May 28, 2011
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The Victorious Life of Joshua Part 14
Jos 1:4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.
Lebanon = “whiteness”
1) a wooded mountain range on the northern border of Israel
Euphrates = “fruitfulness”
1) the largest and longest river of western Asia; rises from two chief sources in the Armenian mountains and flows into the Persian Gulf.
The “Great Sea” is the Mediterranean.
This land…the holy land, the promised land was Canaan land. For most people, the connotation of the “promised land” is one of a life of ease, with no troubles and no worries. That is a false connotation and is certainly not what God told Abraham back in Genesis.
Originally, God gave Abram a command, and told him the compensation or blessings of obedience to this plan. However, Abram did not obey God, thus the plan was delayed. (Check out my study on Abraham in the studies and posts link on the right. It gives the timeframe of the delays.)
Because of Abram’s disobedience, his spiritual life suffered, his relationships suffered, and his reputation suffered. Additionally, when he finally got right in his spirit again, God’s plan took on a new meaning
You see, God never originally told him to go to Canaan land
Gen 12:1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
That word “had” was crucial, because we have no idea when God actually told him that. This goes back to the delay, and the fact that in the previous 2 verses of chpt. 11, we see that Abram’s father’s course was to go to Canaan, because he was a maker of idols, and Canaan was place of merchants.
His father’s name means “delay,” and their stop in Haran is evidence of that. (Check the study on Abraham, because even that city of Haran tells of his spiritual condition at the time.)
You see. It was always “unto a land that I will show you.” It was not originally “Canaan.”
Originally, when I wrote that study on Abraham, and I researched the meaning of Canaan, instead of this definition:
Canaan = “lowland”
1) the 4th son of Ham and the progenitor of the Phoenicians and of the various nations who peopled the seacoast of Palestine
2) merchant, trader
I found two definitions; the first being trader, merchant. The second was:
Canaan: strife; which humbles and subdues.
Clearly, the Israelites live in a land of strife, and doesn’t adversity humble and subdue people? And now, here is Joshua, about to take the promised land…a land of strife; a course for which the previous generation was subdued; a course that is prepared for them, but one in which they face great adversity.
This land was an unremarkable stretch of territory, sandwiched between massive and ancient civilizations, which had never been significant economically or culturally, but was only a land bridge between the two great cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia.
But look what God does with so little. It becomes important to the religious consciousness of mankind, and ends up dwarfing everything that had gone on before and around it. Everything now, and for the longest time, has been about the Middle East…that same little strip of territory.
