The Weight of Words

Joshua 9

In Joshua 9 Joshua and the Israelites make a foolish and sinful covenant with the Gibeonites, people of the land. Had Joshua sought the Lord, he would not have been so easily tricked and God's people would have avoided much heartache. Here's my question: why did God allow them to be tricked?

He could have revealed the truth to Joshua. He could have struck the Gibeonites dead. He could have done an infinite number of things to stop this from happening. Instead He taught the Israelites (and us) an important lesson: a right response to God is more important than acts of obedience.

In other words, God's priority wasn't that Israel just obey, but that they remember to rely on Him for wisdom. God will allow His people to make huge messes of their lives in order to teach them to respond rightly to Him. The painful consequences are often an ongoing lesson - we must turn to God for direction and guidance.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says it like this: Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on  your own understanding.

The Conquest Thanksgiving

Joshua 8:30-35

This is a beautiful event in Israel's history. Nestled between two mountainsides, they whole gang comes together to worship God after conquering Ai. They do so according to specific instructions left by Moses (Deuteronomy 27:2-8).

They build an altar with rough, unshaped stones taken from the ground. They were not to shape them or smooth out the rough edges. They weren't to touch them with tools at all. Why?

"[I]f you wield your tool on it, you will profane it." (Exodus 20:25)

Dirty, jagged stones were an acceptable vehicle for worshipping God. Clean cut, shaped stones were defiled and polluted...

This bit of instruction comes just after Charlton Heston delivers the 10 Commandments in his bathrobe. One of these commandments says we aren't to make graven images. It seems that man is perpetually tempted to worship the works of his hands.

Maybe God didn't want His people making an altar of shaped stones because He knew they would end up worshipping the altar rather than Him. It would introduce a bit of pride into their worship and a little bit of self-worship destroys the possibility of God-worship.

Maybe He knew that if they started shaping stones they would get so absorbed into building fantastic altars that they would forget God altogether. He wanted them to look beyond the altar to the sacrifice and beyond the sacrifice to the God.

God asks that His people come to Him in unadorned simplicity. Don't get distracted crafting fancy words, just pray. Don't get distracted with dress codes, just gather with other Christians to worship God. Don't get distracted by the particulars of a worship service, just sing joyfully to God, encourage one another, apply your mind to His word, and submit your heart to His hands.

The Conquest of Ai

Joshua 7:1-8:29

But the sons of Israel acted unfaithfully regarding the things under the ban...therefore the anger of the Lord burned against Israel. - Joshua 7:1

Imagine God as a fireplace with two giant logs inside. These logs are God's passions. One log is called glory. The other is called holiness. When His people are disobedient and sinful, these logs erupt into flame. This is God's burning anger. It's different from our anger, which is set aflame by our our passion for our own glory. God's anger is right, because His glory and His holiness are proper passions. And in Joshua 7, His anger rages against Israel for sinning against Him.

The result of God's burning anger: Israel's sin rises to the top where it is visible and can be scraped away. God's anger is a purifying anger that burns the sin out of His people, like gold refined through intense heat.

Here God uses defeat to purify His people. Other times He might use failure, misfortune, calamity, setbacks. As painful as these things are, they are sometimes flames God uses for the good of His people. But we want holiness without fire, don't we? Just like we want muscle without exercise, wealth without work, sex without marriage, character without trial, success without discipline, life without death, salvation without crucifixion - we want holiness without fire. But it is the flame that purifies.

May we be open to the purifying flame of God's loving anger.

The Absolute Destruction

Joshua 6:12-21

Amputation is always the last resort; but when a disease endangers the whole, it becomes necessary. The Canaanites were deeply infected by a malignant disease. The symptoms included (from Leviticus 18 and Deuteronomy 18):

1. Incest.
2. Fornication and adultery.
3. Homosexuality.
4. Bestiality.
5. Idolatry.
6. Child sacrifice.
7. Divination.
8. Witchcraft.
9. Sorcery.

The Canaanites had become an oozing, throbbing, cancerous tumor in the land. Their destruction was necessary to preserve God's people, Israel. And so, Joshua utterly destroyed them. Men and women. Sons and daughters. Brothers and sisters. Uncles and aunts. Nephews and nieces. Newborns and senior citizens... Absolute destruction.

Is this blood-stained God unrecognizable to you? Have we focused so exclusively on His grace that we've forgotten His wrath and hatred for sin? Have we focused so exclusively on our new life that we've forgotten Christ's bloody death? Indeed, the blood that flows from God's wrath against sin is a cornerstone of the gospel. Go check out Romans 5:8-10.

We must see sin for what it is. Not merely a choice, a lifestyle, an orientation, a weakness, a mistake, an addiction, a bad habit, a character flaw. We can live with these things. Yet, here we see that sin should send us running to the surgeon, begging for the scalpel. It must be carved out of our families, our churches, our homes, and our hearts or we'll be destroyed like the Canaanites.

We're infected and it's spreading, but there's hope: we must submit every naked corner of our hearts to God's scalpel wielding hands. The only path to freedom from the disease is to leave our dead, sin-ravaged bodies behind and walk in newness of life. This is what Jesus offers in the gospel

Meditate Day and Night

What does it mean to meditate on God's word? Click here.

The Fall of Jericho

Joshua 6:1-5

Jericho was shut tight. No one was coming or going. An eerie silence must have blown with the wind through the empty hills surrounding the city as God laid out the plan for Joshua.

Joshua was to lead the army of Israel in a walk around the city once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh day. After their final lap, they would blast their trumpets and shout as they watched the massive double walls crumble to the ground.

No clever Braveheart-esque tactics. No mighty siege against the walls. They would attack the city of Jericho by walking...

Therefore, when faced with a problem of any sort in your life, walk around it several times and then shout. Lock the keys in your car? Walk around it and shout. A difficult person at work? Walk around him or her and shout.

This is a perfect example of how not to interpret Old Testament narratives like Joshua. We cannot take what God said to a man in a certain point in time and apply it immediately to ourselves. There is, however, a principle to observe here. We catch a glimpse of God's character as He works in the lives of His people. Here's one thing we can learn from Joshua 6:

God's ways are not our ways.
Isaiah 55:8-9 states that His ways are higher than our ways just like the skies are higher than the earth. This plan is clearly different from what Joshua would have come up with on his own. We can recognize at least three characteristics of God's way from this episode:

1. God's way cultivates faith in His people.
Following such a bizarre plan meant that each step around Jericho was an act of faith in God's wisdom.

2. God's way brings Himself glory.
Their victory could not be accounted to their weaponry or skill. All they did was walk and shout. It was God-wrought.

3. God's way is initiated by His Word.
The path that cultivates faith and glorifies God is found only by using God's Word as a map.

In Joshua 1, God tells Joshua to be courageous and meditate on the law. Then Joshua would have success in his endeavors, including the Jericho attack. In other words, God laid out the blue print in Joshua 1. Joshua followed them and built the structure in Joshua 6.

How can we walk in God's ways if they are so high and lofty compared to our ways? By meditating on His Word and responding in obedience.

We so desperately want the historical story of Jericho to teach us that God will miraculously break through the walls of our struggles. That's not what it communicates. It communicates that God will accomplish His purposes for His glory and will allow those who faithfully meditate and obey His Word to participate.

Many want to see their problems crumble to the ground at their feet. But few apply themselves diligently to studying, meditating, thinking through, and aligning themselves with His word.

We cannot read Joshua 6 and walk away with the erroneous conclusion that God will destroy our personal Jericho that we have built brick-by-brick with sinful and foolish decisions made outside of the counsel of His Word.

We must plug ourselves into His Word. We must plug our families into His Word. We must align ourselves with His Word.

The Preparation | Part Two

Joshua 5:1-12

We're going to look at three features of the new covenant. More could be said, but for now, chew on this:

1. The new covenant promises a new heart.
In Ezekiel 36:26, God is speaking about the new covenant to come saying, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a new heart of flesh."

He will replace your stony, hard heart with a soft one full of new desires. A heart He can mold until it looks like Jesus' heart.

Many are wrestling with a tangled mess of problems, addictions, bad habits - all issues growing from stony hearts that are hardened to God. God wants to give you a new heart that is pliable in His hands.

He doesn't just want to modify your behavior, but your essence, your identity, the core of you.

2. The new covenant promises new life.
Jesus explains this in Luke 9:23-25. You give up your plans. You give up your ideas about what's best for your future. You give up your priorities. You give up your life. THEN, God will give you His plans. His ideas about what's best for your future. His priorities. New life.

In the new covenant, you must die to your old self to become alive to God.

Note, we are not promised a new life. God doesn't promise to pluck you out of your crummy life and drop you into a new one with a great family and a huge house. Abundant life is living for God through Jesus in any circumstance.

3. The new covenant promises deliverance from sin.
"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9). As Psalm 103:12 states, God is able to remove our sins from us as far as the east is from the west.

Our part: confess our sins (to God and all affected) and repent (turn away from sin to God). This is the Christian lifestyle. Until Jesus returns and completes our transformation, we will be confessing and repenting.

God's part: die in payment for the sins of all who will believe in and follow Him.

He also promises to help us to see our sin, forgive us of our sin, help us to repent fully (by massaging new desires into our new, soft heart), cleanse us of our sin, and restore us to right relationship with Him and others.

Many are sinking into the quicksand of sin. The harder we fight to get out, the stronger its grip. God wants to deliver us from sin, both its hold on our lives and the punishment it earns.

This is the new covenant in Jesus' blood. Not trying to live a good life, modifying our behavior, trying to escape bad circumstances. Many have settled for this and called it Christianity and have never experienced a new, softened heart, new life, or deliverance from sin.

If this describes you, perhaps it's time to enter into the new covenant. Maybe it's time to give God your heart,  your life, your sin - and receive His promises through Jesus.