We shall look at the by now familiar pattern of events from yet another viewpoint, and again with a different purpose. We begin by recognising that Joseph started out as an ambitious young man - a very ambitious young man indeed. He was in fact bred to it. At the beginning, his father Jacob did with him what many a successful business man does with his son - put him into the family business on the bottom rung of the ladder. Let him learn the ropes at shop floor level. The family business, in Jacob's case, was farming; Joseph was made a shepherd boy and put to work among his brothers.
Like many a young man, his first experience of the world of work was disillusioning. Nobody seemed to be motivated by high ideals, the workers were not workers but slackers: they wasted the firm's time, they indulged all sort of fiddles, there was no cooperation among them and little evidence of any care for the firm's reputation, standards or level of productivity. Joseph's reaction was one of dismay. How could the family business prosper in those circumstances? Where did he fit in to all that? What prospects did he have in such a setup?
His story may well supply a Biblical comment on the question of career ambition for the Christian. How competitive, how aggressive may a Christian be in seeking advancement? Should he seek it at all? And if so, how? Should he take a legitimate step when he knows that by doing so he will cut the ground from under someone else's feet? There are moves people make to get on - what moves can the Christian make?
Joseph is an example of the upright business man who comes out at the top of the pile. It will be instructive to ponder his career.
It did not have a very promising beginning. Again and again, it looked as though he had never get off the bottom in fact. From the point of view of worldly advancement, he did everything wrong. He was naive, he was innocent, he was self-effacing, he was conscientious ... he was almost too good to be true. By worldly standards, he never stood a chance of getting on. He had no eye to the main chance, he never cut corners, he never calculated the next move, he was never in the right place at the right time, he never learned how to make friends or influence people for his own advantage, and time and again it looked as though he had lost out hopelessly, as it is only to be expected that such an innocent would. Yet he came out top man in the biggest power complex of his era.
His career is worth a look from this perspective, and whilst it may not supply answers to all the questions young people may want to ask, it will at least make a positive contribution to them.
Joseph's first reaction - the reaction of an outraged innocent - was to make a report to management on the dishonesty and inefficiency he found at shop floor level. We know the popularity that earned him. Whether it was because things got too hot for Joseph in consequence we are not told, but old Jacob took him out of it. Joseph was brought upstairs and put on a trainee management course. That is what it meant that he was given a long coat with sleeves: he was in future exempt from manual labour and given executive responsibility.
Joseph's first blunder (?!) was that he stuck out for honesty on the shop floor - a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. A man doesn't do that ... not if he knows what's good for him. Let him try - really try - and either he will precipitate an industrial crisis, or he will be so victimised he will quit.
Fortunately for Joseph, he was rescued. At least for a time ... and not very comfortably. Yet it was obvious he was cut out for management; he was the right material for it. The trouble was, he knew it himself. He had a highly-developed sense of his own destiny, and made no secret of it. Is there anything more infuriating than a man who can look you in the eye and say: "Look, son, I'm management, you're labour; that's the way it is, and that's the way it is going to be." That is how the brothers saw those wretched dreams of his.
So here we have a young man who refuses to compromise his ideals at work, and insists that it is his destiny to take them with him one day into the board room. What a threat such a man will be to the prevailing order of things! Such a man is asking for trouble. And Joseph got it ... as has many a man since who combines high ideals with determination.
Joseph's fate at the hands of his brother's is not fairy-tale stuff. Men of that calibre have accidents arranged for them now, in our own day; their families are threatened; they themselves get beaten up in back alleys. It happens.
The irony is that Joseph might have escaped his brothers' bitterness and hatred if he had not been so foolishly conscientious. His father Jacob sent him on an inspection visit to his brothers in Shechem. When he got there, the brothers had moved on. But he received a report there that was enough to satisfy all the requirements of his assignment without risking his own neck any further. He could easily have gone back to Jacob from Shechem and told him, quite honestly, all his father needed to know. But Joseph's standards of integrity required him to go the second mile. He went on to Dothan so as to be able to bring back a first-hand account of how the family business was being handled. Here was a chance for Joseph to cut an awkward corner. He refused to do it. By being conscientious, he put himself at risk. And paid the price. Stupid boy! (as Mr Mannering used to say of his nephew in "Dad's Army.")
But was he stupid? ... being honest and trustworthy ... living by his standards ... sticking to principles?
As it turned out, he came within a whisker of paying for his ideals with his life. He ends up a slave with a rope round his neck. Before long he is up for auction in a foreign slave market, where he is bought by a wealthy Egyptian civil servant. What price Joseph's high-minded standards now? For the sake of his ideal, he has thrown his whole career down the drain. What chance has he now of ever inheriting the Managing Director's chair in the family business? He is finished.
And he never learns! Here he is on the bottom rung of the ladder again, and he serves his new boss with the same ideals. He does his work in Potiphar's house so conscientiously that soon he has the management of the whole household entrusted to him. It must have been galling - to do a Manager's job on a floor sweeper's wages. He was being used ... exploited ... in shameful fashion.
The opportunity Potiphar's wife presented him with must have been an acute temptation ... and not just at the sexual level.
We have no means of knowing how alluring Mrs Potiphar was, of course. For all we know, she may have had bow legs, buck teeth and bad breath (though in a country renowned in its day for its standards of beauty culture, I hardly think it likely in a high-ranking court official's wife). Even so, she may not have been the kind of woman to whom Joseph would be attracted.
But in his position, an affair with the boss's wife offered all sorts of tantalising possibilities. If he played his cards right, he might use his influence with his master's wife to lever himself out of slavery. It is not the last time a man has seen a chance to advance his career that way. This sort of thing happens all the time. What did it matter if Joseph had no real love for the woman? He himself was being used, wasn't he, by Potiphar? ... for Potiphar's own ends. Why shouldn't he use Potiphar's wife for his ends? It would be no more than justice, after all. This was Joseph's golden opportunity to get out and go up.
But again, this foolish man throws away his chances for the sake of his religion. And ends up in gaol. What a fool he is. Will he never learn?
Languishing there in gaol, he might well have brooded on the way his life had turned out and conclude that sticking to your religion was a mug's game. Where had it ever got him but into trouble? What had he ever got out of it but lost opportunities? What good was he anyway, here, in prison?
But still, Joseph does not yield. Even in prison his standards of honesty, trustworthiness, integrity and fair-mindedness are so strong in him that before long, he is being used again. He is made a prison trusty. Again he is doing a responsible job for someone else and getting no recognition for it. This time he is not being paid anything for it, either. He is worse off than he ever was. Humanly speaking there was no way out of the mess he was in.
And he is by this time a young man no longer. Time is running out, life is slipping through his fingers, and he is not getting anywhere. Religion has never done anything but make a fool of him, and rob him of everything in life worth having.
In all those years in prison, there was only ever one gleam of hope given him. That was when he interpreted the butler's dream, and opened the door of hope for the man. After all he had done for others, Joseph might have looked for a bit of gratitude from one person in life, at least. But no. Whatever it was Joseph trusted, it was not human nature!
The days, the weeks, the months dragged by, and it was obvious the butler had clean forgotten all about him. Everybody else in the world was on the up and up, but Joseph was still in the pits ... and no hope of ever getting out. And then the break came. We know the story. He at last found favour with the Pharaoh himself, and was exalted to the highest position of honour and responsibility in the nation.
The point that simply must not be missed is that when he was put there, in Pharaoh's house, he conducted himself to the same standards he had held to all his life. When at last Joseph was put into office, he carried through the same ideals of honesty and industry and trustworthiness, of plain downright honest service to the big job that he had all the little ones that had apparently gotten him nowhere.
Most men who aspire to high office, most men of great ambition, compromise themselves on their way to it, because at the time they see no other way to go forward, to keep the goal in view. So that when they arrive, they arrive corrupted. Stories of scandal and blackmail in high places break into the news often enough to tell us so. Men win their ambitions at the cost of their characters. Joseph won his character at the cost of his ambition.
We know in our heart of hearts that only the Josephs of this world are worthy of high office. And not all men of Joseph's faith and integrity get there. What then is the answer?
The answer is Joseph's own. We know from his reply to Potiphar's wife what the inspiration of his life was. "How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?" he said to her. How many Potiphar's' wives have had that said to them when they made their play?
Joseph built his whole life on two very simple and very old-fashioned qualities - trust and obedience. That was all.
Joseph did not trust the way of the world. He trusted God. Joseph did not trust his own shrewdness, either; in Bible language, he "leaned not to his own understanding." He committed his way to the Lord. And he ended up a man - a whole man, a true man, a worthy man. Not a pale shadow of a man, strutting up and down amid all the trappings - the false, empty trappings - of office. The only glory that belonged to his tenure of high office was the glory in his heart - the glory that was His God.
And then the final, surprising thing.
His life was fitted into an overall pattern of good, by God - a good so great that not even Joseph himself, ambitious as he once had been, could have imagined it back at the beginning.
Had he pushed his ambition - his own ambition - and succeeded, at any of those stages along the way, his self-wrought success would have been paltry, pitiable, pathetic beside the role into which God fitted him because he kept faith. What was it he said to his brothers at the end? "God sent me before you to save life. It was not you that sent me here, but God. As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be saved alive, as at this day." Can any ambition of our own measure up to the ambition God has for us? What will we do? ... sell His kingdom for some bauble that catches our fancy? Let God determine our careers. Our part is to trust Him - really to trust Him the whole way - so to trust Him that we obey in little things even when to do so seems to close life's horizons in on us. God will do a better thing; the horizons are for Him to unfold.
An illustration of this came home to me forcibly some time ago.
The growth and development of our bodies is determined by a blue-print built into every cell of our bodies - the DNA code, as the biochemists call it. There is a chromosome pattern, a set of genes, that determines the particular development of every part of us, from our curly hair and blue eyes to the hair on our chests and the shape of our toes. But there is no gene that determines the overall shape of the finished product, no gene that governs the shape of our bodies. There is a gene for every bit of our bodies, but none for the whole. It is just that when the bits are all carried through properly, they produce the balanced proportions of the full-grown body. None of the genes is working to an overall design. They just do their bit ... and the overall design appears. That was conceived by God.
It is the same with our lives, career-wise. All we are required to do is to give our little obediences from day to day as they arise, and to do this in the faith that God will blend them to a finished design at which even we ourselves will one day wonder.
Psalm 105:16 - 22 summarises Joseph's story this way:
"When God summoned a famine on the land, and broke every staff of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters, his neck was put in a collar of iron. Until what he had said came to pass the word of the Lord tested him. The king sent and released him, the ruler of the peoples set him free; he made him lord of his house, and ruler of all his possessions, to instruct his princes at his pleasure, and to teach his elders wisdom."
God had a care through all these tumultuous events...
... for Jacob's sons, mean-minded though they were
... for prisoners, forgotten people though they were
... for Joseph, lonely and oppressed though he was
... for Egyptians, strangers to Him though they were
... for the world at large.
In the long run events physical, commercial, spiritual, accidental, even diabolical - all - were woven into a pattern providential.
I do not know how God does that. He over-rides no-one's freedom in the process; He pulls no strings, making puppets of people. But somehow the free choices of a great many men and women are mysteriously woven into a pattern of His choosing - and all because one man at the heart of them is giving God his faith and obedience ... almost 'blind' too! We give God our daily small obediences, and He does that still. All we see is the small area of life around us, and very rarely do we discern the broader canvas on which He is sketching our obscure contribution, but He is doing it, all the time. Martin Luther, asked near the end of his life if he felt the had been guided by God, answered, "God has led me, yes ... like an old, blind horse.")
We do not all end up like Joseph, of course. Some faithful and obedient folk end their lives, not in high office surrounded by honours, but in humiliation surrounded by ignominy ... even disease and a martyr's death. But it is our faith that even so, our lives have been fitted into a grand design, called the Kingdom of God, which will be "marvelled at in all them that believe."
Shall we build a kingdom of our own, or the Kingdom of God?
How His kingdom gets built is a mystery; it always has been, it always will be. But get built it does. The building blocks with which God builds it are trust and obedience; that is all. We give those two simple materials into His hands and let Him, like bricks, lay them where He will. The way the whole structure grows is up to Him.
God's uncanny knack of working life out that way is something we have a name for: we call it His Providence. The Kingdom He builds is the only one worth building - the only one in the end that will even stand.
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