The Lord’s Presence in Prison

Genesis 39:20-22
Gary Wassermann | Sunday, February 05, 2023
Copyright © 2023, Gary Wassermann

In Genesis 39 and 40, we read about Joseph first in Potiphar’s house and then in prison.  In both of these settings, the text begins with a theological perspective.  The Lord was with Joseph in Potiphar’s house.  The Lord blessed him and gave him success.  Likewise, the Lord was with Joseph in prison.  This is the Lord’s covenant faithfulness to Joseph.  In both settings we then read about Joseph’s covenant faithfulness to God.  He worked hard and refused to give in to temptation in Potiphar’s house.  He served and witnessed faithfully in prison.  So Joseph is a model for us of what covenant faithfulness looks like for us.  That is one of the themes that we heard about last week.  God calls us to a holy life.  He calls us to a life of faith.  If you want to be a Christian, you should know what God wants you to do. You can look at Joseph as a model for that.

But this morning I want to look at the other side of this covenant relationship. God says, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” We know what God expects of us. What can we expect from God in the Christian life?  There are ultimate promises of glory in the life to come, but I am speaking this morning about in the Christian life. So the first point this morning is “Presence, Not Prosperity.”

Presence, Not Prosperity

What does God say he will do?  This passage has as much to say about that as the previous section says about what we are to do.  It tells us two truths that seem to be in conflict: Joseph was in prison, and the Lord was with Joseph. And these were not in two separate realms. Same person, same place, same time.  The Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph was in prison. And let’s be clear: The Lord did not come to Joseph after Joseph was already in prison.  The Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph was sent to prison.

The Lord also did not make prison a pleasant place for Joseph.  Psalm 105:18–19 tells us something about his experience in prison that we are not told in Genesis 39.  It says, “They bruised his feet with shackles, his neck was put in irons, till what he foretold came to pass, till the word of the Lord proved him true.”  You see, the Lord was with Joseph; they bruised his feet with shackles.  The Lord was with Joseph; Joseph was in prison.  The Lord did not cause Joseph quickly to be exonerated.  The Lord revealed to Joseph many things about the future, but the Lord did not reveal to Joseph how long he was going to be in the prison, or when or by what means he would be released from the prison.  There was no end in sight.  The Lord was with Joseph; Joseph was in prison.

There is a popular gospel that is alive and well today called “health and wealth.”  It says, “Come to Jesus, and he will deliver you from pain.  He will deliver you from suffering.  He will not allow tragedy to come to you.”  This is what people want to hear.  It addresses their “felt needs.” They say that God wants you to be successful.  He wants you to be comfortable.  He wants you to have good health, have a model family, and a pleasant retirement.  Of course, this view has a place for hardship and suffering as well.  The explanation is simply that you are not right with God, and God is not with you.  So you must repent, or perhaps you must give a large donation to the preacher, and then the Lord will be with you, and you will succeed.  But the life of Joseph in Genesis 39 disproves that right away.  The Lord was with Joseph; Joseph was in prison.

The Lord’s promise is, “I will be your God.”  He will be with you.  He does not promise prosperity.  He does not promise health.  He does not promise that you will be a free man as opposed to a slave or a prisoner, both of which Joseph was even while the Lord was with him.  He does not promise that you will have pleasant family relationships.  Joseph did not. He does not promise that you will be comfortable.  He promises to be your God.  He is and he always will be free.  Psalm 115:3 says, “He does whatever pleases him.”  And likewise, he does not do what he is not pleased to do.  He will decide what he will do, when he will do it, and how he will do it, and he doesn’t ask you or tell you in advance. You can’t hold him to some commitment to do something for you that you were hoping.

The carnal mind says, “What then is the value of the Lord being my God?  If he is with me, that should guarantee something good, something that I want in this life.  It seems that his promise is empty.”  To the carnal man, the promise of the presence of God is a big disappointment.

The truth is, though, even God’s people have been troubled by the question of how they can continue to be under affliction if God is with them.  During the days of the judges, when the Midianites oppressed Israel, Gideon was threshing his wheat in a winepress, which was a bad place to thresh wheat because it is sheltered from the wind, which you need for proper threshing. But Gideon was there to avoid being seen by the Midianites. Judges 6:12–13 says, “When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, ‘The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.’  ‘But sir,’ Gideon replied, ‘if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?’” In other words, it doesn’t make sense. How can the Lord be with us if we are in this condition?  “‘Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, “Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?” But now the Lord has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.’”  Gideon did not realize who was speaking to him. The Lord was right there.

Remember John the Baptist.  He had seen Jesus beginning his public ministry, but when he was thrown in prison, he remained there.  Nothing was improving for him. John the Baptist was the one who had testified that Jesus was the Lord.  Jesus had come, and Jesus knew John.  Not only had John seen Jesus, but Jesus saw John and Jesus knew that John was in prison, but no deliverance was coming.  Surely, if Jesus were the Lord, he, John, would be delivered from prison.  So in Matthew 11:3, John sent his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?” In other words, I am in prison. If you are the Lord, if you are with us, what is happening? Maybe I have been wrong. Maybe someone else is yet to come.

This can be our trouble too.  We can understand well enough that the Lord is with us in mountaintop experiences. In those times when God seems to meet with us, in great joy, we can understand that the Lord is with us when everything is going well. But what about in ordinary times or even challenging times?  We may expect that if we walk faithfully with God, then he in return should make our life comfortable.  We should have good health, financial surplus, and no big problems in other areas of life.

The truth is that the Lord has told us what we ought to expect.  In John 16:33, Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble.” Expect it! This is a fallen world. If you think you can live as a sinner in this fallen world without trouble, you are going to be disappointed. But more than that, he said to his disciples, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” Second Timothy 3:12 says, “Everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” In Luke 9:57–58 we read, “As they were walking along the road, a man said to [Jesus], ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’”  In other words, I see you are going places. You are going to be somebody, and I want a part of it. “Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.’” In other words, that is what you can also expect when you follow the Lord.

When he calls us, he says in Matthew 16:24, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”  At the moment that you confess Jesus Christ is Lord, Jesus gives you a cross that you must bear all the days of your life. So not only should troubles not come as a surprise because he didn’t promise that we would be free from them, but he also promised we would have trouble. He promised there would be hardship.  He promised there would be affliction.

Not only that, but there are many troubles we experience that we should not be as mystified about as we often are.  Sometimes our afflictions are the direct result of our own actions, but even when they are not, we should not be too quick to put the blame on God.  Job was troubled by the unjust suffering he saw in the world broadly.  He saw people afflicted by evil men, and they groaned, and they cried out, but God didn’t seem to do anything. He thought that God is distant in his transcendence, that God is disinterested in human troubles, so he doesn’t hear men’s cries and groans.  But Elihu had a better explanation for this problem.  To paraphrase his argument in Job 35, he said, “What sort of cries and groans are these?  Animals also cry out when they are in pain or when they are in trouble, but they are just crying out for physical relief.  A lot of human cries are just like that—empty toward God,” and perhaps some of ours are the same.  It is not that God is disinterested in man, but man is disinterested in God.  A right response from man is to cry out, “Where is God my Maker, who gives songs in the night?”  Our devotion to him should be, “Shall we accept good from God and not evil?  The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

So everyone should be clear on what God does not promise in this life, what he has not committed himself to doing for us in this life.

The Lord’s Presence

Positively, what does it mean that the Lord was with Joseph?  I am going to explain this in four parts. The Lord was with Joseph in ways that he did not know and in ways that he did. And the Lord was with Joseph outside of himself and within himself. So I am going to cover each of these in combination.

Providence

First, the Lord was with Joseph in providence, that is, in ways Joseph did not know outside of himself.  To human eyes, it probably appeared that the significant fact about his situation was that he was in prison.  He was there unjustly. He was there without hope. He was not a free man, as he ought to have been.  But because we have the whole text of Genesis before us, we know that this was not just a prison, but this was the prison where the king’s prisoners were confined.  And that made this imprisonment a necessary steppingstone on the path that God had designed to make Joseph the prime minister of Egypt.

On a smaller scale, this is often the experience of God’s people as time passes.  We look back and we can see how God was using something we did not understand earlier on to accomplish a good purpose. One person is with prayer and counsel pursuing a direction academically or professionally that might seem to be a dead end, and so he moves on to something different.  Down the road, however, that background in that now-abandoned pursuit turns out to be essential for an opportunity for useful service that the Lord has provided, and now he can look back and see that the Lord was with him and had a purpose for what he did in his life.  This is the way of the child of God.  This is the experience of the child of God. What we thought was useless God was using for a greater purpose.

God has big purposes.  His purpose was to make Joseph into the prime minister. And that purpose, of course, was not ultimately for Joseph’s benefit, but it was for the saving of many lives.  It was so that Joseph could provide for the Israelites, for the people God had chosen to redeem and through whom God would bring redemption into the world through Jesus Christ.

Remember what Jesus told John the Baptist when John was in prison and wondering if Jesus was the one they had been expecting.  The Lord said, “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” (Matt. 11:5).  In other words, salvation is reaching more and more people.  God’s redemptive purposes are advancing.

God has a big plan.  These steps along the way for Joseph were not the destination, and it would be wrong to judge them as though they were.  So we should remember that we are not competent to judge what God is doing in our lives or in the lives of others.  No human eye could have seen what was ahead for Joseph or how Joseph’s circumstances in prison were leading toward something better.  In Psalm 73 Asaph was miserable because he rashly judged the wicked to be happy and himself to be frustrated and deprived.  Now, he was wrong, but he had to come into the Lord’s presence to change his perspective.  In Psalm 139:16 David says, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” God knows the end from the beginning. And in verse 6 of the same psalm David says, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.”  That is what we should remember about our days too.  They are in God’s hands, and we cannot possibly understand all that God is doing through his providence, so we should leave it in his hands.  His wisdom is vast.  He knows what he is doing, and we do not.

And not only are we not competent to judge, but it is actually folly even to try to judge the work of God.  Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “He has made everything beautiful in its time.”  Right away we say, “Why this, Lord? Why are you doing this? What is going on here? I want to know at least what the purpose is.”  We shall know more later, so be content with that.

Character

Next in ways unknown to Joseph within Joseph is character.  The Lord was at work on Joseph’s character.  The Lord was not only leading Joseph to where he wanted to put him as the prime minister of Egypt, but he was also forming him to be exactly the kind of man he needed to be to do what God wanted him to do.

Look at what was ahead for Joseph.  At age thirty he would be the prime minister of Egypt.  There was a time in my life when thirty seemed pretty old and mature, but it doesn’t seem that way anymore.  I was considering having those here who are thirty years of age stand up to give everyone a picture of Joseph’s age, but I won’t do that.  You can just imagine.

It is dangerous for anyone to become rich and powerful, but especially for those who are young.  They are apt to grow arrogant.  Remember Sam Bankman-Fried.  He is now thirty years old.  In October of last year his estimated net worth was $10.5 billion.  He thought he was the king of the world.  He thought he was above God himself, and he could just ignore the rules that applied to everyone else because he was so rich and so smart, at least until it all came crashing down.

Joseph was not him, but he would rule over Egypt for seven years of great prosperity.  He would have ample opportunity for building up his own fortune and growing arrogant.  And after that, he would be ruler over Egypt for seven years when all of Egypt and the people from the surrounding nations came bowing down to him to get their daily necessities.  How would it not go to his head?  God was molding him.  He was forming his character.

Joseph had always been a very gifted man.  He clearly had a gift for administration since he was put in charge wherever he went.  He was upright and honest as far as each situation required, but that didn’t mean that he was ready at an early age to handle the position he would eventually hold.  He had to develop his gifts of leadership, but more than that, his character needed to be developed.  He had to become mature.  He had to learn service.  He had to learn patience.  And the thing about patience is that you can’t learn it from textbooks.  You can’t learn it from abundance.  You can only learn it from privation and affliction and disappointment.  Jesus himself was never a sinner, but Hebrews 5:8 says, “He learned obedience from what he suffered.”  Just as physically he grew strong over time, so in character he grew strong over time, able to face larger and larger trials and obey his Father in larger and larger tests.

There is no substitute for experience.  The Lord has been teaching Joseph patience by privation and disappointment. These things go contrary to all our natural desires, but God means them for our good.  Joseph is being trained in low places so that he can serve in high places.

Romans 8:28 says, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  But what is the good that God is working for in us?  Verse 29 says, “For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.”  The Lord is at work to make us like his Son in character.  Ephesians 1:4 says, “He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”  This is God’s purpose for us.

There is a story of a pastor who passed an area where a large cathedral was under construction, probably for restoration.  In that area there was a man sitting in a chair at ground level chiseling away on a stone that was not part of the cathedral.  The pastor asked this man, “What are you doing?”  The man looked up and pointed at a spot high up on that cathedral.  He said, “Do you see that hole up there?  I’m doing this down here, so it will be fit for up there.”

Remember that painful things, when God seems to be distant, may be the very hand of our Father, the hand of the heavenly potter right on us, molding us and forming us.  The Apostle Paul was given a messenger from Satan, a thorn in his flesh, to keep him from being arrogant.  We underestimate our propensity to sin, and we underestimate what is needed to make us proven, humble, faithful, obedient servants of God.  So don’t murmur under these things and recognize God’s goals and God’s purposes.

Success

The Lord was with Joseph giving him success and favor.  This is those things outside of himself that were known to him.

Joseph was put in charge of all those held in the prison, and he was made responsible for all that was done there.  If you think you have a hard job, look at Joseph’s job.  He managed prisoners.  These are not people who are inclined to be civil or cooperative.  Usually people are in prison because they don’t submit to authority.  And Joseph was with them as one condemned as a criminal, or at least as one who hadn’t been able to stay on his master’s good side.  So it would have been a little hard for him to show up with a moral authority in their eyes. To get them to receive Joseph’s direction and supervision surely required something more than Joseph’s innate ability.  The Lord had to be working in them.

As for Joseph, remember that it was Joseph’s integrity that got him thrown in prison.  It would be very natural for a person in that situation to get frustrated and exasperated.  We would understand if he became surly or started looking out for Number One.  We would understand if he cut some corners when the opportunity presented itself.  But Joseph did not do that.  He conducted himself with the honesty and integrity, with the selflessness and the industry, that his fellow prisoners and the prison warden could recognize.  Here and there they caught glimpses of what he was doing, and it caught their attention.  These things he did because the Lord was with him.

The Lord’s gracious presence not only strengthened Joseph’s character, but also gave him the skill, the wisdom, and the tact he needed to do the right thing in each situation.  The knowledge that the Lord was with him gave him strength and courage.  David said in Psalm 18:29, “With your help I can advance against a troop; with my God I can scale a wall.” Joseph faced an impossible situation and said, “I can do something here. I can do the next thing.” He was given management of the prison. He may not have wanted that, but he was given it, and he said, “I can do it,” and he did it. And God’s blessing was upon him.

Good character does not always bring favor.  Sometimes people are cruel for any number of reasons.  But Psalm 106:46 says of the Israelites, “He caused them to be pitied by all who held them captive,” and the Lord did that for Joseph too. The warden showed him pity.

Joseph was a type of Christ, and Robert Candlish drew out the parallel between Joseph in prison and Christ on the cross.  I want to read an extended section from Robert Candlish:

Even in the utmost depths of his humiliation, his glory is seen. . . . In the midst of all his sufferings as a reputed sinner, something of the essential glory and beauty of his nature, something of his exalted character and rank, appears.  “Certainly this was a righteous man” (Luke 23:47). Such, in substance, was the impression made on the [warden], in whose sight the Lord gave Joseph favor.  For “the Lord was with him and showed him mercy.”  [Joseph] was not to be left without some witness from on high of his being indeed, in spite of all outward appearances, the Lord’s chosen servant.  He has the witness within himself; the Spirit witnessing with his spirit that he is a child of God, and enabling him, in the strength of conscious innocence and integrity, and in the still greater strength of the divine approval and support consciously enjoyed,—“the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost being given to him,”—to resist almost “unto [shedding] blood, [in his] striving against sin,” and to “endure the cross, despising its shame.”  And [he had the witness not only within himself but there was a witness from outside] in his being recognized and acknowledged by one and another, given to him by the Lord to be the first-fruits of his pain,—won over to him in his affliction and by his affliction,—he has a testimony that, however he may be despised and rejected of men generally, he is owned by some as accepted of God.  His trial, and his manner of bearing it, tell upon a few, at least, among the onlookers.  From the very officer appointed to guard him,—as if it were from the Roman centurion beside the cross,—this admirable sufferer wins sympathy and approval.  And soon it [appears] that his fellow-sufferers in the same condemnation are not all to prove insensible to his claims.  Joseph in prison, like Jesus on the cross, is still beloved by God.  And his very imprisonment, his very cross, is the occasion of his being seen and felt and owned to be so.[1]

This was the Lord’s presence with Joseph in prison.

Remember, then, how valuable to have the Lord with us.  Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.  If the Lord is with us, he will keep us walking in righteousness and keep us from falling into sin, as he did for Joseph.  Second Chronicles 32:31 says, “When envoys were sent by the rulers of Babylon to ask [Hezekiah] about the miraculous sign that had occurred in the land, God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart.”  Now God didn’t leave him because God was unfaithful.  Hezekiah had begun to become arrogant, and God said, “Okay, you don’t think you need me? Let’s see how you do.” It was then that Hezekiah showed them everything in his palace, and that led to the Lord pronouncing the judgment that the Babylonians would come and take everything. We need the Lord with us to give us success, to give us prosperity, to keep us going in the way of righteousness.

Communion

The Lord was with Joseph in communion with him. This is within Joseph in ways that Joseph knew.

Joseph could be cut off from many things. He could be cut off from the outside world and from the communication that comes naturally, but he could not be cut off from God. This was a fulfillment of Isaiah 43:2: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.”  Joseph was in prison and the Lord was with him.

You see, God is personal, meaning that he is a person, and he relates to us as persons.  He is real and his presence is real, and it has an effect.  He is the revealer of mysteries.  I am not referring here to the interpretation of dreams such as Joseph experienced, but to his imparting wisdom and revealing himself.  God said in Jeremiah 33:3, “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”  He has much to say concerning himself and concerning his plan of redemption—marvelous things, important things, monumental things—that we cannot even imagine, but we will hear if we draw near and listen.  Remember the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38–42.  Mary “sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said.  But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.”  When Martha complained that Mary wasn’t helping out, the Lord answered, “One thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”  Probably the Lord was speaking to Mary about his upcoming death and burial.  She later poured expensive perfume on his feet, which he said was to prepare him for his burial.  How much there is to know of God and of his ways that we don’t see! We don’t know what we don’t know until we draw near to him, and he draws near to us.  The unfolding of his word gives light!  It is good to be with the Lord.

In John 14:23 Jesus said, “If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching.  My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”  I don’t know what this means exactly. I can’t articulate it. But if the God who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth makes his home to be with us, that must be pretty good.

Believe God’s gracious promises.  In Roman 8:15–18, he says, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.  Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.  [For] I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

Seek the Lord’s Presence

All of this means that we must seek the Lord’s presence. The message to all of us is:  What do you want?  Do you want the Lord to be with you?  Perhaps you have never known the Lord to be with you.  Do you want the Lord to be with you even if it means losing everything else?  This is not just for the extraordinary people of the Bible.  This is the promise of the gospel.  Repent of your sins and trust in Christ.  Confess that Jesus is Lord, and you are his slave, and God will be your God.  He will do for you what he alone can do.  Ask that you might walk in integrity as one of his people.  When tempted, practice the presence of God. Say with Joseph, “How can I do this wicked thing and sin against God?”  Receive his word and obey it, as Jesus said, that he may come and make his home with you.

But now I ask not only whether you would choose the Lord without a guarantee of comforts in this life, but would you choose him, knowing that it will cost you great afflictions?  In Hebrews 11:26 we read, “[Moses] regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.”  Moses looked at the people of Israel—despised, enslaved, and afflicted—and recognized that the Lord was with them.  He said he preferred to be with the people of the Lord in their afflictions because these were the afflictions that were the token of their presence with the Lord, and their participation with the Lord, and the Lord’s participation with them.

The Puritan Thomas Manton said, “We are not right Christians till we have such an esteem of Christ, that the worst things which can befall us in his service should be more to us than the best things of the world.”[2]  This was the testimony of the Apostle Paul.  He said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10).  I want to know his sufferings because they are the mark of Christ. He also said, “Christ Jesus [is] my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things” (Phil. 3:8).

Now, Moses made a comparison here. He preferred this over that, and there are many ways that we can esteem more highly the path and the portion of the people of God when we take eternity into view:

• Compare temporal good versus eternal good; the portion of the carnal man to the happiness of a child of God. One lasts for a season and then it is done; the other is eternal glory.
• Compare temporal bad with eternal bad, such as the killing of the body as compared to the casting of the body and soul into hell. They do not compare.
• Compare temporal good with eternal evil. There are those who do pretty well in terms of their worldly portion, but what will happen to them in the life to come?  In Matthew 16:26 Jesus asked, “What does it profit if a man gains the whole world and yet loses his soul?”
• Or on the other side, compare temporal bad with eternal good. In 2 Corinthians 4:17 Paul writes,  “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”

 

But for a moment, leave aside the consideration even of eternity.  Compare the afflictions of Christianity in this present life with the happiness of worldly men in this present life.  That is the case in Hebrews 11:26.  Moses esteemed to be afflicted with the people of God rather than to enjoy the riches of Egypt.  Take these respective troubles and pleasures with all that comes with them.  Take the world’s best now and the Christian’s worst now.  The world’s best is a sorry portion.  It lies in treasures, pleasures, and honors.  These things are the desire of the carnal heart, but they are accompanied by sin as the worldly man lays hold of them.  They are passing pleasures, passing honors, passing riches that leave a man thirsty for more. They do not satisfy.  And they leave a man feeling corrupted because he had to corrupt himself in the pursuit of them.  When a man lives in sin, he can never have any solid pleasure in what he enjoys, for how can peace and satisfaction can be sincere where God is angry and where the soul is in danger of his wrath every moment?

But on the other side, take the Christian’s worst.  If the Lord in his providence brings us to prison, we love that prison because it is related to the Lord.  We love what is associated with Christ because we love Christ.  When the apostles were whipped and disgraced, they rejoiced that they had been counted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ.

But there is more that goes with the Christian’s suffering, and that is especially the strong support and comfort of the Holy Spirit.  In 2 Corinthians 12:10 Paul said, “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”  There is a more generous portion of the support and comfort of the Holy Spirit given to God’s afflicted people than to others, or given to the people of God in their affliction than at other times.

The Lord was with Joseph all of his life.  He was godly from his childhood till the end of his life in his old age. The Lord was with Joseph when he was a child and when he was a youth.  The Lord was with Joseph when he was a middle-aged man and when he was an old man. Many chapters in the book of Genesis speak about Joseph’s life.  But it is only in Genesis 39, it is only during this time, when Joseph was a slave in Potiphar’s house and then a prisoner in the prison of Egypt that this specific phrase, “The Lord was with him,” is used of Joseph. It is as if to say that the Lord was most powerfully, most potently, most sensibly with Joseph during his time of affliction.  Then it was that Joseph would say, “The Lord is with me.  Never have I been nearer to him, and never has he been nearer to me.”

The Lord pours out comfort in proportion to the troubles of the Christian, so that as afflictions abound, so does the comfort.  Second Corinthians 1:5 says, “For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.”  And when God calls us to suffer, he equips us with the Holy Spirit. First Peter 4:15 says, “If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.”  May we never despise the presence of God.  There is nothing like it. Amen.

[1] Robert S. Candlish, Commentary on Genesis, Volume 2 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1956), 145–146.

[2] Thomas Manton, By Faith: Sermons on Hebrews 11 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2000), 631.