“Not a single one of all the good promises the Lord had given to the family of Israel was left unfulfilled; everything he had spoken came true.” Joshua 21:45
Finally, it all came together just has the Lord had said. Every single promise the Lord had made to Israel, going all the way back to Abraham, had finally come to pass. Israel could trace the hand of God throughout the generations. How He called Abraham and gave him a son. How He turned Joseph’s trouble around, taking him from a sold-out slave to the hero that saved the known world, including his own family, from starvation. To how He brought them out of Egypt, across the Red Sea on dry ground, through the forty years of wilderness, and now into the Promised Land. There was no way to doubt what God had done and they would be sure to pass it down through future generations.
There was, however, one thing that was left up to the Israelites in this equation and Joshua 21:43 tells us what that is. “So the Lord gave to Israel all the land he had sworn to give their ancestors, and they took possession of it and settled there.” The one thing that was left up to the Israelites, and to them alone, was that they themselves would have to “possess it.” The Lord God Almighty had given them the promise and the power, but it was up to them to possess it, and God Himself couldn’t do that for them. They would have to, as Paul told Timothy concerning Salvation, “lay hold” of the promises of God. The word possess in Hebrew means to seize, dispossess, take possession off, inherit, occupy, impoverish, be an heir of.
Just like the Children of Israel would have to “posses” the Promised Land, so also you and I must “possess” the promise of Salvation. Everything that Jesus did for us on the cross, in order for it to be in effect, must be possessed. From our eternal salvation, to our healing, to our deliverance, to our preservation, to our protection, our prosperity and our wholeness, we must possess all of these promises of God by faith in Jesus Christ.
Whatever it is we need today for “life and Godliness,” Jesus has delivered. So today, we POSSESS!