The Providence of Pain: Joseph's Test, Part I

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--three very human patriarchs who each spoke directly with God and whose prayers and altars are recorded in Scripture--beget one of the few men in the entire Bible with no reported moral flaws. Although we have no record of Joseph's prayers, altars, or direct encounters with God, we can see God's Providence at work in his life from his earliest days. In Joseph's boyhood dreams we sense the finger of God pointing to some inscrutable destiny, and we follow the riddle of reality as that destiny is fulfilled. Along this painful path, we have in Joseph not even a whisper of his forefathers' compromise, complacency, or duplicity. Instead, we see a guileless virtue, a moral resilience, a selfless bravery, and a genius for administration that would have made a lesser man self-righteous and vain. Why, then, was Joseph allowed to suffer such insults to his reputation and such reversals of his dreams? Was God chastening a "favorite son" for his youthful flaws, as Joseph's critics suggest, or was there some far more mysterious and profound purpose in God's Providence of pain?

Many critics are so hard on young Joseph as to make of his boyhood an entirely laughable caricature. One blogger writes, "By all accounts, seventeen-year-old Joseph was a spoiled brat. He sounded like a pretentious upstart with a big mouth." Another says, "Joseph was likely spoiled and coddled his entire life, until that fateful day where he was forced to leave his father’s favor and blessings. His brothers’ jealousy built up and eventually overcame them so much that one day they threw Joseph into a pit and eventually sold him into slavery. Talk about the end of a spoiled childhood!  Once Joseph belonged to foreign people who paid to own him, his days of being favored and coddled were over." This blogger adds, "Joseph had to learn to work because daddy was no longer around to let him off the hook." Can this be true?

It is difficult not to hold Joseph at least partially responsible for his own tragedy, but can we not recognize the value of pain in his life without reducing him to a mere stereotype? When the moral victor becomes the villain and the villains are made the victims, we prove ourselves very poor judges of morality and merely affirm our own depravity. It is not necessary to endorse every one of Joseph's boyhood behaviors to see in him nevertheless a remarkable young man whom his grieving father found it impossible not to love. And it is not necessary to transfer onto Joseph the failed wisdom of this doting father, who should certainly have known the pain and division that favoritism brings.

If we play devil's advocate, as it were, that Joseph was not spoiled by his father's favoritism, that he was not a snitch because he reported his brothers' evil to his father, that he was not arrogant because he shared his dreams, and that he was not shiftless and pampered despite his coat of many colors, we not only create a picture of Joseph's life that dovetails immediately with his outstanding character in Egypt but we also highlight his brothers' evil in betraying him--an evil consistent with their characters before, during, and after Joseph's fate in being sold as a slave. We also begin to see that God in His Providence uses even the failings of others to weave gold threads of meaning into our destinies. Without the overwhelming love of his father, would Joseph have known the astounding Presence of Jacob's God?

Jacob was far from perfect even after Peniel when the Lord embedded into his name His own identity. But he was a humbler man, a broken man, who saw that he had prevailed with God not through self-assurance but through self-surrender and that this very surrender qualified him for God's highest blessing. Surely, Peniel was but one of many surrenders in Jacob's life thereafter, and if he reached a stalemate of despair following the loss of his favorite son, the Lord surely brought him through to victory and even honored him with a royal entourage at his funeral. Can we not believe that a boyish Joseph, himself bereft of his mother, bore an undying pity and tenderness for his aging, limping father, a father who loved his God with a tenacity that forbad his grieving even the death of his favorite wife, Joseph's mother, because of her sin of idolatry?

If Jacob grieved Rachel's death--a fate he himself ironically pronounced on the one who had stolen Laban's gods--we have no record of this in Scripture, but it is natural to think that he seized Rachel's son as the object of his devotion with a clearer conscience than he could mourn the loss of his idol who had disillusioned him. Joseph seems to have viewed his father with a reverence that looked out for his best interests, and if we see in this love the sole motivation for relaying to his father the ill behavior of his brothers, particularly if Jacob had placed him in watchfulness over them as chief shepherd, then is this not a noble fulfillment of duty, such as we see Potiphar recognizing in Joseph only a short time later? Had Joseph been a "snitch," his motive would have been malicious and self-aggrandizing, but why would this even be necessary if he was already secure in his father's love?

But we do an injustice not only to Joseph but also to the spiritual obligation to expose evil if we call whistleblowing "snitching" or "tattling." We end up trivializing evil. And the evil Joseph's brothers had already done was far from trivial. In modern times, Reuben would have been jailed for incest and Simeon and Levi for mass murder. Judah later showed his own lust for evil and his own utter lack of keeping his word. If the sons of Leah behaved this way, can we not also imagine what the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah were up to? Joseph's brothers certainly proved his worst report by their behavior to Joseph himself. Therefore, to call Joseph a "snitch," voicing the unwarranted taboo attached to holding others accountable, is to make goodness laughable and evil commendable, and nothing but moral confusion results from such a mind game.

We would have to assume that Joseph's brothers were not doing the very things for which they are best known if we fault Joseph for being concerned about behavior that either put his father's reputation at risk or that jeopardized the welfare of his possessions. We also see in Joseph's impartiality to the truth the very same integrity and matter-of-fact directness that allowed him to interpret the dreams of the baker and the butler years later. And if Joseph possessed an unusual candor, can we not also see him sharing with objectivity rather than arrogance his own intriguing dreams? Certainly, doing so was unwise, and if he did, in his keen observations of human nature, sense his brothers' enmity and hostility against him, we cannot help wondering if he wanted to establish his own worthiness in their eyes. If this is true, inasmuch as Joseph, too, was a sinner, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, we can indeed imagine that his boyhood dreams may have taken flight without regard for others' feelings.

But it does not follow that Joseph felt anything more than any other well-meaning, talented young person feels in the idealism of youth that yearns for great things. So few youth even have worthy ideals to cherish, and Joseph's brothers certainly seemed to have none. It is, in fact, Joseph's dreams that they most resented, plotting to kill "this dreamer" coming towards them in the field. And well might we argue that God gave Joseph his dreams to safeguard his purity when life turned into a nightmare of pain and shame. So much could be said to this very purpose in our own culture of jaded youth and obsessive desires. Do we even try to teach our young people the unsurpassed beauty of moral virtue and the unadulterated joy of purity? When we see that God gave Joseph his father's quest of Divine blessing both to inspire him and to test him, we can allow for a youthful lack of discretion without sullying Joseph's character or demonizing his motives.

It is not necessary, then, to reduce Joseph to a mere stereotype, while implying that his poor, victimized brothers had reason to do him in. There are indeed other plausible interpretations of his behavior that line up more logically with the man he became, while we also recognize who his wicked brothers already were. And as for the charge that he was pampered and lazy, if evidence of this is Joseph's coat of many colors, here again we can find no necessary logical proof. It is quite possible that, given Joseph's youth as the youngest of eleven sons, Jacob wanted to make his leadership known by giving Joseph a uniform of authority, as it were. Again, this was Jacob's error in judgment, not Joseph's. We certainly do wonder how Jacob could have missed this family tension, but how do we know to what extent his own faculties were failing? He was almost exactly the same age from his death--thirty-nine years--that his own father Isaac was when he presumed he was dying.

But we know that Joseph did work with his brothers in the field, as Genesis 37:2 tells us. And, contrary to coddling him, Jacob, it would appear, placed upon Joseph more responsibility, not less, than all of his older brothers combined. We know that Joseph knew enough of tending the flocks and herds that he could discern mismanagement from watchfulness and that his father trusted his opinion. For that matter, it is difficult to believe that Jacob, himself a genius in raising livestock, wanted his son to be raised a sissy. If ever Scripture paints a picture of the workaholic, it does of Jacob who worked so tirelessly for seven years to win Rachel that these years seemed to him but a few days. Then he worked another seven years for the same woman, having been tricked into marrying Leah instead. The man who outwrestled every foe in his life and ultimately God Himself as manifest in the Angel of the Lord would not love a son he had so terribly babied. Nor would Joseph have developed outstanding work habits overnight such as he immediately evidenced in Egypt.

If, as William Wordsworth said, "The child is the father of the man," wouldn't Joseph's boyhood foreshadow the man he would become? And if we take the word "spoiled" for what it really means, this is no small, easily reversible process. In fact, spoiling almost inevitably leads to narcissism, which is usually considered incurable. The world is indeed full of children who were pampered as payback for their parents' neglect, and society has rotted with the outcome. If Joseph was indeed "spoiled" during childhood up to age 17, nearly a generation, we should expect to see immediate evidence of it the first time he doesn't get his own way: blaming others for his misfortune; bitterness at reversal when he dreamed of success instead; laziness as a slave; and self-will and sin when faced with sexual temptation. But we have no hint of "spoiled" attitudes or behavior in the Joseph under captivity. Instead, we have only God's redundant endorsement--"The Lord was with Joseph" (Genesis 39:2, 3, 5, 21, 23), stated five times in the text.

The Lord's endorsement of Joseph was obvious by both internal and external evidence. It was Joseph's beautiful and noble spirit of wisdom, humility, and poise that immediately set him apart as an outstanding leader who could be trusted in all his employer's affairs. This integrity never deserted him. When he could indeed have turned "snitch," defending himself while telling on Potiphar's wife, who certainly deserved "an evil report," he shut his lips and worked even in prison as unto the Lord, his own and his father's God. We can be sure he clung to the memory of his father's love as the sacred bond that kept him from drifting into bitter dissolution. Imagine knowing that not one person on earth is praying for you because the only one who would do so believes you to be dead for 22 years! No wonder the text reads, "And the Lord was with Joseph."

In God alone, Joseph kept the upward look, relinquishing without self-congratulation or self-pity the dreams implanted in his boyish heart, even while wrestling by faith a destiny out of his fate. His feet were fettered and his hopes were heavy, for the iron entered into his soul, but out of this iron, he formed unflinching links of loyalty to His God. We learn in Psalm 105:19, "Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him." Can we not suppose that God tested Joseph to see whether favoritism and youthful ambition had spoiled his soul? And did Joseph not indeed pass this test, if God Himself granted him favor even as a slave? This much we know: Joseph's Heavenly Father was keeping a watchful eye, proportioning Joseph's favor to his pain.

Little did Joseph know his life would become a parable of the joy secured through suffering, himself a picture of the Christ his forefathers envisioned along their pilgrimage through pain. As James Russell Lowell, that great abolitionist, could write in his anti-slavery poem, "The Present Crisis," we could say of Joseph these eloquent words:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record

One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word;

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadows, keeping watch above His own.