Faithfullee

Courage Grounded in the Word

God's commission to Joshua is framed entirely around a repeated command and its repeated ground:

"Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you... Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go." — Joshua 1:6–7, 9 (ESV)

"Be strong and courageous" (Hebrew: hazak we'ematz) appears four times in chapter 1 — three times from God to Joshua, and once from the people to Joshua in verse 18. Richard Hess, in his Joshua commentary (TOTC, 1996), notes that this language is not a pep talk. It is a theological declaration: courage is commanded because God's presence has been promised. The reason Joshua can face an entire nation of fortified cities is not that he has superior military skill. It is that the LORD is with him wherever he goes.

But the command to courage is inseparable from a command that might seem less dramatic: meditate on the Book of the Law day and night, so as to do all that is written in it.

"This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success." — Joshua 1:8 (ESV)

Dale Davis, in his Joshua commentary (Christian Focus, 2000), observes that this verse connects Joshua directly to the Deuteronomic vision of the king who writes a copy of the law and reads it all the days of his life (Deuteronomy 17:18–19). Joshua is commissioned not as a military commander who happens to be religious, but as a servant of the word who happens to also be a military commander. Success in the land — "good success" — is the fruit of covenant obedience, not of superior strategy.

What strikes us here is the pairing: courage, and then the law. You might expect God to commission a general with a battle plan. Instead He says: keep the Book of the Law on your lips, meditate on it, be careful to do what it says. The success God promises follows from faithfulness to His word, not from tactical brilliance. The whole book of Joshua will bear this out — the victories come when Israel follows God's instructions, and the defeats come when they don't. That is not coincidence. It is the whole point.

Rahab and the Surprise of Faith

Joshua sends two spies into Jericho, and the story immediately disrupts easy expectations. The spies are identified and take refuge in the house of Rahab — described as a harlot — on the city wall. When the king's men come searching, Rahab hides them under flax on the roof and sends the searchers on a false trail.

Her lie to the soldiers needs to be named honestly. She told them the spies had left, when in fact they were on the roof above her head. The text does not adjudicate this directly. It honors Rahab. It lists her among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11. It names her in the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew 1. The ethics of what she did — the lie told to protect people who were sheltering under her roof — is not resolved in the text. What the text honors is her faith and her action. Later theologians have debated it. Some argued it was a lesser evil. Some argued the lie itself was not the point. The Bible does not tell us. What it does tell us is that Rahab acted on what she believed, and she believed something more completely than most of Israel's own generation.

What makes this scene theologically remarkable is not the subterfuge but what Rahab says before she asks for mercy:

"I know that the LORD has given you the land, and that the fear of you has fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land melt away before you. For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt... and as soon as we heard it, our hearts melted, and there was no spirit left in any man because of you, for the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath." — Joshua 2:9–11 (ESV)

Rahab confesses what Israel's own generation failed to confess at Kadesh-barnea — that the LORD is God in heaven above and on earth beneath, and that He has given the land to His people. Hess observes that her words constitute one of the most complete confessions of monotheism in the Old Testament, and she is a Canaanite. The scarlet cord she hangs from her window echoes the blood of Passover. She and her household are saved by the sign of the cord, just as Israel was saved by the sign of blood on the doorposts. She is later listed in the genealogy of Jesus (Matthew 1:5) and named among the heroes of faith in Hebrews 11:31.

The Hebrew word she uses for the kindness she asks of the spies is hesed — the same word used throughout the Old Testament for God's covenant loyalty. She asks for covenant faithfulness, and she receives it.

We find Rahab one of the most surprising figures in the whole Hebrew Bible. A Canaanite woman. A prostitute. Living in the walls of the city marked for destruction. And yet her confession of faith surpasses most of what we hear from Israel in the wilderness. She heard what God did at the Red Sea — the same news everyone in Canaan had heard — and instead of hardening like the other kings, she believed it. She risked her life and her household on that belief. The kingdom of God often arrives through exactly the people you weren't expecting.

Through the Jordan on Dry Ground

Joshua 3–4 stages the crossing of the Jordan in deliberate parallel to the Exodus crossing of the Red Sea. The priests carry the ark of the covenant into the river. The moment their feet touch the water:

"The waters coming down from above stood and rose up in a heap very far away, at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, and those flowing down toward the Sea of the Arabah, the Salt Sea, were completely cut off. And the people passed over opposite Jericho." — Joshua 3:16 (ESV)

The city Adam, where the waters backed up, is approximately eighteen miles upstream — a distance that reveals the scale of the miracle. Not a trickle but a river in full flood (Joshua 3:15) stopped dead in its course. The people cross on dry ground, with the priests standing in the middle of the Jordan holding the ark until the whole nation has passed.

God's instruction to take twelve stones from the middle of the riverbed and set them up as a memorial (Joshua 4:1–9) anticipates a question not yet asked: "When your children ask in time to come, 'What do these stones mean to you?'" (Joshua 4:6). The memorial is not decoration. It is discipleship infrastructure — a physical prompt built into the landscape to generate the retelling of God's acts across generations.

We keep coming back to that question built into the stones: When your children ask what these mean... God thinks about generations. He builds memory into the geography. He does not trust important truths to survive in oral tradition alone — He creates visual anchors, physical objects that outlast the moment and force the story to be told again. These twelve stones from the middle of a miraculously stopped river will sit at Gilgal, asking their question to every child who grows up in the land. What do these mean? They mean the God who parted the Red Sea just parted the Jordan. They mean He is still who He said He was.

Last updated: March 3, 2026.