Genesis chapter 50 recounts Joseph’s encounter with the brothers who wronged him, sent him into slavery, yet also in doing so put him in a position to save people from famine. “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive,” Joseph says in Genesis 50:20. I wrote here about how much this passage has to say about forgiveness.
But something else this passage reveals, and Joseph’s statement conveys, is the way that God’s will and its effect, and man’s choices and their consequences, are layered together. Joseph’s brothers’ choices aimed for one effect, and achieved it, and God’s purpose for the ultimate outcome of their choice aimed for another effect, and achieved it. God’s will and man’s will are layered together to the point of being practically one in the same even though their aims are so contradictory. The effect of God’s will and the consequence of man’s choice integrate even though one moves toward evil and the other toward good. The kingdom of God advances as grasping and vicious aims also advance. The human aims wreak pain and destruction, and the kingdom uses those very aims for the victory of a greater purpose. God’s will and man’s choices are separate, but not separated.
All our world is like this, separate but not separated: the sheep and goats together, the wheat and tares together (analogies Jesus uses here and here). God’s will is done, and the means by which his will is done are the ignorant, self-seeking, even savage actions of man, as these actions ultimately prove to have unexpected effects (unexpected here on earth) that advance the kingdom’s aims.
The Crucifixion was an act of evil. It remains so, despite what came next. Yet this is the act chosen by God as the instrument of the redemption of mankind, and through this, his creation.
Jesus comes to separate. It seems counterintuitive to learn this. Our sense, in our blindness, is that Jesus ought to draw everything and everyone together. But as his herald John the Baptist described, separation is the mission:
“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” —Matthew 3:12
The wheat is gathered, saved. Part of what is significant in this image: Jesus does the gathering. The wheat (souls retrieved from the floor by the Lord’s grace) are saved into producing grain, as opposed to the state of fruitlessness into which the world has fallen.
Creation awaits the time of this threshing floor, this separation—the advancing time in which God’s will and its movement are apparent because everyone and everything surrendered to this will are sifted out.
Creation waits because the separation will set it free. The Genesis 50:20 integration of God’s will within the weave of man’s choices leaves God’s will still prevailing, still victorious, still realizing all the good God ordains. Yet the separation, the judgement, will bring forth this movement without resort to man’s damage as its conveyance. That is, light with no darkness as its precursor. Read Psalm 98 for a picture of how the natural world responds to this judgement with joy.
We hear phrases like “divine judgement” or “Judgement Day” as ominous or threatening, because we live within minds, lives and bodies still harboring their fallen state. But as scripture describes, creation somehow knows the truth about us, and looks forward to when the clarity of separation has been achieved. A time is coming when people will advance the will of God openly, rather than doing so anyway as an unseen outcome of the self-advancement we otherwise pursue, or the harm we otherwise intend.
Photo: “Wheat Field” by Jeff Golden