In Deuteronomy, if a virgin who is espoused to a man lies with another man, she is to be killed. She is to be stoned publicly. And so that was on Joseph’s plate, if that’s what he wanted to do, it was in his rights.
The Bible tells us that Joseph was a godly man. Some scriptures call him righteous, and others call him upright. He was filled with the love of the Lord. Obviously he had some kind of a relationship with God before this. You and I would have never walked this path without having had that same intimacy with the Lord.
We read that Joseph is just, but we can see through his actions that he was a righteous man. In Matthew, it states that Mary was found with child, which reveals that Joseph probably learned of her pregnancy after she came back from being with her cousin. There is nothing in scripture that says that Mary told him. I think that is one of the ways that she was sort of testing out the whole thing too. She was allowing God to tell him, and God did tell him through a dream. I believe that the Lord convinced Joseph in his heart as well when he came out of that dream, because it says he immediately obeyed.
This also reveals that it has never been God’s will to administer the full fury of the law.
The law was given to point man to meet a savior. It was there to say, you need help, you can’t do this by yourself. That’s what the law was for. God’s intent was never to be brutal and to destroy people. And, it’s still not His will, or His plan today.
So, over the years, Joseph must have cultivated a reverence for God. He obviously had a sensitivity to His voice. And, as we grow in our walk with God, we should be doing the same thing. We should be constantly getting more fine tuned, more sensitive, more one-on-one ready to hear from the Lord, looking for it… anticipating.