Page 9 - August 2025 - Truth & Tidings

Caleb reality of divine power.

We readily recognise Caleb’s status as Caleb didn’t just assume that this would
one of the heroes of the Old Testament. happen or merely aspire to it. Rather, he
Right from his first appearance he is did everything in his power to ensure
marked by a willingness to expect great that it would happen. He was prepared
things from God, while attempting great to invest in the next generation, to make
things for God. His words to the people, personal sacrifices for their spiritual
though unheeded, express the overrid- benefit. He was prepared to give up his
ing conviction of his life: “Let us go up at claim on Kirjathsepher, prepared to give
once, and possess it; for we are well able to his daughter’s hand in marriage, prepared
overcome it” (Num 13:30). Decades later, to put himself in a position of vulner-
as a man of 85, Caleb had lost none of his ability so that the work might go on. His
confidence in God, and none of his desire aspiration for the next generation was not
to possess the inheritance: “Now therefore an abstract; it was deeply personal and
give me this mountain, whereof the LORD affected his ambitions for his own and –
spake in that day; for thou heardest in that so far as we know – only daughter. The
day how the Anakims were there, and value of those ambitions is emphasised
that the cities were great and fenced: if so by the way in which he stands in contrast
be the LORD will be with me, then I shall to his contemporaries: “They took their
be able to drive them out, as the LORD daughters to be their wives, and gave their
said” (Jos 14:12). Now, as his story draws daughters to their sons, and served their
to its close, we discover that age has done gods” (Jdg 3:6).
nothing to dull his ambition. We still need men and women like that,
Although Caleb himself would push senior saints who are prepared to invest
back the borders of possession no further, in younger believers, prepared to take a
his desire was that the generation that chance, to risk disappointment, to sac-
followed him would continue to make rifice time and energy, to do everything
progress, continue to possess what God in their power to make sure that the next
had promised them. It never once crossed generation doesn’t just hold ground, but
Caleb’s mind that the progress of God’s goes further in and higher up than they
people would stop with him. In this, Caleb ever did.
offers a sterling model for older believers. Othniel
Though none of us would articulate the
view that God’s work will stop with us, Successfully negotiating the transition
it is all too possible to act as though that between one generation and the next is
were what we believed, to behave and to neither easy nor simple. It makes demands
talk as though the heights of the past will on both those who are older and those
never again be reached, that the best that who are younger. Caleb’s exercise for the
a rising generation can hope for is, like next generation would have achieved
Tolkien’s elves, to fight the long defeat. little were there not an Othniel who was
Caleb stands as a rebuke to that sort of prepared to step forward. In doing so,
thinking. His ambition for himself became it would seem that Othniel was defying
his ambition for the next generation: to chronology. He belonged to the generation
go further, possess more, and to learn the of whom we are told, “There arose another
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