Genesis 42:9 And Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them, and said unto them, Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are come.
I want to encourage you today that God will provide for you and He has provided for you. Sometimes we don’t see that, and that is what Joseph’s story illustrates for us. A lot of times if you are reading some spellbinder, a fictional mystery of high drama, the first twelve chapters or so are just facts that seem unconnected and insignificant. Then, all of a sudden there is a tipping point and you realize that there is a cascading flow of events that is pushing the characters towards some kind of dramatic resolution of the story. That is exactly what happened in the life of Joseph.
Everything in Joseph’s life had either been mundane or, more often than not, bad and negative. Joseph, for instance, was favored of his father which meant he was hated by brothers. He had a coat of many colors which antagonized his brothers and was eventually taken from him. Joseph did the right thing and then was thrown into prison because of the lies of Potipher’s wife. Many things in Joseph’s life had been bad and negative, yet all of those things were the providence of God.
God is providing for you whether you see it or not. In Genesis 42:6, as Joseph’s brothers came to stand before him they did not know that this was their brother. They knew this man was now the second in command of all Egypt, and they were seeking food from him since there was a famine in their land. Joseph’s brothers bowed before him with their faces to the earth. This is amazing! This is remarkable! This sends a chill down my spine! This is exactly what God, years before, had indicated would happen.
Joseph was a dreamer, yet even the dream had gotten Joseph nothing but trouble up to this point. Verse 9 says, “And Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them.” God was providing even when Joseph could not see it.
Where did Joseph have to be in order to have as much power as he had? The answer is, “Egypt.” Egypt was the only place in the world where Joseph could have as much power as he did as second in command. How did he get to Egypt? He was sold as a slave. Who sold him as a slave? It was his brothers. Why did they sell him? They were jealous. Why were they jealous? It was because he had had a dream. In other words, they said, “We are never going to bow down before our brother. We are going to send him so far from here that the fulfillment of his dream will not even be a remote possibility.” And thereby they facilitated the very dream they were trying to scuttle.
You see, God will win. It may be that your life right now is a mix of good and bad events, or it may be that you are experiencing a long string of nothing but bad events. Joseph’s father, Jacob, said, “All these things are against me.” Were all these things against Jacob? No. God had made a promise to Abraham, and God was actually using all of these bad things that were happening in Joseph’s family to move closer to the fulfillment of the promise that He had made to Abraham. God was providing.
Friend, God will provide for you too. The reason God kept His promise to Abraham was because He was keeping His promise to you, for the Savior that God sent for you and me, God sent through the family of Joseph. You don’t succeed because you have everything figured out, you succeed because you do the right thing right now realizing that God will provide for tomorrow.