“When Joseph’s brothers saw that their father was dead, they said, ‘What if Joseph bears a grudge against us and pays us back in full for all the wrong which we did to him!’ So they sent a message to Joseph, saying, ‘Your father charged before he died, saying, “Thus you shall say to Joseph, ‘Please forgive, I beg you, the transgression of your brothers and their sin, for they did you wrong. And now, please forgive the transgression of the servants of the God of your father.’”’ And Joseph wept when they spoke to him. Then his brothers also came and fell down before him and said, ‘Behold, we are your servants.’ But Joseph said to them, ‘Do not be afraid, for am I in God’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive. So therefore, do not be afraid; I will provide for you and your little ones.’ So he comforted them and spoke kindly to them.”
Joseph’s answer to his brothers was meant to reassure or “comfort” them that they could trust him and that he wasn’t going to harm them, even though they knew they deserved it. His answer shows that he had truly forgiven them from his heart and internally reconciled the matter by believing that God had sent the slave traders in order to bring him where he needed to be, including also preventing his brothers from committing a much worse crime, namely murder.
Genesis 50:20, non-Calvinist paraphrase: “As for you, you meant [the evil of selling me to the slave traders] against me, but God meant [the same evil of selling me to the slavery] for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.”
Genesis 50:20, Calvinist paraphrase: “As for you, you meant [evil thoughts and intentions] against me, but God meant [your evil thoughts and intentions] for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.”
Notice the difference. Non-Calvinists infer that whereas the brothers meant the evil of slavery against him, God meant the same evil of slavery as a way to both save Joseph’s life and also to get him to Egypt where he would someday be elevated to a position of authority where he could save all of their lives. So, in that way, God is the real hero, and totally undefiled because He knew, and used, the evil intentions of the brothers, rather than causing their evil intentions. By contrast, Calvinists believe that God determined or caused the evil intentions of the brothers, and that’s a key distinction, because Calvinists then conclude: “If God is without guilt for intending even one person’s evil thoughts and motives, then non-Calvinists have no grounds for saying God is unjust to bring about all evil desires and motives.” In other words, Calvinists are trying to mitigate the charge laid against their theology of making God into “the author of sin,” by saying that whatever sin and evil that God ordains, He is not necessarily guilty for it. But again, their conclusion rests on an interpretation of Genesis 50:20 that non-Calvinists reject.
What do Calvinists believe?
Joseph said to his brothers that, in terms of the evil of slavery that they meant against him, God meant that very same evil thing for good. So, to the extent that Joseph’s brothers meant the evil of slavery, God devised, planned and foreordained the inner evil inclinations which rendered it certain. God had good intentions in determining their evil intentions.
Our reply:
The 1st key question to ask Calvinists is this: What was “meant”? It seems that Calvinists wish to say that God “meant” the evil intentions of the brothers, but that is not necessarily the case. Instead, non-Calvinists interpret that the brothers “meant” to sell Joseph into slavery (in order to dispatch a rival sibling while also conveniently profiting from it), while God “meant” the same act of selling Joseph into slavery as a way to spare Joseph’s life from imminent danger and to get Joseph into Egypt where he would eventually be used by God to save his family from a future famine. To reiterate, both God and the brothers meant the same act of slavery, but for different reasons.
This should not be taken to mean that God meant their evil intentions but rather, He knew their evil intentions and provided a profitable alternative that He knew they would accept. Moreover, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that God delights in slavery. Far from it. God is simply using what is available to Him, that is, the normal practice of slavery in that generation, in order to save Joseph’s life.
As an analogy, if my son chooses to sign up for baseball, and he means to have fun by it, I may mean for him to play baseball too, although with perhaps a different objective, in terms of having him learn discipline by it. My approval doesn’t mean that I irresistibly caused my son to want to sign up, nor would it mean that I wanted for my son to potentially take up a bad habit of chewing tobacco. It simply means that I acted upon my son’s own interests in order to bring about something good. In furthering the analogy, my son becomes quite good at baseball and ultimately achieves a college scholarship. While he may have meant to go to college to party, I would have meant for him to go to college to further his baseball skills and to get an education. Although we both meant the same thing, namely going to college, does that mean that I irresistibly caused him to want to go to college or that I caused him to misuse his important opportunity by engaging in reckless behavior? So, it’s perfectly natural for both parties to have meant the same event, though with completely different motives.658 This is the best way to understand the intentions of Joseph’s brothers, in conjunction with the intentions of God, all while demonstrating how God’s holiness would remain perfectly intact.
The 2nd key question to ask Calvinists is this: Where do you believe that the evil intentions of the brothers originated? Why did they desire murder in the first place? Do you, as a Calvinist, believe that God decreed the evil motivations of the brothers? Or, do you agree with non-Calvinists who instead say that (for different reasons) God and the brothers “meant” the specific act of selling Joseph into slavery? It seems that Calvinists can become hesitant when asked this because their view could portray God as the author of evil, which they tend to avoid admitting.
James White: “…since God judges on the basis of the intentions of the heart, there is in fact a ground for morality and justice.”659
Dave Hunt: “Yes, God judges ‘the intentions of the heart,’ but Calvinism falsely says that He causes the intentions He judges.”660
The emphatic point that non-Calvinists raise is that God neither decreed the evil intentions nor the evil actions of the brothers, but rather that God knew their evil intentions and provided them with an alternative to murder that He knew they would accept since in their depraved minds they could simultaneously profit from it.
The nature of the debate with Calvinists is this: Does God redeem evil from good—which is the non-Calvinist perspective—or does God cause evil to redeem, which is the Calvinist perspective? Calvinists depict God as having exhaustively and meticulously decreed the pride and evil intentions of the brothers. Non-Calvinists, instead, believe that God brings some good out of mankind’s independently conceived evil. In that way, God acts according to what He knows of the human heart, so as to take advantage of a given situation, in order to bring about His own will and purpose, in spite of the sin and disobedience of others, thus redeeming good from evil. They bottom line is that God does not cause what He uses—an important distinction. God uses what others independently cause. So, here you have the brothers intending to kill Joseph, but God wasn’t going to allow that. So, God took what was the common practice of that generation, namely slavery, and brought the slave traders into the situation so that the brothers would go with that option instead of murder. Therefore, while the brothers intended death, God intended life, and in the process, God provided a way to get Joseph into Egypt, where he would one day save his entire family. Nowhere in that scenario is God’s character impugned. Instead, He is the hero, also demonstrating that He is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-wise, without having to pull strings like a puppet-master.
A common error of Calvinists is that they take unique examples of God working to bring about a particular good purpose through the already evil intentions of men and then use that as proof that God: (1) sovereignly brought about the evil intentions themselves and (2) that He sovereignly works in this same way at all times throughout history. In other words, God didn’t cause their evil intentions, but instead used their evil intentions to His own advantage, in order to redeem good from evil.
1st John 2:16 states: “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” So, how can everything come from God if pride does not come from God? In other words, if the origin of pride is “from the world,” then there cannot be an exhaustive divine decree. So, neither Genesis 50:15-21 nor 1st John 2:16 serves the Calvinist’s interest in promoting their theory that God causes evil motives, pivotal to their theory of exhaustive divine determinism.
What do Calvinists believe?
James White: “I’m not impugning God’s character.”661
Our reply:
If you are contradicting 1st John 2:16 by suggesting that the pride of the brothers came from God’s sovereign decree, rather than from the brothers themselves, then you are indeed impugning the character of God.
What do Calvinists believe?
How could God be able to guarantee the success of His plans if He does not determine the underlying motives and intentions of the people involved? If the brothers truly possessed their own autonomous, libertarian freedom, then it would at least be theoretically possible that the brothers might not have accepted the alternative of slavery, and instead just gone ahead with the original plan of killing Joseph. In other words, if God didn’t determine the thoughts and intentions of the brothers, then some or all of the brothers might have freely rationalized the risk of Joseph possibly talking his way out of slavery and having the slave traders take him back home for twice the bounty, plus other brothers being sold off in Joseph’s place. Exhaustive divine determinism solves this dilemma. In other words, what if Adam had said to Eve, “No thanks. I’m not hungry”?
Our reply:
God’s own omniscience guarantees the success of His plans. Consider the exchange at Jeremiah 38:17-24 between the prophet Jeremiah and king Zedekiah, in which Jeremiah kept relaying alternative realities based upon what God showed him, in terms of how the king’s choices would result in different scenarios. Was God causing Zedekiah’s choices? No. Was God causing everyone else’s potential choices? No. But Jeremiah believed that God was right, and Zedekiah should have, too.
Calvinist objection:
The rebuttal that “just because God ordains evil sometimes, does not prove that God ordains evil all of the time” does not work, because Scripture reveals a discernable pattern in which God does, in fact, ordain evil very often, and moreover, if it is accepted that God ordains evil, even sometimes, then Calvinism’s exhaustive decree of meticulous providence cannot be rejected on the grounds that God would never ordain evil.
Our reply:
While it is true that God sometimes, not always, incorporates controversial things like slavery (Genesis 50:20) and crucifixion (Acts 2:23) into His redemptive plans, God never ordains evil, at least in the sense of causing anyone’s evil thoughts and intentions. That’s a key point. Rather than causing anyone’s evil motives, God takes what He knows of the evil intentions of others and uses their intentions to His own advantage for redeeming good from evil, but never causing the evil that He redeems. Hence, non-Calvinists retain a legitimate basis for rejecting Calvinism’s exhaustive decree of meticulous providence.
Calvinist objection:
What comes first? God who designed all things, created all things, and sustains all things, or hypothetical human responses?
Our reply:
By “designed all things,” does the premise of the question already assume exhaustive, meticulous determinism of all things? You can’t assume Calvinism in order to prove Calvinism. That’s Circular Logic. It’s like asking: “Since we know Calvinism is true, how do you respond?” Well, we don’t accept the premise.
Non-Calvinists believe that God plans things contingently on what He foreknows. In other words, God planned Calvary contingent on His “foreknowledge” (Acts 2:23) that Adam and Eve would not remain faithful and humanity would need a Savior. God contingently planned to use the slave-traders of Genesis 50:20 because He knew that Joseph’s brothers would take the easy way out. God contingently planned to use signs and wonders on Egypt, according to Exodus 3:19-20, because He knew that Pharaoh would not let Israel go except by compulsion. Of course, contingencies are incompatible with determinism, as Calvinist, R.C. Sproul confirms:
“It is said that God knows all contingencies, but none of them contingently. God never says to himself, ‘That depends.’ Nothing is contingent to him. He knows all things that will happen because he ordains everything that does happen.”662
That would mean that God knew the evil intentions of the brothers because God ordained the evil intentions of the brothers. It’s disappointing that Calvinists have chosen a version of divine sovereignty which has them portraying God as the mastermind behind all human evil intentions.
What do Calvinists believe?
James White: “Joseph, knowing that his brothers have committed evil against him, knowing that what they did was wrong, knowing even that God had actually restrained their evil—I don’t know why God didn’t just put him in a situation where they would do freely—but God actually restrains men’s evil.”663
Our reply:
Where does the text say that God “restrained” the brothers? Instead, it simply indicates that God offered the brothers a better deal. Nowhere does it say that God used a Jedi Mind Trick to get the brothers to desire evil. Nowhere does it say that God was “restraining” the brothers. Nowhere does it say that the brothers weren’t able to act “freely.” Instead, it says “you” [meaning the brothers, not God] meant the betrayal of slavery for evil whereas God meant the same act [of being sold into slavery, not their intentions] as a means to spare Joseph’s life from imminent death, in order to bring about the present result of Joseph being elevated to a position of authority in Egypt, where he could save all of their lives from starvation. So, you need to press the Calvinist to answer the tough questions: Point blank, do you believe that God caused the evil intentions of the brothers? Where do you believe the evil intentions of the brothers originated? The non-Calvinist answer is that God had nothing, nada, zippo to do with the brothers’ own evil intentions. God simply knew their evil intentions and provided an alternative that He knew they would take because they could profit financially from it. (Compare with Exodus 3:19-20: “But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion. So I will stretch out My hand and strike Egypt with all My miracles which I shall do in the midst of it; and after that he will let you go.”) God knows the heart of man and acts accordingly. So, if Genesis 50:20 does anything to help the Calvinist argument, my reading comprehension skills tell me the complete opposite.
William Lane Craig: “‘You’ meant it for evil, but God meant it for good, and has brought it to pass. God didn’t move the brothers to hate Joseph, to kill him, to throw him into a pit, to lie to their father—that would make God the author of evil. But God knew that if they were in this situation, they would behave in these evil ways, but that ultimately this would redound to the salvation of Israel and its rescue from famine and all the rest.”664
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658 Helpful illustration provided by “The Society of Evangelical Arminians.”
659 Debating Calvinism (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2004), 320.
660 Ibid., 327.
661 James White, Genesis 50 De-Calvinized, 6:48–6:50, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jScJZ6MEULY.
662 What is Reformed Theology? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1997), 172.
663 William Lane Craig vs James White – Calvinism vs Molinism on the Problem of Evil, 37:06-37:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECcN-fisQRk.
664 Ibid., 40:12-40:44.
[This post has been excerpted with permission from Richard Coords, Calvinism Answered Verse by Verse and Subject by Subject, © 2024.]
