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WHOSE COAT ARE YOU WEARING?

Have you ever seen these sci-fi programs on TV where there’s a kind of “parallel universe,” and if you chose y instead of the x you originally lived with — well, your life went down a completely different, and maybe very dark, path? I’d like to do a bit of that today, quoting as we begin from a great book entitled Joseph: Beloved — Hated — Exalted, by F. B. Meyer. He points out that sinful temptations, such as Joseph faced with the beautiful seductress, Mrs. Potiphar, often come at the best of times.

“We may expect temptation,” he writes, “in the days of prosperity and ease rather than in those of privation and toil. Not on the glacier slopes of the Alps, but in the sunny plains of the Campagna; not when the youth is climbing arduously the steep ladder of fame, but when he has entered the golden portals; not where men frown, but where they smile sweet exquisite smiles of flattery — it is there, it is there, that the temptress lies in wait! Beware!”

That’s a secondhand quote, by the way, which we found in the recent Christian bestseller, Joseph: A Man of Integrity and Forgiveness, by Charles Swindoll.

But I want for you to picture with me this alternate story line, the road never taken — but let’s pretend. Mrs. Potiphar comes to Joseph, with her miniskirt hiked up and her blouse partly unbuttoned, and with the mansion staff all sent into town for concocted errands. And she makes her pitch to him. “Let’s go to bed.” And imagine with me that Joseph, after a brief protest, gives in. They have an affair. If they get caught, Potiphar — who was “chief of the executioners,” we’re told by Jewish historian Alfred Edersheim — has this brazen servant boy beheaded. End of story. Or let’s say Joseph and Mrs. Potiphar don’t get caught, and for a number of months, they have this little Mrs. Robinson-Dustin Hoffman thing going. They break it off, they don’t break it off; Joseph stays a servant, he gets traded off to some other Egyptian big shot. Either way, Joseph never rises up to be anything more than “master of the house” and an Egyptian gigolo. However it plays out, it’s a pretty small story.

In his book, Trials of Great Men of the Bible — and thanks again to Swindoll for sharing it — Clarence Edward Macartney tells it correctly and imagines the fateful scene this way:

“This was no ordinary temptation. Joseph was not a stone, a mummy, but a red-blooded young man in his late twenties. It was not one temptation on one day, but a repeated temptation . . . An old story tells how when Joseph began to talk about God to the temptress, she flung her skirt over the bust of the god that stood in the chamber and said, ‘Now, God will not see.’ But Joseph answered, ‘My God sees!’”

Well, friend, this is in Genesis chapter 39, and for 13 weeks now we’ve been many pages and many centuries removed from the Potiphar era; we’ve been walking the streets of Ephesus with the apostle Paul instead. And here in the middle of his “put on the whole armor of God” sermon, Paul has this very telling battle order:

“Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist” — those were yesterday’s orders, you recall — “with the breastplate of righteousness in place.”

If you remember from Ben-Hur and from King of Kings and some of those old Roman-legion biblical sagas, you have a mental picture of that metal covering the soldiers had protecting their chests: heart, lungs, liver, stomach. If you stubbed your toe on the cobblestones of Jerusalem, that was one thing, but you didn’t want your vital organs exposed. So you always had on that breastplate. Francis Foulkes writes, in his Tyndale New Testament Commentary:

“As the breastplate covers the heart of the soldier, righteousness preserves the life of the believer, and protects the ‘vital organs’ of spiritual life.”

There may not be a Bible story where this is more clearly demonstrated than in the life of Joseph. When this steamy temptation came to him, he was protected by the breastplate of righteousness. He gave the unusual, unexpected answer: “No!”

“How then could I do such a wicked thing and sin against God?” he asks.

And what is the result of his decision? That breastplate of righteousness doesn’t just protect him that moment — from scandal, from AIDS, from a sexually transmitted disease, from an unwanted pregnancy, from being beheaded by a jealous husband. But it also preserves his future! Joseph ends up being prime minister . . . precisely because he STAYS in the center of God’s will and on the track God has already put in place to take him to Pharaoh’s court. And as we see all through the pages of the Bible — Joseph, Daniel, Samuel, John the Baptist, Paul — it’s vital to live the way God directs. Do what God says. Obey what God commands. That, my friend, is the breastplate of righteousness.

There’s a sweet story in Billy Graham’s autobiography, Just As I Am, where he was going to have an evangelistic meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the wife of the governor came up to him. “Rev. Graham,” she said, “I’d like to talk. Could we have lunch together?” Now, she was a fairly young, attractive woman . . . and he was many years older, so from an appearance or “gossip” perspective, it would probably be perfectly safe. But Graham gave her the answer he has given for more than half a century. “I would be delighted to,” he replied, “but I don’t have private luncheons with beautiful ladies.” She laughed, and then suggested that they could eat together in the very middle of the crowded dining room at the Capitol Hotel, in front of many, many other patrons. And finally Billy Graham said yes, and reports in his book that he had a very comfortable and appropriate and spiritual lunch visit with Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton, future First Lady. But going clear back to Billy’s early days with the YFC, “Youth For Christ,” he and his ministry associates had decided that they would never once, not a single time, “travel, meet, or eat alone” with a woman other than their wife. And that has been a breastplate of righteousness to Pastor Graham. It protected his ministry. Recently, when some unfortunate White House tapes from the Nixon years were released, and Graham had said some unwise things into the President’s hidden microphones, it hurt him. It hurt his work. That breastplate of righteousness is designed by God to preserve those vital organs of a man or woman’s spiritual journey. When we get caught cheating or lying or using racially offensive language, that’s a body blow, and Lucifer’s arrows find their mark.

One last point, and it’s raised in a great old Ephesians commentary by E. K. Simpson and F. F. Bruce. Is this breastplate, this lorica, they ask, our own righteousness, our own gritting of teeth and scandal-avoidance behavior, or is it Christ’s perfect righteousness which covers the rags of a dirty sinner? “Imputed or inwrought righteousness” is how they put it, and they suggest that most Bible commentators favor the concept that it is our own actual sanctification and obedience Paul refers to here. “Put on the breastplate of righteousness — toe the line and behave yourselves!” in other words.

But, they go on, cannot it be both? Friend, are we protected against the devil when we’re covered by the robe of Jesus’ perfect righteousness, as described in the great Wedding Banquet parable of Matthew 22? If Satan is after us, can we be confident in our own goodness, or is the holiness of Jesus really our best and only protection? Now, here is some wonderfully archaic and colorful language, so bear with me carefully. This is worth hearing:

“The cuirass [or breastplate] here depicted covers the vital organs and serves as the soldier’s staple protection in a conflict wherein heart-issues lie at stake. Now the Epistle to the ROMANS settles the question what it is that inspires the Christian trooper with inextinguishable confidence and unblenching fortitude. His impenetrable mail consists of a righteousness enthroned at God’s right hand in the person of His well-beloved Son, absolutely flawless, the very ‘righteousness which God’s righteousness requires Him to require,’ reckoned to the combatant’s account; his authentic regimentals, so to speak. . . . His capital confidence lies in his Captain’s victory, the basis and pledge of his own. Self-reliance in any shape would constitute no bulwark for his soul and but ill withstand hostile missiles; it would crinkle or warp in the hour of peril. The Lord our righteousness must be our trusty munition, our sevenfold Shield and Buckler which no sword-thrust can pierce, our impregnable Rampart and Buttress which no volleys of the pit can batter or raze.”

Well, friend, that’s deep theology, but the wonderful reality is that the goodness of Jesus, His perfection, is really our best and safest defense, our perfect armor. You Lord of the Rings devotees will remember how Frodo Baggins was given this wonderful coat of protective mail to wear: mithril. “A corslet of Moria-silver,” worth a huge fortune, and a light, comfortable, but incredibly strong protective coat of safety. When you and I are in a born-again relationship with Jesus, we have that safety. The breastplate of His righteousness trumps helmets and spears and all the rest. Satan may hound and persecute; a dart may nick your heel or scratch your arm. But your LIFE is safe; the silver of His holy character counts for you, and protects the gold of your soon-to-be-mansion.