But, oh, how important it is to be enabled, like Joshua and Caleb, to bear a full, clear, and uncompromising testimony to the truth of God! How important to maintain the truth as to the proper portion and inheritance of the saints! There is such a tendency to corrupt the truth—to fritter it away—to surrender it—to lower the standard. Hence the urgent need of having the truth in divine power in the soul, of being able, in our little measure, to say, “We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen.” Caleb and Joshua had not only been in the land, but they had been with God about the land. They had looked at it all from faith’s point of view. They knew the land was theirs, in the purpose of God; that it was worth having, as the gift of God; and that they should yet possess it, by the power of God. They were men full of faith, full of courage, full of power.
Blessed men! They were living in the light of the divine presence, while the whole congregation were wrapped in the dark shades of their own unbelief. What a contrast! This it is which ever marks the difference between even the people of God. You may constantly find persons of whom you can have no doubt as to their being children of God, but yet they never seem to rise to the height of divine revelation as to their standing and portion as saints of God. They are always full of doubts and fears, always overcast with clouds, always at the dark side of things; they are looking at themselves, or at their circumstances, or at their difficulties; they are never bright and happy,—never able to exhibit that joyful confidence and courage which become a Christian, and which bring glory to God.
Now all this is truly lamentable; it ought not to be; and we may rest assured there is some grave defect—something radically wrong. The Christian should always be peaceful and happy, always able to praise God, come what may. His joys do not flow from himself or from the scene through which he is passing; they flow from the living God, and they are beyond the reach of every earthly influence. He can say, “My God, the spring of all my joys.” This is the sweet privilege of the very feeblest child of God. But here is just where we so sadly fail and come short. We take our eyes off God, and fix them on ourselves, or on our circumstances, our grievances, or our difficulties; hence all is darkness and discontent, murmuring and complaining. This is not Christianity at all. It is unbelief—dark, deadly, God-dishonoring, heart-depressing unbelief. “God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
Such is the language of a true spiritual Caleb—language addressed to one whose heart was feeling the pressure of the difficulties and dangers which surrounded him. The spirit of God fills the soul of the true believer with holy boldness. He gives moral elevation above the chilling and murky atmosphere around, and lifts the soul into the bright sunshine of that region “where storms and tempests never rise.”
“And the glory of the Lord appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation before all the children of Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, ‘How long will this people provoke Me? and how long will it be ere they believe Me, for all the signs which I have showed among them? I will smite them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater nation, and mightier than they.’”
What a moment was this in the history of Moses! Here was what nature might well regard as a golden opportunity for him. Never before and never since have we any occasion in the which a mere man had such a door open before him. The enemy and his own heart might say, Now’s your time. You have here an offer of becoming the head and founder of a great and mighty nation—an offer made to you by Jehovah Himself. You have not sought it. It is put before you by the living God, and it would be the very height of folly on your part to reject it.
But, reader, Moses was not a self-seeker. He had drunk too deeply into the spirit of Christ to seek to be any thing. He had no unholy ambition, no selfish aspirations. He desired only God’s glory and His people’s good; and in order to reach those ends, he was ready, through grace, to lay himself and his interests on the altar.