The second lesson is that the God who goes before us is the same God who has gone before His people at all times. That, too, was symbolized by the ark. He is the God of the exodus who had brought judgment upon the Egyptians, and who had parted the Red Sea, and who had led the people out with a strong hand. This was the same powerful, sovereign God now who was leading them into the Promised Land, just as He had led them out of Egypt. And the symbolism was clear: just as God had parted the waters of the Red Sea to lead them out of Egypt, so God parted the waters of the Jordan in order to lead them into the Promised Land. Moses was the channel through whom God did that first miracle. And now Joshua is the channel through whom God works again. But the point is that it is not Moses or Joshua who are important, but God Himself, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. The God of Moses is the God of Joshua, and the God of Joshua is our God, too.
The God who is the same in His power is also the same in His holiness. In the ark itself was kept the stone tablets of the Law of Moses, The ark thus contained the summary of God’s moral standards for His people. And it seems impossible for any Israelite on that occasion to not remember that within the Ark of the Covenant was the law of God, the same law that had been given to the people by Moses on Mt. Sinai. So the law of God does not change. The holiness of God does not change. It’s a way of saying that the moral nature of God does not change.
And how we need to know that, especially in our relativistic age. We live in a time where we judge morality by consensus. This means that whatever most of the people are doing must be right because, after all, most of the people are doing it. Actually it works the other way: what most of the people are doing is probably wrong because most of the people are doing it. But we think the other way, and we feel our views are justified by the fact that other people are doing what we would like to do. And if they’re doing it, we can do it, too. But that is simply making morality relative; that is, morality is being determined by what people want it to be, as opposed to what God declares it to be in His holy Word.
