By Faith to Conquest

The truth that as a person “thinks in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7), finds another illustration in Israel’s experience. On the borders of Canaan the spies, having returned from searching the country, made their report. The beauty and fruitfulness of the land were lost sight of through fear of the difficulties they perceived. The walled cities, the giant warriors, the iron chariots, daunted their faith. Leaving God out of the question, the multitude echoed the decision of the unbelieving spies, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.” Numbers 13:31.TEd 89.1

Two, however, of the twelve who had viewed the land, reasoned otherwise. “We are well able to overcome it” (vs. 30), they urged, counting God’s promise superior to giants, walled cities, or chariots of iron. Though they shared the forty years’ wandering with the doubters, Caleb and Joshua entered the Land of Promise. As courageous of heart as when he set out from Egypt, Caleb asked for and received as his portion the stronghold of the giants. In God’s strength he drove out the Canaanites, and their vineyards and olive groves became his possession. Though the cowards and rebels perished in the wilderness, the men of faith—Caleb and Joshua—ate of the grapes of Eshcol.TEd 89.2

No truth does the Bible set forth in clearer light than the peril of even one departure from right—peril both to the wrongdoer and to all whom his influence shall reach. Example has wonderful power, and when cast on the side of the evil tendencies of our nature, it becomes well-nigh irresistible.TEd 89.3

The strongest bulwark of vice in our world is not the iniquitous life of the abandoned sinner or the degraded outcast; it is that life which otherwise appears virtuous, honorable, and noble, but in which one sin is fostered, one vice indulged. To a soul struggling in secret against some giant temptation, trembling upon the very verge of the precipice, such an example is one of the most powerful enticements to sin. People who, endowed with high conceptions of life, truth, and honor, willfully transgress one precept of God’s holy law, have perverted their noble gifts into a lure to sin. Genius, talent, sympathy, even generous and kindly deeds, may thus become decoys of Satan to entice souls over the precipice of ruin.TEd 89.4

This is why God has given so many examples showing the results of even one wrong act. From the sad story of that one sin which “brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eden,” to the record of him who for thirty pieces of silver sold the Lord of glory, Bible biography abounds in these examples that are set up as beacons of warning.TEd 90.1