Archives for October 2021

Part 1: Introduction

I’ve proposed using the Old Testament account of Joshua’s succession of Moses as a pattern for us as we face a rapidly and significantly changing world. I suppose I should justify that.

Of course there are differences between our situation and that of Joshua 1:

• What we’re facing is not just a change of leadership.
• We’re not emerging from a lifetime of stability in leadership.
• We’re not Israel. (And no, this isn’t about dispensationalism. :-) )
• God hasn’t given special revelation as to who our leaders should be.

But there are also similarities:

• We are a people of God. (I’m speaking here of the church, not the USA or any other political entity.)
• We are in covenant with God, whose covenant loyalty (Heb hesed, steadfast, loving loyalty) “endures forever” (Ps 136 and often elsewhere).
• We are in a time of significant change.

And as Paul tells us (1Co 10.6), the Old Testament accounts were written as examples for us.

So what did God say to Joshua in his time of transition? And what do those words tell us about God and His plans for us? In this series I’d like to suggest three statements about God in his words to Joshua, and three things he asks us to do in response.

1.      God is great, and he is in charge.

In fact, he is in charge because he is great.

God says to Joshua,

My servant Moses is dead. Now proceed to cross the Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to them, to the Israelites (Jos 1.2).

God begins by calling Moses “my servant.” Now, Moses was the most powerful human these people had ever known. He had faced down Pharaoh and forced him to let his Israelite slaves go. He had held his rod over the Red Sea and parted it, allowing the millions of Israelites to pass through safely and then drowning the most powerful army in the world. For 40 years he had provided for their needs and answered their questions in circumstances that could have turned fatal on them in days. He had led them militarily through hostile territory east of the Jordan.

And he’s just a servant? How powerful must his master and commander be?!

By implication, Joshua—and all the people—are also God’s servants, who must obey His orders. And to make the point, he immediately gives them an order: “Proceed to cross the Jordan.”

The narrative will later tell us (Jos 3.15) that the Jordan is at flood stage during this season. I’ve seen significant rivers that have swelled out of their banks during a flood, and it’s a frightening sight. Your first instinct is not to step out into it. Again, we’ll soon learn that when the people obey, the river will withdraw from them, just as the Red Sea had a generation earlier (Jos 3.16).

So God had graciously already provided them with a basis for courage. He wasn’t asking for blind faith and slavish obedience; he was gently saying, “We’ve been through this before; you know I can bring you through.”

That was 1400 years before the birth of Jesus. How much more evidence do we, living more than 3400 years later, have of God’s power, faithfulness, and tender care? What other evidences do we find in the rest of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the lives of God’s people in all the years since the last apostle laid down his pen for the last time?

Why are we unsettled? Why are we afraid? Why are we frustrated and angry, lashing out and calling names?

Why do we post things like “Joe Biden wasn’t elected. He was installed. Like a toilet.”?!

What kind of weak, inattentive God do we think we have?

God will stop the flow of the Jordan the moment the priests step into it (Jos 3.15-16). He can do that; he’s in charge. This is the God we serve. 

No, God doesn’t always stop the flow of rivers he asks us to cross. But he can. That’s the point. And he will take us through, flood stage or dry riverbed. 

Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

I hear a lot of talk—and a lot of fear and anger and frustration—about social change. Things aren’t the way they used to be, and a lot of people find the situation deeply troubling.

Things always change; that’s a fact of life. Most of us have the experience of going back to a familiar place—a house, a school, a church, an employer—and noticing that while the physical plant is largely the same, we no longer know any of the people. The disconnect is jarring.

But broader cultural changes, driven by technology, by societal mores, by artistic expression, by a thousand other things, are even more unsettling. When the whole world changes, there are no familiar places to go back to.

The sense of dislocation is exacerbated by the indisputable fact that the pace of change is accelerating. I realized a few years back that when my father was born in 1918 in a homestead ranch cabin on the Western frontier, daily life was largely unchanged from life in Jesus’ time—or even Abraham’s. You got water from a well or a river; you grew your own food, using animals to do the most difficult physical labor; you cooked that food over a fire; you walked or rode carts pulled by animals; you did your excretory business in a hole in the ground a little ways off from the house.

Dad lived to be 90. In that one lifespan, he saw pretty much everything that’s changed since the ancient world. He rode in an automobile; he helped build highways; he rode and worked on trains, both coal-fired and diesel electric; he helped build Grand Coulee Dam; he learned to fly airplanes; he worked in newspaper publishing from the days of hot lead Linotype to digital; and with a little help from his son, he navigated on Google Earth to see the old homestead on Sandy Creek, just upriver from Salmon, Idaho.

All in one lifetime.

And in the mere decade and a half since, what social, cultural, medical, and financial changes have occurred!

Some people feel like we’re accelerating headlong toward a precipice, uncontrolled and uncontrollably.

And on the heels of such thoughts inevitably come fear, despair, desperation, rage.

My brethren, these things ought not so to be.

We forget—so easily—that there is providence: that there is a God, who is mighty and wise and loving, who directs all things—even things like the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jerusalem, even things like wars and pandemics and famines and corruption as deep as we can imagine—he directs all things to his own good ends and the benefit of his people.

Nothing is headlong; nothing is uncontrolled; nothing is cause for existential despair.

And if nothing on such a macroscopic scale should bring despair, then what about those narrower, more personal changes and challenges? Should we lose hope when our own lives take difficult turns, change in unexpected, undesirable, and indecipherable ways?

There are many accounts of significant changes in the biblical narrative. I suppose the death of Jesus was the most significant—and even there we find that it was not only part of God’s plan, but it was in fact at the very center of that plan. We wonder, here in hindsight, why those thick-headed disciples just didn’t get it.

Of the many other examples, I’d like to focus on just one.

Moses was a leader for the ages. Specially selected (Ex 3) and then empowered by God, he brought the mightiest ruler in the world of that day to his knees through a series of miraculous plagues, then organized perhaps 2 million people for travel, then parted the Red Sea, brought water out of a desert rock, and saw to their organized government under unimaginably contrary conditions during 40 years of wandering the desert.

And then, over a century old, he brought them through hostile territories to the edge of Canaan, the promised land. The new generation and the new army were about to take on the Canaanite peoples who had so frightened their parents.

Time to get busy and get this thing done.

But wait.

Moses isn’t coming. In fact, he’s dead.

The new leader is Joshua, someone with no chief executive experience, with little military command experience.

How is this going to work?

I’d like to spend a few posts thinking about how God handled this transition.

Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash