RiverTigress
Moderator
It is God's desire that His people come together to share in both the work and the joy of the things He has prepared for them, and to facilitate this He establishes leaders to provide a unified direction for the people to go. This has its advantages, but it has some disadvantages too, which is why God's usage of leaders at first was as temporary positions to be held for accomplishing certain goals rather than more permanent leadership like the kings the people eventually demanded and suffered for.
One of those disadvantages is the people's tendency to place their faith in the leader himself rather than in God who is working through the leader. The death of Moses had to be very hard for the people. Even for all their grumbling and murmuring he had been their guide and visionary throughout the whole journey from Egypt and the tendency was probably strong for them to see him as their provider rather than God Himself. There is often a lot of fear that when a leader is called away from a successful venture, that the venture will subsequently crumble and fail because people err in placing more faith in the man than the God behind the man. When the time came for God to call Moses away from his people, He did not leave those people empty-handed but still continued to fully provide for them through a new vessel of His choosing. There is no such thing as "unforseen circumstances" in the eyes of God, and there is nothing that can happen that he has not already completely accounted and prepared for.
Conversely, someone who is called to be a leader can be tempted to allow his lack of faith in himself overshadow his faith in God. God usually doesn't ask people how they feel about leadership before assigning them the job, and if someone thinks too much about their own inadequacies they can forget that God has the power to overcome even those. There is no shortage of foolishness and error in the heart of any human being, but even the greatest of fools isn't powerful enough to completely mess up God's plan.
In this story, Moses had a hard enough time keeping his people in line even having performed so many miracles proving God's presence among them, and now Joshua's going to inherit this rebellious people that he will soon be taking into war without the benefit of having done anything great yet in the people's eyes. It would be very easy for him to fall victim to thinking he wasn't man enough for the job, but the thing is nobody is man enough for the job but fortunately it's not man we have to rely on to see the job done. There were only two things God asked of Joshua in giving him his position: to be strong and courageous in his faith and to keep the book of the law. As long as these two things are done, God can take care of the rest, promising "As I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee."
