Joshua 3:4 Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore.
There is something definitely unnerving about uncertainty. I say “definitely unnerving.” Uncertainty is a lack of definition, an absence of certainty. If you have ever been on a strange road at night, you may know that mild sense of apprehension. I recently have been several weeks in a state several hundred miles from my home and there were nights when I was driving on roads with which I was not familiar and in places that were strange to me. There was that slight tinge of “I don’t know where I am!”
Maybe that is where you are in life right now. Well, a wonderful truth is that the God of all the earth is also the God of every generation. We have never been here before. Our parents have perhaps been in the moral drama we are in now, but we haven’t. It is a new time.
In Joshua 2:11 God is called “the God in heaven above, and in earth beneath.” He is God of both Heaven and earth. Well, the God of both Heaven and earth is also the God of every generation. In Joshua 3:4 God says to the people, “That ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore.” He was saying, “I am taking you into a land you have not touched before, not been in before, and not seen before. It is uncertain and unknown. It is new.”
Then, in verse 7 God says to Joshua, “This day will I begin to magnify thee in the sight of all Israel, that ye may know that, as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee.” What a wonderful thing! God had brought the children of Israel out of Egypt and had parted the Red Sea. That was a wonderful national memory that Israel had, but none of this particular generation had actually seen that. What was ahead of them was a new body of water, the Jordan River, and a new land, not Egypt but Canaan.
Egypt may have been just as powerful and fearsome as Canaan, but it was in the past so it was familiar. Jordan, Canaan, and Jericho were unknown and uncertain. That gave these places a certain strength just by virtue of the fact that they were unknown.
Let me tell you that the God Who owns Heaven and earth is also the God of every generation. As He was with Moses, so He would be with Joshua. As He brought Israel through the Red Sea, He would bring Israel across the Jordan, and as He was with people in years past, God will be with you if you are with Him.
I thank God for godly people in the past, but God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living. God is the eternal I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. If you have trusted the Lord Jesus as your Savior, this God is your God today. That God will lead you without fail as you follow and not fear.