You’ll Get Rained On

God didn’t promise to keep us from either the famine or the storm, but he did promise to bring us through them. Moreover, he promised to actually use them to bring about his good plan in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be produced if we had been preserved from them. So if you are in a storm, start singing in the rain—the Son is coming.

The Journey // Focus: Genesis 43:1-2

Now the famine was still severe in the land. So when they had eaten all the grain they had brought from Egypt, their father said to them, “Go back and buy us a little more food.”

In Matthew 5:45, Jesus said something of the universal goodness and common grace of God to which we all nod in glad agreement, pointing out that our Heavenly Father “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” But what happens when that same sun that warms the body beats down mercilessly upon not only the heads of the unjust, but on the just as well? What happens when, as children of our Father in heaven, the same God-sent rain that causes the crops to sprout rains on our parade?

If you are like me—even though I know better—I begin to question God’s goodness and his personal love for me. When unfair and unwanted circumstance find their way into my life, my sense of fairness is assaulted and my assumption that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people is shocked back to reality. I know better, but I still tend to drift into that ditch of despair. I’ll bet you do too.

In truth, bad things happen to good and bad people alike. I don’t like that, but that’s the way it always has been and always will be in this world broken by sin that we live in for the time being. Jacob and his family, flawed as they were, found themselves suffering the same famine as the wicked, godless people of Egypt were enduring. Bummer—the same sun that torched the Egyptians scorched the Israelites.

But here’s where the redeeming benefits of being the children of our Father in heaven kick in: He didn’t promise to keep us from either the famine or the storm, but he did promise to bring us through them. Moreover, he promised to actually use them to bring about his good plan—both his larger plan for the world and his personal plan for our lives—through our problems in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be produced if we had been preserved from them.

Now I don’t always understand why he works that way, and I certainly wouldn’t do it that way if I were God—but I am not. And when I step back from my childish expectation and shortsighted perspective, I can see that God has a long and perfect track record of bringing his people through their painful difficulties to a glorious conclusion. And because of that exemplary record of faithfulness and goodness, in the words of Corrie Ten Boom, I will never need to “be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.” He will see me through.

Jacob and his sons were scorched by a famine, and though they could not see the guiding hand of God in their desperate time of need, nonetheless, God was at work, maneuvering them, both in the short term and for the long run, to a place of greater blessing and greater usefulness.

And as far as you are concerned, even when the same famine that is touching the evil is touching you, or to switch weather analogies, even when your parade is getting rained on, you can trust him. Seriously!

So start singing in the rain!