January: New Beginnings
Day 7 — 7 January
Sometimes the New Beginning Starts with Someone Else’s Ending
Scripture: “No man shall be able to stand before you all the days of your life; as I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and of good courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may prosper wherever you go. This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” — Joshua 1:5–9 (NKJV)
Short Teaching
Moses was dead.
That is how the book of Joshua opens. No softening. No build-up. Just three words in the Hebrew, vayyamoth Mosheh (וַיָּמָת מֹשֶׁה, meaning “and Moses died”), and the entire world Joshua had known for forty years collapsed into a past tense. The man who had faced Pharaoh, who had lifted his staff over the Red Sea, who had climbed Sinai and come down with his face glowing, who had spoken to God as a friend speaks to a friend, was gone. And Joshua, who had spent four decades standing in that man’s shadow, learning from him, leaning on him, drawing courage from the simple fact that Moses was in front, was now standing alone at the edge of the Jordan with an entire nation looking at the back of his head, waiting for him to do something.
If you have ever had the person you depended on step out of the frame, you know what that silence sounds like. Maybe it was a parent who passed, and suddenly the family decisions land on your desk and there is no one left to phone for advice. Maybe it was a mentor who moved on, and you realised, with a lurch in your stomach, that you had been borrowing their confidence all along and had very little of your own. Maybe it was a spouse who left, and the structure of your daily life, the thing you had built yourself around, was simply not there any more when you woke up one morning. There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes when the person you navigated by is no longer available to navigate by. You are not just sad. You are unanchored. The map has not changed, but the person who knew how to read it is gone.
Joshua was standing in exactly that spot. And into that disorientation, God spoke. Not gently, either. Three times in five verses, He said the same thing: “Be strong and of good courage.” Three times. If you have ever had someone tell you the same thing three times in a row, you know they are not making casual conversation. They are driving a nail. They need you to hear this, because what is coming will require it.
But here is where most people get this passage wrong, and getting it wrong has real consequences for how you approach the new beginning you may be standing at right now.
What courage is not
When we hear “be strong and courageous,” most of us picture something from a film. A warrior in armour, jaw set, charging the enemy line. A leader standing on a platform delivering a speech that makes everyone’s spine straighten. Courage, in our cultural imagination, is an internal quality that certain extraordinary people possess: an innate boldness, a gut-level fearlessness, a personality trait that you either have or you do not.
If that is what God was asking Joshua to produce, then the instruction was cruel. Joshua was not Moses. He did not have Moses’ history, Moses’ track record, Moses’ relationship with God forged through decades of impossible circumstances. Joshua was an assistant who had just been told to do the principal’s job, and telling him to “be courageous” in the personality-trait sense would be like telling a person with a fear of heights to simply stop being afraid while standing on the edge of a cliff. It sounds empowering. It is actually useless.
But look at what God actually says. Look at where He places the weight of the instruction. He does not say, “Be strong and courageous because you are talented enough to handle this.” He does not say, “Be strong and courageous because the obstacles ahead are smaller than you think.” He does not point Joshua inward at all. Every single time He says “be strong and courageous,” He follows it with something external to Joshua.
The first time: “Be strong and of good courage, for to this people you shall divide as an inheritance the land which I swore to their fathers to give them” (v. 6). The courage is connected to a purpose that God established before Joshua was born. Joshua is not being asked to invent a mission. He is being asked to step into one that was already in motion, already promised, already settled in the character of the God who made the promise. The purpose predates the person.
The second time: “Only be strong and very courageous, that you may observe to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you” (v. 7). Here the courage is connected to alignment. The Hebrew word shamar (שָׁמַר, meaning “to keep,” “to guard,” “to observe carefully”) is not about blind obedience. It describes attentive, watchful, deliberate adherence to a path that has already been laid down. Joshua does not need to forge a new road. The road exists. His courage is the courage to stay on it when every instinct tells him to veer.
The third time: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and of good courage; do not be afraid, nor be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go” (v. 9). And here is the foundation beneath the other two. The courage is not sourced in Joshua’s abilities. It is sourced in a presence that does not leave. “The LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”
Do you see the pattern? God never once told Joshua to look inside himself for the resource he needed. He told him to look at the purpose that was already established, the path that was already marked, and the presence that was already there and would not leave. Every ounce of courage God asked Joshua to produce was tethered to something outside of Joshua that Joshua did not have to generate, maintain, or protect from failing.
What courage actually is
The Hebrew word translated “courage” in this passage is amats (אָמַץ, meaning “to be strong,” “to be firm,” “to be resolute”). It does not describe a personality type. It describes a posture. A decision. A deliberate setting of the feet in a particular direction and refusing to be moved from it. Amats is what happens when a person who does not feel brave decides to face forward anyway, not because they have located some hidden reservoir of inner strength, but because the ground they are standing on is not going to shift.
And here is where this passage connects to everything we have explored this week. What was the ground Joshua was standing on? It was not his own competence. It was not Moses’ legacy. It was the character of the God who said, “As I was with Moses, so I will be with you. I will not leave you nor forsake you.”
Now, we need to hear that carefully, because it is easy to read “as I was with Moses, so I will be with you” as though God is saying, “I used to be with Moses, and now I am going to be with you instead.” As though His presence has relocated. As though He packed up from Moses’ tent and moved His things into Joshua’s. But that is not how God works, and by now you know why. God does not travel from one person to another. He does not vacate one life to occupy another. He fills all reality. He was as present with Joshua during the forty years Joshua spent as an assistant as He was with Moses during the forty years Moses spent as a leader. Nothing about God’s presence had changed. What changed was Joshua’s role, Joshua’s awareness, and Joshua’s need to consciously orient himself toward the presence that had always been there but that Moses’ towering figure had, perhaps, made it easy to overlook.
That is what happens when the person you leaned on steps out of the frame. You discover that you were never actually leaning on them alone. There was something beneath them, something beneath you, something beneath the whole arrangement, that was holding everything up the entire time. You just did not notice it because you were looking at the person in front of you instead of at the ground under your feet.
A child learns this the first time they ride a bicycle without a parent’s hand on the back of the seat. For the first fifty metres, the child believes the parent is still holding on. They pedal with confidence because they think the steadying hand is there. And then they glance back and see the parent standing thirty metres behind them, hands at their sides, grinning. The child wobbles. Panic flashes. But then something settles. They are still upright. They were upright for the last thirty metres, too. The steadying force was never the parent’s hand. It was balance, physics, something built into the design of the bicycle and the body riding it, something that was operating all along but that the child attributed to the hand they thought was there.
Joshua’s “bicycle moment” was the death of Moses. The steadying hand he thought he needed was gone. And God’s three-fold repetition of “be strong and courageous” was not a command to generate inner resources Joshua did not have. It was a command to recognise what had been holding him up all along.
The presence that does not relocate
The Hebrew phrase lo arpheka velo e’ezveka (לֹא אַרְפְּךָ וְלֹא אֶעֶזְבֶךָּ, meaning “I will not leave you nor forsake you”) uses two verbs of abandonment, doubled for emphasis. Raphah (רָפָה, meaning “to let go,” “to let drop,” “to release one’s grip”) and azav (עָזַב, meaning “to leave,” “to forsake,” “to abandon”). God says: I will not loosen my hold, and I will not walk away. Two ways of saying the same thing, because Joshua needed to hear it from both angles.
But remember: this is not God promising to remain in a location He might otherwise leave. There is no location He is absent from. He fills heaven and earth. The promise is relational, not spatial. It is God saying: the way you experienced my constancy through Moses, you will experience it directly now. Nothing has been withdrawn. Nothing has been reduced. The channel has changed; the reality behind it has not shifted by a single degree.
This is what matters for you on the seventh day of this new year, and I want to be direct about it. Some of you reading this have lost the person you leaned on. Not lost them in the sense that they moved to another city. Lost them. Permanently. A parent. A pastor. A friend who was your anchor. And the year ahead feels terrifyingly exposed because the person who made you feel secure is no longer between you and whatever is coming.
Others of you have not lost a person but have lost a structure. The job that gave your life its scaffolding. The routine that kept you upright. The role that told you who you were every morning. And now the scaffolding is down, and you are standing in the open, and you are not at all sure your legs will hold.
Here is what Joshua’s story says to both of those situations: what held you up was never the person or the structure alone. It was the unchanging character of the God who was present within the person, present within the structure, present before either of them existed, and present now that they are gone. The vehicle changed. The reality did not. God did not leave when Moses died. God did not leave when your parent died. God did not leave when the scaffolding came down. He could not leave, because leaving would require Him to vacate a space, and there is no space He does not already fill.
Your new beginning does not require you to become someone you are not. It does not require you to manufacture courage from a well that feels bone-dry. It requires something simpler and, honestly, something harder: it requires you to trust that the ground beneath your feet is the same ground that held Moses, the same ground that held Joshua, the same ground that has held every person who has ever oriented themselves toward the God who does not move, and to put one foot in front of the other on that basis alone.
Amats. Be resolute. Not because you feel it. But because the ground is real.
Declaration
My confidence this morning does not rest on who stands beside me or who has gone before me. My confidence rests on ground that has never shifted, never softened, never given way beneath anyone who stood on it. The person I leaned on may no longer be in front of me, but the presence I was actually depending on has not moved, because there is nowhere for it to go. My courage is not a personality trait I must produce. It is a posture I choose: feet set, face forward, oriented toward the God whose character is the only firm surface in a world where everything else eventually gives way. I do not need to know the full map before I take the first step. Moses did not hand me the map. God handed me Himself, and He has been here longer than any map I could draw. The road ahead is unmarked, and I am walking it anyway, not because I am fearless but because the One who said “I will not leave you” has never once spoken a word that failed to hold. My legs may tremble. My confidence may waver. But the ground will not. It never has. And that is enough to keep me walking.
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