One day the LORD said to Moses, “Climb one of the mountains east of the river, and look out over the land I have given the people of Israel. After you have seen it, you will die like your brother, Aaron, for you both rebelled against my instructions in the wilderness of Zin. When the people of Israel rebelled, you failed to demonstrate my holiness to them at the waters.” (Numbers 27:12-14)Today Moses gets his walking papers. He is through now, ready to be retired. The Israelites have wandered for almost forty years. A whole generation has died because of their sin and disobedience – they refused to believe God cold help them take the Promised Land and rebelled against him and Moses.
Joshua and Caleb and their families are still alive (Numbers 26:64), but everybody else is gone. Their children are ready to claim this promise of God.
These are a people who have never known anything but nomadic existence and now they are ready to become land owners.
But Moses is not the one to lead them. For one thing, he is getting old and there needs to be someone younger and able to keep up with the upcoming battles.
And besides this, Moses is the only leader they have ever known. In their eyes, he is God and the absolute authority of God. There needs to be someone else come in to lead them to new places. He has been in charge for so long that he represents the old. There needs to be the new to bring them to the new land.
He chooses Joshua, a man that has helped him with what he has done for years now. Joshua was capable enough in the sight of God that he was even allowed to accompany Moses up Mount Sinai when everyone else was forbidden to even touch it. He has been there for all the major decisions and has acted as Moses’ second in command for almost half a century.
Moses is to lay his hands on Joshua in front of the whole assembly and appoint him their new leader.
You wonder how Joshua felt. For his whole life, he had been living in the shadow of the great Moses, the lawgiver and ruler of the nation of Israel. Now he will be the one in charge. And what is more, Moses will not be there to give him advice. Moses is leaving.
It would be a scary thing for Joshua and for the nation. Moses has been, for all practical purposes, their king for forty years. It has been his power and God’s power through him that has kept them in line for so long. Everything he said was absolutely the word of God.
And now he is going. As God tells him, he made a mistake and sinned at one crucial point. It seems small to me, but to God it made a big difference. Moses had taken it on himself to bring water from a rock instead of speaking to the rock like God had told him. God gave the water anyway, but it hurt Moses.
I don’t know why exactly. Moses was not sinless, but at the same time, he was definitely old guard. The Israelites needed new guard, someone who was younger, to lead them.
And he was Joshua. He would become their leader. And he would try his best to fill the sandals of what Deuteronomy called the greatest man who ever lived, who knew God face to face.
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