Q. 20.-"Is not the Jordan the eastern boundary of the promised land?

" I quote a few passages as to this :-(Gen 12:5.) ' Into the land of Canaan they came.'-' And the Lord . . . said, Unto thy seed will I give this land.' The tribes of Reuben and Gad said, ' Bring us not over Jordan.' (Num. 32:5.) And Moses rebukes them for objecting to going over into ' the land which the Lord had given them.' All this shows the Jordan to be the eastern boundary.

"But in Josh. 1:2, the word is, 'Moses my servant is dead; now, therefore, arise:go over this Jordan,-thou, and all this people, unto the land which I give to them, even to the children of Israel, . . . from the wilderness and this Lebanon, even unto the great river, the river Euphrates-all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun.' Again, in Ex. 23:31:'And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river.'-the river Euphrates, no doubt.

"Does not 'from the desert unto the river' mean a north and south measurement? If so, what is meant by (Josh. 1:2) 'From the wilderness and this Lebanon,' since the wilderness was south and Lebanon north of the land? Does the land widen out north of the Jordan to the head waters of the Euphrates, the Jordan being the eastern boundary along its course?"

Ans.-In all the references to Israel's inheritance in the land, we have to distinguish between God's original (and unrepenting) thought for them, which is yet to be fulfilled, and the partial way in which they realized it under the legal covenant. When they are finally settled there in full blessing, Jordan will not be the boundary at all, but the portion of each tribe will cross it from east to west, so as practically to obliterate it. On the other hand, in Numbers, it is clearly failure in the two tribes and a half taking their inheritance on the east side.

These things are, as all else, types for us. God has called us with a heavenly calling, and to take up with earth is to renew the failure of Reuben and Gad. Yet, as co-heirs with Christ, we are to reign over the earth also in the day when God's full thought as to us shall be shown out,-the river of death completely obliterated.