A Word

God gave me one word.

The word is 'Joseph'.

It have been almost a month since, but the word remained very hard.

I've chewed and chewed on it but it has yet to exhaust its nourishment.

And I think I have only been nibbling on morsels.

God Be With You

Whatever may happen, indeed God can make it for good. But we can be assured of this only if we know - as evidenced by the other things in our life - that God is with us.

So in the times when Joseph was a slave, a servant, and a prisoner, God was with him throughout, and is evidenced in those whom he was slave, servant and prisoner to.

The morsel here is that although things around us may be painful, perplexing and unjust, we can take comfort and be assured, if we know for sure that God is with us.

Imprisoned By Lies

Joseph was thrown into prison for Potiphar's wife lied about him. And there was nothing Joseph can do about it. The lie had absolute control over him.

There are situations in my life where I too am imprisioned by lies - lies I can do nothing about and lies which everyone involved know they are lies, but yet are compelled, for one reason or another, to live and propagate the lie, and you suffer unjustly for it.

God's Inscrutable Way

God's plan for young tribe of Israel was most amazing, most unimaginable, namely to make Egypt, the reigning super power in the world then, to protect and nurture Israel until it was a powerful and big nation.

If Israel did not have Egypt to feed and protect them, they could possibly be annihilated by the wicked neighbours they had in Canaan. But to use Egypt itself as the very means to raise up Israel is something beyond the wildest human imagination.

And could God have revealed such a plan to Jacob? Why didnt God do so? Why did God let Jacob suffer in anguish and great sorrow to live with the thought that Joseph have died? Alas this morsel is hard to chew.

God's Will: The Great Famine

The issue whether humans have free will or not, is hard to discern, but surely we know that whatever I will can be thwarted or frustrated - or helped along, for that matter - by another person, intentionally or otherwise, with an equally free will.

And God is such a third party too. He too has free will. So men can all will and do as they wished, but they can in no way deny God the very same thing.

And God can will and make famines, and tsunamis, and economic collapse, etc etc. But the question is again, why this way and not another?

But this is again a hard thing to think. It requires peering into the mind of God Himself, and I cannot see with any clarity yet.

What I can see is that God uses that which is humanly natural, such as hunger, to make things happen, as in Jacob - and his cruel sons - to turn and submit to Eqypt for food. Further the famine certainly had a devastating effect on the very existence of the nations in the world then, surely even to make some extinct, just as we see today in the famine in Niger.