God as the Life of the Body 705
so shall your strength be” (Deut. 33.25). This naturally points to the
body. As long as we live on earth the Lord promises to give us
strength for it. God never presumes to grant us an extra day of life
without in addition providing extra stamina for that day. Because of
the failure of His children to claim this precious promise by faith,
they find their vitality unequal to their days on earth. In order to
provide as much energy for His children as the days He gives
require, God promises to make Himself their strength. As God lives
and as we live, so shall be our strength. Believing God’s promise, we
can say each morning upon arising and seeing the dawn that as God
lives so shall we have enablement for the day, enablement physical
as well as spiritual.
It was a common occurrence for the saints of old to know God as
the strength of their body or to experience God’s life permeating
their body. We can observe this first in Abraham: “He did not
weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as
good as dead because he was about a hundred years old, or when he
considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb” (Rom. 4.19). By faith
he begot Isaac. The power of God was displayed in a body as good as
dead. The crux of the matter here is not so much the condition of our
body as the power of God in that body.
The Scriptures describe the life of Moses by saying that he “was a
hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor
his natural force abated” (Deut. 34.7). This is speaking beyond
question about the power of God’s life in Moses’ body.
The Bible also mentions the physical condition of Caleb. After the
Israelites had entered Canaan Caleb testified:
Moses swore on that day, saying, “Surely the land on which your
foot has trodden shall be an inheritance for you and your children
for ever, because you have wholly followed the Lord my God.
And now, behold, the Lord has kept me alive, as he said, these
forty-five years since the time that the Lord spoke this word to