Joshua 3
Unity of Command – 1:10-18
Turn to Joshua 1. The book of
Joshua is a parallel to the New Testament book of Ephesians and it takes up
where Deuteronomy left off in that this book gives you the account of how they
tried to carry out the bringing in of the millennial kingdom by themselves,
that is, the nation
The book of Joshua is characterized by three great principles. These principles we found in the first 9
verses, the commission of Joshua. They
are repeated and interwoven throughout the entire book. They occur in
practically every chapter. We will not
keep going back to these but I just cite these to show you that they do occur
and one of them is going to be dealt with in quite some detail tonight in the
rest of chapter 1. But the three great
principles we find from the book of Joshua are these: (1) the supreme authority
is the canon of Scripture. This is the
first book in the Bible where you have the Bible talking about itself. Up to this point the Bible has been being
written as you read it, in other words, the Law of Moses, but Moses didn’t have
any Bible; he was writing the Bible. But
now when we come to Joshua, for the first time we have men who already possess
a canon of Scripture. Therefore the
supreme authority is the Word of God, not these men. We’ll see this again and
again; the supreme authority is the Word, not the men. The supreme authority is the Word and not the
prophets. The prophets have to conform
to the Word that’s already there. There
has to be a logical continuity or the prophet is thrown out. So the Word of God becomes the crux of the
authority.
(2) The second thing is that there’s a historical continuity to the
Abrahamic Covenant in this book and this is something that we are going to
stress more and more, the historic continuity of God’s program. We try to set up history into a framework;
this is one purpose for this course, to tie this thing together because in
speaking with many of you you have pieces but you don’t have it tied
together. The Jews had a way of tying
this together by tracing covenants through history and by simply tracing one
covenant through history, with all of the branch-offs in that covenant, in
other words, how it applied to this nation, that nation, etc. they could sum up
all of history into one very neat package and this the Christian should be able
to do for it is only when you can do this that you can truly see what Biblical
Christianity really is.
(3) The third thing is that holy war is necessary, that the kind of rest
described in this book doesn’t come automatically. God doesn’t program us as robots so that we
lie down on our backs and bang, that’s it, all is finished. Rather the rest is secured by human
effort. It’s this third and last
principle we’re going to see dealt with in detail tonight as we begin with
Joshua’s efforts to bring this about.
Grace does not preclude human responsibility.
So we begin with Joshua 1:10; remember the first 9 verses dealt with
Joshua’s commission. He was a
commissioned officer, commissioned directly by the Lord Jesus Christ and in
verse 10 he begins his command. From verse 10-18 we have the assumption of Joshua’s
command. Immediately we have a problem
with verse 10 and one of the problems we have in verse 10 is something that we
found in the book of Deuteronomy. If you
recall in the book of Deuteronomy we went back to some of the narrative
sections, and you recall in there I made a point that is often overlooked, and
that is that you cannot read Hebrew literature chronologically. If you do you’re going to be in trouble, and
here is one of the places you’re going to be in trouble for verse 10 does not
come after verse 9 chronologically.
Therefore the liberals jump at these points and say aha, contradiction
in the Scripture, and if we can show a contradiction in the Scripture we can
invalidate Christianity. Is there a
contradiction in Scripture? There is no
contradiction in Scripture. Well then
what do you do with the following problem.
In
So you have the three days show up in two places, separated by four days
and the result is you have a total actually in here it works out you’ve got
eight days to worry about. How can you
resolve this? This is resolved if you understand
the nature of narrative literature in the Bible. It is not chronological. When the Jews wrote their history they wrote
not chronologically but they wrote topically.
They would go through a whole topic and stop, then they’d move to
another topic, and move with that, and stop, and they’d come back and move with
this. This had actually a good technique
as far as literary authorship is concerned because it avoided getting bogged
down with details. They’d just one topic and trace it out and then they’d leave
it with you, then they’d come up with another topic and they’d trace that out
and leave it, and that’s how they worked with their history. And this is how you must understand
history.
In the course we’re going through one of the men will read as an outside
source [can’t understand name] who was a lecturer at the
“Scholars follow well-trodden paths and continue the tradition. They base their examination of the Biblical
text on the rules of Latin or western composition. They start from the assumption that the true
and original text must be (quote) “consistent” in their perspective. If it is not consistent it must be corrected
by scissors and paste work. It does not
occur to scholars that the Biblical author wrote in an entirely different way
and not according to the schema of a Latin composition.” He’s absolutely right; you cannot Hebrew literature
like you do western literature. If you
do it looks like there are contradictions in it and there are no
contradictions; it there are we’d better just give it up. So we’ve either got to learn how to read it
right or see contradictions in it, it’s one or the other.
Now to show you a very famous “contradiction,” (quote end quote) in the
same line, turn to Genesis 2:8. This is
the same result of sloppy reading of the text and yet has resulted in
theological disaster for a lot of believers.
Just the other day a person showed me a book they were reading and sure
enough, down in the footnotes, after Gen. 2:8 it said “a new and contradictory
story of creation,” in other words, this story of creation in Genesis 2 differs
from that in Gen. 1 and I’ve had some young people say my English says there
are two accounts of creation in Genesis.
For your information there are not two accounts in Genesis, never has
been, never will be, there is only one account and it’s the idiotic English
teachers that can’t understand it; they ought to stay with English and let me
take care of the Hebrew but they feel free to comment to our young people and
tear apart their faith.
Here in 2:8 we have the phrase, “And the LORD God planted a garden
eastward in
Back to Joshua and we’ll deal with this problem here. These dislocations in the narrative, they are
called dislocation, at first glance they look to give trouble, but as so often
happens in the Word of God, and this has been my experience, as you study hard
on these “contradictions,” (in quotes) as you get down into it you suddenly
discover the blessing down at the bottom and all you have to do is keep
persevering. You may not get the answer
today, tomorrow, next week or next year, you just keep digging and digging and
digging and you finally find it. We find in these dislocations, actually they
have a spiritual impact because it means the author is saying certain things to
us and if we note how he has arranged the material we will understand what he
is trying to emphasize.
For example, if we had an assignment tonight, everyone go out of here
and by Wednesday be able to come back with a 500 word news story, any event you
want to pick, just write a news story on it.
Now if you were writing a news story and if you’ve been trained in the
area of journalism you’ll know that you don’t write it chronologically. I was standing at the corner and a red
Cadillac came down one street and a black Buick down the other and they
collided and this and that. You don’t
write a news story this way, you give the important detail first and follow
it. Well in many ways the Hebrew
narrative does this. They’ll start with
something and carry on and you have to get the purpose from how these pieces
are put together. Now because this
involves a little jockeying around, we’ve got to cover, before we move past
verse 10 the first three chapters of Joshua.
We’re not going to cover it in detail but I want to set you up so you
see how this fits together. This all
goes together but you have to look at it for a while.
We have this textual block; I’ve written out a sequence in which it
should be. You start with 1:1-9, this is
the chronological sequence, there’s the commission of the Lord. That happens; the next thing that happened
after God got through speaking His words in verse 9 was 2:1, Joshua sent out
the spies. He sent out the spies, the
spies came back, then turn to 3:1, after the spies came back Joshua wrote and
he moved the camp. It was about seven
miles east of
But the first thing you have is day number one, the Lord’s commission,
day minus one or day zero. Then days 2,
3, 4, and 5 were taken up with a fantastic spy mission. We’re going to deal with Rahab and why the
first place the men went was the local whore house, and why it was that they
went to this prostitute and why this prostitute, incidentally, turns out to be
one of the great-great-great-great-great-great grandmothers of Jesus Christ. It’s a tremendous lesson in grace and
understand a woman’s character here. So
2, 3, 4 and 5 deal with the spy mission.
Then in day 6 we have the moving of the camp; 7, 8 and 9 are the three
days that are mentioned both in 3:2 and in
Incidentally what they’re waiting for here, they have about a million
people sitting on the bank of Jordan and it’s flooding, and God has told Joshua
look, I want you to go across there; that’s all he told Joshua. And Joshua then combined the principle of
sovereignty and human responsibility together, he wasn’t a fatalist, he didn’t
lie on his back and say well God’s going to do it all, I’ll just sit here and
wait for Him to do it. He didn’t do
that. Joshua did as much as he could
within his area of responsibility; as a military commander the first thing he
has to do is get intelligence on the enemy. And he does that, he executes this
first, days 2, 3, 4 and 5, and he waits until his intelligence comes back to
him. No military commander is going to
move out unless he has intelligence on the enemy. He has to wait until then. There’s nothing supernatural about this,
Joshua knows what the Lord wants him to do and he starts out doing what he can
within his area of responsibility. The
application to us today as believers, God wants us to know the Word of
God. That means (a) you have to learn to
read, (b) you have to study the text and this involves time and effort. There’s nothing easy, there’s nothing quick,
there’s no easy way about it, you just have to slug it out.
And this is the way Joshua did it.
He operated at this point, if you stood by him and you would have seen
this, he would have said now I need some intelligence, let’s go over there, and
he sent his spies over. Then in the 6th
day when he got the report, he said now’s the time to move, and we’re going to
see what it was about the spy mission that told him that now was the time to
move. So he moves his camp on the 6th
day, moves it up to the bank of Jordan and then stops. The Jordan is overflowing; there is no
possible way humanly speaking you can get that army across Jordan. There’s no bridge ever been constructed
across Jordan at this time in history, no boats are available and he has
absolutely no way from the human point of view of getting across there.
But he knows one thing, he moves from the known to the unknown, and this
is the principle we must exercise in divine guidance. You have to start with what you know to be
God’s will and move from there into the area of the unknown. You may not know. And here Joshua generally did not know how
God would handle the problem. He moved
his army up to Jordan and stopped, and then he ordered his men to gather
food. He didn’t say make boats because
it would have been hopeless, they would have been slaughtered, they couldn’t
have gotten boats across the Jordan fast enough because the people at Jericho
and the Canaanites would have picked them off as they came across. There is no way he could have made boats to
go across there. Plus the fact you have
the stream problem, etc. He’d probably find half his fleet out in the Dead Sea,
so he couldn’t do it by boat. So there’s
only one thing he can do from the human point of view in his area of responsibility
and that is, all right people, get your provisions. That means get your clothing ready, get your
food ready, get your provisions because shortly, in three days, you’re going to
move.
Now the second thing he has to do is sit. Now you can imagine the tension in this, a
million people looking at Joshua; they say in three days we’re going to move,
great, how’s he going to get us across the water. And Joshua is wondering the same thing, he’s
sitting in his tent boy, this is great, I’ve just ordered everybody to move,
within three days we’re going to cross and I have no idea how we’re going to
cross that Jordan. So Joshua is sitting
around his tent, he’s waiting for orders.
And finally he gets them and we’ll see the actual order that God gave to
him, it’s found in chapter 3 and God gives the order and when he receives the
order he’s ready, then he moves.
But you can see, this is a wonderful illustration of how this works. He starts with the known, he applies it as
far as he can go, right up to the edge of the will of God, and then he has to
stop. That’s where everything stops. Then God, in response to his obedience, gives
another piece, He gives them ten more inches to move; he moves those and then
God gives them some more. And that’s one
of the principles of divine guidance.
And we’ll see that, but the thing I want you to see now is that this
involves ten entire days here, at least, from chapter 1 to chapter 3, and we
have to get this into position.
Now the next thing you should ask yourself is well, why is it then that
from this point, the end of verse 9, the man, the final editor that wrote this,
one of the prophets in the days of the Judges, when he put this book together,
why is it that he moved from verse 9, which was an activity on day 1 and
immediately in 1:10 we read, “Then Joshua commanded….” What is the point of doing this? He moved down to here; in other words, the
man who set this text up eliminated day 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and somewhere on the
7th or 8th day he starts here at verse 10. Now what is the point? Can you imagine what the point is that he’s
trying to make here? Notice the connection,
the hint is found in verse 9. Go back to
chapter 1, remember this is not chronological, it is logical; the man who set
this book up has a purpose, he’s being used by the Holy Spirit to generate the
inerrant canon of Scripture, and so at this point he’s trying to get across a
point. And so he interrupts chronological
order and he takes these verses and moves them all the way over here to make a
point and the point that he’s making, in verse 9 do you see what’s happened,
the last part of the Lord’s words to Joshua says this: “Have I not commanded
thee? Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid,” etc.
Now watch what happens, what do you read in verse 10, “Then Joshua
commanded the officers of the people, saying, [11] Pass through the hose and
command the people,” you see, command, command, command, and what the man is
getting at here is he wants to bring out the chain of command that’s
involved. If you haven’t been in the
service you haven’t had the fortunate or unfortunate experience of chains of
command. But chains of command means
that the order generates at high levels and it goes down. Here you have the command generate with the
Lord in verse 9; it is passed to Joshua, Joshua is commander in chief; Joshua
receives the order in verse 9. Joshua
then passes it to the shoterim in
verse 10. So now we have the officers,
these are the men that are going to be in charge of the marching unit. He passes it down to them in verse 10 and
then in verse 11 what does he say? This
is what I want you to do, I want you to go through the camp, the word “host”
shouldn’t be host, it means camp, and command the people. So now we have the chain of command down to
the people.
So obviously what the man did who was writing this text, whoever he was,
is trying to draw out a lesson and the Holy Spirit through him to show how
God’s orders are carried out, and he doesn’t want to fog the details with
chapter 2. He’ll go back chronologically
and say now I want to fill you in on what happened in the meantime, but right
now he wants to start out with a clear cut… you see, if he stopped right here
he’d go out and start talking about the spies and this and that and your
interest would get over on Rahab, etc. and you’d lose the continuity of the
picture here. So in order to keep the
continuity he flushes the details for a minute.
He’s going to come back to the details but right now he wants to keep
this clear: the Lord’s orders go from the Lord to the people through this chain
of command. This establishes the chain
of command which we’ll see again and again in this book, it’s never violated,
never violated at all, and when it is violated eventually in the book of Judges
you have national collapse. You cannot
violate chains of command. This is what
some people have yet to learn, there’s a chain of command that is established
and if you violate it you have chaos.
You can’t do anything and you have nothing but suffering, sorrow and
heartache. Chains of command are
absolutely necessary; this is an illustration.
In verse 10, “Then Joshua commanded the officers,” the shoterim were those men that were in
charge of the small marching groups. He
ordered them in verse 11 to gather provisions, “Pass through the host and
command the people, saying, Prepare food supplies; for within a span of three
days” literally, “you will be passing over Jordan,” and “be passing” is a
Hebrew participle and as I have said again and again, the Hebrew participle is
a motion picture tense, and this tells you something tremendous. Joshua actually sees this happening in front
of him. When he says I want you to go
through this camp and I want you to show the people with absolute assurance
that within three days I see them, they’re going right across the Jordan. Now it’s amazing this man because he has no
idea how it’s going to happens.
To give you a feeling what’s going to happen turn to 3:15 and you’ll see
the condition of the Jordan River at this time.
Those of you who are weak on geography, here’s the land of Canaan, this
is the land that was promised, here you see the north end of the Dead Sea,
here’s the Sea of Galilee. Now if you
blow up this section just north of the Dead Sea where the action is occurring
you get something like this; they are encamped at a place called Shittim, which
is a place in the woods, there are actually forest trees there. Across the river is a place called
Jericho. He is going to cross this
Jordan and make his initial impact here at Jericho, setting up his base camp at
Gilgal for military reasons which we’ll see.
We’re going to study the ten principles of war, the ten classical
principles of war and I’ll show you, I have gone through the entire book of
Joshua and have found that Joshua obeyed every one of the ten classic
principles of warfare, never violated them except at one point and he was in
trouble there. But with the exception of
that one time Joshua always adhered to the classical principles that every good
military commander has always adhered to, and this should underline to you the
role of human responsibility. Joshua
used moxy, he used military information and knowledge, and he used it in the
situation, even though he had the promise of God it would come out, that did
not excuse him from using the military information at his disposal.
Joshua 3:15 the last part says “the Jordan overfloweth all its banks all
the time of harvest.” This harvest is
the spring harvest, this happened in the time of Passover and the rains, the
winter rains are coming off the hills, cascading off the hills, and the river
is at its maximum. This is something
that you ought to see immediately that is very important about the text. God could have had the people arrive at
Jordan in the fall or in the later summer when the river is dry. Now why do you suppose that God worked it out
so that the people would come there at the worst possible season, right after
the rainy season? So that His miracles
and His power might be made known. You
see another reason is a military reason, these people over here are probably
laughing, good night, these people are crazy trying to invade the land of
Canaan from the east across a flooding river right after the rainy season,
they’ll never make it. And this is
exactly what God is doing; He’s using the element of surprise.
So this is an important thing to remember as Joshua is bringing his army
up. Just feel with the man, think what
he’s going through. Here he is with a
million people in back of him, Jordan in front of him flooding, and he’s just
made the ludicrous statement in three days you’re going to be crossing that
thing, with no boats. Can you imagine
the murmuring in the camp, huh, what’s Joshua going to do, what’s the
deal. And you can just hear the rumors
going around the camp as to what is it that Joshua is going to do?
Turn back to 1:11, the provision, “Prepare you,” or “Prepare for
yourselves provisions.” This shows a
principle and the principle is that when God asks us to do something and we can
do it, naturally without supernatural help we do it. It didn’t take any supernatural help to
gather up the food, to pack the clothes.
We see this principle again and again in the Word of God and it’s
something that you have to go to all the time, and that is that you move from
the known to the unknown. You move from
that which you can do to that which you can’t do. If you want a classic illustration of this
think of Acts 12:5-10, Peter is in jail.
The angel comes to Peter in jail, what does the angel say? Peter, get on your clothes, Peter get up, and
then when Peter gets up and gets on his clothes then the angel takes care of
the guards. But the angel doesn’t dress
Peter; Peter dresses Peter, not the angel.
The angel doesn’t help Peter get up either, because Peter can do
that.
Where God comes in is doing what we can’t do, and so this is the
difference of approaching a problem from the standpoint of naturalism where you
have the universe operating by natural law without any divine interference and
supernaturalism. People often think,
some Christians are supposed to be people that believe God is going to do
everything, feed them without their effort, etc. that’s not the picture. The Bible says we live in supernaturalism
which means God will take care of the things God will have to take care of and
we can take care of the things we can take care of, and that’s the way it
works. Here you have a classic
illustration. They have two necessities:
gather food, cross the river. From the
human standpoint they can’t cross the river so they stop, leave it in the
Lord’s hands and deal with that with which they can deal with, namely gather up
the food. That’s what you should do when
you have problems; you work as far as you can with the problem and the rest you
can’t work, leave it in the Lord’s hands, and that’s the same thing they did
here.
Now in verse 12 we have something else.
Before we get to verse 12 notice the last part of verse 11, “you are
going to pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land which the LORD
your God is giving you.” Here we have
the first principle of military warfare, the principle that you have to have a
defined objective. And the objective
must be defined so the army knows when it’s reached the objective. This is what’s wrong in Vietnam, how do you
tell whether we’ve won on the basis we’re operating on? You can’t.
The military commander is over there, how can he tell when he’s won the
war? How many VC’s he’s shot? Absolutely
not. We haven’t given the military an
objective, that’s the problem; they’ve got limited objectives but they have no
final line, if the army comes up to this line the war is over; they don’t have
that, this is one of the great problems here.
Here you have a final objective, “possess the land.” This final objective was never
accomplished. The story behind that
starts in the next verse as to why this land was never fully conquered. Originally God had given them all of the land
of Canaan. Now you notice in verse 12
He’s talking to two and a half tribes, and he said “to the Reubenites, and the
Gadites, and to half the tribe of Manasseh, spoke Joshua saying, [13] Remember
the word….” What has happened is the
Transjordania problem and to understand the Transjordania problem you have to
understand the limit of the land originally given in the Abrahamic
Covenant. In the Abrahamic Covenant you
have the land from this area, which is Wadi el-Arish, the river Wadi of Egypt,
down south to a place called Ezion-geber, north to the south point of the Dead
Sea, across the Dead Sea, up to Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, and then on to the
north for many, I guess a hundred or two hundred more miles, it’s not shown on
your maps in your Bible; I’ve never yet seen a Bible with maps in the back that
have properly shown this, but if you trace out the boundaries it goes all the
way up almost to the Euphrates River on a narrow strip. That’s how far this land goes; it goes all
the way up north into what is now called Lebanon and Syria, that’s the northern
most extension. Now nowhere in the
Bible, even in David’s day, did Israel possess this land up here; she never got
up there, and you’ll see why in just a moment, and it has to do partially with
this Jordanian problem here, this Transjordanian problem.
To see this we have to go back to Numbers 32 and pick up a most
marvelous section of history in this nation.
Something happened when they began to move into this land. And the original promise, the area on the map
I’ve marked in red is what they were aiming for, this was their original
objective. But when they came up the
east side, forty years after being in the wilderness, they encountered a group
of people that were Canaanites. They
were Hamitic, they were people that had spilled and washed over from here, the
Amorites. The Amorites originally were in this land, and for some reason by the
time the Jews forty years later moved up there, and these Amorites had spilled
over east of the Jordan and began to control this. And they had two kings that
were giants, one was Og and the other Sihon, and Sihon and Og [can’t understand
word] their empires to the east of Jordan.
Now when Moses and Israel started their eastward penetration they asked
for permission to move into this territory.
They were denied the permission and therefore God said I am going to
annihilate those two kings. Subsequently
they destroyed the kings, destroyed the Amorite city-states here, etc. and
gained a place called Transjordania, indicated on this map by green. Please notice that this is in addition to the
original Abrahamic Covenant. This was
not promises to Abraham and has never been promised to Abraham.
But in Numbers 32:1 we have the natural response after Transjordania has
been brought in under their power. “Now
the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very great multitude of
cattle; and when they saw the land of Jazer, and the land of Gilead, that,
behold, the place was a place for cattle,” they came and they wanted it. In other words, Transjordania lies in Israeli
hands; it’s cattle country. These two
tribes were ranchers, they had lots and lots of herds and therefore they wanted
a place to graze these herds and they needed good grazing territory for cattle,
and they saw that this fit the picture. So they asked and petitioned Moses,
look, can’t we move our cattle into this area and begin to settle down here
instead of going across Jordan. Then
Moses made them a conditional promise and that conditional promise is found in
verse 29. This is the condition for the
occupation of Transjordania. “If the
children of Gad and the children of Reuben will pass with you over Jordan,”
notice the “if,” here’s the condition, “if they will pass with you over Jordan,
every man armed to battle, before the LORD, and the land shall be subdued
before you, then ye shall give them the land of Gilead for a possession. [30] But
if they will not pass over with you armed, they shall have possessions among
you in the land of Canaan.”
In other words, if this tribe will join in the conquest of the red area
on the map, they can stay in the green area.
If, however, they do not want to go into a team, you make them go into a
team and then deny them all the green territory, just let it go to seed. Now that’s the condition, so the condition
for the occupation of Transjordania by these two and a half tribes is that they
be loyal to the nation until this whole land has been cleaned out. Now this has always presented a problem and
if you turn to Joshua 22, for one of the many places where Transjordania got to
be a pain in the neck for the nation Israel.
Later on they were very sorry they were bothered with the thing. Very early in the history of Israel they had
problems with these people dwelling across Jordan. If you remember the fourth divine
institutions you’ll understand why, because you have a geographical division
in the nation. For example, in the early
days of America, had Alaska been a state we would have been in trouble; there
is no possible way Alaska could be a state in the union 100 years ago because
there would be no transportation, no way to militarily defend it or anything
else.
Joshua 22:19, we have a problem already, this is just one of many, and
notice what it says about Transjordania.
“Nevertheless, if the land of your possession,” this is addressed to
these same two and a half tribes, “if the land of your possession be unclean,
then pass ye over unto the land of the possession of the LORD, in which the
LORD’s tabernacle dwells, and take possession among us; but rebel not against
the LORD, nor against us, in building you an altar beside the altar of the LORD
our God.” In other words, God had set up
His altar right here, at Jerusalem.
These people later on thought it was too much… they wanted to go down
and see the tabernacle and they didn’t want to get in their car and drive
across Jordan, it was too much of a drive so they decided they’d set up an
altar over here, it was closer by, saved gas, etc. So they stayed over in Transjordania. Now the problem was with this is that this
immediately divides the nation because we’re going to see again and again the
unity of the nation Israel is theological and you split that, everything falls
to pieces. So therefore this got to be
just a pain in the neck all the time.
To show you that God never truly recognized Transjordania, turn to
Ezekiel 47:16, you have the final boundaries of the land and they do not
include Transjordania. This should not
surprise you because those of you who understand what the Word sovereignty
means will understand that when God sets the boundaries in the Abrahamic
Covenant, no matter what happened in history those boundaries would be the way
they were stated in the Abrahamic Covenant.
So in Ezek. 47:16-18 you have the eastern boundary of the land; this is
ultimately in the millennium. Look at
how the boundary runs: “Hamath, Berothah, Sibraim,” these are various cities,
many of which are not known exactly, but in verse 17 you start pick up, “And
the border from the sea,” that’s the Mediterranean Sea, “shall be Hazer-enan,
the border of Damascus, and the north northward, and the border of Hamath. And this is the north side. [18] “And the east side,” here’s your eastern
boundary, “shall measure from Hauran,” which nobody knows where that is, “and
from Damascus, and from Gilead, and from the land of Israel by the Jordan, from
the border unto the eastern sea. And
this is the east side.” So the ultimate
boundary comes right down through Jordan valley and Transjordania is not included. This was just a freak temporary occupation
due to the exegesis of the moment.
Now, if you turn to Judges you’ll see why this Transjordanian problem
fell apart. It never worked out. The reason it never worked out was that the
occupation was conditional to begin with.
The Transjordanian occupation was conditioned on the fact that the
nation would ultimately totally possess the land of Canaan. After it totally possessed the land of
Canaan, then the tribes could beat a retreat, go across there and enjoy
themselves. But the trick is, did Israel
ever fully conquer the land of Canaan.
Answer: negative, they did not, found in Judges 2:20, “And the anger of
the LORD was hot against Israel; and he said, Because this people has
transgressed My covenant which I commanded their fathers, and they have not
hearkened unto My voice, [21] I also will not henceforth drive out any from
before them of the nations which Joshua left when he died.”
Now there you have the final pronouncement of doom. This is significant because you can read
every prophet of the entire Bible, every one; has it ever struck you as you’ve
read these prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and all the rest, has it ever struck you
the fact that not one of them every called for continuing the holy war? Not one, not one ever did. The holy war was over right here, this is the
end, it was ended in defeat. The nation
could not secure Canaan and we’ll see the very boring chapters in the last
part, I’ll try to liven it up with some maps, but in the last part of the book
of Joshua it’s very obviously that Joshua himself realizes it, that the holy
war has petered out, and here is the final sentence. After this chapter in the book of Judges you
will never find a man of God calling for resumption of the holy war. The reason now is there’s only one man who
can do it, and that’s going to be Messiah.
Messiah has to be the one that starts and ends the holy war in His
day. So this actually is the beginning
of the Messianic promises.
Now let’s go back to Joshua 1:13.
Here you’re going to see, as we go through this section, Joshua the soldier. Again I can’t stress enough that Joshua,
though he knew the sovereign will of God, still exercised his human
responsibility to do those things that he could do toward this goal. Verse 13, “Remember the word which Moses, the
servant of the LORD, commanded you, saying, the LORD your God has given you
rest, and has given you this land.” “This land” refers to Transjordania. [14] “Your wives, your little ones, and your
cattle, shall remain in the land which Moses gave you on this side of the
Jordan; but ye [the men] shall pass before your brethren armed, all the mighty
men of valor, and help them.”
Now what Joshua did here was to gather his objective he employed a
second principle of classic military warfare and that is the principle of
security. He had to secure his rear and
his flank from enemy attack, and he did this by blocking it. He did this by a very interesting maneuver,
there were 110,000 men in these tribes; you can do your own research and gather
this information in Numbers. Now in Joshua
4:13 we’re told that only 40,000 of the 110,000 men crossed Jordan. If you figure 15,000 men to an army division,
you have three divisions which is about equal to a corps, and so you have a
whole corps of men moving across Jordan at this point. That means the equivalent of five divisions
back to block the rear and particularly the south. Why the south? Because down here you have two kingdoms,
Ammon and Moab, and they’re not to friendly and if they get hostile then
Joshua’s going to be cut off without any supplies.
Remember Joshua has to move there and he’s going to destroy, destroy,
destroy; an army that destroys needs what?
Food, and it needs supplies. If
Joshua’s flank is cut off and his rear guard is destroyed, his army is without
provisions. So to protect that he puts a
whole force over here, 76,000 men or roughly equal to five modern army
divisions, and this is enough to supply, guard against Ammon and Moab, and
enough to provide logistics, which is another principle that he had and that’s
the third principle of warfare that Joshua is observing, the principle of
logistics. He had to have a system of
supply. These people were cattle men,
and so while the soldiers were fighting they had a constant supply of steak,
and these men would go out here, they would act as soldiers, as farmers, as
cattle men, and they would bring the meat back down to Gilgal and that is why
Joshua did not ever move his base camp further west.
Now it’s very interesting, he conducts campaigns hundreds of miles into
the land of Canaan, all around he conducts it, but he doesn’t move his base
camp from Gilgal. Why? To keep his
logistics clean; he’s got to have a line of supply because until they settle
this area west of Jordan they are going to have no natural source of supply
except from Transjordania. So Joshua has
these five divisions blocking and then he brings three along with all the rest
of the divisions, he’s got a massive amount of people. There’s no toning down these figures; these
are 40,000 people that move across Jordan here, just from these two and a half
tribes, and they move across and these are the armed men in verse 14, “the
mighty men of valor.” Some of the mighty
men, the 40,000 move across Jordan, 76,000 stay on the east of Jordan
blocking. Verse 15 is your condition
again, do this and keep doing it “Until the LORD has given your brethren rest,
as He hath given you, and they also have possessed the land which the LORD your
God gives them. Then ye shall return
unto the land of your possession, and enjoy it.” Now the problem was that they never finished
conquering the land and so they kind of dribbled back in bits and dabs and
Transjordania was never totally and fully possessed.
We have certain other principles of war; we’ve already covered three. We’ve covered the principle that Joshua had
a defined objective; the second principle that Joshua had was this principle
that he had of security, he secured his flanks.
The third principle of warfare that Joshua followed was that of
logistics; he maintained a system of supply for his troops. You can’t have an army moving across here
without it constantly being resupplied.
The fourth principle that we find in Joshua is the principle of
concentration of power and that is found in verse 14-15, he is going to keep
all the twelve tribes together. Why keep
all twelve tribes together. Joshua, at
this point, has a military policy that it shows you that the Canaanites are
pretty dumb. They had a series of
scattered city-states, all through the land of Canaan.
Now why these people never saw what Joshua was doing is… well, it’s just
the Lord working here. What they could
have done is they could have banned together and they could have clobbered
Israel. But the Canaanites made a
tactical mistake. They tried to fight a
defensive war; they fought a defensive war and they holed up, all of these
places holed up. Sometimes they came
out, two or three city-states got together and tried to do like Ai and so on,
and what did Joshua do? Joshua was a
shrewd military officer and he realized, if I let my twelve tribes dissipate
what’s going to happen to my concentration of force on these points? They’re going to be lost. So Joshua makes a rule that nobody is going
to occupy any square foot of land until all of it is conquered. So you have the occupation in the last half
of the book of Joshua, the military war in the first part of the book of
Joshua. It’s like two different books
you’re reading. By the time you get to
Joshua 13 all of a sudden everything shifts, and you say what’s happened
here? The thing that has happened is
that Joshua keeps all twelve tribes in one camp always.
Suppose, for example, he moved in and said I’ll take Judah, we’ve
conquered your land, you’re dismissed, and so all the tribe of Judah sits over
here. Now instead of having twelve he
has eleven tribes. Now eleven tribes may
be enough to take these cities, so he clears out this of Benjamin, and now he
dismisses Benjamin, now he only has ten tribes.
His army gets smaller and smaller as he goes on. But Joshua sees this and therefore he does
not dismiss… no one is dismissed from the army until the whole battle is
finished, or until as it turned out Joshua is too old to keep it going. So we have all these twelve tribes together
in one camp, and Joshua just clobbers this city, he moves all twelve tribes in
and they swamp this city; all twelve tribes in and they swamp this one, they
just pick them off one by one and that’s how they conquered the land.
The principle of concentration, they were not overpowering the
Canaanites total numbers but they followed the principle that Claire Chennault
and the famous Flying Tigers followed before World War II. It is often said, if you read military
history of that era that why Chennault won when he had out-moded aircraft,
completely out maneuvered by the Japanese, and yet Claire Chennault’s Flying
Tigers always won. How did they do
it? Chennault has written in several
places that I’ve seen, he said I had one principle, I told my pilots that if
you see one Japanese Zero you climb onto him with three or four American
planes; you may be outnumbered in the whole sky but you pick one you pick one
off and you bully him, so that locally where the concentration is occurring, at
that locality you temporarily over power him. That’s concentration, that’s the
principle of concentration and that’s what Joshua is doing here, total sum of
the population, Israel didn’t have it, but Joshua made sure that when there was
a confrontation, at that point, momentarily, he had the superior numbers. And so Joshua used the principle of
concentration.
The fifth and final principle tonight is the principle of
cooperation. There was no problem here,
the twelve tribes stayed in one camp and everything was coordinated, with one
exception and you’ll see how this breaks down later on. But he always had cooperation and that’s
found in verses 16-18. “And they
answered Joshua, saying, All that thou commands us we will do, and wherever
thou sends us, we will go. [17] According as we hearkened unto Moses in all
things,” in other words, this is the swearing of allegiance, these two and a
half tribes will cooperate. And so he
has coordination and so on between the various areas of his army.
I hope you’ve seen in these five principles, the principle of justice,
the principle of security, the principle of concentration, the principle of
cooperation, and the principle of logistics that Joshua used his head. Joshua fulfilled on the human area those parts
of the plan of God that he was personally responsible for. In conclusion turn to Acts 12:5, this is
Peter. Now that we’ve gone through
Joshua and you’ve seen how Joshua used the principle, let’s come into the New
Testament and see how another man used the principle. This is Peter in the jail. “Peter, therefore, was kept in prison; but
prayer was made without ceasing by the church unto God for him.” Here’s intercessory prayer; this, by the way,
is one reason why missionaries have more trouble on the field than they should
have, because intercessory prayer is not being made loyally for them and here’s
an example of what intercessory prayer can do.
Now from the human point of view there’s a man in jail, the church isn’t
going to have a riot, they’re not going to demonstrate. That wasn’t an accepted mode and if you tried
to demonstrate in the days of the Roman Empire the legionnaires would be at
your door and they’d demonstrate how sharp a two-edged sword was on your neck
and that would be the end of the demonstration.
So the church in those days wasn’t even tempted to demonstrate, they
used, however, a weapon that is far greater and the weapon is prayer. In verse 5 you have prayer being made. [6] “And when Herod would have brought him
forth, the same night, Peter was sleeping,” notice the timing in verse 6, Herod
is just about to bring him to trial, the timing couldn’t be better. You can imagine Peter sitting there and
everybody is praying for him and the clock is ticking; every minute it means he’s
closer to trial and just before the trial this is what happens.
“Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains; and the
keepers before the door kept the prison.”
He had an intense security guard.
Can you imagine, chained to two soldiers and then outside the prison
were more soldiers. From the human point
of view—impossible! [7] “And, behold, an
angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shone in the prison; and he smote
Peter on the side,” this is kind of humorous because it tells you that Peter is
sound asleep. It’s very interesting, the
day before his trial Peter, remember how he acted toward the Lord Jesus Christ,
before Christ was tried, he was at the trial, he denied the Lord, he got all
panicked, shook and upset; evidently by this point he had learned his lesson
and so he’s just sound asleep, and this angel comes in, the light comes
on.
It’s very interesting, Peter doesn’t even see the light; and the angel
just goes up and slaps him. Wouldn’t
that be interesting, you’re sound asleep and have somebody come up and smack
you on the side, right in the ribs, just hit hard. This is a perfect way of waking somebody up;
it gives you that real quick awake feeling.
So the angel comes up and this is what he does, he slaps Peter on the
side. And the word here is strong, it
means he slapped him, hit him on the side.
Now I don’t know whether the angel had a sense of humor or what went on
here, Peter was sound asleep but the angel evidently figured that he had to
apply some force to this guy to get him moving.
So he hit him “on the side, and he raised him up, saying, Arise
quickly.” Here’s where I was wrong
before, the angel actually did raise Peter up, Peter was sound asleep and he
would have stumbled all over himself, and so the angel “raised him up, saying,
Arise quickly. And his chains fell of
from his hands.” In other words, the
angel apparently starts to help Peter up and he says go ahead, stand up and he
takes care of the chains. Peter couldn’t
deal with the chains; that’s an area beyond his human capacity to deal
with. Like many of you have adversities
and problems that are beyond your human capacity to deal with. You can’t change it; angels can.
All right, verse 8, “And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind
on thy sandals.” Now notice in verse 8,
here you have a shift. Verse 7 the
chains are gone, verse 8 is something Peter can do; notice the angel doesn’t
say here Peter, you hold your feet and I’ll tie your sandal on. This is now how the angel works at all, the
angel says Peter, you take care of that, that’s your responsibility. “… And so he did. And he said unto him, Cast thy garment about
thee, and follow me.” See, he even had
to tell Peter to put on his coat. Verse
9, “And he went out, and followed hi, and knew not that it was true which was
done by the angel, but thought he saw a vision.” Evidently, this is something you get again
and again in Scripture, that when angels appear like this, you can’t tell
whether the angel is really there or you’re seeing things. And this is the shepherd in the field
incident that’s so often repeated at Christmas time, whether they actually saw
this or it was a vision, etc. same kind of thing.
Verse 10, “And when they were past the first and second guard, they came
unto the iron gate that led into the city, which opened to them of its own
accord,” now look at this, isn’t this amazing.
A big iron gate, these iron gates weren’t made to just open of their own
accord, they were locked. That’s why
they had the gate in the city, and Peter and the angels walking along and
Peter’s walking up to the gate and all of a sudden the gate opens; the gate
opens all by itself. Again, Peter
couldn’t do this, “and he passed on through one street,” and the last part of
the verse, “and immediately the angel departed from him.” In other words, the angel had finished that
which only God could do and that was it.
And the rest of it was Peter’s responsibility.
So in verses 5-10 of Acts 12 you have the principle of Joshua chapter
1. Next time we’re going to go through Rahab
in chapter 2 and we’re going to see several things in Rahab, one of which to
understand the background you have to understand the timing that we have shown
you tonight. If you don’t understand the
timing and how this works out, that the spy incident occurs before what we have
gone through tonight, you won’t understand why it is that eventually these
spies do what they do, Rahab does what she does, and why Rahab stays in