And the men were afraid because they were brought to Joseph's house, and they said, “It is because of the money, which was replaced in our sacks the first time, that we are brought in, so that he may assault us and fall upon us to make us servants and seize our donkeys.” — Genesis 43:18
The witness of the Spirit is the reason I know the Bible is true. However, I believe the Bible is also correctly recorded in part because of bits like the verse above. In the King James it is even more amusing, "...that he may seek occasion against us, and fall upon us, and take us for bondmen, and our asses." At least it doesn't say "seize our asses." You know how those Egyptians are. We see passages in the Bible that remind us of legendary, heroic stories — the confrontation between David and Goliath is the stuff of myth and legend. I believe it happened, but I also believe somebody could have made it up and come pretty close to the same tale — which would not make it any the less true. But other times, the Bible records the unflattering, the commonplace, the utterly human, as it does here. You really can't "make this stuff" up. At worst, it will be "based on a true story."
The donkey was the ultra-compact utility vehicle of its day, an ATV of sorts. Though undoubtedly relatively valuable, even a dozen of the sturdy animals were hardly a windfall for the prime minister of the world's superpower. Our fears will lead us to assign all manner of bizarre motivations to the object of those fears. As MacDonald says in The Princess and the Goblin, "... but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of."
I have known a few people afflicted in some degree with paranoia, and I suppose I might have suffered with twinges of it myself (but they really were out to get me). You can't argue a person out of it. Logic is useless. I have probably become more paranoid of paranoia than I am of almost anything else. I will do my best to tear apart any evidence that suggests malicious intent or conspiracy. I am much more likely to err in the other direction and think that ignorance and stupidity are to blame — unless money is clearly involved, or jealousy and envy. People will sometimes act out of envy to their own detriment, which I have trouble understanding, though I certainly struggled with jealousy enough as a teenager to grasp how dangerous it can be.
And it was, in fact, jealousy that brought those brothers down to Egypt, that caused them to fear the loss of their freedom and their donkeys. It was their jealousy that had put their younger brother Joseph in bondage in the first place. Now they were the ones in whom fear played upon their long-shadowed guilt. Time had rid them of the delusion that what they had done was right or acceptable. Though their actions were hidden from their father, they had caused him great anguish by their deception. Unknown lies still corrode relationships.
If I have lied to someone, they may never know it, but I know it all along and forever. The only way to neutralize that acid burning in my soul is to tell the truth — if not to the person (and sometimes that does more harm than good, only the parties involved can make that call) then at least to myself, possibly to a trusted confessor, certainly to my Father in heaven. The brothers were not altogether ready to speak the whole truth which they all knew. When confronted by Joseph, still unknown to them, they had said only that the twelfth brother "was not." They said nothing of their betrayal. They could not yet embrace the cure.
For someone diagnosed with clinical paranoia or a paranoid personality disorder, the problem may lie in brain chemistry. For most of us, irrational fears spring up from the bitter root of unacknowledged sin, whether it is envy, jealousy, greed, lust, pride, or something else. We may not have acted on the jealousy as Joseph's brothers did, but that evil has lain long in the pit and spread its invasive tendrils through far too much of our lives. We have specialized in the choice bit of gossip, the carefully dressed innuendo, the sarcastic strike in the dark. Meanwhile, we fearfully suspect that someone, perhaps God Himself, has it in for us, is setting us up, just waiting for the most humiliating moment to yank the rug from under us and laugh at our fall.
Seriously, there are people who, through no fault of your own, you may have offended. They may try to destroy you in some way, large or small. Such was the case with Joseph. Yes, he probably should have kept quiet about the dreams, but how else would he have been in the right place at the right time to see those dreams materialize? There is no excusing or explaining away the evil that his brothers did, yet Joseph continued to hold on to his righteousness and thus to his destiny. He could fain paranoia, but he never felt it. There was no bitterness in him. He was no more perfect than any other human, but he was transparent, the same all the way through. He did not surrender to evil but overcame it with good.
If we ever find ourselves thinking that someone could desire to "seize our donkeys," it might be a good time to step back and see if there is something we need to deal with in our own hearts, a confession we need to make, a wrong we need to address that holds us back from fully and joyfully trusting God with our earthly lives as well as the life everlasting. The donkey thief is sly. Sometimes you can only catch him in a mirror.
