And the priests came up out of the river carrying the ark of the covenant of the LORD. No sooner had they set their feet on the dry ground than the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and ran at flood stage as before. – Joshua 4:18

Today’s Scripture Reading (November 25, 2015): Joshua 4

Jeb Bush’s campaign team insists that their leader is not in trouble. The situation right now is all about timing. Many politicians are strong early but fade as they get closer to the voting. According to the Bush camp and many of the other more traditional campaigns, it is easy to say that you support the bombastic Donald Trump and a Ben Carson that obviously doesn’t understand foreign policy now, but as the time gets closer to voting, that gets harder. The two questions that have to be answered then are these - can this person really be President (what would their responses have been to the Paris crisis if it had happened under their watch) and who is genuinely electable over whoever it is that the Democrats put forward. Bush’s team think that their candidate answers both of those questions better than either Trump or Carson. It is just the timing that is not right. Bush’s number will rise as we get closer to the time of the vote, so his languishing numbers are unimportant now. The important thing is for Jeb Bush to keep walking – keep moving toward his ultimate goal, the Presidency of the United States. If he can do that, then he just might receive the miracle that he is hoping for.

The author of Joshua wants us to understand that the timing of God is everything, and that the crossing of the River Jordan was a miraculous event – on the same level as the crossing of the Red Sea forty years earlier. I have often said that the crossing of the Red Sea had more of a Steven Spielberg feel to it – the Sea was deep and the Egyptian army was closing in and tension was high. By contrast, the crossing of the River Jordan was missing several elements. No one was chasing them. The tension was probably fairly low in comparison to the Red Sea experience. But only two people present at the Jordan crossing had been at the Red Sea crossing – Joshua and Caleb. But the Jordan was no less of a miracle.

But it was a miracle of timing. The bible says that the water was stopped several miles upstream. When the priests stepped in and the water stopped, the miracle had actually happened a few minutes earlier when the water was piled up. And at the tail end the same thing happened, in reverse. The water was released at just the right moment so that the flood stage water would return into its proper place as the priests stepped out of the dry river bed.

God’s timing is amazing. Personally, I think that the River Jordan story is much more applicable to our lives than the Red Sea. I know, that we want the Red Sea story to be true in our lives. We want the water to stop and for us so that we can simply walk through the miracle that God has caused in front of us, but in my experience it is much more common for God to respond miraculously to our movement than it is for God to open up a hole for us to walk through, As we go, he goes, As we step, he moves. And in the middle of the movement God’s miracle happens. But when we turn around, everything is as it was. The timing of God’s movement in our lives is impeccable - and that is the story of the River Jordan.

Today’s Scripture Reading: Joshua 5