Moses, Who Must Die with Canaan Before Him

1Now after the death of Moses the servant of Yahweh, Yahweh spoke to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ servant, saying,

The book of Joshua was written around BC 1370–1330. Even after the exodus, Israel, with Moses set over them as leader, went on defying the word of God and sinning. Because of their own sin they bore God’s rebuke in the wilderness for forty long years. The book of Joshua opens at the end of those forty years, just before Israel enters Canaan, with the death of Moses.

God brought Moses into the world, had Pharaoh’s daughter raise him, and then trained him as a shepherd in the wilderness, shaping him into a spiritual leader able to lead Israel. God sent Moses because the people of Israel, slaves in Egypt for four hundred years, could not leave Egypt on their own. To lead them to Canaan, Moses brought down ten plagues and showed them that God is alive and at work. Through the parting of the Red Sea he revealed that God is the Creator who made heaven and earth, and through the astonishing sight of water pouring from the rock he made known that God is the one who gives them the water of life.

Yet for all the miracles they had seen, the people could not let go of their old life, and they did not trust God wholeheartedly. They listened to the negative report of the ten spies who came back after forty days of scouting Canaan, and they grumbled against God. For that sin they had to wander the wilderness for forty years, a year for each day. Over those forty years, of course, the whole first generation died. But to keep the promise he had made to Israel, the people he had specially chosen, God made Joshua the one who would lead the next generation into Canaan.

When the forty years of trial were over and Israel stood on the verge of entering the land of Canaan, God commanded Moses to hand everything over to Joshua and return to him. As God commanded, Moses went up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, opposite Jericho, and there, looking out over all the land of Gilead, he came to the end of his life. He was a hundred and twenty years old, yet his eyes were still clear and he was in good health. He had been trained through hardship, he had received the law, and he had lived a life of devotion, freely laying down his own life to save the people. Because he had given himself solely to entering Canaan, Moses would never once have imagined that he would not get there. God certainly had his reasons for taking Moses’ life. Still, Moses had come as far as Mount Nebo, within sight of Canaan, and there he had to die. He had been faithful to the point of death for the sake of entering Canaan, and yet he had to die looking at it. His heart must have been torn.

This is why Moses did not enter Canaan.

Numbers 20:8

8“Take the rod, and assemble the congregation, you, and Aaron your brother, and speak to the rock before their eyes, that it pour out its water. You shall bring water to them out of the rock; so you shall give the congregation and their livestock drink.”

When the people complained of thirst, God commanded Moses to strike the rock at Meribah with his rod, for God himself would stand before it. But Moses grew angry with the Israelites, who did not trust God with all their hearts, asked whether he must bring water out of this rock for them, and struck the rock in a burst of temper. The rock is a type of Jesus Christ. Yet Moses struck it twice, as though he himself were the one giving the people spiritual drink. This was a grievous sin against God. Because of this incident God declared in his anger that Moses could not enter Canaan.

I want to look at this event from another angle as well: to see Canaan as heaven, Moses as the man who received the law, and Joshua as a type of Jesus. Seen this way, the one who must lead the people into Canaan is not Moses, who received the law, but Joshua, the type of Jesus. That is why Moses did not enter Canaan. Moses received the law from God at Mount Sinai. He taught it and made the people keep it. But Canaan, the type of heaven, is entered not by the law but by faith, and for that reason God raised up Joshua, the type of Jesus. If we measure it by salvation through faith, this is how we can see it.

Moses trained for eighty years to bring God’s people, slaves for four hundred years, out of Egypt, and for forty years he served faithfully at the risk of his life. The Canaan he had longed for lay before his eyes, yet when God told him to accept death, he obeyed without a trace of resentment. Here Moses shows us plainly what maturity in faith is, and we can see that all along he had served with a true faith that God is real and living. Suppose God gave you a command directly, and you served him faithfully until the work needed only finishing, and then he told you to give the credit to someone else. Could you obey as Moses did? Up to that very day Moses had been faithful to the point of death and had given his whole life. And now God told him to give all of it to Joshua and come home. Had there been even a little ambition of his own in him, Moses would have resented God. He would have made some wicked choice so as not to lose it all to Joshua.

Moses’ death on Mount Nebo, as God commanded, shows that until then he had carried out God’s commands by faith alone. We do not know when our lives will end. So we are to fulfill the calling entrusted to us, and when the time comes and God calls us home, all we need do is what Moses did: hand on to the next person the calling we have borne and the grace we have enjoyed, and be taken into God’s arms. We live in a finite world, and so it is not we who bring God’s work to completion. Because we must leave our work just as it is when God calls, we must teach others, doing our best to live as examples, so that our brothers and sisters can take up well the work we have been doing. God will commend such people of faith for having been faithful to death. Moses was exactly such a man, a man after God’s own heart.

Over eighty long years Moses was broken and crushed and made into an instrument fit for God’s use. Because he overcame his own laziness and shortcomings by faith and prepared himself well for his calling, he became a man of great capacity. Joshua, for his part, served Moses for forty years and learned his wisdom. As a result, he could meet God without difficulty, understand God’s will, and stand as a leader. Just as trees become mighty only after enduring hardship and adversity, God spends a long time cutting away and shaping our greed, our lusts, and our self-righteousness, building us up as he built up these two men.

It was certainly Joshua who led the people of Israel into Canaan. But the one who laid down his life and his whole lifetime until they could get there was Moses. God placed Moses at the heart of the nation so that they could be born again through the law. As Moses taught God’s will through the law, the people, keeping it, came little by little to understand what God wanted of them. To be sure, the law God gave was made entirely to protect them. But they could not grasp the depths of his will, and it was by learning from Moses that they grew up as Israel.

But the law alone could not make them God’s people: once it had taught them good and evil, their survival in Canaan depended on believing God and living out what the law said. God wanted to lead Israel into Canaan and establish a nation. Had Israel believed that God would act and lived by the law, he would have repaid them for all they had suffered in Egypt. If Moses had been faithful to the point of death to make them a nation ruled by God as king, Joshua would now have to take up the work of helping the people live it out by faith.

Joshua 1:1

1Now after the death of Moses the servant of Yahweh, Yahweh spoke to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’ servant, saying,

The great Moses has died: the man who brought Israel out of Egypt, who spoke with God face to face, and who taught Israel the law in order to accomplish God’s will. Like Stephen’s, his death was a blessing, God opening his arms to receive him. He had finished a weary life, entered into rest, and been blessed with eternal life. The death of a man of such stature would signify that he had carried out to the end the calling God gave him.

God chose Moses as the spiritual man who would lead the people of Israel. Moses, God’s servant, would have to confront Egypt. God had him grow up as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and in this way caused him to learn, as a matter of course, the wisdom of ruling a people and made him absorb the advanced culture and learning of Egypt. But because Egyptian learning could not bring Israel out of Egypt, God chose the wilderness of Midian as the place to train Moses and equip him with spiritual power.

God used the incident in which Moses killed an Egyptian for the sake of his kinsmen as the occasion to send the prince into the wilderness. Even if Moses killed out of concern for his own people, murder is an act that makes light of life. God began his training in order to make that natural disposition in Moses new.

Moses knew God, but he had not matured in faith to the point of sacrificing himself for God. The best place to wear down a nature like his is the wilderness, so it was there that God sent Moses. Moses, who had lived as a prince under the complete protection of others, now had to live alone in Midian.

For us today, the wilderness is this world in which we live in the flesh. Even if, like Moses, we enjoy wealth and honor from a prince’s seat, there are things our own ability cannot solve, and we cannot come to God on our own. That is what makes it a wilderness. But once we go out into the wilderness, there is no one to lend us strength, no way to solve the problems we meet, and no way out. In the wilderness there is no one to ask for help, nowhere to flee, and no one to hear even if we cry aloud. The wilderness is where we are afraid and lonely, with nothing to hold on to, as though we were alone in the world. Into just such a place, the wilderness of Midian, God sent Moses, cutting him off completely from the world.

Have you ever met hardship in the wilderness? Have you ever cried out to God with an anxious heart because of poverty, or because of your health, or because you did not know which way your life should go? Have you ever been utterly alone in a wilderness where no one could help you? If you are in the wilderness now, I hope that before you look for a person or a way out, you will first pray earnestly to God.

If you still think, ‘I have plenty, so I can solve my own problems,’ my prayer is that you will repent and turn back now, before you set foot in the wilderness. The reason is that God sets the length of a person’s training by watching what they do: how quickly they obey, whether they give thanks in all things, whether they are content… People may make their plans, but it is God who answers them. If you lean on God rather than on your own wisdom and understanding, he will lead you onto the road out of the wilderness.

God knew Moses had great ability, but he could not use it, because Moses was not yet mature in faith. Moses, too, lacked the wisdom to see God at work by faith and to live accordingly. Spiritual wisdom is sometimes gained through the word, but at other times we come to grasp the depth of the word through suffering and trial. In the wilderness there was no one, as there had been in the palace, who trembled at a single word from Moses, and no one to wait on him. He stood alone on an empty plain. How afraid must Moses have been in that endless wilderness?

Yet in a wilderness without splendid palaces or the noise of crowds, he could quietly fix his attention on God. He could hear the still small voice of God without missing it, and he could look back over the life he had lived. At first it was frightening and hard, but little by little he grew thankful that God had given him a setting in which to meet him deeply. When he let go of the self the world had held in its grip, he understood that all the strength and authority he had had as a prince were an empty mist. He had not come down to that low place by choice, yet he came to see how foolish worldly greed is, and how weak he had been to want it.

Once he admitted that he was a weak creature who could not live free of the world, he began to perceive God’s still small voice and God’s great power. By God’s still small voice I do not mean a voice heard with the ear. I mean a maturity of faith in which God’s will becomes clear to us. When God’s will dawns on people, they will experience the breaking of self and will acknowledge that God is living. After that, a life of obedience to God’s word becomes easy.

When Moses returned home after crushing Ethiopia, the whole people cheered him, and he was filled with confidence in his own ability. He was a prince, raised with special schooling to master the language and learning of Egypt, so he would have taken it for granted that others should serve him. But God meant to make Moses Israel’s spiritual leader, and Moses was full of worldly pride and his own righteousness. To bring such a man low, God had no choice but to send him into a wilderness where there was nothing to depend on. This was necessary because, just as a rock must be split before anyone can drink living water from it, Moses’ strong self had to be broken before the grace of God locked up inside him could flow out like living water. So God broke Moses’ selfishness, greed, and boasting, and shattered the pride of years spent treating God’s grace as his own.

Only after forty years of training in the wilderness did Moses, once so self-assured, realize that he was a weak man who could do nothing at all. When the vessel of his heart, soiled by worldly lusts and pride, had been scrubbed clean through trial, God at last filled it with a heavenly calling. The road he had walked feeling that he had failed in the world and been cast off by God became the road that would lead the people of Israel into Canaan. Once he understood that the path where he had tended his father-in-law’s sheep in discouragement had become a path to save the people, Moses thanked God for his work and his guidance. He came to see how much preparation God had made, and that he himself had a place within God’s many plans.

As Moses laid everything down, did his best day after day at tending sheep, and grew lower and lower, God watched him and set the time for the exodus. Moses probably had no idea that God was watching him. He likely thought instead that, although he had killed a man for God and for his people, God had looked on while he became a fugitive and had not helped him at all. But even when Moses cried out in resentment, asking why he had to become a fugitive, God was quietly watching him. As he cried out again and again to a God who remained silent, Moses grew weary. Because he could not understand God’s will, he gave up all hope.

Speaking from my own experience, Moses may even have clung to God in prayer, afraid of his silence, begging him not to abandon him. To confess that we are nothing but helpless people who can do nothing is, by human reckoning, wretched and sorrowful. But in God’s eyes it means being focused on him alone, and so at last Moses had matured to the point where he could be appointed leader. As long as people think they can accomplish something themselves, God does not use them as spiritual leaders.

When God saw Moses focused on him alone, he would have decided that the training should end. God uses people like this: gentle, warm, and generous enough to take others in. He loves and treasures those who never fly into a temper whatever happens, and who give themselves to the work of salvation with God’s own heart. Moses endured the whole process in silence. And then Moses the prince, Moses the man of power, Moses who was pleased with himself, slowly began to crumble. The hot temper that had filled his heart disappeared, and he came to have a precious spirit that obeys the word.

Then God called Moses by name and at last entrusted him with his calling. The Moses who returned to Egypt for the exodus was not the Moses of old, who had killed a man and insisted it was for the sake of his people. He was a leader who loved souls, a servant of God who always listened for the still small voice and obeyed it. He looked like a shabby man stripped of all worldly strength and ability, yet through the grace and power God gave him he had become a stronger and bolder warrior of God.

What is your situation right now? Are you lonely because no one walks beside you, discouraged because you have met a problem too heavy to bear and have nowhere to turn for help? Or do you think that, since your own strength and ability can solve anything, you have no need to depend on God for now?

If it seems to you that you are in the wilderness, I hope you will go lower still and become one of the weak who hold fast to God’s word. Then God will lift you up from that low place, exalt you, and bring you glory. But if you are proud, thinking you have the strength the world gives, God will wait until you throw that strength away yourself. Friends, may you cast off that futile strength, those thoughts and plans. God has more time than we do, so he will wait until you give up such thinking. And since you might leave this world without ever receiving his call, let us redeem the time.

I hope you will not misunderstand me. I am not saying that God uses us only once we have become powerless. I am saying that if we have the faith to throw off worldly greed, lusts, and temper for God’s sake, God blesses us first, even without our striving for blessing. When you show God that you are doing your best at the work in front of you and striving to walk the good path, God will call your name. The power God gives can never be taken from you. Moses, having gone through all his training in the wilderness, became a spiritual leader God approved.

Joshua learned from Moses, who was wise and obedient, how to give himself to God and how to judge by faith, and he succeeded Moses as Israel’s leader. To learn God’s work and word from someone trained in the wilderness as Moses was is a very special blessing. Why? Because anyone who imitates and practices Moses’ faith just as it was can live as the servant God desires without great hardship. If Joshua lived by the faith of Moses, who was put through the fire and made new throughout his life, he would not fail badly. Joshua’s own well-formed character played its part, of course, but it was also because he did not need to be waited for, pared down, and trained as Moses had been.

Now the generation Moses had led passed away, and a new era, the era of Joshua, began. Like Moses, Joshua heard God’s voice and became the spiritual leader who would lead the people of Israel into Canaan. Moses had borne spiritual fruit that God would receive. And just as Joshua followed Moses’ example and became that fruit, we too must bear fruit that God can use.

May you, too, fulfill the calling of salvation with the obedience Moses showed and the humble faith Joshua showed. Now that Moses, who had centered his whole life on God and lived it to the full, was dead, Joshua took on the heavy responsibility of leading the people of Israel. Just as Moses obeyed God’s commands, Joshua would focus on God alone and grow into a spiritual leader who set an example for the people.

My prayer is that you will grow, as Moses did, to take up the precious calling of extending the Kingdom of God. May you follow the example of Moses, who lived by faith, and walk according to God’s will. I bless you in the name of Jesus Christ.