Be Strong And Courageous

Joshua 1 sits on a seam in the story. Behind it lies the whole wilderness stretch, the forty years of wandering that close at the end of Deuteronomy with Moses’ death and a month of mourning. Ahead lies the crossing of the Jordan and the long, costly work of settling in the land. The events are usually placed somewhere in the late second millennium BC, though the exact dating is debated and I will not pretend to pin it down. What matters most for reading verse 9 is the timing. These words land on a grieving, leaderless people camped at a border they have feared for a generation. The last attempt to enter, back in Numbers 13 and 14, fell apart in panic when the spies returned talking of giants and fortified cities. So when God says do not be afraid, he is not speaking into thin air. He is speaking to a nation with a long memory of fear, and to a new leader who had watched that earlier collapse with his own eyes, since Joshua himself had been one of the two spies who urged the people to trust God and go up.

Slow down over the shape of the sentence and you find it built from four short charges. Two press forward and two push back the fear: a call to strength, a call to courage, a refusal of fright, a refusal of being shattered inside. Hebrew loves this kind of doubling, and here the effect is almost like a wall going up course by course. The pairing ‘be strong and courageous’ (chazaq and amats) threads right through these opening verses, repeated to Joshua more than once, and it is worth noticing that it arrives as a command, not a mood God is hoping will turn up. The word often rendered ‘dismayed’ carries the sense of being broken apart, the way you go to pieces inside when something overwhelms you. What I miss too easily is that all four hang on the little word ‘for’ near the end. The whole weight tips onto it. Everything before that word is asked of Joshua; everything after it is what God himself undertakes to do. The courage is commanded. The presence is guaranteed.

There is a quiet thread here that runs all the way to the Gospels. Joshua, Yehoshua in Hebrew, means something close to ‘the LORD saves’, and it is the same name that comes through Greek as Iesous and into English as Jesus. The man sent to lead God’s people into the promised land shares a name with the One who leads us into something larger still. I do not want to lean on that too hard, because Joshua was a real man with a real and sometimes brutal task, not a tidy symbol. Still, the rhyme is hard to unhear. Joshua’s whole confidence rested on the words ‘the LORD your God is with you’. Generations later Matthew applies the old name Immanuel to Jesus, telling us it means ‘God with us’ (Matthew 1:23), and he closes his Gospel with the very promise the short reflection above quotes from Matthew 28:20. The assurance that steadied a frightened man on the riverbank is, in Christ, made permanent and personal. Hebrews 13:5 picks up an echo of the same Deuteronomy promise and presses it into the hands of ordinary believers.

I want to be honest about how this lands for me, because slogans are cheap and I have grown tired of them. The verse has met me least on grand days and most on quiet, dread-filled mornings: the drive to a hospital appointment with someone I love, the email I kept not opening, the first morning of a job where I was sure everyone could see I did not belong. What steadies me is that God’s order is the reverse of mine. I want to feel brave first and act second. He says go, and the courage is found on the road rather than before it. I take real comfort, too, that he never tells Joshua the walls are smaller than they look. He does not shrink the thing. He simply refuses to let Joshua face it alone. So on the bad mornings I have slowly stopped praying for the fear to vanish and started praying the one thing actually promised: Lord, you said you go with me wherever I go. That is usually enough to get me out of the car.

Here are a few honest questions I would gently leave with you, the kind worth a slow cup of tea rather than a quick answer.

• Where am I waiting to feel braver before I take a step God has already made plain?
• What is the ‘Jordan’ in front of me right now, and have I been asking him to shrink it rather than to come into it with me?
• When I read ‘wherever you go’, is there one place or one relationship I quietly assume he does not enter?
• Who near me is standing at their own border today, and could I be the voice that repeats God’s ‘be strong and courageous’ back to them?

If it helps to keep going, you might sit a while with other verses about fear or read more about Joshua in the Bible.