You Meant It for Bad, God Meant It for Good

Jacob lived seventeen more years in Egypt, close to Joseph and his grandchildren, and then the old man died. Joseph threw his arms around his father, cried over him, and kissed his face.

Joseph kept his promise and carried Jacob home to Canaan, to the cave where Abraham and Isaac were buried. Brothers, servants, Egypt's important officials, chariots and horsemen all went along. (So many Egyptians cried at that funeral that the people of Canaan named the place after their crying.) Then everyone came back to Egypt.

That was when the brothers began to whisper.

"Father is dead," said one. "What if Joseph was only being kind for Father's sake?"

"What if he still hates us?"

"What if he pays us back for everything?"

They remembered the pit, and how Joseph had begged them from the bottom of it while they ate their lunch. They were too scared to face him, so they sent a messenger.

"Before your father died," the message said, "he told us to tell you this: Please forgive your brothers for the wrong they did to you."

(The Bible never says Jacob gave any such order. It does say these same brothers once fooled their father with a bloody coat.)

When Joseph heard the message, he cried.

Then the brothers came themselves and threw themselves flat on the floor in front of him, noses to the tiles. "Look!" they said. "We are your slaves!"

Long ago, when he was a boy, Joseph had dreamed that his brothers would bow down to him. Now here they were, bowing, and he did not want it.

"Don't be afraid," Joseph said. "Am I in the place of God? You meant it for bad. But God meant it for good, to keep many people alive, as he is doing today. So don't be afraid. I will take care of you and your children."

He spoke gently to them and comforted them, and his brothers got up off the floor.

Joseph lived to be a hundred and ten. He lived long enough to hold his great-grandchildren on his knees. (That is a lot of children climbing on one old man's lap.)

When he was very old, he called his family together. "I am about to die," he said. "But God will surely come to help you. He will bring you up out of this land, to the land he promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And when he does, carry my bones up from here."

They promised. Then Joseph died. They wrapped his body the Egyptian way and laid it in a coffin in Egypt, to wait for God to come.

"Am I in the place of God?" Joseph had asked, and the answer was no. Joseph could forgive, but he could not keep himself from dying, so all he left his family was a box of bones and a promise.

The coffin waited hundreds of years, until God came with Moses and Joseph's bones went home. Still the prophets promised that one day God would come himself.

At last an old priest named Zechariah sang, "God has come to help his people!" Another son was on his way. When he grew up, wicked men had him killed on a cross. The people who did it meant it for bad. God meant it for good, to save more people than anyone could count.

This time the answer to Joseph's question was yes, because this Son was God. On the third morning, Jesus walked out of his tomb alive, and nobody ever had to carry his bones anywhere.