There is a detail in Joshua chapter one that is easy to pass over on the way to the more dramatic parts of the story. Tucked into verses twelve through fifteen is a word from Joshua to three specific tribes — the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh. These three groups had something the other nine and a half tribes did not have: they were already home. Moses had assigned their inheritance on the eastern side of the Jordan, and they were already in possession of it. Their land was settled, their families were established, and the promise made to them had already been fulfilled.
And God told their fighting men to cross the river anyway.
The command was specific. Their wives, their children, and their livestock could stay. But every man of fighting age had to leave the land he had already received and go help his brothers and sisters receive theirs. They would not be fighting for something they stood to gain. They would be fighting for something that would never belong to them. The inheritance on the other side of the Jordan was not theirs. The victory, when it came, would not expand their borders or increase their wealth. They were being called to spend themselves for the sake of someone else's promised land.
This is one of the most searching challenges in the entire opening chapter of Joshua, and it is directed specifically at people who are already blessed.
It is a particular temptation of the blessed life to become absorbed in it. When God has been good to us — when the inheritance has arrived, when the prayer has been answered, when the season of waiting has finally given way to a season of receiving — it is deeply human to settle in and tend what we have been given. There is nothing wrong with gratitude, nothing wrong with stewardship, nothing wrong with building and planting and establishing. But there is something wrong when our own blessing becomes the boundary of our concern, when we stop looking across the river at the people who are still fighting for what is theirs.
The Reubenites and Gadites had not done anything to disqualify themselves from staying home. Their inheritance was legitimate. Their settlement was right. But their status as the already-blessed did not exempt them from the call to costly solidarity with those who were still waiting. If anything, the fact that they had already received made them more responsible, not less. They had the strength to give because they had already been given to. They had the capacity to fight because they were not fighting from a place of desperation. They could afford to be generous with their effort in a way that those still in the wilderness could not.
This pattern runs throughout scripture. Those who have received are consistently called to pour themselves out for those who have not yet. The language of the New Testament is saturated with it — bearing one another's burdens, considering others more significant than ourselves, spending and being spent for the sake of the body. Paul describes his own ministry in terms of being poured out like a drink offering. Jesus Himself, who possessed everything, emptied Himself and crossed into our condition to secure an inheritance we could not reach on our own.
The question Joshua chapter one presses on us is uncomfortable precisely because it is so specific. It is not asking whether we believe in generosity in the abstract. It is asking what we are actually doing with the blessing we have already received. Are there people in our lives — in our families, our churches, our communities — who are still in the thick of a fight for something that is rightfully theirs? Are there brothers and sisters who are still waiting, still struggling, still standing at the edge of a promise that has not yet materialized? And are we, from the comfort of our own received inheritance, crossing the river to stand with them?
The Reubenites and Gadites made their promise and then had to live it out across the entire campaign of the book of Joshua. It was not a short commitment. It was not a convenient one. But it was the right one, and it was the call that came directly from God to people who were already blessed.
Being settled in our own blessing is not the end of the story. Sometimes it is simply the place from which the next act of faithful obedience begins.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.