2.  It begins with Joshua. Remember what God said in the very first verse of the book? “Moses is dead” We talked about the importance of understanding reality – even if it is painful.
As Max DePree said: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.”

Here is God again with the new reality. “You are old and there is much left undone in your assignment. We are not finished with what we set out to accomplish and it is going to take both of us.”

I think this is different from Joshua’s having a sense of a great personal destiny like General MacArthur. I’ve heard he told people he had no fear of dying before accomplishing his mission. There was a sense of destiny and protection. He and others I have read about are clear they are being kept from harm until they are finished. Not so with Joshua. He is not fearless but he is obedient. With Joshua it’s more of a sense of “mission not accomplished” so don’t sit down and rest. We have work to do.

It’s not about making the best of the time he has left or finishing well. It is about finishing his life’s task. I wonder how many people have a sense of a life task – something for them to complete? I don’t meet many. I meet more who are trying to figure out how to use the remaining time or make sense of their lives – but that’s not Joshua. His assignment has not changed and he’s not off the hook. It’s not about finding meaning for his life but about accepting his responsibility even when he is old.

I am grateful God did not show Joshua what would happen after his death as it would have probably discouraged him. But it was not his responsibility, was it? He was responsible to be faithful in his lifetime. Look at Judges 2:7-15:

“The people served the Lord throughout the lifetime of Joshua and of the elders who outlived him and who had seen all the great things the Lord had done for Israel.

Joshua son of Nun, the servant of the Lord, died at the age of a hundred and ten. And they buried him in the land of his inheritance, at Timnath Heres in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.

After that whole generation had been gathered to their ancestors, another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord and served the Baals. They forsook the Lord, the God of their ancestors, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They aroused the Lord’s anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel the Lord gave them into the hands of raiders who plundered them. He sold them into the hands of their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the Lord was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress.”

We are not in charge of the future, are we? We don’t have the luxury of saying we will not spend our lives in obedience to the will of God because there is the possibility that the next generation will fall away or destroy our work.

3.  Next we read about Caleb.

This is not an assignment but a dream deferred. It is the fulfillment of a promise made to him many years ago.

“Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it…But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them…Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Caleb has been quietly waiting for 45 years for one thing – the chance to drive out the giants he saw when he was young.

It would have made more sense to do it when he was younger.

It would have made more sense to hand the job off now to younger people. Let them kill the giants.

He doesn’t do that. He has been waiting to do this one thing for most of his life and he is prepared for it.

John Gardner wrote: “One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.” We have so overemphasized success that people stop trying if there is much chance of failure. We get good at something and we want to get even better instead of trying new things. Not Caleb. He has been preparing for this challenge for a whole generation.

Caleb had not lost his strength because he had not lost his capacity to risk or his determination to kill giants.

In “The Road to Self-Renewal” John Gardner says,

“It is a puzzle why some men and women go to seed, while others remain vital to the very end of their days. And why some people stop learning and growing. One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons: Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve. Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim.

I’m talking about people who – no matter how busy they seem to be – have stopped learning or trying. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don’t deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on going is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women at whatever age functioning below the level of their potential.

We can’t write off the danger of complacency, of growing rigidity or of imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well – people even younger than yourselves – are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? The famous French literary historian Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve said, “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.”

If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some people who feel that that just isn’t possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don’t really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.

We build our own prisons and serve as our own jail keepers, but I’ve concluded that our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us – and self-images – that hold us captive for a long time. The individual who is intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past – the memory of earlier failures, the remnants of childhood dramas and rebellions, accumulated grievances and resentments that have long outlived their cause. Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure, but the hampering effect on growth is inescapable. As Jim Whitaker, who climbed Mount Everest, said, “You never conquer the mountain. You only conquer yourself.”

4.  Finally, we have the story of the Levites.

All along we have read in Deuteronomy and Numbers that the Levites will not have an inheritance of land like the other tribes. Why not? It’s ironic but it is because they were faithful when the Israelites were not. They were the men Moses called on to kill those who had worshipped the golden calf. “The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers and he has be lesser you this day.” Moses prepares them for it but it is up to Joshua to actually implement it. 13:14, 33; 14:3-5; 18:7: “The Levites do not get a portion among you because the Lord is their inheritance.” Forever after, the Levites were dependent for their subsistence on a tithe paid by each tribe.

That might sound more like a disinheritance when you hear it at the reading of the will. All this I give to your brothers and you get nothing but the opportunity to work for them and be dependent on them.

But they do get something more than that. They were allotted 48 cities and pasturelands surrounding them out of the inheritance of the other tribes.

They were not given ownership of the cities. They were given the right to live there and use the land to provide a living for themselves. In this sense, they were bi-vocational. They worked in between the times they were serving in the Temple.

They belong to a particular place but they do not own that place. They are assigned to it but they still travel back and forth to serve their rotating shift in the Temple. There is no permanent staff. The earliest form of term limits. There is no permanent job for them. They have no seniority and no committee chairs. There is no career ladder.

Instead, they are sprinkled throughout the other tribes and not concentrated in one place. There is no place they can call special or unique or God’s land. They are salt and light. One person has said “God set up a candle in every room of his house.” They were to be living examples of a holy life for the people to see – not a detached or reclusive monks concentrated in one place with their own special interests. There was no headquarters or convent or monastery. They lived and worked with the people they served and only spent the time necessary in Jerusalem.

They were not only limited in the time they spent in Jerusalem but limited in the years they could be active. They began working as a Levite at the age of 30 and there was a mandatory retirement at 50 – a very short career. After that, their responsibility was to assist the younger Levites in their work.

What is most interesting to me is what this produced.

1. The Levites had an interest in the prosperity of all the tribes and not just one. Because they received a tithe from each the economic health of the whole nation was important to them. They were not supported by just one or two tribes.

2. Because they were in the cities of every tribe and they were far more mobile than everyone else, they were connected to everything. They were like bumblebees moving around the nation. They would go to Jerusalem and then back to their cities. They were the newspapers of their day. They were like county extension agents picking up not only news but best practices to isolated and protective tribes.

3. They were involved in every aspect of the life of the nation. Read the description of their various occupations and contributions.

The occupation of the Levites were in what we call professional fields today. Moses expected this to be the case.

• They were ordained to be teachers of the nation (Deuteronomy 24:8; 33:10; 2 Chronicles 35:3; Nehemiah 8:7).

• They also represented many of the judges of the land, and in the time of Ezra they were the sole members of the Sanhedrin — the Supreme Court of the nation (Deuteronomy 17:8–9; 21:5; 1 Chronicles 23:4; 2 Chronicles 19:8; Ezekiel 44:15, 24).

• Most medical services were in their care (Leviticus 13:2, 14:2; Luke 17:14).

• They were professional singers and musicians (1 Chronicles 25:1–31; 2 Chronicles 5:12; 34:12).

• Producers of books and librarians were almost exclusively Levites (2 Chronicles 34:13).

• It may appear strange to some but even law enforcement was in their care (1 Chronicles 23:4) — they were the “sheriffs” (Moffatt).

• Many of the Levites were architects and builders (2 Chronicles 34:8–13).

• Financial managers of David’s treasury.

They were the creative class/knowledge workers of the nation. It’s not how we think of them from the New Testament, is it? We see them as dry, colorless and lifeless lawyers who are only interested in picking apart Jesus. That was not their original purpose. They reduced themselves to that over time because, in Gardner’s words, they stopped renewing themselves.

When God relieved them of the responsibilities of working the land and protecting the interests of a particular tribe, he enabled them to become examples not just of a holy life but a creative and productive life filled with variety and learning. They were the first examples of what Jews have become everywhere they have gone – the leaders in culture, the arts, the professions and finance.

And what is their assignment when they are over 50? To assist the younger Levites. That is not limited to helping them with their Temple duties. It means helping them to become what God intended for the Levites – to be the creative class of the nation. I think that is why God retired them when they were still vital and learning. It means becoming mentors to the next generation of a whole tribe of connected, creative and competent people.

Isn’t that an irony? What seemed like God being unfair in depriving them of their fair share of land as an inheritance was His giving them a role they could never have played otherwise. They were dependent on the support of the other tribes and that made them free to become those with the most interesting work all at the same time.

So there we are. Joshua’s assignment is complete. Caleb’s promise is fulfilled and the Levites are given an inheritance they could never have imagined.

Where do you see your own?

Joshua as an older man but still with an assignment to complete?

Caleb with a quiet but undying dream to accomplish something he wanted to do when he was younger?

A Levite whose assignment is to bring along the next generation and encourage them to make the most of their unique inheritance?