"But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love," giving him favor with the keeper of the prison (a paraphrase of Genesis 39:21).

Someone might ask, "Why didn't God expose the lie of Potiphar's wife?" It would have made Joseph's life easier, for in spite of God's blessings, Joseph describes his life as one of hardship and affliction (Genesis 41:51–52).

Yet such an outcome was not part of God's purpose and plan. God would use Joseph's suffering to redeem his brothers' hatred and to save the still-small house of Israel — seventy-five people when they entered Egypt, according to Acts 7:14 — from perishing in a severe famine (Genesis 50:20).

One might argue that God could have prevented the famine, making Joseph's sufferings and rise to power unnecessary.

If we go down this road of what God could have done or should have done, we only show ourselves foolish, for we end up second-guessing God and presenting ourselves — mere creatures — as wiser than our Creator.

Rather than defending or criticizing any particular act of God, the wiser perspective is to recognize that God works everything according to His sovereign and good will to bring the greatest glory to His name. This is essentially what Paul writes: "In him we have obtained an inheritance," having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to His will, so that we might be to the praise of His glory (a paraphrase of Ephesians 1:11–12).

Our chief end is not our own good but God's glory — and, as the catechism says, to enjoy Him forever. We were not created simply to enjoy ever greater benefits from God, but to enjoy Him, our greatest benefit, forever. When will we understand that we were not created for our glory but for His? When will we recognize that our calling is not to fulfill our own dreams and aspirations but to faithfully serve His perfect and holy will?

Let this be food for thought as we begin another new year graciously granted to us by God.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Genesis 39 is framed by a refrain: "The Lord was with Joseph" (39:2, 3, 21, 23). It appears twice in Potiphar's house, where Joseph prospered, and twice in prison, where he was unjustly confined. The narrator wants readers to see that God's presence was not measured by Joseph's circumstances. In the pit, in slavery, under false accusation, and in prison, the Lord was with him. The famous "steadfast love" (chesed) of 39:21 is the covenant word used throughout the Old Testament for God's faithful love to His people.

The comment's counsel against second-guessing God is well grounded; it is essentially God's own answer to Job (see #2206, #2310). It is also worth noticing that the story itself eventually lets Joseph — and the reader — see much of the purpose that was hidden at the time (45:5–8; 50:20). Scripture does not forbid asking "why" in lament; Joseph's brothers asked it (42:28), and the psalmists ask it often. What it cautions against is presuming to judge God's goodness from a single chapter of a longer story that only He can see whole.

"Yet the chief cupbearer did not remember Joseph, but forgot him" (Genesis 40:23).

The cupbearer forgot Joseph for two full years (cf. Genesis 41:1). When we read this account, we may feel some distress at the injustice of Joseph's situation. Up to this time, and for about thirteen years, he had experienced nothing but hardship (cf. Genesis 37:2 and 41:46). His brothers hated him and sold him into slavery. He was sold again to Potiphar. He was falsely accused and imprisoned. Then he was forgotten in prison by the very man he had helped.

But Scripture makes clear that these misfortunes must not be explained as coincidence or bad luck. God's hand was present in every part of Joseph's life. The Lord was with Joseph in Potiphar's house (cf. Genesis 39:5). The Lord was with Joseph in the Egyptian prison (cf. Genesis 39:21). And it was the Lord who revealed the interpretation of the cupbearer's and baker's dreams.

When Joseph is raised to power, he acknowledges God's providence in the years of suffering that brought him to the place where he could save Israel: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good," to bring about the saving of many lives (cf. Genesis 50:20).

Friends, I am reminded again that God sometimes — even often — uses suffering to accomplish His good purposes. He certainly did so in bringing Christ to glory. So in spite of suffering, God is in control. He always accomplishes His purposes. Therefore we ought not to fret or despair when we encounter trials. We know who is Lord over trials.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Genesis 40:23 is one of the quietest and most painful verses in the Joseph narrative. Joseph had asked one small favor — "remember me... and mention me to Pharaoh" (40:14) — and the man forgot. The Hebrew doubles the point: he "did not remember" and he "forgot." Two more years passed in prison.

Yet the timing turned out to be everything. Had the cupbearer remembered immediately, Joseph might have been released as a favor to a foreign slave; instead, he was remembered at the precise moment when Pharaoh needed a dream interpreted, which brought Joseph before the throne and into authority over Egypt (41:9–14). What looked like two wasted years was, in retrospect, exactly the right delay. Psalm 105:17–19 reflects on this period: God "sent a man ahead of them, Joseph," whose feet were hurt with fetters, "until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him." The testing had an appointed end. The comment's confidence — that God is Lord over trials — is precisely what Joseph's story is told to teach.

And it came about at that time, that Judah departed from his brothers and visited a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah. Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua; and he took her and went in to her (Genesis 38:1–2).

I somewhat commented on this in a previous year, but I want to highlight this event because some of you may miss its significance. Judah chose a Canaanite woman as his wife!

Do you recall what Abraham said to his servant when he sent him to get a wife for Isaac? He made his servant swear by God that he would not get a wife from among the Canaanites:

Please place your hand under my thigh, and I will make you swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth, that you shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I live... Beware that you do not take my son back there! (Genesis 24:2–3,6).

Remember how Isaac and Rebekah responded to Esau's taking Canaanite wives?

When Esau was forty years old he married Judith the daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath the daughter of Elon the Hittite; and they brought grief to Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 26:34–35; cf. 36:2; 28:8).

What is more, they forbade Jacob from getting a wife from among the Canaanites:

You shall not take a wife from the daughters of Canaan (Genesis 28:1).

And we know that when Israel was finally given the land of Canaan in keeping with God's covenant promise, God's chief command was that they exterminate them and be careful never to intermarry with them. There were no restrictions on their marrying Egyptians, Moabites, Ammonites, what have you, but not the people living in the land of Canaan. Even before God issued this command the patriarchs of Israel understood that this was forbidden, from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob.

However, Judah violates this understood restriction. As a result, at least the first two of his sons are killed by the LORD. Now, the text says that they were killed because Er was "evil in the sight of the LORD" and Onan committed an evil deed that was "displeasing in the sight of the LORD" (Genesis 38:7,10); however, there were others that perpetrated much worse deeds, but God did not take their lives. Now, this is only conjecture, but perhaps beyond the evil deeds, God was displeased with these sons because they were the offspring of a Canaanite woman.

You know the rest of the story. Judah ends up having children by his daughter-in-law Tamar, presumably a Hebrew woman. Though this was incestuous, perhaps the union with the Canaanite woman was a greater sin in the eyes of the LORD.

Consider how this story fits into Moses' overall narrative given to the children of Israel about to enter the Promised Land of Canaan. They were the immediate audience for the books Genesis through Deuteronomy. This account of Judah and Tamar would have supplied a vivid example of God's displeasure over intermarriage with Canaanites.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The original notices a genuine tension between Judah’s marriage and the earlier concern that Isaac and Jacob not take Canaanite wives. Genesis places the patriarchal family’s future within a land whose inhabitants and practices will later become a major issue in Israel’s covenant life. The references to Abraham’s instructions and Esau’s marriages therefore provide relevant narrative context. The marriage is not an insignificant detail merely because Genesis 38 quickly moves to Judah’s sons.

The proposed explanation of their deaths, however, must remain distinct from what the narrator actually states. Er is described as wicked in the Lord’s sight, and Onan’s deliberate refusal to provide offspring for his brother is identified as displeasing to the Lord. The text does not say that either is killed because of Canaanite ancestry. Nor does it identify Tamar as Hebrew. Her ancestry is not supplied in the chapter. Using an unstated ethnic contrast to explain divine judgment would go beyond the evidence and risk obscuring the moral actions the passage does name.

The broader restrictions on intermarriage also cannot be summarized as though no other considerations ever applied outside Canaan. Deuteronomy 7:3–4 connects its prohibition with the danger of being turned from the Lord to other gods. The covenant concern is allegiance, and the wider law contains additional distinctions concerning different peoples and communal participation. These passages require careful contextual reading. They do not authorize modern readers to rank the worth of people by ancestry or to assume that mixed ancestry makes a child especially liable to judgment.

Tamar’s treatment is central to the chapter’s moral development. Judah withholds Shelah after implying that she should wait for him, leaving her future unresolved. When the truth is exposed, Judah acknowledges that she is more righteous than he because he did not give her to his son. That confession directs attention toward his failure of obligation. The narrative does not make every feature of the encounter ideal, but it prevents Judah from retaining the moral high ground by condemning Tamar while concealing his own part in her vulnerability.

The placement of Genesis 38 within Joseph’s story also invites comparison. While Judah’s conduct reveals serious failure, Joseph will face a sexual demand in Egypt and refuse it. Later Judah himself changes, offering to remain as a slave in Benjamin’s place. The family’s story therefore includes the possibility of moral transformation, not merely the sorting of people into fixed categories based on descent. Matthew 1’s inclusion of Tamar and Perez in Jesus’ genealogy further shows that God’s redemptive purpose proceeds through this troubled history.

A responsible application begins with the obligations the text exposes: sexual conduct, truthfulness, care for vulnerable family members, and willingness to acknowledge wrongdoing. The passage invites us to ask whether we use another person’s supposed status to avoid examining our own conduct. Judah’s decisive words are a confession of his failure, not an accusation against Tamar’s ancestry. Preserving that emphasis allows the warning about covenant faithfulness to remain morally searching without turning conjecture into an ethnic explanation of divine judgment.

We read that Joseph's master saw the LORD was with him, and that the LORD made everything he did prosper (Genesis 39:3). I find this amazing — how does this Egyptian officer know anything about the LORD? Later, Potiphar's wife recognizes Joseph as a Hebrew (Genesis 39:17). The Ishmaelites who sold Joseph were themselves related to him through their common great-grandfather Abraham, and they may have told the officer and his household that Joseph was a Hebrew. Along the way, perhaps through Joseph's own testimony (Genesis 39:9), they may have learned that he worshiped the LORD.

I raise this because while Abraham was given the covenant to be a blessing to the world (Genesis 12:1–3), apart from the testimony of personal faithfulness there is little indication of active preaching or evangelizing by these early patriarchs. The primary way God brought knowledge of Himself to the world throughout the Old Testament was through His dealings with His own people Israel.

I bring that up to contrast it with the primary means God chose in the New Testament, which is active preaching, teaching, and evangelism. You cannot study both Testaments without noticing that God chose to reveal Himself in different ways at different times.

AI-Expanded Reflection

The contrast this comment draws is real and well observed — the Old Testament's dominant model is a people whose common life is meant to be visible to surrounding nations, while the New Testament's is a movement sent outward. Both models appear in both Testaments, though, and neither replaces the other cleanly. Jonah is sent to Nineveh; Peter tells believers to live such lives among their neighbors that observers are drawn to glorify God (1 Peter 2:12).

On the inference the comment moves toward — that the New Testament does not support the idea that people will not hear without our evangelism — that reading is contested, and Romans 10:14–15 is the passage usually set against it, where Paul asks how anyone can call on one they have not believed in, believe in one they have not heard of, or hear without someone preaching. Christians hold a range of positions here, from the view that God ordinarily works through human proclamation while remaining free to work otherwise, to stronger claims in either direction. What the comment gets right regardless is that the outcome does not rest on the messenger's adequacy — a point the Joseph narrative illustrates well, since Joseph appears to have influenced an Egyptian household without ever setting out to.

What I love about the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is what Joseph actually says to her — "how then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?" (Genesis 39:9). We often think about how we've wronged someone, or how they've wronged us — forgetting that ultimately, sin is committed against God Himself. Joseph had exactly the right perspective, and I think that same perspective is what can help us when we face our own temptations.

In a case like adultery, if a husband or wife only thinks about their spouse, it's easy to justify their actions ("my husband doesn't love me anyway," "my wife doesn't respect me," "my marriage is already dead") — but if we think instead about God, and how what we do or say is sinful in His sight, I think we'd think twice.

Since we're surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let's lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily entangles us, running with endurance the race set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who endured the cross for the joy set before Him, despising its shame, now seated at God's right hand (a paraphrase of Hebrews 12:1–2).

Thank You, Lord Jesus, for perfecting my faith as I keep my eyes on You. Amen.

AI-Expanded Reflection

Joseph's specific phrasing here is worth noting alongside a nearly identical example centuries later — David, confronted over his own adultery and the murder it led to, confesses in almost the same terms, telling God that against Him, and Him only, he has sinned (a paraphrase of Psalm 51:4), even though his sin obviously harmed Bathsheba and Uriah directly too. Joseph resisted the exact sin David later fell into, and both men, remarkably, land on the identical theological framing when the moment of truth arrives — proof this perspective isn't simply a clever resistance technique, but the accurate way Scripture consistently understands what sexual sin actually is at its deepest level.

One of our members asked, "why is this disturbing story of Judah and Tamar included in the Genesis account?" Here's my response:

The story of Judah and Tamar is a fascinating interlude that would otherwise move naturally from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. I originally thought it was included to show God sovereignly preserving the Messianic bloodline's purity — but then I remembered Rahab the Canaanite and Ruth the Moabitess were also part of Jesus's line.

Reading it again, another thought comes to mind. This entire history, from Genesis through Deuteronomy, was written by Moses for the immediate guidance of the generation about to possess Canaan. God's strict warning was to completely destroy the land's inhabitants and never intermarry with them, since intermarriage would corrupt Israel into idolatry (cf. Deuteronomy 7:1–5). We already saw exactly this kind of corruption in Genesis 6, when Seth's godly line intermarried with Cain's ungodly line, provoking God to destroy the whole world. Abraham similarly made his servant swear not to find Isaac a wife among Canaan's people, and Jacob was displeased when Esau took Canaanite wives, sending Jacob away instead to find one among their own Hebrew relatives. Even before the Mosaic Law was formally given, there seems to have been some earlier understanding of God's will regarding intermarriage with Canaan's inhabitants.

Yet here, Judah takes a Canaanite wife himself. Before she died, she bore him three sons, two of whom died for their own wickedness. Tamar isn't given to Judah's remaining son Shelah, since Judah fears he might die too — violating the Levirate law requiring the nearest living relative to provide offspring for a deceased relative's line. Tamar understands this, and even poses as a prostitute to force Judah, her own father-in-law, to fulfill this duty. In doing so, Judah gains two more sons, through one of whom would eventually come King David, and ultimately Jesus the Messiah.

Could Moses have included this detailed account specifically to highlight the negative consequences of intermarriage, and of disobedience more generally? By Moses's own day, Judah was already recognized as the largest, most prominent of Israel's twelve tribes — how pointed an example, then, to show that this leading tribe might never have existed at all, apart from God's own grace preserving its line even through Tamar's deception and prostitution. Had Judah simply obeyed God, this ignoble chapter might never have been necessary. Even a generation earlier, had Isaac followed God's stated preference for Jacob rather than favoring his firstborn Esau, Jacob and Rebekah's own deceptions might have been avoidable too. Moses's overall assessment of Israel in his own day was that they'd been rebellious against the LORD from the very day He'd known them (a paraphrase of Deuteronomy 9:24) — seeds of that rebellion may well have been sown through choices made generations earlier by their own ancestors.

Another member asked, "why is such a detailed account given of the births of Perez and Zerah?" Here's my response:

Isn't it striking how much conflict runs through Abraham's whole genealogy — Isaac with Ishmael, Jacob with Esau, Joseph with his brothers, and now even in the birth of Perez and Zerah? Recall that at Jacob and Esau's birth, the younger Jacob was grasping his older brother's heel, and Rebekah was told the older would serve the younger. Similarly here, though Zerah's hand emerged first, marked with a scarlet thread to verify it, it's Perez ("breach") who ultimately becomes the heir. These recurring events seem to reveal God sovereignly intervening in human affairs to accomplish His own will regardless of custom or expectation. He is God, not subject to human tradition, and nothing can thwart His plans — as Isaiah asks rhetorically, once the LORD of Hosts has purposed something, who can annul it; once His hand is stretched out, who can turn it back (a paraphrase of Isaiah 14:27)?

AI-Expanded Reflection

The pattern this comment traces — younger displacing older, again and again throughout Genesis — is worth naming as a deliberate, recurring theme rather than coincidence: Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph (the eleventh son) elevated above his brothers, and now Perez over Zerah. Genesis seems to be making a consistent theological point through this repetition — God's choices don't follow the world's expectations about birth order, status, or custom, over and over, until the pattern becomes unmistakable. By the time readers reach Perez's unexpected precedence, the book has already trained them not to be surprised by it.