HIGHLIGHTS IN JOSHUA
Number 18
GOD IS FAITHFUL TO HIS PROMISES

".....Not one of all the Lord's good promises to the house of Israel failed: everyone was fulfilled."
Joshua 21:43-45
=====

THE Christian life is based on the good promises of God which fill the Bible. The Christian believes the promises of God and rests his or her soul upon them. It is through believing the promises in the Gospel that we are saved. In the light of this fact of Christianity, the verses in Joshua before us are of particular interest and assurance.

God made particular and wonderful promises to Israel concerning their inheritance in the promised land of Palestine. Here at the end of the history in the book of Joshua we are told that all those promises were fulfilled. This faithfulness to his promises mirrors God's faithfulness to all his promises, specially concerning the Gospel. We can be assured from God's faithfulness to Israel here, that God will not fail to keep all his promises to believers in the Gospel.

Let us fill out this wonderful assurance as we meditate on these verses in the context of all the promises of God.

GOD HAS MADE PROMISES

This is the first thing to particularly notice. God promised first to Abraham that he would give the land of Palestine to him and his descendants. Abraham in his life time did not see the fulfillment of this promise. He just had to believe God. Together with the promise that Israel would inherit the land on which Abraham walked at that time, there were spiritual promises to Abraham, that through his seed all the nations of the world would be blest, and that his progeny would be as the stars in the sky for multitude.

Now there was much more at stake in the promises of God to Abraham than simply that the land of Palestine would become the possession of the nation of Israel. There was the promise of the Messiah - the one important seed of Abraham. There was the blessing of the nations through this seed of Abraham. Yet the promise of the land of Palestine and the promises of the seed, Christ, and him being a blessing to the nations, were given to the one man Abraham at the same time. Thus the fulfillment of the promise to give the land of Palestine to the nation of Israel as we see in the verses we are considering, gives strong assurance that the Gospel promises will also be fulfilled.

Indeed we know already that the promise of the coming of the seed of Abraham has been fulfilled. Christ, the Messiah, has indeed come. Through his victorious death and resurrection he has become a blessing to all the nations. But from these fulfilments we are assured that the promise of eternal life in Christ and the gift of heaven, the true promised land, will also be fulfilled.

It is a wonderful revelation that God makes promises to us fallen creatures. It reveals a gracious, merciful and loving God. This revelation is enlarged when we take in the greatness of his promises. It is not small things that God promises but great things. The promises of God encompass a total blessing which is blessing to body, soul and spirit for eternity. The promises encompass all our need, leaving nothing to our weak and puny strength to achieve. The promises are also full and free. They do not come with conditions that we may fail to perform or find impossible to perform.

I have heard people say to me in my ministry that the gospel promises are too good to be true, and that there must be some condition we have to perform. But this is not so. God graciously has left us nothing to perform because he knows that we would not be able to perform any condition as it should be performed. If we may feel that the promises are too good to be true, then it is wonderful to have evidence here, in the promise being fulfilled to Israel concerning being given the land of promise, that God does keep his promises, and they are not too good to be true.

ALL PROMISES

It is a characteristic of human life that promises are made, but even if they are kept in some measure, there is always some failure to keep them in full. This is not so in the case of God's promises. We are specifically told this in verse 45. He fulfilled ALL his promises concerning the possession of the promised land. This is why, if we accept his promises concerning blessing and salvation, we should also believe in full his promises concerning judgement on sin. However it his promises of blessing and salvation that are the particular concern in our meditation, and all these he keeps and will keep in full.

God does not forget as we do. How often is a promise made with good intentions, but then the pressure of other things causes us to forget the promise, so that either its fulfilment is late, or is not fulfilled at all. Whereas we may forget some detail of a promise, God neither forgets the promise or any detail entailed in the promise.

We may make a promise with the determination that it will be kept, but then circumstances prevent us performing the promise. Our strength and ability may not be up to task. Resources we depended on to fulfill the promise may fail. We may have thought we could achieve what we promised, but then find that we are not clever enough to perform it. God has no such limitations. His wisdom and power is infinite. He makes no promises that are ill conceived, nor any promises that his power is unequal to perform. Thus no promise he makes will fail to be performed and kept.

Then there are some promises we may make that we find we can't perform because of limitations in the one to whom the promise is made. A surgeon may make a promise of a successful operation, yet the patient may have weaknesses that cause the operation to fail. God has no such limitations. He knows all things, and in the promise is the assurance that there is no limitation he has not perceived and met, so that his promise will not fail.

A promise we make may fail because its fulfillment depends on the help of some other person who may fail us at the last resort. God's promises are not dependent on the failing strength of other human beings, or even on angels. Where he uses others in the fulfilment of his promises, he endows them with sufficient wisdom and strength, courage and endurance, so that the promise will not fail.

God keeps all his promises, in full and in every detail.

GOD'S PROMISES ARE GREAT

By describing God's promises as great I have in mind first of all that he promises great things that would be impossible to us unless God had promised them to us.

In the case of the promise to give Israel the promised land, the greatness of the promise is in the fact that Israel would not have had the power, strength, courage or expertise to conquer the people of the land unless God had given them all these things. Further God did the impossible when he made the inhabitants of Palestine to fear the Israelites, and to feel defeated even before the battle began. Further God so guided and instructed Israel that they knew the best way to hold the land after they had conquered the people.

In other words what God promises, even though impossible in our own strength, he performs, giving grace so that the promises are realized. This is particularly true in his promises concerning salvation. Salvation would be completely outside our grasp unless God had promised to give it to us. Included in the promise was the wisdom of God to find a way we could justly be saved, and also the supernatural grace so that we received the new life, and were able to repent and believe in Christ.

In the next place God's promises are great in the richness of the blessing in the promise. God promised and fulfilled the promise to give Israel a rich, fruitful and extensive land. He chose the land for them, and led them there, and filled the land with rich fertility. It was truly a land flowing with milk and honey.

God's promises in the gospel are great in that they are so rich and full. It is a full salvation that God promises and provides in Christ. It is not just a new start, or some strength to do better. It is complete justification from all our sins. All our sins have been punished in Christ and so have been blotted out forever. We are imputed with the complete and perfect righteousness of Christ, so that we stand accepted as righteous in God's sight forever. We are given new life in new birth, a new creation. This is a life that is holy, in which God dwells by his Spirit. We are given adoption into his family and God makes us his children. We are given the spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father. God, as our Father, cares for us, protects us, and keeps us safe in his love, and brings us to heaven, his eternal home, at last.

God's promises are indeed so very great.

GOD'S PROMISES GIVE REST

We are told in our verses concerning Israel that God gave them rest on every side. No enemy withstood them and all enemies were subdued. They had peace.

The Christian is still engaged in the warfare against sin, Satan and the world, but God has promised that there will be a rest for the people of God. God has promised that the warfare will one day end in complete victory, and we shall enter into our rest. This rest is the heavenly glory.

The rest involves freedom from sin. In this earthly warfare we are never free from the corruption which remains in our flesh. The flesh always lusts against the purity of the new spiritual life created within us, which is our real self. Paul tells us the certain hope in the promise of God at the end of Romans 7. Paul declares "Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through Jesus Christ". This is a direct reference to the freedom forever from the flesh at physical death when this sinful body will be discarded, and the gift of a new resurrection body which will be free from all sin.

This rest involves a rest from Satan. Satan can tempt us and harass us in this life. We are free first from his dominion, because, even in this life, we have been translated from Satan's kingdom into the kingdom of Christ. Satan is no more our lord, so that sin has no more dominion over us. But much more is the fact that a rest awaits us beyond this world and life, where Satan will have no more power over us. There will be no more temptation, and Satan will never be able to harass again.

This rest involves rest from this world of sin and woe. We shall be brought to God's heavenly glory where there will be no more sin, or pain. No more suffering and loss. Nor more ugliness or destruction. All will be the beauty and loveliness of God. We shall dwell in love, and we shall see Jesus face to face.

CONCLUSION

Here is the wonder of our God. In his great love to sinners he has made promises of wondrous blessing and proportions. The fulfillment of the promise to Israel that God would give them the promised land, and that nothing of this promise was left unfulfilled, gives a blessed example of the way God keeps his promises and keeps them fully. Because God keeps his promises we can believe in the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. God has promised his elect salvation in Christ. He has already done in Christ all that is necessary to perfect our acceptance before him. In Christ he has made us his children, his bride, his jewel. He has promised that nothing will separate us from his love, and that he will never leave us or forsake us. Jesus has promised to come and take us where he is in glory.

We stumble and fall in our earthly pilgrimage. We falter and fail. We know in ourselves we can not stand or progress in holiness, or reach heaven. Let us be comforted and strengthen, assured and built up by the promises of God that he will bring us to his eternal glory, spotless at last. We have this assurance in these verses we have dwelt upon. God never makes promises he will not keep in full.