The Same Action Ascribed to Ood in One Sense, While in Another It Is the Act of Man

    The sending of Joseph to Egypt was the guilty deed of his cruel and unnatural brothers. They are accountable for the whole transaction. Yet there is a sense in which God did this thing. The Scriptures assert both: both must be true. "And God sent me before you," says Joseph to his brethren, "to preserve you a posterity in the earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance. Lo, now it was not you that sent me hither, but God." Not only, then, is it true that God did this, but it is denied that his brethren did it. They did it in one sense: God did it in another. And the sense in which God did it, is so much more important than that in which they did it, that in that sense Joseph denies that they did it at all. Can human intellect descry the line that bounds the human and the divine agency in this matter? How did God do the thing that was wickedly done by men? Human arrogance may attempt to explain and distinguish, but it can never satisfy any sound mind. It may speak of divine permission as all that is meant by agency. But will simple permission warrant us to ascribe agency in such a sense as to deny agency to those who were, in the obvious sense, the agents? It is wisdom to submit to God, and prostrate ourselves before him in the dust. Who is man, that he should pretend to comprehend the ways of the unsearchable Jehovah?