It is beneficial to stop and take a regular tally of the deeds of God in your life, as we do in this chapter. Living through the drama of the conquest of Ai was exhausting—hopeful at the outset, demoralizing in the middle, exhilarating in the end. The rear-view mirror perspective reveals God’s justice and mercy and brilliance in it, which escaped us when we saw only trees and no forest.

My favorite example of the advantage of compressed time is always the way the 12 tribes of Israel came into existence. There was a decade-long flying of fur and pulling of hair between Leah and Rachel—and when the smoke cleared, 12 sturdy sons stood all in a row.

The Messiah’s two Comings looked like one Coming from the perspective of the Old Testament saints. The prophets themselves were puzzled by their own prophecies, perhaps expecting every prediction of theirs to occur simultaneously in one great finale. A favorite seminary metaphor for explaining this optical illusion is that of two mountains standing one behind the other in your line of vision. As we now know, the valley of millennia separates Christ’s “First Coming” and the “Second Coming” from each other. But from where the ancients stood, it looked like one mountain; they could not spy the farther mountain behind the closer one. In this case, it was they, not we, who saw the time compressed.

The whole Bible record is, of course, time compressed for our edification—thousands of years between two leather covers. It is the closest we come to God’s own control-tower vista, the beginning from the end.

We need to be able to practice the same thing with our lives—find patterns in the tangle of threads behind us. Paul Miller wrote his excellent book on prayer, A Praying Life, in which he rightly observed that a book about prayer is really a book about learning to know God. God is weaving a story in our lives, but while you’re caught in the skein of wool, you don’t always see what he is doing. There is activity in the long waiting periods, when nothing seems to be happening. It is here when our mettle is being tested and we are learning things both about God and ourselves.

Chapter 12 of Joshua is a pause to take stock of where we’ve been and what we’ve done—more importantly, what God has done. The dust has settled from 11 chapters of unrelenting warfare, and at the end of it, Joshua may list the following conquests: Jericho, Ai, Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, Eglon, Gezer, Debir, Geder, Hormah, Arad, Libnah, Adullam, Makkedah, Bethel, Tappua, Hepher, Aphek, Lasharon, Madon, Hazor, Shimron Meron, Achshaph, Taanach, Megiddo, Kedesh, Jokneam, Dor, Gilgal, Tirzah.

Behind each conquest, a whole story. Just like your life.

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