Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 1-4.

The passage begins with God’s message to Joshua as he took over leadership upon Moses’ death.  Three times God tells Joshua to be strong and courageous.  After the final time, God also tells him not to be afraid or discouraged.  We should take this message to heart.  Just as God promised to be with Joshua, He has promised to be with us.  If we keep God’s Word in our hearts and meditate on it day and night, we will have confidence that God is with us.  God’s message was not just for Joshua.  He tells us also to be strong and courageous.  God will be with us, so we need not be afraid or discouraged.  As long as we follow God’s direction, whatever we do will be successful.  Maybe not the way we define success, but God’s purpose will be served, even if that which we thought was the end goal does not come to be.

The passage continues with the story of Rahab and the spies in Jericho.  Most of the time we focus on how Rahab was promised that she and her family would be protected from the destruction about to be visited on Jericho, or on how Rahab is one of King David’s ancestors.  Those are both great examples of how an outsider was welcomed in among God’s people through their faith.  However, my attention was caught by something today.  The spies insisted that their oath of protection to Rahab was only binding if she did not tell anyone what they were doing.  In the past, I always read that as not revealing them so that they could escape.  But that makes no sense, if they failed to escape, they could not pass the word to the Israelite army to not harm Rahab or her family.  So, that cannot be what they meant.  Clearly, the spies had either done something, or discovered something, which would allow the Israelites to conquer Jericho more easily.  Which suggests that Rahab’s cooperation was about more than gaining protection from the inevitable fall of Jericho, that perhaps Rahab preferred to become a foreigner among the Israelites to remaining a prostitute among her own people.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.