The Lord has promised that He will neither leave nor forsake, His own, and in his

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:

There is no promise in Scripture that the believer will 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:

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:

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:

or, as Whycliffe'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

We are too apt to gauge our prosperity by our possessions or our standing in society,

but these words reveal that truth prosperity is independent of circumstances:

imprisonment my 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

them it could be written that upon their body the fire had no power, nor was an hair of

their heads singed: