Real Estate - Joshua 15

In 2 Corinthian 5, the Apostle Paul describes our inheritance as a "heavenly dwelling."  Modern Christianity has sometimes taken this as some sort of disembodied "spiritual" life. As I read Joshua chapter 15 I am struck by the focus on land, or property. I think we have another example of how the Old Testament can inform our New Testament understanding. This whole chapter reminds us that the Lord deals in physical things that can be seen and handled with our hands. This chapter describes real estate, with an emphasis on a specific land where God’s people live, work, and worship. The Bible seldom communicates in abstractions or theories but often in visible and tangible things.

We should not be surprised since the Lord created a whole physical universe that can be seen and touched. And the Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, also came as a man who was seen and touched (John 1:14; 1 John 1:1). When we get to heaven and join that great heavenly congregation, we will not be floating around on some cloud as a vapor or mist. I believe we shall be walking around with a resurrection body in a new heaven and a new earth (Isaiah 65-66; Revelation 21-22).

I quote Dale Ralph Davis here, 

“So perhaps we can say that Israel’s concrete and tangible inheritance in Canaan is a foreshadowing of our own. Our full possession is in new heavens and a new earth, not in some earth-less, fleshless, void. Our full expectation ought not to be in dying and going to heaven, as the usual cliché has it. The New Testament language is that believers, when they die, are “with the Lord” (1 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Luke 23:43). But the New Testament always lifts our eyes and fixes our minds upon the fullness of our hope, the redemption of our bodies on resurrection day at the return of our Lord (Rom. 8:23; Phil. 3:20-21; 1 Thess. 4:16-17; 1 Cor. 15).”

Davis, Dale Ralph. No Falling Words. Baker Book House 1988