Joshua’s Believing Response (Josh. 1:5-9)

Jordan River Valley.  Image from WikiMedia Commons

Last week, we looked at Israel’s Great Commission and the expansive promises of God that gave them wings to fulfill it.  Today, we want to look at Joshua’s Believing Courage.  We noted that as Israel had a commission from God then, so does the church today, the Great Commission given to us by the Lord in Matthew 28, to make, baptize, and teach disciples.  And just as the promise to Joshua and all Israel was that the Lord would be with them in fulfillment of their commission, so the church has the promise of Christ’s presence to the end of the age.

However, we must not think that the promise of God’s presence means that we have nothing to do.  There were times when God would tell his people to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.  But more often, it was as it is here: to rise and be doing.  These are not in opposition to one another.  God’s promise and grace is not in opposition to effort and obedience.  Rather God’s promise and grace fuel our effort and obedience.  We work out our salvation with fear and trembling – which I take to mean that we work out our salvation with all conscientiousness and industry and care and attention – knowing that God is the one who is at work in us to will and to do of his good pleasure.

So last week, as we looked at God’s promise, we were considering the resources of our  strength and motivation to fulfill God’s will for the church.  Today, we want to consider the way in which we use the strength that God provides to do the task that God commands.  And the way I want to put it is in this way: Church, Christ will continue to be with us and bless us in the fulfilment of the Great Commission as we have courageous trust in him and give complete obedience to him.

There are a couple of things that I think are of note here and that I want us to consider together.  The first is: what does it mean to be strong and courageous?  And the second thing is, where do strength and courage come from?  Or, how do we define it and from where do we derive it?

How do we define it?

What does it mean to be strong and courageous? Fundamentally, to be strong and courageous is to have the willingness to act in the face of opposition and hard things.  It is something required of soldiers about to go into battle, which is exactly the situation in these verses in Joshua 1.  No one needs strength and courage on a couch.  No one needs strength and courage when everything is going well for them.  No one needs courage when the cupboard is full and the friends are all for you and the bank is thanking you for being a customer.  One needs courage when hard things happen and when we face the biting winds of opposition.  We don’t need sunshine soldiers who are willing to be in the army when no fighting has to be done and when everything is going well.  We need persevering patriots who are willing to endure through repeated disappointments on the battlefield and then make it through Valley Forge winters.  And that calls for strength and courage.

We need courage because God has promised that we will have to endure hard things.  The apostles told the early church, soon after Paul had been stoned almost to death, “exhorting them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).  Or, as we have seen in Romans 8, “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together” (17).  You’re not an heir of God if you are without suffering; you’re an heir of God if you suffer together with Christ!  As our Lord put it, “In this world you will have tribulation” (Jn. 16:33).  Not might have – will have.  There is a certainty to this.  

I think we can struggle with being courageous in the face of hard things because we have the expectation that we will somehow be able to navigate around them.  But the thing is, we can’t.  Not when God has promised that we will go through them!  In fact, we cannot disassociate God’s promise to be with us, from God’s promise that we will have to face difficulties.  They go together: “But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee” (Isa. 43:1-2).  God will be with us when we pass through fire and flood.

There is a scene in the Band of Brothers miniseries that has stayed with me and which I think is such a parable for the Christian life.  There is an episode when a certain soldier is really struggling with paralyzing fear in the face of the enemy.  He can’t seem to even muster the strength to fire his weapon.  In contrast, one of the lieutenants, a man by the name of Ronald Speirs, is fearless.  These two men, the fearful and the fearless, have the following conversation.  Speirs asks the solider (whose name was Blithe) why he hid in a ditch and wouldn’t fire his weapon.  “Because I was afraid,” the solider replied.  “No, that’s not why,” Speirs answered.  “We are all afraid.  The reason you hid in that ditch is because you still have hope.  But Blithe the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead.  And the sooner you accept that; the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.”  Do you see the parallel to the Christian life?  We are paralyzed with fear because we still have hope that we will somehow be able to get through life without ever having to die to ourselves and take up a cross as we follow Christ.  But as long as we have that mindset, we’ll never act like soldiers of Christ.  He is with us as we follow him through fire and water.

Paul helps us to see the comparison in his words to the Colossians: “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:1-4).  How do you live the Christian life?  By reckoning yourself dead to this world and your life hid with Christ.  Again, as Jesus put it, if you would follow him, take your cross.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was not a great theologian, but who nevertheless says a lot of great things in his book on discipleship, famously said this: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

The Bible is therefore a record of many hard things and how the people of God persevered through them.   In fact, all you have to do is to read the examples in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews to find many illustrations of this.  To take just one, Moses’ parents, of whom we are told, “By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king's commandment” (Heb. 11:23).  The king’s commandment!  How can you not be afraid of that?  This is Pharaoh, a king with essentially unlimited power.  And what a hard thing!  To be told that you have to kill your infant son!  How then did they endure through this?  By faith!

Or Moses himself, of whom we are told, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of the reward. By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible” (Heb. 11:24-27).  Suffering affliction rather than enjoying the pleasures of sin.  Enduring the reproach of Christ.  Forsaking Egypt, the land of his birth, to live in the desert.  But he did all this, enduring through hardship after hardship, by faith.

Or I think of David, before he became king, when he came to Ziklag and discovered that the city had been raided and their families taken.  Then we read: “And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the Lord his God” (1 Sam. 30:6).  This had to have been a very low point in David’s life.  He was estranged and exiled from Israel because of King Saul and now on top of having his home burnt to the ground and his family taken captive, now his own people are talking about killing him.  What do you do in a situation like that?  What did David do?  He “encouraged himself in the Lord his God.”  The word “encouraged” there is similar to the word used here in Joshua 1 for “be strong.”  It could in fact be translated, “David strengthened himself in the Lord his God.”  I think he would have remembered the promise that God gave to David and the fact that God had Samuel anoint him.  He would have remembered all the times that God delivered him: from the lion and the bear, from the giant, and from King Saul.  What did David do in response?  Did he give up?  Did he just let the people have their way? No, he gathered up his forces and pursued the Amalekites, even when some of them were completely exhausted and could go no further, and overcame them and restored everything.  God was with him.  David acted on that.  That’s courage.

Let me give you a non-Biblical example, from the life of one of our Baptist forefathers, William Kiffin.  He was one of the only guys who put his signature to both the First and Second London Baptist Confessions of Faith.  He was an absolute titan of the 17th century Baptist movement.  Yet he labored in a time of intense persecution and had to endure many hard things.  Not only from persecution but also just from the hardness of life.  Even though he was a very successful businessman (the king asked him at one point for a loan of 40,000 pounds – he gave him free of charge 10,000 and told someone that he had saved himself 30,000 pounds), yet he had to endure a tremendous amount of suffering.  He spent time in prison.  There was at one point a plot against his life.  As Tom Nettles puts it, “Inveterate enemies of the dissenters never ceased harassing Kiffin by submitting false charges against him.”  Two of his grandsons (at 19 and 22 years of age) were executed by the crown for supporting the rebellion of Protestant Monmouth against James II.  His oldest son passed away at the age of 20, “a loss which ‘did greatly press [Kiffin] down with more than ordinary sorrow.’”  Ten years later his daughter died and another son at the age of 44.  When his wife of 44 years died in 1682, Kiffin said, “Her death was the greatest sorrow to me I ever met with in the world.”

And yet, he endured through it all and was faithful to the very end of his long life.  This is how Kiffin expressed it to his family:

You may hereby see it is not vain to follow God in the way of duty, nor to enquire betimes after the knowledge of Jesus Christ, for they that find him find life, and obtain favour from the Lord; and that whoso walks in the way of God shall dwell safely and be quiet from the fear of evil.  This to the praise of God, I can say I have experienced; and I would not for ten thousand worlds, if I know my heart, but have tasted the gracious dealings of God in my younger days. 

By the way, it doesn’t mean that we are necessarily without fear and anxiety.  It is true that God tells Joshua in verse 9, “Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.”  But I think what the Lord means here is that we are not to let fear paralyze us.  We are not to let fear take control of us.  We are not to take counsel from our fears.  Even Jesus asked his Father to let the cup of crucifixion pass from him.  What do you think that sprang from if not fear on some level?  Luke records that in the garden of Gethsemane, “And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Lk. 22:44).  Yet our Lord did not let his fear keep him from wanting to do his Father’s will.  He was courageous for us in the face of the terrible wrath of God poured out on the cross.

From where do we derive it?

First of all, it is a matter of faith in God, not ourselves.  We are not to be strong in ourselves, and our courage is not something which we pull out of our own resources.  Rather, as Paul put it to the Ephesians, we are to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might (Eph. 6:10).  The fact of the matter is that many of us may not feel naturally courageous.  That’s okay.  Some of the most mighty of God’s soldiers would have felt the same way.  There’s a reason why Paul would need to exhort Timothy that God did not give him a spirit of fear, because I think that Timothy was probably a naturally timid person.  However, even to timid people God gives the spirit of power and courage (2 Tim. 1:7).  This is not a call to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and I would be a poor pastor if I gave that impression.  As the Puritan William Gurnall put it, “It is not the least of a minister's care and skill in dividing the word, so to press the Christian's duty, as not to oppress his spirit with the weight of it, by laying it on the creature's own shoulders, and not on the Lord's strength, as here our apostle teacheth us.”  Well, I don’t want to do that.  I want you to see that this call to strength and courage is a call to find it in the Lord.  That’s the reason why the promise of God’s presence and the call to believing courage are so intertwined in this passage.  You can’t really separate the one from the other without the whole passage coming apart.

The fact of the matter is that most of the great heroes of the faith didn’t feel like heroes.  Moses certainly didn’t.  When God told him to lead his people out of Egypt, he didn’t jump up and kick his heels together and give three cheers for being chosen by God.  Rather, he said this to God: “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exod. 3:11).   And even after a burning bush and a number of signs, Moses still hesitated!  And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue” (4:10).  The Lord had to rebuke Moses and even then it was only with the help of Aaron his brother that he was persuaded to go.  

I’m not saying that Moses’ hesitation is a model for us to emulate.  After all, we are told that God’s anger burned against Moses for this, and I’m sure none of us want to have God’s anger burn against us.  But it does show that one of the greatest leaders in the history of leadership didn’t start off because he was an A-type personality who exuded lots of mojo.  I doubt very much if Moses had much of a Charlton Heston command presence.  

What’s the point?  The point is that our strength and courage don’t come from ourselves.  They come from God.  They don’t come from having a lot of self-confidence.  They come from having an eye to God and his presence and power and promise.  They come from people who are strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.  As Paul put it with regard to his ministry, “And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:4-6).  How are we made sufficient for the things God calls us to do?  We are made sufficient by the God of all grace.  It’s a matter, therefore, not of self-confidence, but of confidence in God; not of faith in ourselves but of faith in God.

Second, we derive it from a life of prayer.  In fact, it was when Israel did not inquire of the Lord that they got in trouble.  We are told that they were deceived by the Gibeonites because they “asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord” (Josh. 9:14).  Brothers and sisters, if we would have the kind of courage called for here, we must be men and women of prayer.  

When the early church faced fierce opposition, they promptly went to the Lord for help.  But what’s interesting to me is both what they prayed for as well as what they did not pray for.  They didn’t pray for protection.  Rather, they prayed for courage and strength and God gave it to them: 

“And being let go, they went to their own company, and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them. And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all that in them is: Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ. For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done. And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, By stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness” (Acts 4:23-31).

The apostle Paul asked similarly that the church pray for him: “And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, For which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak” (Eph. 6:19-20).

If it is true that we are strong in the Lord and that our courage derives from him, then it only makes sense that those who exercise their faith in prayer for it will have it.  We have not, because we ask not.

Then, it comes from a life of obedience to the Lord.  It is hard to have conviction about the things of the Lord when your own life is not a life of integrity.  You will notice here in these verses the emphasis on obedience to the word of God.  “Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee: turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper withersoever thou goest. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success” (Josh. 1:7-8).  

Obedience here is defined in the context of God’s word.  We are to be strong and courageous “that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee.”  We don’t get to define right and wrong.  We don’t get to decide what God wants us to do.  We don’t have to figure it out.  We simply are to take the word of God and apply it to our lives.  And that means that we have to have a humble and believing attitude towards the word of God in the Scriptures.  It’s not enough to have the Scriptures; we need to obey them.  We need to be willing to do whatever they tell us to do.  Not to be like the Israelites who told the prophet Jeremiah that they would obey God but then when God told them to do something that was against their liking, they brazenly went ahead with their own plans.  Is that our attitude?  Let us not be hearers of the word only, as James puts it, but doers also.

Notice that this is not just obedience to God’s word, but obedience to all of God’s word.  “All the law . . . turn not from it to the right hand or to the left.”  No deviation from Scripture!  Universal obedience!  We don’t want to be like King Jehu who was zealous to put down Baal worship in the northern Kingdom of Israel, but who nevertheless did not serve God with his whole heart: “Thus Jehu destroyed Baal out of Israel. Howbeit from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them, to wit, the golden calves that were in Bethel, and that were in Dan. And the Lord said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in mine heart, thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel. But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart: for he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin” (2 Kings 10:28-31).  Is there some secret sin that we are nursing?  Is there some hidden disobedience in our hearts?  We may be able to hide it now from men, but be sure that God knows.  Be sure your sin will find you out.

Then it is not just obedience that arises from a casual acquaintance with God’s word, but obedience that arises from constant attention to God’s word: “This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein.”  Now I’m not suggesting that we go around with an open Bible in our hands all day long.  What I am suggesting, however, is what it says here.  We are constantly meditating on the word of God: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night” (Ps. 1:1-2).  We should do the same.  The word of God should always act like a sort of operating system in the human heart.  It may be in the background, but it’s what’s running things.  

My friends, it is in this context that we will give the sort of obedience that God calls for here.  Because it is only as we get to know God through his word that we will obey him with courageous faith.  This is what we read in the book of Daniel.  The prophet is foretelling a time when the people of God will have to endure great and terrible persecution.  There will be some who will succumb to the pressure to abandon the faith: “And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries.”  The prophet is probably talking about the persecutions during the times of the second century B.C. reign of Antiochus Epiphanes who sought to corrupt the people of God by forcing them to abandon the faith of their fathers.  Some were corrupted.  But not all: Daniel immediately goes on to say that “the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits” (Dan. 11:32).  Who were strong?  Those who knew God.  

So what am I saying here?  Believers have the promise of God’s presence.  But this presence is not an excuse to do nothing.  We have a commission to fulfill as did Israel of old.  And that requires two basic things on our part: faith and obedience so that we will be strong and courageous.  For it is when we are believing people and obedient people that we will be the kind of strong and courageous people that God calls for here.  And it is precisely this kind of person that God uses to advance his cause in this world and bring Christ’s kingdom into the hearts and lives of men.

And that means if you have never put your faith in Christ and never repented of your sins, then now is the time to do that.  Jesus is your King and he is the only Savior of sinners.  The Bible says that all who turn from their sins and turn to him trusting in his righteousness and grace will have the forgiveness of all their sins.  May you do so today!