Family is how Jesus sees us 

The parallel with Joseph and Jesus is captured beautifully in Genesis 39:8, when Joseph fends off Potiphar’s wife by saying, “With me in charge (of managing the Potiphar household) my master does not concern himself with anything in the house; everything he owns he has entrusted to my care. No one is greater in this house than I am.” He would, therefore, stay faithful to the one who appointed him, which would definitely exclude a sexual relationship with his master’s wife (9). 

In John 16:15 Jesus then said the same of himself too: “All that belongs to the Father is mine.” So God entrusted everything he owned to Jesus, which meant his entire household too, because God looks upon this planet and us humans as his “house,” Hebrews 3:2. And he allotted Jesus as “a son over his house,” because no one was greater than Jesus in God’s own household either. But Jesus was also “a son,” an intimate and utterly trusted member of God’s own family – so, just like Joseph, “Jesus was faithful to the one who appointed him” (2), and nothing would tempt him to break his Father’s faith in him either. 

And temptation there would be, because, like Joseph in Genesis 49:23, Jesus would also be “viciously attacked by people who hated him.” Joseph “remained steady,” however, “because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob” (24). And in Hebrews 5:7 it was crying out to God that kept Jesus from caving in too.

But with both Joseph and Jesus there was another reason for them remaining faithful to God, no matter what stress or temptation they faced. There’s a clue in Hebrews 3:6 which says, “Christ is faithful as a son over God’s house,” the Greek word for “house” being oikon, which also means “home” and “family,” which is such a fitting word, because in Hebrews 2:11, family is how Jesus sees us; he and we are members “of the same family.”

And to get a grasp of what that means to him we have Joseph, who, despite his brothers wanting him dead and selling him into slavery, “wept loudly” when making himself known to them in Egypt, Genesis 45:1-2. Despite all they’d done to him, he loved them, because family was the only lens he saw them through. And because of that the nation of Israel was born, and from Israel came Jesus who would look upon all humanity through the same lens. And fortunate that is, when reading about Jacob’s twelfth son “Benjamin, a ravenous wolf”….(next blog)