9/11/22 - God Is Up All In It - Genesis 37 - Pastor Jason Fritz

This Sunday we are introduced to another key figure in the Genesis narrative. He is a teenager named Joseph. His life is by far the longest and most masterful account in the entire book. The story is famous enough to launch Andrew Lloyd Weber’s big musical hit, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. But I can assure you that the real life story of Joseph is far more entertaining and has an underlying subtle theological depth that is unmatched. The grand theme of Joseph’s life as I see it is this: 

God is working his will through the everyday events of your life and very often in ways that are yet to be seen. 

There are no miracles here. God does not upend the physical laws he created in order to get things done. Rather, there is a hidden but sure hand of God moving and arranging everything without one highly visible, supernatural event. It is perhaps the second greatest story about how God takes the evil intentions of men and women and uses them for good. (The life of Jesus would be at the top of this list.)

Joseph is the favored child of his father and it shows. Naturally, this means he is despised by his siblings. He doesn’t do anything to improve family relations. In fact, he makes it worse by his lack of self-awareness. So they beat him up, sell him as a slave and destroy the very thing that represents how much of a spoiled little brat he has become: his famous coat. One could ask, “Where is God in all this?” 

We all carry wounds. Like Joseph, some of those wounds are self-inflicted and like Joseph some of those wounds are given to us by others. It doesn’t take much for those wounds to reopen. Today’s pop culture, with its encouragement toward victimhood, doesn't help. Joseph’s story teaches us that life is unfair, hard, full of inequities and injustice, and yet God works in the manure of every human life to form compost from which something beautiful can grow. But you have to surrender and give everything to him. This includes the bitterness, the anger, the resentment, the lifestyle, the attitudes - the things that are not congruent with what God wants for you. When this happens, you are set free. And one day you can say as Joseph did, “What others meant for evil, God meant for good.”