God meant it unto good

October 7, 2026

The teaching behind Unto Good. Scripture is quoted from the King James Version (KJV).

Genesis 50:15–21

¹⁵ And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him.

¹⁶ And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did command before he died, saying,

¹⁷ So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto him.

¹⁸ And his brethren also went and fell down before his face; and they said, Behold, we be thy servants.

¹⁹ And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God?

²⁰ But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.

²¹ Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them.

What they did to Joseph

To feel the weight of this scene, you have to remember what the brothers did, and what Joseph went through because of it.

Joseph was the favorite son. "Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours" (Genesis 37:3). His brothers saw it, and "they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto him" (37:4). Then Joseph told his brothers a dream he had had, and "they hated him yet the more" (37:5).

One day the brothers saw him coming from a long way off, and the hatred turned into a plan. "They conspired against him to slay him. And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit... and we shall see what will become of his dreams" (37:18–20). They stripped off his coat and threw him into an empty pit (37:23–24). Then, instead of killing him, they sold him to traders for twenty pieces of silver, and he was carried down into Egypt (37:28). He was a slave in a foreign land, sold by his own brothers.

The Bible doesn't hide what the brothers did. It was hatred, and it was cruelty, and years later they admitted it. When the famine had come upon them, they said to one another, "We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear" (42:21).

In Egypt, Joseph was bought by Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh (39:1). He was later put in prison (39:20). But Pharaoh finally called him out of the dungeon (41:14), set him over all the land of Egypt (41:41), and when the famine came and "was over all the face of the earth," Joseph opened the storehouses and Egypt had bread (41:54–57). Joseph's brothers came to Egypt to buy grain and bowed down to him with their faces to the ground, not knowing who he was (42:6). Later Joseph told them who he was, and said, "God did send me before you to preserve life" (45:5).

That brings us to our passage. Their father Jacob has now died. The brothers look at each other and are afraid. Joseph had been kind to them, but they cannot believe it. "Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him" (50:15). Maybe, they think, he was only waiting until their father was gone. So they send a message, and they fall down before him: "Behold, we be thy servants" (50:18). And "Joseph wept when they spake unto him" (50:17).

What he says next is one of the great sentences in the Bible: "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good."

1. God rules even over the evil that is done to us

Notice that Joseph does not call what they did good. He says, "Ye thought evil against me." The wrong was real. It was a sin, and Joseph does not pretend it wasn't.

But then he says, "God meant it unto good." And here is something you can only see in the Hebrew. In the Hebrew language, Joseph uses the very same word twice in this sentence. The word is chashab. It begins with a picture of weaving or plaiting, and it came to mean to plan or devise, to think something through and mean it. Our King James Bible translates it "thought" in the first half of the sentence and "meant" in the second, and in other places it often says "devise." So you could hear Joseph say it this way: you devised evil against me, but God devised it for good. Two plans were running at once. The brothers had a plan, and God had a plan, and God's was the one that stood.

Does that mean God wanted them to sin? No. Matthew Henry, the Bible commentator, wrote about this verse in the early 1700s. He said that "God often brings good out of evil, and promotes the designs of his providence even by the sins of men; not that he is the author of sin, far be it from us to think so; but his infinite wisdom so overrules events, and directs the chain of them, that, in the issue, that ends in his praise which in its own nature had a direct tendency to his dishonour." And then he adds: "This does not make sin the less sinful, nor sinners the less punishable, but it redounds greatly to the glory of God's wisdom."

That is exactly what Joseph's words show. The brothers are still guilty. Joseph does not say they were innocent, and neither does he say that God needed their sin. He says that God was over it. The brothers could throw him into a pit, but they could not throw him out of God's hands.

You see this all the way through the Bible, and nowhere more clearly than at the cross. On the day of Pentecost, Peter said of Jesus, "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: Whom God hath raised up" (Acts 2:23–24). The people who crucified Jesus did a wicked thing, and Peter says so. And yet God had planned it for the salvation of the world. The worst evil ever done was overruled by God for the greatest good ever done.

And that is why Joseph says, "Fear not: for am I in the place of God?" (50:19). The brothers were afraid that Joseph would take revenge. But Joseph knew that he was not God. He did not have to settle the score, because God had already been in charge the whole time.

If someone has done you wrong, and you've been carrying it for years, hear this. What they did was not good, and God does not say it was. But it was not outside His hand. Nothing that was done to you has gotten loose from God.

2. God is with His people in the pit and the prison

Think about what Joseph's life looked like from the inside. He was in a pit, and then in a slave caravan, and then a slave in a stranger's house, and then in prison. Over those years, he had no way of knowing how it would end. No one stood next to him and explained, "This is all for a good purpose."

But the Bible tells us one thing that was true the whole time. "And the LORD was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man" (39:2). Then, after he was thrown into the prison: "But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison" (39:21). And again: "because the LORD was with him, and that which he did, the LORD made it to prosper" (39:23).

God did not wait to be with Joseph until he reached the palace. He was with him in the prison. The pit and the dungeon were part of the road, and God was on it with him.

The psalmist looks back on that road and says that God "sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a servant: Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron: Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried him" (Psalm 105:17–19). God sent Joseph before them. It looked like the brothers had sent him away, but God had sent him ahead.

Maybe you are in a pit right now, or in a long stretch of dark that you did not choose. Maybe it was someone else's choices that put you there. Joseph's story tells you that God has not left you. The same LORD who was with him in the prison is with His people now, and He is working in the pit, not only after it.

3. God turns evil into rescue

Here is what it was all for. "God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (50:20).

Many years before, when the brothers did not yet know whom they were bowing to, Joseph told them the same thing in other words: "God did send me before you to preserve life. For these two years hath the famine been in the land... And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God" (45:5–8). The very men who had sold him were alive because he had been sold. The famine would have destroyed them, and instead there was grain and there was a brother who was in a position to feed them.

And look at what Joseph does with it. He does not say, "I forgive you because it turned out well." He says, "Fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones." And then the text tells us, "he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them" (50:21). The man they had wronged is the one who feeds them. He knew that God had been in charge, and so he did not have to hold on to what they had done.

That is one of the surest signs that someone truly trusts God. It becomes possible to forgive, because you are not carrying the burden of getting even. God has it.

And there is more. Near the end of his life, Joseph did not talk about himself. He said, "I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob" (50:24). All of this, the pit and the prison and the famine, was moving God's promise forward. The God who promised Abraham was keeping His word, even through the sins of Abraham's grandchildren.

So if you are in the middle of a story you can't understand, take heart. We know that "all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). It is not that every thing is good. It is that God is working in all of them, for the good of His people and for His own glory. "If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Romans 8:31). The brothers' hatred could not stop God's plan. The pit couldn't. The prison couldn't. Evil has never managed to defeat Him.

Joseph's brothers meant it for evil. God meant it for good. Hold on to that sentence. It is true of Joseph's story, it was true at the cross, and it is true of yours.