Having God’s favor might not be what it’s cracked up to be. You would think being one of God’s favorites would be a really great thing. And it is, but it often doesn’t look that way. The favor of God in the Bible rarely looks like worldly success. It often looks like the exact opposite. Psychologist Edward Edinger writes, “The favorites of God receive the severest ordeals…”
What does a favored person look like? How can you spot the favor of God on a person’s life?
To have the favor of God is not a prize but more a path of undoing. Truly walking with God can look like your life is falling apart. The favor of God can cause personal disintegration. But this can be what the path of destiny looks like. It is not a road we would naturally choose. Narrow is the way, and few find it.
Joseph learned the hard way: the road to God’s goodness is paved with evil. Joseph could not have said “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” unless his family had truly meant to destroy him.
God saw where Joseph was going. He also knew the only way to get Joseph into Pharaoh’s house was through this process. Joseph could not sit where he sat in Egypt without walking the road he walked and enduring the pain. His suffering was the vehicle that delivered God’s goodness. His God-given gift was, at first, a detriment. On the outside it looked more like a curse than blessing. Joseph’s path to greatness was filled with hardship, suffering, and losses stacked one after another. Having God’s favor requires swallowing tough, bitter pills.
The process began when the coat was put on the dreamer. What looked like a wonderful gift from a loving and adoring father was the beginning of Joseph’s undoing. Initially it was a sentence more than a blessing. It marked Joseph, isolated him, and put him in the line of fire. Out of all his brothers, he is the one singled out.
Joseph couldn’t help but tell his family what God had said to him in his dreams. He probably thought, like anyone would, that his family, of all people, would support him and take him seriously. But he was evoking envy without knowing it. Joseph, still wet behind the ears at seventeen, is unknowingly showing off his unmerited spiritual gift to his older brothers and father, men with far more life experience, and telling them they will someday bow to him. The natural response to such a gift is envy. Favor draws out envy in other people. He didn’t realize that “a man’s enemies will be those of his own house” (Mt. 10:36). Real life hadn’t hit Joseph yet, but it soon would. And when it did, the signs were unmistakable:
- Favor awakens envy.
- Favor provokes betrayal.
- Favor leads to alienation.
Joseph’s brothers couldn’t help themselves. Scripture says they could not speak peaceably to him. It was impossible for them to treat him any other way. The coat and the dreams enraged them.
Psychologist Aldo Carotenuto wrote: “All those who have something new to say pay the price of hatred and are subject to the law whereby no one is a prophet in his own country.”
And again: “The envious individual sees in the happiness of others a continuous curse on himself, and accordingly becomes imbued with poison: successful people are pursued by envy and this is something difficult to bear.”
The favored person must be betrayed, and it comes from someone close. Parents. Spouse. Children. Colleagues. Friends. Sometimes, from all of them. It is impossible to see the gift of betrayal when it is fresh, but the gift is there. It is a gift in hindsight because it is the painful instrument that God uses to move a person from one place into another. It is an awful, painful mechanism that separates Joseph from his family for his dreams to be fulfilled.
Part of the function of favor is to isolate and alienate. Betrayal strips away the false sense of security Joseph has in his family system. From the outside it can look like abandonment, but it’s really the beginning of a deeper relationship. Joseph spent years in obscurity. In a place he didn’t belong. Favor isolates Joseph so that God can bring him to the place where God is all he has.
Edinger writes,
The encounter generally occurs in the wilderness or in a fugitive state, i.e. alienation. Moses was a fugitive from the law, pasturing his father-in-law’s sheep in the wilderness when Yahweh spoke to him from the burning bush and gave him his life assignment (Exodus 3). Jacob, obliged to run away from home because of Esau’s wrath, dreams of the heavenly ladder in the wilderness and makes his covenant with God (Genesis 28:10–22).
The ones who alienate often think they’re doing the right thing, and in a sense they are. They might think they’re protecting the hierarchy, group, or the family, like keeping David out with the sheep. But the one left alone, the one that is different, is often the one carrying the gift. In the alienation a strange security is formed. In the fear of the Lord there is a strong confidence. In all of Joseph’s hardships he was protected.
Joseph and his family were troubled by the meaning of his dreams, but none of them could see the awful path that would lead to their fulfillment. It took envy, betrayal, and many threats to get Joseph there. They could see the clear interpretation, but the magnitude was impossible for them to see. His enemies came to him for mercy. The people that thought about killing him came to him bowing down asking for help. God turns the tables, but it takes time. He will tell you a secret, and then your life will fall apart. Joseph spent years in which from the outside it looked like the interpretation of the dream was wrong. It looked like his brothers’ plot had worked. But their attempts to stop the dreamer helped kickstart the process. They were necessary for the fulfillment of the dream.
Biblical stories like Joseph’s pull back the curtain and let us glimpse the behind-the-scenes hidden workings of God. Joseph saw glimpses of the behind-the-scenes through dreams. However, Joseph couldn’t see the whole narrative, but the reader does. There is a hidden dimension to the call of God. Years later, when Joseph saw the fulfillment of those early dreams, he finally understood the plot of his life.
The road to God’s goodness is paved with misfortune, betrayal, evil, suffering, tragedy, and loss. Jesus says we are blessed when these things happen to us (Matthew 5). The only way to make all things work together for good is for all those things, evil included, to be part of the journey. If it’s all good, nothing needs to “work together” for good.
Greatness, in God’s economy, can be preceded by undoing:
- Betrayal (by family and those closest to you)
- Injustice (by Potiphar’s wife)
- Neglect (by the cupbearer)
Betrayal. Death. Evil. Bitterness. Alienation. All built into the call.
Through it all, Joseph had one constant. It obviously wasn’t his family. Over and over, scripture repeats the same phrase: the Lord was with him.
In exile, you discover you are not really alone. This is the strange gift of alienation. Joseph’s position in Egypt was substantial, but it could not compare to what he carried inside.
And the same is true for us. Nothing external can compare to what you have internally. Favor may strip everything once held, but only to show you the one thing needed.
Sources:
Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche (1972).
Aldo Carotenuto, The Vertical Labyrinth: Individuation in Jungian Psychology, trans. John Shepley (1985)
Thank you for this! It is so helpful. It’s so easy to look at the hardships and feel that they are a sign that we’re on the wrong path.
I don’t know how Mockingbird keeps finding folks who write these articles, but they’re hitting it out of the park in my estimation.
Thanks for this article Melvin. I’ve lived this experience and am praying for God to continue melting away the anger and bitterness from the loss. I’m not in charge of any country, not in ministry, just a guy who mercifully got caught in the tractor beam of God. I think the way you’ve portrayed this story is a accurate illustration of how our Heavenly Father draws us closer to Himself, and enables us to walk in trusting Him.