Providence in the Pit
Joshua 16:4
The people of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, received their inheritance.
Joshua 16 reads like a page from a cartographer’s travelling journal, giving a precise and detailed mapping of the terrain, the sort a surveyor would follow when marking boundaries. Yet, upon reading this account, I’m struck not so much by the specifications of this allotment to Joseph’s offspring, but rather by the fact that Joseph ever had offspring at all.
“There is not pit so deep that God’s love isn’t deeper still,” Betsy Ten Boom whispered triumphantly to her sister Corrie before dying in a Nazi death camp; and that’s the truth that comes back to mind when I think of Joseph. Think back with me to that scene in his early life, before kids and grandkids, before a wife and a cushy advisory position in the Egyptian palace, to the day his father sent him out into the countryside to check on his older brothers and they seized him in outrageous contempt, tore off his special robe, and threw him into an empty well to die an emotionally excruciating death. And just think: had Judah not been so especially cruel to sell Joseph to foreign slave-traders instead, in order to make a little profit from his demise, Joseph might’ve died in that very hole. Ah, but Almighty God turned what those bullish brothers meant for evil into an ineffable good! God kept Joseph alive, through a slave market, through Potiphar’s rage, through half a decade in a horrible dungeon, and raised him out of that pit of injustice and obscurity and loneliness at just the right time. To start a new life, to save a nation from starvation, and to be the agent of redemption for his broken family.
Let’s not rush past a line as providentially luminous as Joshua 16:4, friend. Let’s not forget that without the intervention of the LORD moving in and through even the auspices of wicked men, there’d be no people of Joseph to speak of. Doesn’t your own life in Christ relay that same truth? Look out across the terrain of your own testimony. Measure the miles like a cartographer, from coast to coast, from the river to the sea, and thank the LORD for His intervening care that has brought you this far! Oh how differently our stories would’ve read had God just left us in the pit.