The Land of Promise

So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. HEBREWS 3:19

Simpson’s favourite way of describing the Christian life was a map, and the map came from the book of Joshua. Israel’s history divides into three: Egypt, the wilderness, and Canaan. And he held — following a reading with a long pedigree in Puritan and Keswick teaching — that these correspond to three conditions in which people may be found.

Three places

Egypt is bondage. A person in Egypt is not God’s, has not been redeemed, and is a slave whether or not he knows it. The wilderness is the condition Simpson was most concerned about. Here are people who have genuinely left Egypt — the blood has been applied, the sea has been crossed, they belong to God — and who are going in circles. They are saved and defeated. They have real experience of God’s provision and no possession of anything. They live on manna, complain a good deal, and remember Egypt with a fondness that horrifies them. Canaan is the land of promise: not comfort, but possession. Now the crucial point, and Simpson made it repeatedly because the mistake is so common. Canaan is not heaven. We sing about crossing Jordan as a figure for dying, and it makes for good hymns, but it will not survive examination. There are giants in Canaan. There are walled cities, unconquered territory, defeats like Ai, and forty years of warfare. Nobody fights battles in heaven. Canaan is a picture of the Christian life as God intends it now — a life of rest and conflict at once, in which the believer possesses what has been given him and has to take ground to do it.

Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you. JOSHUA 1:3

Note the tense. Have I given. The land is already theirs by grant; they enter into what is already legally theirs.

Why a generation did not enter

The wilderness generation stood at the border at Kadesh-barnea and did not go in. Simpson dwelt on the reason, because Scripture states it plainly and it is not what we would guess. They did not fail through weakness, or through sin in the ordinary sense, or because the giants were genuinely too large. They failed through unbelief. Ten of the twelve spies reported accurately about the giants and inaccurately about God.

And they brought up an evil report of the land …and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. NUMBERS 13:32–33

So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. HEBREWS 3:19

The writer to the Hebrews applies this directly to Christians, which is what licenses the whole comparison. He is not making a devotional analogy; he is arguing that the same danger stands over the church.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God …Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief. HEBREWS 4:9, 11

Crossing Jordan

Between the wilderness and the land lies a river, and Simpson made much of the manner of the crossing. The Red Sea is deliverance from Egypt — redemption, the picture of the cross applied to our guilt. Jordan is different. It is entered by the ark going first into the water, and it stands, in this reading, for the believer’s identification with Christ in death and resurrection — the end of the old self-directed life and the beginning of a life lived from another source.

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. ROMANS 6:11

On the far bank the manna ceased and they ate the old corn of the land. Simpson took that as a picture of the change from a life of daily emergency supply to a life of settled possession.

A caution about typology

Honesty requires a note here. This kind of reading can be pressed too far. The Old Testament narrative was not written as an allegory of individual spiritual experience, and interpreters who treat every detail as a code have often ended up saying whatever they wished. The disciplined approach is to follow the New Testament’s own use: Hebrews 3 and 4 authorise the comparison between the wilderness generation and the church, and 1 Corinthians 10 does the same. Beyond what Scripture itself draws out, hold loosely.

Some careful Christians also object that this scheme creates two classes of believer — the wilderness sort and the Canaan sort — in a way the New Testament does not. The objection has force, and it should be weighed. What survives every qualification is the substance: it is entirely possible to be genuinely redeemed and to spend decades possessing almost nothing of what God has given, and the reason is not weakness but unbelief.

The border is not crossed by trying harder in the wilderness. Israel did not enter Canaan by improving its wilderness performance. It entered by going in.

Rest and conflict together

The most common misunderstanding of this teaching is that the land of promise means the end of struggle. It does not, and Joshua makes that unmistakable. Canaan contained walled cities, iron chariots, a coalition of hostile kings and a defeat at Ai brought about by one man’s concealed sin. The conquest took years. Some ground was never taken at all, because certain tribes could not be bothered to finish. So the life Simpson was describing is not one of ease. It is a life in which rest and conflict exist together — rest as the settled condition of the heart, and conflict as the ordinary experience of the day. The New Testament says the same thing about the believer’s position.

And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. EPHESIANS 2:6

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers. EPHESIANS 6:12

Seated, and wrestling — in the same letter, to the same people. Simpson took that as the exact description of Canaan: the ground is given, and it must still be taken. There is a warning attached, and it comes from the tribes who stopped early. The book of Judges opens with a list of the places that were never cleared, and the rest of the book is the consequence. Unfinished conquest does not stay neutral — what is left becomes, in the phrase of the text, thorns in the sides of God’s people. The application is straightforward and searching. The area of your life you have decided not to contest will not remain a quiet exception. It will become the source of your trouble in ten years.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Locate yourself honestly on the map. Egypt, wilderness, or land? 2. If you are circling, ask what report you have been believing about the giants — and whether it was accurate about them and inaccurate about God. 3. Identify one promise of God you have never actually acted on. Put your foot on that ground this week. 4. Notice the pull back to Egypt. What do you find yourself remembering fondly that God brought you out of? 5. Stop waiting to feel ready. Israel never felt ready; the ones who went in were not braver, only more convinced about God.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have been out of Egypt for years and I have possessed very little.

I have circled the same ground, complained about the same things, and called it the Christian life. I have believed accurate reports about the giants and false reports about You.

You have given me the land. Teach me to put my foot on it.

Take me across Jordan — through the death and resurrection of Your Son — into what You have already granted, and let me stop living on emergency rations in sight of Your abundance. Amen.