The Faith of Joseph

God never blessed me with the opportunity to father a child. My oldest two were adopted when they were 4 years old and my youngest two came to me through marriage.
It wasn’t until my grandson, Mateo, was born that I was able to be a part of the process of watching someone you love grow in the womb and then seeing them moments after they are born. He just celebrated his third birthday and he is the joy of our lives.
I think I know a little bit about how Joseph must have felt raising a child as his son that was not biologically his son. The child’s origin soon fades to the background and you are enveloped by the warmth and love of raising that child from an infant through the stages of his growth and development.
I can identify with that.
I can’t identify with what it must have been like to find out that your wife to be is pregnant and that you, after saving yourself for marriage and resisting temptation despite the passion burning in your loins for your betrothed, are not the father.
Talk about feeling betrayed. In the Jewish tradition he had every right to walk her out to the town square to have her stoned. But that wasn’t Joseph. Instead, he would quietly dissolve his engagement and go on with his life. After all, denouncing her publicly would only serve to humiliate him. Besides, this turn of events just didn’t seem to mesh with whom he thought Mary to be. She was a pure, devout woman. How could this have happened?
He goes to bed and I can only imagine it took him half the night to fall asleep as his mind went over his predicament from every possible angle. Exhausted though, he finally did drift off to sleep and it was only then when he stilled his mind that God to be able to talk to him in a dream.
Matt 1:20-21 “an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, "Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins."
That must have been some dream. I don’t know about you but I know that as soon as I woke up I would have second guessed that dream. Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit, seriously? There was no man involved…  yeah right.
It says a lot about his faith that a couple of verses later it says this:
Matt 1:24 When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.
This is obviously an abbreviated, second hand account of the birth of Jesus so we don’t really know what went through Joseph’s mind when he awoke that morning. All we do know it that ultimately he was obedient to God, took Mary as his wife and took on the job of being a father to Immanuel, “God with us” who was the first man since Adam, not to have been come from an earthly father. Furthermore, he did not claim his rights as a husband until after Jesus was born.
That is faith.
As a result of his faith, even though Jesus was not born of his seed, it is assigned to him to be the recognized as the father and it is his lineage, not Mary’s,which is counted as tracing back to David and ultimately to the first Adam. Joseph vouched for Mary and God vouched for Joseph.
We don’t know a lot about Joseph, but we do know this; when it counted, Joseph was a man who against all odds acted on his faith.
I pray that I can be that yielded and obedient.

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