A: Well now, it doesn’t mean that God has given us trials. That would be an impossibility. “God has no pleasure in your dying, turn ye and live.”2 The reason the Master conducted his ministry, he said, was to heal the sick, raise the dead, open the eyes of the blind, open the ears of the deaf. If it had been God’s will for any of those things to take place, he would have been thwarting God’s will, not performing God’s will. Therefore, you must understand that poverty, lack, limitation, sickness, death are no part of God’s will for man, and therefore, even though they are the trials by which we grow, they are not God-given. They are brought to us because we have brought them forth as the only means by which we can grow.
I cite you the story of Joseph. Joseph was the son of a rich and important man in his day, and not only that but he was the favorite son, so in the ordinary walk of life, Joseph would have continued unto the end of his days worthless, just being a nice, pampered son with lots of everything and not having earned anything.
But you see, Joseph evidently had a gift, and one that would have gone to waste in that kind of idle life, and so he had to be lifted out of himself, and he was. He was thrown into a pit to be killed, and he was thrown into a pit and sold into slavery. Even after he got to Egypt as a slave and started to do well for himself, he was accused of a crime and sent to prison for two years. Joseph and Job could have gotten along beautifully together for a while.
But when it is all over, Joseph is second to the King of Egypt and in charge of all of the supply, and the very brothers who threw him into the pit and sold him into slavery are there to get food. Naturally, you can imagine how they feel to find their own brother as the one they have to go to for their food. They felt ashamed, but Joseph told them, “No, no, no. No, don’t feel that way. It wasn’t you that did this. God sent me before you into Egypt.”
In other words, it was Joseph’s destiny to fulfill himself in Egypt, but as the pampered son of a rich and important man, he would never have gotten there, and so he had to draw unto himself the very experiences—hard as they were—that eventually brought him to Egypt.
This is true of you and this is true of me. If we ever achieve anything in this spiritual work, you will find many trials and many tribulations and many hard paths that you will have to walk before you get there. It is not that God put the stumbling block in your way, but there was no way for you to transcend these universal beliefs without surmounting them one by one in each form as they have come.
I have witnessed, in my travels, that every man and woman who has gone any place at all spiritually tells the same story of problems that their students and disciples never would go through, never would survive—most of them—never would permit themselves to have, because they wouldn’t feel it worthwhile.
And so it is that trials are the very things we need to lift us up. God doesn’t give them to us. We attract to ourselves the conditions that we need, just as on the other hand, we attract the teachers to us that can advance our progress. We attract the supply necessary to accomplish what we want. We attract everything to us that may appear to us as good or as evil.
1This excerpt is from Recording 302A, from the 1960 Los Angeles Closed Class, “Nothing Takes Place Outside of Consciousness.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at www.joelgoldsmith.com or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
2 Ezekiel 18:32