GOD MEANT IT FOR GOOD – CHAPTER 4
WHEN GOD PUTS HIS FINGER ON MAN
If God puts his finger on you, it is enough
to change you, your family, your church – even a nation or the world. The highest compliment a man can ever have is
to be tapped on the shoulder by God.
When that happens, wonderful things are at hand. Yet, it also means a time of preparation is
at hand. This can be called God’s
chastening. It is God’s way of getting
the man he has owned ready for his own use.
When God puts his finger on you, things may get worse before they get
better.
We do not have any evidence that Joseph
ever said, “God you can have my life.
You can take my life.” Have you
ever prayed a prayer like that? Whether
Joseph did or not, one thing is for sure – God took over Joseph’s life. Be careful about saying to God – “you may
have my life”. He may take you
seriously.
It is not necessary for you to pray that
prayer. God has the right to do
precisely that anyway because you are his property. You are not your own, for you were bought
with Jesus’ blood. God has given people
that prayer as a kind of merciful warning.
It is a sign that he is working in them already so that they will not be
too surprised later. He was going to do
it anyway. If it happens to you, it
means he is going take over your life.
But what he did was to inspire you to pray that way so when he takes
your prayer seriously, you will know you had prayed that way.
What often happens to us is this: we
consecrate our lives to God and utterly mean it. We may say, “Lord you can take my life. Use me as you wish.” But no bright light flashes in the room. No bells ring. We are not aware that God said, “Good I am
going to take you seriously.” We
continue to pray about other things and for other needs, and we finish our
prayer. Then, when the beginnings of
God’s preparation are suddenly set in motion, God is acting upon our own wish
to be used.
The first thing we notice about Joseph’s
preparation is that it began without any advance notice. When God hides his face, or when God begins
to chasten, he does not give advance warning.
A part of what makes chastening, chastening, is that it comes suddenly
and unexpectedly. When our world is
shattered and the bottom drops out, it is in fact the result of the most
careful planning by a loving, wise, sovereign God. His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55
verse 9). It is comforting to know God
has “abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence” (Ephesians 1 verse 8). We are in his hands, he knows how to deal
with us, and he alone knows how to direct our lives.
The second thing that God puts his finger
on is our “sore spot”. In Joseph’s case
that had to be dealt with urgently. His
sore spot was that coat of many colours, his father had made it for him, but
that only antagonised his brothers. The
first thing that has to be dealt with is often the thing most dear to us, but a
sore spot to everybody else. However
devoted his father was to Joseph, that coat of many colours had to go before
God could use Joseph.
What in your life must go before God can
truly have you and make you his instrument?
It may be a gift somebody has given to you. It may be a gift that you have naturally. It may be God’s very gift. It may be that the
gift God has given you must be smashed before it can be of any value. God can smash it – but he can also mend it
and make it more beautiful and lovely than it ever was. Ot it may be something about your personality
that needs to be dealt with. It may be
the area of your life about which you are most defensive or most
sensitive. Maybe you have great
potential, but there is something about you that makes you of little use.
The third thing about Joseph’s preparation
is this: when God put his finger on him he underwent the shock of seeing how
sinful and frail other people were.
Joseph knew that his brothers were not fond of him, but he did not know
they were capable of doing what they did.
R T Kendall at this point in his book
shares how he shared with his family what God was teaching him from his word
when he first came home from college. He
thought they would be so pleased and ask him to tell them more. But they did not react like that. It was the opposite. He had never dreamed that Christian people
could be like that.
I have experienced the same – when I
expected Christians to want more from God’s word when I had proclaimed it but I
quickly learned that the opposite was true.
I was very surprised because they were Christians – it was so
heartbreaking and sad. And it continues
to be so – when I hear God speaking from his word on Sunday morning and I share
it on social media – well yes I can see people viewing it but whether they read
it I don’t know. But no-one actually
comes back to me and says how they heard God also speaking to them.
Before Joseph was ever going to be of use
to God he needed to observe people with a certain objectivity. He could hardly have expected that his own
brothers would cast him into a dry pit, intending to leave him to die.
Why does God want us to see the frailty of
other men? Psalm 118 verse 8 “It is
better to trust in the Lord that to put confidence in man.” This is a hard lesson to learn! We want to find at least one other person we
can totally trust and say, “I will believe anything you say”. As soon as we begin to do that we are setting
ourselves up for the greatest hurt of our lives! God shows us the frailty of other men so that
we will not trust the best of men too much.
We also need to be sufficiently detached
from people to help them. We must learn
to see them with objectivity and discover to what extent they need us. When we do this, nothing will surprise us. God brings every man to the place, sooner or
later, where he is never surprised at the depths to which man can sink. As long as we have a naïve view of human
nature, or a naïve view of the best of Christians, we are not ready to be
launched out. We first need to face the
real world and discover how wicked man is.
The fourth thing God does to the man on
whom he puts his finger is to bring him to a place of apparent despair. They cast Joseph into a pit – an empty pit,
with no water in it, and left him to die.
There was nothing for him to do but to pray. God does us such a favour when he treats us
like that. This is how we learn to trust
him. The principle is this: God is proven
through an unprecedented situation.
There was no known precedent for a true
child of God being thrown into a pit to die, much less surviving! For a child of God this might even be
evidence that he was out of God’s will.
There would be no way that Joseph could explain to anybody while in a
pit that he was in God’s will. The 10
brothers said, “we shall see what will become of his dreams” Genesis 37 verse
20. They were quite sure they had him in
such a fix that nobody could conclude he was God’s man.
The way God often tests our faith is to
bring us to places where there is no known precedent. We all feel rather safe with a precedent to
lean on. The interesting thing about the
men in Hebrews 11 is that every one of them had to do something different from
people of the generation before. Not a
single one was given the luxury of doing it exactly as it had been done before. God likes to bring us to the impossible
situation when, humanly speaking, it is the end.
Finally, when God puts his finger on his
man, he will bring him to the point of no return. That is what God did to Joseph. The 10 brothers lifted Joseph out of the pit
when they saw the Ishmaelites coming.
They decided they did not want to have his blood on their hands and that
it would satisfy their own needs just to get Joseph completely out of the
way. So they lifted him up from the pit
and sold him to the Ishmaelites for 20 pieces of silver. Then the Ishmaelites brought Joseph into
Egypt. There would be no turning back
for Joseph. What is more it was out of
Joseph’s hands.
Joseph was given temporary relief from his
immediate ordeal when he was lifted out of the pit. He had thought that was the end. He had no water and he was thirsty. In our time of preparation, God will give us
definite encouragement along the way. At
that particular moment, when Joseph could not have gone further, God gave him
relief. He was thankful to be out of the
pit, to have water, and to be alive. Had
you told Joseph the day before that he would be sold to the Ishmaelites and
going to Egypt, he would not have looked forward to that trip at all, but God
brought him to such extremity that he was now glad to go to Egypt! That is the way God works.
If you knew in advance what God wanted you
to do, you might say, “Oh no”. But God
can work things around until you would rather do that than anything in the
world. An old song put it, “He doesn’t compel us against our will; he just
makes us willing to go.” God has a way
of bringing us through a horrible ordeal with joy, even though a new trial is
on the horizon. It will seem mild
compared to what we just went through.
Why does God do that? One answer
is that we will see his intervention and know that he is never too late, never
too early, always just on time. God
brought Joseph to the place where he would be thankful just to be delivered out
of that pit.
Joseph would always remember how he was
lifted out of that pit. He knew God was
with him. He had seen God act and he
could never forget that.
Joseph’s new home was going to be
Egypt. Much had happened in the last 24
hours to Joseph. God can accomplish a
lot in a very short period of time. What
was accomplished now was the impossibility of turning back. Perhaps the single most important thing that
happens to the man God puts his finger on is to bring him to the place where
there is no turning back. It was still
painful. He did not even get to say
goodbye to his father. He could only say
in his heart, “Goodbye father, goodbye Canaan, goodbye coat of many
colours.” But he could also say goodbye
to that pit he was thrown in! Now he
would have to wait and see what God would do next.
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