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#4.
"I will be with thee."
pp. 121, 122
The Lord has promised that He will neither leave, nor forsake, His own, and in this
double promise of His presence we rejoice. The words "not leave" and "not forsake",
however, are negatives, and so we will turn to a positive declaration:--
"He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him:
I will be with him in trouble"
(Psa. 91: 15).
There is no promise in Scripture that the believer be exempt from trouble, but what is
promised is that he need never be alone in his trouble. The Lord has said: "I will be with
him in trouble." The saint may pass through fire and water, but the Lord will be with him
and sanctify to him his deepest distress:--
"When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers,
they shall not overflow thee" (Isa. 43: 2).
Joseph passed through a long period of trial and testing, yet in the midst of it all the
Scriptures reveal the hidden source of his joy. First of all he was sold by his brethren into
Egypt. At this the iron entered into his soul:--
"Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron" (Psa. 105: 18).
or, as the margin says, "His soul came into iron". It must surely have been a bitter
experience for the beloved son of Israel to be sold as a slave, and sold by his very
brethren; yet one blessing, at least, was his; the Lord was with him:--
"Potiphar . . . . . bought him . . . . . and the Lord was with Joseph and he was a
prosperous man" (Gen. 39: 1, 2).
or, as Wycliffe's quaint version puts it, "He was a lucky fellow".
But Joseph suffered yet deeper humiliation. He was falsely condemned and put into
prison, a position not conducive to joy or peace, which often produces resentment and
rebellion:--
"Joseph's master . . . put him into the prison . . . but the Lord was with Joseph . . . and
that which he did, the Lord made it to prosper" (Gen. 39: 20-23).
We are too apt to gauge our prosperity by our possessions or our standing in society,
but these words reveal that true prosperity is independent of circumstances:
imprisonment may go hand in hand with prosperity, the deciding factor being the
presence or absence of the Lord. The three men who were cast into the fiery furnace at
the command of Nebuchadnezzar were certainly in an extremely perilous position, yet of