1Ⅱ “No man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, I will be with you; I will not fail you nor forsake you. Be strong and take courage, for you will cause this people to inherit the land which I swore to their fathers to give to them. Only be strong and very courageous, being certain to do according to all the law which Moses My servant commanded you. Do not turn away from it to the right or to the left, that you may have success wherever you go”—Josh. 1:5-7:
2A For Jehovah to tell Joshua that, as He was with Moses, He would be with Joshua was a great matter; at one point the Lord told Moses, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest” (Exo. 33:14); because Moses was a person very near to God’s heart and according to God’s heart, he had God’s presence to a full extent.
3B In the New Testament the presence of Jesus is Emmanuel, meaning “God with us” (Matt. 1:23; 18:20; 28:20); Christ as the Spirit of reality, the life-giving Spirit, is Emmanuel, the presence of the Divine Trinity in our spirit (2 Tim. 4:22).
4C We should continually exercise our spirit of faith to be strong and very courageous to enjoy the all-inclusive Christ, signified by the good land, as the pledge of our inheritance today, which is a sample of our full and eternal inheritance of the wonderful Christ in the next age and for eternity—2 Cor. 4:13; Eph. 1:14, 18; 2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5-6a.
5D We should take the Lord as our strength and our courage to magnify Christ under any circumstances, which is to experience Him with the topmost enjoyment (Phil. 1:20; 4:11-13); we can always declare, “Jehovah is my light and my salvation; / Whom shall I fear? / Jehovah is the strength of my life; / Whom shall I dread?”—Psa. 27:1.
6E Death once reigned over us (Rom. 5:14), and we were under its slavery, continually fearing death; since the Lord destroyed the devil and nullified death (Heb. 2:14-15; 2 Tim. 1:10), we now have no more fear of death and are released from its slavery.
7F “Jehovah will not abandon His people, / Nor will He forsake His inheritance” (Psa. 94:14); “The Lord is my Helper, and I will not fear. What shall man do to me?” (Heb. 13:6); “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom. 8:31).
8G We need to be those who fan into flame our God-given spirit, which is not a spirit of cowardice but of power and of love and of sobermindedness (2 Tim. 1:6-7); our feelings are altogether a lie; we should always believe and declare that we are strong, that we are full of love, and that we are very clear; then we can “be strong and take courage” (Josh. 1:6) to enter into and enjoy the all-inclusive Christ as the reality of the good land.
9H We should not turn away “to the right or to the left” (v. 7) from the holy Word concerning the heavenly vision of God’s eternal economy, so that we may have success wherever we go by walking worthily of the Lord “to please Him in all things” (Col. 1:10); thus, before our translation we can obtain the testimony that we have been “well pleasing to God” by continually believing that God is and we are not (Heb. 11:5-6; Gen. 5:21-24).