A Letter from Demon to Demon on the Art of Temptation

My Dear Shadowbrand,

I admire the zeal you have exhibited in your struggle to bring Joseph into the hands of Our Father below. I need not remind you, however, that zeal is never sufficient in and of itself. To zeal must be added cunning, and cunning must issue in success. In your file I see nothing but one dismal failure after another. Joseph stubbornly clings to the Enemy. He still waits for those dreams of his to come true.

This latest turn of events, however, presents you with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Press your advantage. If Joseph will ever be vulnerable, it is now.

As you know, Joseph recently interpreted the dreams of his fellow inmates, the cupbearer and the baker. The latter, I rejoice to say, is now firmly in our clutches; the former is free and serving again in the court of Pharaoh. In the weeks and months to come, one of our brothers will be hard at work on the cupbearer. That disgusting human tendency to repay kindness with kindness will be met with counterarguments such as, “Yes, but we all know those foreigners will lie about anything, including their innocence,” and “If he were truly a man of God, then he wouldn’t be in prison now, would he?” Over time, any inclination the cupbearer might have to speak a good word to Pharaoh on Joseph’s behalf will seem less and less of a moral necessity. With humans, it’s almost too easy to turn “maybe later” into “never.”

Here is where your task becomes of vital importance. To begin with, hope will be your most powerful weapon. Stir up in Joseph a lusty anticipation of impending release. With the dawning of each new day, whisper to him that today will certainly be the day when he is vindicated, when his good name is cleared of the trumped up charges of attempted rape. Lure him to hope like he’s never hoped before. Do this, I suggest, for at least the first month.

Then, once you have fattened Joseph with hope, gradually introduce him to a diet of doubt. Make him begin to count the days since the cupbearer’s release. Reacquaint him with the pains of prison life that he may have overlooked during his month of excess hope. At the same time, labor on his imagination. Let him think of the life of ease in the palace that is enjoyed by the cupbearer—the man he helped to free! Let the bitter irony of this man’s dream leading to his release, and Joseph’s dreams leading to his eventual imprisonment, grow more bitter by the day. Your goal, my dear Shadowbrand, is for Joseph to grow angry with the man whom he thought was his ticket to freedom; then to feed that child of anger until it grows into the adult of hatred; and finally to bring forth from hatred’s womb the offspring of revenge, spite, and mistrust.

But even if you accomplish these goals, you have only gone halfway. We are waging war, I need not remind you, on both the horizontal and vertical levels. It is not enough that he hates this man, the cupbearer. Joseph’s blade of hatred must penetrate all the way through this man and plunge into the Enemy himself. Gradually transform the image of the cupbearer in his mind from the Enemy’s emissary to his tease. Suggest that the Enemy was only tantalizing him, holding out hope as a mirage in this desert dungeon.

If you can move Joseph, emotion by emotion, thought by thought, closer to the conception of our Enemy as the Grand Deceiver, then with the mere push of a finger, he will plummet off his mountain of hope into the pit of despair. His dreams will seem nightmares from childhood. His faith will seem an irrational fixation upon a sadistic, celestial tyrant. His hope…well, he will have no hope, for in the religion of despair, hope has been excommunicated. The vacuum left by it is easily filled with bitterness over the past, selfish pity over the woes of the present, and a blank stare into the futile future.

Do not waste this opportunity, Shadowbrand. Our Father below is watching. I trust you will not disappoint him again.

Yours truly,

Azazel

This fictional epistle is, of course, patterned after The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, whose literary gifts I do not pretend to match. In my studies of Joseph's life, including the chapter in Genesis that is the basis for this article (40), I have often wondered at the temptations he must have faced. I suspect that the two years which elapsed from the cupbearer's release until Joseph's liberation were the most difficult of his life. For there are few sufferings harder to endure than to have one's hope built up, only to see it dashed to the ground. But thanks be to God, who sustained Joseph, and still sustains us, that we might cling to His word of promise even in the face of the most diabolical of temptations to despair.

My thanks to Haleigh Morgan for the suggestion of "Shadowbrand" as the name of the letter's recipient.