Daily Devotional – April 30, 2020

the sunshine. We need that. Well, this whole near -isolation thing has afforded some time for reflection, and in doing so,

I discovered 10 ways that the coronavirus is like my preaching. Here we go. Top 10 ways.

Countdown. Number 10, it just keeps getting worse. Number 9, people are constantly asking, is it over yet?

Number 8, young people aren't taking it seriously. Number 7, you likely won't.

Number 6, the people most affected by it are senior citizens. Number 5, maybe it makes sense just to stay home.

Number 4, it's shut down a lot of churches. Number 3, people are making a lot of grocery lists.

Number 2, people want it to hurry up and end so they can be the first to the restaurant. And number 1, here it is, once it started, people just had to get up and go to the bathroom.

Well, I've always thought someday I'd get this whole preaching thing figured out, maybe about the time that all the scientists can agree on the whole

COVID -19 thing will all come together at this at the same time. All right.

Well, we've been talking this week about how to respond when the wheels come off, when everything's been going along great, and then all of a sudden it's not.

Sort of like the way things are in our world right now, and maybe even in your personal life.

All of it ground to a halt by a microscopic germ. Been using

Joshua chapter 7 as a foundation for these noon talks.

And we look at Joshua 7, and this is what happened in the history of Israel.

The wheels fell off. Now, what do we do? How do we handle the distress? What questions come to our mind?

Where do we go to get answers to those questions? And so as we've looked at this this week,

I've suggested that ultimately, the only satisfactory response is the biblically

Christian one. That is, we go to God with our questions, we seek answers and direction from him, and not merely going to him to get relief.

Now, I'm not minimizing here the importance of doing scientific research and all the rest of that kind of stuff, to find medicine to help, etc.,

etc. That's not the point. The point is, why the catastrophe? Why the crisis?

What has happened for this to come about in the first place? And so in responding this way, in going to God with our questions and these answers,

I've suggested several responses that we see here in Joshua chapter 7. The first is that we need to be humble.

We saw that in verse 6. Joshua tore his clothes, fell to the earth on his face before the ark of the

Lord until evening, he and the elders of Israel, and they put dust. Examples of humility there.

Rending the clothes, getting face down on the putting dust on their heads. There's no room here in Joshua's place, in Joshua's situation, or in ours.

There's no room for a cocky, we can handle this, self -reliance, that we got all the answers, we can figure this all out, we know, and so forth.

Humility. We need to respond by being humble. And then the second response that we looked at was the need for being quiet, being quiet.

Joshua and the leaders were face down on the ground until evening. How much time went by there, we don't exactly know, but there was enough time for it to be noted that they were on the ground until evening.

And that quietness, that silence before the Lord gives us time to settle down, to process what has happened and maybe what is happening, to think things through, to clarify our thoughts before speaking.

Always a good thing to do, being quiet. And then a third response is the response of being honest by asking honest questions.

So Joshua finally speaks and he opens his mouth and he speaks to the

Lord. And when he does, he asks a series of questions and they are brutally honest questions.

They're not the kind of questions we think maybe should be asked of God, and yet he asked them.

So the first question he asked in verse 7, Joshua 7, is essentially, what have you done?

What have you done? Now a variation of that question we might ask sometimes is, what haven't you done?

Speaking to God, you know, why haven't you acted? And so Joshua put it this way, he says, alas,

O Lord God, why have you brought this people over the Jordan at all? Speaking of the people of Israel, to give us into the hands of the

Amorites, to destroy us. You hear what he's saying? God, what have you done?

You brought us over the Jordan River to kill us. Would that we had been content to dwell on the other side of the river.

There are some implied questions in that, aren't there? What have you done? One of those is, what are your true intentions here?

We thought you were bringing us over here to give us this land. Is that what your intentions really are? And then what happened to your promises?

God, you promised to give us this land, and here we are in the land, starting to take possession of it.

We have great success, and now we're defeated. What happened to your promise of giving us this land?

And then there is an even more disturbing implied question in this, and the question is, can we really trust you?

Can we trust you? This is a question that we ask God when we ask honest questions like this, questions that are really on our heart, really on our mind.

Can we really trust you? The second question he asks the Lord is, what can

I say? In verse 8, he says, oh Lord, what can I say when Israel has turned their backs before their enemies?

And here, his question is kind of like the question we might have that says, what can

I say to unbelievers, to those who are not followers of Christ, to those who think you don't exist or you don't care about life on the planet when something like this happens?

What can I say to unbelievers about COVID -19? Where are you, is what they want to know, and what can

I say to them? And then the third question that Joshua asks in verse 9 is, what are you going to do about it?

He put it this way. He says, for the Canaanites and all the inhabitants of the land will hear of it, and they will surround us and cut off our name from the earth.

Now listen, here it is, and what will you do for your great name? Here, he's questioning

God's plan for his own reputation. And in essence, he's asking, what are you going to do,

God, to prove your existence, to prove your power, and to prove that you actually care?

Now, do we ask those questions? I think we do, and maybe we don't verbalize them to God, but I wonder how many of us actually have those questions in our mind or in our heart and are maybe a little too afraid to ask them.

What are you going to do to prove that you actually exist, to prove that you are the powerful God that you say you are, that you actually care about people and care about us?

What are you going to do? So those are honest questions, and it's a valuable thing to ask honest questions, even of the

Lord. But then there's yet another response. So you've let off some steam, you've been honest before the

Lord, what's next? What's next is seen in verses 10 through 15, and we could just put the response this way.

Your fourth response is to listen and be teachable. Listen and be teachable.

And frankly, what you hear may be very uncomfortable. Here's what

God replies to Joshua. In essence, he says in verses 10 and 11, it's not what

I have done, it's what you have done. The blame is not on me, the blame is with you.

Listen to what he says. Get up, God says to Joshua. Why have you fallen on your face?

Israel has sinned. They have transgressed the covenant that I commanded them. They stole stuff from Jericho that God told them to destroy.

And then God says, I will be with you no more unless you destroy the devoted things from among you.

Do you hear how God replies to him? It's not what I've done, it's what you have done.

The blame is not with me, the blame is with you. I think there are a couple of lessons that we can take from this reply of God's to Joshua's.

And one of the lessons is this. Instead of asking in that series of honest questions, instead of asking,

God, why have you done this? It would be better to begin by asking,

God, what have we done? Have we done something that is behind this, that is perhaps a contributing cause of this?

That's a very uncomfortable question to ask because it puts us in a place of taking personal responsibility.

This is one thing that in a catastrophe like this, that's going on in this world, however much of it is man -made or whatever, is not the point.

The question is, what responsibility do we have in this? Are our sins, our national sins, somehow responsible at the root of this?

And then a second lesson we can learn from this is that the act of AI, the loss of AI where Israel was defeated there, was not an act of judgment on God's part as if he actively did something against his people, like God was the force behind those warriors of AI.

No. Instead, God tells Joshua, instead he withdrew his presence and that presence had enabled them to overcome what would otherwise naturally occur.

The point is that the loss of AI was not an act of judgment on God's part.

God simply removed his protective power that kept them from being affected and influenced.

And I wonder how many times catastrophes, disasters, and shutdowns and the wheels fall off,

I wonder how many times that happens. It's not because God is actively swinging his baseball bat, but he has just removed a measure of his protection to allow what would otherwise naturally occur to take place.

Well, we have to be teachable. We have to learn lessons that God wants to teach us. And so here's what we've discovered so far.

When the wheels fall off, be humble, be quiet, be honest, be teachable.

There's one more response that we want to look at and we'll glean from this passage. We'll look at that tomorrow.

And I hope that you can join in tomorrow at noon or 6 p .m. for our daily devotional time and wrap up this little discussion about how to respond when the wheels fall off.

Let's ask the Lord to bless our day and to guide us and give us insight and wisdom in our day.

So Father in heaven, I pray that we would glean much from this little section in the

Old Testament book of Joshua. It is alive. It is vibrant. It is real for us today.

May we learn much from it. And this we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake.

Amen. All right. Well, again, I do really hope that you'll get outside, get some vitamin

D, enjoy the sunshine, and have a good spring day this last day of April.