Dear friend,
I want to show you something this Wednesday morning that I believe will change the way you read history.
Not just American history. All of it.
There is a pattern in Scripture that most people miss because they are reading the stories one at a time instead of seeing the thread that runs through all of them. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And once you see it in Scripture you will start seeing it everywhere else too.
Here is the pattern.
The men God chose for the most important moments in history were almost always the most hated men of their time before those moments arrived.
Not disliked. Not controversial. Hated. Hunted. Written off. Dismissed. Despised by the very people who would later depend on them.
Every single time.
Before I show you the pattern let me place something in your hands.
I wrote a guide called They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. It traces this exact pattern — the hated man, the opposition, the survival, the vindication — through Scripture and maps it directly onto what you are watching happen right now. Many of you have told me it gave you language for something you already felt but could not fully say. You can find it by clicking the image below
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
Now let me show you what I mean.
Joseph.
Joseph was seventeen years old when his brothers decided they hated him.
Not disliked. Genesis chapter 37 verse 4 says it plainly. They hated him and could not speak a kind word to him. The hatred was so complete that ordinary conversation became impossible. You cannot say good morning to a man you hate that much.
Why did they hate him? Because he could see things they could not see. Because he had dreams that described a future they did not want to believe in. Because something about him made them feel exposed in a way they could not articulate and did not know how to handle.
So they threw him in a pit. Sold him to strangers for twenty pieces of silver. Told his father he was dead. And went home and ate their dinner.
That was not the end of Joseph. That was the beginning of Joseph.
The pit was not his grave. It was his passage. The slavery was not his punishment. It was his preparation. The prison was not his destination. It was his waiting room.
By Genesis chapter 41 the man his brothers sold for twenty pieces of silver was standing before Pharaoh interpreting dreams that no one else in Egypt could understand. And Pharaoh took the signet ring off his own hand and put it on Joseph's hand and gave him authority over all of Egypt.
The men who hated him most ended up bowing before him.
They tried to stop him. They could not.
Moses.
Moses was a wanted man.
Exodus chapter 2 records that he killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. When Pharaoh heard about it he tried to have Moses executed. Moses fled into the wilderness and disappeared for forty years.
Forty years.
By the world's measure that was the end of Moses. A fugitive. A failure. A man who had thrown away every advantage he had been given — raised in Pharaoh's household, educated in the finest court in the world — and ended up tending sheep in the desert for four decades.
And then God appeared to him in a burning bush and told him to go back.
Not to hide. Not to blend in. To go back to the most powerful ruler in the known world and demand the release of an entire nation of slaves.
The man Pharaoh wanted dead became the instrument God used to dismantle Pharaoh's entire kingdom. The fugitive became the deliverer. The wanted man became the one God wanted for the most important assignment of his generation.
They tried to stop him. They could not.
Paul.
Paul did not just hate the early Christians. He hunted them.
Acts chapter 8 says he was ravaging the Church, going house to house, dragging men and women off to prison. He was present and consenting at the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. He described himself later as the chief of sinners — not as false humility but as an accurate accounting of what he had done.
And then on the road to Damascus everything changed.
The man who had been the Church's most dangerous enemy became its most prolific advocate. The one who had imprisoned Christians ended up writing more of the New Testament than anyone else. The letters he sent from his own prison cells — to the Romans, to the Corinthians, to the Ephesians — are still being read two thousand years later by people whose names he never knew.
The hunter became the hunted. The persecutor became the persecuted. And through it all — the beatings, the shipwrecks, the imprisonments, the execution he eventually faced — the mission did not stop.
They tried to stop him. They could not.
I want you to notice something that all three of these men had in common.
The hatred came before the greatness. Not after it. Not in response to something they had already accomplished. The opposition arrived early, when the mission was still invisible, when the purpose was still unclear, when there was no obvious reason to believe that this particular man was going to amount to anything at all.
Joseph was seventeen and tending sheep when his brothers threw him in the pit. Moses was a fugitive tending someone else's flock when God spoke to him. Paul was a murderer on his way to commit more violence when the light knocked him off his horse.
None of them looked like chosen men at the moment the opposition came for them.
That is the pattern. The hatred is not a sign that God has abandoned the man. It is almost always a sign that God has chosen him for something the enemies cannot yet see and are trying to prevent before it arrives.
I have been studying this pattern for fifty years. And I have come to believe something that I want to say as plainly as I can this Wednesday morning.
When you see a man being opposed with the specific intensity and coordination that this pattern describes — from every direction, by enemies and by people who were supposed to be allies, by institutions and courts and media and members of his own party — it is worth asking yourself a question.
Does this look like ordinary political opposition? Or does it look like something that has a name in Scripture?
I believe it has a name. I wrote that name down in They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump. Every passage. Every parallel. Every reason a person of faith should look at what is happening and feel not confusion but recognition.
Read it this week. You can find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with something Joseph said to his brothers when they finally stood before him.
After everything they had done. After the pit and the silver and the lie they told their father and the decades of silence. After all of it. Joseph looked at the men who had hated him before they understood him and said this.
Genesis chapter 50, verse 20.
You intended to harm me. But God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done.
You intended to harm me. But God intended it for good.
That is the summary of the entire pattern. Every attempt to stop the man becomes, in the economy of God, part of the mechanism that carries him forward. The opposition does not derail the plan. The opposition is used by God to execute the plan.
Hold onto that today, friend. Whatever you are watching. Whatever you are afraid of. The God who turned a pit into a palace has not changed His methods.
God bless you. He is still working.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read Genesis chapter 37 and chapter 50 back to back. Read them in one sitting. Pay attention to how much time passed between the pit and the palace. Pay attention to how many hands were involved in moving Joseph forward without any of them knowing what they were doing. Let that sit with you all week.
Two. Write down Genesis chapter 50, verse 20 and put it somewhere you will see it every day this week. You intended to harm me. But God intended it for good. That is not a sentiment. That is a theological claim that has been proven true more times than history can count.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week. https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
The pattern I described this morning did not end with Paul. It is the contemporary chapter of the same story. Read it and see if you recognize what you have been watching.