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.

Spare a thought for what it meant to come after Moses. This was the man who had stood before Pharaoh, parted the sea, carried the tablets down the mountain and, as the closing lines of Deuteronomy put it, spoken with God face to face. The people had buried him and were now meant to follow his assistant across a river. If I were Joshua, the loudest voice in my head would not be the giants on the far bank but the comparison standing behind me: I am not him, and everyone knows it. What strikes me is that God never asks Joshua to be Moses. He does not hand him Moses’ staff or Moses’ temperament. He simply promises that the same presence that went with Moses will go with him too (Joshua 1:5). That reframes the courage entirely. It is not the swagger of a man who reckons he can match his predecessor. It is the quieter bravery of obedience, of stepping forward because Someone has promised to come too, not because you have finally measured up to the size of the task.

Read the whole chapter and you notice the same charge keeps coming round. God says be strong and courageous to Joshua near the start (Joshua 1:6), says it again a verse on, tied this time to keeping the law (1:7), and says it a third time in our verse (1:9). I used to hear repetition like that as filler. Now it sounds more like a parent at a bedside, saying the steadying thing again because they know how thin the courage of a frightened person wears by morning. What moves me most comes at the chapter’s close. When the tribes pledge to follow Joshua, they end by saying the very words back to him: only be strong and courageous (1:18). The charge has gone right round the camp and returned to the leader from the people he leads. Courage here is not a private reserve Joshua must dig up alone. It is something spoken and passed along, said and re-said, until it starts to hold. And underneath every repetition sits the one reason that never changes: the God who gives the command is the God who promises to go along.

“Haven’t I commanded you?” reaches back further than the verses just above it. God had commissioned Joshua with this same charge in Deuteronomy 31:23, promising then to be with him, and that happened while Moses was still alive and near enough to hear it said. So Joshua had these words in his pocket already. Then the funeral. Then thirty days of mourning. And by the time the camp is looking at him and the river is in front of him, the old assurance has clearly worn through, because God has to say it again.

Here is what stops me. God does not add anything. No upgrade for the harder morning, no extra clause to cover the grief, no sweetener now that the man who used to do the talking is under the ground. The promise Joshua was given on a good day is the entire promise he gets on the worst one. I have wanted more than that, if I am honest. I have wanted God to say something new to match how much worse things had got. He mostly does not. He says the same thing, to a man who is now standing alone, and expects it to be enough, because it is the same God saying it.

If you are teaching this, do not let anyone reach for the meaning until they have looked at the river. Joshua 3:15 tells us the Jordan was overflowing its banks, because it was harvest time and that is simply what it did that time of year. This was not a stream to paddle across. The charge in verse 9 was issued for a crossing that could not be made in the obvious way, at the worst season for attempting it. Let the swollen water arrive after the promise and the promise turns up cheap.

The other thing worth doing with a group is asking what the courage is actually attached to each time it is asked, because the answer keeps moving. In verse 6 it is bolted to the mission. In verse 7 it is bolted to the law, which is a plodding sort of bravery about staying obedient when nobody is clapping. Only by verse 9 is it handed over for nothing in particular, just for the going, wherever that turns out to be. Walk people through in that order and most of them will find themselves somewhere in it.

I would use this gladly at the induction of a minister following someone the congregation loved and has just buried, because that is precisely its scene: a death, a gap, and a person standing in it who is not the one who died. I would use it commissioning an elder, or sending someone into a role they feel unfit for, or over a building project a church is quietly terrified it cannot afford. Anywhere someone stands at their own Jordan with the task still on the far bank, this verse is home.

I would not read it at a deathbed. I would not send it to someone facing a diagnosis with nothing left for them to do. The command assumes you can still go somewhere, still choose, still cross. Aimed at a person who cannot act, whose fear is not in front of a task but sitting inside a loss they cannot avert, it stops sounding like a promise and starts sounding like an accusation: why are you not braver than this. Keep it for the living who still have a step in them. For the one whose only task left is to be held, find another verse.

In the world Joshua camped in, gods tended to come with an address. A city, a hilltop shrine, a grove, a particular temple, and with all of it the sense that a god’s writ ran strongest on his own ground. I want to be careful here, because people generalise about the ancient Near East far too cheerfully and I am not going to hand you a tidy theory about what every nation believed. But you can catch the assumption at work inside the Bible itself. In 1 Kings 20:23 the advisers of the king of Aram, picking over a defeat, tell him that Israel’s God is a god of the hills, and that the next battle had better be fought down on the plain where he would presumably have less say. They lost that one too.

Which is what makes “wherever you go” such a strange thing to say to this particular man on this particular morning. Every proof Joshua had was local. The sea opening, the cloud and fire going ahead of the camp, the manna: all of it happened on this side of the water, on ground his God had already made his own. Now he is told that walking into somebody else’s country, land with its own altars on its own hilltops, changes nothing whatever about who is beside him. I grew up hearing “God is everywhere” as a soft thing you say to a child afraid of the dark. Standing on that bank it is not soft at all. It is a claim staked against every other god on the map, made before a single stone of Jericho had fallen to back it up.

A couple of generations later an angel sits down under an oak and says nearly the same thing to a frightened farmer beating out wheat in a winepress so the raiders will not spot it: the LORD is with you, you mighty man of valour (Judges 6:12). Same promise, near enough the same words.

Gideon does not answer with anything resembling be strong and courageous. What comes out of him is a complaint, and it is one of my favourite moments in the Old Testament: if the LORD is with us, then why has all this happened, and where are the wonders our fathers used to tell us about (Judges 6:13). Then he wants a sign. Then, having had one, he wants another, and sets the terms himself: fleece wet and ground dry, and afterwards, because even that had not settled it, fleece dry and ground soaked (Judges 6:36 to 40). God does not tell him off. He does not remind him how Joshua behaved. He just does it, both times, and never once mentions the second asking.

For years I treated Joshua 1:9 as the pattern and quietly measured myself against it. Told once, believed, crossed. Judges 6 wrecked that for me, in the best way. God appears to have an enormous tolerance for the man who argues with the promise before he acts on it, and no visible interest at all in punishing him for needing it proved. Nobody taught me that as a boy. If you have ever caught yourself bargaining for evidence before you would take one step, you are in older company than you were led to believe, and it did not cost Gideon the promise.

Here is the part of this verse I have never managed to preach around. “Be strong and courageous” is not general life advice dropped into the book at random. It is a war command, handed to a general on the eve of a campaign, and the campaign it is handed over for includes Jericho put to the sword bar one household (Joshua 6:21), summaries that read to a modern ear like something closer to a war crime than a triumph, he left none remaining (Joshua 10:40), and a coalition of kings whose hearts God is said to have hardened so that they would fight and be destroyed rather than sue for peace (Joshua 11:20).

I love this verse. I have used it at commissioning services and meant every word of it. I have also sat on my own, late, with the fact that the courage God is putting into a man in chapter one is the courage that carries out chapters six to eleven. You do not get to keep the comfort and leave the conquest on a shelf somewhere, as though the book were only ever about the part before the fighting starts.

I have no clean answer, and I have grown suspicious of people who offer one quickly. Some readers point out that historians and archaeologists disagree, often sharply, about how much of the conquest happened as narrated, and whether the language of total destruction was a stock way of claiming a victory rather than a body count, since other nations’ annals boast in similar terms. I cannot referee that, and I am wary of reaching for it just because it makes me more comfortable. It may soften the problem. It does not remove it. What keeps me reading rather than shelving the book is that scripture is plainly not hiding this from me. It hands over the charge and the aftermath in the same scroll and declines to sand either one down to fit the other. Sitting with that honestly is the most faith I can manage here, and I would rather offer you that than a resolution I do not actually have.

Go on six chapters and this promise gets tested in a way nobody prints on a fridge magnet. Israel loses at Ai. Thirty-six men dead, the army running, and Joshua face down in front of the ark until evening with dust on his head, asking God why he ever brought the people over that river at all (Joshua 7:6 to 7). It is the precise fear of verse 9, turning up in full, after the crossing, in the middle of the thing he was promised he would not face alone.

God’s answer is not the voice from chapter one. It is: get up, why are you lying on your face (7:10). And then the sentence I find hardest in the whole book. Israel cannot stand in front of its enemies any longer, and he will not be with them any more unless the devoted things are destroyed from among them (7:11 to 12).

I will not be with you. Said to the man who had been told, on the best morning of his life, that his God was with him wherever he went.

I have stopped pretending I can hold those two verses together smoothly. The nearest I get is this. The promise was never a charm Joshua carried about in his pocket, working regardless of what the people it was made to actually did with it. It was covenant, and covenant is between parties who can wreck it. Oddly, that makes chapter one warmer to me rather than colder. God is not issuing a risk-free guarantee to a man who cannot lose it. He is binding himself to people who very much can, and he goes ahead and does it anyway, knowing about Achan before Joshua has taken one step towards the water.

Long after Joshua’s river had settled down into geography and archaeology, congregations over here kept singing about it and meaning something else entirely by it. William Williams of Pantycelyn wrote his hymn in Welsh in the 1760s, and the English version most of us grew up with, Guide me, O thou great Jehovah, or Redeemer depending which hymn book was in the pew, came through Peter Williams shortly after. Its last verse puts the singer at the verge of Jordan, asking for anxious fears to subside and to be landed safe on the other side.

Nobody singing that in a chapel on a wet Sunday evening imagined they were about to ford a river in Canaan. They meant dying. Somewhere in the long life of that hymn the Jordan quietly became the last border any of us crosses, and it is the one you cannot send two spies over first to bring you back a report on the far bank.

I find the borrowing moving rather than sloppy. Joshua was told he would not be alone on the other side of a real river, in flood, at harvest. Generations of people who would never see the Jordan heard that and thought: then I will not be alone at mine either. They were reading past what the verse first meant, I suppose. I am not at all sure they were reading it wrongly.

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.