Chapter Twelve

The Perfection of Detours

Meant.

The word can be defined as the past participle of “to mean” which is to intend for a particular purpose and destination. You’ve probably heard someone say something they probably shouldn’t have said or done something that lacked tact, but someone else tried to cover it up with, “They meant well.”

What they were saying is that even though what the person said or did created a negative reality, that was not their intention. Their motives were pure.

But that was not the case with Joseph’s brothers when they stripped him of his coat and dumped him in a pit. Nor was that the case when they greedily plucked him from the pit and sold him for a profit to slave traders headed to a foreign land.

Joseph’s brothers meant anything but well. They meant to cause him harm. They meant to ruin his life. They meant to dethrone him from the position of importance he had come to believe he would one day hold. They meant bad. Actually, they meant evil.

But God.

Those two words are two powerful words. When you come across “but God” in Scripture, pay attention. What comes next will usually change the entire situation. Especially if “meant” is added after them.

But God meant . . .

We read, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Gen. 50:20 nasb). When Joseph confronted his brothers after God had turned his situation around, he chose those words. He chose to let his brothers know that the very exact thing they had meant to cause him harm was the very exact thing God had used to bring him to his destiny. I don’t want you to miss that because oftentimes when we think about God working things out for good, we think about Him working around the negative things. But in this case, God gives us an example of working directly in the negative thing.

Joseph’s brothers meant evil. And with the very evil they used, God used that mess for good. The very same mess Joseph’s brothers meant for harm is the very same mess God meant for good. That’s good news if someone has ever done something intentionally to hurt you. That’s comforting knowing that even the evil people have intended toward us is used by God for good, when we surrender under His plan. Providence includes using the negative to produce a positive. God’s sovereignty does not only include good things, but it also includes the bad and what other people mean for harm.

This might be a curveball in the way you view hurtful situations, but here is how it works.

Since God is sovereign, nothing happens outside of His rule. But within His rule He has created freedom. Freedom means you get to choose. There is no freedom without choice. You are free to say “yes” or to say “no.” You are free to go or you free to stay. God created freedom. But how can a sovereign God control everything while simultaneously creating freedom? Let me try to explain it through an illustration of football.

In football, there are sidelines and goal lines, which serve as sovereign boundaries. These do not move. You can’t negotiate them. You can’t make them wider or narrower. These are fixed standards with which the game of football is played. If you step over a sideline, you are out of bounds. Period. Because that is a boundary.

But within those boundaries teams are free to run their own plays. They can call a good play or a bad play. They can gain yardage or they can lose ground. They are free to play within the boundaries established by the game.

God is sovereign in the boundaries He has set for us. But He allows freedom within those boundaries that give us the choice to do good or to do bad. To be right or to be wrong. To intend evil or to intend well. While freedom doesn’t cause evil, it does allow for it. Yet He limits how free He lets us go within His providential connection of all things. Providence is God either causing or allowing things to happen for His purposes. That is not to say He endorses evil or sin, but rather He redeems it. He redeems the bad intention of someone who may have hurt you on purpose by intervening in you to twist that thing to work for your good. His merciful hand will use what was meant for harm—for good. He will even use evil to accomplish His purpose, as we have seen with Joseph.

Scripture tells us that God even made Pharaoh’s heart hard so that Pharaoh would chase the Israelites out of Egypt. He took the evil in Pharaoh’s heart and allowed it to be even more evil in order to fulfill His purpose of delivering His people from that place. God is so good at His providential work of hooking stuff up and arranging things to accomplish His will that He can even use the devil to help a brother out. He can even use someone who means you harm to take you, mold you, develop you, strengthen you, or redirect you to your purpose and your destiny. God even uses Satan to accomplish this as in the case of Job, Peter, and even Jesus.

Despite the rise of smartphones, people still wear watches. I still wear a watch even though I could look at my phone anytime I wanted to see what time it is. But it’s a habit when you want to know what time it is to look at your wrist. You look at the face of your watch because that is what will show you the time. But the only reason you can see the time on the face of your watch is because of what is underneath it. If you were to open up your watch, you would see a myriad of tiny, itsy-bitsy particles and pieces interconnected and interrelated somehow. These pieces turn together in just the right order so that you can see what time it actually is on the outside of the watch. But you can’t tell the time by looking at the gears.

Life is a lot like a watch. Sometimes we see the face; sometimes we see tiny individual pieces. But we never see everything. There is so much more happening behind the scenes, underneath the hood, behind the curtain in places and in people that we could never see. When you are dealing with the providence of God, you never see all there is to see. In fact, the things you do see often don’t connect. It might look like there are parts that don’t seem to relate to one another at all. That’s because God is always doing more than one thing at a time; He’s doing fifty million things at the same time.

Sometimes, when we can’t see what He’s doing, we feel like He isn’t doing anything at all. Sometimes it looks like God is sleeping when He should be awake. Or His phone is busy, and He can’t hear our prayers at all. Sometimes, if we admit it, it looks like He’s gone on vacation and left us on a detour for way too long.

It may even seem like more than just a vacation. For Joseph, if we were to do the math, it would be twenty-two years before he reached his destiny. From the time he was seventeen years old to the time he stood before his brothers with them kneeling before him as he had seen in his vision, twenty-two years had come and gone. Joseph is a true reminder that we rarely arrive at our destiny overnight.

Very few people get to God’s intended purpose for their lives quickly. It takes time not only to develop you for your destiny but to develop your destiny for you. God is the master weaver, and things are rarely as they appear. That is why it is so critical to walk by faith and not by sight.

Have you ever seen an orchestra when musicians first come out and are getting ready to play? All of the instrumentalists are warming up at the same time, and it sounds like chaos. It sounds like no one on the platform even knows how to play. That is because all of the different sounds are discombobulated all over the place. There is no harmonizing taking place.

Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere it seems, a conductor walks out. He stands confidently and quietly in front of the musicians. He pulls out a small stick and raises it slightly. When he does, everyone in his or her chairs who had been playing their instruments sit up straight and look directly at him. Then when he taps the stick a couple of times and begins to wave his hand, what had once appeared to be pure chaos now makes sense. The random, disconnected tunes that had previously polluted the air suddenly turn into a beautiful, powerful harmonious song.

Friend, if you feel like your life is in chaos, with so many disjointed and disconnected noises, don’t leave the concert hall before the symphony swells. Don’t check out on your faith. Wait for the Conductor to appear, because when the time is just perfect, He will bring harmony to discord. He will show up and turn a disappointment into a destiny.

Not too long ago I was in my office at the church when one of our members came in for a short meeting. We were chatting for a few moments before the meeting was to take place, and, as small talk, I asked him how his job was going. I knew he had finished his master’s degree not long before, and so I was curious how things were going for him.

“I just got laid off last week,” he said.

“What?” I asked, shocked to hear it. This man had held this job for over five years. It had provided a stable environment for him to pursue his master’s, while still taking care of his wife and daughter. But now, out of the blue, due to the economic downturn, the company he worked for was cutting back.

“Yea,” he said, looking dejected. “Pastor, they cut back, and I was one of the ones removed, and I’ve got a brand-new baby on the way. It’s just not a good time for us, as a family, to lose my job.”

Trying to turn the conversation to something positive, I asked him what kinds of things he wanted to do. Maybe I knew someone to whom I could refer him.

His eyes lit up a bit and he replied, “Well, now that I’ve finished my master’s in media from the seminary, I really hope to get into that field somehow, based on my training and my passions. But finding a job like that might take some time; so right now, I just need to get a job so I can take care of my wife and the babies.”

As he spoke, I couldn’t believe my ears. Because we had just experienced an employee in that exact same field resign that very week in our national ministry.

Now I should note that this is a position that has only come open maybe once in a decade, and here it was coming open the very week this man, who now held a degree and a desire, in the exact field he got laid off from his job.

The two men didn’t know each other. There was absolutely no connection between them. One resigned. The other got laid off. And by luck—I mean, by chance—okay, by providence, God had him walk into my office for a meeting about some small project my daughter had asked him to volunteer to do the very same week the position had come open. And by this same providential God, I had been prompted to ask him how his job was going. Within a week or two, at the most, he was hired. And it’s been a great fit both for us and for him.

You can call that luck, chance, or happenstance, if you want. But you wouldn’t be calling it correctly. Because that was the providential hand of a sovereign God aligning all people at the exact time for the right connection to take place.

When you understand providence, you start looking to see what God is doing. You start opening your eyes to see where He is moving. You start operating on a different level of understanding when you observe the patterns of God’s providential maneuvering.

If you are a baker, you know how to prepare a cake. You know that none of the individual ingredients would be all that enjoyable on their own. No one would sit down and eat a stick of butter. Nor would you scoop your hand in the sugar and put it to your mouth. You don’t dig into the flour with a spoon and eat a spoonful of flour. No one does that. And the reason why no one does that is because, on their own, each ingredient is nasty. Raw eggs are just plain nasty.

But when everything gets mixed together according to a great recipe, by a master chef, and baked in the oven, you wind up with a masterpiece. This is because all things are now working together for the good of the cake.

It may look like God has your life in bits and pieces right now. You can’t possibly see how, or why, any of it could amount to much good. There doesn’t appear to be a real connection to a lot going on. The delays are bitter. The disappointments leave a bad taste in your mouth. But when you allow God, in His providential care, to mix it all together according to His purposes and plan, all things will work together for our good. I promise. And the reason why I can promise is because God says so in His Word. It’s probably a verse you have heard so many times that it may have somehow lost its impact, but if you will let the truth of it truly sink in, it can change your entire life.

“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28 nasb). And that good will always be connected with conforming us to the image of Christ (v. 29). For God is not just concerned about our circumstantial deliverance, but more importantly, He is concerned about our spiritual development. To that end, He will use all things to work together for good.

Even those things that others may have meant for evil.

All things means all things.