“And as soon as she saw that he had left his garment in her hand and had fled out of the house, she called to the men of her household and said to them, “See, he has brought among us a Hebrew to laugh at us. He came in to me to lie with me, and I cried out with a loud voice. And as soon as he heard that I lifted up my voice and cried out, he left his garment beside me and fled and got out of the house.” Then she laid up his garment by her until his master came home, and she told him the same story, saying, “The Hebrew servant, whom you have brought among us, came in to me to laugh at me. But as soon as I lifted up my voice and cried, he left his garment beside me and fled out of the house.””
Genesis 39:13-18 ESV
Potiphar’s wife is a hero. Well, to the world and by its standard of self, that is.
She wants something and plots to get it. In this case, she wants the handsome young Hebrew that is her husband’s most trusted slave. She makes advances. No doubt she had tried to flirt. Surely, as these things go, she usually got what she wanted in life.
The thing to know about sin is that it always excites within us the twisted ambition of desiring what isn’t ours to have. Buddhism, as far as it goes, is correct to say that it is desire which breeds the innumerable suffering afflicting mankind and his homes, his businesses, and indeed, his churches too. What Buddhism misses, though, is that it’s man’s sin that draws him into such wants. He wants the littles because he deeply and truly desires the bigs, which is to say, his great want is total autonomy.
Most men and women are quiet tyrants. They want god-like powers so that they can have what they want in their own little world, their private sphere. This isn’t so much to ask, he tells himself. But the desire is to be as one’s own god and which is why contentment and thankfulness are foreign but complaining is the human condition.
Unfulfilled desire draws the madness of sin and conflict out of men and women. One tepid step into darkness at a time.
It’s for this reason that the secular world makes heroes of those who connive and scheme to get their way. We watch TV dramas and movies about it. And the thing that unites every one of them is that no one ever bothers in these dramas to stop and pray to the Lord, nor submit to Him.
So, Potiphar’s wife is such a hero. When subtlety doesn’t prevail, she makes sure she’s alone with the object of her desire. And that’s the other thing sin does. It dehumanizes others as pawns on the chessboard of our passions. Rather than have a biblical worldview of life and the world around us, humanism sees through the eyes of ambition and desire. Rather than look at the world as His, we see what we want. Instead of seeing Him as our desire and our happiness, we want some thing or another and we must get our way.
“I want…I must have…”
These are the mantras of those who will use every resource, even invoke the name of the Lord Himself, in the attempt to quench the insatiable thirst of iniquity’s great con: the desire for just a little more.
If there is something you desire more than humble patience on the Lord, and true faithfulness to Him in the circumstances you’re in, that thing will be the weapon the Enemy uses to bludgeon your soul. He will assuredly lay waste to your life and batter you with it. Potiphar’s wife was in this way not unlike Cain in killing Abel only she had a different desire and used a weapon of lies. The hands that throw Joseph in jail were not hers directly but were animated by her sinful lie.
This is why we live in a world of lies, of prevarications, lawyers, bureaucrats, politicians and the like. To tell the truth is to love the truth and the truth is full of faith. Sin is always hostile to faith. The world of corrupt politics is the world of lies and violence. The lies we spew are the out-workings of the intensity of our grand desire to be our own god and get our way no matter what the cost to others. This is, be sure, at the bottom of it all, the great and vicious sin in our hearts that we dare not admit to ourselves nor others. We’re well-dressed Gollum’s who are clever enough to surround our ambition with a bodyguard of nice.
In the most decayed spiritual cases, the worst of us are the best dressed and have the best manners.
We must forever be vigilant to want God more than anything else for, make no mistake, Potiphar’s wife is our destiny, not Joseph lest we cling to Him in faith.
This is the true psychology of man that we don’t want to accept.
Man without submission to God is at epistemic war with Him. This means that the fleshly mind will insist upon interpreting the facts around him according to the principle of his ambition. Potiphar’s wife was a good liar because she’d been training in deceit her entire life. The difference between her and most of us is that she had the position and resources as the wife of a high official to indulge her tyrannical quests.
When Jesus met Nathaniel He said of the young man something that should melt our hearts. The Lord called him a true Israelite in whom there’s no deceit (John 1:47). Oh, what a precious commendation from the Lord. How much does our heart leap at such a thing or do we have our mind’s set on some scheme or another? Watch how you pray and what you pray for, Christian! Be warned:
“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.”
Romans 1:21-25 ESV
Our psychology today isn’t biblical. It rejects God’s definition of us as sinners who willfully and without excuse exchange the truth for a lie. Oh, how many of us there are in the pews who call ourselves the Lord’s men and women and yet say with Pilate, “what is truth?” How many of us will babble on like the rich fool about “I, me, mine…”? Indeed, the parable of the rich fool is all about getting our way in this world despite God and, therefore, despite others. Who cares who we step on or over when our goal is our ambition! And if our goal isn’t faith, if it isn’t the righteousness of God and the glorification of His name, then it must be some earthly thing and that’s the danger.
The false prayers of deceived or phony Christians center on themselves. They treat God like a genie in the bottle and petition Him for their own glory. Rather than a submission to the sovereign God, the prayers of the deceived are attempted manipulation of Him.
So, Potiphar’s bride was spurned and in that black belt level skill of hers she immediately summoned her creative powers of deceit to reframe the world. If she couldn’t have Joseph, she would make him suffer. There’s no prayerful contemplation, no wrestling with her conscience, because the only counsel sin will keep is with itself. Sinners never ask direct questions. They live and relate in shadows of truth. They are anti-Nathaniel. They see all and everything as opportunities to advance themselves. There is no sin they cannot justify on their own part. Conversely, there’s nothing in anyone else they can’t twist into something sinister. They have telescopic vision that spies every speck of every person and every single speck is due, in their reasoning, to some deep and sinister hidden motive.
Potiphar’s wife shows us this in a nutshell.
Joseph, she says, is a filthy Hebrew who’s there to infiltrate and overrule. He’s there to mock and shame her and all Egyptians. So, she evangelizes. Not to save, but to separate. This is the path of sinners far and wide. Watch them! It is for destruction of others that they advocate, never redemption. They never confront others in sin, but gossip and slander behind their backs in order to destroy.
Such is Joseph’s treatment for the simple reason that he would not be used by her and for her.
The evil bride of Potiphar projects her own motives onto Joseph. Read her lie carefully. You’ll notice that, like Adam blaming Eve on God, she mentions that Joseph was brought in by Potiphar. It’s never your fault! Sin makes us masters of deflection. We must beware.
Then watch! She says that “the Hebrew” wished to use her as a plaything, to mock and insult her. Let’s take careful note of how she’s stripped him of personhood. He’s a Hebrew slave. A Hebrew. Just this thing and not a person. And he was there as a Hebrew, not a man, not a human being, and his sole purpose was to use and mock her and Egypt.
How absurd can you get!
How does a slave use and mock his masters exactly? What power did Joseph have that he was abusing? Her whole line of reasoning makes no sense and that’s always the thing about sin. It’s illogical and fails under cross examination.
We are commanded to show no partiality, by the way. We’re told to carefully assess an accusation and get both sides of a story (Proverbs 18:17). Christians have stopped being salt and light in this increasingly secular world because we’ve ceased to value wisdom. Truth exists and matters for the very reason that Jesus Christ is the Truth. Lies and deceit are the work of all those who oppose Him. Thus, we must beware that we tell the truth all the way through our inner being. That’s why we must watch our prayers for in them we see our deepest focus.
And that’s also why we must be vigilant in both how we talk about others and how we evaluate what’s said about them too. We must learn more and more to value what God values rather than seeing the world through the fleshly lens. To critique others or to hear critique of them absent the gospel is a sure sign of sin.
Let us pray that we learn the nearly lost skill of seeing the beams in our own eyes through a more careful and honest evaluation of ourselves before the Lord. What a dangerous game we play, living as though He doesn’t mind our perpetual analysis of others while excusing ourselves.
When a man or woman understands their dire need of grace from God, and only then, are they free to love. And live. To live is to live in faith (Romans 1:17).
Where is the gospel of Jesus Christ in this?
That’s the main thing always.
The very fact that Potiphar’s wife didn’t simply report a specific event but also added a clear and sinister motive is instructive for us. How would she know this about Joseph? Isn’t this the case so much in our day? A slanderous label is slapped immediately upon everyone with whom we disagree. They’re racist or haters or stuff like that. Where is the call to repent for a specific sin?
In all, let us tread carefully. Always.
We would all like to see ourselves as Joseph here. Let us go to Him humbly in prayer, knowing we’re sinners. Let us do that instead and leave the rest to Him.
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