Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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How It Ends, Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation

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Part 1: Taking the Long View | Part 2: Anticipating the Then

If we’re living with the end in mind—an eternity living in intimate fellowship with God, and serving him perfectly—then how do we live now? What are our priorities?

Like all the most important questions, the Bible answers this one clearly. I’d like to offer three passages where the New Testament addresses the answer.

Anticipate with Confidence

In his last recorded words to his protégé Titus, whom he left on the island of Crete to oversee the churches there (Ti 1.5), Paul gives him some imperatives designed to last him for life:

11 For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, 12 Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; 13 Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; 14 Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works (Ti 2.11-15).

Some of this he has said often elsewhere: in light of God’s grace to us (Ti 2.11), we should live seriously and righteously (Ti 2.12). No surprises there.

But then he adds a descriptor, a participle, that applies specifically to what we’ve been discussing; he says we are to “look for” Jesus’ return, the event that distinguishes the present age from the next, the event to which life as we know it points. This verb describes Simeon and Anna, and indeed all the Jews of their day, living under the bondage of Rome and the hated Roman puppet Herod the Great, as they anticipated and longed for the day when they would be liberated once more (Lk 2.25, 38). It describes Joseph of Arimathea, who as a member of the Sanhedrin, the Supreme Court of Israel, had not consented to the council’s condemnation of Jesus and then risked his career by asking Pilate for custodianship of the body of the crucified “blasphemer” (Mk 15.43; Lk 23.51)—a body that in the eyes of the council should be thrown out in the trash with the bodies of the other two miscreants. Joseph’s most noteworthy characteristic, in the eyes of the two Evangelists, is that he “was waiting for the kingdom of God.”

That’s our verb. That’s how we’re supposed to be thinking and living—“looking for” Jesus’ return. Or, as Paul calls it here, “that blessed hope.” I’ve noted before that biblical hope is different from how we use the word today. To us, hope is something we wish for. Maybe it’s likely, maybe it’s not; as is evident from the size of the jackpots, millions of people buy lottery tickets in the forlorn hope that one day they’ll hit the big one. Some wag has observed that a public lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. They hope, many of them fervently, even religiously. But if their dreams come true, they’ll be more surprised than anyone else.

That’s not biblical hope. Hope is the anticipation of a certain future event. It’s the president-elect waiting for Inauguration Day; it’s the senior who’s just passed all his final exams; it’s the engaged couple focused intently on the coming June Saturday.

This is not wishing; it’s explosive, confident anticipation. It’s taking the future to the bank.

There’s a lot we don’t know about the future. It may hold financial setbacks, or job loss, or terminal disease, or sudden, violent death. We don’t know what life will be like for our children and grandchildren, should the Lord tarry. Even as we study prophecy, we don’t know—for sure—when Jesus will return, or when it will be in relation to the Tribulation, or what the Millennium will be like, or which ZIP Code of the New Jerusalem we’ll occupy, or what we’ll do with our time—or the absence of it.

So many unanswered questions.

But this we do know.

Jesus is coming back. For us. And for justice. And for eternal day.

Anticipate, with confidence.

Next time, more ways to live as we anticipate.

Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 2: Anticipating the Then

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Part 1: Taking the Long View

I noted last time that there’s quite a bit of biblical material about the millennium. Assuming that the millennial passages should be taken with a reasonable amount of ordinary hermeneutic, this period will be characterized by

  • Natural peace, such as the lion lying down with the lamb (Is 11.6), after the manner of “Peace in the Valley”
  • Social peace, with nations beating their swords into plowshares (Is 2.4)
  • Spiritual peace, with the nations full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Is 11.9)
  • Political peace, as justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream (Am 5.24)

Our knowledge of the eternal state, however, is much less extensive. Most of it is confined to the last two chapters of the Bible, Revelation 21-22. The environment portrayed there seems to have two outstanding characteristics:

Perfect fellowship with God

God and the Lamb light the whole city (Re 21.23)—and likely the whole world, given that “the nations will walk by its light” (Re 21.24). Recall that at the Transfiguration, Jesus’ garments shone whiter than any launderer could bleach them (Mk 9.3); that Paul was blinded by Jesus’ heavenly glory (Ac 9.8-9, 18); and that when Jesus’ closest friend, John, saw him glorified, he fell at his feet (Re 1.17).

But there, all the barriers—sin, distance, visibility—will be removed. You and I are going to enjoy the open, intimate, personal presence of the Godhead.

Perfect service for God

There we will be in a position to worship God perfectly; we’re told that “his servants will worship him” (Re 22.3), in a time when we have bodies like Christ’s resurrected body (Php 3.21), and we will be like him in other ways as well (1Jn 3.2).

We worship him today, both in private and in public, but our worship is dented by our sinfulness, by distraction, by limitations of imagination and creativity, and by all sorts of other factors. Yet even in this broken state worship is highly satisfying, both to us and to God.

I recall attending church a few years ago in Arad, Israel, with a small Messianic Jewish congregation. They met in a house on Shabbat. As I entered, a young lady just inside the door asked, “What language?” When I answered, “English,” she twisted a knob on a small black box and handed it to me with a set of headphones. I entered the living room and sat down with 30 or 40 other people seated close together.

The preacher began speaking—in Hebrew—but I heard a live translation in English. As I looked around the room, I noticed that most had on headphones, but a handful had microphones as well, and they were speaking softly as the sermon continued. I learned afterward that translations were available in German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and a North African tribal language as well as English.

I couldn’t help thinking that this was a delightful foretaste of glory divine, of the day when every kingdom, tongue, tribe, and nation will be gathered around the throne, singing and shouting the praise of the Lion of Judah, the Lamb who was slain (Re 7.9ff).

Even here, worship can be delightful.

But there, there, all those limitations will be done away. We will worship him purely and completely, and we will serve him perfectly and successfully as well.

What will that service look like? Will there be white-collar and blue-collar jobs? Will there be physical kinds of service as well as spiritual? Will God send us shooting off through the regenerated universe on missions of importance to the accomplishing of his will?

All good questions; thanks for asking them. But by God’s choice—and his grace—we don’t know the answers. All we know is that we will serve him—and serve him perfectly.

So that means—to put it in absurdly simple terms—that everything’s going to turn out just fine.

And that presents us with a question: What do we do in the meantime? How do we think? How do we make decisions? How do we feel?

How do we live?

More on that next time.

Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

How It Ends, Part 1: Taking the Long View

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It’s human nature to focus on the Now.

Sometimes that looks like shallowness: the magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store, the obsession with celebrities, many of whom are famous for nothing more than being famous.

Sometimes it looks like self-centeredness: hoarding, the manic grasping for whatever’s right in front of you, from Tickle Me Elmo to toilet paper, before somebody else gets it.

Sometimes it looks like fear, or even despair, over the state of the world, the suffering of so many, wave after wave of insoluble problems.

There’s a difference between stewardship—doing your best to approach life’s problems sensibly and successfully—and nearsightedness. From driving a car to inhabiting the C suite in a multinational corporation, we know that it’s unwise to obsess over the immediate or to downplay the long-term view.

It’s wise to proceed with the end in mind.

For the Christian, that means staying focused on the certain divine victory.

There are many who scoff at such things. It’s pie in the sky. It’s how the empowered and privileged manipulate the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation.

I’m not for the empowered and privileged manipulating the masses into not revolting and casting off exploitation; the prophets talk a lot about that, and Jesus speaks to it as well. But I would argue that thinking eschatologically is not in fact pie in the sky, and it’s not properly used to manipulate the unempowered.

It’s not only a worthwhile occasional exercise; it’s the only way of life that makes any sense.

I’ve written here before on the difficulty of developing an eschatological system, because the prophetic genre is inherently and intentionally clouded; God intends that the prediction not be fully understood until it is fulfilled. I speculate that one reason he might do that is so that the outcome—and the accuracy of the prediction—would have maximum impact on the audience. If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to figure out a puzzle for centuries, then the resolution is going to hit you like a ton of bricks.

That’s essentially what educators call discovery learning, and in my experience it’s the most impactful kind. When a student learns something for himself, he considers it his own personal property, and he’ll remember and use it for a long time—often for the rest of his life.

But even though interpreting the Bible’s eschatological material is difficult, and even though we’re unlikely to figure it all out ahead of time, and even though we have to come to our conclusions humbly, it’s still worth studying the material—first, because it’s Bible, and going to the metaphorical gym in your study of Scripture is a means of grace, building spiritual muscle in you; and second, because in this area of theology, as in all others, God has made the important stuff, the stuff necessary for now, clear enough. There are some things of which we can be certain.

I’d like to spend a few posts investigating how it all ends. There are significant arguments, as we would expect, over the path we follow to get there, and when that will happen, but the main truths of how it ends are pretty clear. And thus it’s equally clear how we should live now in light of where we’re headed.

I’ll note that while there’s quite a bit of biblical material on what we call the millennium, that material suffers from the same clarity problem that other prophecy does. Bible students can’t agree on whether the millennium is real or symbolic; whether it lasts a thousand years or something else; whether it’s in heaven or on earth; or even whether Christ is visibly ruling or not.

I’ll note that I have an opinion on all this—I’m premillennial, and I have what I think are good reasons for holding that position—but if it turns out that God has some other approach in mind, I’m not going to be overly surprised, and I’m not going to go all Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Mt 16.22-23) and try to change his mind.

So my concern in this series isn’t the millennium; I’ll let the millennium take care of the things of itself. I want to look at the very end, after everybody’s eschatological system has been either confirmed or, more likely, corrected. What then?

We have very little biblical material on that—what theologians call the eternal state, and what most people refer to, accurately or not, as “heaven.”

Next time we’ll see what we can wisely discern from that little bit of material.

Part 2: Anticipating the Then | Part 3: Living in the Now—Confident Expectation | Part 4: Living in the Now—Patient Endurance | Part 5: Living in the Now—Diligent Occupation

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Integrity Matters, Part 2: Case Study

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Part 1: Two Commandments

In Acts 5, we read of Ananias and Sapphira, a couple in the church at Jerusalem, who sell a piece of land and donate some of the proceeds to the church.

The Motive: Personal Recognition (Ac 4.32-5.2)

Hidden under the surface of this simple and apparently commendable act, however, are two key facts:

  • They do this immediately after many other church members, including a highly esteemed man named Barnabas, have done something similar (Ac 4.32-37).
  • They lie by saying that the money they’ve donated is the entire proceeds of the sale (Ac 5.2, 8).

It’s pretty clear what’s going on here.

Everybody’s making sacrificial donations to the church. Ananias and Sapphira don’t want to appear selfish, and they want a piece of the action; they want the praise of their peers, but they don’t want to make the sacrifice Barnabas and others had made. And thus they’re willing to lie to get it.

Nearly all sin is based in pride and self-centeredness: you want something for yourself more than you want God to be glorified. And this in spite of the fact that God has already given us “all spiritual blessings” (Ep 1.3) and promises much more to come (Lk 6.38). 

What would you do for recognition? What would you do to have fellow believers think well of you? If you’d do something God forbids, then you’ve made yourself into an idol that you worship. Can you think of anything more ridiculous?

You know, the physicists tell us that you and I don’t have nearly enough mass to be the center of the universe.

The Sin: Lying to God (Ac 5.3-4)

It’s obvious that Ananias and Sapphira  lied to the church; but at bottom, as Peter tells them, they lied to God (Ac 5.4b)—who, by the way, is omniscient.

How hopeless is that?!

Sin, you see, makes you stupid.

Like the bank robber who wrote the holdup note on the back of one of his personalized checks.

They didn’t have to do any of this; as Peter tells them (Ac 5.4a), they were free to do what they wanted with their property and with the money they got from selling it. Did they really think God wouldn’t know what they had done? 

That’s just stupid. 

The Penalty: Death (Ac 5.5-10)

Ananias lies, and then he dies.

Does this penalty seem harsh? 

I’ll confess that it seems harsh to me. 

But this is a direct act of God—Peter didn’t call for it—and we know that God is just. 

Now, in this country we don’t have the death penalty for lying or stealing. I suppose there are circumstances in which your lying or stealing might get you killed—stealing copper wire from an electrical power substation is pretty risky—but you’re not likely to be executed for lying. 

But God is just, and in the end of time all the scales of justice will be balanced, and all evil will be accounted for. Don’t put him to the test.

It doesn’t stop with Ananias. His wife Sapphira doubles down on the lie, and she dies too.

Ananias, who is supposed to be a tender shepherd for his wife, leads her into sin instead of out of it. And her conspiracy just compounds the crime. 

The Outcome: Fear (Ac 5.11)

And now the body, this body so eager to care for one another, this body so generous with their belongings, this body surrounded by the grace and power of God, is afraid.

That’s what sin does—even to innocent bystanders.

It corrupts and disturbs and poisons everything it touches; it turns a delightful situation into a fearful one.

Now, this isn’t how God wants us to live. “Fear not,” Jesus said repeatedly (Mt 10.28; Lk 5.10; 8.50; 12.7, 32; passim). Perfect love, John says, casts out fear (1Jn 4.18). We sons and daughters of God should live as adults, not little children; we should be motivated by love, not by fear.

Sin keeps us from doing that. Living a lie keeps us from doing that.

Integrity matters, for so many reasons more than just reputation.

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Integrity Matters, Part 1: Two Commandments

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Everybody knows about the Ten Commandments. Not everybody knows what they are, and nobody obeys them perfectly, but the term is pervasive as an expression for Doing Good.

It’s been often observed that the commandments come on two tablets—not just literally (Ex 31.18), but logically as well. Commandments 1-4 address our relationship with God, answering to the Great Commandment (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” Mt 22.36-38), while commandments 5-10 address our relationship with other humans, answering to the Second Commandment (“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Mt 22.39). And within that second table, many have noticed that the last 4 seem to be related:

14 You shall not commit adultery.
15 You shall not steal.
16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
17 You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Ex 20.14-17).

Adultery and coveting (especially coveting your neighbor’s wife) seem of a piece, bookending the prohibitions on stealing and lying, or “bearing false witness.”

I’d like to spend a post or two on these last-mentioned two as connected. Stealing, I’d suggest, is really just a form of lying—which is why the two so often travel together.

Stealing, as we all know, is taking something that doesn’t belong to you. We know instinctively that that’s wrong, but it’s worth our time to think systematically through the reasons why.

  • Like all the other sins listed in the Second Table, stealing is failing to love your neighbor, since you’re depriving him of something that he has earned:

8 Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law (Ro 13.8-10).

  • But when you do that, you’re engaging in a whole list of lies. You’re saying that
    • Your neighbor is not in fact in the image of God, deserving your respect;
    • What you’ve taken really and rightly belongs, or should belong, to you;
    • God, your abundantly generous heavenly Father, hasn’t given you everything you need;
    • You need more—and God doesn’t care enough about that need to give you what you need in a legitimate way;
    • If you’re a believer, you’re saying that you haven’t taken off the cloak of ungodliness and put on the cloak of righteousness (Ep 4.17-25). You’re saying that God hasn’t fundamentally changed you from your unbelieving days. As a believer, you’re living as though you’re still by nature a child of wrath (Ep 2.3). That’s like being a square circle—it doesn’t make any sense at all.

So when you steal, you’re lying, in multiple and obvious ways. It’s no surprise, then, that Paul mentions both together:

25 So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. … 28 Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy (Ep 4.25-28).

Note his requirement that thieves work “honestly” with their hands, in contrast with the lying way they had “worked” before.

When you steal, you’re not telling the truth, and you’re not living the truth. And there’s nothing good down that road. Since you don’t like it when other people do that to you, how can you possibly excuse it in yourself? 

In the next post I’d like to look at an incident of lying and stealing in the Bible.

Part 2: Case Study

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Change, Part 7: Meditation

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience

The third and final prescription God has for Joshua in a time of momentous change is also straightforward:

This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall be successful (Jos 1.8).

3. Meditation

“Meditate” (Heb hazah) refers to an animal sound, a coo or a growl. It came to carry the idea of pondering over something by talking to yourself about it. 

What does Joshua meditate about? What has God given him? “The Book of the Law.” This is probably a reference specifically to Deuteronomy (the “second Law”), but of course Joshua had all five books of Moses.

We have an advantage over Joshua in that we have the completed Word of God. God’s inspired instruction to us goes far beyond the Law of Moses. Joshua had a record of the past works of God, His requirements of Israel, and His promises to them. As Warren Wiersbe once noted, “If Joshua was able to conquer Canaan having only the first five books of the Bible, how much more ought we to overcome now that we have a complete Bible!”

What do we know that Joshua didn’t?

There’s a lot, of course, but I think it can be summarized in two classes of revelation:

  • The Canon, which includes the rest of the Old Testament and the New Testament—the persistent failures of Israel through the period of the judges, the kings, and the Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors, as well as God’s ongoing faithfulness to them even in judgment; and the record of the Incarnation and atoning work of God’s Son, including expositions of its significance and a snapshot of its outcome at the Heavenly Throne.
  • In particular, God has revealed Himself to us perfectly and completely in the incarnate Son. As we get to know Christ as revealed in the Scripture, we will 
    • Come to know the Father better (Jn 14.9). 
    • See in the image of Christ the goal of the Father’s sanctifying work in us (Rom 8.29). 
    • Understand the meaning of His everlasting presence (Mt 28.20). 

That’s a lifetime of meditation and rumination, with persistent and substantial benefits throughout.

How did this turn out for Joshua? He models our response (Jos 1.10-11). 

10 Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, 11 “Pass through the camp, and command the people: ‘Prepare your provisions; for in three days you are to cross over the Jordan, to go in to take possession of the land that the Lord your God gives you to possess.’ ”

He believes God—he takes his promises as certain to be fulfilled—and he acts on that belief by obeying what God has told him to do. 

This was not without risk. They were going into battle. And so are we. But we rest our hopes not on Moses, or on Joshua. We rest on Jehovah, Lord of the heavenly armies, Creator of heaven and earth, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, faithful Keeper of covenant promises, and our tender Shepherd and loving Father. 

So in chaotic times we turn the page. We take our Father’s hand, and we walk fearlessly, joyously, with Him to a delightful outcome. 

I hereby command you: Be strong and courageous; do not be frightened or dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Jos 1.9).

These words call to mind Jesus’ similar promise as He sent His disciples forth. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go … and make disciples of all nations,” he said, and then he added, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Mt 28.19-20). 

This is God’s promise to us all, including both those who are confident and those who are fearful. 

He is with us. His plans will be accomplished, for our good, and most especially for His glory. 

God reigns.

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Change, Part 6: Obedience

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust

The second of three prescriptions God has for Joshua in a time of momentous change is as straightforward as the first:

being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go (Jos 1.7b).

2. Obedience

God began by asking for Joshua’s trust; now he asks for his obedience.

As commentator David M. Howard writes, “It is striking that God’s instructions here to Joshua are not about military matters, given that Joshua and the Israelites faced many battles ahead. However, the keys to his success were spiritual, directly related to the degree of his obedience to God. The keys to Joshua’s success were the same as those for a king: being rooted in God’s word rather than depending upon military might (Deut 17:14–20, esp. vv. 16, 18–19)” (Joshua, New American Commentary, 85).

Obedience is a major theme in the book of Joshua. We shouldn’t be surprised that God peppers the book with reminders of the importance of obedience, given that the Israelites had just spent 40 years in the wilderness in response to their faithless refusal to enter the Land from Kadesh-Barnea (Num 14), and that before that, from the beginning of their time in the wilderness, they had complained of their circumstances and expressed doubt over the Lord’s character and motives (Ex 16.1-3). At the close of Moses’ ministry, God had predicted that this well-established pattern of disobedience would continue under the leadership of Moses’ successor (Dt 31.16).

As indeed it did. Immediately after the initial miraculous victory at Jericho, the disobedience of Achan led to death and defeat at Ai.

God’s plan was for them to do the hard work of taking the land. He would intervene spectacularly on their behalf as they crossed the Jordan (by parting it before them, Jos 3), surrounded Jericho (by collapsing the walls, Jos 6), and battled the southern Canaanite confederacy (by causing the sun to stand still, Jos 10), but He begins with their obedience.

And in turn, there’s a reason that he has asked for their faith before asking for their obedience. They wouldn’t step into the raging Jordan unless they believed that he would part the waters; they wouldn’t march in military aggression against the walled city of Jericho unless they believed that he would collapse the walls; they wouldn’t go into a days-long battle against the southern Canaanite confederacy unless they believed that he would make it possible for them to mop up the scene while there was still daylight.

Trust, then obey.

What of us?

We don’t have a land to conquer; we have other, different commands to obey. We are called to be ambassadors, representing him faithfully in the midst of unbelief, taking the Good News to a sometimes unwilling, even aggressively hostile audience, with weapons that are spiritual, not carnal, and with the very confidence and grace of the Son.

But we have advantages Israel didn’t have. “Christians under the new covenant have the two-fold advantage that Christ satisfied the law’s demands and promises (Mt. 5:17; Rom. 3:21–26) and through the Spirit has written the law upon their hearts (2 Cor. 3:3–6; Heb. 8:7–13; 10:15–18)” (Gordon McConville, New Bible Commentary, 237). Our obedience to the Great Commission is spiritually empowered by the Commissioner himself. He has rendered us fit for the task and inclined to obey—in even the hard things. “Like Joshua, Christians do not succeed spiritually because they obey God’s Law. Instead, God through Christ enables them to have victory over sin” (Richard Hess, The Tyndale OT Commentary). 

So it turns out that the old children’s chorus expresses just exactly what’s called for from us adults: “trust, and obey.”

And we can do it.

Part 7: Meditation

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Change, Part 5: Trust

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper | Part 4: Present

Having reminded Joshua of whom he serves, thereby assuring him of success through changing times, God now outlines his expectations: how should Joshua respond in this potentially unstable situation?

He presents Joshua with a “to do” list of just three items, all of which make perfect sense and strike us an eminently reasonable.

1.      Trust

6 Be strong and courageous; for you shall put this people in possession of the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them. 7 Only be strong and very courageous … (Jos 1.6-7).

OK, I grant you that there’s no mention of the words trust, believe, or faith in there. Fair enough.

But if he’s going to stiffen his spine and lead 600,000 men into battle against people who are fighting for their homes—and who offer their own babies as fiery sacrifices to persuade their gods to give them bounteous crops—then he’s going to have to believe what the Lord has just told him—and what he tells him again in this sentence: that God’s power and presence is going to give him victory in all the coming battles.

That’s faith. That’s trust.

You don’t charge into the lion’s mouth unless you trust the lion tamer’s power over the lion. If Joshua allows his fear of failure—the consequences for which are extreme—then he’s telling God that he doesn’t believe him. As one commentator notes, “Fear and anxiety are tantamount to unbelief.”

It’s worth noting, I think, that God speaks of Israel’s “inheriting” the land (KJV NKJV ESV NIV) that he had promised them. You don’t “inherit” something by stealing it or taking it by force; you “inherit” it legally, because it is rightfully yours. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof” (Ps 24.1 KJV)—or in modern parlance, the earth and everything in it belongs to God. The land of Canaan doesn’t belong to the Canaanites; it belongs to God, who can bequeath it to whichever heir he chooses. And he chooses Joshua and the people of Israel, Abraham’s seed.

Similarly, we have an inheritance that is ours by right and that we shall certainly receive. Peter writes,

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time (1P 1.3-5).

We need not fear any current chaos, personal, familial, civic, national, or global. Our inheritance is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven” for us. Our Father is infinitely more reliable than the governor, the banker, the taxman. Our inheritance is sure.

And so Peter can immediately say,

6 In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, 7 so that the genuineness of your faith—being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed (1P 1.6-7).

Trials do not terrorize God’s people; they are merely a mechanism for removing impurities in us and rendering us clearer trophies of his grace, more effective ambassadors of his kingdom.

Trusting God brings a calm confidence that astounds the terrorized. Sometimes they think we’re stupid; sometimes they think we’re crazy; sometimes they think we’re insufficiently concerned and therefore unloving.

No. None of those things. Calm, confident, trusting in the good plan of a strong and kind heavenly Father.

Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

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Change, Part 4: Present

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good | Part 3: Promise Keeper 

God encourages Joshua in a time of great change and potential instability by telling him three things about himself. We’ve looked at the first two in the two previous posts. It remains now to note God’s final assurance to Joshua from his own character.

3. God Remains with His People

No one shall be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will not fail you or forsake you (Jos 1.5).

It may seem odd that God starts with the conclusion or the result rather than the basis. He assures Joshua that his enemies will fall before him; no one will be able to stand against him.

As we’ve noted, this is not because of Joshua’s skill with a sword, or the strategic and tactical depth of experience in his battlefield commanders. This army has had some battle experience—just recently—but they’re still fairly new at it. Further, they’re about to attack the Canaanites on their home turf, something that puts them at a disadvantage in both tactics and morale.

So why this outrageously optimistic outcome?

God is with him, and he will be with him uninterruptedly throughout the campaign. As he was with Moses, so he will be with Joshua.

We’ve noted before that God is the kind of person who keeps his promises. He’s going to keep the promise of the Land, made to the patriarchs and most recently to Moses, faithfully and powerfully. He doesn’t get tired or distracted or called away on something more urgent—in fact, there is no “away” with the omnipresent God.

The Hebrew word translated “fail” here (“leave” in the NKJV, ESV, and NIV) speaks of loosening the hand and letting something drop. It’s used that way in Ezekiel 21.7—

And when they say to you, “Why do you moan?” you shall say, “Because of the news that has come.” Every heart will melt and all hands will be feeble, every spirit will faint and all knees will turn to water. See, it comes and it will be fulfilled, says the Lord God.

The hand loosens. The weapon falls. The battle is lost.

When my daughters were still living at home, occasionally I would be watching a football game on a Saturday afternoon while lying on the couch. Because there are multiple games on, I’d have the remote in my hand, ready to check on another game when the commercial break comes to this one. Well, it’s Saturday afternoon, after lunch, and I’m lying on the couch, and you know what happens.

I doze off.

My daughters, who aren’t interested in the game and would rather watch something else, would gently ease the remote out of my hand and change the channel. At some point—maybe immediately, maybe a few minutes later, I’d wake up and say, “Hey! I was watching that!”

Indeed.

God’s hands don’t go limp on his people, either from lack of commitment or from exhaustion. God is there for Joshua and his army, keeping his promise to deliver them to the land, overwhelming their enemies certainly, faithfully, attentively, effortlessly.

He’s like that with us too.

As we noted in the previous post, he has made promises to us as well—more promises, in fact, than he made to Joshua. And it is impossible for him not to keep them, whether by forgetting or by becoming exhausted or by losing interest.

When everything around us is changing, God is not. He cannot violate his own character.

Interestingly, this promise to Joshua is quoted in the New Testament and applied to us in a specific context:

Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you” (He 13.5).

Contentment in the midst of chaos is a powerful testimony to a solid foundation and a confident purpose. We have what we need. God is enough.

The next verse broadens the application:

 So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”  (He 13.6).

God’s promised presence dismisses fear of both the known and the unknown.

Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, LORD,
who walk in the light of your presence (Ps 89.15).

Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Change, Part 3: Promise Keeper

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Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good

As we’ve seen, God is great, the great sovereign over his created order. He is able—and certain—to act on behalf of his people. How will he do that?

2. God keeps his promises.

As the narrative proceeds, God reminds Joshua that he has made promises to the people of Israel:

3 Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, as I promised to Moses. 4 From the wilderness and the Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, to the Great Sea in the west shall be your territory (Jos 1.3-4).

The Lord refers specifically to the promise he made to Moses (Dt 11.24), and through him to the people of Israel. And you’ll recall that even earlier, at the burning bush (Ex 3.8), God had commissioned Moses to bring his people out of Egypt “to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” And God prefaced that commission by identifying himself as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex 3.6). Why does he describe himself that way? clearly because he had made the same promise to the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham (Ge 12.7; cf 17.8), then Isaac (Ge 26.4) and then Jacob (Ge 28.13).

God is the kind of person who 1) remembers his promises and then 2) keeps them. It had been about 600 years since God made the original promise to Abraham; for more than 400 of those years Abraham’s descendants had been in Egypt—not in the Land God had promised them—and for most of those 400 they had been slaves.

But God had not forgotten; he had not reneged; he had not failed to keep the Promise.

One of the evidences of sovereignty is that you’re not in a hurry. If you see the White Rabbit hopping madly by, crying, “I’m late! I’m late!” then you know that he doesn’t have his life under control at that moment.

And so now, six centuries of providentially directed history later, it’s time—time to fulfill the promise, time to give Abraham’s seed the land.

As I’ve noted, you and I are not Israel, and we have no claim to the land from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates.

But if God is the kind of person who remembers and keeps his promises, then he remembers and keeps his promises to us as well.

And there are hundreds of them, more than I can list here.

But there a few that might be profitable for us to recall here where we find ourselves in history.

Some apply to us as individual believers.

  • “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16.25).
  • “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day” (Jn 6.40).
  • “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (Jn 14.3).
  • “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it” (1Co 10.13).
  • “The one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Php 1.6).
  • “I will never leave you or forsake you” (He 13.5).
  • “It is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the ignorance of the foolish” (1P 2.15).
  • “Let those suffering in accordance with God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator, while continuing to do good” (1P 4.19).

And others apply to us as Christ’s body, the church, in corporate unity.

  • “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Mt 16.18).
  • “Never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’ ” (Ro 12.19).
  • “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart” (1Co 1.19).
  • “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this” (1Th 5.23-24).
  • “All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2Ti 3.12).

He remembers all of these. And he will keep them.

Part 4: Present | Part 5: Trust | Part 6: Obedience | Part 7: Meditation

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash