The Wisdom Of God Series

In Genesis 37 we are introduced to a young man named Joseph. Joseph lived a charmed life. His father—who was a very rich man—loved Joseph more than any of his other sons. He had everything a teenager could want: a huge allowance, the latest brand name sandals, the fastest camel money could buy. But his most prized possession was a robe given to him by his father. It was no ordinary robe. It was a very expensive and extremely rare robe. Every time Joseph rode through town, people would stare at his “coat of many colors.”

Joseph had ten older brothers, and you can imagine how jealous they were of him. One day their hatred for Joseph reached an all-time high. He told them about a dream he had the night before. He said, “We were out in the field tying up bundles of grain. My bundle stood up, and then your bundles all gathered around and bowed down before it!” Perhaps it was foolish for Joseph to mention his dream. Maybe he should have kept quiet. But he didn’t. His brothers taunted him, “So you are going to be our king, are you?”

Soon after this, Joseph’s brothers went to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem. When they had been gone for some time, Jacob sent Joseph to check up on his sons. When Joseph’s brothers saw him coming in the distance, one of them said, “Here comes that dreamer! Let’s kill him and throw him into a pit. We can our father that a wild animal has eaten him. Then we’ll see what becomes of his dreams!”

But Reuben, the oldest brother, came to Joseph’s rescue. “Let’s not kill him,” he said. “Why should we shed his blood? Let’s just throw him alive into this pit here. That way he will die without our having to touch him.” Actually, Reuben was secretly planning to help Joseph escape.

So when Joseph arrived, they pulled off his beautiful robe and threw him into the pit. Just as they were sitting down to eat, they noticed a caravan coming their way. It was a group of Ishmaelite traders traveling to Egypt. A brother named Judah said to the others, “What can we gain by killing our brother? Let’s sell Joseph to those traders.” His brothers agreed. So when the traders came by, his brothers pulled Joseph out of the pit and sold him for twenty pieces of silver.

What a difference a day makes! On his way to finding his brothers, he was dreaming about attending Canaan College in the fall. He was going to major in livestock trading. He was hoping to star on football team. Now those dreams were shattered. Joseph was on his way to Egypt to be a slave.

Genesis 39:2 says, “The LORD was with Joseph.” You might be thinking, “If the Lord was with him, why did He allow such a terrible thing to happen to Joseph?” Joseph may have struggled with the same question. Little did he know that God, in His perfect wisdom, would turn this “bad” thing into something great for Joseph.

Definition: God always chooses the best goals and the best means to those goals. In other words, God makes no mistakes.

God’s wisdom is seen:

1. In CREATION

“How many are your works, O LORD! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24).

Consider the wisdom of God in His creation of the human body:

• The average human heart pumps over one thousand gallons a day, over 55 million gallons in a lifetime. This is enough to fill 13 super tankers. It never sleeps, beating 2.5 billion times in a lifetime.

• The lungs contain one thousand miles of capillaries. The process of exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide is so complicated that “it is more difficult to exchange O2 for CO2 than for a man shot out of a cannon to carve the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as he passes by.”

• DNA contains about two thousand genes per chromosome—1.8 meters of DNA are folded into each cell nucleus. A nucleus is six microns long. This is like putting 30 miles of fishing line into a cherry pit. And it isn’t simply stuffed in. It is folded in. If folded one way, the cell becomes a skin cell. If another way, a liver cell, and so forth. To write out the information in one cell would take three hundred volumes, each volume five hundred pages thick. The human body contains enough DNA that if it were stretched out, it would circle the sun 260 times.

• The body uses energy efficiently. If an average adult rides a bike for one hour at ten miles an hour, it uses the amount of energy contained in three ounces of carbohydrate. If a car were this efficient, it would get nine hundred miles to the gallon (Source: Perfect Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion, pp. 135-136).