Did God Fulfill Every Good Promise? - The Master's Seminary

76 | The Master’s Seminary Journalthere.” Indeed says Joshua, “Not one of all the LORD’s goodpromises to the house of Israel failed; everyone was fulfilled” (Joshua21:34, 45). Even as the life ebbed from his body, Joshua reminded thechildren of Israel that the Lord had been faithful to his promises. ‘Youknow with all your heart that not one of all the good promises theLORD your God gave you has failed. Every promise has beenfulfilled, not one has failed’ (Joshua 23:14). 56One can already see the effects on Hanegraaff’s eschatology in that even in writingabout Joshua, he cannot bring himself to refer to the land as the land of Israel butrather instead refers to Joshua leading “the physical descendants of Abraham intoPalestine.” Joshua would have been totally unaware of this unbiblical designationbecause not once does God ever refer to the land He promised in the AbrahamicCovenant as “Palestine”—and this is significant—as Kaiser has previously shownthat the word “land” is the fourth most frequent substantive in the Hebrew Bible. 57The designation Palestine does not occur in the Pentateuch—or elsewhere inScripture—to describe the land promises of the Abrahamic Covenant, the nameonly coming into use many centuries later during “the times of the Gentiles” (Luke21:24). 58 The repeated use throughout the Bible, particularly the Pentateuch, is to“the land of Canaan,” such as Gen 17:8: “And I will give to you and to yourdescendants after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for aneverlasting possession; and I will be their God.” 59 Psalm 105:8–12 likewise givesreference to God and the Abrahamic Covenant and His giving of the land of Canaanas the portion of their inheritance:He has remembered His covenant forever, the word which Hecommanded to a thousand generations, the covenant which He madewith Abraham, and His oath to Isaac. Then He confirmed it to Jacobfor a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant, saying, “To you I56Hank Hanegraaff, The Apocalypse Code (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007), 178. [emphasisin the original]57Kaiser, “The Promised Land: A Biblical–Historical View,” 302.58NASB has no occurrences of the word “Palestine” in all of Scripture while the KJV has oneoccurrence in Joel 3:4, which NASB translates as “Philistia.” See J. H. Paterson, “Palestine,” in TheZondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, eds. Merrill C. Tenney and Steven Barabas (GrandRapids: Zondervan, 1976) 4:564, for the origin of the word “Palestine,” its connection with ancientPhilistia, and for a survey of the use of the word beginning with the Roman occupation and its increasedpolitical usage during the twentieth century. Paterson sites the KJV as having the name Palestine fourtimes but has three of the four uses translated as “Philistia” (Exod 15:14; Isa 14:29, 21) and only Joel 3:4as “Palestine.” “The ASV and RSV, acknowledging the origins of the name, have preferred Philistia ineach case, for its primary application was to the Philistine homeland, i.e. the coastlands of E.Mediterranean from Gaza N to Joppa. Application of the name to the wider region lying inland from thecoastline was the work of classical writers, so that by the time of the Rom. occupation it could beunderstood in its modern sense, embodied in the Rom. province of Palestina” (ibid.).59Accordance Bible Software lists 65 hits for “the land of Canaan.” Of these hits, 53 occur inthe Pentateuch, and 8 occur in the Book of Joshua. Other than the Ps 105:11 passage cited above, theother occurrences are Judg 21:12, 1 Chron 16:18, and Acts 13:19.