"Give me this Hill Country" (Joshua 14)

When we meet Caleb in today’s reading, he is eighty-five years old. Forty years have passed since he was one of only two spies who insisted that the children of Israel could – and should – storm the Promised Land. (The other was Joshua, his current Commander-in-Chief.) Together with ten other spies they’d done a reconnaissance mission in preparation for their invasion into Canaan.

As the Lord had promised, they discovered the land to be bountiful and beautiful. “It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit,” they said, displaying clusters of grapes so large that they carried them on poles between them (Numbers 13:23-27). It was a good land indeed– everything God had promised and more. At last, they had reached the Promised Land!

Yes, there were fortified cities there. Yes, there were powerful people there. Some even called them “giants.” But hadn’t the Lord brought them out of Egypt, down to Mount Sinai, and over to Canaan in order to give them their ancestral land? Was not this the whole point of their journey? Could not God be trusted to finish what God had begun?

Of course God could. “Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it,” Caleb said (Numbers 13:30; see also 14:6-10). But the other spies disagreed. Yes, the land was great, but the people were powerful. They felt like grasshoppers in comparison to them (Numbers 13:33).

Caleb and Joshua were outvoted. The Lord was outraged. The Israelites were outcast, condemned to wander in the desert for forty years. Other than these two, all the fighting men of that generation died in the wilderness. The death they foolishly forecasted in Canaan came tragically true in the desert.

There is a provocative parable in this story, for as Bible commentators have often observed, it parallels our own Christian experience. Like the children of Israel, we have been rescued from slavery as a gift of God’s grace. Like them, God has promised to give us a new future, a future of freedom, blessing and beauty. He wants to make us a brand new people (a “new creation,” the Apostle Paul said).

But there are “giants in the land.” It will not be easy to be God’s people in God’s place. We face many obstacles in the midst of an alien culture. We, like the people of Israel, are tempted to give up hope in the face of these challenges. We acquiesce to our culture. We turn and run. We long for the old days in Egypt.

How many of us, for example, have bent the knee before the contemporary giants of money, sex and power? We know Jesus said we “cannot serve both God and Money” (Mt 6:24), and yet we try our best to prove him wrong. We know Jesus said he came not to “be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45), and yet we are prone to seek power rather than to relinquish it. We know Jesus warned us against adultery, lust and divorce (Mt 5:27-32), and yet we find these prohibitions unreasonable in today’s “enlightened” age.

Yes, there are giants in the land. Unless we are vigilant, and wholeheartedly devoted to God, as Caleb was, we will prefer the slavery of Egypt — or the pointless wandering of the desert, or the destructive values of the Canaanites — rather than the freedom and blessing of living as God’s free people in God’s good land. If we see these giants in the light of our own frailties, rather than the light of God’s faithfulness we will be defeated before we ever begin. That’s what happened to Caleb’s compadres.

But it is not what happened to Caleb. When he was a young man he refused to capitulate to the obstacles before him, nor to the naysayers around him: “I wholly followed the Lord my God,” he said (Joshua 14:8). As an old man, nothing had changed. He’d waited forty-five years to fulfill his dream, and he was not about to let his advanced age stop him: “So now give me this hill country … and I will drive them out just as the Lord said” (14:12).

So he said, and so he did. God grant that the same may be said of us.