The Pit, The Prison, The Palace

After the pit experience comes the prison experience. When you’re down to nothing, God is up to something. Joseph was innocent and sent to the Egyptian Penitentiary System by the repeated entreaty and false accusation of Potiphar’s wife, the Wicked Witch of the West of the Old Testament. Potiphar’s hormonal, raging, menstrual-cramping wife stalked Joseph into a corner; her perfume filled the room while her body was a billboard for lust. Her eyes locked on Joseph with hypnotic power, her gold-braided arms slithered around his neck, and he went through the blast furnace of accusation as Potiphar’s wife’s hormone count ran off the charts and screamed, 'Rape!' For hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.Eventually, Joseph was escorted into the prison by burly Egyptian guards. The sun in his life sank at high noon and was replaced by a cloud of darkness. They bruised his feet with shackles, and his neck was put in iron. He tried to adjust the shackles on his feet, and he could feel the iron yoke around his neck. The darkness hid the tears that were flushing down his cheeks. Joseph, in his private, darkest Gethsemane, sat there in the brutal, bewitching hour; he was crushed, and he looked up into the darkness of his cell, lifted his eyes toward a God he could not see, and probably screamed,'God, where are You? Why are You so silent? Why have You forsaken me? My brothers sold me into the slave market to the Midianites by camel express and deceived my aged father, and he reached the natural conclusion that I was dead. I was sold again in Egypt. I helped Potiphar build his business empire, the epicenter of the universe. I don’t have a friend in the world! My legs, life, and neck are in shackles and shambles! It has never been darker! God, where are You?'This is where Joseph was face-to-face with the devil, in the Deep Blue Sea, the absolute bottom. This is the worst day of Joseph’s life; like Job said, 'May the day of my birth perish.' If you have not been here, you are going to go here. At some point in your life, you are going to have a prison experience. There will be a day when you reach up and feel the iron yoke around your neck. Your prison experience may not be behind steel bars. It may be the day when your divorce is final. It might be the day when you walk into the silent city of the dead and lay your child in the yawning mouth of the grave. It may be the day when your teenage daughter comes home and says, 'Mom, I am pregnant.' It may be the day when your child says, 'I want to change my gender.'It may be the day your son comes home and says that he has feelings for the same sex, and life pivots in a second. It may be the day your son or husband is sent off to prison, never to come home again. It may be the day when the moving van backs up to your house to sell your possessions and settle the debt against your name, and all of your dreams filter through your fingers like hot sand. It may be the day that the doctor tells you that you have cancer and the life expectancy is months. If the devil can crush you in the pit and destroy you in the prison, he knows you will never reach your full potential in your calling. Satan is attacking you because he knows your potential. If you can’t sing in the pit and praise God in the prison, you will never make it to the palace. Remember this: No one gets to heaven without scars! We are all scarred vessels in the hands of the Master Potter, transforming us into matchless beauty. God poured steel into this man’s soul and transformed him from a fuzzy-faced cat into a lion of God. He is no longer strutting like a peacock of many colors with lacquered hair, acting like a prima donna. God used Joseph’s pain, pit, and prison, and turned it into a divine profit. One man’s pain, pit, prison, and predicament birthed a paradise for millions.