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Genesis 40:1-5  Some time later, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt offended their master, the king of Egypt.  Pharaoh was angry with his two officials, the chief cupbearer and the chief baker, and put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, in the same prison where Joseph was confined.  The captain of the guard assigned them to Joseph, and he attended them.  After they had been in custody for some time, each of the two men – the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were being held in prison – had a dream the same night, and each dream had a meaning of its own.

There are several things that feature in my daily prayer schedule in respect to which I really struggle concerning God’s strange providence.

Can I accept that God really is Sovereign over all our lives when tragedies happen to faithful servants of the Lord Jesus Christ – tragedies that seem to defy any logical explanation from my perspective?

And then I read the opening verses of Genesis 40!  Joseph has been separated from his loving father, sold by his jealous brothers into slavery in the foreign country of Egypt, and there, while seeking to be faithful to the laws of his God, he has been wrongly accused by Potiphar’s seductive wife, and thrown into prison!

After ‘some [considerable] time’ of being left to wrestle with the mental torture of loneliness, isolation, and suffering as the victim of several gross injustices which might cause him to ask, “Why is my God, whom I have always served faithfully, allowing – perhaps even causing – all these terrible things to happen to me?”, it just ‘turns out’ that two of Pharaoh’s personal servants are thrown into prison with him, and ‘just happen’ to have dreams that trouble them.

From a purely (and very limited) human perspective we might well ask, “Where is God in all this?”  Then, as we read on in Genesis, we discover that God is very much involved in all this, and all these strange ‘injustices’ and ‘coincidences’ do have a planned purpose from his perspective, even if not from ours.

Keeping all this in mind, I will continue to pray daily to my Sovereign God for my suffering friends, because I know that “All things … come to us not by chance but from his Fatherly hand,” and that “All creatures are so completely in his hand that without his will they can neither move nor be moved” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 27-28). 

– Bruce Christian