Daily Devotional – April 27, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, good afternoon. Here we are in what, what is this, day 38 of stay at home?

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And just think, we're just a few days away from no mask, no food.

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I'm not particularly looking forward to that, but I have, I have got my mask ready.

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It's one I've been wanting to wear ever since I was a little kid and used to watch the Roy Rogers show on TV every week.

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Remember that? And if I can't find a good Roy Rogers mask, then, then I'll have to settle for the mask of Zorro.

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I mean, you know, it's a mask and they just say you have to wear a mask, so we'll see how that goes.

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I'll, I'll, I'll be sure to let you know. Well, today is a special day in our family's household.

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It's my wife's birthday today. I, I won't tell you which birthday it is.

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All I'll tell you is it's a one, one of those wonderful milestone birthdays that has a zero at the end. And I know some of you are guessing that that's probably 40, but you, you can't, you can't go by looks.

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Okay. So you have to, you have to think a little more deeply than that, but I'm just going to leave it at that. But anyway, happy birthday to my wonderful wife.

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She's a great, a great delight in our home, her family, a great, wonderful compliment to me.

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She couldn't ask for a better wife. So happy birthday to my wife. Well, you know, in the last few weeks

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I've occasionally suggested, you know, maybe doing some extra reading, picking up a book that's been on the shelf for a while or whatever.

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And some people have taken me up on that. One lady reported that she, uh, she was interested in doing some reading, but in a subject she'd never really thought of before.

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So she got on Amazon, did a little browsing and she came across a title that she decided to, to, to purchase and to read.

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And to me, it's kind of a weird book, but it's entitled Stuck in the Past, a

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History of Glue. A little odd, but she's finding it very delightful.

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She says she can't put the book down. You may have to think on that one. All right.

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Well, I've been thinking a little bit recently about the book of Joshua and not long ago, read through the book and you're familiar with the book of Joshua.

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So it's a history of Israel as, uh, they entered the land of promise and conquered the land and then divided the land, took possession of the land and so forth.

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And in that, um, in that conquest, things started off great. You remember, maybe remember that, uh, the leadership transition from Moses to Joshua went very well, went without a hitch.

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And Joshua was being very successful, the people are appreciating him and so forth. And then there was that miraculous crossing of the

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Jordan River, which was certainly reminiscent of, you know, 40 years earlier when, uh,

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Israel left the land of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. Uh, the sea parted and they went through the

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Red Sea and same thing here at the Jordan River. And then that incredible defeat at, uh,

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Jericho never been anything like that before. Uh, so, so things are going off, we're going along very well until all of a sudden, as they say, the wheels came off the cart.

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And this happens in Joshua chapter seven. Now things begin in a pretty typical, ordinary way.

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In verse two, we read that, uh, Joshua suggested that they take the typical approach, the usual approach before going to a new area.

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And we read in verse two that Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is near Beth Avon, east of Bethel, and said to them, go up and spy out the land.

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And the men went up and spied out the land. Well, this is, this was typical stuff. This is what Moses had the 12 spies do at Kadesh Barnea 40 years ago, when they went and spied out the land to check it out, see what kind of a land it was.

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And this is what Joshua did when they were still on the east side of the Jordan River. He sent spies to go in and check out the city of Jericho, see what they were up against when they went to Jericho and so forth.

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So he does the same thing here, sends the spies to Ai and has them check it out. So it's a usual, typical approach.

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And then in verse three, the spies, you know, they're, they're charged with coming back and giving a report and they give their report and they reach what seems to be a pretty reasonable conclusion.

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It says, they returned to Joshua and said to him, do not have all the people go up, but let about two or 3 ,000 men go up and attack

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Ai. Do not make all the people toil up there, for they are few. Yeah, and it seemed like a reasonable conclusion.

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It was a small city, village, large village, town, I guess, and a few thousand people in it, not nearly as big as Jericho and not well as defended.

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So it seemed like a reasonable conclusion. But the wheels came off. They suffered a humiliating, demoralizing loss.

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We read in verses four and five, so about 3 ,000 men went up from there, from the people, and they fled before the men of Ai.

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And the men of Ai killed about 36 of their men and chased them before the gate as far as Shebarim and struck them at the descent.

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And then read this, the hearts of the people melted and became as water.

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Okay, so now what? Now what? I want you to consider some parallels to our current crisis.

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Now one of the parallels I am absolutely not drawing is a parallel between the

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United States of America and the nation of Israel, the Old Testament Israel.

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I'm not making that parallel at all. But what I do see as some parallels is this.

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In our nation, we have been known for having a strong military. We've been militarily successful over the last decades.

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And even when challenged, greatly challenged, we've risen to the challenge and seem to be militarily successful.

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In the last few years, we've seen some strong economic growth, stock market reaching great highs and record highs, and unemployment reaching record lows, and a very, very strong economy.

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And then all of this is ground to a halt by a microscopic germ.

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Okay, so now what do we do? What do we do? How do we handle the distress?

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What questions come to our mind? And more importantly, where do we go for answers to those questions?

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Well, we have some options about what to do, where to go. And I think all of these options are probably being utilized these days.

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One of them is the scientific approach. That's where we look strictly and only at the circumstantial explanations or reasons or causes.

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We look only at the quote -unquote data to try to figure out where did this thing come from, what caused it, and how do we solve it?

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So for example, you've heard the stories. COVID -19 was caused by animal contamination in one of those wet markets in Wuhan.

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Or it came about as a result of inadvertent contamination from a research lab near Wuhan.

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Or more conspiratorially, it came about as a result of a deliberate contamination from a virus from this research lab in Wuhan.

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The scientific approach, just strictly looking at data, if you will.

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And then there is the stoic approach to this crisis. A stoic approach is sort of a passive acceptance that uses that statement that you hear a lot these days.

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Well, you know, it is what it is. It is what it is. So let's just deal with it and get on with life.

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You know, stiff upper lip kind of a thing. The stoic approach. And then there is what

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I'll call the naturist approach. This has a couple of different nuances to it. One of them expresses it like this.

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This is bad karma. This is bad karma. This is just us getting what we deserve because of what we've done.

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Kind of like this would be the interpretation of Israel's defeat at AI. It's bad karma for what they did to Jericho.

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Now they're getting it in return. And more precise or specific, the naturist, the true naturist would say, you know,

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Mother Nature is retaliating against man for man's abuse of Mother Nature.

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And so you see some hints of this in some of the statements that go like, well, have you noticed how clean the air is now that we're all in a stay -at -home mode?

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Or have you noticed how clean the water is? Or I've heard a report that the bear population in Yosemite National Park is just proliferating.

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It was just, you know, because there are no humans there. I'm not exactly sure how the bear population could be proliferating in a matter of a couple of months.

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I'm sure that the naturists have some kind of an explanation for that. But the whole idea of the naturist approach is, isn't this wonderful?

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Mother Nature is finally retaliating and getting back at us for what we've done to her.

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Well, and then there are some spiritual approaches. And the American religion spiritual approach or response is that of what we call moralistic therapeutic deism.

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I'm not going to go into that at this point. But just to summarize it to say this, the

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American religion looks at God as someone who's supposed to make our life comfortable, make our life easier, to relieve us when we're in a crisis and so forth.

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We saw this about 20 years, almost 20 years ago with 9 -11. And, you know, when the

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Twin Towers went down and those attacks came from the Islamic terrorists, the cry was issued, pray to God, pray to God, pray, pray, pray.

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And then when it seemed the crisis was averted and things calmed down, you know,

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God is forgotten about. So in this day, with this crisis, you've heard a lot of people saying pray.

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And the prayer is something along this line. Pray to God to make this thing go away, to make this disease, this virus disappear, to make everything better again.

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So the American religion is, you know, a religion that says pray that we get relief.

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But a biblical Christian response is a little deeper than that. It asks some questions and it goes to God with those questions.

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It seeks answers to God, from God for those questions.

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The biblically Christian response doesn't just seek relief. It wants to probe deeper.

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And this is what we're finding, going to find in Joshua chapter 7. I'll come back to this subject tomorrow.

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And I think that we can find some help and encouragement from Joshua 7 in responding well to this virus crisis.

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So until then, let's have a word of prayer and ask the Lord to bless the remainder of our day and our work and service for him.

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So our Father and our God, we do thank you for this day and thank you for your grace and your provision in it.

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And I pray that as we continue to deal with this crisis in our day, that we would respond to it with a biblically

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Christian response. This I pray in Jesus' name, amen. All right, well have a good rest of your