Joshua 4
Divine Guidance, Finding God’s Will – 2:1-3:8
We are going to move into the second of the great stories, so-called, of
the first chapters of Joshua. In Joshua
In the second chapter of Joshua we immediately encounter a problem that
we all encounter as believers at some point in our lives and that is the
problem of divine guidance. So out of
chapter 2, before we actually get involved with the details of it, tonight we
are going to spend some time in going over how to find God’s will. This second chapter of Joshua is a cast in
point; it gives us principles that we can use in our Christian lives, just as
valid today as they were in 1400 BC.
When Joshua sought God’s will, immediately in 2:1 you read the he sent
spies out into the land. Last time we
took particular pain to show you that these chapters are not chronological,
they are logical and that Hebrew authors of literature are not always careful
to give you a chronological listing. And
because certain people don’t see they jump to all sorts of conclusions about
errors in the Bible. There are no errors
in the Bible, if there were you could throw it in the wastebasket and forget
it. That’s the only position that you
can take; if you have an errant Bible with errors in it then you have a
fallible way of determining the errors from the non-errors, non-erroneous
material and of course the whole thing goes down the drain. So we have to operate with an infallible Scripture
if we’re going to operate at all.
Now here we have the text, and I have broken the text down so that you
can see the sequence of the days and how they operated. Chapter 1:1-9 deal with the first day;
technical no because you can’t prove that the commission was given the first
day but at least for our purposes we will consider it to be the first day. Chapter 2:1-24 deal at least with four days,
one day the spies went out and then for three days the spies stayed in the
land; so that accounts for days number 2, 3, 4 and 5. So you see the Lord’s commission and the spy
mission. That takes us down to day
5. On day 6 is chapter 3:1 when the
spies come back with their report and when they come back with their report
certain actions are taken, so now we have the 6th day in the
sequence. Then we have days 7, 8 and 9,
the three days that are said to exist in 3:1 and also
This is a large map that shows you the green territory have already
secured, that’s Transjordania. The red
is the land of Canaan and that is the area that is their military objective at
this point, to annihilate the Canaanites in a holy war and take over and
destroy them throughout this whole area, all the way down here northeast, up to
near the Euphrates River, a long thing strip.
Today this would encompass the countries of
Now taking this small area just north of the
Now immediately the question comes up in 2:1, why bother to send spies
into the land? Again going back to our
time chart you have the problem of these days.
Chapter 2:1-14 deal with days 2, 3, 4 and 5. Notice that the commission was given to
Joshua in 1:1-9, that’s be strong and of good courage, Joshua, you’re it, it’s
all your baby, you are to do this. And
that’s the general will of God addressed to Joshua. Now notice in the time sequence, now here’s
where the time chart becomes very crucial so you can see how a man of God in
history responded to God’s will and how this man sought to ascertain God’s will
for his life. Notice he didn’t
immediately give the orders of 1:10; it’s very deceiving when you read this,
you read in chapter 1:9 he’s finishing up with the Lord’s commission and in
verse 10, “And then Joshua commanded the officers of the people,” and it sounds
like God commanded Joshua so Joshua just went ahead and commanded the
people.
Well this is one reason why the author of this book took this section
and move it over here, because remember the Jewish authors of the Old Testament
write logically, not chronologically.
Now sometimes, of course, it’s chronological but they write
logically. This is why this trite little
criticism you hear every once in a while by some college or high school teacher
about two accounts in Genesis is a reflection on their personal ignorance. Anyone who says there are two accounts in
Genesis does not understand the principle of Hebrew literature, that you can
have two parallel accounts or a doublet which are just logical amplifications
of one another. Our young people are
being taught this systematically in the schools and in college, there are two
accounts that conflict in the early chapters of Genesis, it is based on a
misunderstanding of Hebrew literature.
Now in chapter 2 we have this problem; this was the first step Joshua
took. He sent the spies out and waited
for the spies to come back to him and give him a reading on what was going on
across the river. After the spies came
back, day number 6, he ordered the people to move west. This is the
Here we are introduced to the problem of the sovereignty of God and the
free will of man. These are two
principles that the Christian always has to deal with at every point in your
life, the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. I really get a bang out of listening to some
unbeliever tell me all about the problems of the sovereignty of God and the
free will of man because I have to deal with that problem 24 hours a day as a
believer in Jesus Christ. It’s not a new
problem to me, and so I’ve got to the point where this comes up in the
conversation I just simply say you tell me all about it because I’ve just been
a Christian since 1957 and I’ve had to deal with this problem ever since so I’d
be interested in all you know about it, which usually shuts them up so you can
talk to them.
So you have these two principles, the sovereignty of God and the free
will of man. These always have to be
correlated and if you get out of balance by swinging to one or the other you
have an imbalanced Christian life that is unproductive for the Lord, or at
least is crippled for the Lord. So
you’ve got to keep these two principles in balance, the sovereignty of God on
the one hand that all of history is a plan, that it’s all under the control of
God’s plan overall, but yet in the specific concrete cases in historic
space/time you and I are responsible and we have free choice. One of the greatest commentators on the book
of Joshua said this, Bush in his work Notes
on Joshua said, “The certainty of a promised issue does not supercede the
use of the prudent means and the attempts accomplish it. To neglect the use,” and this is a very
tremendous statement, the last part of the quote, “to neglect the use of
appropriate means is to contravene the established order of the divine
counsel. Faith never precludes effort.”
Now I’m going to show you two examples in the Bible of how believers
correlated sovereignty where sovereignty issued a certain decree about their
life and yet where at the same time they responded with their volition and
exercised human effort. The first
illustration is found in Numbers 10:29 and it’s a striking illustration of this
in connection with divine guidance, for certainly you would say that all Israel
out in the wilderness, these are the forty years in the wilderness, they had a
cloud, at night the pillar of fire and by day the cloud. And you would have thought that a group of
people, a group of believers with this certain direction, wouldn’t have to
sweat divine guidance. And you would
think that if this was very clear then there would be no question at all of
seeking out God’s will.
Yet in Num. 10:29 we have this statement, “And Moses said unto Hobab,
the son of Raguel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, We are journeying unto
the place of which the LORD said, I will give it to you; come you with us, and
we will do thee good; for the LORD hath spoken good concerning Israel. [30] And
he said unto him, I will not go; but I will depart to mine own land, and to my
kindred. [31] And he said,” Moses said, “Leave us not,” now he’s talking to a
Midianite, the Midianites had the reputation for being desert scouts, these are
the people that would be hired by the great caravans through the desert to
scout out and find the paths, etc. and act as guides. Here is Moses with the pillar of fire and the
cloud by day and yet he is relying on a human guide. Verse 31, don’t leave us, “I pray thee;
forasmuch as thou knowest how we are to encamp in the wilderness, and thou
mayest be to us instead of eyes. [32]
And it shall be, if you go with us, yea, it shall be, that what goodness the
LORD shall do unto us, the same will we do unto thee.”
So there’s a very interesting principle here that though Moses had, you
might say, infallible guidance through God Himself, yet nevertheless he relied
on a human guide, showing you the interplay between a sovereign declaration and
free will or your personal responsibility to find it. Now this is a very unpopular type of balance
because a lot of people would love it if you could just forget free will; if
you could just forget free will and your own responsibility and just make
divine guidance just simply a deal where God just flashes light from the
ceiling of your house and this would be the will for you, and it would be
totally dictated to you, there’d be no problem, you’d just sit there and take
notes and that’s it, divine guidance.
But it isn’t that way, God expects us to use our minds. God expects us to use the facilities that he
has built into our soul. We won’t go to
the second principle; I think Num. 10 is sufficient.
Let’s move to the New Testament to Eph. 5:7-21 where we have an extended
section on the filling of the Holy Spirit that deals with divine guidance. We will study Eph. 5 for the express purpose
of bringing out two prerequisites of divine guidance. We are moving to Ephesians to find out two
prerequisites for divine guidance.
Having found these two we will then go back to Joshua and find out how
Joshua in a concrete historical situation used these principles. Joshua used these principles but we’ve got to
find the principles first and they’re given to us in Ephesians. First
background, verses 7-14; in verses 7-14 we have the necessary background to
make us understand verses 15-21. Verse
7, “Do not become, therefore, partakers with them,” speaking to believers, to
us, and he’s talking about people being not “therefore partakers with them,”
“them” are unbelievers who are embedded in the world system.
The idea in Ephesians, if you’ll hold the place and turn to chapter
2:1-3 is that Satan is the lord of the culture.
Let me hasten to add at this point culture is not bad; art, music,
history, science, are not bad. I
understand that people are getting from my remarks about culture that it’s all
bad; no it isn’t, you misunderstand.
Culture is not bad; I am saying culture is not neutral, it’s one way or
the other but it’s not bad, you can’t breathe without having culture. You are a member of the human race and
members of the human race are built to have culture. And you’ll either produce a weak emaciated
kind of Christian culture, which we have today, expressed in our hymnals,
expressed in our education, etc. or we will have a virile type of Christianity
that they had 300-400 years ago. But
nevertheless we are always faced with the problem of culture.
In Eph. 2:2 Paul says that when we were non-Christian, before we
received Christ as Savior, “Wherein in times past ye walked according to the
present course of this age, according to the prince of the power of the air,
the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.” And the point that he is making here is that
there is a spirit of every age; every age has a certain spirit or a certain
attitude, certain presuppositions, yet you’ll meet, everywhere you go, it’s
amazing, the more I study other fields, outside of the Scripture and you begin
to study history and you study these other things, you meet up with exactly the
same presuppositions, all over the place and you don’t really begin to see what
Paul is saying here in verse 2 until you begin to study various subjects and
you get smashed with this; it hits you right in the face as you begin to study
these things, that the spirit or the “prince of the power of the air,” which is
Satan, “the power of the air” is in apposition with “the spirit that now works”
in the children. Satan is the prince of
the spirit; he is not the spirit itself.
“The spirit that now works in the children of disobedience” is the
amalgamated type of operation that the demonic forces have by which they control
men’s thoughts, men’s action and whole political entities.
So in Eph. 2:2 we basically are faced with a satanic over-lordship of
the culture. You have to really feel
this because this has a tremendous implication for you because it means that whether
you are on the job, now the trouble you see, what we face is that Christians
have a disease called compartmentalization, and they have God here and then
they have a little bit of Bible doctrine and then they build a big wall all
around this and that’s as far as it gets.
So now we have art, music, literature, science, history and all these
things outside, we have relationship with our loved ones, with believers, with
society at large, our job, etc. all these details of life out here but they are
on the other side of the wall. And so
you’ll find a spectacle of Christians and we have them on the job, we have them
on college faculties, we have them all over the place, the woods are full of
them, Christians in high places that are genuine children of God, no question
about it, but they are totally ineffective in their witness because they’ve
built a compartment around them and they study their subjects as though their
own specialty is neutral.
For example, 2 + 2 = 4. They
think that’s a neutral statement; that’s not neutral at all, it involves all
sorts of spiritual presuppositions. And
so we have people say mathematics, so the kid will go through algebra and
geometry, trigonometry, etc. then he’ll go to college, analytical geometry,
calculus, advanced calculus, linear algebra, and go into these various phases
of mathematics and then what happens?
All the while he thinks that he should be in mathematics as a
mathematician. In other words there’s
some theoretical neutral entity called a mathematician that exists. There isn’t any; there are either Christian
mathematicians or non-Christian mathematicians.
There are either Christian biologists or non-Christian biologists; Christian
physicists or non-Christian physicists, but there’s no intermediate neutral, it
just isn’t there. It’s impossible
because every man’s heart has a basic set of presuppositions; we know this from
Romans 1. So there’s no neutrality in
any of these fields.
But here’s what Christianity has done in the 20th century and
what we have got to do and we are going to do is to break out of this
compartmentalization and punch holes through the wall and begin to make this
Bible doctrine move out and control these areas. We’ve got to do this or we’re dead; you can’t
fight a defensive wall, we’ve fought one for the last 70 years and we’re
losing, badly. We are being shoved all
across the board and you don’t win a ballgame by taking the defense; you win
the ballgame by taking an offense which means we have to challenge our people
to move out and capture these areas, bringing every thought into captivity for
Christ. And if they’re not doing this
they’re not following the lordship of Christ.
This is the true lordship of Christ, contrary to what you may have heard
in some spiritual life conference or something.
They’re right in that the lordship of Christ does concern your personal
life but if it doesn’t concern your professional life and if the lordship of
Christ doesn’t have anything to do with your business there’s something wrong
with you and there’s something wrong with your pastor because he hasn’t taught
you or at least expounded the principles of the Word of God involving these
areas. So the lordship of Christ means
lordship over all areas, not just personal ethics, but how you run your
business from Monday through Friday, etc. all these areas, Bible doctrine can
not be walled in through this disease called compartmentalization.
And this is what we have, Christians have erected this thinking this way
they will be safe, thinking that if they will wall themselves in they will be
safe from verse 2, “the course of this age,” the satanic control of the
culture, and so Christians retreat instead of acting as soldiers. And they’re in the barracks training all the
time while Satan is out winning the battles on the battlefield. And this is what happens and it’s tragic and
this is why we’re speaking to less and less people in our time. You realize this when you realize how weak
the evangelical position is with regard to the colored race, with regard to
some of the so-called lower classes of our society, with regard to the upper
intellectuals, you just have to take a look around for five minutes and you can
realize what a mess we are in. We are
not reaching out to these people and it’s because of this,
compartmentalization. This has got to be
broken and the back of this thing has to be destroyed. This is the thing that is hamstringing
fundamentalism in our generation.
Now we come to Eph. 5 and we have to deal with this finding the will of
God. So Paul warns us, don’t be
partakers of this, don’t go along with the culture, and you’ll find yourself,
if you seek out God’s will, the first thing you’re going to find out is that it
puts you at total collision course with the culture around you. It seems that everywhere you turn when you’re
following the Lord, bang, you’ve got a collision with something; either it’s a
principle in business, a principle in teaching, a principle in your
professional field, somewhere you will find yourself in collision with the
majority. Now if Christians had been
doing this over the last 50 years we’d understand where the student radical
fits in today. The reason we don’t
understand is we haven’t been those radicals, we should have been those
radicals, we should have captured and struck out in these places, but we’re
not.
So in chapter 5 you see this conflict come out. In verse 10 he says you’ve got to test “what
is acceptable unto the Lord.” You see no
passivity here, this is not a zombie floating through the Christian life from
day to day, hour to hour; this is a man who is actively in a struggle and this
is why some of you, you’ve probably been introduced to the Puritans and you’ve
probably seen these pictures of John Calvin and the Puritans and they look
stern and no smiles on their faces, etc.
One of the reasons why they weren’t smiling people was that they felt
the pressure of their generation and they didn’t smile. Many of them were not humorous people at all;
some of them were, but they did have an intensely serious streak about them
because these men were fighting for their lives against the culture in which
they lived. And here you have it verse
10, constantly testing, testing, testing, testing, it requires effort, it
requires thinking, it requires something that you’ve got to put in, here is
human responsibility coming into the picture.
Verse 11, “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of
darkness,” and then in verses 13-14 you see the final point of deception, the
collision that results. I point this out
to you because you can’t think of this finding the will of God as a bed of
roses. Often times the impression is
given that if find God’s will for my life, and if I’m operating in His will,
then I’ll have total peace. You will
have an inner peace that is superior to anything man can have, yes, but you
will not have external peace and you will not have peace in your behavioral
relations with other people and you may suffer some deep hurts. Jesus said I am not come to bring peace but a
sword; I’m come to set daughter against her mother, father against his son,
because when people are active in seeking out the will of God friendships often
get ruptured in the process. But it’s when
you break lose from these entanglements that you feel the pressure.
So verses 13-14 no longer just become words in your Bible to look at and
meditate on, they become something that truly describe your life. “But all things that are reproved are made manifest
by the light; for whatever doth make manifest is light. [14] Wherefore, he
says, Awake you that sleep,” and this is Paul’s quotation from Isaiah 60, he’s
saying the Christians who are not actively seeking out God’s will, who are just
kind of floating in a no-man’s land, in kind of a spiritual deep freeze, these
kind of Christians are asleep. He says
“Awake, you who are sleeping and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give
light by you,” literally, He will shine into the culture through you, but He
cannot shine into the culture through you unless you yourself are awake.
Notice all these idioms here, “awake” verse 14; verse 15, “walk wisely,”
verse 16, “redeeming the time,” verse 17, “understanding” the will of God,
verse 18, being filled with the Spirit.
All of these contrasts here, notice it’s alertness against drowsiness,
in other words a lazy passive kind of blah.
And this is characteristic of carnality in the Christian life. I never can understand why people can say I
don’t have anything to do. That’s
amazing, there are ten thousand things to be done, in fact, every hour, and yet
people can drift around, I don’t have anything to do. You don’t have anything to learn from the
Word of God, nothing to apply from the Word of God or anything like that, yet
we have people in all seriousness, I don’t have anything to do, life is
boring. Of course it, they’re sleeping.
Now verses 15-21 deal with the results and here we are introduced to our
two prerequisites of divine guidance.
Verse 15 is a mistranslation in the King James, it should be, “look
carefully” or “see,” look carefully is just another way of saying it, “See
circumspectly,” the word “see” and the word “circumspectly” should be tied
together, otherwise verse 15 is saying nothing than verse 17 is saying, it’s
just a duplication of verse 17. Verse 16
means look carefully, in the earlier texts in the manuscripts in the original
Greek have the word “circumspectly” linked with that imperative “see.” “Look carefully” in other words, then, “that
ye walk not as fools but as wise.” And
here the word fool means a Christian.
These are believers; remember, these are not non-Christian, these are
believers. So what Paul says is don’t
walk like an idiot, walk as a wise believer, “Redeeming the time, because the
days are evil.” And verse 16 amplifies
verse 15.
Verse 15 is a summary statement and verse 16 gives you the
characteristic of the wise person. Paul
looks on space/time history as a series of moments in the flow of time and what
he is saying at the end of verse 16 is that these days are evil, but by that he
doesn’t mean… it’s obviously true but it’s not his point right here in the
text, that there’s evil all around you.
That’s not the point; the point is that Satan active in the flow of time
wants to keep those moments of time under his control, and here we are
introduced to the Christians holy war.
The Christian has to wrestle these moments of time out of the satanic
stream and make them count for Jesus Christ and that’s how the person has a
production; this is the Christians production for which he will be evaluated at
the believer’s judgment seat. “Redeeming
the time,” buying it back out of the satanic flow.
In other words, the implication is that if you don’t exert effort and if
we don’t ascertain and spend time looking, thinking and criticizing and
grappling with this thing to find God’s will, then Satan wins,
automatically. If nothing is done Satan
automatically wins. The soldiers must
get into the battle and they must take their weapons and they must pry loose
every moment of time; that’s the point here.
And so the one who walks wise is prying lose the moments of time out of
the satanic flow to make them count for eternity. So the implication here is that is you don’t
exert an effort in this area then Satan wins.
Then in verse 17-18 we have two parts, and these two parts are actually
the two prerequisites for divine guidance.
In part one, verse 17, we have “Wherefore, be ye not unwise but
understanding what the will of the Lord is.”
Now that is a command and you don’t have to be an advanced Bible
student, you don’t have to be of superior intellect to draw the logical
conclusion for your life in verse 17.
That is a command; it is addressed to every believer who has ever existed,
and it means therefore that you and I have been told by God to understand His
will. Divine guidance, then, is not an
option. Divine guidance is a command and
there’s no option about it. We are in
the battle and we have to automatically find the will of God; there’s no option
here, the Christian has no freedom at this point, we only have one dimension to
move, either rebel against verse 17 and say the heck with it, or submit to
verse 17 and get serious as to what God’s will is. So the first principle of divine guidance
comes out verse 17 and that is the principle that I must have
illumination.
Now I have for several years drawn these two circles and you should
understand what that bottom circle is. I
have a top circle which depicts my legal relationship that never changes; down
here we have a small circle, that small circle is where we have our
relationship with the Lord in space/time history. That circle is the will of God and you wonder
why do I make this connection, from verse 17.
This circle for your life is going to be different from my life. This is what makes Christianity exciting and
nonconformist. In Christianity you have
freedom to express yourself and you need never fear that you have to become a
number on a card, that you have to dress a certain way, wear your hair in a
certain style or something else. There’s tremendous freedom that you have as a
Christian and it’s expressed in this bottom circle. You must find your bottom circle, as it were,
or the territory of God’s will. That bottom
circle represents the known will of God for you. I will add the word “known” will of God, it
does not represent the unknown will of God, it represents the known will, the
will that you have ascertained.
So our first prerequisite is that we must have illumination to the
truth. How do we have illumination to
the truth? We have gone through the
doctrine of illumination. I have
depicted it in five steps, you need not have it structured out this way but let
me just give you these five steps as an idea of the flow of illumination and
you can rearrange these and I urge you to; don’t accept points just because I
give them to you; these are just guides to show you what we are trying to get
across and you can rearrange these as you study these things over before the
Lord in His Scripture.
I would say that the first thing about illumination is that obviously I
must be in contact with the truth, but truth in the Scripture means truth of
both general and special revelation, which means therefore there are three points
of truth: the Bible, man, and the world.
In other words, I have three spheres in which I have to operate;
actually they are all one sphere but you might say three ways of looking at
things. First I look at the Bible,
that’s one source of truth, the infallible inerrant source of truth. Then I have the fallible sources but
nevertheless, these are needful, for remember the heathen who knows not
Scripture, in Rom. 1 he’s in contact with absolute truth without the Bible, he
just has man and the world and yet he is condemned because of his contact with
absolute truth over in that territory.
But we have three areas, we have the Bible, we have man, by man I mean
knowledge of how men operate and have to live, and the world, the world around
you. So you have these three areas; I
have to be in touch with all three. Now
be careful here because this is going to answer why Joshua sent out the
spies. You have to be in touch with the Bible
AND your world or you cannot be led of the Lord. You have to have all three of these
operating.
The second thing is that after you’ve come in contact, or simultaneously
with this, this is just a logical sequence here, you have to have
illumination. Illumination is a gracious
work of God whereby He opens your eyes to the data that is already there. Illumination does not give you more
illumination; illumination doesn’t add one period to the Scripture, not a
comma, not an extra letter is ever added by illumination. Illumination does not add one bit of
information. Illumination opens your
eyes to that which is already there. And
so we have the grace operating, that is expressed in Psalm 119:18, “O LORD,
open Thou my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy Law,” that’s
illumination by grace.
Then we have the third thing given to us in 1 Cor. 14 and following and
that deals with the fact that we must have scrutiny. Paul says these things are spiritually
discerned, and most Christians read that as though the word “spiritual” is in
capitals and the word “discerned” is in very, very tiny print. In other words, the emphasis is SPIRITUALLY discerned. I suggest you re-read that as “spiritually
DISCERNED” and the word “discern” is anakrino
and it’s a strong intense word to take this stuff and grapple with it. If the Word of God goes down your throat like
mineral oil there’s something wrong, it shouldn’t do that because if it’s
really touching you and the Holy Spirit is really interacting with it it
shouldn’t go down easy, it should go down hard and it should be kind of a
feeling, like you’re gagging on it at times.
There should be that feeling because that shows that your heart has come
in contact with the Word of God. But if
just kind of slides in there’s something wrong somewhere. So we have this tendency, the problem of
scrutiny which requires mental effort and this is why our educational system
today is a Christian’s worst enemy. Kids
are not taught to think, they’re taught to memorize a few points for an exam
and that’s it. And when you go to try to
teach kids how to think they are almost utterly incapacitated. You can’t always have a coach always telling
you how to go through every crisis in your life; who you’re going to marry, how
much money you’re going to make, how many children you’re going to have, where
you’re going to live, and all the rest of God’s will for you. You can’t have somebody tapping you on the
shoulder all the time, you’ve got to think.
And so here’s the area of scrutiny.
Then the fourth area is that as a result of this you eliminate error;
you eliminate the false leaving a residue of the truth and that is the absolute
truth, or as I call it epignosis, truth.
Finally the fifth thing is now you have a platform on which to stand by
faith; you have a platform for your faith in absolute truth. So this is the illumination and this is the
first prerequisite for divine guidance, you must understand the revealed will
of God.
Now the second prerequisite for divine guidance which we wanted to get
out of this passage is found in the next verse, the filling of the Holy
Spirit. “And be not drunk with wine,
wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” Then notice in verses 19-21 amplification of
what the filling of the Holy Spirit is.
Please notice something; do you see any mention of ecstatics? Do you see people frothing at the mouth in
verses 19-21; do you see them rolling down the aisles; do you have them going
into some frenzy where everybody is yakking at the top of their lungs? No, you don’t find that and do you know what,
you don’t find it in any other portion of Scripture either. The only place you find it is certain kooky
groups, but you don’t find it in Scripture.
The filling of the Holy Spirit is very mundane in many ways because if
you notice very carefully three great social institutions are now treated,
three great areas of conflict in personal relationships and isn’t it strange
that after Paul has gotten through the filling of the Holy Spirit, guess what
he begins to talk about? Marriage. And so in verse 22-33 he deals with how the
ladies are supposed to treat their husbands and how the husbands are supposed
to treat their wives. That’s a mundane
thing, can’t you just see that in a headline devotion; “The Filling of the Holy
Spirit is to do this.” That’s not
spectacular; people always love the spectacular, got to have frothing at the
mouth and rolling down the aisles and saying glory, glory and hallelujah and
all the rest of it. That goes on and
that passes for a very cheap, and I might say very horrid imitation for the
filling of the Spirit.
Here in verses 22-33, one of the greatest social institutions that man
has ever had and here it tells the immediate result of the filling of the
Spirit. And then immediately in 6:1-4 it
goes through the next institution, that’s family and it tells the children how
they are to react to their parents and parents how they are to react to their
children. And finally in verses 5-9 we have
the employer-employee relationship and the Christian doctrine of labor. That’s something I’ve never seen; I’ve gone
to Christian business men’s meetings and various professional organizations and
in all the years I have been a Christian I have never heard an exposition of
the Christian doctrine of work. Both
labor and management in 20th century America are completely off base
in this area. The Bible has a doctrine
of labor and it was this doctrine, taught in verses 5-9 that built
America. The Puritans were so fantastic
in their understanding of what it means for a man to take his hands and use
them in labor, as unto the Lord, that that mental attitude of the Puritans
rubbed off for centuries and we’ve lost it today and that’s why we have people
trying to get 8 days pay for 4 days work and all the rest of it.
These are all practical things here, filling of the Spirit, nothing
esoteric; it’s a common thing in the area of marriage, family, and labor
management, the home and the job. Now
what more common thing could you have, the home and the job. That’s the exposition of the filling of the
Spirit. Now let’s go back to verse 18,
“Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit.” We would translate the filling of the Spirit,
you could also say that the filling of the Spirit can also be called the
“fulfilling,” in other words, let your fulfillment be that that comes from the
Holy Spirit and not something that’s prop, not something that’s artificial and
phony. If you want to be real
contemporary in verse 18 you could say, “Be not drunk with drugs,” be not
bombed out of your mind with drugs, “Don’t escape with drugs wherein is excess,
but be filled with the Spirit.” In other
words, the real dynamic fill-ness comes from the Holy Spirit.
This means there is a second prerequisite for divine guidance. The first one was that we have to be
illuminated to the revealed will of God.
The second one is that we have to be in submission to it. There are two distinct acts; first I am
illuminated to what it is that God wants me to do and the second thing I must
submit to it; it’s very absurdly simple, but this is the prerequisite, this is
the absolute prerequisite for all divine guidance; without these two you fall
flat on your face every time.
Now let me insert a footnote here just to correct any
misconceptions. I have noticed, as
people have asked me to pray with them and to help them find the will of God
for their life, I have noticed something that seems to come up right at this point. And that is that a Christian will come and
suppose he has all these things, home, job, children, maybe he has some debts
and a few other interests. So he has all
these interests, this is his life. Now
he might come to me and say look, I want to know God’s will for my job and so
he’ll start going over all the details of his job and pray, etc. and nothing
seems to happen. There’s no seeming
direct guidance.
I often wonder when this happens, since we know that God always is
faithful to His promises, therefore there must be some human condition that’s
blocking. What human condition do you
suppose? I think it’s the fact that on
the overall there’s no yieldedness to the will of God. The yieldedness to the will of God is only
over this one small area, it’s not a total yieldedness to God; it’s not a total
submission in every area of the life of the known will. For example, let this be that bottom circle
and in all these areas, you know something about all these areas that are
inside that circle. The circle is one
circle, not two circles, not eight circles but only one circle and to be filled
with the Spirit means I must be in submission to the will of God over the whole
area of the known will for my life. So a
little hypocritical to be unduly concerned about my job when for the last eight
years I couldn’t give a damn for how the home has been run, how debts have been
done, how children have been raised, how a number of other things have been
done. And then all of a sudden I get a
job and really what I want is financial security and so I want the best job
financially, and all of a sudden the Christian is interested in divine
guidance. And often I’ve seen believers
cry and be very frustrated because of it.
Do you know why? Not observing
these two prerequisites for divine guidance.
It’s very simple. What they do is they panic at one point when they
should just stop at this point and say now wait a minute, am I in submission to
the will of God over all areas and having done that check then come back and
deal with the problem. But trying to be
unduly concerned about this one little lone problem when all the rest of them
are just going to pot doesn’t make senses; it’s not consistent. It’s living
your life in fragments, there’s no unity before the Lord.
So these two principles are very crucial. Now let’s go to Joshua and see the exciting
way in which he applies these and we’ll have a step by step historical
solution. Again I will continue to
stress over and over again, when we deal with a doctrine we should go to a
concrete historical situation, so this will not be an abstraction to you, so
you will see how a man in real space/time history worked this out.
In Joshua 2 we have the first two prerequisites satisfied. Let’s see how Joshua started out finding the
will of God. We’ve got two prerequisites,
illumination and submission. If you want
to express this diagrammatically it’s the bottom circle, that’s illumination;
I’m in the bottom circle, that’s submission.
If I’m outside the bottom circle I’m carnal. I’m either in the circle or out of the
circle. So there’s your two parts of
divine guidance, illumination to the truth and submission to the truth. I’ve got the bottom circle established in my
life; that’s illumination. And I’m in
the bottom circle, that’s submission.
Now in Joshua 1:8 these two prerequisites are contained in verse 8,
“This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth,” notice that phrase,
“depart out of thy mouth,” the word “mouth” is a pair with heart, that Romans
10 passage, believe in thine heart, confess with thy mouth, see it
together. In the Old Testament you’ll
find these words again and again, this is a classic reference which shows you
why they were connected. This is one illustration
so that you can link the two words, “mouth” and “heart,” so you’ll have a tight
link, and you can see from verse 8 why the Jew, back in Old Testament times
linked these two things. It “shall not
depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night,” and
the word “meditate” means to sit at something, take a scroll and you read it
with your lips moving, and you don’t make any sound but you just have the lips
moving; it’s exactly the opposite of the way you teach you to read in school,
because the Bible cannot be read on a speed reading basis. The Bible has to be read slowly and the
moving of the lips and reading helps concentration. And all Jews were brought up to meditate on
the Torah this way; this is what the Hebrew verb means. It means to sit and meditate and when you sit
before this you meditate, you say this thing over to yourself.
So therefore it came to be that these people would look upon a man in
deep meditation and his lips would be moving, and so they’d combine the word,
his heart, it was on his heart because they would see his lips moving. And so the word “heart” and “mouth” came to
be a word pair for knowledge in the Old Testament. Please notice it’s verbalized knowledge. It “shall not depart out of thy mouth, but
you will meditate therein day and night,” we won’t go on further but these are
the two prerequisites for divine guidance.
And now I want to show you the extent to which Joshua had in the Law,
the knowledge of God.
You might be inclined when you see that word “law” to say oh, I know
what he’s talking about, Joshua had Moses’ law that he had on Mount Sinai,
that’s what he meant here in verse 8.
No, that’s not what he meant in verse 8.
Verse 8 includes the first five books of the Bible, that’s what he’s
talking about. The law includes Genesis
as well as Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Genesis is there too, and so now in verse 8
when he says “let this book of the law” it means Joshua, I have given you a
framework of victory and oh boy, wouldn’t it be a wonderful time if the school
systems would start out by giving the pupils a framework for history, that is,
the first 11 chapters of Genesis. If
every pupil could have the first 11 chapters of Genesis they would have a
framework that would make history the most exciting subject going. Yet when I went through high school the most
boring frustrating class I ever had was history. Have a date here and a date there, who cares
about who did something in 1815, ridiculous.
And do you know why I had that attitude?
Because no one ever gave me a framework, all they give the kids is a
pile of facts, memorize them and we’ll have an exam on Friday. It’s a horrible way of introducing any
knowledge. It’s destructive of the whole
concept of history. The modern system
insists on cramming, ramming and jamming things down students without giving
them a framework on which they can hang the facts. So it’s just a pile of facts, you might as
well come in with a broom and sweep it out.
Let’s look at the framework that Joshua had and I’m going to suggest
that Joshua had six propositions in his framework. Again, this is not a complete exposition of
it, this is just something to get you into this to see what it was that Joshua
started out with. Joshua didn’t start in
a vacuum. God told him I want you to
take these first five books and I want you to have a 24 hour Bible class in
addition to all your other duties as military commander; I want you to
memorize, I want you to go over this and over this and over this and over this
over and over again, these first five books.
What is it that Joshua got out of the first five books? I would suggest he got the following
propositions, the major ones from Joshua’s own… this is how he got his
philosophy of life. From Genesis 1 and 2
Joshua got the doctrine of creation, that there was an infinite personal
creator over all, over and against Baalism; Yahwehism versus Baalism. Baalism is a form of evolution in which Baal
is a process of nature which has been deified.
So you have various processes, the sex revolution is another part of
this, the worship of Ashtoreth, you take the sexual process, this is animals in
human form, you deify it in the form of a woman, that’s Ashtoreth, Venus and so
on. The ancient world did this and they
did it here but Yahweh didn’t have sex in the Bible, Yahweh was never
considered as a sex being; only man was but Jehovah Himself, who incidentally
always appears as a man, Jehovah was pitted against Baal, and Joshua had to go
into the Canaanites who were Baal worshippers, remember all these people had a
polluted theology, and the one thing that Joshua had to have clear in his mind,
that Jehovah Almighty was the Lord of heaven and earth. And you’re going to see Rahab make this
confession in chapter 2 so I want to prepare you for it, how this prostitute,
in a corrupt land, came to the conclusion of the doctrine of creation. That’s a story in itself.
The second proposition that Joshua got, not only was he a creationist,
but in Gen. 3 he had a solution; he said that suffering and death come from the
fall, and so Joshua could look out upon the suffering of his day, have
compassion on the people and want to do something about the suffering in his
generation without fighting God. You
see, if you are one of those kinds of people that have allegorized Genesis 3
you have put yourself in a very bad position because Camus, Albert Camus, one
of the great existentialists of our day has put your position very well when he
says that if you really believe that the fall is just an allegory, you place
yourself into the position where you can’t fight evil without fighting God, in
Camus’ book called The Plague, and in The Plague he has the priest and the
doctor and these are two men that have to struggle, all of a sudden this town
is swept with the plague and people are dying like flies, it’s disease. The point is that he must make a decision, do
I go with the medical doctor who is trying to heal these people against the
disease or do I go with the priest whose God it is that’s caused the disease. Do I side with the doctor or the priest? And you’re stuck with this problem unless you
believe in a literal fall that has brought about decay into the biological
realm as well as all others. So now I
can fight this kind of suffering and I can fight it not fighting against God
but I can fight it as the corruption that’s been introduced into history.
The third proposition that Joshua inherited from his study of the Law is
found in Gen. 9. In Gen. 9 Joshua came
to understand that capital punishment was a legitimate mode of conduct in
society; not murder. Capital punishment
is not murder because only God can take life; man cannot take life but God can
delegate the responsibility to take life to man as an institution, which He did
in Gen. 9, therefore you have capital punishment.
The fourth principle, notice all of these things come out of Genesis,
it’s an extremely important book.
Genesis 10-11, he got a racial philosophy of history, and watch it; this
isn’t what you think it is. There’s a
racial philosophy of history. This is
utterly antithetical to modern anthropology.
The Bible views all men as descendants of Adam. These men, therefore, can be traced back to
Adam. The Bible has the audacity to say that you can go to the major countries
of the world and trace the ancestors back to Adam; that various countries have
a certain racial characteristic that has been transmitted down through
history. There are three streams in
humanity; the Japhetic, the Shemitic, and the Hamitics. This great potential trio all has certain characteristics. When we get to Gen. 10 we’ll deal with
these.
First let’s take the Hamites; the Hamites were evidently the first men
out from Noah’s ark. Noah landed his ark
in Ararat and the Hamites moved out. We
have a study where a man has taken the cave men findings and shown that their
skull forms are always Hamitic. And it’s
interesting that you can take a map of the world, plot the finds of ancient man
and the further you go from the Mesopotamian valley the more primitive their
skeletal form. It’s very interesting,
you get a geographical factor here, not how deep but how far from the cradle of
civilization you go and they become more and more Hamitic, which is evidence
that the Hamites were the first ones after Noah. Illustrations of countries that are Hamitic
would be Egypt; Egypt was a great Hamitic civilization. Carthage, the Carthaginians were Hamitic; the
Phoenicians were Hamitic, all the colored race, the Negroid race, the Chinese
race, the American Indian race are all Hamitics. The Sumerians were Hamitics. All of the great early civilizations were
Hamitic. And the Hamitics are
characterized by the following characteristics.
They are industrious and technological.
That may surprise you because many of you have been brought up to believe
that most of the inventions have come from Europe. Oh no, every major invention has been made by
either the Egyptians, the Sumerians, that includes the wheel, the gear, it
includes various forms of pesticides, every area of technology you can think of
were in the pioneer form by the Hamites.
The next great stream that moved out, evidently, was the Shemites. The Shemites have been historically
identified with the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Arabs and the Jews, and the
Shemites according to Gen. 10-11 would be the heirs of the world’s great
religions. And so you have Islam today, it’s a Shemitic product, from the
Arabs. You have Judeo-Christianity, it’s
a Shemitic product from the Jews. And
you have the great Babylonian religion of Ashtarte etc. that is coming from the
Babylonians.
Then the third great stream of race comes from the Japhetics; most of us
are from the Japhetics and the Japhetics who moved into the Indo-European races
and the Japhetics are mostly known for their intellect, for their philosophy
and for their aggressiveness. It wasn’t
until the Japhetics came upon the scene in power, building upon religion, that
you had philosophy and theology develop.
So out of this you have a whole stream of philosophy that Joshua could
have picked up from the chapters of Genesis.
Then the fifth thing that Joshua could have gotten from this, remember,
all this is meditating on the Lord day and night, the fifth thing he would have
gotten would have been Genesis 12. This
is the Abrahamic Covenant, and the Abrahamic Covenant would say this to Joshua:
that God has rejected every national culture except His own specially designed
culture, Israel. Turn to Deut. 32:8 you
go to that strange verse where history is a tight knit network of controlled movement
of races. I admit that if you grant the
non-Christian premise and you try to treat mankind statistically that it looks
like a mess. From God’s viewpoint it’s
not at all. From God’s viewpoint the
history of man is the history of a tremendous interlocking network of movements
of race. And in Deut. 32:8 it says,
“When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated
the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of
the children of Israel.” And you
remember when we went through verse 8 that we said there were 70 in Israel, the
children of Israel, the children of Jacob, and there are 70 nations listed in
Gen. 10-11. And so what this is saying
is that the whole concrete form of history itself bears testimony to God’s
special interaction through that one chosen culture.
Finally, the sixth thing that Joshua would have gotten by way of
framework from meditating upon the Lord day and night would have been simply
the history of the Exodus. And he would
have known from that history as he lived through part of it and read about the
other that God was literally true to His promises. And that God could supernaturally intervene
into history. And why this sixth
principle is important is because we’re going to see as the story goes on in
the book of Joshua that over and over again Joshua has to do the things that
Moses did. For example, Moses had the
crossing of the Red Sea; Joshua has the crossing of Jordan. Moses has the ceremony around Mount Sinai:
Joshua has the ceremony at Gilgal. Moses
meets the Lord and has to bow before the tree, the burning bush, and out of the
burning bush comes the words, “take off thy sandals for the ground on which you
stand is holy.” Joshua comes before the
city of Jericho and he meets Jesus Christ who says “take off your shoes for the
ground upon which you stand is holy ground.
And so God has Joshua reduplicate and replicate the very experiences
that Moses himself had. This is
crucial.
Now go back to Joshua 1:8 and see how we apply this. From Joshua 1:8 I hope you see now the
tremendous body of truth that Joshua had.
He had a tremendous working framework for history; he could walk into
his age in his generation insulated from the spirit of his age because he had a
Biblical ground, a Biblical framework, so he could take his subjects and move
them together in this skeleton. I always
think of this as a skeleton; give me a skeleton and I will put the meat on the
bones. And that’s the way education
should be, you get your skeleton from God’s Word, then you go into these
disciplines and that’s the meat that you put onto the bone. But how stupid to go into all these courses
and just have a pile of meat with no bones, no framework.
What did Joshua do with this? I
would suggest that there are three basic steps in applying these principles of
divine guidance. These steps are
chronological. The first one means that
you start with the known. When you’re trying to find God’s will for your life
you obviously have to start with the known will. That means that you start out of the circle
that you already have. You’ve already
ascertained this is God’s will for your life; you have to start with that. That’s what Joshua started with here. Joshua had the command of 1:1-9 and he worked
from that, and as we have shown you he took this command and he began to work
with it. What was the next thing that
Joshua did? The first day he got the
general command. There’s his starting
point; that’s the known. Now beginning
on the 2nd day, and the 3rd, 4th and 5th
day he begins to work out logically from the known to the unknown. Notice so far there’s been no added
revelation here. This is simply a
non-supernatural, natural almost, working out from that which is known. There’s no added revelation at this point.
And I want you to notice, if you turn to Joshua 2:10, Joshua starts with
the known and now he moves to step two.
He reasons out from the known to the unknown. First notice the material that he uses to
find God’s will for his life. In Joshua
2:10 they’re talking to Rahab, and the spies are to report. Notice Rahab, by the way, didn’t do a thing
for the spies except hide them. The
point of Rahab’s story is this woman is a believer; she’s accepted Christ as
her Savior, she’s a prostitute; she not only was saved but she became one of
the great grandmothers of Jesus Christ.
There’s a woman who by divine grace was perfectly accepted in God’s
plan. And now the spies come into this
house of prostitution under Ahab. “And
she said unto the men, I know that the LORD has given you the land, and that
your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint
because of you. [11] /for we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the
Red Sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings
of the Amorites, who were on the other side of the Jordan,” etc.
Now what kind of material is Joshua after here? He has his known information; again let’s go
back to the known. He’s got his known,
that’s his bottom circle, but Joshua needs more than that, he’s got to add
information to find God’s will for his life, so he begins to try to work out of
the circle and make that circle bigger.
And he does so by taking three things into account. First, the Bible, the first five books; he
only had five books in his Bible. The
second thing that Joshua had was a knowledge of himself and how men act. And the third thing he had was a knowledge of
the world or history. Which of three
teachers of data or sources were the spies after; did he send them across the
Jordan to examine the Bible? No, he sent
them across Jordan to examine history, to examine the non-Biblical material to
put this thing together. That’s what the
spies were after; if they wanted to study the Bible they could have stayed on
this side of Jordan, they didn’t have to cross the Jordan and go into
Jericho. They went over there to gain
information about their generation as to what it was and where God was working.
So they took the Bible and moved out and began to combine so the second
principle is this: if you reason from the known to the unknown with two little
sub points; you reason always within the divine viewpoint framework, and the
second is that you utilize general revelation or man and his world. You’ve got to take that into account and you
have a case illustration here with the spies.
The spies were not Bible students.
He didn’t give them an assignment to study so and so chapters of
Genesis; he knew that, that wasn’t the problem; he sent them to get
material.
For example, if you’re a businessman and you’re looking for a job and
you’re working in an area of business you don’t just go on the basis of the
Bible. You take the Bible as your
framework, then you move out and you look carefully at this business, this
business, this business and this business, and you begin to use (quote)
“secular” (unquote) information. It’s
true, it’s part of God’s general revelation to you and so you have to study economics,
and the problems of management and labor and production and profits and
investments, etc. These are legitimate
areas, just like Joshua sent the spies out.
What do you suppose Joshua’s reaction would have been if the spies went
over and ate grapes under the tree and came back and said it looks pretty good
to us? Do you think Joshua would have
accepted that? No, he was after quality
and he wanted those spies to go out there and get some hard intelligence on the
enemy, and I mean I want you to go over to that city and I want you to go into
that city, I don’t care if you lose your life, but you go into that city and
get me back some hard data, I need it for divine guidance.
I hope you see here the second principle that Joshua reasoned out
logically from what he knew, utilizing and incorporating all this additional
material and putting it together with the Bible; the Bible is not neglected
here but the Bible by itself [can’t understand word/s] doesn’t help you a bit,
you’ve got to incorporate it, make it in touch with the world in which we
live.
The third step; up to this point we would all agree and sometimes up to
this point that’s all you have to do.
For example, one illustration, a very simple trivial one, you all should
know this one but I’ll give you a test on it now, let’s take a 21 year old boy
and a 20 year old girl. The Bible gives
you a principle: the Bible principle is “be not unequally yoked,” that means no
Christian young man has a right to marry a non-Christian girl or a Christian
girl marry a non-Christian man. It’s
forbidden by the Word of God; that’s the principle. But does the principle help you? No.
Here’s this guy and he wants to find out something, he goes out with
this girl. He knows the principle from
the Word of God, but what does he have to do in addition to the Word of
God. He’s got to check out the girl, got
to find out, is she a believer or isn’t she.
Now he’s brining in other information so he has the Bible plus man or the
knowledge of this girl and he puts it together.
Now at the end of this process that’s it, the girl is either a believer
or not. And if she’s a believer then he
goes on to the right man/right woman doctrine.
If she’s not a believer he dumps her.
That’s it; it’s simple, the will of God has been ascertained immediately
and there’s no mysticism about it, no crystal balls, nothing else, it just
terminates right there.
But I want to show you that there are times in your life when this is
not going to be sufficient; the simple two-step doesn’t work in all cases. Joshua’s is an illustration where it doesn’t
so we have to add a third step in the principles of divine guidance. Not only do you start with the known and
reason to the unknown within divine viewpoint framework, utilizing the Bible,
man and the world, but sometimes you come to what I would call the critical
point. You think this thing out and you
begin to reason out and then all of a sudden you get into position like
this. The only way I can diagram it is
something like this. Let this be kind of
a wall, a cement wall and let this be land and this water. You’re looking down from this on the
top. Let the water be out of the will of
God, and the land, you’re in the will of God.
Now you come along here logically and you encounter a wall, and you
begin to work your way along the wall logically, utilizing the Bible, all the
information you can get, and you try to put all this together and you find
something, that it seems to be the only way around the wall is to go into the
water to get around it.
Now that’s what I call a critical point in the Christian’s divine
guidance. The critical point is right
there. In other words, you start with
these two steps but they become insufficient; you follow God’s will and you
kind of inch out and you begin to put these things together carefully and
prayerfully, and you find you’ve got an obstacle in the way but you can’t get
around that obstacle without going outside of the will of God. So you can’t satisfy that restriction. We said you reason from the known to the unknown
within the divine viewpoint framework.
But if you come to this kind of a situation you reason from the known to
the unknown but you can’t get around the thing without dropping the divine
viewpoint framework.
Now if you go back to Joshua 1:10 this is the problem Joshua had; this
is exactly the problem Joshua had, he had a problem at a critical point. Here’s his problem; here’s the Jordan River,
here’s the Dead Sea. Joshua had the
problem of reasoning out and saying God wants me to go across Jordan. Okay, I know that; I know my military
resources. Now God wants me to go across
Jordan, here’s God’s will, divine viewpoint, across Jordan now. But as Joshua begins to move from the known
to the unknown he discovers something; I haven’t got any boats. He discovers something else, nobody’s ever
built a bridge across the Jordan successfully, and I can’t do it now I don’t
have any engineers. And if I did it’d be
suicide because they’d knock it off at the other side. So now he’s got a critical point. Joshua has taken the will of God for his
life, He has taken the spy report, everything is ready to go in, everything
checks out, there’s only one problem.
He’s got the wall. Now Joshua
could devise a human viewpoint solution and say well, I’ll wait; I’ll wait
until the flood goes down. Remember, the
Jordan is flooding, this is the end of the rainy season, it’s all a flood. So Joshua could say to himself wait a minute,
reasoning this out trying to find God’s will for my life, what I’ll do is I’ll
hold the armies over here and we’ll just mark time till the Jordan goes down,
and then we’ll just walk across. You can
walk across the Jordan in the dry season, no problem. So why not do that?
This is the critical point; that violates the “now.” But he has no resources to do it, so at the
critical point is where you have to go by faith and wait. And the procedure, the SOP for operating in a
believer’s life when you reach the critical point you petition the Lord and stop,
right there; going back to this illustration, when you hit the water you stop;
you stop right there and say Lord I can’t fulfill your command without breaking
another command you’ve given me; I’m at the critical point. And Joshua had to do this. He had to say Lord, You want me to go across
Jordan, I’ve got my armies here, I’ve got no boats, no bridge, you want me to
go across now and I can’t. Joshua has
reached the critical point. This is why
in Joshua 3:2 we have the statement made, “And it came to pass after three
days, that the officers went through the host,” they waited there three
days. See, going back to our chart, he
waited three days, day 7, 8 and 9, he waited there marking time until God gave
him an answer. Joshua had reached his
critical point and when reached that that’s all he could do. So he held up his order, he moved his armies
as far as he could, right to the edge of the water, he gave an order, in three
days we’re going across this thing, I don’t know how, I have no idea how we’re
going to cross it but I know that God has told me to do it and I know that at
the critical point God is going to come through.
This is waiting on the Lord and here’s where you do truly have to wait
on the Lord by faith. You have to wait
and sometimes these are agonizing hours, agonizing days, sometimes agonizing
months and years for you when you may face a critical problem and you’re going
to have to just come to a screeching halt, you’re at the edge and you have to
sit there and you have to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and petition
the Lord till He comes through. And all
the while He’s testing you, He wants to see, again go back to this aerial chart
here, He wants to see if you’ll go out into the water and go around the wall
that way. He wants to see if you are
going to stick with it and if you are going to trust Him for what He promised
or chicken out and go out in the water.
That’s the problem at the critical point and these three areas, these
three mechanics of ascertaining God’s will are shown by Joshua and the principles
given to us in Ephesians.
Next week we’ll deal with more details of how this worked in this
specific situation.