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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Incomprehensible Faith

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In my Bible study plan I’m always doing a deep dive on a section of Scripture. For the first three months of this year, I’m studying Ruth. I return to the book every day, studying it from multiple perspectives and reading. A lot.

A few days ago I thought of something that I’d never noticed before, after all these years of hearing and reading the story dozens of times. It’s something about the first major incident in the book.

We all know the story. Naomi and her husband move from Bethlehem—the house of bread—to Moab because of a famine. Their two sons marry Moabite women, and then all three men die. In the culture of that day, a childless widow is in very serious danger of starving to death. Naomi hears that the famine is over back in Bethlehem and decides to return—likely because she has family there who will be legally obligated to help her.

So far the story is pretty simple. But it’s complicated by the fact that one of her Moabite daughters-in-law, Ruth, wants to return with her.

Naomi argues against it, citing the obvious practical fact that Ruth is more likely to find a second husband in her own land. Naomi doesn’t mention the fact that the Moabites and the Israelites are enemies; the king of Moab had hired the prophet Balaam to curse Israel (Nu 22.4-5), and God had consequently cursed the king and his people (Nu 24.17). Surely Ruth’s marital prospects would be better in Moab.

But Ruth insists. She will go with Naomi; she will live with Naomi; she will adopt her people and culture; and she will worship her God (Ru 1.16)—for the rest of her life (Ru 1.17).

Why?

Look at this from Ruth’s perspective. The conventional wisdom in her day is that every ethnic group has its own god. Chemosh is the god of the Moabites—and their harvests are so plentiful that Yahweh’s people are coming over there to get a piece of the action. In all of Ruth’s experience to this point, she has seen nothing that would convince her that Yahweh cares for his people, or even that he is good. His people are starving, so Chemosh feeds them. Her father-in-law dies in Moab, as do his two sons, including Ruth’s husband, and all of them allegedly under the care of this tribal god Yahweh—who, to make matters worse, has placed her and her people under a specific curse.

Why seek shelter under the wings of such a god? What has he ever done for his own people, let alone an enemy?

Was it Naomi’s love for and trust in her own god? Well, she believes that her god, Yahweh, has taken someone who was full and has left her empty. A few days from now she will tell her own people no longer to call her by her name, Naomi, which means “pleasant.” Instead, she will say, call me Mara—“bitter.” My god has not been good to me.

So why does Ruth go with Naomi? And especially, why does she seek to worship Naomi’s god?

Well, for all her imperfections, Naomi does recognize that God is in charge. (And here I begin to capitalize the word again.) It is he who has brought food back to Bethlehem (Ru 1.6). It is he, not Chemosh, who she confidently believes will prosper the lives of her daughters-in-law (Ru 1.8-9). Even though his hand has gone out against her (Ru 1.13), she still believes that he is strong enough to bless, and she prays that he will. You don’t pray to someone you don’t believe in.

Apparently, Ruth sees in Naomi’s imperfect faith something greater than what she sees in the worshippers of her tribal god. For all of the trouble, for all of the pain, this is a God worth following—even at the cost of leaving home, family, culture, and language to go to a land where you’re under a curse, where you will likely face deep, overt, and lifelong discrimination.

So she goes.

And she finds that her faith is richly rewarded. This Yahweh, she finds, does indeed direct circumstances, even down to the portion of the community field where she happens to go looking for loose grain lying on the ground or standing beyond the reaches of the reapers’ sickles around the edges.

This is a God worth trusting. Worth following.

No matter what.

Photo by David Marcu on Unsplash

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 3: Why the Killing Stopped

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Part 1: Place Is Important | Part 2: Where the Killing Stops

Last time we saw God, whom I take to be the Father, order the Angel of YHWH, whom I take to be the Son, to stop the killing of plague victims as a consequence of David’s sin of numbering the people.  In both of the accounts, the writer notes immediately that the angel was at a threshing floor owned by a man named Araunah (2S 24.16), or Ornan (1Ch 21.15). To us readers, it seems that God’s command was prompted in some way by the location.

What was it about this site that moved God to intervene with compassion? Why did the killing stop … here?

Well, this site has a history. It had a history in David’s day, and it has had a history ever since.

We first find it referred to by God himself, as “one of the mountains that I will tell you of” (Ge 22.2) in the land of Moriah. God chooses this hilltop as the place where he will ask Abraham for the ultimate act of obedience—the sacrifice of his own son, the son of his old age, the son of promise. As we all know, Abraham obeys, even tying Isaac on the handmade altar and taking the knife in his hand to kill him. The author of Hebrews tells us later what Abraham was thinking: that once he had killed his son, God would surely raise him from the dead (He 11.17-19)—because Isaac was, after all, the son of promise, the son through whom all the nations of the earth would be blessed. This faith is all the more remarkable in that in Abraham’s time, no one in history had ever been raised from the dead.

But he didn’t kill his son, did he?

Why not?

Because as he raised the knife, an angel—the Angel of Yahweh—seized his hand (at least metaphorically) and stopped him. In essence, he said, “No one is going to die here today.” And a substitute, a ram, served as the sacrifice instead (Ge 22.13).

Now, if my speculation is correct, the Angel who seized Abraham’s hand was the Son of God. And when that same Angel was killing in judgment on sin in David’s day, the Father reenacted the earlier scene by stopping his own Son.

These two accounts make a marvelous pair. But they still don’t answer our question: what moved the Father to stop the judgment? Surely the memory of Abraham’s faith wasn’t enough, was it?

As I noted last time, the Chronicles account ends with David saying that this spot would be where the Temple would be built (1Ch 22.1). And so it was. And for the next 4 centuries or so, Israel sacrificed to God there, and his glory filled the Temple (2Ch 7.1).

But eventually the Temple priests fell into apostasy, and the Lord withdrew from his Temple (Ezk 10.18-19). And then the Temple was destroyed (2Ch 36.19).

But it was rebuilt. And though there is no record that the visible glory of God returned to the new structure, God promised that he would make it far more glorious than Solomon’s Temple had ever been (Hg 2.7-9).

And after 4 more centuries—of silence—God began to move again.

A poor young couple brought their baby to the Temple to be circumcised, and a prophet spoke marvelous words about him (Lk 2.34-35). Twelve years later that same boy astonished the priests there with his words (Lk 2.46-47). Then the boy became a man and drove the moneychangers out of his Father’s house (Mt 21.12-17) and healed and taught there (Mk 12.35; Jn 5.14; 7.14; 8.20; 10.23; 18.20).

And then, one day, as hours of midday darkness lifted, the veil of the Temple was torn in two, from the top to the bottom (Mt 27.51), demonstrating that the way to God was open (He 6.19-20).

Why?

Because on another ridge of that same hill, the Son—the Angel who had stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son—gave himself as the perfect Ram, the substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.

I wonder.

I wonder if the Father, knowing all that had happened, and would happen, on that threshing floor, was moved to reach out and stay the hand of the Son, the Destroying Angel, and say,

“The killing stops here.”

Indeed it does.

Photo by Hugo Teles on Unsplash

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 2: Where the Killing Stops

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Part 1: Place Is Important

In response to David’s sin of numbering his army, God gives him a choice of punishment, and David chooses to place himself in the hand of God, in a plague, rather than in the hand of the surrounding enemy nations (2S 24.14). In the resulting outbreak (called “pestilence” by the KJV) some 70,000 Israelites die (2S 24.15). Warren Wiersbe has noted that the consequences of this sin—at least in the cost to human life—were far greater than the consequences of David’s sin with Bathsheba.

We read that the agent of this death plague was “the Angel of the LORD” (2S 24.16). We don’t find this surprising initially, because this same angel is said to slaughter the Assyrian army in their tents as they besiege Jerusalem (2K 19.35). But on second thought this strikes us as exceedingly odd.

Why is that? Because a great many interpreters of the Bible, myself among them, believe that “the Angel of the LORD” who appears in the Old Testament is none other than a preincarnate appearance of the Son, Jesus Christ. There is much to say about this theory—a former student of mine wrote his PhD dissertation on the question—but the arguments in brief are that

  • sometimes the angel speaks of God in the third person (Ge 16.11; 22.12a, 16), and other times he speaks as God (Ge 16.10 [cf 13]; 22.12b; Judg 2.1-4);
  • the only member of the Godhead ever said to have taken a body is the Son; and
  • the Angel never appears after Jesus’ conception by Mary. (In the KJV references to the angel in several NT passages [Mt 1.20, 24; 2.13; 28.2; Lk 2.9; Ac 5.19; 8.26; 12.7, 23] there is no definite article in the Greek.)

Now if this view is correct, then we have the Son—gentle Jesus, meek and mild—acting in vengeance on the sin of David, and literally massacring people.

This is not what we expect.

We know that he will sit in judgment at the end of time (Mt 25.31-46; cf Re 20.11-15), and we know that the book of Revelation speaks of “the wrath of the Lamb” (Re 6.16), but still, this is not how we typically think of Jesus.

Our sense of cognitive dissonance is increased when we read here that “the LORD”—who is here distinguished from the death angel, and is thus apparently the Father—intervenes to prevent the angel from carrying out any more executions (2S 24.16). The Son is executing people, and the Father intercedes to restrain him? Isn’t that the very opposite of the picture the Scripture gives later, in speaking of the Son as interceding on our behalf with the Father (Ro 8.34)?

Counterintuitive.

The Son carries out divine wrath in judgment for sin, and at a key point in the process the Father seizes the hand bearing the sword, and says, “Enough. The killing stops here.”

This is a remarkable moment.

Why does he do this? Why does he “repent” (2S 24.16) of the disaster he is bringing, and stop the killing? What motivates him at this moment, in this place?

Immediately after the Father’s command to the Son, the narrator says, “And the angel of the LORD was by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite” (2S 24.16; the parallel account [1Ch 21.15] says “Ornan the Jebusite”).

The narrator says this for a reason; he seems to want us to connect the Father’s words with the location. So where is this place?

We know that threshing floors were flat places used to beat the harvested grain to separate the grain kernels from their husks. The farmer would then winnow the grain, throwing it into the air with shovels so that the wind would blow away the lighter husks, leaving the heavier kernels to fall back to the ground. Since wind was an important part of the process, winnowing was often (though not always) done on hilltops.

There are a lot of hills in Israel. Where was this one?

We don’t have to guess. The Chronicles account ends with David identifying this threshing floor as the place where the Temple would be built (1Ch 22.1).

This is the Temple Mount.

And that, I think, gives us some help in determining why the Father spoke up at this place and told the Son, “The killing stops here.”

More on this next time.

Part 3: Why the Killing Stopped

Photo by Hugo Teles on Unsplash

Mercy on the Mountain, Part 1: Place Is Important

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For some reason, I’ve always felt a very keen sense of Place. I’m moved by being in places where important things happened; I recall the power of the moment when, on a lunch break from work at the CVS on Tremont Street in Boston, I walked down Tremont to State Street and, just around the corner, found a simple bronze plaque on the wall of State Street Bank, right next to the drive-through lane. I remember its wording to this day: “D. L. Moody, Christian evangelist, friend of man, founder of the Northfield Schools, was converted to God in a shoe store on this site.”

I’m similarly moved by going back to places where significant things happened to me—places where I lived, went to school, traveled, camped, experienced unusual spiritual growth. And my favorite place in the world, though one I can rarely get to, incites powerful memories and emotions.

In consequence, I find it interesting that even though God is infinite—unbound by space—and existed before there was even such a thing as “location,” he seems to see Place as significant. He tells his people more than once to mark significant places with memorial altars (e.g. Ge 35.1; Jos 4.3). The biblical narrative is rife with place names, and often the narrative seems to be telling us more than just where that town got its name; it’s more than just what critics deride as an “etiological tale.”

An example of this divine focus that I find particularly interesting is a biblical site that was known by the Canaanites as the threshing floor of Araunah (or Ornan) the Jebusite. Multiple threads of the biblical narrative weave themselves around this otherwise unremarkable place.

I’d like to take a few posts to tell that story.

I’m not going to start where the Bible first mentions the place—I’ll get back to that later—but at an incident in the life of King David, toward the end of his life. We find two accounts of the event, in 2Samuel 24 and 1Chronicles 21.

There we read that David ordered a census of his army. Right away we notice two things that seem odd.

First, the Samuel account says that God moved David to order the census, while the one in Chronicles says that Satan did. Critics have made much of this supposed contradiction, but the many thinkers who have responded to them have demonstrated that the allegation of error is not well founded; since God is sovereign, there is a sense in which, by allowing others to act, and especially by using even evil acts to accomplish his purposes—for he is never frustrated—he can be said to “do” anything that happens (cf Gen 50.20; Am 3.6). (And of course he is not the author of sin, but precisely how that all works is beyond me, and it’s beyond you too; if you think you understand the infinite with a brain the size of a small cantaloupe, then you most certainly don’t.)

The second odd thing is that while David’s general Joab, David himself, and God all agreed that the census was sinful, the passage never tells us why—and frankly, it doesn’t seem like all that big a deal to us, especially since God himself had commanded earlier censuses (censi?) (Nu 1.1-2; 26.1-2). Several possibilities have been suggested; the two most common are that it was an act of pride by David, betraying confidence in his armies rather than in God, and that he may have failed to pay the temple tax historically connected to censuses (Ex 30.13; suggested by Josephus).

At any rate, the act is viewed unanimously as sinful. The prophet Gad brings David a message from God, offering a choice of three punishments: famine, war, or plague (which were, incidentally, the promised curses for disobeying the covenant [Dt 28.20ff]). In a cry of deep faith, David commits himself to the hands of God, choosing plague (1Ch 21.13).

What happens next is remarkably counterintuitive.

More on that next time.

Part 2: Where the Killing Stops | Part 3: Why the Killing Stopped

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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 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

Change, Part 2: Sovereign, Attentive, and Good

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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