In a sermon on Romans 8:28, Charles Spurgeon said, “All things work together for the Christian’s eternal and spiritual good. And yet I must say here, that sometimes all things work together for the Christian’s temporal good. You know the story of old Jacob. “Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away; all these things are against me,” said the old patriarch. But if he could have read God’s secrets, he might have found that Simeon was not lost, for he was retained as a hostage—that Joseph was not lost, but gone before to smooth the passage of his grey hairs into the grave, and that even Benjamin was to be taken away by Joseph in love to his brother. So that what seemed to be against him, even in temporal matters, was for him. You may have heard also the story of that eminent martyr who was wont always to say, “All things work together for good.” When he was seized by the officers of Queen Mary, to be taken to the stake to be burned, he was treated so roughly on the road that he broke his leg; and they jeeringly said, “All things work together for good, do they? How will your broken leg work for your good?” “I don’t know,” he said, “but for my good I know it will work, and you shall see it so.” Strange to say, it proved true that it was for his good; for being delayed a day or so on the road through his lameness, he just arrived in London in time enough to hear that Elizabeth was proclaimed queen, and so he escaped the stake by his broken leg. He turned round upon the men who carried him, as they thought, to his death, and said to them, “Now will you believe that all things work together for good?””¹

I was reflecting on these words this morning as I was reading the story of Joseph again. I wonder what he would have thought of these words in the various stages of his journey? After he had been thrown into the pit by his brothers, sold into slavery by the same, betrayed by his master’s wife, thrown into prison by the same, forgotten by the chief cupbearer and left to rot in a cell. How would you respond? Would you be tempted to be filled with despair and frustration?

It is easy for us who read, “The LORD was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison,”² to imagine that Joseph found it easy. However, Joseph didn’t necessarily know this. Remember that it takes a long time for Joseph to be able to say, “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.”³ In doing so, his life becomes a living testimony that God means good out of the evil we endure in this life. As Spurgeon said, sometimes temporally as well. It is a solemn reminder for us to be patient and wait for the fruit of suffering to rippen into a gracious provision of God.

1. C. H. Spurgeon, “The True Christian’s Blessedness”, Volume 3, 413. ↩︎
2. Genesis 39:21 ↩︎
3. Genesis 50:20 ↩︎