As I begin to return to blogging life after my flag-lowering of the past week, I turn to a meditation I was having when the second pillar of my current life got kicked out- about the story of Joseph. David Jeremiah cites him as one of the few people in the Bible there is nothing bad said about, and I'm not here to dispute that, but I do think there is definitely one, and perhaps two, things the Bible showed us that he had to learn the hard way.
One of those is patience. One of the lessons that Dr Jeremiah says Joseph teaches us about sin is that you can't effectively fight it in your life without having had a structure for resisting it already built in your life. And so it is, that if one of Joseph's key attributes is the patience he showed in the Egyptian prison- and later in dealing with his brothers- he had to build it at some point.
If you go back in your mind to Joseph's early days, the Bible shows that, before he shared his dreams with his father and brothers, he had shared something else- a "bad report" about his brothers. This is not saying he was a young tattle-tale. The word, Jeremiah explained, is one indicating his brothers were giving his family a bad name amongst their neighbors- a bad rep surely started by Simeon and Levi's murder of the Shechemites, but not limited to it. He told his father because he had already started developing his relationship with God- and this was an obedience TO God, to stand against his brothers' evil. The very next thing in the Bible is about the dreams God sent him. In other words, as I have learned, a major obedience "kicks you up a level." And in his impatience, he shared with an unappreciative audience something he might have been better off not sharing quite yet. Yes, it was all part of God's plan for him and his family, but consider: His next few life events revolved to a great extent around being trapped in situations in which he had no recourse but to wait and do his best. If God gives you a lesson, odds are you needed to LEARN it.
The second thing I feel he had to learn was being careful. That he was still learning this in Egypt came to me in the story about Potipher's wife. She had come at him with seduction more than once before the big moment when he had to run off without his robe and she cried rape. And yet, what does it say about that particular event?
Gen 39:10 And as she spoke to Joseph day after day, he would not listen to her, to lie beside her or to be with her.
Gen 39:11 But one day, when he went into the house to do his work and none of the men of the house was there in the house,
Gen 39:12 she caught him by his garment, saying, "Lie with me." But he left his garment in her hand and fled and got out of the house.
He blundered into a point where he was ALONE with her- apparently the first time, else the Bible writer wouldn't have pointed it out. And because of that carelessness, he found himself BACK in a prison. Mind you, he hadn't sinned, just let his guard down. And this is the same man who would later come up with the intricate plan to weigh his brothers in the balance as Pharaoh's second in command. And once again, God gave him time to meditate, so to speak, on it.
In all this, I am not disputing Dr Jeremiah's high regard for Joseph. But what I want to do is point out, it wasn't EASY for him to BECOME that person in the end. He certainly had that structure he needed to resist sin, But also, as every obedience kicked him up a notch in God's plan, that new level left him new things to learn- and God very rarely has us learn such things the easy way.
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