July 8, 2018 The Beginning and the End XLII. Joseph and Potiphar s Wife Genesis 39:1-23 Dr. William P. Seel Easley Presbyterian Church Easley, South Carolina Joseph s story this morning breaks down into three distinct scenes. And each of these three scenes can be understood as an illustration of a larger Biblical theme. Scene One (vv. 1-6): Joseph, having been sold into slavery by his brothers, ends up in the household of Potiphar, a high ranking Egyptian official. And there, God blesses Joseph and through Joseph, brings tremendous blessing into Potiphar s household! As our narrator puts it: The Lord was with Joseph, and he became a successful man. Even as a slave in a foreign land, Joseph is being watched over by God and being blessed by God just as God had promised to his father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather before him. Remember that original covenant God had made with Abraham God had specifically promised: I will bless you and make your name great. 1 To Isaac, the same: I will be with you and bless you. 2 To Jacob: Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. 3 And now, here is Joseph, a slave in a foreign land and yet, even in this worst of circumstances, God is with him, God is watching over him, God is blessing him just as promised. Even Potiphar can t help but agree: His master saw that the Lord was with him and that the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands. In fact, things are going so well for Potiphar, thanks to Joseph and God s blessing of Joseph, that Potiphar eventually puts everything under Joseph s control and, our passage says, begins to spend his time in utter leisure, without a care in the world, except over what he will eat and drink out of all the bounty God has provided for him, through Joseph. Which, again, points us back to that original covenant God had made with Abraham: I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 4 And therein lies our first larger Biblical theme: that the people of God are blessed by God in order that we may then share that blessing with others. We are blessed in order to be a blessing. Now, blessed to be a blessing does not necessarily mean that we will have Joseph s success in the stock market. Most often, blessed to be a blessing happens in far more ordinary ways, and far less material ways although certainly when God blesses us with money, we should be glad to share it with those who have not. But the blessing given to us by God which is of far greater value even than money, and which is given in part so that we might share it with others, is the gift of God s grace to share the Good News of the Gospel with others. And, as such, our being blessed to be a blessing most often is realized in ways that are ordinary and relational. A small example: a pastor was greeting a first-time visitor at the door, and was pleased to discover that she had decided to visit because of the kindness shown to her by one of the church s members. She told of how she was a single parent, new to the community, working two jobs in
2 order to provide for her three kids. All of this, she said, left little time for yard work and she had been very worried about her yard becoming the neighborhood eyesore, overcome by weeds. But this had not happened. In fact, her yard looked great. But it wasn t until a few days earlier, when she made an unscheduled trip home in the middle of the day, that she discovered why her yard looked so great: she discovered her 86-year-old neighbor, a member of that church, on his hands and knees weeding her yard. He was embarrassed to have been caught in this act of kindness, and explained to her that he had heard the pastor preach a sermon on the importance of living a life of compassion and service to others and that he had decided to put that into practice by secretly weeding her lawn for her. He was blessed, he said, to be a blessing to her and to her children. 5 Or this. A graduate student was travelling in Austria, on his way to meet friends in Vienna. Along the way he became seriously ill, and spent two weeks in a hospital in a small Austrian town which ate up nearly all of his money. When he finally made it to Vienna, his friends had already gone on. So, there he was, sitting in the train station tired, discouraged, hungry, and broke when an older woman who was sweeping the station platform came over to him. She asked him if he was hungry. Before he could answer, she had pulled a sandwich out of her lunch bag and given him half. And as they sat their together, eating, they began to tell each other their stories: [Her life] had not been easy. She was raised in the country, knowing nothing but hard work on a farm. She had lost her husband and two sons in the Resistance to the Nazis. Only her daughter survived. But she was thankful, she said, for many things. She was at peace with her story. Finally, I asked her why she offered me her lunch. She said simply, Jesus is my Lord. God is good. 6 Blessed to be a blessing. That was Joseph in Potiphar s house blessed to be a blessing. God s blessing come upon Potiphar through Joseph. And that is what every one of us is, blessed to be a blessing. Even if we don t have material blessings to share, still we can share ourselves, we can share the kindness and compassion of Christ our Savior with others. We can share the grace of God which has been given to us, in order that it should be shared with others. You and I are, like Joseph, blessed to be a blessing. Scene Two (vv. 7-10): Joseph is not only a blessing to Potiphar, but also, apparently, a very attractive man handsome in form and appearance. These facts attract the attention of Potiphar s wife who, day by day, pleads with Joseph to lie with her. Joseph steadfastly refuses, day after day refuses to betray his master s trust in him, refuses to do this which he knows to be wrong in the eyes of the Lord. And so, I think the larger Biblical theme illustrated in this scene of Joseph resisting temptation is exactly the same one we just read together in Psalm 1: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.
3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Big Biblical theme number two the people of God, rooted in God like a tree planted by streams of water, will be able to remain steadfast. Be able to resist temptation. The temptation, when dealing with temptation, is to focus even harder on resisting that temptation by means of our willpower. Willpower helps, but is insufficient, alone, in resisting temptation. In fact, focusing our willpower on the temptation in question often only makes that temptation even stronger. In the classic children s book, Frog and Toad Together, there is this wonderful scene about willpower that takes place after Frog bakes a batch of cookies, and the two of them, Frog and Toad together, start stuffing the cookies into their mouths as fast as they can. Even as they are doing say, they say to one another, We ought to stop eating. We must stop. Finally, Frog says to Toad, We need willpower. What is willpower? asks Toad, swallowing another mouthful. Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much, Frog says. Frog discusses a variety of ways to help with willpower putting the cookies in a box, tying the box shut, putting it high up in a tree but each time Toad points out (in between bites) that they could climb the tree and untie the box. In desperation, Frog finally dumps the remaining cookies outside on the ground: Hey birds! he calls. Here s cookies! Now we have no more cookies, says Toad sadly. Yes, says Frog, but we have lots and lots of willpower. You may keep it all, Toad says. I m going home to bake a cake. 7 Using our willpower, alone, will never work. As we have said, paradoxically, sometimes the greater we try to resist the temptation wit hour willpower, the bigger that temptation becomes in our minds. But look at Joseph and the way he responds to Potiphar s wife. He responds, not be referring to his willpower to resist, but by focusing upon his relationship with his master and his relationship with His God. And by focusing on these things, rather than the temptation itself, the temptation loses any power over him. He tells her that to do this thing would be a betrayal of his master and the trust his master has placed in him the master who has been so good to him. But, even more, he says to her: How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? Again, he resists by focusing on right relationship with God and with his master not by focusing
4 on the temptation itself and his willpower to resist it. The Bible has a word for this sort of resistance to temptation and that word is righteousness, another name for our second larger Biblical theme. Righteousness meaning to be in right relationship with our God, and so able to live out right relationship with our neighbor. It is this fundamental posture, orientation of our hearts and minds towards God, as opposed to our own solitary capacity for willpower, which most enables us to resist temptation. Righteousness to be a person deeply rooted in daily relationship with God and deeply knowledgeable regarding the things of God: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked... but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. And it is through our being so rooted in God and the things of God, like a tree deeply rooted by streams of living water, which enables us then to live out right relationship with others including the capacity to turn away from temptation, to be able to do the right thing in relation to ourselves and others and our God in that moment of temptation: He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither... The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. The secret to resisting temptation, as Joseph does, lies not in mobilizing our willpower, so much as it lies in drawing upon our longterm character formation in Christ that long obedience in the same direction we spoke of two weeks ago. Scene Three (vv. 11-23): Spurned and angry, Potiphar s wife then falsely accuses Joseph of just that which he has refused to do. And, next thing he knows, Joseph is thrown into prison the second time now that he has ended up in a pit. Joseph has done nothing wrong, and yet tribulation has once again found him. In fact, tribulation has found him simply because he was doing right in the eyes of the Lord. Hence the third great Biblical theme and, this time, from Jesus own words in John 16: In the world, He tells His disciples, In the world you will have tribulation. 8 If we are truly to follow the way of righteousness in a world that knows neither right relation to God nor right relation to neighbor, then we Christians are always going to run into occasional bouts of trouble and tribulation. And by that Jesus means, not the ordinary troubles and tribulations that all human beings encounter sickness, grief, accident, and so forth. Rather, what Jesus is talking about are the troubles and tribulations that will come upon us simply because we are Christians, simply because we are those seeking to live in right relationship with God and right relationship with others in the midst of an unrighteous world. We American Christians have been lulled into a sense of complacency about this, since for so long American culture and Christian values seemed to coincide. But the time for that complacency has now come to an end, as we witness, day by day, an ever greater divergence emerging between Christ and culture. We are finally now realizing what has, in fact, always been the Gospel truth: namely, that there will always be a cost to following the way and the truth and the life of Jesus in this fallen world. His own cross has been a constant warning to us that this is so. Being a Christian in this world means being different. It means learning to say no when everyone else is saying yes, and saying yes when everyone else is saying no. It means making choices, setting priorities, that come into direct conflict with the choices and priorities that others around us are setting putting God and neighbor first in a world which puts self before all
5 else. In the case of Potiphar s wife, Joseph rightly chooses righteousness over selfish indulgence and look where it lands him. And it has always been that way for the people of God always will be, until the Kingdom comes. In fact, if this day we are not in some way being made somewhat odd in relation to the world around us, if we are not finding ourselves in ways both small and large out of step with others because of our faith then, perhaps, the only reason why is because our faith is not quite as deep and not quite as priority-setting for our lives as we claim. To be a Christian, by definition, is to be different from the world around us. It is heed continually, for God s sake, those words our mothers used to tell us when we asked to do something everyone else was doing you remember those words, You are not like everyone else! In the world, says Jesus, says Joseph s story, you will have tribulation. In the world you will have tribulation but listen to the rest of that teaching: But take heart; I have overcome the world. 9 Joseph is thrown into prison tribulation. But God is with him God overcomes the world for Joseph. Soon Joseph is running the prison. So it will be for us because, in the end, Jesus always wins. In the end, the people of God will be both vindicated for their sacrifices and rewarded for every tribulation they have endured for Jesus s sake. A story take it as a parable, if you will, of what Jesus promises His own. An elderly missionary couple came home on a steamship at the end of long service in Africa. When they got on the boat, they were quite surprised to see that none other than the former president Teddy Roosevelt was also a passenger. He had been on safari in Africa and was also headed home to the States. After the long voyage home, the boat finally docked in New York City. There, on the pier, a great crowd had gathered to welcome Teddy Roosevelt back home. A band was playing, the crowd was cheering, streamers flying, flags waving, newspaper cameras flashing a huge celebration of the homecoming of the former president from his safari. But for the two elderly missionaries who had spent their lives building schools and churches and new Christians, who had no pension waiting for them, whose bodies were worn-out from their labors for them there was no welcoming celebration at all. They got off the boat alone, no one to meet them, and began to make their way toward the small apartment they had rented to finish out their days no fanfare to accompany them. As they walked, the husband turned to his wife and said, Where is our celebration? And his wife said, Ah, but we are not home yet. 10 If we are following Jesus, seeking to serve Him above all else, and so bringing blessing upon others in Jesus name, then, indeed, we will have tribulation in the world. But Jesus Christ has overcome the world. Which means, in the end, that every sacrifice, every tribulation, every moment of being odd in the eyes of others will be more than vindicated. It will be celebrated in the Kingdom which is our true home. 1 Genesis 12:2. 2 Genesis 26:3. 3 Genesis 28:15. 4 Genesis 12:2. 5 Source unknown. 6 Source unknown. 7 Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Together (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), page unknown.
8 John 16:33. 9 John 16:33. 10 Ray Stedman, The Nature of Prayer, accessed on-line at: https://www.raystedman.org/thematicstudies/prayer/the-nature-of-prayer. 6