Is It God's Will?

“Is It God’s Will?”

Genesis 45:4-8

A sermon for 8/22/21

Pastor John Bright

Genesis 45 “4 And Joseph said to his brothers, “Please come near to me.” So they came near. Then he said: “I am Joseph your brother, whom you sold into Egypt. 5 But now, do not therefore be grieved or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. 6 For these two years the famine has been in the land, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. 7 And God sent me before you to preserve a posterity for you in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. 8 So now it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egypt.”

A documentary from 2006, Heroes Among Us, Miracles Around Us, recounts many of the stories from September 11, 2001. It included the story of Captain Jay Jonas of the New York Fire Department's Ladder Company 6. Jonas was with fellow firefighters in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. They were running down the stairs to get out of the building knowing that it was about to collapse. But when they discovered Ms. Josephine Harris lying in the stairwell unable to walk, they refused to leave her there and delayed their escape. They said later that they knew this delay could cost them their lives. Even so, they slowly helped her down 16 flights of stairs in the North Tower.

They were still on the fourth floor in the stairwell when the tower collapsed on them -- and miraculously, they survived. They would later learn that had it not been for their delay in stopping to help Ms. Harris, they would have been in a different position when the building collapsed and would have all been killed.

There were other stories of angelic beings who guided people through smoke filled rooms and many, many stories of people delayed or missing work that day all together. Each of the Twin Towers employed over 22,000 folks, but on that day there were less than 10,000 in each one – most of them survived because it took so long for the buildings to collapse. That day 266 passengers died on four planes. The capacity of those four flights were over 1,200. There was also loss of life at the Pentagon. 125 were killed in the outer ring that was struck by the plane. It was being reinforced and renovated at the time and had very few folks working there. That area would normally have 5,000 people working in it.

Whenever someone asks me, “What was God doing on 9/11?” I always have the same reply – “He was very busy!”

With the 20th anniversary of 9/11 coming soon, I planned to do talk about this in an upcoming sermon, but this past week made me change my mind. The news brought us stories of tremendous suffering following the earthquake in Haiti and the collapse of the government in Afghanistan has allowed the Taliban forces to take over much of the country. If you are old enough to remember the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the taking of US hostages from the embassy, then you probably said an extra prayer this week as they evacuated the embassy in Kabul.

The title of my sermon today is the question we wrestle with when bad things happen to good people. It is the question when the storms of life blow in with a vengeance and devastate the ones we love. This question haunts us when a global pandemic brings death to over four million people; when natural disasters happen month after month and when Believers are executed by Islamic extremists across the world. Is it God’s will?

Teaching about the will of God could get slightly complicated… to say the least. I have told you before – I stopped trying to figure out why other people do what they do because I am not always sure why I do what I do. All of us have had that moment when we looked back at what we said or some action we took and wondered, “Why did I do that?” So we start with a limited understanding of human will. Then we read this revelation in Isaiah 55:8-9 –

“8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.

9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways,

And My thoughts than your thoughts.”

If ever there was somebody who had no idea what God was going to accomplish by the ups and downs of his life – it was Joseph.