Exodus 23:20-33--Conquest of Canaan Promised

Conquest of Canaan Promised
20 “Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. 21 Pay careful attention to him and obey his voice; do not rebel against him, for he will not pardon your transgression, for my name is in him.

22 “But if you carefully obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries.

​23 “When my angel goes before you and brings you to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, and I blot them out, 24 you shall not bow down to their gods nor serve them, nor do as they do, but you shall utterly overthrow them and break their pillars in pieces. 25 You shall serve the Lord your God, and he will bless your bread and your water, and I will take sickness away from among you. 26 None shall miscarry or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days. 27 I will send my terror before you and will throw into confusion all the people against whom you shall come, and I will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. 28 And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites from before you. 29 I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you. 30 Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land. 31 And I will set your border from the Red Sea to the Sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates, for I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. 32 You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. 33 They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against me; for if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

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I want to say immediately that I don't believe this is a passage that we as Christians should appropriate as the promise of the Promised Land as a physical kingdom was promised to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but that we as Christians who are spiritual descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are waiting for the ultimate fulfillment of this promise in the New Heaven and the New Earth and the New Jerusalem that is prepared for The Bride of Christ, the Church.  It will literally be heaven on earth and that is our Promised Land and kingdom that we are waiting for.  We hold no claim to the physical kingdom that is part of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants for the Hebrew people, but that doesn't mean that we don't have something to learn from this passage as we study it today.

We see the angel of the LORD described in the beginning of this passage.  He is a special character in the Bible and is unlike any mere angel that we would normally think of.  Personally, I think "the angel of the LORD" when it appears with the definite article "the" in the text is talking about a preincarnate appearance of the second person of the trinity (I don't mind if you call him Jesus, though technically it would be better to call Him "the Son" at this point because He hadn't been given His human name in our timeline yet).  That is not to say that I think that Jesus is an angel.  The word "angel" in Hebrew here simply means "a messenger or representative" (like a diplomatic envoy, emissary or ambassador from the king that has a message and speaks with authority and probably has some power to back up that authority).  This word can and does get used to describe "the theophanic angel" which is "the angel of the LORD" that I am speaking of.and that I think is described in this passage.  Don't worry you don't agree with me here, it shouldn't change the meaning of the text--I just see where God says "I will send my angel" and that's an unusual verbiage as normally generic angels would be referred to as "an angel."  We usually don't see a personalized relationship between God and any angels, only the Father and the Son.  If we interpret this as "I will send my messenger" then we know that's exactly the role that Jesus fulfilled.  One of the main ways we know the difference between "an angel of the Lord" and "the angel of the LORD" in the Old Testament is that regular angels will not accept worship--only God deserves that.  But we do see this special "angel" who is worshiped as God and readily accepts that worship and sometimes even commands it (like at the burning bush).  This only makes sense if this were one of the three persons of the Trinity and we only know one of them that takes one physical form--we are told that no one has seen the Father and we only ever see the Holy Spirit manifested as a dove and as fire in the New Testament.  I have trouble believing that God commanded the people to obey the word of a mere angel and that He would base His covenant with them solely on their obedience to an angel--even an archangel like Michael that we know his role is to protect the nation of Israel (perhaps this passage is talking about Michael), but it makes a lot more sense to me that the Father it talking about obedience to the Son and true Israel being disciples of Christ that will "obey everything I have commanded you" from the very beginning of the nation--the same command that Jesus gives to us as His disciples when He establishes the Church in The Great Commission.

The people are told that the Lord will give them victory over the people living in the land of Canaan (the Promised Land) and they must swear they will never take the false gods of those people as their own if they want to experience the blessings that God is promising here--I think we can see from the wording here that God will fulfill His part regardless of their obedience and already knows they are not going to obey and God is laying out the case for why they are going to miss out on these blessings that He wants to give them.

If they followed the Lord their God and served Him only, they would have their water and bread blessed by the LORD, they would be fruitful and multiply in the land and their women would not miscarry or be barren, and the people would live long lives that were lived to their fullest (I think "full" lives speaks of both quantity of years and quality of life here).  God would fight their battles for them and drive out their enemies before them, even using nature on their side as the hornets would take sides with God's people and drive out the enemies of the LORD from the land before the people ever went into battle, but that it would not be done quickly but would be done gradually.  All this was part of God's plan to protect the Land that was promised to his people, because even the evil Canaanites were stewards of the land and were keeping it from going fallow and keeping the wild beasts in check.  God did not want the land to be desolate and go wild as man has a role to have dominion over all of creation and to establish God's order--even though they often do this imperfectly.

God promises that eventually they will increase in number and will possess the entire land, but it's going to be a process.  They will need to depend on Him daily for many years during the Conquest and many years to come as not all their enemies would be defeated completely in the Conquest because there would be enemies from outside the Land (the Philistines, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians to name a few) who the people would be contending with who would desire to possess the Land that had been promised to them--even the Romans at the time of Christ fall into this category, and the people were looking for a Messiah that would overthrow the occupying enemy force and return the Land to the People.  But Jesus had to explain that He came for a different purpose--to free them from a greater enemy and to promise them a better kingdom and a better land--a kingdom "not of this world" as He would tell Pilate during His trial.

God gives much more land to the people than we imagine and we have yet to ever see the people of God take full possession of the Land that God had promised to them.  What are the borders of this Promised Land?  The Red Sea to the South, the Mediterranean Sea (the Sea of the Philistines) to the west, and the Euphrates River to the East.  This is a HUGE plot of land and maybe King Solomon came close to conquering all it before the kingdom was divided.  I'd also include all the area south in Arabia between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and the Sinai Peninsula (as the the Red Sea is the western border of the Sinai region).  Imagine a world where God's people were fruitful and multiplied and filled the entirety of all of this land--that's what God said he had planned for His people.