Brerah

God and life

I was surprised this morning as I was reading the Bible (yes, I'm still going strong on a new year's kick, but leviticus and others loom in the distance...). I was coming to the end of Genesis, which in my mind is one of those pinnacle moments of redemption and forgiveness and grace and all the like as Joseph and his brothers re-unite and there is crying and celebration, and it is just a wonderful story. There have been movies made about much weaker story lines than this, but I digress.

And then it comes...

Joseph's famous line to his brothers after they come begging for him to spare their lives and to not kill them (which they thought he would do after their father died). In response to their pleading, he says this, (drum roll for the God is sovereign camp...) "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good". And so we stop, and we breathe and think, 'man, just shows how God can turn any bad situation into a good one,' and so the sunday school lesson goes. BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN THE END OF THE SENTENCE!!!

"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, as they are today." It is not as if he side steps the wonder of God's sovereignty, but he says its all because God cares about life! Joseph is saying to his brothers, 'don't worry about it, God put me here so that he could tell me about the famine that was coming, so that I could tell Pharoah to start saving grain so that people won't starve!' It was all about life and God loving life and it wasn't even a story about a great revival. It could have been, it surely could have been a story about how God used Joseph to spread the gospel among all of Egypt, but as we know from history, Egypt was hardly a pious nation at any point in its storied past. God loves life. God loves salvation and redemption, but God also loves common grace that preserves life. Our goal isn't only to get people into the "Christian lifeboat," our goal is to love life, other peoples' life even, enough that we work toward its preservation. I'm not very good at this, in fact, I so look forward to glory sometimes (usually after a time of seeing my sin very clearly and wanting to do it no more), that I fail to remember that life is good and that God would have me to enjoy it and work toward others preserving and enjoying of it. I've claimed to be pro-life because I just kind of knew that killing the innocent is a cruel and unjust thing, but I have found something on which I can hang my hat and say, "the Bible told me so."

posted by corbs @ 7:01 AM