Genesis 39:1 Commentary and Bible Study

in the providence of God, the one to whom he is sold is this man Potiphar, a chief officer of Pharaoh’s crack troops in defending the capital, the captain of the guard. That is a very considerable office. That was the section of the Egyptian army which was charged with guarding Pharaoh and his palace, and maintaining his power. They didn’t want betrayal from captain of the guard, and therefore this man would have been so well-paid that it wasn’t worth his while to rebel. So Potiphar was a considerable person. He is to be the first one to provide a home for Joseph. In the providence of God Joseph doesn't go into the brickyards, into the rough areas to break stones and to work as a navvy. As we read these events, we can bring all the hindsight that Scripture gives us, and observe the providence of God unfolding before our eyes. He is sold into the household of Potiphar where his intelligence can be recognized and his particular talents and gifts.Even now the dream is being fulfilled, but in ways which show us that God indeed moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. How many actors carry out their role, unaware of the part they are playing in the drama of redemption, but their part is vital to the whole. The Ishmaelites conveyed Joseph to the very place that God wanted him to be. Hall says, ‘Little did they think that they had in their hands the lord of Egypt, the jewel of the world.’ Yet they played their part skilfully and no doubt treated Joseph with the contempt that Satan intended in an effort to convince him that he was utterly rejected by God. At this time Joseph could see nothing of where he was going. He surely thought often of his boyhood dreams in these dark times, which were from God, and he knew it, and which were respected to a large degree by his father. They told him that he would be the preeminent son, and he would be the one upon whom all the others would one day depend. He believed that, we can assume, not in terms of being a superior person, but in terms of being the provider and the saviour of his family and all the others. But it seemed that obstacle was laid on obstacle, making the dreams’ fulfilment very obscure. How abandoned he must have felt, far from his father’s love, sold from one person to another – an object to be traded – unable to get word to him, though he knew his father would have done anything to deliver him. For now he was a slave and a nobody, with no identity of his own, just at his master’s beck and call. But he expected that God would one day deliver him and promote him and use him somehow and prepare him for that great day. In hindsight, how often he would have looked back at all the marvellous and unlikely steps in his life which were all superintended by God.