THE BLESSING OF THE LORD
Genesis 39
“So Potiphar left everything he had in Joseph’s care; with Joseph in charge, he did not concern himself with anything except the food he ate.”
If you take out the verses that spoke of God being with Joseph, blessing Potiphar’s household and granting Joseph success, you will read a narrative of a young man who decided to make the best of a bad situation (sold into slavery by his brothers) and did so by doing his best and being trustworthy.
Yet you would wonder how a 17-year-old could be so mature in his response to the calamitous situation he was in. It would have been easy to collapse into self-pity, or be paralysed by fear, or completely bitter and distrustful of everyone, or just calculating every decision in terms of self-preservation.
It is easy to read about the intervention of God and imagine some supernatural ways where everything that Joseph touched just miraculously turned out well. However, it makes more sense to see how Joseph’s faith, his knowledge of and relationship with God helped him to overcome the negativity that could have destroyed him. Yes I certainly believe that there were probably some miraculous interventions but I believe, much more, that the miracle was in how Joseph turned out. The fact that God did not intervene when Joseph got into trouble and prison because of his honesty and responsible behaviour persuades me that we are not dealing with a situation where God was intervening to make things go Joseph’s way.
Taking into account the kind of person Joseph had turned out to be, it was no surprise that even in prison good things began to happen for him. Once again we are told that God “was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden” and “the Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”
The bible does contain stories of how God intervened directly to help individuals but it is rare to read of such interventions in spite of what those individuals did (God protecting Abraham and Sarah in Egypt comes to mind).
The blessing of the Lord, I believe, flows from the righteousness and righteous choices that a person makes (Joseph’s imprisonment notwithstanding). It flows from the character of a person who embodies the fruit of the Holy Spirit, and it flows from a desire to impact a situation for good. This is not to say that God refrains from direct intervention—that is his prerogative and we should never discount that—but we must never think that we play no part and have no influence in the outcomes of our choices and decisions.
“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.”