Genesis 50:20 (ESV)
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.
I still don’t get how God can use evil for good—for His glory.
Good. This is an advanced subject. I’d be worried if you’d just said, “Makes sense to me.” As usual, I don’t have a canned answer. All I can do is point out that this is all over the Bible and give you some tools to help you think about it.
The clearest example of this is Genesis 50:20, where Joseph says to his brothers, “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.”
Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery when he was young, and now he’s in a position to save their lives. It’s kind of the ultimate plot twist, and Joseph sees God’s hand in it.
Yeah, but that’s a fairy tale ending, and fairy tale endings are not how God works, right?
Except it’s not the ending. Joseph’s family is only rescued for the moment. Next thing they know a new Egyptian pharaoh comes along and—bang!—they’re all slaves.
And the family stays enslaved for four centuries. Then the next “ending” comes along and they escape. There’s a passage in Exodus that’s especially blunt. God says to Pharaoh, “But for this purpose I have raised you up, to show you my power, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.” — Exodus 9:16 (ESV)
Pharaoh’s evil is clearly being used to glorify God.
So, what exactly does glorify God and what doesn’t?
Okay, great question. Of course, we can’t know exactly what glorifies God, because we can’t see outside our universe and that’s where the glory really lies. But we can start to understand the concepts.
Read the whole Bible and you’ll see that these plot twists never stop. Almost every time things look good, they’re about to turn bad (or are already bad), and every time things look bad, they’re about to turn good (or are already actually good). This highlights how short-sighted our vision is.
I get that, but how does that glorify God?
Stay with me here. Let’s zoom in on some important ways that the analogy between our created worlds and God’s breaks down. I already mentioned that the universe is vastly larger and more complex than a piece of fiction we create. That’s going to be the key. The examples I gave were that we cannot communicate with the characters we create, and we cannot incarnate ourselves into a play or novel. Let’s press on.
Another important one is that God cares about us. It’s absurd to think that Dickens might actually care about Scrooge. That’d be ridiculous because Scrooge isn’t worth caring about; he isn’t real. An author that actually had feelings for a fictional character the way we would have feelings for a real person would be mentally ill.
But God does care about us, and that’s not crazy. This is a direct consequence of how God’s universe is greater than a work of fiction. We are worth caring about. This is foundational to Christianity. God makes a personal sacrifice for our sake. C.S. Lewis describes this beautifully at the end of chapter III.9 of Mere Christianity.
“But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”
This is the point of the incarnation, the cross, and the gospel, which clearly have the potential to be a much bigger deal than just a bunch of entertaining plot twists.
How’s that?
God’s caring for us sprouts wings with Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. Look at what Jesus prayed just before His arrest.
After Jesus said this, he looked toward heaven and prayed: “Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you. — John 17:1 (NIV)
The Bible explicitly connects Jesus’s crucifixion with God’s glory. This isn’t just some plot twist with a momentary benefit; it’s the key.
So, this is the key to how this universe glorifies God?
It’s definitely one them, but there’s another way that this universe is grander than ones we create—you can “graduate” from this universe into a greater reality. Because of God’s love for us, He has set that up—at great cost to Himself.
And that glorifies God?
Yes, and this is a big part of where everything I’ve been teaching has been leading. If the purpose of a created thing is external to the thing, then our being able to become external to this creation has unimaginable potential.
Sure, but I don’t see how this works.
Oh, we’ll never fully understand that. We can only see its magnitude. On to tomorrow!
