“So now, come on, let’s kill him and throw him into one of the pits. We can say that a vicious animal ate him. Then we’ll see what becomes of his dreams!” (Genesis 37:20)
If we’ve learned anything from 2020, it’s that there’s much we don’t have control over. More than ever, Christians are taking comfort in the fact that although terrible things are happening in the world, God is ultimately in control of all that’s going on right now, using everything for His perfect glory and purposes.
However, man is quick to forget these truths. If we’re being truly honest with ourselves, especially in good times, we don’t live as if God is sovereign. Rather, we become our own gods and believe that we are the sole reason for our success, that we are the ultimate guarantors of our happiness, that the health or prosperity we may have (temporarily) is due to our fitness routine or our mighty will. This is not so!
As we’ve seen throughout Genesis (the Tower of Babel!) we often believe that we are ultimately in control of this world when we’re not. Joseph’s brothers thought that by killing or selling Joseph into slavery, they would avoid a life under the reign of their brother. They thought that by expressing their might and imposing their will on their brother, they could frustrate God’s plans and create the world that they wanted. But no—God used their evil deeds to accomplish His purposes, to His glory.
Man is quick to forget these truths. Fifteen-hundred years later, many Jews who eagerly studied these same scriptures demanded that their Messiah, Jesus Christ, be nailed to the cross. They thought they had power to create the world they wanted to live in. And were we in their place, we would’ve done the same.
But God, through his sovereign power, used this wickedness of man to express his unfathomable love through Christ’s death and resurrection, to bring salvation from eternal death to his people. Praise God that his plans will never be thwarted and that we are reminded of these things through his word! He has promised, “Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away” (Rev. 21:4).