It Was Not You That Sent Me Hither, and He Said It to Their Faces

A man told me he did not know how to pray about his own life because he had not chosen any of it.

He said that carefully, and he was not being dramatic. He had been in a business with two other people, and one of them had made a decision that ended it, and that decision had put him where he now was: a different city, different work, an eleven year detour that he had never asked for and had never agreed to.

He said: people talk about God's will for their life like it is a road they are choosing. Mine was chosen by a man I have not spoken to in nine years.

Then he asked the real question, which took him a while to get to. He said: when I pray about where I am, who am I actually praying about? Because either God did this, and I have things to say about that, or a man did it, and then what is God's will got to do with any of it.

That is not a beginner's question. That is one of the oldest questions there is, and there is a man in Genesis who answers it in a room full of the people who did it to him.

What he said, and what he did not say

Joseph is standing in front of his brothers, who sold him, and he says something that has been misquoted in comfort cards for two centuries.

So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt. (Genesis 45:8, King James Version)

Now, read what that sentence is doing, because it is doing two things at once and both of them matter.

It is putting God behind the outcome. That much is obvious.

But it is not saying the brothers did nothing. Five chapters later Joseph says the other half plainly, and there is no softening in it at all.

But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. (Genesis 50:20)

Ye thought evil against me. He says that to their faces, in the same breath as the rest of it. He does not tell them it was fine. He does not tell them it was secretly God's idea and therefore not theirs.

Two agents, two intentions, one outcome. And Joseph holds both without collapsing either one into the other.

You have been trying to answer a question the Bible declines to answer, and declining it is not a failure of faith (Genesis 45:8). The same Spirit is the one who gives a person rest inside something unexplained rather than handing them a diagram.

You are not required to decide whether it was God or a person, and Genesis holds the two of them in one sentence without resolving it into either, and Genesis 50 says they thought evil and God meant good in the same line, and it is the Spirit who lets a person carry both facts without going numb to one of them.

What this teaching is not

I need to be careful here, and I want to name the misuse before it can do damage.

This is not a teaching that says the wrong done to you was fine because of how it turned out. Joseph does not say that. He says they thought evil, present tense in the record, unretracted.

It is also not a teaching that says God arranged somebody's sin in order to move you. Scripture does not explain how those two things fit together, and I am not going to invent a mechanism where the text supplies none. The book gives us the outcome and refuses the diagram.

And it is not a teaching for a person to use on somebody else. Joseph said this about his own life. Nobody said it to him while he was in the pit or in the prison, and if anybody had, it would have been a cruelty.

You are allowed to say this about your own eleven years and nobody is allowed to say it to you (Genesis 50:20), and Scripture only ever puts that sentence in the mouth of the person who was wronged, and the Spirit is the one who brings it up from inside a person rather than delivering it through a well meaning friend.

The long middle nobody quotes

There is one verse about the years between that almost never gets read, and it is the one I would give the man in the courtyard.

Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him. (Psalm 105:19)

Until the time. That covers about thirteen years of prison and slavery in six words, and the psalm does not soften them or explain them.

And notice what it says was happening in there. The word of the LORD tried him. Not his circumstances. The word. The thing he had been given years earlier was the thing working on him during the wait, and that is a strange and precise sentence.

You are being carried through a middle that Scripture does not skip over, and it names those years plainly rather than jumping to the palace (Psalm 105:19). The Spirit is the one who does something in a person during a stretch nobody would have chosen and that nobody can see from outside.

The one thing I would not do is promise you a palace at the end. Joseph got one. Most people do not, and the New Testament is full of people who never saw the outcome of anything, and this site will not sell a resolution it cannot deliver.