To be, or not to be, that is the... Choice! - Stuart Sneddon

Joshua 1:9 AMP‬‬

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not be terrified or dismayed (intimidated), for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

I was reading Joshua 1 and I got to the verse above 1:9. As often happens when I am reading the Bible a word jumped out at me. The word was 'be'. I thought to myself what does 'be' mean? I know that Hamlet questioned this in his Shakespeare play. But what does it mean?

I first got out the Oxford English Dictionary and this defines it as - 'Be: to exist'. Now this troubled me because, unlike you I'm sure, I don't always feel strong. Sometimes I am not strong at all, for instance when I'm not well!

So I decided to dig a little deeper and had a look in my Strong's concordance. This says 'to be strong' is the original word chazaq. 'Chazaq' means to 'to strengthen, prevail, harden, be strong, become strong'.

So now I thought let's look a little more at the verse. A little further on it says "Do not be terrified or dismayed". The original word for 'do not' is 'al' and 'be terrified' is 'arats' which literally means 'do not be terrified'! So no big help there!

But then it hit me, the difference between 'be strong' and 'don't be terrified' is, there is a choice. The verse finishes with "for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go". The choice is to look at, think on, worry about, that thing that causes fear OR to look at God and be strengthened because the Creator of the universe is with you!

So now you know you have a choice, what will you choose to 'be'?