source David Pawson
◑Sharp Contrast
▲Now it is the sixth book in the Old Testament and in English it just seems to carry on from the 5th. We have the five books of Moses Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy. And the story finishes at the end of Deuteronomy with Moses’s death. And then Joshua just seems to pick the story up at exactly the same point and Joshua, Moses’s successor carries on the leadership on God’s people. So what is different and why is this book not read annually in the synagogue where in Deuteronomy is.
Now Bible it looks no difference that it just carries straight on and the story continues but to the Jew there is a profound difference between Deuteronomy and Joshua. Deuteronomy is part of the laws of Moses, Joshua isn’t. it is quite a different book. If you really think about it Deuteronomy is packed of what I call legislation, it is packed with the laws of God. There isn’t a single law anywhere in the book of Joshua or in any of the books that follows it. We are out of the Law country or in other word we are out of the foundation of the nation; we are now into the outworking of the constitution.
So the first five books of our Bible are the basic constitution of the people of Israel, that is their foundation and the rest of the Old Testament is how it all works out so that when you put the book of Joshua which is the first none law book in the Bible against the first five book, you will see remarkable change. I will just try to indicate this.
▲See the next six books are all what we call history. In the next video that I am going to make with you we are going to see that the Jews don’t call this book history at all they actually call them prophecy. But I’m afraid we think to see them as history and the story continued.
But when you read those five books then these six books then you realize the contrast between them.
This is the law the foundation in Judaism and they are usually called the first five book "Torah" which means "instruction". And basically every Jewish rabbi is instructed in those five books and they read through once a year. But here we are having a Jewish scriptures, this are called the former prophets. We never thought of it like that. In the next video we are going to look at why.
▲Here(Pentateuch) we have God’s promises to them but here(rest of it) we have the fulfillment of those promises, how God kept His words. Here God says what He will do but here He does it. And once again this grace gratitude seems comes out. The grace of God is very clear in the first five books, (by the way) in the next six we shall see quite bit gratitude. Not quite enough but quite a lot. Here the redemption, here the righteousness. Here the legislation in the Law of Moses but here is the application of that law to their life and how it all worked out in practice. Here are the promises to bless obedience and in Joshua their obedience is blessed, they do what God tells them in Jericho and walls fall. Even if what God has told them what to do seems crazy, irrelevant, and unless but they did it and God blessed them and the land was given to them because they obeyed God.
But I am afraid there are also some examples in this book of the opposite of where they were disobedient and they were cursed. Unfortunately Joshua tells them they were given them land, 2 King tells us how they were taken away from them again.
▲It is the tragic story now of how the promises to bless them if they are obedient and to curse them if they are disobedient. These books tell them how the promises actually were fulfilled. They were blessed at first and then they were cursed. And from Joshua through to the end of Kings, it is a sad story of how they got the Promised Land and how they got lost it again.
The book of Joshua is mainly a book of obedience but the seeds of disobedience are there. They got Jericho but they did not get the nest town, Ai because they were disobedient. So the seeds were already there of losing the land but it did not happen for many centuries and then they lost it totally again.
▲Now here the covenant was established between God and the people of Israel but here it was expressed, it was practically applied to their life. So now we can see the first five books as cause and the next six books(Jos.~2Chron.) as the effect. And you can explain everything that happens in these books of cause and the next six books were the effect. You can explain everything that happens in these (history) books in terms of what was said here so now we are into a different part of the Old Testament. In English unfortunately if we don’t notice that because it has no separate headings it is just one book after another but I hope you can see that there is a sharp contrast and we are into something quite different.
◑Is it really happened? Yes. Of course!
▲Now one of the big questions about all these entire historical book is did it actually happen. Now I want to mention a trend in modern scholarship and it is very dangerous and that is to say that the truth in the Bible is not historical or scientific but truth of moral and religious value. Now let me spell that out.
People widely believe that the Bible is full of truths but what kind of truths? And to say it is a book of moral and religious truth but not necessarily scientific or historical truth, it is a very shaky position. Behind this distinction lies the concept of myth or legend if you like or saga. And the idea is it doesn’t matter whether it actually happened or not but it is still has a truth to teach us. Do you follow me?
Now of course there are parts of the Bible that are like that. Jesus' parables are all technically myth, it does not matter whether there is an actual prodigal son or not. The important thing is that the story has a truth in it. And it is very clear that Jesus’ parables are like that, that He made up story to communicate the truth. But when you start to say that the Bible is all like that then you are into very different territory.
So when you starts saying that the stories in the Bible like the story of Jericho, they have truths but don’t believe that they actually happened, they are myth containing truths, not lies but truth. Now that development has happened at phase it virtually treats everything in the Bible as parables that they are all just legendary stories made up to convey moral and religious truth to us, something like Aesop’s fables. And none of Aesop’s fables actually happened but they all contains truths, if you have read them you’ll know.
Now that began in the 19th century to be applied to the book of Genesis and it began to be said Adam and Eve did not actually lived, it is a myth, it is a story to communicate a truth. The truth is if you tell somebody not to tell something they want to go and touch it and that is the truth in Genesis 3. (I’m not advocating this; I’m just trying to tell to you what's been happening.) At first Adam and Eve were regarded as fable, as parable, as Adam was every man not a particular man, he was every man and Adam was everywhere, not a particular place. But it contains a truth that we could be dug out of it. To get to the truth we have to "demythologize" the story. You have to get rid of the story part and just keep the truth part of it only.
Well it soon began to be applied to others, to Noah next. Noah’s flood did not happen but the story of the flood has a moral or religious truth in its forms. So the Bible became not a book of history but a book of values. That is the favorite term being used nowadays. It has value but it is moral and religious not historical or scientific. Then it began to be applied to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then Jonah began to be treated as a myth even though he is presented as a factual man with a genealogy in the book of Kings.
And now it is even got written into the New Testament. In fact many now church figures question whether the virgin birth actually happened but it is a story that has a truth in it. You see it has a value for us but not historical.
Then it finally was applies to the resurrection of Jesus Himself. There are bishops saying that it doesn’t matter if Jesus' bones lying rotting in the Middle East that does not affect the story of the resurrection. And the story contains the truth that Jesus influence went on after His death.
▲Now this is a process that was particularly applied to the book of Joshua and the story of Jericho and the reason why all these develop was to make the Bible acceptable in a scientific age because this enables the miracles to be dismissed as stories and not actual events. And you can see the motivation behind this.
Well what is wrong with that? Because you see that book of Joshua is full what a scientific age says are impossible things. The walls of Jericho are not the biggest problem, the biggest problem is the sun and the moon standing still for a whole day and if it wasn’t them that stood still but the earth that stopped revolving, why doesn’t everybody flung off into space when the whole earth stopped in a jerk. Now that is claimed to be a myth. The truth in the story is that God wants to help us win our battles but the historical truth is not there. Now I hope I said enough to show you this development. It is very widespread.
▲So now when you turn to the book of Joshua, your face was rivers drying up and walls collapsing and sun and moon standing still. What do you make of all that in a scientific age? We’ll let as assume that they are fiction for a moment and they are simply legends. So we cut them out, we demythologize the book. What is left? If you cut the miracles out of the books of the Bible you are left with the purely human history and you might as well studied the history of ancient Tibet, I’m sure you have found some value in that. But this is serious, once you cut out the miraculous part and say that is ridiculous, it could not happen, you are actually cutting out God’s part in history and you are only left then with man’s part. What is the point of studying man’s history, it is three thousand years ago. I see no point on it at all. I might as well lecture to you on Chinese culture in the Deng dynasty or whatever it is. See it is irrelevant as that because in fact the miraculous is absolutely fundamental to the Bible history. It is so fundamental that if you cut them out there really not anything left to be studying.
▲Now let us take this a little further than that. Joshua presents us with real people in real places. Real places, the Jordan River is a real place, you can go and see it. I have baptized people in it. Jericho is a real place I have stood on the ruins of it. Jerusalem is a real place you can go and stand on the streets. And the people, the Canaanites were real people. Archeology demonstrates it. The Israelites are real people their descendants are still with us. Furthermore the book of Joshua claims to be written by eye witnesses, it is written in the first person plural, “We marched around the walls of Jericho”. Now that is a direct claim of people who said we were there, we saw what happened. why should it be thought that the scholar in the 20th century A.D. knows better what happened than someone who was actually there, the strange prejudice that comes to such a conclusion.
So the book claims to be a record of events written at that time and one of the frequent little phrases that comes in the book is “And it is there to this day” so people could go and check up on what has been recorded.
▲Now to dismiss this all as myth is a very arrogant thing to do unless you have you have very good evidence. Furthermore archeology had been busy confirming a great deal of Joshua. I’ll tell you more about the archeology of Jericho in a moment. But there are other cities that they conquered, cities like Hadzon and Lachish and the number of other cities. An archeologist have been very busy in all this cities and what they have discovered is that over a period of 50 years the entire culture of all those cities changed radically to a much simpler lifestyle, they were very sophisticated cities, they were very elaborate wealthy cities with a culture of their own. Yet over a space of 50 years, all these cities have been utterly destroyed and a new city built on them are the very different cultures. That is a remarkable thing to archeologist to have discovered. And the dating of that change exactly fits with Joshua’s account of how they took those cities, over periods of 50 years.
Now let us be quite clear that archeology can’t prove a miracle because it can only examine the results of the miracle and was not there to observe what happened at that time. Archeology confines fallen walls but it can’t find who knock them down. For that we either have to say it was a mere coincidence and it fall just the right moment. All we have to say is that is was a chance at all and the God is also busy at that time and to God knocking a wall is nothing, absolutely nothing.
▲Now they are also parallels to some of the events on Joshua, for example the Jordan River regularly dries up in time of flood. That sounds a contradiction but I tell how it happens. It is a very Meandering River as it goes down the Jordan valley. In flood when it meanders, it undercuts the banks on the curve and there we often even to this day when it undercuts one of the big banks, the bank falls in and temporarily dams the stream until it rises and goes over the dam and it may stop for 4~5 hours. So this things just have happened once, they happen again. Furthermore big buildings do collapse. I don’t know how many cathedrals in England have lost their spies and towers this way, they just suddenly collapsed. I’m not trying to explain the miracles away but I’m saying these are not isolated events. What is significant about in the book of Joshua is that they happen in the exactly the minute that God said they would happen, and happen just when they most needed.
So you have still got a problem even if you have tried to explain it the in a way in naturalistic terms. The heart of this is what God involve or not and if you remove the supernatural events you removed the divine activity and you reduce the Bible to a human activity in it then it becomes like any other history book of no more relevance to us today than ancient China.
◑It is the history of the God of Israel, not the history of what Israel
▲See the Bible is not the history of Israel, there is so much excluded. It is not a complete history of Israel. Joshua covers 40 years yet most of what happened in that 40 years is not recorded and the fall of Jericho spells about 3 chapters, it is out of all proportion to be history of Israel. It is actually the history of the God of Israel. The Bible is not the history of what Israel did but it is the history of what the God of Israel did. And if you cut out what He did, you cut out most of it because the reason why certain things are given a lot of chapter and other things no chapters, when God is doing something a lot of attention is given, when God wasn’t busy no attention. That is how the Bible is selected because every history is a selection of events according to what the historian thinks is important or significant. And the Bible historian says that the only important thing in our history is what our God did because it is not just the history of the God of Israel, it is the history of God and Israel. It is the history of their covenant relationship and it is the history on how they get on with each other and how they did not get on with each other and how God reacted to what they did. And so it is the history of the God and Israel, what He said indeed ‘He is the real hero of the drama’. I can put strongly as this, if God had not intervene with them then they would never gotten the Promise Land. It is as simple as that because humanly speaking it is an impossible task for a bunch of ex-slave who does not have a well military training to go in and take a well-fortified land and replaces a culture that was far superior to this in humanistic terms, it is impossible.
So if you cut the supernatural out, you cut God out, you have nothing left of what we call the history of the Bible, it is not the history of Israel. There must have been many, many things that they did that are not here.
▲We can put it like this, the covenant of Sinai is like a marriage. The betrothal begins with Abraham that is when God became engaged to this people. At Sinai He got married, the rest is this in Sinai was the honeymoon, it was a good deal longer than intended but the bride was not ready to look after a home yet. So the honeymoon lasted for far, far longer. But Joshua begins the marriage; they are home from the honeymoon now, they are setting up house together, God and Israel, in the place He wants them to live together, the place is chosen. Now how did the marriage worked out, that is the real question and I’m afraid it worked out badly. But since God hates divorce He never let them go, that is the beauty of it. He refuses to divorce them, had every reason to.
▲So we have this sad story of the marriage that did not work out but the fault is all on the wife side and God constantly calls Israel “My wife, I’m your husband”. And when she went after other gods He said, “Now you become an adulteress and even a prostitute”. But it is all in marriage terms, all the way through the Old Testament, what happened on Sinai was a wedding service but the wedding is one thing and a marriage is another. And working out the marriage after the honeymoon is when the real test begins. But it does not begin.
◑Now let's look at the shape of the book.
I always find it helpful to see the overall shape of the book, the structure of it, the outline and once I got that I can fit the bits in. too often I’m afraid we read the Bible in bits. Can you imagine reading an Agasa Christin's novel, ten sentences at a time ones a week. Can you imagine? I mean by the time you get to chapter 8 you have totally forgotten what happened in chapter one and yet we read the Bible that way which is the craziest way to read it. The best way to read the Bible is to right through a book at a time. That is why I’m making these videos to get you into the book. Every sentence in the book takes its meanings from the book. That is the context of every text and the text out of context is a pretext. And if you can understand that you will understand everything else.
▲Let us look at the outline of Joshua then. It is a sandwich in three parts. Two thin slices of bread and a lot of filling in the middle.
There is chapter 1 and then chapters 23 and 24 are the bread in the sandwich and they are all about this man, Joshua.
Then the prologue if you like is his commission from God and the epilogue is his final sermon and death and burial. So this book covers the life of Joshua from the age 80 to the age of a 120, 40 years. Interesting enough that is exactly the same period of Moses’ life covered by Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, from 80 to 120.
So these two men have the same period of leadership. The difference was that Moses was a law giver as well as a leader, Joshua was only a leader and law giving is finished.
▲In the middle, chapter 2-22 is a simple account of how they took the land the God had promised them in spite of the fact that it is already occupied.
Chapters 2~5 talks about entering the land. How they got over the Jordan and into the Promised Land for the first time. one lovely little touch id this, the day they got into the Jordan, “what is it” stopped, Manna stopped, and for the first time they have fruits and cornflakes and they had a proper meal. Interesting as soon as they got out of the Jordan God stopped feeding them. Now you have to feed yourself but He have given them the land full of milk and honey. So that is entering chapter 2- 5.
Chapters 6~12 were how they have conquered the land and their strategy is terrific. You divide to conquer. And so Joshua drove away straight to the middle of the Promised Land and having divided the enemy troops into two half that they can’t line up against them, he then cleans up the south and then cleans up the north. Brilliant strategy and God showed him how to do it. So he conquered the center first then the south, then the north.
And then in chapter 12 we have a list of 24 kings that Joshua defeated. Now of course the king is not necessarily king of an empire, the leader of a tribe would be a king. Then came the task dividing the land up between the tribes who conquered it.
So we have 3 simple parts of the middle of Joshua,
-entering the land,
-conquering it and then
-dividing it up.
And that is then they have a national lottery, but more of that later. Literally true, they had national lottery. Lotteries are biblical, right up the day of Pentecost and then they become wrong and I’m sure you know why that is. But remember they chose the replacement of Judas Iscariot by lotteries. But they did it not because they are appealing to chance but I’ll tell you why they did it later.
▲Now if you got the shape of the book of Joshua, "sandwich", his call and commission which came from both God and the People. That is going to be a very interesting point. Then he led them to enter the land, to conquer it, and divided it properly among the different tribes. And then he preached the final sermon to them, a magnificent sermon. “Choose this day who you will serve. As for me and my house I will serve the Lord.” Tremendous dying word, you remember the man’s dying word. That is his last message and then he was buried.
◑Well having got the shape let us begin to look at its ingredient detail,
very simple structure and a very obvious outline. I have to point out that I’m afraid the chapter division in our English Bible is so often in the wrong place. I wish I was able to do it but in fact I honestly believe it should never have been done. I believe very firmly that the Bible should never have chapter numbers in it and never verse numbers. You would then have to know your Bible. But we become text people as if God gave us a box full of individual verses that we encode to support anything that we wish to prove and the Bible becomes a sort to prove text to people and you can prove anything you like from the Bible. I can prove atheism from the Bible, there is a verse that says there is no God in the psalms. The goes on to say the fool have set in his heart there is no God but there are the words there is no God. You can prove anything from the Bible by proving text.
But the context, God gave us a library of books. He did not give us one book He gave us a library of books and each books have its own character therefore we have to study the book in whole if we are going to understand the Bible's message.
▲So let us look at his commission first. He was 80 and the call came to him from two directions. I like this. I believe we need this double call if you are going to remain faithful to God. You need a call form God and you need a call from God’s people. And if it is really a call from God, God’s people are going to recognize it and confirm it. Too many people say God has told me to do this and it hasn’t been confirmed by God’s people. Others have been forced into Christian work because God’s people have told them to but they haven’t heard from God about it. But when you’ve got both, I am now in a traveling ministry, I haven’t chosen it but I live out of a suitcase but I heard a direct call from God through a prophetic word and I checked it out with the elders and the elders after weighing it carefully says this is from God and that made me secure. I can do it; knowing it is double confirmation, God and His people. Look for that double call.
So Joshua was called by God, God said now Moses is dead. Well now Joshua knew that, but God said, “Moses is dead. Now you.” And He said. “I will never leave you nor forsake you”. That is the promise. Moses got them out of Egypt; you are to get them into Canaan. And those two tasks are very important.
▲He said you will prosper and be successful. It does not mean you will become wealthy. The word prosper has been misunderstood in the Bible, it does not mean wealth but there is a prosperity gospel which has got holds in a lot of people. But prosperous mean to achieve what you have set out to do. That is a wonderful promise. “May the Lord’s people prosper”. Not mainly become wealthy but they succeed in which they set out to do for the Lord.
▲God said there are two things that are very important. Number one is you are morale. When you are going to battle, tactics are very important, strategies are important but the thing that is going to win the battle is morale.
World War II is turned on General Montgomery; he became insufferable in victory as Winston Churchill puts him unconquerable in battle but insufferable in victory or something. But nevertheless the battle in El Alamein, North Africa that squeaky little voice, “We’re going to beat this chap, we’re going to win this battle” and a new voice of morale raised the 8th army in the desert in World War II. That was the turning point of the war. And it was largely on morale.
And that is why God said to Joshua your leadership will depend on morale, be of good courage. You must be courageous. You must say we are going to win. Your courage will take the battle to victory, very important point.
The second important point is morality. God said, “Joshua you must keep my statutes, you must obey my laws”. Morale and morality are the two things that God requires of the leader, interesting, aren't they?
▲Well Joshua went and told the people, “I’m now your leader, Moses is dead." You know what the people said? They said "be strong and courageous" and the people actually repeated word for word what God had told him privately. What a lovely confirmation, what a witness. And the people said this, you might smile at this but they actually said to him, “Just as we fully obeyed Moses, we will now obey you.” Now you may have laughed to that but actually you shouldn’t because they had. This is a new generation, remember. The older generation hadn’t obeyed Moses but these were young men, this was a whole new generation and they had already conquered Moab and Ammon when they obeyed Moses. So they weren’t quite so disobedient as you thought when I read that. They were genuinely meant it, they said we obeyed Moses and we are going to obey you now but be strong and of good courage. We do not want a leader who gets cowardly or get doubts about the crusade. May the Lord be with you as it was with Moses, they said.
▲So now we come to the actual heart of the book. He led them to enter the land, conquer it and divide it, all relate the land, the land, the land and dominate the whole book. Now Jordan was the barrier, it was in flood and it was 20 feet deep. There are no bridges and the floods are well on the water this time of the year. It was the flood time, the rainy time.
▲The first thing he does before entering is to send spies in but he is not going to send 12 he sends two. Perhaps you remember that two spies came out with good report but he sent only two now not 12.
Listen, faith is not fool hearted. Jesus emphasizes ‘sit down and count the cost before you go to battle.” It is very wise to sort out the situation. Find out what you are facing. Fool heartedness is not faith and there is a very narrow dividing line between the two. Some people who do things by faith are being really foolish, they haven’t sorted all out, and they really do not know what they are taking on. That is not faith, faith isn’t blind. Faith looks at the situation. Send spies now and find out what is the situation. And above all he did not want to report on the military mind, he wanted to report on their morale. What is their morale like?
▲Well the spies found lodging in a brothel with a prostitute called Rahab, she became an ancestor of Jesus, the most incredible story, a prostitute. She took them in and hid them. The men of the city have heard that spies that came in and they came looking for them and she hid then in the straw in the roof. And when the men have gone, she sent them west. She said, “Don’t go back to the river they will be looking for you. Go further west into the hills and then in a few days go back”. She saved their lives. Why did she do it? She said “Because I believe in your God, He is going to give you this land and I want to be on your side”. That is faith, incredible faith. one resolves this that she is held up in the New Testament by two of the writers as a wonderful example of faith, not a good woman but a woman of faith. And God can do more with a bad woman that have faith than a good woman who doesn’t have faith. We often forget that.
So here was this prostitute, she hid them and saved their lives. So they were actually remembering the blood of the passover lamb. They said “hang something scarlet out of your window, and we won’t touch you, we will passover your house”, interesting, isn't it? So she hung something looked like blood out of her window, a scarlet cord. Therefore her house was the only house that did not fall down.
▲Well now that is what happened before. What happened during the crossing into the sea? Well the Jordan dried out. But it dried up just as the priest’s feet that are carrying the Arc touched the water. Yes it means further up the river the bank came in and dam it temporarily. But why did it do it in that moment. See there is so many coincidences in the Bible that is statistically can’t be, the ark is much too high.
So the people got across on dry land virtually whereas the spies would have to swim across earlier. What was really happening? This generation has never seen the crossing of the Red Sea so God is doing it for them again. How lovely. They heard about the Red Sea but did they really believe that God can do such things. They were whole new generation. So now they know that the God of their fathers is with them too. That is what I believe what happened, a repetition of the Red Sea for their new generation.
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