“I, Myself, Will Go Down With You”

Almost exactly a year ago, I was about two weeks into a One Year Chronological Bible Reading Plan that a Discord group I belong to had started on January 1.

Joseph, the long-lost son of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob, was alive. After over twenty years believing his son was dead, Jacob, in his frail, old age, was confronted by the startling proposition to leave Canaan, the land he’d known all his life, and travel to Egypt — a heavy task for one so old and weak. He couldn’t walk or ride; he’d have to be carried the entire journey. What if his health deteriorated on the way?

And how could it be true that his son, who had been mauled and eaten by wild animals at seventeen, was alive in Egypt? And not just alive, but a very great and powerful man second only to Pharaoh himself? Despite the testimony of his other sons, it seemed like a dream.

At Beersheba, perhaps the closest spot to Egypt that Jacob was familiar with, God came to him in a vision. “Jacob, Jacob,” God called (Gen. 46:2–4).

“Here I am,” Jacob said.

“I am God, the God of your father. Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great nation.” The voice was calm, a breeze on the night air. And then God said, “I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.”

I don’t know what it was about those words — “I myself will go down with you…” — but they leapt out of the screen and into my soul. I was floored.

“I myself…” You, your very self? With me?

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t then (and still can’t) recall a more profound and apparent spiritual experience.

I felt like Digory and Polly at the end of The Magician’s Nephew when they bid farewell to Aslan and find themselves tossed and floating in a sea of gold, as “such a sweetness and power rolled about them and over them and entered them that they felt they had never really been happy or wise or good, or even alive and awake, before.”

“I myself will go down with you.”

There’s such muchness in those words; it’s incomprehensible. I spent the rest of the year meditating on them, not so much trying to decode them as I was trying to drown myself in that sweetness and power again and again.

Imagine all of that omniscience, all of that omnipresence, all of that omnipotence — all of that goodness and glory and terribleness — wrapping itself up and going someplace with you — you, specifically.

Fresh at the start of another year, those words come back to me. I don’t know what the weeks and months ahead hold. I’ve got a heavier graduate degree workload than I wanted or anticipated in the waning weeks of last year. My short-term writing plans are essentially shredded. I’m closing in on a high-pressure examination that’s been a long time coming. Within the next couple of months, I’ll be pushed far outside my comfort zone on projects I never anticipated being involved in. And while I have big, long-term plans, my vision beyond March remains blurry.

But if I picked a scriptural theme for the year, it’d be the one that startled me and captivated me all of last year: God telling Jacob, “I myself will go down with you.”

In those words, there’s no guarantee of success or happiness or pleasure. There’s nothing that says, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” There’s no promise of health or glory.

The primary promise is the promise of presence. “I myself will go down with you.”

Jacob’s sons had tricked him before. Likely, he’d long held reservations about their involvement in Joseph’s disappearance. The miraculous tidings of his beloved offspring being alive likely reignited such misgivings. If, in my old age, hope confronted me in this form, I’d have doubts. I’d demand guarantees. I’d need proof of life.

But what Jacob gets is a guarantee of presence. A guarantee that the God of his father would be with him and would keep the promises that he had made to Jacob’s forefathers.

He also gets a guarantee of death. The hands of his beloved, long-lost son will lower his eyelids over his vacant gaze.

I’d love to know now that I’ll finish this semester with high marks. I’d love to be promised that, miraculously, I’ll shed my nervousness and reticence for the weeks ahead where I’ll have to speak in front of strangers. I’d love to know that my upcoming examination will go swimmingly. And, probably more than anything, I’d love a roadmap for the nine months after March.

I could pray for certainty. But if God could give me these guarantees — and I’m sure he can — he has chosen not to.

Instead, I receive from him the promise that he will go with me. He will be there. He will be present. And I know, from last year, that that is comfort enough.

I want so much for God to do things. (Am I projecting our society’s productivity fetish onto the divine? Perhaps.) But sometimes, God’s standard operating procedure is doing nothing at all.

When the descendants of Jacob and Joseph were enslaved in Egypt, they cried out to God for help. They wanted deliverance. They wanted a God who did things. But the Exodus account tells us that, for the longest time, “God heard their groaning… God saw the people of Israel — and God knew” (Ex. 2:24–25).

There is comfort in being heard, being seen, being known. To know, to see, to listen are sympathies all their own. Perhaps you’ve experienced the power of someone’s presence in moments of disappointment or grief. When nothing can be done, something is done by hearing, seeing, and knowing.

And that is what God promises.

Another of Jacob’s descendants refused to take a step into the future without the guarantee of God’s presence. Moses had been tasked with leading the Hebrews out of Egypt and into their promised land. It was a vast undertaking: hundreds of thousands were in his care. He had to develop a system of government, sustainable economic practices, and a rough ’n’ ready military, all while being stranded in the desert due to the people’s lack of faith in God’s plan.

Perhaps out of faith, but just as likely out of frustration, Moses makes a demand of the God who set him to this task: “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us?” (Ex. 33:15–16).

Panim, the Hebrew word translated as “presence,” means face. The act of presence cannot be carried out without turning the face toward the person who is to be seen, heard, and known. Moses is saying, “Look at me! Look at us! See us! Hear us! Know us! Go with us — whether in life or in death.” For that is what he requests: the Hebrew halak bears the figurative meaning to walk with one whether they live or die — or in whatever manner of life they find themselves.

God sees me. He hears me. He knows me — even when I am unsure what I know of myself. His face is turned to me and will remain turned to me no matter the outcome of the events that lie on the path ahead. He himself is present. He abides in whatever manner of life in which I find myself. And I’m comforted by that. I wouldn’t dare demand it, but it’s all I can ask.

“I myself will go down with you.”

I’ll return again and again to the memory of the moment those words leapt unbound from my phone screen into my soul. I hope they are to me what Aslan’s golden sea was to Digory and Polly: a moment that “stayed with them always, so that as long as they both lived, if ever they were sad or afraid or angry, the thought of all that golden goodness, and the feeling that it was still there — quite close, just round some corner or just behind some door — would come back and make them sure, deep down inside, that all was well.”