Joshua 4:23

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"God dried up the waters of Jordan from before you, until ye were passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red sea." Jos 4:23

This presents God as doing the little and doing the great: in the one case he dried up a river; in the other case he dried up a sea. The idea to be kept steadily before the mind is, that it is the same God that worketh all in all. Omnipotence is as much required in the drying up of the Jordan as in the dividing of the Red Sea; and the Omnipotence that divided the Red Sea condescended to dry up the river. Every action on the part of God must of necessity be a condescension. When God made the universe he humbled himself. When God made man he subjected the Deity to degradation. This must not be looked upon in the light of experiment, but in the light of necessity. Terms which seem to indicate the contrary are merely terms of accommodation, and not terms which express the essence of things. We are to reason from the greater to the less; thus, if God dried up the Red Sea, he will also dry up the Jordan; if God enabled us to kill a lion, he will enable us to slay a man; if God enabled us to climb a mountain, he will not forsake us when we have to pass over a molehill. The text is an appeal to memory as well as an appeal to confidence. That we may live well in the future we should live steadfastly in the past. The witness of God's personality and presence in life must be found in a man's own experience; he can only assent to them with the intellect, but he can claim them as verities, and affirm them as the truest facts of life only in proportion to the richness of his personal experience in divine things. Thus growing life should be growing religiousness; old age should be itself an argument; memory should be a library of exposition and defence. What is forgotten so soon as grace or favour even on the part of man to man? It is even so with God. We forget that our whole life has been a miracle. We forget this in proportion as we draw a line beyond which our recollection is not permitted to go Recollection must be helped by association or analogy. Thus we can go back to our own infancy by carefully regarding the infancy of others, marking its frailty and its continual exposure to fatal danger. Life regarded thus from the beginning to its end becomes itself a piece of work which no human hands could have executed, a very miracle of mystery and beauty. The Old Testament saints in particular were accustomed to reason from the past to the future. David did so in relation to Goliath. That is but a typical instance. Job did so when he contended that, as God had been with him in six troubles, he would not forsake him in seven; or when God himself affirmed this to be the line of his treatment of mankind. Our own hymn-writers have celebrated this truth in many a soothing and encouraging line, "His love in time past forbids me to think," etc.