’s goodness. It is as if he says, “Yes, people can be cruel and evil, but God is good and I will rejoice in Him and I will trust Him to run His universe as He sees fit.” Joseph could have remained trapped in the past, bitter and vengeful and blaming others for his pain, but he chooses instead to trust the Lord and to live in the present and to do today what God has commanded him to do today.

RECONCILES WITH HIS BROTHERS

            What will Joseph do with his feelings toward his brothers? How can he ignore the hateful evil that they did to him, throwing their own brother in a pit and then selling him off to slave traders? But even in this Joseph will not be a slave to his past. He will not be trapped in the pit of self-pity or in the chains of revenge. Instead, when he finally confronts his brothers, the men who robbed him of his home and of the peacefulness of his youth, he says, “And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life (Genesis 45:5).” Joseph knows the God is the one who used the evil deeds of his brothers to preserve life in Egypt. God is the one in control. and God is good. God has made Joseph lord of all Egypt (45:9). Joseph focuses on God and is thus able to escape the slavery to his past. So, Joseph chooses to forgive his brothers and not to hold them under his judgment, and thus is able to live and love in the present. At the end of this scene, Joseph “kissed his brothers and wept on them, and afterward his brothers talked with him (45:15).”

CONFESSION OF SIN AND FORGIVENESS AT LAST

            Joseph has been freed from his past, and he has forgiven his brothers’ sins against him, but because his brothers have never admitted (confessed) their evil to Joseph and have never asked for his forgiveness, they remained trapped in the past. They remain fearful that Joseph may some day remember the evil that they have done to him and may take revenge. But finally, the brothers, too, are set free from the evil that they did to Joseph. “Please forgive the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did you wrong (Genesis 50:17).” Joseph responds to their request for forgiveness by weeping, as all the evil of the past and its pain finally rolls away, and he says, “Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good to preserve many people alive (Genesis 50:19-20).”

FORGETTING THE PAST SO WE CAN FULLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT

            By fixing his focus on God, and not on the evil deeds of men, Joseph is able to move past his past, so that he can fully live in the present. The Lord has given him the ability to forgive his brothers so he can forget their cruelty to him. He thus forgets what lies behind, so that he can be free to embrace what lies ahead (Philippians 3:12-14). When we focus on the Lord and His goodness, we remove from our past the power to enslave us and we can joyfully live in the present.

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You Knew My Path (Psalm 142:3)

            There is a scene from the original “Star Wars” movie (1977) that sticks in my mind. All the living heroes of the movie (Luke, Leah, Han Solo, and Chewbacca) have temporarily escaped from the battle with the storm troopers by ducking into a convenient trash bin. Their relief from escaping the battle is short-lived, however, because the trash bin becomes a trash compactor and threatens to doom them to a nasty death by crushing.

            While this may not be a perfect analogy, there are times in life when we all feel like we are in this situation. Part of the human experience is the feeling that we are small and weak and that the threats against us are big and gnarly. We have exhausted all our cleverness in escaping our adversaries, only to end up in a sloppy, scummy trash bin just as the maintenance crew decides to activate the compactor. In that moment we realize that we have been outmatched by the challenges that life has presented to us. And the question is, “What do you do then?” To whom do you cry out when life has overwhelmed you and your carefully laid plans have collapsed, when your friends have failed you, and there seems to be no escape for you? Where can you find hope and confidence? In Psalm 142, David is in that place, and we will find, in this psalm, patterns and strategies for how to respond from the midst of the intergalactic trash compactor.

            This study of Psalm 142 will focus only on the first half of verse 3:

“When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, You knew my path.” (NAS Bible)

            Since we have dropped into the middle of the psalm, it would be good to get a little context. Although the nature of David’s trouble is not clear, it is obvious that the shepherd-king is in distress and may have been in distress for a while. Here in Psalm 142:3, David says that “his spirit is overwhelmed within him.” I read this as meaning both his soul and his body are exhausted. He has tried to maintain his courage, but the setbacks keep on coming. Like a surfer caught in the midst of a series of big waves, he is losing the fight to catch his breath. As soon as he fights his way to the surface, another wave of water crashes down. Fear and fatigue are towering over him, and he is overpowered. He is outmatched. “When my spirit was overwhelmed within me . . .” What is David’s source of hope?

            The last four words of Psalm 142:3a are “You knew my path.” These four words are critically important to the child of God who is feeling overwhelmed by the incessant challenges of life.

“You, O LORD, knew my path.”

            David expresses the confidence that every believer can have, that the LORD is personally aware of and concerned with our every trial and overwhelming circumstance. The LORD knows my path, and He knows your path. The NAS Bible renders the Hebrew verb in the past tense, “knew.” In this case, the past tense is much stronger than the present tense. The LORD KNEW my path in eternity past, before the creation of the world, and then He brought my “path” into existence according to His perfect plan. He personally ordained it to be. “You knew my path” means that the LORD has led me into this situation, the LORD is personally with me in the midst of it, and the LORD already knows every detail of the outcome. “You knew my path” means that the LORD has His personal fingerprints on every detail of every circumstance of my life, making sure that exactly this circumstance unfolds exactly this way so that all things work together for good (Romans 8:28) and so that I am conformed more into the image of Christ (8:29).

REFLECTION

            In the book of “Job,” we read that “man is born for trouble as the sparks fly upward (5:7).” Our Lord Jesus Himself said that “each day has enough trouble of its own (Matt. 6:34)” and “in this world you will have tribulation (John 16:33).” The Bible speaks truth about life on earth after sin enters the world, and it is a life of effort and setback and difficulty. Of course, it is not ALL trial and difficulty, but we must have a sober expectation that overwhelming times will come so that we are not defeated when we meet the first opposing waves.

            In light, then, of the inevitability of trials, what can we, as followers of Jesus, do that will make a difference in our lives? First, when we are feeling overwhelmed by the trials of life, we can have confidence that the Lord who guided us into the trial is with us in the storm and will guide us out to our safe haven (Psalm 107:30). Remember, “the LORD knew my path.” Each trial thus becomes an opportunity to increase our trust in the Lord and to anticipate His faithfulness.

            Second, it is in trials that the Lord proves His power to deliver us. God has already accomplished the most powerful act of deliverance imaginable when He delivered us from our sin and condemnation and raised us up in salvation through our faith in the Lord Jesus and His completed work on the cross. Having already demonstrated His power in giving us eternal deliverance, He is more than able to come to our help for temporal deliverance. What I mean is this: The Lord will deliver those who cry out to Him. Nothing is too difficult for Him (Jeremiah 32:17). Your trial may be overwhelming to you, but to the One who called the universe into existence ex nihilo and who raised Jesus from the dead (Ephesians 1:19-20), the trial is completely under His feet. In fact, if my thinking is correct on this, the Lord brings trials into our lives SO THAT He can rescue us when we cry to Him. “The LORD knew my path,” so He knew how He was going to deliver me.

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To you it has been granted . . . (Matthew 13:11)

In chapter 13 of Matthew we read of the kingdom parables, where Jesus tells a series of parables which describe different aspects of the kingdom of heaven. After telling the parable of the sower, the disciples ask Jesus why He speaks to the crowds in parables, and He answers them, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the Kingdom, but to them it has not been granted (13:11).” Here is this simple statement is profound teaching, indeed. For while there are many things that could be said about this verse or this passage, what strikes me most powerfully is how clearly this verse demonstrates God’s sovereignty in revealing truth to some and denying truth from others.

Like the world of this age or of any age, this crowd also is made up of two groups of people. Every single individual in the crowd is in one group or the other. Each person has either been granted to know the mysteries of the Kingdom or they have not been granted to know. The one who decides who is able to understand the parables and who is not able to understand is God Himself. The ability to know the mysteries of the Kingdom does not depend on education or intelligence or social status or gender or any other human characteristic. The content of the parables is simple enough for a child to understand, but to understand how the parable reveals the kingdom of heaven is only granted by God. God grants to whomever He chooses the knowledge of the Kingdom and to the rest, He does not grant that knowledge. The teaching is thus that God and God alone is the One who sovereignly chooses who will be granted the knowledge of the Kingdom and who will thus be blessed (13:16). God is the One who grants and blesses some, and God is the One who does not grant and does not bless others.

And it is the same with the gospel message. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe (Romans 1:16), but some are granted to believe that gospel message and some are not granted to believe. As God was sovereign in granting spiritual understanding so that some of these people could understand the parables, so God is sovereign in opening hearts and minds of some to receive the gospel message. The same message that brings one person to faith and repentance leaves another entirely unmoved or drives them finally away from God forever. God and God alone is the one who determines who will believe “the report” (Romans 10:16, quoting Isaiah 53:1) and who will thus be saved. He grants to some and He does not grant to the rest.

How, then, should we respond to this teaching that God is the one who grants the ability to know and who decides who will be saved and who will be condemned? First, if you are a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ and you have thus been saved from the wrath to come, then you should praise the Lord for His mercy. Because of nothing that you ever did or ever will do, the Lord granted you salvation and opened your eyes and gave you the ability to believe. By His sovereign choice He granted you faith and repentance. Why did He grant His grace to you? We do not have an answer to that question. He simply granted salvation to us by His grace. Therefore praise Him for His mercy.

Second, I think that we as believers must bow before His perfect justice when we come to truths which we find hard to grasp. That God is the One who grants salvation to some means that He is also the One who does not grant salvation to the rest. How does He decide who will be granted salvation and who will perish? He does so perfectly and with perfect justice. In the end when our finite minds cannot grasp a truth or reconcile truths about God we will do best to trust that the God of all the earth will do right (Genesis 18:25).

SDG      rmb          1/23/2017