TRIUMPH

Meditation

Joshua 1:3—I have given you every place where the sole of your foot treads, just as I promised Moses.

There are times when I am reading my Bible and a verse stops me in my tracks. The verse above qualifies—what an incredibly powerful 18 words. Let’s consider the context. Moses just died. To appreciate his loss, think of losing your parents as a child or your nation’s best leader right before a major war. The Israelites were poised to move into Canaan, a land full of bigger, stronger nations and now the man who spoke with God was buried somewhere in a Moab valley (see Deu. 34:6).

God told Joshua, the heir to Israel’s greatest leader, “Moses is dead now get moving” (vs. 2). Imagine for a moment even trying to fill Moses’ sandals! But what is amazing is the promise God uttered in verse three. Before the Israelites crossed the Jordan River, He guaranteed their victory. They just had to walk forward into a land whose inhabitants they feared not knowing that the Canaanites were even more afraid of them (2:9-11).

How many times in life have we missed triumph because we failed to understand or claim God’s promise of victory? How many times have we wallowed in the slough of fear unwilling to move forward? The world longs to see God at work. He longs to work through us! The former cannot experience the latter unless we are willing to live by faith. We don’t have to go earn the victory, we already have the victory! The problem is we don’t live out God’s reality because we get stuck in our inferiority.

No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord! (Rom. 8:37-39)

Though the fig tree does not bud and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will triumph in the LORD; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation! (Hab. 3:17,18)

Triumph is not a fictitious possibility it is a realized hope. God smashed Satan’s play for supremacy on the cross. Jesus’ conquest of sin and death fashioned all we need to live victoriously so long as our trust remains squarely in Him. If we want to know God we have to know triumph—anything less is just religion.

Inspiration

Satan’s primary object is not to get us to sin, but simply to make it easy for us to do so by getting us off the ground of perfect triumph on to which the Lord has brought us.—Watchman Nee in Sit Walk Stand