Joshua’s moment to shine in a totally different capacity. He was no longer the servant who waited on the directions of his leader, Moses. He was now the leader who waited on directions directly from the God of all the earth. It was now his responsibility not only to represent God before the people of Israel, but also to represent the people before God; and to cooperate with Him in leading the nation to its promised destiny.
As one carefully reads the account of God’s call on Joshua to replace His faithful servant Moses, it is not very difficult to notice the distinguishing adjective “this” that qualifies both the Jordan and the people of Israel. These identical qualifiers beckon our inquiry and understanding. THIS Jordan is a very clear indication that there was something quite unusual about the Jordan at the time of Israel’s impending crossing. At this place, and at this time, the Jordan overflowed its banks, on account of the melted snow from the mountains of Lebanon.
The springtime phenomenon forced excess water to pour into the Jordan in torrents, making it gravely unsafe for anyone to cross, let alone a teeming multitude of undisciplined ex-slaves—infants, children, the aged—with all their animals and belongings. THIS Jordan presented an evacuation nightmare, more serious and life-threatening than that precipitated by the infamous hurricanes “Katrina” and “Ike,” which devastated many gulf cities in southern United States in 2005 and 2008 respectively.
“THIS Jordan” was not the only major challenge facing the newly appointed leader of Israel. Shepherding THIS weary, impatient and rebellious people was an equally very daunting task. However, God commanded Joshua to take the responsibility of handling both. “THIS people” carries the connotation of quite an inglorious history that began in the clay pits of Egypt and that haunted the children throughout their forty years of wandering in the desert. It was “THIS people” who murmured against God from the gates of Pharaoh’s Egypt to the borders of the Promised Land.
THIS was the people who quarreled with Moses for water; railed on him for the flesh pots of Egypt; forced Aaron to make them a golden calf for a god; incited a mutiny against Moses and was ready at any moment to rebel against any new instruction he’d receive from God. THIS was such a cantankerous multitude of ex-slaves that God associated their volatile, unpredictable disposition with the waters of the raging Jordan that was overflowing its banks. Joshua was commissioned to take “THIS people” across “THIS Jordan.”
God of Hope
“For I know the plans that I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.”
Jeremiah 29:11
Despite Israel’s selfish, rebellious, and reckless ingratitude, God, through His servant Joshua, offered THIS people the promise of a much brighter future. He instructed His servant to cross the Jordan and to take the ungrateful people along with him to the land that He was going to give to them. Because of His unconditional promise to His friend, Abraham, God was going to bring the patriarch’s downtrodden, desert-worn descendants to their undeserving inheritance. Through His covenanted promise, God had already established His plan to give the sons of Abraham a glorious future, filled with bright hope. Consequently, His command to Joshua was to escort them to the place He had made ready for their possession.
You and Your Jordan
Crisis Intervention
Gaining a person’s undivided attention is often a very difficult and challenging task when life appears to be good, and everything seems to be going according to plan. This is especially true when that individual is in a phase of life that is fulfilling a particular pleasure quest. During that phase, a person can become so absorbed in his activities and preoccupations that he is oblivious of other major events that may be occurring in his little world. Moreover, pleasure quest activities can lead a person to more addictive behaviors, from which the individual often feels quite powerless to break free.
How do we get the attention of someone caught in such a cycle, to focus on making a decision to change the course of events in his life? Social psychologists characteristically use an approach called “crisis intervention,” in which they create a life-threatening crisis for the victim caught in the cycle of abusive behavior. Such a crisis has the effect of awaking and grabbing the victim’s attention long enough for him to accept therapeutic treatment designed to rescue him from his unhealthy, destructive conduct.
Moses’ death, prior to Israel’s entrance into Canaan,
was a God-appointed “crisis intervention” strategy.
At the time of Joshua’s appointment as the new leader of Israel, the people had been through cycles of abusive behavior toward God and His servant Moses for a period of forty years. The entire journey through the wilderness was a checkered history of whining, complaining and disaffection.
On the very borders of the Promise Land, when the spies returned with their reports, the stiff-necked people kicked off their final rebellion against Moses. They were quite ready to stone Caleb and Joshua to death for bringing back what they thought was a contrary description of their intelligence-seeking expedition. Had not this same Moses interceded for Israel, God would have wiped out the entire nation at the border; but He chose, instead, to destroy all those who were twenty years old and above (Numbers 13, 14).
However, Israel had been down that road before when they witnessed the rebellion and destruction of Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10), and of Korah, Dathan and Abiram (Numbers 16). Nevertheless, these very compelling incidents did not stop all their bitter complaining and revolting against God’s appointed servant. Consequently, Moses’ death, prior to Israel’s entrance into Canaan, was a God-appointed “crisis intervention” strategy, not only to inject fresh leadership into this unbroken nation of intolerant ex-slaves, but also to provide new direction for Israel’s grand and exciting future.
God was now using the very one (Joshua), whose faith embraced the divine vision of Israel’s future, to lead a nation in crisis, out of its rebellious, complaining debacle, into an era of conquest and final settlement. It took the crisis of Moses’ death to be the launching pad for this new experience. The death of this faithful servant of God, along with the prior wasting of the people twenty years of age and older, were symbolic of the death of the old cycle of the wilderness life of the nation. Something new was about to occur and the crisis in the plains of Moab (Moses’ death) was the precursor to this impending event.
Sometimes God, in His mercy, has to break through our “this-worldly” preoccupations in order to fulfill His design and purpose for our lives. We can become so engrossed in the things of this age that we completely lose our focus on God, or we place Him on the back-burner because of all that is “cooking” in our self-absorbed lives. Jesus’ warning to the people of our age is:
“And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares”
Luke 21:34
John also cautioned:
15“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
1 John 2:15-17
A worldly heart is one that is so crowded with the demands of this life that there is very little room (or none at all) or time for God and His will in the daily experience of a person categorized by such a disposition. In such a heart, the love of the things of the world has supplanted the love of the Father, and the person possessing that overcharged spirit belongs to the self-centered, “last-day” crowd who loves pleasure more than God (2 Timothy 3:5).
Sometimes God has to break through our “this-worldly”
preoccupations with a crisis in order to fulfill
His