The Land We Shouldn't Have
For the upright will inhabit the land, and those with integrity will remain in it, 22 but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it. Pr 2:21–22.
In my devotional time I’m reading through Joshua. It’s brutal. I am on the section where Joshua and his army are going through each tribe and utterly destroying them. Nobody left. Man, woman, child. The whole of it is devoted to destruction.
I would prefer a much more sanitized version where a big pickle named Larry marches around a wall and those French peas get their comeuppance. (If you haven’t watched Veggie Tales you’re probably really confused right now). This isn’t a sanitized version. This is brutal. And I don’t think we can really escape behind saying that Joshua and his dudes were bloodthirsty tyrants who wanted to conquer land and then later on blamed God for it.
I mean, you can go that route—but you’re now guilty of doing the same thing to the text that Joshua did to the Canaanites. We have to wrestle with passages like this. To make it even more difficult you’ve got a verse like Joshua 11:20,
20 For it was the Lord’s doing to harden their hearts that they should come against Israel in battle, in order that they should be devoted to destruction and should receive no mercy but be destroyed, just as the Lord commanded Moses.
I don’t have a simple answer for all of this. But I think I can get in the ballpark of what is happening here. I think the answer is found at the end of Joshua 11:23. “…And the land had rest from war.” Somehow, that is where all of this is heading. Proverbs 2:21-22, written quite a few years after the conquest, is also part of the answer.
“The land” is a reference to the Promised Land. That goes back to the promise to Abraham—which really goes back to the Garden of Eden. When the first couple was cast out of the garden it’s a picture of what you read in Proverbs 2:22. The wicked are “cut off from the land”. They are divested of their inheritance. They now must live where the wild things are.
But God’s grace is great. God pursues humanity in the wilderness. One of the threads that runs throughout the Bible is God’s work to bring us back into the land. It culminates in the new heaven and new earth. God is rescuing a people, giving them purpose, and planting them in a place. But it sure is bumpy getting there.
I don’t know what to make of all the slain bodies which once inhabited the promised land. Yeah, I can hide behind some theological explanations but at the end of the day, if I’m honest, it still leaves me a bit unsettled. And it should. What leaves me really unsettled is that I’m not one who is “upright” or who has “integrity”. I’m the wicked and the treacherous.
I don’t deserve the land. Neither do you. None of us do. That is also part of the story of the Old Testament. It’s why you see the people of Israel booted out of the land and cast into exile. It’s why you see them come back into the land and then ultimately reject the Messiah. And it’s why you see the destruction of the temple in 70AD and the global purpose of God begin to unravel even more.
The only one who is upright and truly has integrity is the Lord Jesus. He inherits the land. We don’t. Our only hope is that we’re connected to Him—through His graciously drawing us to himself. He’s the Boaz who becomes our kinsman Redeemer. And because of our union with Him—His home becomes our own. I don’t get that. I don’t understand why I’m not one of the slain bodies in the wilderness.
Grace is really the only answer that I have.
And I don’t really understand it. I don’t think I’m meant to. This is why John would say in 1 John 3:1, “What other worldly love is this that we would be called children of God, and so we are”. I marvel at this. We inherit what we didn’t earn.