Check Your Roots

There is a popular idea that getting to the promised land is an Old Testament type of going to Heaven. Some of the Negro spirituals and even some older Christian hymns make the connection plainly. I think they are wrong. When Joshua took the new people of Israel into the land, it was occupied by the enemies of God. The Israelites had to fight bloody battles with and suffer repeated attacks from those enemies all through their history there. That does not sound like an analogy for Heaven, at least not the Heaven I’m looking forward to.

I think crossing Jordon and taking the land is a metaphor of the Christian life. Crossing Jordon is not going to heaven, but becoming a new person in Christ. This analogy lines up much better with the historical facts of the Israelite occupation, and it leads to several instructive parallels.

First, Joshua 21:43 reports that after God gave them the land and they possessed it, they “settled” there. The Hebrew word for settled is taba (טָבַע). Taba means to sink in, to be planted (think roots); it is even translated “to drown” once. I do not mean to imply that Christians should be “planted” in earthly things. Remember that the physical realities of the Old Testament are most often types of spiritual realities in the New Testament. Israel had physical land and a physical kingdom. Christians have Christ as their “land,” and God’s rule as the Kingdom. Believers are told to be “rooted and grounded” in the Love that signifies Christ’s Kingdom.

There is another parallel between the Israelites’ situation and believers’. We both need to be zealous to root out the enemy forces that surround us. Before he left, Jesus warned that we would be hated by the world because they hated him. Peter called our enemy a “roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” We cannot make deals with the enemy, as Joshua was fooled into doing with the Gibeonites. Nor can we stop short of sweeping the land clean unless we want the “Philistines” constantly troubling us. We must seek to be holy as God is holy keeping in mind that holiness is separation for a cause. In the world, but not of the world.

Even the Israelite desire for an earthly king resonates with our situation as subjects in Christ’s Kingdom. Israel wanted to be like the people around them; their neighbors all had physical rulers who, by the way, were followers of God’s enemy. Israel rejected God as King and longed for a human replacement. Samuel says, “But today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him, ‘Set a king over us.’” Isn’t that exactly what we do today when we set something other than God at the center of our lives?

The last parallel I want to draw may stretch the linguistic boundaries somewhat, but you will forgive me. The Hebrew word taba carries the idea of sinking in, translated once “to drown” as I mentioned earlier. One of the pictures Christian baptism paints is that of identification with Christ. We are baptized, immersed, into Christ in the sense that we are identifying ourselves with his death and resurrection. We must not think of the resurrection as only that which comes after we die; after our immersion, we are subsequently raised that “we too might walk in newness of life,” says Paul. Israel passed between the waters of the Jordan as they entered the promised land. In our case, Jesus fulfilled the promise of land that God made to Abraham; He is our “land.” We are born anew, baptized into Him, so that we might live a new kind of life in the Land of Christ.

Ask yourself if you are settled, rooted, drowned in Christ. In whose kingdom do you belong? It is not enough to say we belong to Christ. We must live so that we “shine like stars in the sky” letting the world know to whom we belong. Anything less than that is living in the Promised Land and worshipping Baal. Look what happened to Israel for behaving like that!