Joshua 3:10-13 – The Assurance of the LORD’s Power

Before the crossing Joshua had predicted: “Here is how you shall know that the living God is among you and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Hivites, the Perizzites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, and the Jebusites” (v10). There is a certain logic behind this assurance. If the LORD can tame a raging river, He can also resist attacking Amorites. If He can stop up the Jordan, He can put down the Jebusite. If He can get Israel into the land, He can surely give them that land. Israel had failed to exercise this same kind of logic in the past – like when they complained about their hunger as they wandered (Ex. 16:3). They should have realised that the God who had just miraculously delivered them from Egypt by bringing them through the Red Sea (Ex. 14) would not let go of them in the wilderness.

Bible commentator Dale Ralph Davis says: “The rescue at the Red Sea, the crossing of the Jordan, and the death and resurrection of Christ are explosions of God’s power that are meant to colour the whole horizon of the believer’s life in order to assure us that the God who so mightily handles greater emergencies is surely adequate for the smaller crises and anxieties that beset us”. “You shall know that the living God is among you” (v10). The point of this text is to impress us with the adequacy of God. It drills into us that God is not merely a three-letter word in our Christian vocabulary. He is not merely the honorary leader of our club. He is the living God who works and intervenes and saves and rescues and counsels His people in all their perplexities. He is indeed “the Lord of all the earth” (v11,13). This is no lower league ‘god’. We must turn our back on our tendency to downsize God, to carve Him down to our stature and to limit Him to our possibilities.