It is NOT genetics!

4/16/2017

Quick thought: you all remember Caleb, right? He was one of the twelve spies who entered Canaan. He and Joshua were the only two who brought back a positive, faith-filled report. When the other ten started inciting panic by talking about all the fortified cities and strong populations and giants in the land, “Caleb calmed down the crowd and said, ‘Let’s go and take the land. I know we can do it!’” When the people bought the bad report and wanted to choose new leaders to take them back to Egypt, Caleb and Joshua risked their lives by tearing their clothes and rebuking and exhorting the crowd. “The entire community intended to stone them” together with Moses and Aaron, and the mob would have gone through with it if God’s glory hadn’t appeared at the very last moment. God announced that the Israelites over age 20 would die in the desert, but added: “I’ll bring my servant Caleb into the land that he explored, and his descendants will possess it because he has a different spirit, and he has remained true to me.” And years later, when the Israelites were finally in the Promised land, Caleb went to his old friend and said: “Joshua, it was forty-five years ago that the Lord told Moses to make that promise, and now I am eighty-five. Even though Israel has moved from place to place in the desert, the Lord has kept me alive all this time as he said he would. I’m just as strong today as I was then, and I can still fight as well in battle. So I’m asking you for the hill country that the Lord promised me that day.”

You do remember that Caleb, right? One of my heroes. :) Yours too?

But what you may not realize (I didn’t until today), was that Caleb was not an ethnic Israelite, descended from Jacob. At some point Caleb’s dad or grandfather must have gone to Egypt and perhaps married into the Judah tribe. But Caleb and his ancestors were originally from the Kenaz clan, and Kenaz was a descendent of Esau, not Jacob. That’s right, Esau—the guy who sold his inheritance for a bowl of beans, married a couple of Hittite women and one of Ishmael’s daughters, and settled down on the fringe of the Promised Land. The same Esau who would forever symbolize the “godless, immoral” person we aren’t going to let each other become (Hebrews 12:15-17). Esau’s physical blood flowed in Caleb’s physical veins, but Caleb was “of a different spirit,” and that made ALL the difference.

The point? Most of you have parents or grandparents who were pagans. Others have physical ancestors who “escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” only to be “again entangled in them and overpowered” so that their “last state has become worse for them than the first.” And some of you worry about that fact. You wonder if an apple can really fall far from the tree, as the saying goes. You wonder if your physical ancestry somehow dooms you to spiritual failure. Caleb, and a whole cloud of witnesses, are here to tell you that IT DOES NOT. Physical DNA may control everything from earlobes to toenails, but it does NOT control your spiritual future. There is no gene for faith, hope or love! You can be as close to Jesus as you choose to be, and as full of Him as He can make you (and that’s a lot!), just like everyone else. And even if you don’t believe Caleb, believe Jesus, who told us, “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.”

Oh, let the Spirit give you life! Put no obstacle in His way, like the silly (but very common and tenacious) notion that you are limited somehow by your ancestry. “The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.” Believe it!!!

xoxox, —dz