Intro to Joshua - Preparation of a Nation

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Don Filcek, Joshua: Land of Promise; Intro to Joshua - Preparation of a Nation

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Join us at Recast Church in Matalon as Don brings us a sermon series entitled
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Joshua Land of Promise. Well, good morning.
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I want to say one more time welcome to Recast. Is everybody doing alright this morning? Okay. Alright.
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All are here. I want to encourage you to get comfortable. You can feel free at any time to get up and get some more donuts or get more coffee during the message.
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You're not going to distract me. And if you do, I'll just pick up where I left off. But just get up and don't worry about that.
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This morning I'm going to do something different. If you've been here for a while, you know that what we generally do is we open to a passage of Scripture.
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We read that passage of Scripture and then we talk about that passage of Scripture. I kind of break it down for you historically and then we apply it to our lives.
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Isn't that what you're kind of used to that here? We're going to do something just a smidge different. I'm going to take you through the historical perspective of the first five books of the
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Bible. I'm going to be setting up a study in the book of Joshua. So we're going to get the flow of the text, the flow of the history of God, so to speak, and work at it that way.
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The truth is that the Bible is a story. And I fear that what we often do is we can pick a chapter, we can pick a verse, we pick a section.
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We treat the Bible like a compilation of the best of wisdom or something like that. So we just pick a verse out or we pick this and just kind of focus on that.
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Does that make sense? But the Bible has flow, it has a plot, it has character development, it has all of these elements of things that you would expect to find in a good story.
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And so I wanted to draw that out this morning as we come to studying the book of Joshua where we can understand the history, the culture, what
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God has been doing with his people up to the point where we get to the book of Joshua. Because if you were to read
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Joshua 1 verses 1 through 3, I'm going to read that for you and I want you to think of this as if you have read this for the first time.
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You're coming into the middle of a story. Think about what kind of questions come to mind when I read these three verses.
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Any questions that come to your mind as you hear me read that? Anything that is just kind of like, what's the context, what's going on here?
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Who is Moses? Now, I think probably most of us, raise your hand if you have some inkling about who this Moses guy is.
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You've seen Charlton Heston play him or you've seen, what's the Prince of Egypt, you know, the little cartoon one or something.
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So you've got an idea who Moses is. Who is Joshua? How did he become the assistant of Moses, as the text tells us?
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You know, these types of questions. What is the Jordan and why are they being given a land and what is the promise and who is this people?
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Why did they just all of a sudden appear at the introduction to Joshua? Well, there's a lot of history. By the time that we get to Joshua 1, our main character is already 60 to 70 years old.
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He's lived a lifetime. He's got a lot of history, a lot of experiences that are recorded for us in those first five books of the
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Bible before we get to Joshua. So we're going to look at that. We're going to break that out and look at his life a little bit more carefully.
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There's been a lot of history that's happened, a lot of preparation. The preparation for this nation, therefore the title,
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Preparation of a Nation. We're going to look at a brief history of the first five books of the
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Bible. This is the story of God, the story of his interaction with humanity. And really, there's no better place to start in the beginning.
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So if you're thinking, where do we go for the beginning? Well, of course, Genesis 1, in the first two chapters.
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Genesis 1, 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The account of God's good creation is found there in those first two chapters.
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He created things from nothing. And if you believe that, if you believe that there is a
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God, then there's some other things that need to come along with that.
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If you accept that there is a Creator, then you must confess that no miracle is out of bounds.
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Would you agree with that? If you believe that there is a God who created all of this stuff, then who is the
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Master and Lord over all of this stuff? So we're going to come in contact throughout the book of Joshua with some miraculous things, some pretty amazing things, some things that really challenge our minds and our thoughts, as we encounter a lot in Scripture.
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The question is, do you understand creation? Do you believe that there is one who started all of this material stuff that we see?
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And then equally you have to confess that if there is a God, He is the one that is sovereign and has control over all things.
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What we see on the sixth day specifically, God created humans. He created them in His image, in His likeness, male and female
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He created them. And being in His image means that He endowed humanity with His authority, with an ability to reflect
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Him. So in essence what it means to be human is it means to be a mirror, to image
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God. That's what sets us apart from the rest of creation, that in essence we are like a mirror that is able to reflect the image of God in our intellect, in our emotions, in our will, in the way that He has created us and endowed us with specific abilities.
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We reflect Him. And we see that everything was perfect and declared to be very good at the end of the creation account.
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But as I said last week, we were talking about Jesus Christ encountering demons there at the end of chapter 8 of Matthew.
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I mentioned a short history of the demonic realm, of what's going on behind the scenes in the spiritual realm from Revelation 12, that Satan and a third of the angels, angels being created beings as well, but they rebelled against God and they were cast down to earth, ultimately exiled to earth.
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And Satan, we see him show up in the garden and he tempted Eve and Adam to disobey God. God had put a tree in the middle of that garden, well it doesn't say in the middle, but in the garden, and he tempted them to eat of it when
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God had told them not to. And we see that death was born in that event.
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Ultimately that's when death occurred, was at that time when Satan tempted
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Eve and Adam and they sinned. As a result, Satan, man, the woman, and even the earth were all cursed.
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They were broken. So that now at best, humans are like broken mirrors.
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You take a rock and you throw it at a mirror, what happens? Shatters, right? If you have an arm, anyways.
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But it'll break. Now it might not shatter, it might not fall, but can a broken mirror still reflect an image?
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Yeah. Does it reflect an accurate image? No.
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It doesn't reflect accurately anymore. And that's the picture of what humans have now become, in a broken and in a fallen world, where we were intended to reflect
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God, to demonstrate his power, his authority, what he is like. Do we do that?
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Think about your own life. Do you accurately convey to others what God is like? To some degree, hopefully.
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We can still see glimmers of God, of that image of God in people, can't we?
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Even people who are not in church, even people who are not religious, do you still see them do some good things from time to time?
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Do you still see some decency that is out there? Yes, I would contend that that is the image of God in people.
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That is that they still reflect, although we all reflect poorly, the image of God.
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We are, in essence, broken mirrors. And even the created order was broken.
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We see corruption, decay, the corrosion on the bottom of your car, all of the things that we see around us.
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It's like the laws of entropy, that things move towards more disorder. Have you experienced that in your life?
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Things tend to move from an orderly state to a disorderly state. That's the physics law of thermodynamics.
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Things are breaking down. And it's as if that law was born there at the fall when we sinned.
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It's interesting because we go from Genesis 1 and 2 to Genesis chapter 3, we have this fall, and right away in chapter 4 of Genesis we see the first murder, where Adam and Eve's sons, one kills the other, as if to demonstrate right off the bat that this sin thing is not going away anytime soon, that it is a perpetual human problem now that is being passed on from generation to generation, not just caught by environment, but something that we do not have to teach our children to sin.
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Humanity now is essentially greedy, self -centered, and sinful. Can you relate to that?
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It's probably one of the only doctrines that can be scientifically provable. It's just consistent across the board.
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We all sin. We all break our own laws. We break our own rules. We set them up, then we break them. Sometimes I think we set up rules just to break them, so that we are all sinners.
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And over the next few chapters, there's a continuing wickedness in the book of Genesis that leads to judgment through a worldwide flood.
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God preserves the animals, the humans, through Noah, this thing called the Ark. How many of you have heard of that before? Been there?
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All right. And we see for the first time that God demonstrates to humanity that He is a promise -giving
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God, that He is finally beginning to enter into history in a way that He is making a unilateral promise to His people.
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I will never destroy the earth with a flood again. He puts a rainbow in the sky to show it.
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Noah, right away, gets off the boat and commits sin. Of course, that's what people do.
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And sin continues on. If we were to sit down and read Genesis in one sitting, which is just an amazing thing to do.
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It's amazing if you get the chance to do that. I know that it takes some time to do that, maybe an hour of reading.
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But if you were to sit down and read Genesis in one sitting, you get to chapter 11. I've done this before. You get around chapter 11, and you're going,
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Where is God? When is He going to really show up? When are things going to be taken care of? Because it's just this progress, like cycles of darkness, just ever -deepening darkness.
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And then you get to chapter 12, and an amazing thing happens. God picks out a man and makes a commitment to him.
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And it's like a relieving moment where all of this corruption and all of this sin is just owning us.
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And God comes in and begins to start the process of redeeming creation, of redeeming people, of winning us back from our sin, from within the system.
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Now, what He could have done is God could have just taken the whole cosmos and just crinkled it up and thrown it into His great big trash bin and started over again.
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But instead, He chose to work from within the broken system to redeem us, to redeem us from within it.
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What an awesome God we serve. We're going to see Abraham, or Abram, as he's called early on.
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He shows up at this breaking point in history. And we come to what I'm going to call the first scenic overlook.
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We're going to zero in on four passages that I'm going to ask you to turn to, where we're going to kind of take a moment from this history of these five books and actually go there.
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So I want you to open your Bibles to Genesis 12, 1 through 3. Now, the Bible in the seat back in front of you could come in handy today.
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I know some of you are kind of married to the Bible that you brought, but I'm going to be giving page numbers. That's page number 8.
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And as we jump around Scripture, it might be more beneficial for you to actually use the Bible that's provided for you there so we can get there quicker.
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But Genesis 12, 1 through 3, we're going to see God's interaction with this guy named
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Abram. And I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.
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I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
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So Abram was this guy who lived in what's modern -day Iraq, the area of Babylon at the time, this place called
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Ur, an actual town there. He lived among people who were idol worshippers. Their primary religion was to make silver and gold and wood idols and bow to them and worship them and worship the trees and the stars and all of this stuff.
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And God gets a hold of this guy. And I don't know, the text doesn't tell us whether God physically appeared to Abram or whether he just heard a voice or what, but whatever it was,
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Abram knew definitively that God had called him. He spoke with him. He called him out and he said, leave this place of idolatry, move away from here, head west to this land called
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Canaan. We're going to see that he has a specific place in mind here in a moment. And God ultimately gives
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Abram three promises. He says, if you will follow me, Abram, I will give you three things.
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I will give you a land. I will make you into a great nation.
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I will give you a multitude of descendants that will become a great nation. And third, from your lineage will come someone who will bless all the nations.
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You will ultimately be a blessing to all of humanity, which we know in the end, in retrospect, is
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Jesus Christ who comes from the line of Abram. But here in this text, in this context, he's giving these three promises.
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Now the first promise sounds a little bit weak, right? If you just read only this account in 12 .1, this is the one that is the first time that God speaks with Abram.
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But look at verse 1. Now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you.
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Did he promise the land there? It's not really a promise. So you really have to turn over just a couple of pages to chapter 17, verse 8, and you see that God is making a more specific promise there.
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He's reiterating this to now Abraham. And in verse 8 he says, I will give you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, the land of your wanderings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their
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God. This is why I've entitled this sermon, the series in Joshua, The Land of Promise.
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The Land of Promise, because this is the place that we are seeing in Joshua the fulfillment of God's promise to his people that they will possess a land.
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And that's what we see here. If you take Joshua out of the Bible, God proves himself to be inconsistent and unfaithful, not committed to his promises.
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That's how important and how central the book of Joshua is. You remove it, God doesn't keep his promises.
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Why trust him? It's an extremely significant book from that standpoint. So God set in motion a plan through Abram.
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By the way, he changes his name in there, and that's why this is, I've been a little confused in my mind saying Abram, Abraham.
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Abram means exalted father, and God likes to change people's names for some reason.
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And he changes his name to Abraham, which means the father of many, the father of a multitude.
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To remind him that every time somebody calls Abram, Abraham for the rest of his life, it is a reminder of God's promise to him that he's going to become a great nation, this huge nation.
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So why doesn't God just give Abram the land? We see that by the time we get to chapter 17, he's actually in Canaan.
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He's wandering through this area, sojourning is the word that the text says. So he's there and he's in Canaan. Why doesn't
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God just say, okay, settle down, pitch your tents, and you're going to have lots of kids, and your kids are going to have lots of kids, and your kids are going to have lots of kids, and eventually you'll just occupy this land.
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Why not? Why all this Egypt thing that we're going to see here in a minute and all of this?
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Well, turn back a couple pages to Genesis 15, 12 through 16.
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You can go there or you can just listen. Just listen and don't need to worry about going. Genesis 15, 12 through 16 says this, another interaction between Abraham and God.
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As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram, and behold, dreadful and great darkness fell upon him.
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Then the Lord said to Abram, Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs,
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Egypt, and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for 400 years.
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But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, think Egypt, and afterwards they shall come out with great possessions.
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As for yourself, you shall go to your fathers in peace, and you shall be buried in a good old age.
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But here is the clincher, verse 16. Why not get the land right away? Verse 16 says, And they shall come back here, your descendants shall come back in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the
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Amorites is not yet complete. Amorites are the people who possess the land currently. They're currently in Canaan.
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They are occupying, they're building cities, they're doing all of this stuff. The reason given for why the land wasn't given to the
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Israelites, given to Abraham right away, was that the depth of the sins of those who currently occupied the land was not full.
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It wasn't complete yet. Is that kind of confusing to us? Like as if there's a quotient, a quota rather, as if there's a quota of sin out there for these people, and once it gets full, then
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God is going to judge them? Well, the implication is, a time was coming when their sins would be so great that God would have proven himself to be faithful and patient to endure their wickedness.
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Wickedness like taking their babies and putting them in the fire to be burned.
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This type of wickedness, the Amorites literally did this type of thing to sacrifice children to their pagan gods, to their idols.
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And God demonstrated his patience and his long -suffering with them. It's not as though the
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God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath and anger and just quick. He just loses his temper, right?
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And just flies off the handle and judges people and burns and does all that kind of stuff. And the
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God of the New Testament is kind of a God of grace and kind of nice and all of that stuff. God proved himself to be merciful and gracious even in the
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Old Testament by waiting and enduring and giving chances for repentance. God is ever so patient with sinners, but the truth is even in our lives we see this.
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There does come a point where his love and justice are expressed by reasonable judgment, by reasonable consequences.
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Have you seen that? Have you been there on that receiving end of kind of coming to the end and the logical conclusion of your own sins?
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I know I have and that's not a pretty place. Sometimes we have a tendency to call that rock bottom. And I think probably some of us have been to rock bottom at times in our lives.
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But against all odds, Abraham and his aging wife have a child named Isaac. They're pretty old when
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Isaac is born. Isaac gets married, gives birth to twins, Jacob and Esau. And ironically, just to mention,
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Esau, his descendants are the Amalekites who we're going to see here in a minute. They play a major part coming up.
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But Jacob, whose name is changed by God to Israel, like I said, God likes to change people's names, changes his name from deceiver.
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How would you like the name deceiver? That would be a nice name, wouldn't it? Jacob means deceiver. And from the one who deceives, he changes his name to Israel, which is so much better, the one who wrestles with God.
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How would you like to be called the one who wrestles with God? All right. Israel has 11 sons who will eventually become 12 tribes.
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So how do 11 sons become 12 tribes? Well, one of the sons named
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Joseph, the other brothers didn't like him so much, and so they sold him to slave traders.
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He ends up in Egypt, a slave there, works his way up until ultimately, by God's sovereign plan and miraculous things, he ends up being second in command.
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A worldwide famine hits, and Joseph's brothers are coming to Egypt for food.
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They run into each other, and eventually through a long series of events, Israel and his 11 sons are reunited in Egypt.
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And God preserves them from this famine through all of this amazing stuff that happens in the book of Genesis.
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Over the next 400 years, the Israelites multiply and become a threat to Egypt. Now they're living there, they're in there, they're given some property, some land, they work that land, and eventually they become so numerous, they're subjected to forced labor.
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You ever wonder where those pyramids came from? What do you think built the pyramids? The Israelites had a part in that.
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In Egypt, have you ever considered how many slaves they must have had in Egypt in order to build those huge monuments?
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It's pretty amazing. But God hears his people's cry for deliverance.
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He raises up this man named Moses through a bunch of miraculous events. Moses encounters God in the burning bush.
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Familiar with that story? Burning bush, out in the wilderness. God calls him to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt to the land of promise.
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God is still working. God is still committed to this promise that he made to Abram. And he's moving towards that, and he's working within human history to make that come about.
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Now miracle upon miracle happens, including all these plagues that come on Egypt, the Red Sea is parted, some pretty amazing things that happen there, and a defining event in the life and the history of God's people, this exodus that happens, and that's where we get the second book of the
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Bible, the book of Exodus, is about that departure from Egypt and moving to the land of promise.
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God leads them in a cloud by day. The text tells us by a fire at night. He feeds them miraculously in the desert.
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And now during this exodus time, we're going to come in contact with Joshua for the first time.
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Now where God has been in the process of preparation for a nation, now we're going to see that he also prepares leaders for his movement.
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So I want you to turn over to page 51 in your Bible. That's Exodus 17. And I'm going to read 8 through 13 there.
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I need to get there as well. Exodus 17, 8 through 13 says this.
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Then Amalek, the reason I'm reading this is that this is the first mention of Joshua in the
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Bible. Then Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim. So Moses said to Joshua, Choose for us men and go out and fight with Amalek.
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Tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand. So Joshua did as Moses told him and fought with Amalek while Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.
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Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed. And whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed.
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But Moses' hands grew weary, so they took a stone, put it under him. He sat on it while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, the other on the other side.
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So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun. And Joshua overwhelmed Amalek and his people with the sword.
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So we see here the descendants of Esau, who was the brother of Israel, bar the way for Israel early on in their journey to the promised land.
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They probably haven't even hardly gotten through the Red Sea at this point. They get through the
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Red Sea, celebrate that amazing victory over the armies of Egypt, and then suddenly they are confronted with war right away.
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Joshua is apparently at a young age at this time, because we're going to see him survive 40 years out in the wilderness.
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So he's fairly young, but he has chosen to lead the army. He selects his soldiers.
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They march out to, I want to point out, a defensive war. The terminology and the words that are used in Hebrew here in this text demonstrate that the aggressors were the
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Amalekites. They come out and make the confrontation. But God does something pretty strange in the text here, right?
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The course of the war is decided based on what? Where the hands are, where the arms of the leader are.
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Why would God do something like that? Arms up, the battle is going your way. Arms down, the battle is going bad.
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What do you think? Why would God do something like that? Why would the position of the leader's arms make a difference?
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I believe it was intentionally to teach a huge, huge lesson to the
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Israelites, and particularly even to Joshua. Think about what Joshua is going to do is he's going to come in and he's going to conquer the land.
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So this is his first battle. And Joshua, from his very first battle, recognizes that it is not his own military prowess, it is not his strategy that won the day, but it was
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God. When the leadership's hands were lifted and raised to God in recognition of him, the battle was going their way.
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When the arms were down, the focus off of God, the battle slid.
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So we see that it was God who granted the victory. Now, how often do we give the glory to God for our own accomplishments?
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It seems like an oxymoron, doesn't it? Do we give God the glory for our accomplishments? Can we in any sense call them
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God's accomplishments if we did them? Or can we in any sense call them our accomplishments if God is doing them?
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Confused? Who gives you the air to breathe? Who gave you the muscles to move?
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Who gives you the intellect to figure out problems? It is all of God. And that's where humility must come into our lives, where we give the victories, we give the successes over to God and say, thank you.
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Thank you. It was you. Without you, I wouldn't have done anything. I would be dead, inanimate, not moving.
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So thank you for the victory. The nation of Israel then from this victory continues to move through the desert.
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They have no home, but God is leading them. They come to the base of this mountain that he leads them to, Mount Sinai, where the covenant, a commitment, a promise, how many of you the word covenant is a little bit confusing?
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It is a contract, an agreement that is drawn up between two parties. And here we have a covenant between God and his people that's going to be drawn up here at this mountain.
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Here God is going to call the people to live in the way that he designates in exchange for his blessings and his protection.
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That he will be their God and they will be his people. So he sets up his nation with the intention as a model to the other nations that these people are going to demonstrate they are going to mirror
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God. That is the intention of this nation. And once again, we're going to see
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Joshua. We're going to zoom in and see Joshua learning at the feet of his mentor, Moses. He spends a lot of time with Moses.
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Turn over to Exodus 24, which is page 56, just a couple pages. I'm going to read 12 through 18 here,
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Exodus 24, 12 through 18. The Lord said to Moses, so they're down at the foot of this mountain, and then this conversation happens.
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The Lord said to Moses, Come up to me on the mountain and wait there that I may give you the tablets of stone with the law and the commandments which
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I have written for their instruction. So Moses rose with his assistant Joshua and Moses went up into the mountain of God and he said to the elders,
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Wait here for us until we return to you and behold, Aaron and Hur are with you. Whoever has a dispute, let him go to them.
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But notice at the start of verse 14, Wait here for us. Joshua and Moses are going up together to meet
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God. All of Israel is camped at the foot of the mountain. God calls up Moses to get some stones inscribed with his law.
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Verse 13 identifies that Moses takes his assistant Joshua. They go up into the presence of God while the rest of the leadership of Israel hangs back.
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Not until chapter 32, several chapters later, do we see Moses and Joshua come back down.
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They spent 40 days and 40 nights up on the mountain with God. By this point,
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Aaron and the other leaders have gone back down and joined the people at the base. God tells
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Moses, While they're up there, they're receiving the law. He says, Your people down at the bottom of the hill, the
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Israelites, they have polluted themselves. You need to hightail it back down the mountain and get down there and take care of this.
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On the way down, Joshua, it says, hears a commotion. And what does a military commander think when he hears a commotion?
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He says, Well, I hear the sounds of war down in the camp. And Moses says, That's not the sound of war.
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That's the sound of singing and partying. Partying. You're supposed to laugh.
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Partying. Sorry, that didn't work. Has anybody here ever been to the proverbial party with the parents gone?
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Ever been to that one? Has anybody here ever hosted the party with the parents gone?
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Nobody's ever... Pete, we had a conversation. Hosting the party with the parents gone.
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Yeah, things don't go well at those parties. This is so much worse, what happens here.
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Moses' brother... Maybe they thought that God had just killed Moses on the mountain.
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That His glory and His holiness had just consumed Joshua and Moses. And they were like, Well, we've got to do our own thing now. It's been 40 days, 40 nights.
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What are we going to do? So they take all the gold, throw it in the fire and melt it down.
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And Moses' brother fashions a nice gold calf for them. And they have this party. And they worship this calf.
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They're getting drunk. They're doing all kinds of party type things. And Moses is in his anger.
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He comes down. He rounds the corner and looks. And he sees what's going on. And what happens to the stone tablets?
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Smashes them. Smashes them. And I would contend to you that the symbol that is there of the broken tablets is a symbol of the broken law.
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It's as if before the covenant is even ratified, before the agreement, you keep my rules. You follow me.
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I will be your God. And you will be my people. And we'll have this agreement together. And you will be a nation that reflects.
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What did I say humans are like now after the fall? Broken mirrors.
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And here we have a broken law where those broken tablets serve like a symbol of how broken and corrupt we really are.
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We see here a hint of what the entire Old Testament nation of Israel exists to do in God's big picture.
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It's as if they are just one ginormous case study in our inability to make ourselves righteous.
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Have you ever tried to make yourself righteous? I think probably all of us have been at that place in our lives where we've been working on our own to try to make ourselves holy and righteous and more like God.
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And the law serves the purpose of showing us that we cannot do it.
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We cannot make ourselves more righteous. So what does Joshua learn in this scenario?
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He gets an opportunity to meet God but I think there's three lessons that he gets out of this deal. First of all, his encounter with God highlights how utterly holy
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God is. He goes up to the mountain and he meets God. God is perfect and powerful and righteous and he sees him.
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Second of all, he also gets a clear glimpse into human sinfulness, human depravity. While God is setting up the parameters of a relationship with his people, he's up there making a commitment to his people.
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His people are down at the base of the mountain worshiping an idol made of gold. Think with me about this for a minute.
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I think this is exactly like starting an affair with one of the bridesmaids at your own wedding reception.
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You are there and you are supposed to be making a commitment to someone else and instead you're looking around.
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Wanting something else. Pretty serious. How much is that the nature of our own hearts when it comes to God?
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Looking, maybe holding up my options. Maybe I'll try a little God on the side but maybe money would serve me a little bit better.
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Maybe get to the bargaining table. Materialism or God? Which one's got the better payout?
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Which one do I really want to run with? Think about that. Joshua, thirdly, he gets a front row seat to the wrath of God show.
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3 ,000 Israelites are slain by the sword as a result. And he also gets a picture then of the corporateness of sin.
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That they have sinned together and they are judged together. 3 ,000 people are killed that day and that's the way that God dealt with his nation.
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They understand that if the one sins, they are all guilty. They are their brother's keeper.
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They are to be watching out for one another. So then the Israelites leave
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Mount Sinai. They whine and complain their way to a town on the south edge of the land of promise.
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And during this time, Exodus 33, 11 tells us that Moses would go and pitch a tent of meeting outside of the camp.
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And that he would go out there and meet with God. And I point this out because it says in the text in Exodus 33, 11 that Joshua would meet there with them, with Moses and God.
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And we see that Moses included Joshua not just in his life. It's not like he was a business mentor or a sales mentor who was bringing somebody along.
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He was incorporating Joshua into his life with God. And it actually says of Joshua that Joshua lived, stayed, spent his nights in the tent of meeting.
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Joshua spent his time close to the place where they met with God. It's the kind of character of the guy that we're going to be watching through the next couple of months as we study the book of Joshua.
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So from this southern town, at God's request, Moses selects 12 men, representatives of each of the 12 tribes.
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Joshua is one of them. And they enter the land as spies to basically bring back a report.
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They're getting ready to go into this land and conquer it. They want to bring back a report.
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After traveling 40 days, they go all the way to the northern end above the Sea of Galilee in the north of Israel, come all the way back, and they come bringing evidence of the goodness of the land.
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The picture in the graphic is of grapes because it says in the text that when they entered the land of promise here and the spies went in, they literally cut down clusters of grapes and it took two men to carry the clusters of grapes.
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They attached them to a pole, one man on each end of the pole. They brought pomegranates. They brought figs back.
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They're demonstrating that this is an amazing land filled. Now, okay, you know, like figs, you know, we could just run down to Meyers and get some of the stuff, what's going on with all this.
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Try wandering around in the desert for a while and then get some grapes. Would grapes sound good after you spent a lot of time in the desert?
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I'm thinking that would be pretty sweet. Literally sweet, I don't know. But they come back with a negative report.
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So they're carrying all this goodness. The land looks good. I mean, they've got to be hungry for this kind of produce that they're seeing here.
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And yet they come back with a negative report. Ten of the men come back and say, well, there's really nice figs and there's really big clusters of grapes but there's also these really big people.
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They're like giants to us. They're huge. They're powerful. They have fortified cities. There are multitudes.
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We can't even count the people in the land. There's so many of them. There's no way we're going to conquer this.
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But two of the spies, Joshua, our Joshua, and Caleb.
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And they both say, well, you know, we're going to give a positive report. It was a great land and we can do this.
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But the majority report wins over the minority report just like a good democracy.
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It wins the heart of the nation and they turn against their leadership. They literally begin the plans to place a leader above Moses that will lead them back to Egypt.
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We went in the land. We looked. We saw there's no way we can conquer this land. It's a done deal.
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Let's go back to Egypt and be slaves. Can you imagine the despair that must be in the people's hearts at this time?
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It's just crazy. And so they're getting ready to set up a new leader when we come to Numbers 14.
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That's page 105 in your Bibles. Page 105, Numbers 14, and we'll look at 5 through 10.
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It follows right on the heels. Verse 4 says, and they said to one another, let us choose a leader and go back to Egypt.
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Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the congregation, before all the assembly of the congregation of the people of Israel.
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And Joshua, the son of Nun, and Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes and said to all the congregation of the people of Israel, the land which we pass through to spy out is exceedingly good.
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It's an exceedingly good land. If the Lord delights in us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey.
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Only do not rebel against the Lord and do not fear the people of the land, for they are bred for us.
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Their protection is removed from them and the Lord is with us. Do not fear them. Then all the congregation said to stone them with stones.
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But the glory of the Lord appeared at the tent of meeting to all of the people of Israel. You see in verse 6,
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Joshua and Caleb, they tear their clothes. It's a sign of mourning, a sign of grief. But consider the boldness of Joshua to stand against his nation who is all in disagreement with him.
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They are all opposing him and he says, it's a good land. And if the Lord is pleased with us, he will give us this land.
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Don't fear the current occupants. If God is fighting for us, we'll win.
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An implicit trust that he has learned through all of the trials and difficulties that God has brought him through in his life, through watching
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Moses, through meeting God, he says, I implicitly trust God. Have you been brought to the place where you have seen
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God's hand work in your life to such a degree that you implicitly trust him? You can just say,
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God, whatever you want to happen to me for good or for bad in an earthly sense, if you want to take something from me, it is yours to take.
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I trust you that you will bring into my life what is best for me. It's a hard thing to say, but when you get to know
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God, you begin to say some crazy things like that. God, whatever it is, I'll give it to you.
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It's yours. The people pick up stones, but God shows up and saves
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Joshua and Caleb just in the nick of time. They're literally about to be killed, and Joshua shows up.
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The punishment for the rebellion and distrust in God is that the Israelites are forced to wander around in the desert for 40 years.
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The purpose of that 40 years is that an entire generation would pass away. Those that were 20 and over end up dying out in the desert.
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They never get to the land of promise. By the time we get to Joshua chapter 1,
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God has promised that Caleb and Joshua will be the only ones from that entire generation who get to see the land of promise.
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That's exactly how it happens. They're the only ones left of an entire generation. Can you imagine what that would have been like for those who were going to see them enter the land?
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Who are they led by? These two old guys that are there and are faithful and have proven themselves over time to be
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God's men. The Israelites win two battles east of the
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Jordan as they approach the land of promise. Now remember, we're a whole generation now gone. Minus two.
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Crossing the Jordan into Canaan is the thing that has been the hope of generations. Moses is with his people, so he's still there, so actually there's three.
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He passes the baton to Joshua in Deuteronomy 31, and then we see in Deuteronomy 34, the very final chapter,
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Moses dies. The nation is now poised to enter the land and we are meant to take a deep breath and pause with anticipation.
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This is a promise that was given to Abraham centuries before about to be fulfilled.
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God is about to prove himself faithful. That is the significance of the book of Joshua.
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It's the significance of crossing the Jordan River. An amazing thing. But a whole generation has missed out on this because of their faithlessness.
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Can you sense the anticipation that would have been with the people at this time? An intense anticipation.
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I hope that as we walk through this this morning, it doesn't just hit you like some dry history lesson, because Scripture is so much more than that.
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It's not just the story of Israel, but it's the story of God. Our God. The God who is sovereign over all history.
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The God who is working all history to lead to redemption. He enters into time, and enters into covenant with his people.
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Despite our inability to keep up our end, he maintains his end and continues to move forward.
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And continues that promise to Abraham that he will bless all nations through him. Although he ends up doing it in a very different way because of Israel's faithlessness.
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God is working all of history to lead to a place of restoring all things to wellness. To peace.
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To as the Israelites would say, and the Jews even today would say in a word, Shalom. Now Shalom is a word that we would translate to mean peace.
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But the problem is we think of peace in a different way. Peace to us means an absence of war. Primarily.
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Isn't that what we think of when we think of peace? Peace is so much more than an absence of war. Peace is the presence of goodness.
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The presence of rest. The presence of the fulfillment of the promises of God. That is what
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God is moving history towards is a completed Shalom. Peace. And rest.
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Two applications before we come to communion this morning. First of all, God is sovereign over all of history.
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You can see his hand working. The threat of redemption. The threat of him buying back humanity all throughout the
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Old Testament. And on into the New Testament. And on into the book of Revelation. And on ahead of us in the future.
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He is sovereign over history. He raises up nations. And he is at work in our personal history.
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And the question that I have for you is do you see God's hand in your life? Do you see the thread of God working in you and in your personal history?
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In your personal exodus to him? All of us have things that I asked
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Rob to share because there are things in Rob's life and he demonstrates that God is still in the business of doing that with people.
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It's not like Joshua. Okay, he's just preparing somebody to lead his nation and that's it. He is preparing you for things.
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He is preparing you for ministry. Look back at your history. And I would encourage you to maybe even this afternoon take a moment to do that.
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Walk through the thread of God's hand in your life. Some of you are new in your life with God.
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You've just come to recognize even that he exists recently. Some of you were raised at an early age.
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You understood God and started a relationship with him of getting to know him better.
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But look at your own life and see what an exodus he has led you through. Closely tied to the fact that he's sovereign over history is the fact that he is the
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God who raises up leaders to accomplish his purposes. Look at all the things that he brought Joshua through.
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But in the end it was how close Joshua was to God that singled him out as a leader. How tight was he with God.