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Joseph - A Study in God's Sovereignty

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Life's up's and downs may very well be God's hand positioning you for the next step in His plan for your life.  He often allows trials in our life to prepare us for the role He wants us to fill later.  Joseph disovered this fact as God sovereignly guided the events in his life to finally raise him up to the position of being the second-most powerful man in Egypt.

Most studies of Joseph seem to focus on his faith and his integrity.  This study, however, takes a look at the role that the sovereignty of God played in Joseph's life as recorded in chapters 37 through 50 of Genesis.  Joseph went through various ups and downs during his life but if we look closely we will see that God was positioning Joseph at each step of the way so that he would be in the right place at the right time to fulfill God's plan for him.  From the dreams God gave him that intensified the hatred his brothers had for him to being in prison with the right person who would later mention him to Pharaoh at just the right time, Joseph had God's hand on him from start to finish.  While God may not have chosen us to be the one to save millions of lives during an intense famine as He did Joseph, from Joseph's life we can learn how God guides the circumstances of our lives in order to fulfill the purpose He has for us.

This study covering Genesis 37-50 was composed by Robert Rathbone in 2016 for a series of Wednesday night Bible studies.  The text is split into 11 lessons, each of which can be used for a single session of roughly an hour in length.  Since the lessons are split along natural divisions in the text (chapter divisions or changes in "scenes"), some lessons are a bit longer than others and may be difficult to squeeze into an hour.  Some effort has been made to format the study to make it suitable for printing in booklet form, but this has not been tested at the time of this writing.

May God get the glory from this study.