Daily Manna · Day 322 · November 18
God Meant It for Good
“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.”
Jacob has been buried, and the long mourning is over. Now Joseph's brothers are afraid. They send him a message they say their father left before he died, asking Joseph to forgive them, though the text never confirms that Jacob said it. Joseph weeps when he hears it. Then the brothers come themselves, fall down before him, and say, "Behold, we be thy servants."
Joseph's tears are the detail to stay with. They are the sorrow in this chapter, and they usually get skipped on the way to the famous sentence. For seventeen years the brothers had lived in Egypt under his protection, eating food he had arranged for them. In all that time they had not believed him. They assumed his kindness was for their father's sake and that his revenge had only been put off. Years earlier he had kissed them all and wept over them, and still it had not sunk in. Now the old man was in the ground, and they came with a story. Joseph cried, because having truly forgiven someone and still not being believed is its own long loneliness.
The loss underneath that is bigger still. Thirteen years of his life had gone by: a pit, a slave market, a household where he was lied about, and a prison where the man who owed him a good word forgot him for two full years. Nothing in the chapter says those years were fine. Joseph names what they did to their faces: "ye thought evil against me." He does not soften it or call the pit a season of growth.
Then he uses one Hebrew verb for both halves of the sentence. They "thought" evil, and God "meant it unto good," and in Hebrew both are the same word for planning. The same events had two purposes running through them at once. Joseph does not say the evil became good, and he does not say it was worth it. He never once tells them how it felt.
What is true is this, and it is enough to live on. Both purposes were real, and God's purpose outlasted theirs by decades. It was still at work "as it is this day," and its aim was "to save much people alive."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 322 is It May Be (Zephaniah 2:3).