Today’s reading: Joshua 1; Luke 14
As I’ve been thinking about Joshua this morning (the man, not the book), I can’t help but think how helpful and important it is to learn to relate to the Lord from someone who already knows Him more intimately than you do.
Joshua was a great leader for Israel and a powerful man of God in his own right, but he can very easily be overshadowed by Moses. To be fair, Moses was kind of a hard act to follow, but in reality, Joshua had an astounding level of access to God that is easy to miss only because Moses’ relationship with God was so exceedingly extraordinary that it takes all the focus. But it’s worth considering what we have seen of Joshua so far.
We shouldn’t miss, for example, that while Moses was alone on Mount Sinai with God for 40 days, Joshua was there too. We don’t know what exactly he was doing, and if he was just patiently sitting there waiting for 40 days, or if he was having his own dealings with God in some capacity, but he was the only person, other than Moses, to be given the unique privilege of ascending the mountain of God into the swirling clouds of His divine presence. We also shouldn’t miss that Joshua stayed at the tent of meeting where Moses went to meet with God face to face. While everybody else stayed back, evidently Joshua was right there, potentially even in the tent with Moses, and when even Moses would leave, Joshua would stay behind at the tent of meeting. While there are a lot of details we aren’t given, it is clear that Joshua desired to be close to the Lord and enjoyed a privileged level of access to Him that the average person did not have, largely through his association with Moses.
So when Joshua 1 starts out with God talking to Joshua, that really isn’t a surprise because Joshua has been part of these conversations between God and Moses for decades now. It’s not even clear that this is necessarily the first time God has spoken directly to Joshua, but even if it is, again, Joshua has long been accustomed to relating to God because he has spent so much time watching Moses and God relate. In fact, a lot of what primes Joshua for the position he takes on in leading Israel is not his natural charisma or his great insight into the 7 habits of a highly effective tribal leadership, but it’s his relationship with God developed at the feet of Moses.
And even though we aren’t talking about leadership of Israel anymore, you still see a lot of this today. There are Christians you hear or read about or meet in person who just so clearly have an incredible intimacy with the Lord, and when you listen to their stories, they seemingly all have people in their lives by whom they were influenced and from whom they learned to relate to the Lord as they do, at least in part. That’s not to say that we cannot have great intimacy with the Lord without someone else teaching us or exhibiting such a relationship first, but it does make it so much easier when you are taken by the hand and led up Mount Sinai to experience the Lord’s presence in a unique way without having had to spend all the years working your way up the mountain on your own.
Relating well to the Lord is just an area where we really can benefit so much from standing on the shoulders of giants. But, this also isn’t something that will just simply happen. Moses took Joshua up the mountain with him, but that was because Joshua had already attached himself to Moses and was following him. So while some of us might have the fortune of having grown up under or around such an influence, for the rest of us, if we want this kind of benefit to our own spiritual lives, we have to be proactive to seek out the person or people God has placed around us from whom we can learn a death of relationship with the Lord much more quickly than we will arrive at on our own without help.
So if you want to know a deeper relationship with the Lord, while spending more time in the Word or prayer may certainly be helpful, it might also be worth asking the Lord if there is someone He has around you who, like Moses did for Joshua, could take you up the mountain with them and introduce you to the Lord in ways you have not yet experienced.
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