God Meant It for Good

by Phil Johnson



he beginning and end of Genesis make an interesting contrast. The book starts with "In the beginning God . . . " but ends with the words, " . . . in a coffin in Egypt."

The opening chapter of Genesis is about creation; the closing chapter is about death. At the beginning, Adam is placed in a beautiful garden surrounded by life and divine blessings. At the end, the body of Jacob is interred in a cave with the bodies of Abraham, and Sarah, and Isaac, and Rebekah, and Leah. And Joseph's body is kept in a coffin in Egypt, awaiting burial in that same cave. Pretty dismal stuff, when you think about it.

The rest of Genesis is the chronicle of how sin entered the human race and brought catastrophe and divine wrath again and again. God's judgment against the sin of the human race is a repeated theme. There's a worldwide flood, the confusion of languages at Babel, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

In fact, from a human perspective, the Genesis account often seems like things are totally out of control. Human history begins with the fall of Adam, and everything gets worse from there. It gets so bad that in Genesis 6, God simply wiped out the whole human race and started over again with one family. But even after that, the human race seemed bent on wickedness. So God confounded their languages and dispersed them around the globe. He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness. And by the time you get into the heart of Genesis, there are almost no righteous people in a world of paganism and evil. Abraham is the one person who is truly devoted to Jehovah. (According to 2 Peter 2:8, Abraham's nephew, Lot, was a righteous man. But he was so thoroughly worldly that he serves only as a negative example.) Abraham's own family is seriously dysfunctional, and major family troubles persist in every generation, right through to the end of Genesis.

Finally, internal strife tears the chosen family apart when Abraham's great grandchildren sell their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt. Then a famine forces the rest of the family to seek refuge in Egypt, and the book of Genesis ends (it more or less just grinds to a halt) with the death of Joseph in that foreign land.

The whole story, on a purely human level, is both disturbing and discouraging.

But through it all, there is a subtle thread of redemption, and Genesis gives us enough of the divine perspective to reassure us that God is completely in control. He has a good purpose in the midst of all this misery and strife. Evil may seem to have the upper hand, but God will triumph.

That, of course, is the great lesson of Genesis. It is the very lesson the story of Joseph and his brothers is designed to relate. It's a lesson about the sovereignty of God, even in the face of human rebellion. And it's summed up in that final chapter in Joseph's brief words to his brothers after the death of their father: "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" (Genesis 50:21).

---