Bible CharactersTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
Bible Characters
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Bible -- Biography
There was no president, no general, no marshal about it. There was no
title at all, but just merely: “Joshua, arise and go over this Jordan.”
Now, Joshua just obeyed, and here you will find the secret of his
wonderful success. He did just what the Lord told him to do. He did not
stand, like many people would have done, and say: “I don’t know how I
am going to get these people over. Hadn’t you better wait, Lord, until
the next day? How am I to get these three million people over this angry
flood? Hadn’t we better wait until the waters recede?”
No! Joshua did not say that. He had got his command from God: “Arise and
go.” When the Lord gave orders, that was enough. He had got His word, and
he brings these children of Israel down in sight of the swollen stream.
Faith must be tried. God will not have people whom He can not try.
Joshua brings them there in three days, in sight of the angry flood, with
not a word of murmuring. If he had brought them there forty years before,
what murmuring there would have been! We will get trained--every one of
us.
They had had their faith tried in those forty years in the wilderness,
and now they murmured not. There was not a word of complaint. But forty
years before they would have asked, when they had got opposite Jericho:
“What is He going to do? How are we going to get over? We’ve got to have
a bridge or a pontoon. And even if we get over, they will see us and
defeat us. They will slay us here on the bank of Jordan. Guess we had
better turn around and go back.”
That is about what they would have said, what they would have tried, and
what they would have done forty years before. But now Joshua tells the
people that the priests are to walk out in front of them, and that the
moment the priests touched the water--the moment the soles of their feet
touched the water--the water was to be cut off.
There was faith for you! When those seven men took up the ark God was
with them, and the moment the soles of their feet touched the water the
waters were cut off, and they passed into the middle of the stream and
put down the ark.
That ark represented the Almighty. He was in the ark, with the ark right
there in the midst of death--for Jordan is death and judgment--right in
the middle of the stream. He held that stream in the palm of His hand.
And now the people pass beyond--three millions of them.
You can hear their solemn tread. Not a word said on their march through
death and judgment until Joshua led them on to Resurrection Ground. After
he had got them all over, he told twelve men--one from each tribe--to
take each a stone and set them up where the priests stood, so that when
their children asked “What mean ye by these stones?” they could tell how
the Almighty brought them through dangers into the Promised Land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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