Joshua 1:1-9 · Revelation 4:11 · Proverbs 28:26 · John 18:9
The Sunday Daily Word is the doorway.
Begin with There Is No Gap in GOD →
Grace and peace to you.
I want to start with a road.
Somewhere in the Amazon, a highway runs through the forest. It was built for good reasons. People need to move. Goods need to reach markets. Medicine needs to reach villages. Nobody built that road to hurt anything.
But a forest is not only ground. Up above the ground there is a second world. The branches of the trees grow into each other and lock together and form a roof that runs for miles. Whole species live their entire lives up in that roof. They are born there. They feed there. They mate there. Some of them never touch the dirt at all.
And when a road goes through, the roof gets cut.
The trees come down in a straight line and suddenly there is a hole in the sky. On one side, family. On the other side, food. In between, sixty feet of open air and then pavement.
So the animals do one of two things.
Some of them come down. They cross the road on the ground, which is the only way across they can see, and they are killed by traffic. In Brazil, the estimate is around four hundred seventy five million vertebrates killed on the roads every year. That number is so large it stops meaning anything, so let it be one instead. One animal, at the edge of the branches, looking at a gap that was not there when it was born.
The other ones stay up. They do not come down, and they do not get killed, and they slowly disappear anyway. Cut off from the rest of their kind, the group gets smaller. The gene pool narrows. A population that was healthy becomes a population that is alone, and alone is a slow death.
Scientists have a name for this. They call it the barrier effect.
I want you to hold that phrase, because I do not think it belongs only to monkeys.
♪ Only a Holy God
Jonny Robinson, Rich Thompson, Michael Farren, Dustin Smith, 2016
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There is a Brazilian biologist named Fernanda Abra. She founded a project called Reconecta. She is a researcher with the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, and she has been given the Whitley Award for her work.
She looked at the barrier effect and she did something I keep thinking about.
She did not sit down and design what she believed a crossing should look like. She went and watched.
Because here is the thing she understood. Animals do not all move the same way. Spider monkeys travel by swinging, hand over hand, hanging underneath. Some species carry their weight on a tail that grips like a hand. Some do not swing or hang at all. They walk, one foot in front of the other, and they want something under them.
A single rope helps one of those creatures and fails the rest.
So the crossings she built are layered. Steel cable. Rope. Nylon net. Anchored into concrete on both sides. Some sections are crossed lines making an X. Some sections are mesh. Kinkajous, it turns out, prefer the crossed lines. Monkeys prefer the netting. The structure was not built for the animal in general. It was built for the way each animal really travels.
She did not build it alone, either. Much of this work was done in partnership with the Waimiri-Atroari people, who have been recording animal deaths along seventy eight miles of that highway since 1997. They have been counting for almost thirty years. It is the largest citizen science project involving an Indigenous community anywhere in the world. The knowledge did not come down from an expert. It came from the people who live there and who never stopped paying attention.
Think about what that took. Thirty years of writing down what died on a road. No cameras rolling. No award ceremony. Nobody clapping. Year after year of showing up and recording a loss and recording another one, with no way of knowing whether any of it would ever add up to something.
It added up to the design.
Every good thing built on that highway rests on somebody keeping count in the years when keeping count looked like it was going nowhere.
Then they put cameras on the crossings and left them running for fifteen months.
Fifteen thousand crossings.
Zero roadkill.
Six primate species used them. Howler monkeys. Black faced spider monkeys. Night monkeys. Capuchins. And the Alta Floresta titi monkey, which is critically endangered, meaning there are few enough of them left that every single one matters.
Brazil's federal transport department has now made that design the recommended standard for the whole country.
Fifteen thousand times, something stepped out onto a structure it did not build, over a gap it did not make, and got to the other side.
And not one was lost.
Now I want to turn, because there is another kind of barrier, and people have been trying to build across it for a very long time.
Almost two thousand years ago a group of teachers came up with an elaborate answer to the distance between GOD and us. They taught that the true Father was unknowable and unreachable, so far above the world that HE could not touch it. So they filled the space with beings. Thirty of them. Layer stacked on layer, each one a little lower than the one above, reaching down and down until finally something got close enough to make the world we live in.
It was a structure built to get us across.
A man named Irenaeus wrote all of it down. Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century teacher who defended the faith against those who dressed up error to look like truth. He recorded their system in detail, and he did it to expose it, never to teach it.
And he noticed something that takes the whole thing apart.
The builders could not agree on their own structure.
He listed out what they said about where the Saviour came from, and there were six different answers. Six. Not six ways of saying one thing. Six accounts that contradicted each other. The men who built the crossing could not tell you what was holding it up.
That is what happens to a bridge we build toward GOD. It looks impressive from a distance. Get close and the builders are arguing about the design.
An old proverb says it in nine words. He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool.
That is not an insult. It is a warning sign posted at the edge of a structure that will not carry your weight.
♪ How Deep the Father's Love for Us
Stuart Townend, 1995
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Now open the book of Joshua and read the first sentence, because it is one of the loneliest openings in Scripture.
Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass.
Moses is dead.
Stay there a moment. For forty years, Moses was how the people got to GOD. Moses went up the mountain. Moses came back with the word. Moses stood between them and the fire. When they were afraid to hear GOD themselves, they sent Moses.
Moses was the bridge.
And now Moses is gone, and standing there is Joshua, who has done nothing yet. He is on the wrong side of the Jordan, which he has never crossed. Behind him is a whole people who are watching to see whether the thing that carried them is going to be replaced.
Watch what GOD does not do.
GOD does not give them another Moses. GOD does not appoint a chain of officials. GOD does not build a system to fill the gap Moses left. There is no new structure at all.
GOD speaks to Joshua directly, and what HE says is this.
As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.
I will be with you.
That is not a bridge. That is a Person, coming along.
And notice when HE says it. Not after Joshua proves himself. Not after the crossing. Not after the first victory or the first year or the first anything. Joshua has accomplished nothing at this point in the story. He is standing at the Jordan with an assignment he did not ask for, and before he has taken one step, GOD tells him HE is already with him.
The presence comes first. The walking comes after.
I want to be careful here, because this is the place where people get hurt.
GOD does not say the road will be easy. HE does not say Joshua will feel brave. In fact HE tells him three separate times to be strong and of a good courage, which is not something you say to a man who already feels that way. You say it to somebody whose hands are shaking.
GOD did not remove the fear. GOD stayed.
That order matters more than almost anything I could say to you this morning.
We have been trained to believe the presence is a reward. Get your life in order and GOD draws near. Worship well enough and GOD stays. Pray hard enough and the door opens. Every one of those puts you on the far side of a gap with a set of instructions and a hope that you are strong enough to follow them.
Joshua got none of that. Joshua got a word from GOD before he had done a single thing to deserve one.
The presence was not what he earned at the end. The presence was what he was standing in the whole time.
Here is what has stayed with me all week about those crossings in the Amazon.
They were built for the way each creature really travels.
Not for an idea of an animal. Not for the average animal. For the one that swings and the one that grips with its tail and the one that has to have something solid underfoot before it will take a step.
I keep thinking about what that means for the way GOD deals with us.
Because we are not all the same either. Some people come to GOD swinging, all confidence and motion, out over the open air without much fear. Some people need to feel every board before they trust it. Some people have been hurt badly enough that they will not step out at all until somebody who has already crossed is standing on the far side calling their name.
GOD did not build one narrow rope and tell everybody to figure it out.
GOD came HIMSELF.
Not a chain of messengers. Not thirty layers descending. Not a structure at all. The distance between GOD and us got closed from HIS side, in a body, on the ground, at the exact spot where we were standing.
Jesus did not shout instructions from the other side.
HE walked over and got us.
♪ He Will Hold Me Fast
Ada Habershon, 1906 · additional words and music, Matt Merker, 2013
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I said the number that matters is not fifteen thousand.
Fifteen thousand is a wonderful number. It is the sound of a species not disappearing. But it is not the number that undoes me.
The number is zero.
Fifteen months of cameras running, and nobody was lost.
On the night before HE died, Jesus was praying about the people the Father had given HIM, and HE said this.
Of them which thou gavest me have I lost none.
None.
Not most of them. Not the strong ones. Not the ones who moved gracefully and never hesitated at the edge. Peter was in that group, and Peter was hours away from denying HE ever knew HIM. Thomas was in that group, and Thomas was about to say he would not believe it without putting his hand in the wound.
Not one of them was lost.
So hear me.
You may be somebody who has been living on the wrong side of a gap for a long time. Maybe something got cut through the middle of your life and you have been standing at the edge of it ever since, looking across at the person you used to be, or the family you used to have, or the faith you used to have, and you cannot see any way over.
I am not going to tell you the gap is not real. It is real. The forest really was cut.
And I am not going to tell you that naming it right will make it close. I have watched too many people be handed that and go home heavier than they came.
I am telling you who is on the other side, and that HE did not stay there.
The animals in that forest did not know a biologist was watching them. They did not petition anybody. They did not do anything to earn a crossing. They stood at an edge they could not fix, and one day there was a way over it that they had no part in building, and it held.
You do not have to build anything. The people who tried to build it could not agree on the plans. Every structure we put up toward GOD comes apart under inspection.
The crossing is not something you make. It is Someone who came.
And the record on that crossing is fifteen thousand and counting, and nobody was lost.
Grace and Peace.