Joshua leads the people to another river, just as they had
come to the Red Sea under Moses' leadership.
That time, they had Pharaoh's army behind them, preparing to destroy
them from the earth and the Red Sea presented an obstacle that seemed to them
insurmountable until God acted to dry up the Sea for them to pass through to
safety. Now, they had the wilderness
behind them, where their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers,
were buried. It was a place of relative
safety, a place where the Lord had provided for them and where many of them
were born and raised these past forty years.
Now, they had to face the fears that lay before them, the fears that had
kept them in the wilderness these forty years.
Crossing the Jordan was the first step towards conquering those fears
and it required the step of faith not to stand at the river but to step into
the river and wait for the Lord to act as He promised in parting these
waters. To move forward required faith
and they had to prove they had faith by moving forward. The next step depended on His faithfulness.
Jesus tells about the great judgment day and the separation
He will make on that day. We know that
we enter the covenant by faith but that faith has to have an effect on our
lives. We, like the people Joshua led,
have to step out in faith and live according to the faith we have. The incarnation tells us that faith is meant
to be an active thing. We have been
given the gift of life and that life is now to be lived in faith to the glory
of God. Faith calls us to get out of the
boat, out of our fears, out of isolation and selfish motives and give and love
actively. Those who are judged as worthy
to enter the everlasting kingdom are those who have extended themselves in
faith and love. Those who are not are
those who have lived for themselves and have not loved others as
themselves. Faith demands us to step
out. If the Israelites did not take that
first step into the river and remain there until God acted they would never
have inherited the kingdom He promised, neither will we.
Paul sees a "partial hardening" in his own people,
the Jews. That idea comes from the
Exodus doesn't it? God is described as
hardening Pharaoh's heart concerning the Israelites and it is that hardening
that kept him from seeing the great deliverance of God. He failed to recognize God when he saw Him at
work. The Jews of Paul's day and ours
experience this as well in failing to recognize Jesus as Messiah. That partial hardening, Paul says, is what
has allowed the Gentiles to come into the covenant in faith. The hardening is partial in this case because
God is faithful to His promises and He has promised much to Israel. Paul believes God will be faithful to those
promises so the hardening isn't permanent and it is partial because some
believe. In spite of his obvious pain at
this reality, after eleven chapters of doing serious theology, Paul does what
we all must do, turn to doxology, the praise of the one who is inscrutable
except for what He chooses to make known.
In the end, praise and thanks are all we have to offer.
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