The Way Through the Wilderness

“The Way Through the Wilderness”

“Streams in the Desert; Joy in the Journey”

Rev. Alison Longstaff, March 1, 2015

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Isaiah 43: 16-21, Matthew 4:1-11, Secrets of Heaven, Paragraph 2334

The hardest thing about writing a sermon is not “what to say” but “what NOT to say.”  There is so much bounty in God’s Word.  So many gems of wisdom!  This thing was ten pages long when I started it, but fear not, I did some relentless trimming.  I pray that the outcome is a lovely bonsai, not a… well, mangled bush.  So here we go.

“I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

In 2007 I had the privilege of going to the Holy Land. I breathed in the clear, clear air and walked under the brilliant blue sky.  The air is clear and the sky so blue because there is almost no humidity—no airborne water vapor at all.  You see, most of southern Israel is a desert.  Water is a rare and precious commodity.  Unless regularly irrigated, or immediately after a rain, nothing grows.  Nothing, except the occasional most drought-resistant shrubs. Maine is a lush rain forest in comparison to southern Israel.  There is simply NO WATER.  For miles and miles there is nothing but rough, extremely rugged rock.  This isn't a soft, sandy desert, but a deeply ridged and rocky landscape. 

The craggy mountains are sliced and intersected by “wadis,” or deep gullies carved by rare flash floods.  Crossing this landscape before the advent of modern highways involved a lot of climbing and descending into steep ravines, stumbling over large boulders, or taking repeated wide detours to find a less challenging path.

  Think about it: John’s prophesy that “every valley will be lifted up and every mountain and hill made level” takes on a whole new meaning when one  considers what must have been involved in trying to navigate such a hostile geography.  This is the wilderness the Children of Israel wandered in for 40 years; this is the wilderness in which our Lord Jesus suffered his forty days of temptation.

But that’s not all.  Being a desert, not only do the temperatures rise to scorching highs in the day, they plummet to near freezing at night, because, with no suspended water vapor trapping the heat near the surface, all the accumulated heat disperses back into the atmosphere at nightfall.  The lack of water in a desert impacts every aspects of the environment, rendering it shockingly inhospitable to human life. 

You and I may never have to contend with the actual Negev wilderness, but each one of us is called to cross our own spiritual Negev.  To make our own journey from the spiritual Egypt to our personal Holy Land, you and I must traverse this spiritual wilderness.

Saying “yes” to this journey invites intense spiritual work. No amount of physical wealth or powerful technology or top-notch insurance can make any difference when we face this personal gauntlet.  Only one thing can help us on that journey, and that is the presence of God—the original local nomadic guide, with his wisdom and compassion.  God’s love and wisdom are the only things that will get us through.  These show up in the Bible as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that guided the children of Israel in the wilderness. 

So where do I get me some of them?

As I've said before, Swedenborg talks a lot about love and wisdom.  He tells us that they are two distinctly different things that are in relationship inside us.  He tells us that the bread of communion represents God’s love, and the wine represents God’s wisdom.  In another place he says again the bread represents God’s wisdom, and the wine represents God’s love.  Wait….

Is the bread the love, or the wisdom?  Is the wine the wisdom or the love?  Huh?

The answer is: “Yes.”

Deeper study of Swedenborg’s material shows us the very yin/yang relationship between these two essential capacities of our nature. Wisdom holds deep within it tremendous love (or it isn't real wisdom), and genuine love is always guided by a deep inner wisdom. The two capacities mirror each other and work together in a profound and miraculous way.  This means we can always find BOTH qualities in every correspondence.  Wine or bread can represent love or wisdom, depending on the context and the emphasis.  The same is true with many other representatives in the biblical narrative.

So, I submit that though Swedenborg tells us repeatedly that water corresponds to truth, when we are looking at a rocky, sun-baked landscape, where rocks represent truth, and sunlight represents truth, the thing that is needed for survival in this case is possibly not more truth.  In considering the wilderness and surviving spiritual temptation, it is entirely possible that our need for water could represent our need for supportive, utterly essential life-giving love.

Can water represent love?  Well, think about it.  Love, feelings, and emotions—are they static and solid, or fluid and difficult to restrain? What is more likely to swamp us, ideas or feelings?  We can “drown” in emotions, be “flooded” with feelings and “filled” with love—all language that suggests a fluid nature more like water than rocks. Our bodies are 98% water, and Swedenborg tells us love is our very life.  We are gestated in water, baptized in water, and will die without water long before starvation can carry us off.  So for me at least, water and our need for water images our need for love far more than truth, and this is NOT contradictory to Swedenborg’s message.  You don’t have to agree with me, but when it comes to crossing my spiritual wilderness, nine times out of ten it is love and comfort I need to get me through.  It is the warmth of a hug, the reassuring squeeze of the hand of friendship—not a book or a quote or a lecture.  Honestly, when you are truly hurting, which is more helpful, a hug or a platitude?  A Kleenex or being told, “Don’t cry?”  A silent, sympathetic, non judging presence or a sermon?

Secrets From Heaven, Paragraph 1690:3 says, “Every temptation [which is what the “wilderness” corresponds to] is an assault upon the love in which a person is, and the temptation is in the same degree as is the love. If the love is not assaulted, there is no temptation. To destroy anyone's love is to destroy their very life; for their love is their life.” Emanuel Swedenborg

We are in temptation when our love is under attack---not our ideas, our love.  Love manifests and cloaks itself in ideas, but never let us mistake the fact that any genuine temptation is an attack on what we love, not what we think.  Confusion and deep questions and a crisis of faith will only occur in the midst of such a temptation, but they are not the real issue.  Genuine spiritual temptation means what we love is under attack.  And love is always good.  

Even twisted love, otherwise known as evil, derives any power it has from the kernel of goodness at its core.  And it is the attack on that goodness that creates the suffering.  It is the attack on God-with-us that creates the pain.  Jesus suffered because this is what suffers in us.  We are not wrong when we are suffering temptation.  It means that we are spiritually alive.  It means we are responding to God’s call to live and love more deeply!  It hurts like…well, hell but please don’t waste one scrap of energy beating yourself up for being in temptation if you are.  As Winston Churchill said, “When you are going through hell, keep going.”  Don’t beat yourself up for being there, keep going!

So, knowing all that we know about spiritual temptation, what do we do to prepare ourselves?  Given our Swedenborgian-status-special-Biblical-knowledge, how do you and I prepare to be Swat-team buff and ready to face our personal wilderness crossing?  How do we become wilderness-crossing-ninjas—not only surviving but ready to rescue everyone else?

Step one, we get over ourselves.  The twelve steppers have it right: “We admitted we were powerless before our personal wilderness….”

The truth is we will probably survive about as well as anyone else does.  We may even end up whining and complaining as loudly and often as the most cantankerous of the children of Israel.  We may give up again and again on God, even having seen the miraculous provision of water and manna for our survival in every prior experience. 

Because the story of the Children of Israel in the wilderness and their repeatedly failing faith and almost ADD inability to trust in their God isn't in the Bible to shame us into doing better than they did.  It is there to say, “This is what the journey looks like.  This is what mortals do in this process.”

We are the ones who get stuck on thinking we’re supposed to be better than we are.  We are the ones who think that somehow, because we supposedly “know better,” we should be able to do better.  That’s called pride.  Honestly, looking at the whole of human history, how often has “knowing better” ever meant we chose to do better?  Our idealism is adorable, but rarely realistic.

The Lord’s miraculous love and tremendous wisdom knows that we have lousy spiritual attention spans.  God is way ahead of us.  It is kind of darling how earnest we are and how hard we try to be perfect.  But the truth is, we are two-year-olds trying to do quantum physics here.  It is important to us that we try, and it is good for us to try, but the victory ever and always belongs to God. It is probably good for our pride that we don’t realize just how powerless we are.  But the truth is, despite all their shortcomings, God brought the Children of Israel through the wilderness intact, and God will do it for you and me as well no matter how inept we might feel.  We just have to show up.  We just have to say, “Yes,” to the journey. Then the only thing that might make the journey more comfortable is letting go of doing it more perfectly than anyone else.  You won’t.  I won’t.  We are not that powerful.  And that is perfect.

God’s power.  God’s love.  The spiritual journey to which our God calls us is the journey to venture more deeply into love.  Love equals compassion, and the one who needs compassion the most from you and me is not our lousy neighbor, not the idiot from our work-place, not even Hitler.   The one who needs compassion the most from you and me is our own, broken selves.  Yourself.  Myself.

I’m going to share something with you:  My particular heredity gifted me with an inner critic so harsh as to rival the most abusive nasty parent.  It never was and probably never will be more criticism that I have needed, but more compassion, more gentleness, and far more patient loving-kindness than I would ever naturally give myself.  I have had to get over an enormous pride—pride, I tell you, that was not because I ever truly felt I deserved it, but pride that is a massive defense against the relentless, merciless, profoundly abusive inner critic (that I now know is a legacy of my particular genetic line).  A cruel personal demon.  A nasty hereditary trait that is not unusually special by the way—I don’t even get to take pride in how harshly that inner critic can abuse me.  Dang!  Because a vicious inner critic is not even as rare or special as my pride would like to think.

But the point isn't whether I'm prideful or special.  The point is that what has helped heal me—what has helped get me through that leg of my wilderness—was not stones.  Which is to say, not criticism or advice.  Not the stone of “I shouldn't be so proud.”  Not the stone of “I should love God more.” Not the stone of “I should try harder;” but the life giving, miraculous experience of being radically loved in the midst of feeling so miserably unlovable.  Immense, overwhelming, utterly delighted tenderness.  Being bathed in that cleansing benevolence when we are so utterly dry is what saves you and me, and continues to save us in the midst of the glaring sun and harsh and scraping landscape of personal temptation. 

That God loves you and me even in our profound brokenness is the saving truth of God’s love.  It is true for me, and it is true for you.  Show up. Care.  And forgive yourself for being so imperfect. Who did you think you were, God?  We are so cute.

“I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert,” says our God.

It is the Lord’s bounteous, miraculous love that lifts the valleys before us and turns the mountains into plains, not our preparedness, not our amassed store of wisdom, not how many bible quotes we have memorized or how much Swedenborg we know.  It is God’s love that does that work—the spiritual water that fills every cell of our spiritual bodies and that sustains us and operates at levels far beneath our conscious control.  That is what wins the victory and transforms the desert.  If we can just let go of thinking we have to do it perfectly—when we can stop judging ourselves so harshly and stop trying so hard, we just might open ourselves into relaxing into God’s providence.  And when we can do that, then, then we will see how the river of God’s love lifts up and softens that barren rock and causes the desert to bloom with joy and life.  Amen.

The Readings:

Isaiah 43:16-21

Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, and a path through the mighty waters,
Who brings forth the chariot and horse, the army and the power (They shall lie down together, they shall not rise; They are extinguished, they are quenched like a wick):
“Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing, now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The beast of the field will honor Me, the jackals and the ostriches, because I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to My people, My chosen. This people I have formed for Myself; they shall declare My praise.

Matthew 4:1-11 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And when He had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterward He was hungry. Now when the tempter came to Him, he said, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”

But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.’”

Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: ‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’ and, ‘In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”

Jesus said to him, “It is written again, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’”

Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.”

Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’”

Then the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.

Secrets From Heaven, Paragraph 2334 “All temptation includes feelings of doubt about the Lord's presence and mercy, about salvation, and so on; for people who experience temptation suffer great emotional distress, even to the point of desperation. They are kept in this state primarily so that they may eventually be confirmed in the certainty that all things are governed by the Lord's mercy, and that they are saved through Him alone….” Emanuel Swedenborg

Is the Lord With Us? Finding trust

"Is the Lord With Us?"

Finding Trust in the Face of Doubt

Rev. Alison Longstaff, May 18, 2014

Original version preached October 30^th 2011 in Ontario

Bath Church of the New Jerusalem

Joshua 3:7-17; Matthew 23:1-12; TCR portions 283, 284

Today we are looking at the story of the Children of Israel at the brink of the Jordan River.  They are at the very edge of all that they have dreamed of and worked so hard for.  The Promised Land is within reach!  It is steps away!  However, they are a rag-tag bunch and have arrived fairly ill-equipped to take the last few steps.  They are ill equipped except for one little detail---the Lord is with them and has been with them every step of the way.

Now let me set the scene.  The Jordan River is not such a big river.  If you visited the site of the crossing today, you might wonder what all the fuss was about, as it is little more than a stream.  It runs today at about one tenth of the size it ran at the time of this story, due to all sorts of redirection of water into field irrigation and housing developments.   But back then, it would have been about the width of the Saco River as it passes through Fryeburg. Picture the Saco River as it passes Fryeburg, and you would have an approximate picture of the Jordan River at the time of our story.  The Children of Israel simply have to cross this river and they will have achieved their dream.

Except... the children of Israel arrived at the Jordan during the time of the spring flooding.

So, picture the Saco River at its most frighteningly rough—overflowing its banks and thundering by with an overabundance of snow-melt or rain water, and this is more like what the Children of Israel were facing.  Put yourself in their sandals.  Remember that you grew up wandering in the desert, and while you are skilled at surviving all sorts of difficult desert conditions, navigating an overabundance of water is not your strong suit.  In fact, you have no idea how to swim.

Furthermore, at the point at which they crossed, the shoreline is not a nice sandy, flat stretch of land.  No, the banks here are steep and covered in thick thorn-bushes.  The ground is treacherous and difficult. You really can’t see your footing, and one slip could tumble you into the maelstrom.

Do you have the picture?  Here you are, on a steep slope, grasping a thorn bush, staring down into a roaring cataract, and you can’t swim---not at all.  All you have to do is cross this thing.  That’s all.  Simple.  So, how are you feeling?  You are just meters from your lifetime dream-come-true! Aren't you excited?  You must be raring to go! 

Hmmm.  Given the evidence in your face, how confident do you feel?  God has assured you that he is with you and that you will enter the Promised Land.  You have grown up with the story of how God miraculously parted the Red Sea for your parents, but as you stand in the thorns and look at the leaping, gushing flood, maybe you are having a few misgivings?

Now remember that the stories in the Bible are always speaking to the reader in real time, through metaphor, poetry, and symbolism.  They are not just about some strange people, long ago, but about you and me right here, now, today.  So I ask you, as we sit here together in our modern, vinyl-clad building; with bucket-loads of money, standing room only, no trouble paying our bills, no threat of having to “grow or close” in a few years, and no big expenses looming (like an entire building repaint or a complete kitchen renovation): I ask you to try, just maybe, to feel like these people in the story did—ill-equipped for the daunting challenge ahead of them, thinking their dreams are idiotic, that their plans and vision make no sense, and that going forward now will certainly result in, well, death.  Maybe that is too big a stretch. But please try. (Tongue firmly in cheek.)

So.  Back to our story.  You are standing right at the edge of something great that God had promised you, but you have this huge, terrifying, apparently impassable obstacle between you and the finish line. Everything you know and everything your senses tell you is that you are facing certain death. 

This is a classic crisis of faith.  God has set this situation up as both a test and as ongoing proof of God’s covenant with his people.  Covenant means PROMISE, and when God makes a promise, you can bet (S)He will keep it.  The question is not whether God is with us, the question is: how ready are we in these circumstances to trust in God?  God has promised that He blesses us and blesses our efforts.  God has promised that s/he is with us again and again and proved he/r guiding presence time after time, but the people in the story are a lot like us.  Each new challenge just seems to bring a fresh wave of insecurity and doubt. Each new challenge calls us out of our comfort zone and into a deeper walk with God—a deeper trust in providence.  How ready are we to place our trust in Providence this time around?

I don’t know about you, but for me somehow it doesn't matter how many challenges God has brought me through in the past. Each new challenge requires a re-commitment on my part to trusting God’s providence.  Remembering that God has indeed gotten me through until now helps, but I want a guarantee that s/he will get me through again.  I don’t want a risk.  I don’t want to jump without a safety net.  No matter how many times God worked miracles in the wilderness for the Children of Israel, they still doubted again and again.  That sounds like me. No matter how many times things have worked out for the best in my life, there is still such a large gap between my little desire to trust and the major leap of faith often required of me.  Tiny me.  Huge leap of faith.

Does this sound familiar?

When you and I are needing to make a leap of faith, what can we possibly do to find the trust we are lacking?  Let’s take another look at today’s Scripture.  We read, “the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan…. ¹²¹³When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap.”

The first thing to note is that the ark went before.  The ark “of the covenant,” the very symbol of the promise, takes the lead before the people.  Not only was the ark the symbol of the Covenant, it was their concrete reminder that God was leading them.  In that golden box, guarded by golden angels, was the story of how God had been with them and would continue to be with them.  When the feet of the priests carrying that box touched the water, or rather, when they skidded down the steep bank into the rushing flood, the flood waters stood up in a wall and let the entire company cross the river on dry ground.  When the priests, holding up the promise, took the plunge, the obstacles withdrew. 

And so the river divides after we take the plunge.  God requires us to get our feet wet first.  The priests leading the way with the ark remind us that when we put God first, we will have success.  We have to commit to the path. We have to make the leap, skid down the bank and into the river where we can’t swim, before God can divide the water.  But because we stepped out holding fast to God’s promise and God’s ability to work miracles, the waters part.

It is interesting to note that the name of Joshua is actually the same name that the angel Gabriel tells Mary to give to the holy baby in her womb.  Joshua in Hebrew becomes Yeshua in Aramaic, which becomes Iesus (Yay-soose) in Greek, which becomes Jesus in English. So the switch of leadership from Moses to Joshua at this point in the story has deep significance.  It is describing the same sort of spiritual energetic shift that is represented by a shift from a written law (the Hebrew Testament) to a living God walking among us, (Jesus). 

Moses, throughout the Scriptures, represents the law to us.  Moses represents the time in our spiritual development when we are still learning all the various rules and teachings about how to be a good person from whatever tradition we come. To develop as a truly living spiritual being, we must start as students.  We must first learn what others have decided is true and right.  Our teachings say that God provides such spiritual and moral teaching to every person in every context, sufficient for them to make the spiritual journey.  So no matter what our background and beginnings; no matter what tradition shaped and informed our learning, at some point we must begin to distill and sift among all the things we have learned and begin to live according to our own conscience.  We begin to reject and discard all that cannot live in our lives, and we put into practice all that resonates with our new spiritual identity. And that is a shift from law and learning, to life and living.  It is the shift from Moses to Joshua, and from learning about the rules of how to be good, to actually wanting and working to be good.

The switch from Moses to Joshua is this precise shift from rules and law to an active, living, vibrant spiritual life.  There is nothing wrong with being at a stage that we are still following Moses in our spiritual walk.  It is a necessary and vital part of our spiritual development.  But, we will not enter the Promised Land until we are ready to be lead by Joshua.  We must be people of spiritual courage.

 Joshua cannot lead a dutiful, rules-in-my-head version of spirituality into the Promised Land.  The only ones ready to survive the crossing are those with a committed intention to put all that they have learned into practice.  That shift can be daunting, and we can feel like we are stepping onto far less secure spiritual footing.  It a shift from head to heart, and it is a definite move forward in faith. It involves a lot more risk-taking, and takes a lot of trust and courage, but the rewards of stepping up and following Joshua will be those of settling into a green and vibrant spiritual landscape, not the sparse fruits of wandering in a wilderness. 

Stepping up to follow Joshua and the ark into the Promised Land also requires us to shift our consciousness from that of scarcity to that of abundance.  While in the wilderness, we survive by carefully rationing what we have.  We can’t do otherwise.  We are still pretty much in the illusion that it is our own efforts that are getting us through even though all along it has been God.

But once we move to settle in the land, we can prepare for an abundance that we have only previously imagined.  We have to believe it to see it.  We have to be ready to trust, and to step out in trust for the way to open.  Until we do, we stay in the thorns and the desert.  We really can and often do choose struggle and effort and barely making it over relaxing and allowing abundance to flow in.  It is just our natures.  It can feel safer.

After all, relaxing and allowing abundance to flow in sounds like hocus-pocus to us when we are used to spiritual desert-living.  I can only say that I have seen too many examples of this shift into welcoming abundance truly working to be able to discount it any longer.  Welcoming abundance, and seeing it begin to flow can bring up all sorts of uncomfortable feelings for us: feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and the fear of the responsibility it would entail. After all, should we really have a flood of abundance, we would have to step up in our response to it.  If this church should thrive and succeed and become the booming center for spiritual life that we envision, we will all be called into a greater level of love, activity and service than ever before.  Does that frighten you a little?  We must be strong and of good courage to welcome this new future.

We are indeed approaching this venture ill-equipped to go forward.  But it never was and never has been about us being good enough or ready enough to serve God’s purpose in the world.  God takes our few loaves and fishes and makes a banquet for thousands.  God does. We just have to show up and bring our whole selves, no matter how small and inadequate we may feel.  The Lord is with us now and has been with us every step of the way.  We just have to trust and commit.

When we refuse to listen to the fear and doubt, trust in God can flow in.  When we cultivate an attitude of gratitude for all that we have and a deep faith that God is already providing, then the Lord can hold back any flood waters of fear and doubt that might be threatening, so that we can walk through on dry ground---the dry ground of peace and trust.  This journey truly needn't look like a flounder through the rushing waters of struggle.  Peace is waiting the moment our feet touch the water. But we must commit to living in the Promise. God doesn't ask for a partial commitment.  God can’t work with a “well, I’ll wait and see what others do and then decide.”  God asks for all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.

So surrender your fears and inadequacies, your “yes-but”s and your “what-if”s.  We are enough, have enough, and will be enough because God promised it. God’s intention is for each one of us to be blessed and to be a blessing.  God’s intention is for the church to be blessed and to be a blessing. The only thing standing in the way is our fear.  We can see this promise fulfilled. We can become the living, thriving center for spiritual life that we envision if we can just push aside the fear and get our feet wet.

I would like to end by quoting Marianne Williamson.  This is a passage made famous by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural speech:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves ‑ who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small doesn't serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone.

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

There is nothing to fear.  Go up and take this land.  Amen

The Readings: 

Joshua 3:7-17

⁷The Lord said to Joshua, “This day I will begin to exalt you in the sight of all Israel, so that they may know that I will be with you as I was with Moses. ⁸You are the one who shall command the priests who bear the ark of the covenant, ‘When you come to the edge of the waters of the Jordan, you shall stand still in the Jordan.’” ⁹Joshua then said to the Israelites, “Draw near and hear the words of the Lord your God.” ¹⁰Joshua said, “By this you shall know that among you is the living God who without fail will drive out from before you the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, and Jebusites: ¹¹the ark of the covenant of the Lord of all the earth is going to pass before you into the Jordan. ¹²So now select twelve men from the tribes of Israel, one from each tribe. ¹³When the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, rest in the waters of the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan flowing from above shall be cut off; they shall stand in a single heap.”

¹⁴When the people set out from their tents to cross over the Jordan, the priests bearing the Ark of the Covenant were in front of the people. ¹⁵Now the Jordan overflows all its banks throughout the time of harvest. So when those who bore the ark had come to the Jordan, and the feet of the priests bearing the ark were dipped in the edge of the water, ¹⁶the waters flowing from above stood still, rising up in a single heap far off at Adam, the city that is beside Zarethan, while those flowing toward the sea of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, were wholly cut off. Then the people crossed over opposite Jericho. ¹⁷While all Israel were crossing over on dry ground, the priests who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord stood on dry ground in the middle of the Jordan, until the entire nation finished crossing over the Jordan.

Matthew 23:1-12

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, ²“The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat; ³therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. ⁴They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. ⁵They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. ⁶They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, ⁷and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. ⁸But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. ⁹And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father—the one in heaven. ¹⁰Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. ¹¹The greatest among you will be your servant. ¹²All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Portions of True Christianity 283, 284
The Ten Commandments are a condensation or short summary of the life necessary for a human soul to find conjunction with God, and God to find conjunction with the human soul. For this reason the stone tablets containing them within the Ark were holy above all else.

Miracles happened in the Presence of the Ark of the Covenant because the Law or Ten Commandments nested within it, and the Presence of Jehovah hovered around and within it. The Lord's power that was present in the Law that was inside the Ark split the waters of the Jordan river; and as long as the ark was resting in the middle of the riverbed, the people crossed on dry land.

Joshua 1: 2-9 portions “Arise!  Go across this Jordan, you and all this people, into the land that I am giving to you. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you everywhere you go."