God Uses Bad Things for Good Ends

When everything is going well, when our favorite team is on a winning streak, our business is piling up profits and our romance is blossoming, life is good.
That’s the way it was with Jesus’ followers when the church was just a few months old. On the day of Pentecost 3,000 new believers were added to the church. Within months the Jerusalem church exploded to as many as 15,000. The church was blessed by God and extremely popular with the people of Jerusalem.
And then bad things started to happen. The Bible says, “On that day a great persecution broke out against the church at Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison. Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.”
It didn’t look good for those first Christians. Stephen was killed because he was a Christian, believers were being thrown in jail and many others fled Jerusalem to save their lives. But their situation was a picture of how God often operates – he uses bad things for good ends.
When the Christians were run out of town, they told about Jesus wherever they went. Without persecution, they never would have reached out to Judea and Samaria. It was the persecution that scattered them to nearby provinces where they began to fulfill Jesus’ command to “Go and make disciples of all nations.”

Related Scripture: Acts 8:1-4

© 2007 Leith Anderson