You Will Never Go Where God is Not
On occasion the world bottoms out. The phone rings in the middle of the night, the housing market crashes, the test results come back positive, and before we know it, we discover what the bottom looks like.
In Joseph’s case he discovered what the auction block of Egypt looked like. The bidding began, and for the second time in his young life, he was on the market. The favored son of Jacob found himself prodded and pricked, examined for fleas, and pushed about like a donkey. Potiphar, an Egyptian officer, bought him. Joseph didn’t speak the language or know the culture. The food was strange, the work was grueling, and the odds were against him.
So we turn the page and brace for the worst. The next chapter in his story will describe Joseph’s consequential plunge into addiction, anger, or despair, right? Wrong.
“The LORD was with Joseph, and he was a successful man; and he was in the house of his master the Egyptian” (Gen. 39:2). Joseph arrived in Egypt with nothing but the clothes on his back and the call of God on his heart. Yet by the end of four verses, he was running the house of the man who ran security for Pharaoh. How do we explain this turnaround? Simple. God was with him.
– The LORD
was with Joseph, and he was a successful man. (v. 2)
– His
master saw that the LORD was with him. (v. 3)
– The LORD blessed
the Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake. (v. 5)
– The
blessing of the LORD was on all that he had. (v. 5)
Joseph’s story just parted company with the volumes of self-help books and all the secret-to-success formulas that direct the struggler to an inner power (“dig deeper”). Joseph’s story points elsewhere (“look higher”). He succeeded because God was present. God was to Joseph what a blanket is to a baby—he was all over him.
Any chance he’d
be the same for you? Here you are in your version of Egypt. It feels
foreign. You don’t know the language. You never studied the
vocabulary of crisis. You feel far from home, all alone. Money gone.
Expectations dashed. Friends vanished. Who’s left? God is.
David
asked, “Where can I go to get away from your Spirit? Where can I
run from you?” (Ps. 139:7 NCV). He then listed the various places
he found God: in “the heavens . . . the grave . . . If I rise with
the sun in the east and settle in the west beyond the sea, even there
you would guide me” (vv. 8–10 NCV). God, everywhere.
Joseph’s account of those verses would have read, “Where can I go to get away from your Spirit? If I go to the bottom of the dry pit... to the top of the slave block... to the home of a foreigner... even there you would guide me.”
Your adaptation of the verse might read, “Where can I go to get away from your Spirit? If I go to the rehab clinic... the overseas deployment office... the shelter for battered women... the food bank... even there you would guide me.”
You will never go where God is not.
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This excerpt is drawn from You'll Get Through This. Sometimes the challenges of life threaten to overwhelm us. Maybe it's been a day of a financial crisis, a bad diagnosis, an accident, or you were served divorce papers by your spouse. Whatever it was, Max Lucado reminds us that God will help you through this.
Copyright 2013 Max Lucado. Used by permission. All rights reserved.