One of the features of the Bible is that the people, especially the "heroes", are very human. After the stiking the rock incident (Numbers 20:1-13) God had told Moses that he would never enter the Promised Land, but would only see it from afar.
Here we see that Moses acted in obedience since that day, continuing to faithfully lead the Israelites, and preparing Joshua to lead them into the land. Yet Moses still longed to be able to go into the land himself. So he pleaded with God to be allowed to actually go in and see the land. The Lord refused, but let Moses see the land from top of a mountain, and focus on preparing Joshua.
So we see several things here about prayer. First, Moses was bold enough to ask God to be allowed to see the land. God is perfectly capable of dealing with our personalities, our desires, fears and hang-ups. Second, Prayer is not a slot machine, it is a relationship. We can easily fall into one of two traps in prayer. One is to be so vague that we never really ask for anything, or don't really expect God to actually do anything. The other is to focus only on being "specific in prayer". Now there are times to be specific, indeed Moses was specific here, and times when getting a positive answer should be our expectation. At other times it is about God dealing with our hearts and minds.
So the two battles that they had won served as a lesson for Joshua, showing him that God could indeed enable them to defeat their enemies. Moses won these battles so that Joshua could learn from them and win even greater battles in the future. Sometimes we win battles for the benefit of others.
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