"For if ye shall _diligently keep all_ these commandments which I command you, to do them, _to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways_, and _to cleave unto_ Him; then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves." In a word, sure and certain victory was before them, a most complete overthrow of all enemies and obstacles, a triumphal march into the promised inheritance--all secured to them on the blessed ground of affectionate and reverential obedience to the most precious statutes and judgments that had ever been addressed to the human heart--statutes and judgments every one of which was but the very voice of their most gracious Deliverer. "Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours; from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea, shall your coast be. There shall no man be able to stand before you; for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as He hath said unto you." Here was the divine side of the question. The whole land, in its length, breadth, and fullness, lay before them; they had but to take possession of it, as the free gift of God; it was for them simply to plant the foot, in artless, appropriating faith, upon that fair inheritance which sovereign grace had bestowed upon them. All this we see made good in the book of Joshua, as we read in chapter xi.--"So Joshua took _the whole land_, according to all that the Lord said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel, according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war." (Ver. 23.)[8] [8] No doubt it was in faith that Joshua took--and could take nothing less than--the whole land; but as to actual possession, chapter xiii. 1 shows there was "yet much land to be possessed." But alas! there was the human side of the question as well as the divine. Canaan as promised by Jehovah and made good by the faith of Joshua was one thing, and Canaan as possessed by Israel was quite another. Hence the vast difference between Joshua and Judges. In Joshua, we see the infallible faithfulness of God to His promise; in Judges, we see Israel's miserable failure from the very outset. God pledged His immutable word that not a man should be able to stand before them, and the sword of Joshua--type of the great Captain of our salvation--made good this pledge in its every jot and tittle; but the book of Judges records the melancholy fact that Israel failed to drive out the enemy--failed to take possession of the divine grant in all its royal magnificence.