Past, Present and Future

One of the reasons people flocked to hear Jesus speak was because he gave them the hope and the dream that their future did not have to be defined by their past. Even the present need not define the future. Things don't need to go on being the way they are now.

In Joshua 5 God is preparing the people of Israel to go in and take the Promised Land. And in doing so He deals with their past, 'Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you'. It wasn't that they were to forget their past - for they were about to go on and celebrate the Passover, the annual reminder that they were slaves in Egypt and that God has rescued them. But because of what God had done they were no longer to allow themselves to be held back by the past. God had dealt with that past, and now they were on the brink of moving into something new.

God can deal with our past so that it no longer defines our future. Sometimes we get into destructive cycles of behaviour that are driven by past experiences and it seems that we are just unable to escape. We keep on making the same bad choices. We get into patterns of repeated failure. But it doesn't need to be that way.

How were the people of Israel about to leave their past behind and embrace a new future?

1. They re-dedicated themselves to God, so that He was reflected in their lives.
2. They remembered what God had done for them in the past, without allowing their past to hold them back.
3. They got on board with what God was doing rather than imagining that God was at their beck and call.

Great Expectations

I wonder how often we allow the past to limit our expectations for the future. We look at our past and even our present and we imagine that things will always be like they have always been. There seems no escape from the rut we are in. And maybe if we don't do that for ourselves maybe we subconsciously do it to those around us. Because (in our opinion) someone has made nothing of their life so far - we assume that their whole life is going to be wasted; that nothing positive will ever come of it.

This week we have looked at the story of Rahab (Joshua 2). When we first meet Rahab she is an enemy of the people of God, she is a prostitute, she is living in a city that will soon be totally destroyed. As Rahab demonstrated her faith in Israel's God by hiding the spies and risked her life by lying to her own king, I wonder what her hopes were for the future. I expect they were short-term - not to be killed along with all the other inhabitants of Jericho.

She could not have imagined that we would know of her life and her story all these years later. (And I'm sure that no one else imagined it either, for she was a foreigner, a woman, a prostitute...). Who dared to dream that she would in time be one of only four women listed in the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah (Matthew 1:5). That she would be mentioned among those commended for their faith, alongside people like Abraham, Moses, Noah... (Hebrews 11:31). That she would be used by James as an example of someone whose faith led to actions (for that is the only kind of faith there is) (James 2:25).

God is not limited by our past or our present. When we put our lives in God's hands amazing things can happen that are totally beyond our greatest expectations.