Joshua is the story of an underdog. His amazing arc of development saw his remarkable rise from the slave pits of Egypt to the pinnacle of triumphantly leading three million former slaves and their descendants into the promised land of Canaan. He had an intimate relationship with God. It showed what God could do. During a 40-year apprenticeship under Moses, Joshua rose from being a slave under the whip of his Egyptian masters to being a prince of his tribe in Israel. He became Israel's first military Field Marshal. Joshua ascended Mount Sinai with Moses, saw God, and heard the voice of God with his natural ears. As Moses neared the end of his natural life, God directed Moses to choose and publicly ordain Joshua as his successor, rather than one of his own two sons or anyone else. Then Joshua went on to see God perform physical miracles for him on a par with what God did for Moses, defying the laws of nature and physics. Miracles of this magnitude did not occur again until 1,400 years later when Jesus Christ walked the earth in the flesh as God and man. Joshua ruled, not as a king, but as the intermediary for God's theoretic governance of the descendants of Israel. Joshua's final work was driving the pagan nations God abhorred out of the promised land of Canaan, including subduing the progeny of a race of giants, and then distributing the land among the tribes of Israel. Being advised by God of his approaching transition from life to death, Joshua assembled the nation, recounted all that God had brought them through and then charged them to serve God or come under a curse that he himself pronounced, before they could eventually be restored.
