“I will not drive them out ahead of you in a single year; otherwise, the land would become desolate, and wild animal would multiply against you. I will drive them out little by little ahead of you until you have become numerous and take possession of the land. I will set your borders from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates River. For I will place the inhabitants of the land under your control, and you will drive them out ahead of you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

My oldest is learning how to drive. As his most regular passenger, I can say with authority that he is doing great. He’s a very comfortable driver. There are a few situations, though, where he has not yet driven. He’ll get there just fine, but before he does, we’ll get him some experience under our watchful eyes. One of these experiences is driving downtown. Downtown driving, especially when you are used to small town driving, is different from driving around where we live. It’s more crowded, more stressful, has less room for error, and so on. If I were to throw him right into that kind of a situation before he’s ready for it, things would likely not go well. First, we’ll get him very comfortable driving in general, and then we’ll start exposing him to more. This is all kind of like what God told the Israelites He was going to do with them when it came to their entrance into the Promised Land. Let’s explore what’s going on here.

The full narrative picture of Israel’s entrance into the land of Canaan is a complicated one. If you look at it from one angle, it sounds like they came in as rampaging conquerors, mowing down everything in their path until they took the land God had promised to give them. If you look at things from another angle, they failed miserably to actually do what God told them to do in terms of completely eliminating the Canaanite peoples and as a result, all of the problems God told them would come from not fulfilling His commands happened. The people were led astray into sin because of the influence of the pagan peoples around them causing them no small amount of trouble with their God. Here, we have yet another picture. God was going to lead them in a conquest, but it was going to be slow and methodical and at a pace they were going to be able to handle.

The point here is not that all of these different perspectives are somehow contradictory, but rather that the picture of how exactly it all unfolded is more complicated than it seems at first glance. The matter is not a black and white here are the heroes and here are the villains. God was working through the fairly natural unfolding of human history, guiding things in the direction He ultimately wanted them to go. He was bringing judgment to some people at certain times and to others at other times. As the apostle Paul said and we talked about the other day, “from one man he has made every nationality to live over the whole earth and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of where they live.”

God is sovereign over the whole affair, but His interactions with it are more nuanced than sometimes we would like to believe both positively and negatively. Where critics might like to write the whole thing off as offensive nonsense supposedly directed by a God who is a moral abomination, things aren’t quite so cut and dried as to give the kind of support for such an approach as they would like. At the same time, believers who want to see God as directly and intentionally pulling each and every string at every point along the way don’t have quite as strong a case as they’d like to have either. This doesn’t mean that God isn’t ultimately sovereign over the whole thing, but His sovereignty is so great that He is able to allow people to make choices that are meaningful and consequential and still work things out in the direction He plans for them to go.

I think there’s something else worth seeing here too. Look again at how the passage starts versus where it ends. Look at the language God uses at the beginning versus the language He uses at the end. At the beginning of the passage, what does God say? He’s talking about His driving out the current inhabitants of the land for Israel. Specifically, He talks about His not doing it faster than they could handle. I will not do that, He says. At the end, though, look how the language has shifted. No more is it God’s doing all the work, but the people of Israel doing it. “For I will place the inhabitants under your control, and you will drive them out.”

That’s nice, but what are we supposed to do with this? Well, nothing. It wasn’t written for us, remember? That being said, I think there is something to see here. Look at the synergism between God and the people. He’s doing some of the work, and they are doing some of the work. There’s a both-and at play here.

Well, so does that mean God somehow needs us to accomplish His purposes? Of course not. He is absolutely capable of doing it all on His own. After all, don’t forget that He was talking at the beginning about His doing all the work to drive the current inhabitants out of the land. And everything that happened was ultimately going to be because of what He did. But H was inviting Israel to be a part of the process. He was going to accomplish the things He planned to accomplish through them. They were going to have some skin in the game. It was still going to be all His show, but they had a starring role in the part of the show that involved them.

One of the great theological debates over the centuries of church history has been where and how to draw the line between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility and freedom. Is God’s sovereignty so totally overwhelming that we are little more than automatons spinning around mindlessly on a track He long ago set in place? Or do we have some kind of great measure of freedom in the decisions we make? When it comes to salvation, does God just come and put the thing in us at His choosing, or do we bear some responsibility for how things unfold with our relationship with Him? We’re not going to try to sort all of that out this morning except to observe that the various contributors to the Scriptures hold the two positions in a messy, uncomfortable tension. They don’t bring any neat, clean resolution to the question and so we really shouldn’t try to do that either.

Instead, they present God as completely sovereign over His creation and us as bearing total responsibility for every choice we make, word we speak, thought we think, action we take, and so on and so forth. Israel was going to do the work to drive out the peoples already living in the land of Canaan. And God was going to drive out the peoples already living in the land of Canaan. I took a shop class when I was in Junior High. It was a great class with a fun professor, and I loved it. I still have the two lamps I made in it. Speaking of those lamps, while we did all the work in putting them together, the teacher did a whole lot of work behind the scenes and on the front end so that we could put them together. I never gave any thought to it then, but he had to do a lot of prep work before we got to class so that when we did come to class we could get to work and get the project done in a reasonable amount of time.

That’s a little like what’s going on here. God was going to do a whole lot of work before Israel lifted a finger that was going to enable them to do what He was leading them to do. They weren’t necessarily going to be able to see it. Much of it was going to seem like little more than the machinations of human history working themselves out naturally, but we are to make no mistake that it was God’s doing. Then, when Israel showed up for class, they were going to be able to get right to work doing things that felt meaningful and significant (because they were). Because of the things He did, they were going to be able to do what He was leading them to do in a reasonable amount of time and with a reasonable amount of skin in the game.

The same kind of thing is true in our own lives. We make our own decisions. We go our own directions. We bear responsibility for the outcomes in our lives. But God is there the whole time working ahead of us in ways we can’t even imagine, smoothing out the path some for us. That doesn’t mean He takes out all of the bumps. We know that from experience. But He takes out some and in ways we’ll probably never even know. He goes with us in the moment too, gently guiding us forward. When we drift from His plans and path, His hand is there creating a bit of resistance for us. We can push through that resistance and veer off course. He’ll let us do that. And when we crash, He’ll help us pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and set back off on the right path. It’s all Him from start to finish while we do all the work. In the end, when we get it right, His glory is increased and our joy is enlarged which is just exactly how He designed it all to work. So work with Him. You’ll be glad that you did.