The betrayal and sale of Joseph which placed him in Egypt allowed the Almighty to prepare a way for the Jewish people, through a great disaster (the seven years of famine throughout the entire Middle East). There were clearly many facets to this ‘cure’, including the raising of Moses amongst those who most hated his family.
All the prophecies of Jewish exile always included a prophecy of return. Regardless, of the ‘disease’ that led to the consequence and punishment of exile, such as idolatry and hatred; God always prepared a way back ahead of time.
Perhaps the greatest ‘cure’ that God arranged was the arrival(s) of the Messiah. This ‘cure’ prepared at the foundation of the world, for the greatest disease of all, is still to be fully applied!
It is interesting to reflect on how God may have placed a ‘cure’ in your life, before you faced a ‘disease’. Notice that God does not remove the disease in the first instance, consider for example the famine that resulted in the 12 tribes of Jacob, the Jewish people, being in Egypt.
Why doesn’t the Almighty just remove the ‘disease’ before it causes any trouble? Why is there evil and suffering in the world? Whatever the full answer to this ultimate and extremely challenging question, the reality is that the ‘disease’ is still here.
Let me share a fascinating example of how God prepared a ‘cure’ for me last year, before I wrote my car off in a car accident.
We had come home late one week and it appeared that someone had tried to break in through a back window. We called the police etc., even though we could see nothing missing, and I went to check out our contents insurance. In looking through the filing cabinets, for some reason I was also prompted to look for my car insurance. I couldn’t find it. I had just finished paying off a new car over 5 years and had had the insurance coming out of one of my credit cards every month.
When I couldn’t find the insurance papers, I went looking through my credit card statements for the payments and though I had definitely never cancelled the insurance I could not find any recent withdrawals. After ringing the insurance company and making a few inquiries it was clear that I had been driving for some months without any insurance!
I was never able to determine why the insurance company had stopped deducting the monthly charge, but it all prompted me over the weekend to organise a new full comprehensive policy.
Signing up online, I had it all sorted late Sunday night.
Early, the following Thursday a very unusual set of circumstances led me to me driving one of my daughters to a train station, when I had an accident involving another vehicle and wrote off my 5 year old car. If the accident had happened only 5 days earlier, I would not only have lost my car, and had no money for a replacement, but I would also have been looking at very significant costs related to the other vehicle, etc.
The ’disease’ was the accident (my first since rolling my car some 30 years earlier), and the ‘cure’ was the insurance coverage which saw me end up with a better car for no extra cost (although plenty of heart-ache, soul-searching and stress)!
My daughter and I were also escaped with only a few bruises, and these mostly to my ego!
This was not the first time I was aware of my Father, the Creator and Sustainer, preparing the way for me. What about you? Can you share any examples for your life?
The Apostle Paul also shared a not too dissimilar insight when he said that all things work together for good to those who are called according to His purposes.
This is still not the whole answer though, as I am sure we can all think of times when suffering some ‘disease’ or still suffering it, and not being able to see any pre-prepared ‘cure’. Life is far from simple, and yet our Father, the Creator of the Universe is always there in some mostly unseen way, supporting us and loving us! Praise Yah!
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