All Things Are Against Me?

In this message drawn from a single verse — Jacob's cry "All things are against me!" in Genesis 42:36 — Pastor Jason Duff uses a series of things everyone knows but that turn out to be completely wrong (the dark side of the moon, Napoleon's height, moths eating your clothes, the 10% brain myth) to make the case that what we think we know with certainty, especially about God's intentions toward us in hard seasons, is often exactly backwards. Building to Romans 8:28 and the Greek word sunergo — the same root as "synergism," the chemical process where two poisons combine into table salt — Pastor Jason argues that God doesn't promise all things are good, but that He takes all things, good, bad, ugly, and sinful, and works them into something that couldn't have existed any other way, for three specific purposes: to work out your physical location, to work on who you are spiritually, and to work toward what you will do eternally. The message closes with the beautiful irony hidden inside Jacob's despair: absolutely nothing he believed was against him actually was — his son Joseph wasn't dead but was ruling Egypt, Simeon was being held by his own brother, Benjamin was safer with Joseph than anywhere else, and the famine itself was the very instrument God used to set the whole redemptive plan in motion — a reminder that the gap between "all things are against me" and "all things are working for me" is often just the distance between what we can see and what God is already doing.