Everybody, what is going on? You know what time it is. You're listening to join the Journey podcast with your host, Emma, daughter.

Thanks for joining. Today, we're reading Numbers 34, and the question is, what can we learn about the boundaries God sets?

As a fifth grader, I used to get to roam the streets of my neighborhood with my friend Brittany.

And the best part about hanging out with Brittany was that she had an electric scooter.

And since we were tiny fifth graders, we were both able to ride on it together at the same time, which was amazing.

And we felt like we had so much freedom and honestly thought we were so grown up, like driving, we thought,

all over the neighborhood on that scooter. But our parents set boundaries. We were never allowed

to leave the neighborhood. And here in Numbers 34, we're seeing the Lord lay out the boundaries

for the people of Israel. We read in verse two, give these instructions

to the Israelites. When you come into the land of Canaan, which I am giving you as your special

possession, these will be the boundaries. And for starters, though, we've got to understand what

Canaan is. In the 15th century, Canaan was a widely recognized geographic region.

Historians have primarily learned about Canaan through Egyptian texts, so we know at some

point in time, Canaan was likely under Egyptian control. It was a real place, it had real rulers,

and those rulers changed. Now, extra-biblical works, that's historical texts outside of the Bible,

they don't lay out Canaan's boundaries as specifically as the Bible does, but generally,

historical texts describe Canaan with the same boundaries. So all that said, we've got to remember

that Canaan was and is a very real place. It just might have had different names throughout history.

And it can be easy to think of it as this make-believe land from the past, but it truly is a very real and tangible region of land.

And God told Israel he was giving them Canaan, this very real place as a special possession.

The NIV, it reads that the land would be allotted to Israel as an inheritance. And this raises an interesting question.

If the land God was giving Israel was a gift, an inheritance, why did they have to conquer the land?

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