Caleb, in the Old Testament, was an Israelite spy. He was best known for his faith in God's power and for standing firm against prevailing opinions.
Today on Truth for Life Weekend, Alistair Begg takes a closer look at Caleb's life and character. We'll learn from his example how to finish our race strong. He was prepared to stand against the tide of popular opinion. He was sure of what could be accomplished by God's power. He was aware, thirdly, of the reality of God's presence. In Numbers 14, speaking once again, he says, Do not rebel against the LORD, and do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will swallow them up. Their protection is gone, but the LORD is with us. A man of faith in the midst of fear. A man of courage in the midst of a group of people who had determined together that they are a shut-up shop and just stay where they were. In fact, things were so bad that, as it says in verse 4 of Numbers 14, the people had begun to say to one another, Let's choose a leader and go back.
Have you ever been in a church like that? Dear ones, you don't ever choose leaders to go back. You don't need leaders to go back. Just go back. You don't need anybody to lead you back.
You can always get a group to go back. You need leaders to go forward. There is a tomorrow. There are purposes yet in the unfolding of God's plan for our world, for our nation. There are generations if Christ tarries yet to come.
And Caleb reveals this spirit. A young man, forty years old. A young man of commitment. Now, the commitment of his early life is matched by his consistency in middle life.
Not only committed at forty, but consistent at sixty, and seventy, and seventy-five. There's a cartoon involving Charlie Brown standing, pressing the water fountain, and the button of it, and he has his pajamas on, and he's pressing the fountain, and the pressure in it is greater than he is able to contain within his mouth, and it's actually going over his head and landing on the back of his pajama jacket and soaking it. And underneath it says, I don't care how the day starts, it's how it ends up that bothers me.
Okay? Some of us are the masters of yesterday, aren't we? Oh, boy, you should have been around yesterday. Now, there was a day. You know, when we were all together and when we were all ready for action and when we were all younger?
Boy, did we have a time then! But not Caleb. Caleb is a classic illustration of the fact that the Christian life is a bit like a cross-country run. It's not a series of a hundred-yard sprints.
It's a cross-country. It goes on forever. You go over a hill and dale and stiles and hedges and bridges and streams, and you can always find a group of people who begin to lag further and further and further behind and start to grumble to one another and say, I wish we never started this thing.
Goodness sake. Well, let's just walk. After all, we've got our health and strength.
We could die out here. And so they all go on, and they eventually encourage one another into a tremendous morass of mediocrity. And it takes an individual like Caleb to break out from the group and to keep on.
Think of how many people have got off to a flying start in life, but in their middle years they lost it. They were well known as a young man or as a young woman, for whatever reason. At age forty they had prominence. At age forty they had clout, they had influence, they had status, whatever it might be. In Christian terms they were useful to God, but they ended their days strangely.
Think of even a hero of the faith in some ways, a man like A. W. Pink, whom presumably all of us would want to admire for his writings, for surely we have benefited from them greatly and we have absorbed them as we've read them. And yet do you know that A. W. Pink ended his life in the Hebridean Islands, on the island of Louis, living in Stornoway, not even worshipping in a church. He never went to church for the last two or three years of his life.
He couldn't find a church that he was comfortable to worship in. Far be it from me to criticize somebody who's gone on ahead, but something's not right there. I don't care how well he started. Something happened in the middle. You can't finish like that. Something happened in the middle years. Tozer, incidentally, was similar. Tozer ended disgruntled. What happened in those middle years?
Now let's just think about this for a moment because the environment in which he spent his middle years was not exactly fantastic. Numbers 14 and verses 34 and following give us the illustration of where they were. For 40 years, one year for each of the 40 days you explored the land, God says, you will suffer for your sins and know what it's like to have me against you.
I the Lord have spoken and I will surely do these things to this whole wicked community which is banded together against me. They will meet their end in this desert and here they will die. So the men Moses had sent to explore the land who returned and made the whole community grumble against him by spreading a bad report about it, these men responsible for spreading the bad report about the land were struck down and died of a plague before the Lord. Of the men who went to explore the land, only Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh survived. They survived, but they still had to live for 40 years wandering around in the wilderness.
Now that would give the average person a real challenge, would it not? He was stuck for 40 years from the age of 40 because of the people around him having failed to see what God is able to do. So in the midst of frustration, in the midst of wanderings, in the midst of disgruntlement, he obviously never became disgruntled.
That's fantastic. Do you know how many people when at their optimum point of usefulness in the church of Jesus Christ chill out? Do you know how many people who have the greatest resource, the greatest energy, the greatest wisdom, the greatest of just about everything decide somehow miraculously that they're on early retirement? We're out of this. This is for the young people now. Let them carry their load. I've done my bit.
I pledge my tithe. It's not my responsibility anymore. This is for another generation. And along with that so often comes what happened to so many, and that is embitterment and disgruntlement. And how remarkable that Caleb remained free of all such. Who's to say that one stage of life is more challenging than another or presents more difficulties than another? I certainly haven't lived long enough to be able to speak authoritatively on the subject, but I have observed, and I have observed so far to this point in my life experientially, and others I just look on and watch. And I have seen how marriage and the establishment of a home and the concerns of business and the very necessary contingencies of life can so often be accompanied by a loss of spiritual ardor, a loss of spiritual effectiveness. And the fervency and the vision with which this individual had begun their life has become insipid, has become paltry to the degree that they have lost sight of actually what is really important—what I call the great untapped resource of the church. The folks who've been reading their Bibles now for a long time, they've lived long enough to get their noses put out of joint and put back into place to realize that the church is really a ragbag of people—the people with spotty-faced Jones and his wife and the whole group, a funny bunch of people. They've lived long enough to get kind of stabilized on that. They know there ain't no perfect church. There's no perfect pastor.
You know, Spurgeon said he only knew one perfect man, and he was a perfect nuisance. And these people who are 55 years old, they've already worked that out. But something's happening to these characters.
They're zoning out. Now, I don't know whether it's us doing it to them, or they're doing it to themselves, but it can't, and it mustn't happen. This is the very backbone of the church. We always hear this stuff about that the key to the church is in the youth. They're the church, you know, they're the church of tomorrow. Thank God for the youth, and we need them, and we're going to work with them, but that's not the key to the church. The key to the church are mature men and women who have gone through experiences of life, and they're in their middle years. We need those men and women to live lives of consistency. Otherwise, how are we going to produce a generation underneath them who will be marked by commitment? It takes consistency in the middle years to produce a generation of commitment in the early years. So it's a silly idea to think you build your church on a youth ministry or even on a children's ministry.
You build your church on the quality of leadership that exists in those middle years. So some of you who were just planning to announce your retirement, you've got a major problem as a result of this message, and I haven't even finished it. We're going to come to the last point now. It would be really difficult to estimate how many people at the point in life where their potential is the greatest have settled for disinterest, for criticism, for cynicism, and have failed to see the disintegration in their own spiritual lives. That's the saddest part of all. They didn't even realize they messed up. They didn't even realize they grew cold because they got in a cold group, and they went and had cold meetings and went out for cold coffee, and they just generally chilled each other down, and the lowest common denominator prevailed. And there was no one in the group prepared to say, guys, we're not what we once were. Our commitment's not where it once was. Our conversation is not edifying to the body of Christ. Don't you detect that we're getting a critical spirit? Don't you see that we're beginning to eat the manna of disgruntlement?
Can't you see that we are losing our spiritual edge? Caleb, a man of commitment in his early years, of consistency in his middle years, and finally, of triumph in his latest years or oldest years or old age. We might have expected that forty-five years after the reconnaissance in Canaan, he would have had to be reminded of this. People would have been saying to him, don't you remember that, Caleb? Nobody needed to say, don't you remember that, Caleb? He'd never forgotten it. There hadn't been a day gone by, I don't think, but Caleb hadn't remembered those events, and hadn't looked forward to the fulfillment of the promise, hadn't looked forward to that parcel of land that would be given to him.
I don't think he was in the real estate business. I don't think he was concerned to be able to say, Hebron's mine. I think he was concerned to be able to see in bodily terms, as it were, in a tangible evidence, the fact that he had proclaimed at the age of forty, God is powerful, God is great, God is true to his promises, and when I take my place in Hebron, I'll know, and so will all who look on. And what an irony that Anak, used to be the king of Hebron, used to be the big boy in Hebron. And Anak gets moved out, and little Caleb gets moved in. Triumphant in his old age. What was it that marked him out?
Well, those two things in them were through. In verse 10, he was aware of the Lord's preservation. Now then, he says, just as the Lord promised, he's kept me alive for forty-five years.
I've said this already to you, but I honestly believe this. Every day you get your feet over the edge of the bed is a great day, no matter what it holds. It's a great day. An old man that lived across the road from Sue and I and Hamilton, he taught me that. His name was Alec. And no matter, he walked with a stick some of the time, and he was like a grasshopper trying to walk across the street to buy his newspaper. But every day I would see him and say, How are you doing today, Alec? He'd say, Hey, son, it's a great day.
It's a great day when you get your feet over the end of the bed. And Caleb was aware of the fact that God woke him up every morning, and he woke him up on this particular morning. It was God who kept him alive. And he was assured of the fulfillment of God's promise. Aware of the Lord's preservation and assured of the Lord's promise.
Now give me this hill country that the Lord promised me that day. The thing I like best about Caleb is that his life moved not towards a termination but towards a consummation. He still had his climbing boots on at the age of eighty-five.
He fits the statement in Hebrews 11, where it says, All these people were still living by faith when they died. They never quit. They were still going.
Still going. I sat on the platform of the Keswick Convention some time ago now with a man whom I've regarded as a great man in the ministry of the Word, all since I was a boy of the age of five in Scotland. The man's name is George B. Duncan, and just a tremendous preacher. And I sat with him on the Keswick platform. He'd been invited to sit up there. He wasn't preaching. He wasn't preaching because, frankly, he's just not able to cope with everything the way he did as a younger man. And as we sat together on the platform—there were about twenty of us all up there—as the service came to an end and the benediction was given, I turned to greet him, and as I looked at him, the tears were running down his face. And when he composed himself, he said to me, You know, son, I am done. There is no future for me now. I don't speak here anymore. They just invite me to sit on the platform.
And what use is that? I said to him, Mr. Duncan, he says in the Bible, You're not supposed to rebuke an older man, but get ready for it, because I'm about to disobey the Bible. I said, I've known you, and I've listened to you preach since I was five years old, since my dad took me to hear you preach. I've cheated off most of your sermons, and I know many of your outlines better than you.
I said, But listen, you may not preach here, but you are here. And I'm watching you, Mr. Duncan, because I want to see that you're moving not towards a termination, but you're moving towards a consummation. And I'm wanting to see that you run right through that tape, right all the way to the end, just like Caleb. And he looked at me and he said, Do you really mean that?
And I said, I really mean it. I'm going to be watching you to see how you finish. Can I ask you tonight, how are we going to finish? I'll tell you how we're going to finish. We're going to finish on the basis of how we're doing tonight. That's how you're going to finish.
So then let's take it back one. How are you doing tonight? Have you begun the race? Do you know the Lord? Are you on track?
Have you been cleared for takeoff to mix my metaphors and you're on your way and you know that you're heading towards a destination? Or frankly, are you standing as it were on the observation deck and you're watching the planes come out and go and you're saying, you know, I don't really know what you're on about, sir, because I don't know this Lord that Caleb knew and I would love to know him. Hey, I'd love to introduce you to him. Solomon, he didn't finish so well. He was another guy who got off to a great start, but you can go home and do your homework and read in 1 Kings 11, and you will discover that's what said of Solomon towards the end of his life. It says, As Solomon grew old, his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God. Solomon finished with an inflated ego, a corrupted worship and a divided allegiance.
And he made a great start. You know, the reason that so many end up in mediocrity is because we discover that in order to get to the top, we've got to let go of a lot of stuff that we're not prepared to let go of. Let me tell a story, and I'm through. A group are going to climb Mont Blanc in Switzerland. They meet together in the evening with a guide, a Swiss guide, who's going to take them up this part of the French Alps. The guide gets the group in the room, and he says, Listen, let me tell you something. If you make the top of this mountain and you're coming with me, you can only bring what I'm telling you.
And this is what I'm telling you. Show up with your boots, show up with your ropes, show up with your ice axe, and don't show up with anything else. And a young Englishman—this is a true story—a young Englishman announced to the group and to the guide that he was going to go to the top of Mont Blanc, but he was going to do it his way. And he had already put together all the things that he was taking with him to the top.
And he had already decided that he was taking a multitude of camera equipment. He was going to take lots of stuff to drink, big bars of chocolate and big blocks of cheese and blankets, because he said that he liked to sit down every so often on his journey. So the guide, unable to dissuade him, told the guy, You're out of here. You come under my rules, or you don't come at all.
Good night. The Englishman went away in a huff. And the guide turned to the group, and he said, Let me tell you, nobody ever makes the top of Mont Blanc carrying all that stuff. So they set off the following day, the Englishman ahead of them, the group with the guide following on. And as they make their ascent, they start discovering all this guy's nonsense—blankets and cheese and old bottles and things and camera lenses and everything else. And when they finally reach the summit, there is the Englishman, dressed in his clothes, with his boots, his ice axe, and his robes. And S. D. Gordon, who first told this story, said, So it is in the Christian life. Many find that when they cannot make the summit with all that they hold in their hands, let the summit go and pitch their tents in the rain.
And the plain is so very full of tents. The cry from Caleb, down through the centuries, is Let go of the baggage, and go for the mountain, committed in youth, consistent in the middle, and triumphant at the end. You're listening to Truth for Life Weekend with Alistair Begg. Today's message wraps up our study of selections from the series Jars of Clay. If you'd like to listen to the complete two-volume series, you'll find all 16 messages online at truthforlife.org.
They're all free to listen to or to download and share. I want to talk to you for just a minute. If you have children or grandchildren who you would like to have a solid faith like Caleb's, we want to recommend to you a book called God You Are, 20 Promises from the Psalms for Kids. The book was written for children between the ages of four and eight. Each reading draws from passages from the Psalms to teach children about God's character so that, like Caleb, they can be confident that God is good, that he keeps his promises, that he is an ever-present, never-changing God who is committed to helping those who trust in him. Just so you know, this is the last weekend we'll be talking about the book God You Are.
To find out more, visit our website today, truthforlife.org. Now here's Alistair to close today's program with prayer. Father, I thank you for the inspiration and example that so many of the people are here tonight, even as I walk around and am greeted by them. Look into their eyes and see the illustrations of your grace and your favor towards them.
Listen to their testimony of your provision for them down through the years. I'm simply encouraging them, even as they encourage me, to keep going, to keep on, to resist the temptations of disgruntlement and cynicism and despair, to look towards the end as if it were a cul-de-sac, instead of seeing it as a great and glorious gateway into your presence, where we will rejoice with you forever and ever. For young people here tonight, I pray that you will forge in their lives the kind of character that makes them committed against the crowd, so that they may grow into maturity, consistency, and eventually to triumph. Hear our prayer and let our cry come unto you, for we ask it with the forgiveness of all our sin in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for taking time out of your weekend to study along with us. Next weekend we begin a study in Philemon to learn how genuine faith empowers seemingly impossible forgiveness and reconciliation. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.
