Part 2: The Temptation of Joseph

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of temptation from Genesis 39.

---

I’m profoundly grateful for the invitation. I have come to know and respect and love many of you. I’m profoundly grateful for the desire I see here every time I come back to build Christian families, to build Christian men. That vision is a wonderful one in our society. I count it a privilege and an honor to be back amongst you. Let me begin by reading Genesis 39. I shall read the entire chapter. This is part of the account of the life of Joseph. It is a part of Scripture that is not always read in public, but it needs to be.

“Now Joseph had been taken down to Egypt.” Sold, as you will recall, by his brothers into slavery. “Potiphar, an Egyptian who was one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard, bought him from the Ishmaelites who had taken him there. The Lord was with Joseph and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes and became his attendant. Potiphar put him in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned. From the time he put him in charge of his household and of all that he owned, the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had, both in the house and in the field. So he left in Joseph’s care everything he had; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate. Now Joseph was well-built and handsome, and after a while his master’s wife took notice of Joseph and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he refused. ‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?’ And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her. One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house. When she saw that he had left his cloak in her hand and had run out of the house, she called her household servants. ‘Look,’ she said to them, ‘this Hebrew has been brought to us to make sport of us! He came in here to sleep with me, but I screamed. When he heard me scream for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.’ She kept his cloak beside her until his master came home. Then she told him this story: ‘That Hebrew slave you brought us came to me to make sport of me. But as soon as I screamed for help, he left his cloak beside me and ran out of the house.’ When his master heard the story his wife told him, saying, ‘This is how your slave treated me,’ he burned with anger. Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined. But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”

So reads the Word of God.

Imagine an army recruitment program in wartime that laid out only the benefits: free travel; no cost to you, so far as clothes are concerned; acquire technical skills; fine pension; 20 years and you’re out; comradeship. But how distorted if you were given no inkling of other things: boot camp; sergeants yelling at you; death in the trenches or in bug-infested jungles; the muck; the cold; the sheer boredom; and in some theaters, the likelihood of being wounded or killed or taken prisoner.

That is why, in wartime, recruitment drives its appeal from heroism not self-interest. It makes appeal to sacrifice not travel, to love of family and nation not to personal advantages. The church of Jesus Christ, especially in the West, has not always learned this lesson because it has not believed it is in war.

We may appeal to fulfillment, to victory (the victorious Christian life), to well-being (the abundant life) in which we define our adjectives, whether victorious or abundant, by our criteria not by biblical usage. Love, stable homes, fellowship. In fact, God, if he exists, exists primarily for our benefit instead of the other way around.

There is very little God-centeredness in a great deal of American evangelicalism. He’s a functional being who blesses us if we behave and believe a few things, but by and large in the West, we have to admit, we say little about the nature of Christian warfare. There is little about self-discipline, few remarks on Jesus’ parables warning us to count the cost or else don’t get in, little emphasis on the nature of wrestling with spiritual beings in high places, to use the language of Ephesians, the nature of temptation and sin.

Most Western evangelicals find a passage like Luke 9, the closing paragraph, a little strange. “As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ ” Surely, that’s a sign to baptize him quickly and get him to give his testimony next Sunday night! “Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’

He said to another man, ‘Follow me.’ But the man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father,’ ” which sounds reasonable. “Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.’ ” Let the courtesy stay in place. “Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’ ”

Oh, I know you can explain the cultural climate of the first century and the expectations of children looking after their parents and so forth, but at the end of the day, that is still shocking language. The church is wise to review the nature of her warfare from time to time, and that’s what we’ll be doing this weekend.

I want to draw your attention this evening to three aspects of Joseph’s temptation; tomorrow, we’ll look first at Hezekiah’s temptations, which were really quite different; tomorrow night, something of our Lord’s temptations and, then, some of the generalizing principles regarding temptation (all of our temptations) articulated in the book of James. From this passage, then, let us learn these three things

1. The power of Joseph’s temptation.

A) Joseph’s temptation was strong because it was subtle and flexible.

It is important to put yourself in Joseph’s place. He was sold into captivity at about the age of 17. By the time he becomes prime minister of Egypt, he is about 30, so he had 13 long years either as a slave or in prison. Things did not turn around in about the time it takes you to read three chapters.

When he was carted off into slavery, he had to learn another tongue. It was a new culture, a new language, and, far from being the pampered, favorite son, he was the low person on the totem pole in a clan hierarchy. He started with the bottom jobs as slave, and gradually, he learned the language and the culture and, by sheer integrity, began to go up the pecking order within the slave caste with no prospects, really, of marriage or home or fulfillment or freedom. He was a slave. He had been bought. He could be sold.

Here is this woman appealing, doubtless, to his pride, his manhood, perhaps promising, in effect, to alleviate his loneliness. Perhaps, he could have reasoned this was confirmation that all was finally going his way. Relieve his bleak marital prospects. Alternatively, if Joseph could not be coaxed, perhaps he could be stormed. Grabbing his cloak. Flattering him.

It is important to see Satan does not normally come to us to tempt us in some ugly sin by saying, in effect, “Look. Here’s this great big, ugly morass of evil. Why don’t you choose it?” He just doesn’t come to us in those terms. He comes to us and says not, “I know this would be going back on your wife. It would be betraying your children. I know this would, if it ever comes out, smash your family and your marriage, but it is vile and evil and you will enjoy it.” Is that how he comes to us? Not a chance.

He comes to us, and he says, “Look. Your wife doesn’t quite understand you. You know how busy she is. This second career business takes its toll. She seems to care more for the children than she does for you, doesn’t she? Hmm. All this stuff about being the head of the house.… You’re just dirt around here. There’s more respect for you in your job. After all, didn’t God put us here to be fulfilled as men? Besides, your secretary really does understand you. She’s not flirting. She’s just being friendly. You just wish your wife would be a little friendlier, don’t you?”

Gradually … gradually … it builds up until you have a divergent path, and it all seems so reasonable. There’s nothing shocking or grotesque or vile about it as it’s presented to you. No one ever, ever jumped into adultery from a habitually clean mind. No one ever stooped to embezzle funds without first lusting for more and more and more and wondering what it would be like to get away with it, contemplating how you could cook the books. Joseph’s temptation was strong because it was subtle. It was flexible. Sometimes the nagging on and on and on.

B) Joseph’s temptation was strong because it was persistent.

It’s one thing to stand up to sin and temptation once in a while, but look at verse 10. “And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused.” Water on a rock eventually eats away the rock. Temptation on a certain kind of character with apparent moral resolve often just destroys the moral resolve. In temptation, it is often easier to win once than again and again and again.

This, of course, is what found out Samson, if you recall, twice. A woman who nagged. Or Balaam, if you recall the account. Quite prepared to listen to the voice of God and not curse the people of God until the money offer was ratcheted up and up and up and up. Then, finally, he sort of managed just barely to come down on the side of righteousness and not curse the people of God, but he gave a little bit of advice on the side to Balak and compromised himself through and through anyway.

Quiet contemplation of sin is what always precedes performance of sin. Some of you men are on the road at least as much as I am. Maybe more. You sleep in motels and hotels. I want to know what channels you watch on TV. I want to know what you put in your mind. You might not at this point think you are going to compromise yourself or your marriage, but if you’re watching things you know before God you should not watch, the likelihood of your moving down that track is very high. Don’t kid yourself.

2. Reasons why Joseph successfully resisted this temptation.

A) Because of who he was as a believer

It generates a certain kind of reasoning. Listen to verses 8 and 9. “But he refused. ‘With me in charge,’ he told her, ‘my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing …?”

Somebody else could have used exactly the form of reasoning and come out with exactly the opposite conclusion like, “With me in charge, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house. Therefore, I couldn’t possibly be found out. Everything he owns he has entrusted to me except his wife. Why shouldn’t I have her, too? He obviously doesn’t care for her. The poor woman is frustrated!” Exactly the same facts could generate quite different conclusions.

It wasn’t the peculiar facts that forced this conclusion; it was the man. I don’t care what your temptation is. You can view it as an excuse for sin, or if you have a certain stance in Christ that we’ll be developing gradually over the weekend, then you reason another way. Every inducement to temptation provides scads of reasons for avoiding it, or you collapse in front of it, but it’s not the temptation itself.

Some men come up to that point and turn one way. Some come up to that point and turn another way. It’s where the man himself is. You can never, ever blame the temptation, on the circumstances, on the mere brute facts of where you are in history. Never. Because others come to the same point in history and turn another way.

B) Because he was prepared to call a spade a spade and sin a sin

Look at his language in verse 9. “How then could I do such a wicked thing?” If you train yourself to call that wicked which God calls wicked, to think of it in vile terms, rather than to glorify it in your mind as something that might be fun, then it becomes much less attractive.

I still do a fair bit of university evangelism, and one of the hardest things I deal with today in evangelizing non-Christians in a modern, secular America (people who just have never read the Bible, who don’t know the Bible has two Testaments, who come out of a postmodern epistemology, who think in categories entirely alien to the Judeo-Christian heritage in which at least those of us who are older were reared) is trying to get them to understand sin.

Sin has become a snicker word. You mention sin, and you snicker. There’s no odium to it. There’s no disgust. It’s not something that makes people immediately feel ashamed and dirty. In fact, for many Americans, it’s now becoming a lost word in the vocabulary. A friend of mine teaches grade five in a Midwestern, normal, suburban school, and she was talking about right and wrong and moral values and dropped in the word sin into the classroom of 25 kids, and two hands went up. “Please, Miss. What is this word sin?” They hadn’t even heard of it.

You have 300 university students in front of you, and you know they don’t know transgression or iniquity or vileness, and if they know the word evil, it has to do with certain PC related things. Evil is sexism. Evil is racism, which may be genuinely evil, but they have not thought about evil at the principial level. Evil is that which God detests. They just haven’t.

If we, then, get snookered by the contemporary categories so that we think of all behavior in merely sociological and personal terms instead of insisting on labeling things as God labels them (calling a spade a spade, naming sin a sin), we are far more likely to fall into the muck than if we train ourselves to think God’s thoughts after him in this respect. If we think of sins as minor peccadilloes, minor blemishes.… We all do it, don’t we? There’s not a hope. How, then, could I do such a wicked thing?

C) Because he fears God and sees the act with respect of trust against Pharaoh

You would have thought the chain of the argument would read, “With me in charge, my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am. My master has withheld nothing from me except you, because you are his wife. How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against my master?”

But that’s not what he says. “How could I do this wicked thing and sin against God?” Slave boy though he was, when he was sold, Joseph had already in a remarkable way established a theocentric view, a God-centered view, of right and wrong. The only person in the Old Testament who comes close to this sort of language is David.

Do you recall? “Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight?” Probably written in Psalm 51 after the terrible sin in the matter of Bathsheba. “Against you only …?” What about Uriah? Uriah got bumped off. But there is a sense in which sin is, first and foremost, not against individuals, although there are entailments for individuals and there is a kind of offense against individuals in which the Bible speaks. Yet, in the first instance, sin, if it is understood in biblical terms, is a defiance of God.

What gives sin its horrendous power and its terrible value is precisely that it is doing what God forbids and failing to do what God commands. Therefore, it is defiance against God. If you shoot a policeman, there are entailments for the policeman, but in the first instance, it is sin against God. If you lie, you are deceiving someone else. In that sense, you’re sinning against the person, but in the first instance, you’re sinning against God who says, “You shall not bear false witness.”

If you steal, whether your employer’s time or from the IRS or from anyone, undoubtedly, you’re stealing from the person or from the organization (in the case of the IRS from fellow citizens), but in the first instance, you’re stealing and offending God because he is the one who said, “You shall not steal.”

Joseph clearly feared God. Proverbs says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” This does not mean the kind of cringing thing that is motivated only by a whining terror. No. It is recognizing, quite frankly, we are made in the image of God and one day we will give an account to him of the things we say, the way we used our time, our priorities, our values, how we treated our families, all that we have done and said and thought. Nothing is hidden from the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

Practically speaking, this means there must be an ongoing walk with God, a deepening knowledge of God. This cannot be maintained by a kind of vague remembrance of Sunday school attended 30 years ago. What this means is a kind of walk with God that truly does know him and fears him. God is not merely a privatized source of personal blessings when I’m in deep trouble. He is my Maker. He is the Sovereign. He is my judge, and I must not sin against him.

Joseph’s commitment to God enhanced his loyalty to Potiphar. That’s the truth. Many of us in business and in hierarchies know when you come across a genuine believer (I don’t mean someone who talks the talk without walking the walk, but a genuine believer) that very often is the person you trust. Is that not the case?

I remember my first job as a boy 14-years-old working after school. I worked for an organization called Canadian Tire. It sold tires and car parts and the like. I started off working in the shipping department returning old alternators and brakes to the company for remanufacture. The manager of the whole place told me how to cook the books so the cut the local dealership got was a little higher, and I just refused to do it and fully expected to get sacked.

He was angry! Blisteringly angry. Threw me out of the stock room and changed all the records himself on that occasion. I went back the next day and did it my own way, and I thought that was probably going to be it. In fact, shortly thereafter I got promoted and promoted and promoted because the man knew he could trust me. Isn’t that the way it is? Joseph’s commitment to God enhanced his loyalty to Potiphar not the other way around.

D) Because he knew not to play with fire

Verse 10. “And though she spoke to Joseph day after day, he refused to go to bed with her or even be with her.” In other words, he not only refused to fall into the sin, he didn’t even want to be around her. He knew that was going to be trouble already. Proverbs 5 says, “Keep to a path far from her. Do not go near the door of her house.” The person drawn to holiness will not try to see how close he can get to wickedness, and nowhere, may I say, is this truer than in the sexual arena.

When I was a seminary student in Toronto 25 years ago, we had a chap teaching us pastoral theology. It’s really the way of handling yourself as a Christian under the Word of God as a Christian leader in the practical arenas of life. Partly, this turns on church government and structure as laid out in Scripture, but partly, it’s a lot of sanctified common sense that is passed on from a senior generation of elders to a new group coming through.

This chap was called Don Loveday. He was pushing 60. He had just lost his wife, and he was a fount of a great deal of practical, godly wisdom. Let me tell you frankly, these were not the most academically startling lectures I ever attended. He had a remarkable capacity for being boring. For example, his lectures on how to visit in a hospital started like this. He enumerated everything.

“Number one. Wear soft shoes. You shouldn’t make too much noise on the hospital floors, and they’re all hard. Number two. Don’t sit on the bed. Number three …” He would eventually get to the place where he told you the kind of passages to use and those kind of things, but it was this sort of practical, down-to-earth nuts and bolts. None of this sort of theoretical stuff that as a young man I really wanted. I found this boring.

Then he got to the lecture on how to counsel women. Do you have any idea how many men in the ministry foul up their moral lives because of the counseling room? His lecture (I can repeat it to this day) went like this. “Number one. Stay behind the desk. Number two. If she starts to cry, let her finish. Number three. Stay behind the desk. Number four. If she continues crying, pass her Kleenexes over the desk. Number five. Stay behind the desk. Number six. Pull out your Bible. Number seven. Stay behind the desk.” Thirty-five points and every second one was, “Stay behind the desk.”

I was in church planting after I graduated, first in French Canada and then in English Canada. The first week I became senior pastor of a church in metropolitan Vancouver … the first week … in comes a woman about my own age. I’m single at this point. In she comes, and her name (would you believe?) is Mrs. Carson. No relative. I knew already she came from a really tough background. She was a sweet lady, a Christian woman with a really foul husband and about my own age.

She comes in, and she sits down in front of me, and she starts to cry. This was the age before computers, but I could see screening up in my mind, “Stay behind the desk. Stay behind the desk.” I passed her a box of Kleenex and stayed behind the desk. In fact, it was hard not to laugh which wasn’t quite the right idea. All of Loveday’s advice was coming back.

I know it is true that anybody can be tempted (I know that), but let me tell you, quite frankly, you’re far less likely to be seriously tempted if you simply follow a little bit of common sense that Joseph followed and refuse to be with her. Stay behind the desk. I tell you, you who travel, you who mix with colleagues at work who are attractive women, adopt a few inflexible rules such as never, under any circumstances, ever go with a woman to lunch unless there’s a third party or unless she’s your wife. I just never do. I just never, never, never do. Never.

There’s a woman in our psych department who comes to me for theological advice on how she’s thinking through psychology and this sort of thing. “Would you like to go to lunch, Don, and we’ll talk about depravity and human nature and the imago Dei and so on?” Well, that’s right up my alley! I want to help the psych department think more biblically. “Sure, I’ll be glad to. Who are you bringing along?”

You have to put in some rules so that, in fact, you’re doing what Joseph is doing. He refused not only to sleep with her but even to flirt with the fire. If the nature of your job makes it impossible for you to put in some safety nets, change your job. At least you’re not a slave. You have more flexibility than Joseph had.

The same is true with every kind of temptation. This may be a peculiar form, but it’s certainly not the only one. The first senior pastor I worked under when I was just getting out as an assistant and interning was a chap called Ernie Keefe. Ernie Keefe used to play for the Redwings A Team, the feeder team, and he was on the fast track for stardom in the NHL.

The Lord broke his ankle twice before he bowed the knee and was converted, but he was so enamored with hockey and with sports, when he became a Christian and in due course was called to the ministry, he learned, in his case, not to watch sports and not to play sports for years because he found that every time he did it just devoured him again. It focused his attention and grabbed his interest.

Quite frankly, I was brought up in Quebec, and there you grow up with skates on your feet. You probably skate before you walk, but I’ve never been tempted to have hockey devour my time. I’m not sports-minded enough. Hockey has never been a great temptation for me. It was for Ernie Keefe. Therefore, he set up some ground rules so it wouldn’t destroy him.

For some people, it’s watching endless television. For some people, it’s pornography. For some people, it’s a kind of habit of speech so that no matter to whom they talk they always have to tell one better or stretch the story so they look good, but they’re not committed to truth. They’re just not committed to humility. They’re just not. They’ve never seen things in moral terms. They don’t protect themselves.

Joseph knew not to play with fire. The Christian who is serious about moral integrity, the Christian who is serious about holiness, the Christian who is serious about the knowledge of God won’t flirt with sin in the hope that somehow at the end he’ll be pulled out. This will affect the friends you choose. It will affect what you think about.

E) Because he was more concerned for his purity than for his prospects

“One day he went into the house to attend to his duties, and none of the household servants was inside. She caught him by his cloak and said, ‘Come to bed with me!’ But he left his cloak in her hand and ran out of the house.” His flight saved his purity and lost his prospects. A coward would have lost his purity and saved his prospects. Joseph was more concerned for his purity than his prospects.

In this day and age when there are tragic cases of sexual harassment and abuse in the marketplace but, on the other hand, sometimes accusations of this that aren’t really fair, where somebody is trying to manipulate you into something by threatening to talk that way, establish it in your mind right now that you’d rather be thought guilty before a watching world and not be guilty before God than to be guilty before God and thought pure before a watching world. Establish it. You care more for purity than your prospects.

3. The ways of God hidden behind this temptation

The text is remarkable in this regard.

A) God often chooses to bless us in difficult circumstances rather than to place us in happier ones.

Notice how this chapter is framed. It’s framed by an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph that say approximately the same thing. This is not accidental. This is a very carefully Spirit-inspired narrative.

The narrative doesn’t simply flow through giving little details that are good to carry you on in the storyline without singular attention to the point of the whole thing. When you look at the whole thing and stand back and say, “How is this structured?” you see God is very prominent in the beginning and he’s very prominent in the end, and the same thing is said both times. Listen carefully. Joseph is sold. Verse 2:

“The Lord was with Joseph …” In slavery! “… and he prospered, and he lived in the house of his Egyptian master. When his master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord gave him success in everything he did, Joseph found favor in his eyes. Potiphar entrusted to his care everything he owned. The blessing of the Lord was on everything Potiphar had.”

Then at the end Joseph is in prison. Verse 20: “But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden. So the warden put Joseph in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there. The warden paid no attention to anything under Joseph’s care, because the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”

Isn’t that a remarkable passage? I know what I would have been tempted to think if I had been in Joseph’s place. “Isn’t it enough, Lord, that you sold me into slavery? Where was your providence then? Now I try to keep my purity, I try to walk a life of integrity, and this is what I get for it? I’m a sleaze ball in the eyes of Potiphar. I know I’m pure, you know I’m pure, but the whole country, so far as it knows, thinks I’m a sleaze ball, and now I’m in prison!”

Prisons in those days didn’t have color televisions. The Psalmist comments in Psalm 105, “Whose feet they hurt with fetters; he was laid in chains of iron.” How long did it take? How many years was he there before he gained the reputation for integrity in the prison and went up as a prisoner to a kind of trustee position?

After all, we know he was in prison for two years after he interpreted the dreams of the baker and of the cupbearer in the next chapter. He was there for two years, and he could not deal with them until he had the trust of the warden, so he must have been in prison for years and years and years! But God often chooses to bless us in difficult circumstances rather than to place us in happier ones.

Some of you are in very uncomfortable marriages. Some of you face considerable financial pressures. Some of you are in jobs you detest. Those situations are not all the same. You may be able to change the job; you must not morally contemplate changing your wife. Have you ever? Have you ever daydreamed? Not, “I’d really like to divorce my wife, Lord,” but rather, because you’re a Christian you wouldn’t stoop to such a thing, “Lord, it would be nice if my wife were bumped off in a traffic accident.”

In other words, instead of thinking through how to be men of integrity, Christian men with fidelity and love and firmness in your context regardless of your circumstances, you’ve started to stoop to self-pity and what if imaginings. My mother died of Alzheimer’s just a few years ago. Starting at the age of 72, we began to notice the personality changes. By the time she died nine years later, she was, humanly speaking, like a vegetable.

Six months before she died, occasionally you could get a little response out of her if you sat on her bed and held her hand and sang an old hymn. You might get a small squeeze of the hand. That’s all. Or if you quoted the Bible, especially the King James Version on which she was brought up, you might get a small squeeze of the hand. If you held up pictures of her grandchildren to her eye, it might flicker, but in the last three or four months, we didn’t even have that.

Four years earlier, I can remember my father taking her by the hand from the settee, pulling her to her feet, and taking 45 minutes to walk her to the bathroom. Let me tell you frankly. By all human accounts, my father’s not a great man. He was a preacher, a faithful witness to the gospel, but he never wrote a book, never served a great congregation, was not God’s gift to homiletics, but I never once heard him complain during the years he nursed his wife, my mother.

I never once heard him say, “She’s not the woman I married.” I only heard him say, “She has loved me all her life, and I love her more every day.” Instead of wishing (at least overtly so far as I could see) that he were out of the situation, it became for him a stepping stone to grace because he knew God often blesses you where you are rather than change where you are.

If, God help me, I reach his years before I die as he has now died, in this respect, I want to be like him. Isn’t that the kind of pattern you want to leave to your children, too, and grandchildren? Not a whiner, a complainer, loaded for bear with self-pity, but the kind of man who will say, in the midst sometimes of tears and in the midst sometimes of loneliness and even of mystery with Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”

The ways of God are often hidden behind temptations, behind trials, and they can serve to bring us out into a broader course provided we recognize God often chooses to bless us in difficult circumstances rather than to place us in happier ones.

B) God’s providence was working behind the scenes to bring about the creation of a nation and the preservation of the messianic line.

In other words, you must not read Genesis 39 as if it has no bearing in the book as a whole. Genesis 39 is part of a flow from Genesis 1 to Genesis 50, and Genesis 1 to 50 is part of the flow of the Pentateuch through the end of Deuteronomy, and that is part of a flow that brings you, finally, to Jesus Christ. God has called forth Abraham, the beginning of the messianic line, and to this Abraham God promised, “In you and in your seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.”

Now, decades before the race was going to be threatened by a severe Middle Near Eastern famine, Joseph was sent off into slavery. Joseph learned fidelity. Joseph went to prison. You know the end of the story. He becomes prime minister, and in due course, he does save not only his own family but thousands of others from destitution and starvation. In his own family lies the seed that brings forth Jesus the Messiah.

Suppose for argument’s sake, you had taken Joseph aside and you had said to him, “Joseph, I’m going to ask something really hard of you. Think carefully on it. You’re only a young man. You’re a bit spoiled, but I’m going to ask you to face the following hardships for 13 years: being sold into slavery, brutalized, ignored, tempted, put in prison.

I want you to be faithful through all of this because my plan for you is that by the fidelity you display in this regard you will eventually be brought into a wide place where in the peculiar providences of God you will save the messianic line. Thus, all of history will in the peculiar providences of God be transformed by your fidelity.”

Supposing you could have said all of that to Joseph at the age of 17, don’t you think he could have invested his discipline with a certain kind of romance, even heroism? But the fact of the matter was he didn’t know a thing, and he was faithful anyway. We know how the story comes out. He didn’t.

This year at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School where I teach we’ve had as a visiting professor, a man on sabbatical from Australia, Peter T. O’Brien. Some of you may have read his commentaries. He has written a major commentary on Colossians in the Word series, an excellent piece.

Probably the best commentary in the English language on the Greek text of Philippians. He’s writing one now for a series I edit on Ephesians. He’s going to do another one on 2 Corinthians. He has written several books on mission theory. He was a missionary himself for 10 years in India. Learned Malayalam and Hindi and saw many come to Christ and taught in the Yavatmal seminary.

He is a gracious and godly man. It has been such a delight! He’s my best friend in Australia. Such a delight to have him on campus and watch him interact with our students. He is so godly and learned in the Scriptures and humble, and his wife is a sweetheart. She has just befriended so many people and brought them along in the Christian way.

Humanly speaking, Peter became a Christian because his mother became a Christian. The only one in the family who did. When Peter was a young man (a teenager), his mother became a Christian, and she started witnessing to him and bringing him along in the faith. His mother became a Christian because down the street there was a woman who was very, very sickly and suffered constantly, but she was a Christian, and the way that woman bore her suffering as a Christian influenced Peter’s mother, so that humanly speaking, that was why she became a Christian.

I know in the mercies of providence, God was working in that woman. God was working in Peter’s mother. God was working in Peter. Nevertheless, God is normally a God of means, and the means, humanly speaking, was the fidelity of that suffering, sick, semi-literate woman down the street whose Christian example was the major influence in bringing Peter’s mother to the faith, and thus, in Peter coming to the faith, and thus, in Indians in India coming to the faith, and thus, in influencing young Americans who are heading into the ministry today and producing books that are life-changing and ministry serving.

Supposing you had gone to that semi-literate, suffering woman and said, “Listen. I know you have this chronic disease and it gives you all kinds of pain, but I tell you, if you will take this under God’s good hand in a fallen and broken world and be faithful, this is what will come from it. You are going to lead this neighbor down the street to Christ, and that little snotty-nosed boy of hers.… He’s going to become a missionary. He’ll become a giant in the land. He will have international impact, and the success of fruit that will be borne in various countries around the world will be traced in God’s mysterious providences to the way you bear your illness.”

Do you not think she would have done so? When you read this chapter, not only as a story in itself but in the context of the book and in the context of the Canon, you cannot read it any other way. Brothers in Christ, let me tell you quite frankly we just don’t know enough to make determinations like that. It is part of what it means to walk by faith to trust God to sort it out.

What he wants from us is fidelity, obedience. That’s what he wants from us and empowers us toward. Meanwhile, we believe that all things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to his purpose. The way you handle your ailing wife, the way you handle your finances, the way you handle your sex life may be responsible for the conversion of thousands in Pakistan four generations from now. You don’t know.

How dare you tamper with things like that? Do you see? You trust God. Let the outcome come out to him. God’s providence was working behind the scenes to bring about the creation of a nation and the preservation of the messianic line. The ways of God are often hidden behind our temptations. He does not ask us to know the end from the beginning. He asks us to be faithful and to trust him. May the Lord God himself so enable us. Amen.