On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.
Within evangelicalism, there is an understanding that the purpose of the Christian’s life is to “cross the Jordan” and to enter into the “victorious Christian life”.
While this sounds great, and even Christian, it not only does damage to the hymn, but also to the New Testament’s use of the imagery of the Old Testament, by completely misreading the biblical storyline and leaving damaging false conclusions in its wake.
Let’s set the scene.
In its familiar revivalist form, the imagery follows, rightly, that Egypt represents bondage to sin, and the Red Sea represents conversion. However, the break happens when you get to the wilderness, as it is said to represent the defeated or carnal Christian life, and that crossing the Jordan is representative of the believer entering into a higher, more committed, “victorious” Christian life.
This scheme emerged from the nineteenth-century Higher Life movement and was later popularized through Keswick teaching, revivalism, and fundamentalism, which was promoted by men like D.L. Moody1, F.B. Meyer2, Andrew Murray3, C. I. Scofield4, and Lewis Sperry Chafer5, among others.
The problem is that it depends on an eschatological mistake that places the Christian, and the church, on the wrong side of the river. But don’t take my word for it; take the word of the apostle Paul, because his use of Israel in 1 Corinthians 10 should be enough to overturn the whole scheme.
In 1 Corinthians 10, the wilderness generation is not given to illustrate the so-called ‘carnal’ Christian; rather, Paul argues that the church is to be seen and understood through the eyes of Israel in the wilderness. Paul addresses the Corinthian church through the history of wilderness Israel because Israel’s experience functions typologically for the church living between redemption and consummation, stating that the believers have been delivered, having passed through judgment, and that they are recieving the provision of the Word as they travel towards their inheritance.
He then makes the case that the greatest danger facing them is the danger that Israel encountered, and that danger is unbelief. However, Paul’s warning not to fall in the wilderness only really works if the wilderness is the Christian’s life between redemption and consummation.
Within the Marrow tradition, this is the same way Ebenezer Erskine describes the church in this present world as “a wilderness, or a weary land, through which they are travelling toward their own home.”6
Prior to the last century or so, and certainly not in the New Testament, the church was not divided into wilderness Christians and Canaan Christians. Instead, the church as a whole is called a pilgrim people traveling through the wilderness toward what Erskine calls “the Canaan that is above.”7
Further, her present posture is not one of victory or carnality, but of weakness and dependence, as she is “leaning upon her beloved”8
Paul, again in Hebrews (Yes, I take Paul to be the author, but that is an argument for another day.), places the church alongside the wilderness generation and instructs it to persevere until entering into God’s rest. The logic of Hebrews is not that some Christians have entered this rest experientially while others remain behind in a carnal wilderness condition. Erskine, quoting this text, says that the believer comes through the wilderness expecting “a quiet rest on the other side, or beyond the wilderness,” and grounds that expectation in Hebrews 4:9 that “There remaineth a rest to the people of God.”9 He even describes God as having made “a promise of life and rest, on the other side of death, through Christ.”10 Erskine clearly believed that wilderness belongs to the present pilgrimage; rest belongs beyond it.
That is why the idea of crossing over Jordan into a supposed victorious life is in reality simply an over-realized eschatology. It takes the biblical categories of inheritance, rest, possession, and arrival and turns them into a stage of the Christian experience that is somehow attainable before glorification.
Again, Erskine’s language is almost a direct contradiction of this idea. The believer, he says, is one “whose life in this world is a life of faith and dependence on Christ”; while traveling through the wilderness, “she leans on her beloved.”11 He then explains the condition of the present age with Paul’s own language: “Here we walk by faith, not by sight.” Thus it cannot be understood that deficient Christians remain in the wilderness, but that wilderness is the sphere in which the Christian life is lived by faith upon Christ.
Not only does it have an over-realized eschatology, but it also creates a two-tier Christianity where there are supposedly ordinary believers who have been saved from Egypt but continue to wander, and then there are victorious believers who have entered Canaan. The issue is that this kind of distinction is not between immature and mature Christians, nor between faithful and unfaithful conduct, but between two supposed modes of Christian existence. This is why within this type of system, “total surrender” sermons and appeals to finally get serious with God abound.
It also shifts the center of sanctification away from Christ and toward the believer. Once the wilderness is defined as the place of the carnal or nominal Christian, the ordinary struggle with sin that is normative to the Christian life (Rom. 7), becomes evidence that the believer is obviously not serious enough. Instead of depending on Christ, the question becomes whether he has finally yielded everything, finally let go, finally gotten right, etc. The decisive factor in the Christian life is relocated from Christ’s sufficiency to the believer’s act of surrender.
The great irony is that the wilderness is meant to expose human weakness and establishes dependence upon God. It was in the wilderness that God gave manna and water from the rock to a people that could not provide for themselves, and He led them because they could not find their own way.
Israel was not sustained in the wilderness by what the wilderness could produce. Rather, as Erskine put it, the believer’s provision does not come “out of the earth”; but like Israel’s manna, “it comes from above.”12
He then asks how the Christian is fed in the wilderness and answers that Christ, the bread of life, comes to his people and “they gather it by faith, and feed on it.”13 Wilderness existence, according to Erskine and according to Paul, is not sub-Christian existence; rather, it is Christ-dependent existence.
To make the wilderness illustrate a subnormal Christianity is to miss the entire theological and eschatological point of the wilderness itself. The very things that higher-life preaching treats as evidence that the Christian needs to leave the wilderness - things like weakness, conflict, dependence, hunger, thirst, and the necessity of continually looking to Christ - are precisely the things the wilderness typology is intended to teach us about life in the present age.
The Christian life is not Egypt, conversion, wilderness defeat, Jordan surrender, and Canaan victory. Instead, the pattern of the New Testament is redemption, wilderness pilgrimage by faith, and final inheritance. We have been brought out, but we have not yet arrived.
The believer, as Erskine articulates, is “bending his course heavenwards,” growing in grace, fighting sin, receiving strength from Christ, and moving toward glory, but he does all of this as a pilgrim.14
This brings us back to the hymn. The Christian in “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” is standing on this side of the river and looking across toward Canaan as the inheritance still ahead. Likewise, we have not crossed Jordan yet, and any theology that tells us otherwise has confused the present age with the age to come.
D. L. Moody, Secret Power; or, The Secret of Success in Christian Life and Christian Work (Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1881)
F. B. Meyer, Israel, a Prince with God: The Story of Jacob Retold (London: Morgan & Scott, 1909),
Andrew Murray, The Deeper Christian Life: An Aid to Its Attainment (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1895), chap. 4, “Out of and Into,” 15.
C. I. Scofield, ed., The Scofield Reference Bible: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments (New York: Oxford University Press, 1917), note on Num. 15:1.
Lewis Sperry Chafer, He That Is Spiritual (Philadelphia: Sunday School Times Company, 1918), 21.
Ebenezer Erskine, “The Believer’s Journey from the Wilderness of This World to the Heavenly Canaan,” in The Whole Works of the Rev. Ebenezer Erskine, Minister of the Gospel at Stirling: Consisting of Sermons and Discourses, on Important and Interesting Subjects, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: William S. & A. Young, 1836), 886.
Ibid., 887.
Ibid., 888.
Ibid., 896.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 893.
Ibid.
Ibid., 892.