By Dan Jenkins
The Bible clearly says, “Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father above” (Jas. 1:17). While we might sometimes misunderstand what is truly good, there is no doubt that there has never been a good and perfect gift which does not come from God. It is so wonderful to read the Bible and see where God reveals just how He often works in the background to bring blessings to His people.
Think of the providence of God in the life of Joseph and how it shows He works. Years before anyone understood what was actually happening, God gave Joseph two dreams about what some day would come about. The first dream concerned his brothers’ bundles of wheat bowing down to Joseph’s bundle. When he told his brothers this dream, their hatred of him became even greater. When he told them of the second dream, where the sun, moon and eleven stars bowed down to Joseph, his father, Jacob, rebuked him by saying, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall your mother and I and your brothers indeed come to bow down to the earth before you?” (Gen. 37:7-10).
Because we know the “rest of the story,” we read and immediately understand how all of this came about. There was no way Jacob, Joseph or any of his brothers could have imagined how this would happen, even as it was happening. This is such a revelation about how God used events (even the jealous hatred Joseph’s brothers had, the lies of Potiphar’s wife and the seven years of famine) to accomplish His purpose. Any of them could have asked at various times in their lives, “Where is God?“ It is only afterwards that Joseph could look backwards and say to his brothers, “God sent me before you to preserve life…You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive” (Gen. 45:50; 50:20).
Some might foolishly say, “Jacob and his children were so lucky that Joseph was the ruler in Egypt.” It was not luck—it was God working in the shadows. How do we know this for certain? It is because God foretold it in the two dreams.
The only way anyone can know that a specific event was God working in the shadows is for God to speak to that specific event and say, “I did that.” To see this, read the words of Mordecai to Esther about all that had happened to enable her to become Queen of Persia. “Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). Without divine revelation, we cannot know any specific event happens because God changed the world to make it happen. We do not need to know, for it is enough to know that every good gift comes from our Father.