Events happen for a reason

Growing up, I used to always say that: "Events (or things) happen for a reason."  I may not know what that reason is right away, but eventually God shows me what that is.  Whether it was not getting a job I applied for or not getting an agent to approve of my fiction query letter, or even the turmoil our family has gone through in the past year and a half with my wife's illness and our financial troubles, in the end events happen for a reason.

The same goes with Joseph, in Genesis.

From the last week's post, we covered Joseph turning from slave to governor of Egypt.  Now, starting on chapter 42, his brothers go to Egypt to buy goods, for the famine is severe.  Joseph recognized them immediately but the brothers did not.  Not all of the brothers went with though.  Benjamin, the youngest and only full-brother to Joseph (the others are half-brothers), is the only one who stayed behind.  Joseph confronts them and calls them spies.  He orders them to come back to Egypt with Benjamin or else he was going to imprison them.

As the brothers return home, they discover that all of their money has been returned to them.  They do not know what kind of miracle it was, but when they tell their father Jacob that they need to return with Benjamin, Jacob is fearful that something was going to happen to him, seen as though Benjamin was his only living son--since Joseph, as far as his knowledge was concerned, was dead.

In the end, the brothers go back with Benjamin.  After a fair amount of testing on their part, Joseph reveals who he really his: the brother they sold as a slave so many years ago.  But he is not angry with them.  He tells them that if they hadn't sold him off as a slave, he never would've had a chance to interpret the king's dream and become governor, thereby saving the people of all the lands.

Any normal person--and rightly so--would be angry with their siblings for doing this to them.  But Joseph saw the bigger picture and said it was all due to the will of God.  In the end of chapter 45, Joseph rides back home and sees his father, Jacob, once again.