Joseph’s Journey: An Exploration of the Goodness of God

I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction, so let’s get straight to the point.

God is good.

And no, I am not calling God good like one may describe a well-cooked meal or a nice book.

I mean, He is goodness itself. His character, his plans, and the way he interacts with us all testify of the goodness of God.

There are plenty of lives, experiences, and testimonies I could use, but for this topic specifically, I would like to use Joseph’s story.

Betrayed By His Brothers

We start with Joseph being the favorite son of Jacob (Isreal) and his favored wife Rachel. Although this was not Joseph’s fault, the jealousy that his parents allowed into the family began to directly affect the family dynamic between Joseph and his brothers.

I mean the bible straight up says Jacob loved Joseph more. He didn’t even try to hide it!

But his brothers hated Joseph because their father loved him more than the rest of them. They couldn’t say a kind word to him.

Genesis 37:4 NLT

Furthermore, it was apparent that God also cared deeply for Joseph as He gave him two dreams, both depicting him in a favorable light compared to his family.

Finally the nail in the coffin: A young naive Joseph with a brand new colorful coat, tells his brothers that they would bow down to him one day. Unwittingly, Joseph had started his path of betrayal.

After years of not receiving a kind word from his brothers, he experiences the true extent of their hatred for him. After tearing off his beautiful robe, they seize him and throw him in a well. Afterwards Joseph, no doubt scared and confused, is sold to a passing Egyptian to be a slave. Almost certainly, he probably thought he would never see his family again.

Betrayed by Potipher’s House

However, Joseph was able to make the best of it. He was a diligent worker and soon he had worked his way up to being Potipher’s trusted attendant.

This was it! Yes, he may never see his family again. And yes that brother wound is still there. Yet, God was obviously still with him and has gifted him with a respectful position. He does everything he is supposed to including rejecting to sleep with Potiphar’s wife multiple times.

He is doing everything right. Right?

So why does he suddenly find himself looking at the dank walls of an Egyptian prison?!

Unfortunately, we find Joseph in a similar turn of events as before. From favored son to slave and now from trusted attendant to prisoner. And what did he do wrong?

He just wanted to share his dream with his brothers.

He wanted to honor God by not sleeping with another man’s wife. Joseph may not have been sinless, but he was trying to be good.

It seems no matter what he does, Joseph was doomed to be betrayed and abandoned.

Betrayed by The Cup Bearer

Well it seems Joseph can’t stay down for long and never being one to shy away from hard work he soon began to manage the prison.

Maybe this was it!

Finally, Joseph can be content here. Would it be nice to be a free man? Of course!

However, we have to be realistic, and God has already favored him enough to get to this point. Maybe he can just be content where he is…in prison.

That is, until hope arrives. A baker and a cup bearer are thrown into the prison for upsetting the Pharoh. During their stay, they both have a dream. Using the gift God gave him, Joseph interprets the dreams and makes only one request to the cup bearer: Don’t forget about me.

He asks the man to plead his case to Pharoh and get him out of there.

Thus, it seems Joseph cannot find contentment in this place. Not when this perfect opportunity has been placed before him.

So, I wonder if it was any surprise to Joseph that the cup bearer had indeed forgotten about him. I mean, that seems to be the story of his life. All his life Joseph has been betrayed, abandoned, and now forgotten. Once the beloved son of a wealthy landowner, now just some prisoner forgotten by those with real power. After being betrayed so many times, this may have been the lowest Joseph had ever been.

Why is Life so Hard?

Life sucks. It just does. This isn’t our home, and it was never meant to be enjoyed like heaven. The enemy is a theif, a destroyer. He hates us and it brings him pleasure to harm us.

 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.

John 10:10 NKJV

The kingdom of Satan roams this earth with the sole purpose of devastation. That includes the children of God. In fact, seeing as we are a threat, anyone seen marked as God’s child are probably going to be attacked the hardest. Just look up the lives of the 12 disciples and Paul after they committed to give themselves to the spread of the gospel. I won’t go into detail but it was far from glamorous.

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

1 Peter 5:8

Joseph had done nothing wrong in the grand scheme of things. Yes, all have fallen short, but when it comes to the circumstances he found himself in, he truly had done nothing to deserve where he was. It felt like the rule, “reap what you sow” did not apply in this case.

It was as if Joseph was bearing the consequences of everyone else’s sins and failures The only thing that set him apart in this story was his faith in God.

In this life, we will go through our own Joseph stories. We will be elevated and we will be brought down. We can be trusted and betrayed by the same people. We can be forgotten by those in authority all the while slowly falling into obscurity in the world around us. We can even resist temptation and find ourselves still facing the challenges of life, as if each problem is trying to goad us into being like Job’s wife,

 “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!”

Job 2:9 NKJV

We look to God and ask, if you are indeed sovereign, why is this happening to me?

But this isn’t how Joseph’s story ends.

Remembered by God

Now let me tell you about how God works!

God gave pharaoh two dreams. And in all of his court, there was no one who could interpret it. It was in his lament that his cup bearer remembered that prisoner all those years ago. It was this prisoner that God gave the ability to interpret Pharoh’s dream.

In the span of a day, Joseph went from prisoner to right hand of Pharoh. After being degraded to a slave and then a prisoner for years, God redeemed his position in a day! Furthermore, he did not just reinstate Jospeh as Potiphar’s attendant. The Lord elevated him to the highest title under Pharoh.

And it doesn’t end there!

Once his respect and authority were restored, it was time for his family to be reconciled.

Long story short, the famine was happening beyond the land of egypt, and stretched into where Jacob and Joseph’s brothers were. In this time, Rachel had died giving birth to Jacob’s final son Benjamin. The brothers go to ask the right-hand man of Pharoh for grain not realizing that they were speaking to Joseph.

This is where I highly recommend reading the story for yourself as there is a lot that happens between Joseph seeing his brothers for the first time and finally revealing himself to them. However, it is important to note that multiple times throughout these family encounters, the bible says he was overcome with emotion and wept.

Restored by God

This was where I had to take a moment to pause and reflect. When we read the bible, sometimes we remove the humanity of the people we are reading about. They fit the entirety of these people’s lives into a couple of chapters, often causing us to forget all of the real emotions they probably felt during their lifetime.

Joseph was a good guy but he was not some “holier than thou” saint that always had faith in God and never felt hurt by what had happened to him.

He went into his private room, where he broke down and wept.

Genesis 43:30 NLT

Based on what the Word says, we see that Joseph had a wound in his heart that he had carried since he was a young man. A pain that he had tried to suppress through all of the years of being betrayed and abandoned by those around him. And it all started with the same men who were now begging him for grain.

It says Joseph wept when he heard his brothers acknowledging their wrong and regret.

He wept when he saw his youngest brother for the first time.

Finally, once he revealed himself to his brothers, he removed all the Egyptians that were in the room and wept “bitterly”. Infact, he cried so loudly the Egyptians outside the room heard him.

God Revealed

I’m sure he never dreamed he would see his family again, let alone his own little brother from his own deceased mother. Adding to the blessing, he finds out his father is alive as well. Joseph will get to see the father that loved him so much after years of being an Egyptian foreigner. Jacob’s family was not only reunited but restored stronger than ever!

Finally, reconciling with his brothers he says the most beautiful part of this story

“I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. But now, do not therefore be grieved or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. For these two years the famine has been in the land, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.

Genesis 45:4-8 NKJV

What a moment!

Joseph has now come to realise something that God will continue to reveal to man throughout the rest of scripture. God is good.

Remember when he was sold into slavery? His brothers were originally planning to kill him, but his brother Reuben convinced them to spare Joseph. The enemy as a natural destroyer wanted to kill joseph, but in His nature as a savior God rescued him.

Everytime Joseph was placed in a leadership position, the bible says, God was with Him or

The Lord was with Joseph

Genesis 39:2

Even in slavery and in the prison, God was with Joseph.

The devil tried to destroy Joseph again by working through Potipher’s wife to try to seduce him. When he was unsuccesful, he used one of his roles as a deceiver to lie about him and have him thrown in jail. However, although the enemy was hard at work trying to break Joseph down, the Lord still preserved him even in the Egyptian prison.

It was God who brought the cup bearer to him to interpret his dream, but the enemy wanted to destroy that hope through the forgetfulness of the cup bearer.

But even in this lowest state, God was still with Joseph, and most importantly, Joseph had never given up on God.

We know this because even when he is brought before Pharoh, he still acknowledges God as the one who is truly interpreting the dream. After all this time, he still knows who has the power and who is truly in control.

And it is not until it is all done, and the plan has been complete that he can look at his wealth, his position, his father, his brothers and their families and truly understand why it was all necessary.

Then Joseph said the line of victory!

But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.

Genesis 50:20

God is Good

That is why I say God is good. His love will always conquer the evil that comes against us as children of God. In a world that is rampant with liars, deceivers, schemers, seducers, and the forgetful, God is good.

He remembers the forgotten.

He preserves the hated.

He restores the broken.

And He redeems his faithful people.

Like Joseph, we must understand that our fate was never ours. And like my pastor once said, “you don’t control your destination, only your direction.”

Joseph remained faithful wherever God allowed him to go. From the slave quarters to the prison cells, even as Joseph was hurting, he remained faithful. And it is in our faithfulness that the enemy cannot destroy us. He can put us anywhere, and in any situation, but if we are committed to remain faithful, we too will be able to understand, as Joseph eventually understood.

God is good.

With love,

The Road Writer

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