The next step

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Sometimes the hardest step is simply the next step. Here’s WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: The book of Joshua records a high point in the complicated history of Israel. After the Lord brought them out of Egypt, these former slaves saw signs and wonders, ate the bread of angels, drank water from rocks, and complained at almost every turn. After their rebellion had earned them 40 years of wandering in the desert, that generation died off and a better one, or at least a less passive one, emerged. Under Joshua’s leadership they crossed the Jordan river, laid waste to Jericho and moved on to conquer and claim the land their father Abraham once walked with no more than a promise it would someday be his.

Promises kept, yet Israel hesitated. In Joshua chapter 18, we read about the whole congregation assembling at Shiloh. Some tribal boundaries had been drawn, but for various reasons seven and a half tribes had not claimed their territory. I can sense Joshua’s exasperation when he asks, “How long will you put off going in to take possession of the land, which the Lord, the God of your fathers, has given you?” A reduced Canaanite population remained, but they were no threat. The main work is done: why do you wait?

Israel had been functioning as an army on a grand military campaign. Now it was time to settle, plow and plant, be fruitful and multiply, subdue the land, build a nation. Maybe after forty years of wilderness wandering, they had forgotten how to do that. What’s our excuse?

I wonder how much territory we leave unclaimed? Because we all have some: our little sphere of influence may not extend beyond the nursery or the nursing home, but size isn’t the point. Possession is.

Caleb, Joshua’s intrepid fellow spy from the old days, understood this. Years of frustration never dimmed his memory of the land flowing with milk and honey. See Joshua 14:12 where, walking like a man in his prime at age 85, Caleb stepped up to his old commander and reminded him of the promises of God, adding, “So now give me this hill country, of which the Lord spoke on that day.” Yes, he remembered those giant Anakites in their fortified cities, but so what? “It may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as He said.”

Caleb had vision; we have more. Caleb saw the establishment of Israel; we see Jesus establishing the Kingdom of God. Caleb experienced history in the making; we experience history fulfilled in the gospel. Every child of God has been led out of bondage and sustained in the desert. Every redeemed soul has seen horses and riders thrown into the sea when death was defeated. Every Christian has a glorious inheritance, and it begins right now.

What’s your territory? It could be a boardroom, a classroom, a construction site, a home – anywhere God has placed you and me to do the good works he prepared in advance for us. What we need is the confidence of a Caleb to claim it.

For WORLD, I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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