Book of Joshua: Setting the Scene -- Joyful Heart Ministries

Book of Joshua:
Setting the Scene

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

While the people of Israel were now poised to enter the Promised Land, it had been forty years since Moses led them out of Egypt, longer than any of them had ever imagined.

In the short span of two years, they had crossed the Red Sea, seen the destruction of Pharaoh's army, drunk water out of the rock, been sustained with manna for food, and received the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. For those two years they had grumbled and rebelled and complained until they came to the southern boundary of the Promised Land.

From Kadesh-barnea at the very south of Canaan, Moses had selected twelve men, one from each of the Twelve Tribes, to spy out the land, getting the lay of the land, probing for weaknesses, and developing strategy for conquest (Numbers 13-14). When they returned, they came carrying a huge cluster of grapes on a pole between two of them as a sign of the fruitfulness of the land. "We went into the land ... and it does flow with milk and honey!" they reported. But ten of them were fearful:

The people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.... We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are. The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size.... We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we look the same to them" (13:28, 31-33)

These ten spread a bad report among the people, and their fear was infective. Their view was countered, however, by two spies, Caleb and Joshua (14:30). Caleb declared:

"We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.... Do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them" (13:30; 14:9).

But they were afraid. The negativism and fear of the majority report had infected the whole people. "That night all the people of the community raised their voices and wept aloud. All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron.... "We should choose a leader and go back to Egypt" (14:1-4). The people began to talk of stoning their leaders. At that point God intervened. Though he forgave the people their sins of unbelief and contempt against Him (14:11), he swore that none of that generation would ever enter the land, only Caleb and Joshua. "Your children will be shepherds here for forty years, suffering for your unfaithfulness, until the last of your bodies lies in the desert," he told them (14:33).

The book of Joshua begins at the close of that forty years of wandering in the Wilderness of Zin around Kadesh-barnea. The generation of the parents has now all died. Moses, too, has died at the ripe old age of 120. With his final strength he climbs Mount Pisgah and surveys the Promised Land. Then he dies, and Joshua is filled with his Spirit (Deuteronomy 34).

Moses has brought the people to the very edge of the Jordan. It is Joshua's task to bring them across, and lead them to conquer and occupy the very land he had spied out forty years before as a young man. Now he is probably sixty or seventy (we don't know for sure), along with Caleb, the oldest men of their entire nation. Their contemporaries have all died during these forty years; only their children remain.

The first chapter you're about to study outlines God's encouragement to Joshua as he prepares to lead the people into the Promised Land.