“Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, Pass through the host, and command the people, saying, Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it” (Joshua 1:10-1110Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, 11Pass through the host, and command the people, saying, Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the Lord your God giveth you to possess it. (Joshua 1:10‑11)).
There is something contrastive with human ways in the people of Israel being bidden to tarry three days after receiving such a stirring exhortation as that which has just been given to them.
They have to prepare food, and wait a perfect period of time, and not rush on impetuously; and thus it is, that having removed from the last stage of their wilderness way – Shittim – Joshua, and all the people lodge on Jordan’s banks before they pass over.
We have to learn that human energy cannot cross rivers of death, or break down the walls of this world’s strongholds, and that should we be stirred up to follow the Lord. It must be in His time as well as according to His Word. Impulse is not faith, and going forward in the mere strength of our own acquired knowledge of God’s truth will surely manifest itself to be impulse.
God has His own time. He is not in haste, and He would neither have His people act in fleshly zeal, nor in the excitement of freshly gained knowledge. Right actions may be wrought at wrong times, and well would it be if some that love their Lord, instead of pushing on in the impulse of newly-acquired truth, would first tarry their three days and digest it – make it, by the grace of God’s Spirit, thoroughly their own. Unless we make the truth of God part of ourselves, as it were, our weakness will betray itself in the day of testing. That knowledge of the divine Word which does not, sink down deep into the heart, will not stay the soul when its support is most needed; it will be found then that such knowledge was of an exterior kind; and that, therefore, we cannot use it. To learn as a matter of intelligence a truth of God from another, without having experienced the force of it in our own souls, is knowledge without power.
In drawing instruction from this literal history let us not, however, suppose that a set interval of time is necessary to effect a needed exercise of soul, for God can and does work in some in a short period, what it is His pleasure to accomplish in others by a life-long lesson.