Words to Live by is a weekly devotional email of Scriptures and quotes that highlight and expound upon our Union with Christ. If you’d like to receive devotionals like the one below, please subscribe using this link.
Wednesday February 4, 2026
God meant it for good
“‘God, who is rich in grace…hath quickened us together with Christ…hath raised us up together, and made us sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus…far above all principality and power and might’ (Eph. 2:4-6; 1:21). This is our Throne Life, ‘the power of His resurrection.’ The king as well as the priest. It has as its basis a new stretch of understanding of God, not just personal but universal, and that He means, not just weakly permits, all that comes to us, evil or good. The most used Scripture to illustrate this is when Joseph said to his repentant brethren, after their selling him as a slave and all that followed with Potiphar’s wife and years of imprisonment, ‘You thought evil against me; but God meant it for good’ (Gen. 50:20). Then the bold statement of Peter at Pentecost, ‘Jesus of Nazareth…Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and slain,’ and that early recorded prayer, ‘Against thy holy child Jesus both Herod and Pontius Pilate with the people of Israel, were gathered together for to do whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined before to be done’ (Acts 2:22-23; 4:27-28).
As we have already said, in creating persons like Himself, God created a freedom of choice, and evil is that alternative false choice of Lucifer’s seeping down to us. Then God’s perfect meaning is that while there is the reaping of the harvest of false choices, He always has the perfect plan by which apparent losses are really gains, just as Satan’s Calvary became God’s resurrection of millions of Satan’s captives. For when Pilate said to Jesus, ‘Don’t You know I have power to crucify or release You?’ Jesus answered, ‘Thou couldest have no power at all against Me except it were given thee from above.’ From above? We would surely have said, ‘from beneath!’ (John 19:10-11), but ultimately “beneath-power’ is actually from above.
So now seeing this foundation true of the devil himself being really God’s convenient agent for good, we learn to see through our plentiful negative situations, and thus help others to do the same. By the exercise of authoritative faith, we persistently and boldly affirm that God means just that, and my only sin is not believing that He is my God and Father of love when it appears, and indeed is, an operation of the devil himself. Then as I believe against all appearances, and not lightly or easily, I have the inner calm of being able to accept an evil thing as from God. This is where I am moving on to the royal authority of faith of the Hebrews 11:32-34 type. What was in earlier childhood and young man stage a simple faith in my daily walk with Jesus now becomes the formidable weapon of faith by which I am ‘more than conqueror’ in all situations; a conqueror in a stable walk on rocky ground, and ‘more than conqueror’ by knowing how to apply the conquest to bringing good out of evil, supply out of need, advance out of retreat.”
Taken from: “To All Believers…It’s as Simple as This”
By Norman Grubb
Pages 41-41
