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Why do bad things sometimes happen to good people?
Have you ever experienced a major setback in your life, not because you did anything to deserve it, but because it seemed like life randomly dealt you a bad blow? People often find themselves as victims of circumstances beyond their control and then are left to ask, “Why is this happening to me?”
Let me start by saying there are no pat answers to such questions. We do know that everything that happens in this life is either caused by God or allowed by God. That creates a great tension for many when they consider the great evil that has happened both to them and others.
One such example in the Bible is found in the story of Joseph.
A teenage boy is given a couple of dreams from God that he would one day rule over his father, mother, and older brothers. Lacking a sense of tact, he brags about it to his brothers. They throw him in a pit and sell him into slavery in Egypt. The next 26 years of his life, he is imprisoned for a crime he didn’t even commit. Eventually, one day, he is removed from the prison and into the palace of Pharaoh. His ability to interpret dreams places him ruler over all Egypt underneath Pharaoh.
Then one day, he reconnects with his brothers. What do you suppose he says?
Genesis 50:20 says, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” The verse does not offer a quick or simplistic answer to suffering. Instead, it comes at the end of Joseph’s long and painful story, showing us that God can be at work even through circumstances meant for evil.
This scene happens right after his father Jacob dies and gets buried back in Canaan. Joseph's brothers panic. With dad gone, they figure Joseph has just been waiting for the right moment to finally get revenge for what they did to him decades earlier, stripping him, throwing him in a pit, and selling him into slavery as a teenager out of pure jealousy. That wasn't a misunderstanding or an accident. It was calculated, ugly, and cruel.
So the brothers come groveling, terrified, basically begging Joseph not to kill them. And Joseph, now the second-most-powerful man in Egypt, could absolutely have done it. Instead he says these words. He doesn't pretend the evil wasn't evil. He names it directly. But he also points out that God had been weaving something else through the whole mess: positioning Joseph to save an entire region, including his own family, from a devastating famine.
That's the key tension in this verse, and it's important not to flatten it. This isn't Joseph saying "everything happens for a reason" in some vague, feel-good way. It's two things being true at once. The brothers really did mean evil, and God really did mean good, without either one canceling the other out. Human responsibility and God's sovereignty sit side by side here, uncomfortable as that can be to hold.
Here's where I want to be careful, because this verse gets misused a lot. It's not a blanket promise that every bad thing that happens to you will get magically fixed into something great, right on schedule, so you can feel good about it. Genesis 50:20 is describing something specific that happened in Joseph's story. It's not a formula you can plug your own suffering into and expect the same outcome on the same timeline.
But there's still real application here, and it's this: God is not intimidated or defeated by other people's worst choices. Joseph waited over twenty years, sold at seventeen, ruler decades later, and this conversation with his brothers happens even later than that, before he could say these words with any confidence. He didn't understand what God was doing while he sat in an Egyptian prison on a false charge. He couldn't see it. He just kept showing up faithfully in unfair circumstances, one day at a time.
That's usually how it goes for us too. If you're in the middle of something someone did to you. A betrayal, a broken relationship, a job loss you didn't deserve, a season where people meant you harm. You probably can't see the "Genesis 50:20 moment" yet. Joseph couldn't either, for decades. The application isn't "smile, this will work out great." It's trusting that God's purposes run deeper and longer than any single person's cruelty, even when the evidence isn't in yet.
And notice what forgiveness looks like here. Joseph doesn't minimize what happened ("you meant evil") and he doesn't hold it over them either. He releases the need for payback because he trusts God has already been at work in ways bigger than his own vengeance could ever accomplish. That's a tough, mature kind of forgiveness, not denial, not doormat behavior, but a genuine handing-over of the outcome to God.
So if you're carrying something someone did to you, this verse isn't permission to fast-forward past the pain. It's an invitation to keep walking faithfully, trusting that God is still writing a bigger story than the one your betrayer intended, even if, like Joseph, you don't get to read the ending for a long, long time.