Joshua 4
WE may consider again the steps we have been viewing in connection with the people of Israel — steps in type and shadow of greater things not then revealed, but which the New Testament plainly sets forth.
First, then was God intervening for faith, and providing a lamb, whose blood He would accept as a type of the Son of His love who was afterward to be put to death under the judgment which the sinner should have borne. “When I see the blood”, said He, “I will pass over you.” Exo. 12:1313And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. (Exodus 12:13). But to leave the people in Egypt, slaves of the enemy, was not at all God’s purpose, and therefore we are next shown Satan’s efforts to retain his slaves, and his overthrow, together with God’s triumphant deliverance, (and in type, justification) of His people through the Red Sea, fresh type of the death of Christ. Henceforth they are separated to God, out from under the dominion of sin and of Satan. In all this we observe that man has no part; it is wholly God’s work, this of visiting judgment upon an accepted substitute, and of redeeming a people for Himself, while overthrowing the enemy, Satan.
There is much to be learned by the redeemed ones, however, and so there next appear extended humbling lessons of self-distrust, of failure and sin where faith should have triumphed. The scene of these experiences is a wilderness, marked with every evidence of God’s care. But there is something yet more which is important to learn experimentally: God is done with the old nature, the old man; He identifies me, who have believed on His Son. with Him in the place He took for me.
I have, I trust, learned the painful lesson of Romans 7, and I am in the position of Romans 8:1,1There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8:1) no condemnation, because viewed by God as in Christ Jesus. I have died with Christ, and am risen with Him, henceforth to walk in newness of life.
“It is important first to see Jesus alone in life and in death: there we have the thing itself in its perfection. It is equally important then to know that God sees us (believers) as having been there, —that it (the death of Christ) expresses our place; that God sees us in Him, and that it is our place before God. But then, there is also our taking that place, by the Spirit, in faith, and in fact. The former was the Red Sea; as to death, it was Christ’s death; while the Jordan exhibits our entering into death with Him.” The crossing of the river then brings us, not as physical death, as so many have hastily supposed, but now in life on earth, as risen with Christ, into the state or condition which makes us fit to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.
What then of chapter 4? The memorials of the thing that has been made mine—viewed by God as dead with Christ, the old nature judged, and I delivered from its power—are set up on the other shore, a continual reminder of the believer’s deliverance from the power of sin, at the very entrance to the place, in resurrection life, that He now enjoys.
“The believer, risen with Christ, has the indelible marks of His death imprinted on him, and if such is my place in Christ, can I live any longer in the things which I have abandoned, which Christ has left in the depths of Jordan? (Rom. 6:2, 112God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? (Romans 6:2)
11Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6:11)).
The twelve stones taken out of the depths of the river, remind the believer of what he has to be. In the Jordan, God declares him to be dead; on the further shore, He presents him risen with Christ.
But there was another monument, set up in the midst of the Jordan. Who could see it? Faith considers this memorial. “When I think of the stones in Jordan, my heart is in communion with Christ in death. I return to sit, so to speak, on the banks of the river of death, and I say, ‘That is my place; it is there I was; there He has been for me . . .What led Thee, blessed Saviour, to take this place? It was Thy love to me.’”
ML 05/31/1925