SUNDAY 25th
Joshua 3
NIV (v5) – ‘Joshua told the people, Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do amazing things among you.’
ESV (v5) – ‘Then Joshua said to the people, Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do wonders among you.’
As we come into this chapter, we see God is going to be doing something for his people which he had already done when they first left Egypt, which was to part the waters. In the first account it was the parting of the Red Sea as they were being chased by the Egyptian army, you will recall what happened, the people of God crossed on dry land and the pursuing armies were engulfed in the waters and drowned. It ended with the people of Israel singing the song of triumph. (Exodus 15) On that occasion it was Moses who was leading the people.
Now we come to the river Jordan, the people of God need to get across and this time the leader is Joshua, our text tells us that Joshua instructs the people to get ready, for God was about to do great wonders among them. And he did. The story continues that as they approached the river, and the feet of the priests were dipped in the water, it began to rise into a heap and was completely cut off until all the people had crossed over to the other side.
As I was meditating over these verses, these are the thoughts that crossed my mind. At the Jordan crossing we see a new leader and a new generation, remember Moses who was at the Red Sea crossing had died and most if not all of the generation that crossed the Red Sea had also died, it was a new leader and a new generation at the Jordan river. They were going to experience for themselves what their fore parents had experienced, God performing a miracle that would see them cross through a water barrier on dry ground to get through to the other side. In my mind prior to this crossing and while still in the wilderness, I can visualise the older generation retelling the younger generation all the things they had witnessed as they left Egypt, and in particular the crossing of the Red sea, and the younger ones thinking to themselves, ‘Wow, I would love to have been there and experienced it for myself’ and now, as they prepare to cross into the Promised land, they are about to witness for themselves something very similar as the River Jordan is opened up for them to cross.
I can remember when I was younger, the older generation talking about the early days of the modern Pentecostal movement, retelling the amazing things that took place, some of them recalling first hand, others telling it second hand but still excited to have witnessed the actual outpourings of the early 20th Century and that which spilled on into the next generation. I had a very close friend who although not a first generation Pentecostal, but of the next generation who would retell to me so much of what happened in those early days, even up until his dying moment (aged 94) he had a pin sharp memory of so much of what happened in those earlier days, as what took place had been recounted to him and excited him so much so that he wanted to know something of its impact in his own life. What about you and me, as we perhaps have heard or read about the wonders of the Pentecostal outpouring in the early 20th Century, do we have a yearning and a longing for God to do it again, just as he revisited the people of Israel with another miracle of the crossing of water, he can revisited us in this a new generation with a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit so that what our fore-parents witnessed so too we ourselves can witness.
‘Do it again Lord, do it again, pour out your Spirit on this dry and thirsty land, do for us in the 21st Century what you did for the Church at its inauguration on the day of Pentecost and what you have done for the generations before us, help us the Church in the 21st century to consecrate ourselves again, so that you will do wonders among us.’