What Does Genesis 45:5 Mean?

"And now do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life." The first word of Joseph's interpretation of what happened is "And now": and now, given all of that, here is what it means. The brothers should not be distressed or angry with themselves. This is preemptive absolution: before they have asked for forgiveness, before they have confessed (they confessed to each other in Genesis 42:21 to 22), before any formal reconciliation process, Joseph releases them from self-directed guilt. "Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves."

The theological interpretation arrives: "for God sent me before you to preserve life." The sale was not the decisive action in the story: God's sending was. Joseph was sold by his brothers, and God sent him to Egypt. Both are true; neither cancels the other. The brothers' action was real; God's action was also real, and providentially operative through the brothers' action. The mechanism of Joseph's arrival in Egypt was the sale; the agent behind the preservation of life is God. Joseph reads his story as God's story: not the story of his brothers' crime against him but the story of God's preservation plan enacted through and around what his brothers did.

"To preserve life": the purpose of God's sending is practical and universal: life preservation. The seven-year famine, the seven-year abundance, the stored grain, the administrative system Joseph built: all exists to preserve life through the famine. The world's food crisis is being managed by the man who was thrown in a pit by his brothers. The pit-to-prime-minister arc is the arc of God's preservation plan. "To preserve life" connects Joseph's suffering and his exaltation to their purpose: not his own glory, not his brothers' punishment, but the preservation of life.