EXTRACT

Now Matthew brings in Joseph, the Lord’s reputed father, as an example, for usually Scripture in dealing with a great subject exemplifies it in some person. There are many persons in Matthew who are exemplified as righteous; indeed, it is he who tells us about righteous blood. There is a good deal made about blood today by certain classes, but righteous blood is blood of some account. Abel’s blood is called “righteous blood” by the Lord Jesus in Matthew. Joseph is addressed by an angel in a dream as the son of David after he had just been designated as a righteous man. He was righteous in relation to a most delicate matter, which I might classify as an assembly matter. Issues that come up in Scripture are not always crystal-like on the outside. They are to the anointed eye, but not always to those of others. And so Joseph had a delicate matter on hand, a matter that was not outwardly clear, the most important matter conceivable to a righteous man, as to how to deal with it. He pondered the matter. In an assembly crisis, dear brethren, matters have to be pondered. They come up from time to time, and they never will cease to come up while the assembly is here. They require delicate handling. Here, it is a question of Christ and the assembly. We are not to be too hasty in dealing with assembly matters, we are to ponder them, and that is what Joseph did here. In the pondering he had time for the exercise of his own righteous senses and sensibilities, but God had time, too. Let us give God time. He deserves time. He made time, he was the first to use it, and certainly he should be allowed to have it in helping us in assembly matters. So that while Joseph is pondering he has a dream in which he is directed what to do, and he does it.

He is a righteous man. A righteous man is never wilful, and a wilful man is never righteous. Joseph was a righteous man, and he was a subject man. Matthew makes more of him than Luke does; he fits in with Matthew’s line of thought, the line the Spirit of God gave him in the presentation of the truth. He sets him in the front page, as it were, as an example for us. A man who is righteous ponders things—“But in the multitude of counsellors there is safety”, Proverbs 11: 14. Everything in this case had to be weighed carefully from all sides and that is what Joseph did; he pondered the matter, and then the angel appeared and spoke to him and told him what to do. He did it, and he became the custodian of the precious Babe. “Take to thee the little child and his mother, and flee into Egypt”, he is told, Matthew 2: 13. He was the custodian at the time when the Lord needed him. As custodians under God, as we pursue his way, we shall become entrusted with things, dear brethren, in the assembly, because there is great need of custodianship in the assembly. One has often said that there are many more preachers and teachers than elders and deacons. It is not the service of the preacher to be a custodian of the truth, an elder is entrusted with that; I mean that he is the custodian of the saints; he has to take care of the assembly. Joseph was entrusted with the most precious charge with which any one ever was entrusted, and he faithfully kept it.

J. Taylor (Vol. 57, pp.506, 507)

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