Clough Genesis Lesson 86
Joseph resists temptation, is falsely accused – Genesis 39
We’re continuing our study in Genesis in chapter 39 and once again I remind you, so as not to lose the forest for the trees, that we are continuing the same major theme of Genesis; the major theme over and over and over again in Genesis is that God is sovereign and He is moving to form the Old Testament kingdom. In Genesis 37-50, that God is sovereign over heredity and environment; these two forces that most people look upon as shaping them, these two forces, if you’re to be a real Bible-believing Christian cannot be looked upon as autonomous forces all by themselves. If you happen to think that way then you’re going to be in a situation of certain results. If you think that heredity and environment are the final determinates of your personality, then you will be one who comes across with slogans like these: (quote) “I’m a victim of my environment,” (end quote). Well now just a moment, how can this be? “I’m a victim of my environment?” If the God of the Scriptures is the One who is controlling the environment then aren’t I really saying I’m a victim of God? You see, it just doesn’t follow and you have to be very, very careful of this. Once we establish that God is sovereign over both heredity and environment, then we have to… we have to respond differently.
Take the person who may have been raised
with a congenital birth defect, like Moses.
Let’s suppose it’s an embarrassing defect, like Moses. And suppose this person can blame God for
creating me the way I was created; he’s going to get the same answer back that
God gave Moses in Exodus 4. God says to
Moses, when Moses gripes out God by saying God, you can’t expect me to live this
way, you can’t expect me to do this in life because I can’t, I just was born
without the ability to speak. He had a
speech problem, interesting; the man who was the architect of the law of
So we can’t blame circumstances for us in the sense that we pass off responsibility to circumstance. Now don’t get me wrong; I am not getting up here and telling you that you’re to be passive to circumstances. The Bible doesn’t say that either, for if we pray about something and we see that given the structure of God’s creation there are things you and I can do to alter those circumstances, by all means alter the circumstances. So we’re not arguing for passivity, we’re arguing for an attitude; an attitude that doesn’t demean yourself by saying here I am, poor me, I’m a victim of my heredity and I’m a victim of my circumstances.
On a larger social scale we can argue the same way. The people today who are the most vehement about heredity and environment and so on, argue that things are in such a bad state that the state has to step into everything; the state has to tell you how to raise your children; the state has to take the children out of the home at age 2 and 3 for various programs and so on. Of course the people who take this thinking to the logical conclusion are the communists and the fascists. Both are birds of a feather because both assume that heredity and environment are final factors.
Now we’ve looked at two men; we’ve looked at
If you notice the first verse of Genesis 39 we see that his exact location has been specified. Genesis 39:1, “And Joseph was brought down to Egypt; and Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him of the hands of the Ishmaelites, which had brought him down thither. [2] And the LORD was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian. [3] And his master saw that the LORD was with him, and that the LORD made all that he did to prosper in his hand. [4] And Joseph found grace in his sight, and he served him: and he made him overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his hand. [5] And it came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer in his house, and over all that he had, that the LORD blessed the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake; and the blessing of the LORD was upon all that he had in the house, and in the field. [6] And he left all that he had in Joseph’s hand; and he knew not ought he had, save the bread which he did eat. And Joseph was a goodly person, and well favored.
[7] And it came to pass after these things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me. [8] But he refused, and said unto his master’s wife, Behold, my master does not know what is with me in the house, and he hath committed all that he hath to my hand; [9] There is none greater in this house than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God? [10] And it came to pass, as she spoke to Joseph day by day, that he hearkened not unto her, to lie by her, or to be with her. [11] And it came to pass about this time, that Joseph went into the house to do his business; and there was none of the men of the house there within. [12] And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out. [13] And it came to pass, when she saw that he had left his garment in her hand, and was fled forth, [14] That she called unto the men of her house, and spake unto them, saying, See, he hath brought in an Hebrew unto us to mock us; he came in unto me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice: [15] And it came to pass, when he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled, and got him out.
[16] And she laid up his garment by her, until his lord came home. [17] And she spake unto him according to these words, saying, The Hebrew servant, which thou hast brought unto us, came in unto me to mock me: [18] And it came to pass, as I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and fled out. [19] And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy servant to me; that his wrath was kindled. [20] And Joseph’s master took him, and put him into the prison, a place where the king’s prisoners were bound: and he was there in the prison. [21] But the LORD was with Joseph, and showed him mercy, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison. [22] And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it. [23] The keeper of the prison looked not to any thing that was under his hand; because the LORD was with him, and that which he did, the LORD made it to prosper.”
This particular story, another one in these series of stories that we’ve been studying, carries forward the great theme. You can’t help but see, if you read the stories, the emphasis on, for the first time actually in the Scriptures, racism, for as we noticed as you read that story the word “the Egyptian,” in the house of the Egyptian, the master is Egyptian, and this, thou Hebrew slave. So we have the rise of anti-Semitism beginning to show its ugly head here. That is for a reason.
But we want to look further; you notice the first verse of this chapter is a verse that ties together the story with the rest of what is preceded. In fact, if you look to Genesis 37:36, the last verse of that chapter, you’ll notice how the author has woven these stories together. And I do this to show you so when you read the Bible yourself you’ll notice something. Chapter 38 is set in the middle; chapter 37, chapter 39 carries the theme. I said chapter 38 was kind of odd and it was stuck in there to show a particular problem that was going on in the moral deterioration of that first family. Genesis 37:36 ended that story and it ended it on the note that though it was bad Joseph was thrown in the cistern, and though it was bad that he was almost murdered by his brothers, it was good that he was transported where he was.
Now Genesis 39:1 picks up the theme and carries it forward. So you can see these stories are all put together with a design. What we have is the unseen hand of God. Adam Smith, the great economist in the 18th century argued that this was… he called it the invisible hand that creates a balance in the market place. It was one of the arguments, incidentally, and still is for a free market economy over against the socialist one, that a free market is based on this unseen invisible hand of God that operates in the market place. Well, here the unseen hand is operating in the life of Joseph.
To show you it is all part of a grand
scheme; these are not random stories, turn back to Genesis 15, way back at the
part of Genesis where the Abrahamic Covenant was originally made. When this covenant was made some 100+ years
before chapter 39, God said to Abraham certain things. He specified that three things would take
place in history. The first thing that
would take place in history would be that the Jewish race would be created and
that this Jewish race would never die out, no matter how many adversities, they
would be an indestructible people. A
second thing that he said was that Abraham was heir to the land. We still believe that, that though there be
ebbs and flow in history, when Jesus Christ comes back He will come back to a
definite place. That place will be
Well, all this is part of the scheme of
history and in Genesis 15:13-14 part of that scheme of history was
forecast. God “said unto Abram, Know
surely that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs,” “a
stranger in a land that is not
theirs, and they shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred
years. [14] And also that nation, whom
they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward they shall come out with great
substance.” That nation, the “land that
is not theirs” is
And so it says in verse 2 that “the Yahweh” or “Jehovah was with Joseph.” Let’s explain this clause for a moment. When you see this clause in your Bible don’t pass it by as just a pious slogan. Usually it’s like this: The LORD was with X where X could be any character of the Bible, and then it’s understood to bless him, to rescue him, or in some way to help him. Now that’s the full content of this formula; it is a standard formula in Scripture.
To show you how standard this formula is, you know the great commission; you remember what it says? Go preach the gospel to all the creatures, teaching them, baptizing them and so on, you notice this formula occurs in it? Christ says, “And lo, I am with you to the end of the age.” Now there’s significance in that and most people read the great commission never once think, if that is the technical phrase, or the clause and Christ takes that clause and appropriates it when He’s teaching people about the great commission, doesn’t that suggest to you that He’s making a God-claim, because nowhere else is that formula used of man. That formula is always used of God in the Scriptures. So when Christ communicates at the very last to His disciples, “Lo, I am with you to the end of the age” and He picks up this formula and applies this formula to himself, that is a claim to full deity on the part of our Lord. So you want to watch how Jesus makes these God-claims.
Well, what else does it mean? It means that the unseen hand of God, when He is with somebody, will bless, rescue, or help them in some tangible way. This is not ethereal, this is not mystical; you don’t have to worry about seeing this; there is something concrete that somebody can point to and say yes, God blessed them here, God blessed them here, God blessed them here. There has to be a tangible thing.
All right, right here in Genesis 39:2 what do you see? “And the LORD was with Joseph,” and it says, “and he was a prosperous man,” and the chapter goes on to depict this prosperity. It says [3] that “his master saw that the LORD was with him,” so obviously by verse 3 the blessing of God, whatever it is, is so obvious that the non-Christian, the unbeliever looks at Joseph and is able to say yes, this God that I really don’t believe in is doing something in that guy’s life because I see evidences that I can point to. What do you suppose were some of the evidences that Potiphar observed? I suggest this; I suggest perhaps that Joseph as very young, remember he’s only about 18 or 19 when this was going on. I would suggest that one thing he observers about this boy is that when you tell him to do something he gets it done, that he was a highly responsible young man. I suggest another thing that he probably saw was that this guy, for 18-19 years of age, was exceptionally productive. I would suggest that where Joseph managed property that everything was done decently and in order. So Potiphar observes this and Potiphar sees something and you can see from verse 5-6 that he gets promoted.
Now for the Christian men here this morning, there is a whole philosophy of Christian employment and the attitude a Christian ought to have toward his employer and how he ought to respond; let’s pause a moment and look at some concepts that the Bible teaches about this, very practical, easy to apply concepts that make a difference. The biggest concept to remember is when you’re involved in an authority structure and you’re here and your employer or your commanding officer or someone above you is here, and this person may not like you personally, and there may be some frictions that go on between you and the other person, one of the things you can immediately begin to do in your mind’s eye that will help you cope with this kind of situation is to mentally, when you visualize your boss or you visualize the employer or whatever this person is, that if you will visualize Christ standing in back about two feet in back of that person, so when you conceive of this person you conceive of the fact that as you look at them you’re actually looking a little by them to the One standing in back of them. And if you’ll do this, it automatically sorts out things so you can keep your cool, so you can endure, so that you can see that basically by submitting to this person in this situation you’re ultimately submitting to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let’s look at how this comes out. Notice in verse 4, “And Joseph found grace in his sight,” that’s Potiphar’s sight; it means he found acceptance. Potiphar loves this young Jewish boy; this guy was fantastic. I remind you, incidentally, from verse 1 as to just who Potiphar is. Potiphar would be equivalent to a general today; it calls him a captain but that’s the translation of the Hebrew word sar, and sar can be translated a number of ways, but “captain” just means captain more like in the navy, it doesn’t mean a two-bar type in the Army or the Air Force. It means somebody with stars on his shoulders. And as such, Potiphar, to show you the scheme of things, here’s the Pharaoh of Egypt, the king, Pharaoh has an administration under him; guess who one of his administrators is? Potiphar; it’s very clever of the Lord, isn’t it, to place Joseph in Potiphar’s home, it makes him one step away from Pharaoh himself, though Joseph doesn’t realize it at the time. Joseph, all he knows is he’s trying to do a good job and do it as unto the Lord. So it says that “he served him,” notice the two verbs in verse 4; he “found grace” and “he served him.” He could only serve him properly as a Christian man if he would know that he was serving the Lord Jesus Christ while he was serving this Potiphar.
If you want some New Testament emphasis on this, turn to Ephesians 6; this is one of the major New Testament passages on labor and management. Ephesians 6:5-8; this passage of Scripture gives principles for men involved in these kinds of relationship; and women too in principle but it’s directed toward the men. Notice the language used. “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ. [6] Not with eyeservice, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,” or literally “from life.” [7] With good will doing service as to the Lord, and not to men. [8] Knowing that whatever good thing any man does, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free,” wherever he is in the organization.
Now observe, you’ve got four verses, verse 5, 6, 7 and 8, in every one of those verses the same expression is repeated. Look at verse 5, “as unto Christ.” Look at verse 6, “but as the servants of Christ.” Verse 7, “as to the Lord.” Verse 8, “he shall receive of the Lord.” Now quite obviously there’s a philosophy of labor that’s embedded in those verses that looks something like that; here’s the employer or the boss, and what it’s doing, this person down here is looking by the boss at the Lord Jesus Christ standing in back of the boss, and it’s Him with whom the employer has the ultimate relationship. Now if this one principle could be applied in many of these work/management problems it would at least solve one problem and that’s the problem of attitude. And if that problem of attitude could be solved, then a lot of other personnel problems could also be worked out. But the attitude hinges on the correct divine viewpoint idea of authority and submission.
Let’s turn back to Genesis 39 and observe another principle about Christian employment and Christian labor. And Joseph is the classic case of this second principle. The second principle is a flow of responsibility. You’ll notice in verse 4, as Joseph finds grace, as Joseph serves him, what does he do? He makes him overseer, he gives him a promotion. And what is the promotion? “He put all that he has under his hand.” So now we observe a second principle. Not only do we have the principle that we work as unto the Lord, but we also have the principle that responsibility flows from the irresponsible person to the responsible person.
It’s sort of like Gresham’s law in
economics; bad currency drives out good currency; this is why you look at your
change, you can’t find any silver coins before 64 because everybody that has a
coin before 64 that’s silver is going to keep it, they’re going to horde
it. And you hear all this, oh, those
nasty people are hording all those coins.
No, they’re just smart people because they realize the subway tokens you
and I use every day for money aren’t worth anything. Pretty soon, if the decline of currency
continues, actually you’ll watch another phenomenon take place; we’ve got one
coin left in American currency right now that has real metal in it and that’s
the penny. Now watch what happens; as
the currency declines finally the amount of copper in the penny will equal the
value of a penny; when that point is reached,
Well, now here’s a law that always works in human organizations, barring a few conditions that we’ll see in a moment, and that is, where you have two people in an organization of equal rank and one person is responsible they will always drive out the other person, eventually. They’ll always out compete them; they’ll always out promote them. Why? Because responsibility flows to the responsible; it flows away from the irresponsible people. Joseph, in verse 4-5, is a responsible young man. When he is told to do something he does it, whether he likes to or not, he does it. That’s responsibility. He’s a very responsible person, later on in the text you notice, in verse 8-9, when he’s trying to bargain with Potiphar’s wife, you notice how he bargains with her? On the basis of responsibility. Joseph feels extremely responsible in verses 8-9, he tells her this in no uncertain terms. So we’re safe to conclude that the young boy had tremendous sense of responsibility, so great that his master saw it and he paid him by promoting him. Joseph created a track record, in other words, that made him credible.
In verse 4 he’s promoted to “overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his hand.” Now think of who Potiphar is. Let’s just back off from this a moment and think; let’s imagine, do a thought experiment here this morning, how would you characterize the mindset of Potiphar? Well I don’t know, the Scriptures don’t tell us everything, but here’s a guy who was the equivalent of a general; he’s in charge of the penal system of Egypt, basically is what his office is. And a man doesn’t get to that status in life without having a pretty good idea of how to work an organization and a pretty darned good idea of what people can do. Now here he’s been working, probably an older man, working for 20 or 30 years and along comes this 19 year old kid, 18 year old kid, and he looks at this kid and he says hey, I’ve seen hundreds of young men in my life but this 18 year old boy is outstanding. What is it that’s outstanding about Joseph? Right now it’s not necessarily his brilliance, it’s simply his character; he’s responsible. Now in an age of increasing responsibility it stands to reason that you don’t have to be too responsible to be outstanding any longer. Back, maybe fifty years ago, you really had to be outstanding to be outstanding. Today all you have to do is put your shoes on in the morning at a regular time and you’ll be outstanding. You see, it makes it easier in one sense for the Christian who has standards to excel, simply because no one else is doing anything.
Notice what happens; in verse 6 at the end we have an interesting situation develop. The end of verse 6 actually ought to be the first part of verse 7; there’s a break syntactically there and I think if some of you have modern translations you’ll see that they’ve actually pulled part of verse and dropped it down into verse 7. That’s not a mistake, that’s there because the verse numbers weren’t in the original text anyway.
Now it begins to take an unusual tact; up till the end of verse 6 everything has emphasized Joseph’s character and we’ve said there’s a reason for this. As Joseph, we’ve depicted him as the brilliant brat, he is a person who has great talent, he is a person that has fantastic potential but he’s just a brat. And he’s got to learn how to stop being a brat, always running at the mouth with the wrong person or always doing some stupid thing to irritate people. So he’s got to get rid of this. And slowly being developed in the story this bratiness is getting rid and this brilliance shines through. It’s like God’s taking a diamond and He’s cutting it and He’s cutting it and cutting it and soon all the facets of that diamond show and reflect the light. As this process goes on, at the end of verse 6 the text shift’s emphasis.
When you see a shift like this, and you’ve got to read your Bible closely to watch it, but when you see a shift like this, be on guard, something’s coming up, because the Bible usually doesn’t this. Very rarely does the Bible give you a physical description of people, and this is why it’s been so frustrating to illustrators of Bible characters, artists and frustrating I’m sure to movie makers, everybody today thinks of Charlton Heston as Moses and George C. Scott as Abraham and that’s the best we can do because we don’t have pictures of what the real characters look like. And when you start to see a physical description like you do in verse 6, that’s a trigger that the Holy Spirit is going to tie something in to the physique of this person for some reason. Usually it doesn’t; usually the Holy Spirit is interested in character rather than appearance. Well when it starts favoring the appearance it’s a setup. It says, “Joseph was a goodly person, and well favored.” Modern translations say he was handsome and well-built,” he was an extremely attractive young man.
So now we have the seduction scene; here we have Potipher’s wife attempting to seduce him. Now how is this going to fit with the overall scheme? Keep in mind these are not random events; they are all tied to a scheme. What ministry do you suppose this seduction has to Joseph in a spiritual way? It’s simply this: Joseph, along with his brilliance, apparently from verse 6 is quite physically appealing. In other words, replacing this we say that Joseph has fantastic assets in all departments. Now a person that is very gifted this way often has a big problem in life because they think, and I’ve watched this again and again spiritually, a person that is very gifted in every area has a constant battle and the battle is this; people who don’t have the assets always look up and boy, I wish I had that, and yet you talk to the people who do have the assets and they say hey, it’s not quite the asset you think it is and I’ll tell you why. Because the tendency is to rely upon your own assets rather than upon the Lord. The tendency is to get by because you are brilliant; therefore you can make up for your own sloppiness and lack of discipline by blowing smoke at people and you get by with it because you’re smart and you can out think a lot of people, but you’re not developing your capacity that God gave you because you’re too busy trying to snow people to cover up your own ineptitude; it’s just that your ineptitude doesn’t show so much because you usually have somewhat great talent. Similarly in areas of art and drama and music you see this, somebody that has great gifts of artistry, for example, paints in a mediocre way without trying, and so they continue painting in a mediocre way all their life, never being challenged to do their best because to do their best would mean they’d have to acknowledge their limitedness and if I acknowledge my limitedness guess what I have to do? I have to start looking up. And it’s that sinful tendency not to want to look to God that keeps really from developing a lot of our own talent.
Well, Joseph was this and what Joseph was learning here is that any one of his assets can be a cause of his own destruction. That’s how it fits in his life. And he’s got to learn this lesson; Joseph, just because you’re sharp, just because you’ve got talent, just because you’re physically attractive, don’t think that you’ve got it knocked, that you can just kind of coast through life and not pray about every step of the way. Don’t be over confident; pride goes before a fall.
All right, as Joseph gets into the situation the text, very literally, in verse 7, “And it came to pass after these things, that his master’s wife cast her eyes upon Joseph;” now there is some reason why perhaps this woman was attracted to Joseph besides the fact that he was a handsome fellow. One of the reasons was, we think, is that her husband was eunuch and in the ancient world this meant castration. So very obviously this woman was in a position of sexual deprivation in her marriage and therefore she was vulnerable to these kinds of things. And we get hints later on in the text that it wasn’t the first time. So if that’s the situation then it’s understandable what a highly bottled thing it is, a 19 year old guy, good looking, sharp, put into this kind of a position. Talk about a crucible of testing, here’s one. Now the Bible, fortunately for us, is written so that you can benefit from it without any theoretical knowledge. That’s why the Bible isn’t written like a systematic theology; it’s written so you can take that Bible home and you can read it in time of suffering and sorrow and tragedy and heartache and get out of it what you need to get out of it. One of the ways that the Bible does this is that the Bible never talks abstractly about anything. It doesn’t give you a fancy psychological jargon; it gives you concrete words, like in verse 7, “she lifted up her eyes to Joseph” is the way the Hebrew reads.
Now the eye is again and again mentioned in connection with sexual temptations. To show you how consistent the theme is, remember in the Garden of Eden, though it wasn’t a sexual temptation it was a temptation, Eve, it says, she looked with her eye and she saw the fruit that it was good and it was attractive. So again the emphasis is on the eye. Now let me show you three verses, three among a hundred of them, but I want you to see how physical and concrete the Bible is.
Turn to Job 31. The Bible does not have abstract words; say for a word like “emotions.” In the Hebrew language and biblical language there is no word for emotion. Guess what word the Bible does use to express emotion; obviously they had emotions, they had to express the word. The Bible uses the word stomach or sometimes it uses the word for intestine. You’ll say what does the stomach or the intestine got to do with emotions. Well, anybody that knows physiology knows your intestine and your stomach has a lot to do with emotions. Ask somebody here with an ulcer. Now, here is a key and I’ve discovered this with some people who have had a lot of trouble sometimes with emotions of depression, and emotions of up and down and so on, they’re reported to me… we discovered this going through the Proverb series, that once they thought of their emotions in terms of the body organ where they could feel the emotion, they could then control the emotion, sometimes for the first time in their life. For example, when you’re angry and you’re upset, a little exercise to do is sit quietly for a moment and shut your eyes so you shut out all the data around you and concentrate on just how you feel, and think of each part of your body and how it’s feeling that moment when you’re angry. And you’ll feel, oftentimes, that the emotion is located at a certain point in your body. Now what this does, it makes you aware of the fact that emotions are physically based, and for some strange reason, just that mere awareness that your emotions are emanating from some point in your body helps control the emotion. Not always but at least it’s an exercise to show you there is a physical relationship.
Now in Job 31:1 he expresses problem as a man and sexual temptation; he says, “I made a covenant with my eyes. Why then should divine institution think upon a maid?” It doesn’t mean he didn’t think about girls; it meant that he didn’t lust after a maid; the word “think” in this context is lust. And notice, he doesn’t make a treaty with his emotions. He doesn’t make a treaty with his hormones. He makes a treaty with his eyes. Very physical!
Let’s develop this theme even more; let’s
come down to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5. You know the Sermon on the Mount, the person
that never read the Bible, always read the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew
Matthew 6:22-23 tells you why; here in another context but still mentioning eyes, we have a little bit more insight as to why the physical eyeball is so important. It says “The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be single [healthy], thy whole body shall be full of light. [23] But if thy eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” What he’s talking about is something that I’m told, it’s been found recently in experimental psychology, by recently I mean the last 30 or 40 years. It used to be thought back in the days when Greek philosophy permeated the field of psychology that the eye was merely a reporting device that transmitted a signal back to the brain and the brain simply interpreted the signal. In other words, all viewpoint, all interpretation was done back here in the brain, none was done here in the eye. The eye was simply a receiving unit, sort of like a receiver in the radio. But that has since been shown to be false. There’s actually a two-way flow between the brain and the eye; the eye is already doing interpretation at the point it’s observing. That was shown by the fact that how do you know that you’ve seen something if you don’t know what it is you’re supposed to see? If I asked you to go out and get me a football and you don’t know what a football is, how do you know when you’ve seen it. In other words, the eye already carries a program of its own interpretation with it. So when the Bible uses “eye” it’s very serious about it; it means that that’s the center of the battle; it’s not the hormones, it’s not something else, physically the organs that are involved are the eyes.
One further passage to show this, 2 Peter 2:14, notice the expression here, same thing, same consistency. The Bible does not change that much from chapter to chapter. It says, “Having eyes full of adultery,” it doesn’t say having a heart full of adultery; it says the eyes are full of it, as though the eyes are taught, the eyes are programmed. So therefore in the battle of sexual temptation, that’s the center in the body where the battle takes place, where the human spirit does battle with the body is right here in the eyes, to control the eyes and have dominion over the eyes.
Now let’s turn back to Genesis 39 and watch the eyes of this woman. Those of you who are new to Scripture, after
you’ve gone with me through Genesis 38 and 39 I think you are slowly getting
the impression, if you didn’t have it before, that the Bible is not embarrassed
to talk about any particular area of life.
She throws her eyes, literally the Hebrew says “she lifts up her eyes
upon Joseph,” so once again she’s being led by her eyes, and he refused. And in Genesis 39:8-9 his defense to the
woman is a plea that he wants to be responsible. But then he takes concrete action, he doesn’t
just talk. At the end of verse 10 what
does he do? He avoids her. He keeps from being with her. Now that’s not chicken and that’s not
shameful to do. The Bible says stand
against Satan, resist the devil and he will flee from you; that’s stationary
counterattack. But when it deals with
problems of the flesh, interesting, the Bible carries a different tactic and
the tactic is to avoid the situation. If
you can’t handle the situation then get out of the situation, if it triggers
constantly the flesh, and that’s what Joseph does. He avoids her in verse 10.
Verse 11, “And it came to pass” in verse 11 that he’s there alone in the house one day and that’s when it hits, and so therefore he flees. And verse 12, he fled and he got himself out. And the idea is that she grabbed his garment and it’s a very picturesque view in the Hebrew language, it’s somewhat idiomatic so maybe it isn’t exactly concrete, but she grabs his garment and she starts to tear if off of him. And he takes off so fast that she’s left there with a garment in her hand. It’s a picture as though he’s so quick at the way he does it, he leaves her suspended, so to speak, in this pose of holding his garment.
Now her attack on him, and here we have a follow up to that second principle before when I said we’ve examined the responsibility of Christian employment, that we’re employed for Christ; our second principle was that responsibility flows to the responsible. All right, now here is the last principle, and this will happen to you, particularly Christian men, don’t get unstable and panicky when this thing happens. Let’s say this is an organization, typical pyramid type organization, it could be a company, it could be a business of some sort, a school, military, whatever, you’ve got your pyramid structure.
Okay, here’s the Christian man; the Christian man is given some responsibility in this organization and he has dominion over it. Then he gets a promotion and so now his dominion area increases and he has dominion over that, and he gets another promotion and his area of dominion keeps on increasing so he has more and more of that organization affected by him. Three things can happen at this point; one of these three things will always happen. As the Christian man who’s really doing his job gets promoted, (1) the organization will allow the promotions to continue begrudgingly, because what’s becoming increasingly obvious is that this Christian man is letting his lifestyle permeate along with his work. This casts a shadow over the organization and this causes people to react within the group that may be non-Christian, they don’t like this guy, what’s with him and so on; you know, gee, we have to work for the first time in our life and so forth. So you get this reaction to all this that goes on. But yet, the non-Christians who are smart in that business organization are going to look over here at the Joseph’s and say yeah, we don’t quite like the lifestyle of this guy but I’ll tell you one thing, we’ve never had a guy around here that produces like him. So on a purely pragmatic basis the Christian will be allowed to be promoted up in the organization, but begrudgingly. There’ll be a resistance to it, the people will have to be sold on a pragmatic basis, we can’t stand his guts but he does a good job, we will have to admit that. That’s one way, one pathway of the Christian.
Another pathway that can take place and hopefully this would be the pathway is that because the Lord has allowed him this position in the company or business that he can influence those other executives, or those other managers, or those other workers and they become Christians. So you have evangelism begin to occur in the organization. When that happens the promotions and the advancement can continue but now they’re welcomed, they’re begrudgingly given, they are given full-heartedly. So that’s pathway number two, but in order to get to pathway number two there has to be a concurrent evangelism that goes along with teaching of the Word of God so that principles of Scripture are understood, so that, for example, this fellow worker or this fellow manager looks over and says hey, now I’m a Christian I realize that the Word of God is absolute over every area and I realize that you must be taking some of these principles from Scripture and applying it here, and I realize this, and I’d like to help out as to what we can do to align our organization more fully with the principles of Scripture as best we can in a fallen world. And so there’s unity and harmony there; now that’s the second approach.
But what happens to Joseph is a third approach, and that is a total rejection. Don’t take that, men, as a sign of failure. If you’ve been doing your job as unto the Lord and you reach that critical point as there’s sudden rejection, even a firing, dismissal or they get you out of there some way, don’t take that as a sign of your personal failure, because you’ve got a counter example right here with Joseph. Joseph has not failed but Joseph is ejected from the state of Potiphar; why has he been ejected from the state of Potiphar? Let’s think about what forces caused the Christian man, who begins to ascend in an organization and suddenly bam, he’s out. Why? Well, what happens is that his lifestyle causes more negative feedback than his positive production. So where you have pagans that reject this kind of thing, finally, and this is the desperation of fallen man, finally a decision will be made, I don’t care if he’s a good manager and he produces more for our firm, we can’t stand him personally. We don’t like his Christ and we don’t like this idea that man is held accountable, and so we’re going to get rid of him. We will sacrifice our organization’s unity, harmony, organization and production just to get the Christian out. Don’t you think that doesn’t happen; it’s happened thousands of times to Christian men, and you can’t get bitter at that point. Joseph is your model; watch what happens.
So in verse 14 the rejection process begins from the estate. At this point he’s 19 maybe or 20 and he’s been given managership over the estate of Potiphar. So she starts in a propaganda in verse 14. More people have been hurt with mouths than fists and guns. It always humors me, they talk about gun legislation; you know what we ought to do is we ought to start tongue legislation, take the same approach and take an ad for gun legislation and replace g-u-n with tongue and just see what happens. So she starts in, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fortunately she didn’t have a telephone but she started this prejudice about the Hebrew. Notice how she plays on the racial slur; it’s not that Joseph is just a young man but he’s a Hebrew. Why do you suppose this woman does this? She’s a clever one. Do you know why she’s pulling this stunt because she’s trying to produce divisiveness Joseph and the other servants that he was promoted over? Now what quality, she thinks to herself, can I get that I can really use as a gouge against this kid. Well, the only thing I can point to that’s noticeably different is that he’s of another race so I’ll just bring up the race issue all the time, just so he can be identified and we’ll use it as a nice little handle to discriminate against him. The fact that she does this in verse 14 hints that she’s been playing games before because if it was merely a case that she’s trying to feign that she was raped, that’s all she would have had to have done, but she doesn’t do that; she has to use these extra devices which suggests that the servants said oh yeah, it happened again huh Hon? Well, to get around that counter argument she brings up the racial slur to make sure that it gets across.
So the master comes home and another hint we have that there was hanky-panky going around before was in verse 19, after her husband hears about it, it says he gets angry but not at Joseph; it just says he got angry. Usually this expression is followed with an object of the preposition, he was angry at… and you fill in the person. The question is, why is this prepositional clause dropped; why is it omitted here. I suggest for the following reason: that Potiphar is hostile that the whole situation developed because look what a position he’s in; he’s number two to Pharaoh, remember the organization of Egypt now; here’s Pharaoh, he’s way above in the organization chart, but under him he has a staff of general officers and one of these guys is Potiphar who’s over the prison system. And so he’s high up and he’s associated with Pharaoh, so he can’t permit a scandal on his estate, so what he’s got to do is somehow take care of Joseph and get him out of there, but yet he doesn’t like that because what has Joseph done for him? Caused his estate to prosper. So he becomes angry in the sense he becomes frustrated with the situation but rather than be hostile toward Joseph per se, he isn’t.
The third evidence we have of this is in verse 20, he sentences him to prison. Two things about this; it’s a place where the king’s prisoners were bound which means it would be equivalent today to minimum security compound, like your Watergate figures and these people, it’s not the regular prison. Why was Joseph confined in a minimum security for VIP’s; that was a mild sentence. Another point about verse 20 is that it’s not capital punishment; in the ancient law codes the punishment for adultery was capital punishment. Why wasn’t capital punishment administered to Joseph. It shows you that Potiphar really isn’t that hostile to Joseph.
But the story doesn’t end there; the story ends as so often we’ve observed in these Genesis stories, on seemingly a totally different note. Verse 21, 22 and 23; what happened to Joseph after he arrived in prison. You see, the stories always want to leave you on the note of the sovereignty of God, that finally after all is said and done, don’t get upset, Joseph isn’t out of the picture, God is still carrying forward his program, so what do you read in verse 21? The formula again, “But the LORD was with Joseph, and showed him mercy, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.” And what do we find in verse 22, the flow of responsibility. Now what has he done? He “committed to Joseph’s hand all the prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he was the doer of it.” The law of the flow of responsibility, from the irresponsible people to the responsible people. Verse 23, “The keeper of the prison looked not to any thing that was under his hand; because the LORD was with him,” you compare the language of verse 23 with the language of verses 4-6 and you’ll see it’s a repeat, a repeat of the same victory of Joseph, being given responsibility, responding, doing his best wherever he is, even if it’s in a prison.
Now out of this we obtain yet another principle for living; a very general and very encouraging principle. It looks like the square root of something, but it’s a principle that you’ll see time and time again, it’s deeply embedded into the philosophy of history. Take for example mankind; he starts out in innocence, goes to the fall, is redeemed, and mankind’s state after his redemption is better than it was in Eden, for it’s in resurrection body; in Eden there was no resurrection. The Lord Jesus Christ was born in innocence; He took your sin upon the cross; He was raised from the dead, and now he abides in a state more glorious than the one he was born into. Joseph was a boy in his father’s house, a brat, one who was just a little Hebrew servant boy, a shepherd boy, he descends and now he rises to be at the right hand of Pharaoh himself. That pattern is found in Romans 6, Romans 7 and Romans 8 as part of the parcel of the Christian life. You don’t get the crown without the cross; in your experience as a Christian there will be many crosses and many resurrections. The resurrections always come after the cross, not before them. Tragically we wish our lives could be like that, we wish that we could just simply ascend in a smooth line, but there’s always the heartaches and always the depressive periods, but that you see is part of how the whole cosmos works. It’s not abnormal with you, that’s the way life is and this is the way it was with Joseph.
Now I said that the author of these stories
is a very slick writer, a very organized man and one of the things that he
loves to play with his readers is couplets.
Remember Abraham, he got involved with Sarah down in
Therefore we conclude our service by singing….