Genesis 50:19 And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God?
It is just a guess, but my guess is that fifty percent of the people who are reading this are worried about something or will be in the next several days. Of the things we worry about, most of them regard people problems. If you keep whittling down your problems to their bare essence, they usually trace back to people, people who have harmed us, people who could do harm to us, or people who might be harmed.
In Joseph’s story in Genesis 50 both elements, the past and the future, come into play. We have those who had hurt Joseph in the past, and we have the uncertainty of Joseph’s future. Joseph and his brothers had buried their father Jacob, and when Jacob was gone, Joseph’s brothers feared that he would take revenge for all they had done to him. So, they sent messengers to Joseph to basically say, “The last thing dad said before he died was to tell you to be nice to your brothers.” Did Jacob really say that on his deathbed? We don’t know, but we rather doubt it. What don’t know if Jacob said it, but we know that his sons said that he said it.
You see, they thought that Joseph was probably as motivated by revenge as they were, but Joseph was a man who realized the providence, the looking ahead, of God. In verse 19 Joseph responds, “Fear not: for am I in the place of God?”
Now that is a good question for you to ask yourself this morning. “Am I in the place of God?” Maybe someone has hurt you in the past or you have done wrong in the past. In either case, you cannot take the past back; it is done. You may look ahead to tomorrow and worry about whether you will be up to the task. The fact is that stress is responsibility without ability, something you have to do that you cannot do. All of us face the unknown when it comes to the future.
The bottom line is that Joseph said, “Am I in the place of God?” What a liberating thing to let God be God and not try to take His place. We don’t have His power, which means that we also do not have His responsibility. Joseph said, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” So, I am not God, and that means that I should leave the past and the future with Him. If I am following God, I can always know the right thing to do when the time comes.
So, if I will do the right thing right now, I can leave both the past and the future to God and be thankful that I am not God but that He is.