I will never leave you nor forsake you. (Joshua 1:5)

When Moses was about to die, he summoned Joshua and said to him, “The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:8). Then the Lord said to Joshua, “I myself will be with you” (31:23). After Moses was dead, the Lord again said to Joshua, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Joshua 1:5).

Even as the Lord declared this promise to Joshua again and again, he had already said it to all of Israel. He said by Moses, “The LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deuteronomy 31:6). So it was not Joshua alone who could claim God’s presence and support, since when God said to him, “I myself will be with you,” he also said, “You will bring the Israelites into the land I promised them on oath” (Deuteronomy 31:23). God made his promise through Abraham and Moses to all of Israel.

Turning for a moment to Psalm 118, verses 1-4 call God’s people to declare, “His love endures forever.” And verse 5 begins a section that seems to be a personal testimony or exhortation. As verse 6 says, “The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?”

Then, in admonishing those who suffered persecution for the faith of Christ, Hebrews 13 directly applies these statements associated with Joshua, the Psalmist, and Israel to all Christians: “God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?'” (v. 5-6). But when did God say this to Christians? And when did the Psalmist say this to believers in Jesus Christ? There is no need for complicated hermeneutics to justify the application. God had always been making all those promises to all his people, and the Psalmist, although speaking in terms of “I” and “me” had always believed that he held the divine blessings in common with all the people of God.

Paul illustrates this principle when he writes, “Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, ‘I believed, and so I spoke,’ we also believe, and so we also speak” (2 Corinthians 4:13, ESV). This is the proper way to apply the Bible. It is astoundingly simple, and it is astounding because there are many who do not share the sentiment. They do not share it because they do not have the same spirit of faith. But for those who possess this same spirit of faith, when we see that God said to Joshua, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” we can say, “He will never leave me nor forsake me.” And when we see that the Psalmist said, “The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid,” we realize that he believed, and so he spoke – we also believe, and therefore speak the same thing.

There is continuity from the faith of Abraham to the faith of Moses, from the faith of Moses to the faith of Christ, and from the faith of Christ to the faith of all Christians. Just as the promises God made to Moses belonged to Joshua, and the promises he made to Joshua belonged to all of Israel, the promises that Jesus Christ made to the apostles belong to all Christians. When he said to them, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), he promised all of us that he would remain with us to the very end.

There are those who make sophistical distinctions to cut away the promises and powers that belonged to the apostles until we are left with a faith small enough that our preachers and theologians are no longer threatened by it. That, they say, is the post-apostolic era. However, the apostles did not define an era, and the promises that we possess reach as far back as those made to Abraham, to Adam, and even to Christ before the world began. Why would the death of the apostles end anything for us?

No, the trouble is that they do not possess the same spirit of faith. When Jesus left instructions to the apostles, he said to the Father, “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message” (John 17:20). It is in this context that he said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it” (John 14:12-14).

This leaves so much for our preachers and theologians to answer for. Perhaps all of us must answer for our failures, and suffer the haunting rebuke that echoes down the ages: “O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?” But what these others have to answer for is the fact that they do not even try. They do not acknowledge the teaching, and they even attempt to hide it and deny it, and to turn the whole world against it. They do not enter into this realm of faith, and they forbid others to enter. This is not the spirit of faith, but the spirit of the Pharisees, the spirit of the antichrist. It is the spirit that ended in perjury, murder, and damnation.

Is this not enough? Must God repeat every promise specifically to you before you believe? Is that your excuse? You fool! In Christ, all the promises of God are “Yes!” and “Amen!” You do not inherit a line of promise here and another line of promise there. You have been made a co-heir of Jesus Christ, and you have inherited an entire covenant relationship, an entire set of exceeding great and precious promises – even an entire Christ, an entire God. In the light of all this, how dare you whimper to his face, “But…but I am not an apostle”? If you have such an audacity to trample the blood of the covenant, it would be far better for God to transform it into a holy courage, so that you would defy the devil and his servants instead.