Today’s section of Joshua is marvellously encouraging! And it’s a great (even amusing!) picture to absorb for our longterm personal growth…
It’s about Caleb. We need to know the background. It’s Numbers 13; that (to me) deeply haunting event that decided the destiny of a whole generation.
Moses had sent twelve spies into Palestine. Two, Caleb and Joshua, came back enthusiastic about how God could give them the land; but all the others reported that there was no hope because the land was too full of giants. (As indeed it was; even people like Goliath, three metres tall. Satan seems to have garrisoned what he knew was the promised land against Israel, and there may well have been something demonic here.) Anyway the majority’s lack of faith was disastrously infectious; that entire generation chose not to trust God – and so they lost their destiny and spent the next 40 years wandering round the desert, and they all left their bodies there.
This story haunts me, because both reactions were correct: the land was indeed garrisoned by Anakite giants; but the majority who couldn’t see past that fact lost their destiny. In contrast, Caleb and Joshua were absolutely right about what God could do, so that they could and must go forward with God. They must have felt isolated, eccentric, even lonely. (If we want to live by faith, that may well involve not being conformed to our surroundings, but being radical. Actually that’s the nature of leadership.) But it was Caleb and Joshua who marched triumphantly into the promised land with the new generation 40 years later…
So in Joshua 14, Caleb recalls all this to Joshua. `You know what the Lord said to Moses at Kadesh Barnea about you and me…. I brought him back a report according to my convictions, but my fellow Israelites made the hearts of the people melt in fear. I, however, followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly! So on that day Moses swore to me, “The land on which your feet have walked will be your inheritance and that of your children forever, because you have followed the Lord my God wholeheartedly.”’ And now it’s happened! Caleb has trusted God in this way, and he’s now in the promised land. It must feel good. He‘s been proved right; he’s one of Israel’s heroes. So now he’s 85 (v10) and he comes to claim his inheritance. He surely deserves a good one; perhaps a sunny lakeside villa with a vineyard and a beautiful view.
That’s not quite what happens. He remembers God’s promise: `Here I am today, eighty-five years old! I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then. Now give me this hill country that the Lord promised me that day. You yourself heard then that the Anakites were there, and their cities were large and fortified, but, the Lord helping me, I will drive them out just as He said!` (vv11-12).
This is so cool! Caleb trusts God’s word, and in fact stakes his family inheritance on it. Not only that, he deliberately picks up the most challenging implication of God’s promise, he deliberately picks the toughest place that his `feet had walked on` that still remains unreached: Hebron, the stronghold of the Anakite (Nephilim) giants, visiting which had devastated the faith of his fellow spies in Numbers 13:33. Someone had better tackle it sooner or later? Well then, says Caleb, I want that one! And so he finds his place in history!
May God make us like this! I remember a friend I met when he was first absorbing the shock of seeing a real Christian community in his student hall of residence; when he found Jesus, he headed straight for the Muslim world. I remember too a former US Marine who turned up in St Petersburg with the same sort of vision, but St P wasn’t tough enough, so having married one of our best StP student leaders he headed for the Russian Caucasus, which was. If it’s a dirty job, then, since someone had better do it, I want that one…
V14 is almost amusing: `So Hebron has belonged to Caleb ever since!` Obviously there were humble infantry – squaddies, to use the English slang – who actually had to storm the place. But as far as the Holy Spirit who inspired this book is concerned, the really decisive breakthrough came when in adventurous faith Caleb decided to not just sit around but, having spotted the toughest part of the frontier, to stake his family’s inheritance on God coming through. (And interestingly it might seem Caleb wasn’t 100% certain just how it would work out, if the ESV and NASB are accurate: `Perhaps the Lord will be with me, and I will drive them out!` (See Daniel 3:17-18 for another example of this sort of faith.] But (and this is something John Wimber taught the church about praying for healing) – let’s give it a whirl! Only by trying can we see what God will do!)
So what do I want in my obituary? We saw in Joshua 1:4 the adventurous spirit that marks this book of victories: `Your territory will extend from the desert to Lebanon, and from the great river, the Euphrates— all the Hittite country` – all places Joshua and the Israelites had surely never seen; and that joyous, adventurous faith is a keynote of the victories that followed. (In contrast, in Judges 1, not pressing on to the unreached and uncaptured is the keynote of that book’s decline and defeat.) And this is true of the church too; an outward going church pushing over the frontiers of God’s kingdom reflects the nature of God! Acts 1:8 has the same adventurous mentality: We’ll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on us, and the idea of that is that we should be His witnesses here in our Jerusalem, yes, but with an eye to the ends of the earth! Somewhere where the giants are: the Muslim world, Siberia, somewhere in Europe miserably hard like French-speaking Belgium…
Of course when we ask God where He wants us these next ten years, He may very well say, Right where you are, but I’m so glad you asked! Whatever, let’s think how to do things that will last; like Caleb, dreaming big dreams of what God can do, investing our next decade for God’s glory, carrying His truth and love across the kingdom’s frontiers time and again; tackling the giants, changing our bit of the world, seeing lost people saved and Jesus-followers raised up; doing things that will last…
PS Actually, that’s the point of this slightly odd section of Joshua as a whole. These chapters get printed in some Bibles in small print, and they may be ones we should read at a good pace, perhaps 3 or 4 chapters at a time: lists of long-forgotten towns Israel inherited, and long-forgotten kings they defeated. But they’re still God’s Word with real food for us! As Dale Ralph Davis says, they’re not a bureaucratic record but the lyrics of a song of triumph, the Israelites’ equivalent of `Great is Thy faithfulness` – the records of what God has done! (It’s like the list of cities present that we’d read out the first night at a Russian student conference. Murmansk is here? Really? Tomsk is here too? But that’s three days travel! God’s doing something!) So what can we learn here? Davis says: itemize, train yourself to make lists of the good things God has done. And that will lead you to thankfulness, and thankfulness to faith, and faith to strength!
Of course the various tribes still had to go and fight for their inheritance (just as they had to go round Jericho seven days in a row). And ch18 shows us Joshua’s frustration: so much of Israel settled down and lost that adventurous, God-empowered spirit (see 13:13, 15:63, 16:10, 17:12), which led, not immediately but eventually, to spiritual disaster. So as we speed read these chapters they repeatedly provoke the question, which type of person do I act like? And in these chapters we’ll also find four cases of people wanting more of what God had promised; people who were not settling down with what they had already, but seeking to go for God’s further frontier. These apparently dispensable, small-print chapters actually flag up what determines our destiny.
So one of these four is the brilliant, even hilarious, story of old man Caleb, 85 and refusing to settle down… Real faith takes action (James 2)! All of us have one piece after another of God’s kingdom’s frontier with our name on them, the arenas for our own personal adventures with God; and we should always be on the lookout for the next one, praying for it, going for it — then seeking the one after that (Jerusalem > Judaea > Samaria!); dreaming big dreams of what God can do, in our workplace, or our street, our region; or maybe somewhere even more colourful……
