In All Places

“And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places…” – Gen. 28:15a

         It would seem to me that this generation lives on catch phrases in any kind of communication. One that I hear or read so often now is, “I’m not in a good place right now.” In other words, “This is not a good time for me.” They may be referring to present circumstances and/or their present mental or emotional state. In any case, they should not be expected to react or perform in a way you might want or expect them to.

         I get that; but I would argue, we just may not know what our true place is. For instance, God told Moses, “Behold, there is a place by me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock” (Exo. 33:21). And Paul tells us in his Epistle to the Ephesians (2:13) that though our inborn sin has separated us from God, the Blood of Jesus Christ brings us back to that “place by him,” standing on the Rock, Christ Jesus. If we have cast ourselves on the mercy of God by faith in His shed Blood, this is our place, now and forever.

The place you are in may be a hard place, a place of suffering or grief or even danger. But for the child of God, there is no “bad place.” Our problem, it would seem to me, is the problem Jacob had in this twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis. “And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.”  He didn’t know where he was. He woke up to what he thought was a place of fear and dread; but when he came to realize it was really the “house of God,” he turned his “pillows” of peril into a “pillar” of praise! (vv. 18-19)

Whatever bad places the children of this world find themselves, you and I, as children of the King, can only be in one place: that place by Him. And that’s a good place!