Joshua 11
Passover Celebrated – 5:10-12
So far we have covered the first 9 verses of Joshua 5 and in these 9
verses we have seen how Joshua defied a normal principle of war which was
security. We’ve used this as an
illustration once again of how often it may be in life when one follows a
divine viewpoint pattern that you’ll find yourself out of joint with those who
operate on human viewpoint basis. Things
which appear normal to a person who’s operating on human viewpoint will be very
abnormal to you or anybody else that’s operating on divine viewpoint
basis. In Joshua 5 we have Joshua
violating his security through circumcision of his army he incapacitates
two-thirds of the men in his army; they are unable to fight, with the result,
we find here, that Joshua is actually trusting in the umbrella of God’s
protection. And this is the reason he
has for this.
Before we move on to verses 10-12 and the Passover, I want to spend some
time in taking what we have learned so far, this historical sequence, and
applying it to the believer’s life. We
have a most fascinating illustration here of certain spiritual principles that
apply to every believer. And these
spiritual principles, I am becoming more aware every day, are being largely
neglected in many circles. We hope later
on we will get to these spiritual principles, and you will see how they have
operated throughout history again and again and again. But you remember that we dealt with the
problem of verse 9 where it says, “This day have I rolled away the reproach of
Turn back to Num 14 so you can see what happens. If you can remember this flow of history for
50 years, if you can just remember 50 years of history you’ll have under your
belt one of the key sets of principles for living the Christian life, and if
you can remember what happened in these 50 years of history you will also have
empirical evidence that this does indeed work out. In Num. 14 we have the result of the Kadesh-barnea
incident, operation panic button, verse 1.
And at this point the congregation collapsed, they panicked, they cried
and screamed and yelled and wanted to go back to
So in Num. 14 we begin with a rebellion against God, a rejection of the
will of God. We find a crisis; in verse
11 God is even able to say, “How long will this people provoke Me? And how long
will it be before they believe me, for all the signs which I have shown among
them? [12] I will smite them with the pestilence, and disinherit them, and will
make of thee a greater nation and mightier than they.” Notice, he would disinherit them, and it
means that when we sin we are on this kind of ground were it not for something
else. Sin has to be taken seriously,
including sins of believer. This is what
God in His nature, apart from His gracious provision, would ask, in verse 12,
shall I not disinherit them; shall I not disinherit, take away, that which I
have promised to you.
So we start with sin and the catastrophe that is brought about. But then in verse 13 remember the
intercessory prayer of Moses. Picture
what is happening so you can follow this; this is the time we receive Christ,
God the Holy Spirit puts us in union with Christ, there’s the legal
relationship; you’re inside that circle,
you never get out of that circle. Down
below you have another circle, the will of God, which varies and this circle
expands the more of the will of God that you know. This, you might say, expands in proportion to
your maturity. Now, at a certain point
you rebel against God’s will. What
happens when you rebel against God’s will?
You’re out of fellowship. This is
the state of Israel, and to keep this illustration going we’re going to have to
jump back and forth between the principles of history and the principles that
operate in the believer’s life. So Israel
is out of fellowship at this point. They
are threatened with disinheritance in verse 12.
But in verse 13 we have the intercession of Moses. “And Moses said unto the LORD, Then the
Egyptians shall hear,” and he went on and explained that… he begged, in other
words, God’s forgiveness. And then in
verse 20 we have God’s pronouncement of forgiveness, I have pardoned according
to thy word.” “I have pardoned according
to thy word!” From this we get
confession and restoration. So now let’s
look at the steps we’ve got. Sin knocks
the believer out of fellowship. What is
the result? Let’s make this concrete so
you don’t just think of a diagram. What
is the result of being out of fellowship?
Operation panic button, verse 1, chapter 14, worrying, being upset,
etc. This is a result of being out of
fellowship.
In other words, what I’m trying to tell you through this passage is that
this is not just getting out of a circle on a chart. When you are out here
there’s a certain behavioral change that occurs in the believer and this
behavioral change is measurable and observable.
And when a Christian is out of fellowship he behaves in abnormal
ways. Verse 1 and following shows you
evidences of this. However, when
confession is made and restoration is promised and pardon is given then we are
placed back in the will of God. And we
have taught you to use 1 John 1:9. Now 1
John 1:9 isn’t a magic verse, there are thousands of other places in God’s Word
where confession is. I just use 1 John
1:9 because it’s clear, you could use Psalm 32, Psalm 38, Psalm 51; you can
cite lots of places in the Bible where confession is made. 1 John 1:9 happens to be convenient and easy
to memorize. You should have memorized
it by this point.
Now if you know 1 John 1:9 then you, like the nation Israel, are out of
fellowship, and you therefore like Israel must confess your sin, which means
that you acknowledge that you have revolted against the will of God and you now
declare your willingness to once again submit to His will. That transaction had to take place; it HAS to
take place! I don’t care who you are,
how educated or uneducated you are, or how young or how old a believer, that
has to occur; you have to confess and have to acknowledge your personal
responsibility before the Lord. And
immediately 1 John 1:9 says “He is faithful and just to forgive us our sin.” I
want you to notice what it doesn’t say; it doesn’t say you have to do 25,000
different acts of penance in order to get back in fellowship with God. It doesn’t say that you have to carry on like
a crybaby and telling everybody about your sin.
And it doesn’t say that you have to do a lot of other things that are
fashionable in religious circles. What
it amounts to is one and only one thing is necessary to be restored to
fellowship—acknowledgement of your sin, period!
That’s all, nothing else.
People say wait a minute, don’t you have to confess and then trust the
Lord. Well of course, if you don’t trust the Lord then you have another sin on
your mind. But how can you use 1 John
1:9 without trusting, because 1 John 1:9 is a promise so therefore you cannot
use 1 John 1:9 without trusting so it’s superfluous to say you have to use 1
John 1:9 and then trust the Lord. You
are trusting the Lord while you’re using 1 John 1:9, that’s the whole point of
using 1 John 1:9, it is a promise that God has made to you to do
something.
All right, that’s confession, that’s the second step in the Christian
life. And so often we stop there and say
well, the believer’s back in fellowship, no problem now. But I want you to notice there is a problem,
and this is where we forget a thing called discipline. Discipline comes to us in various ways. God can discipline you when you are out of
fellowship and it’s misery. And God can spank and He can discipline and He can
clobber you for rejecting His will. Over
and over again you’ve rejected and over and over again He will spank because
you are His child and the doctrine or predestination says I am destined to be
conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
And if I am conformed to be predestined to be conformed to the image of
His Son, Jesus Christ, what does that mean but that I’ve got to pass through
whatever it takes to get in that condition.
It’s very simple. I’ve got to
pass through everything that it’s going to take to move me into the position
for which I have been predestinated.
That’s simple, predestination doesn’t come automatically, it comes
through life that you live; it comes through phase two, into phase three. So predestination compels God to discipline
His children.
Now the discipline can also be administered, and here’s where believers
forget. You’re in fellowship, in other
words, you can confess your sin, be received before the Lord and have a
personal relationship reestablished on a conscious level with Jesus Christ and
still be under discipline. You can still
be under discipline even though you are in His will. Now it means that when you are in His will,
filling of the Holy Spirit, etc. when you are in His will then you can take the
discipline and He enables you to ride through it. But He doesn’t necessarily have to remove the
discipline just because you get back in fellowship. That is a fallacy which I
am discovering many Christians believe.
Just because they confess their sin they think because they’re
reestablished inside that bottom circle that means the discipline is over.
But here I am going to go back to this historical incident because this
disproves your theory. Let’s look at
this; let’s look at this short period of history, let’s blow it up on a time
scale so we have the year 1440 BC, that’s the time of the Exodus. All right, two years after that they blow it,
approximately one and a half years actually, but inside this time interval they
blow it. The nation as a whole gets out of fellowship. Moses immediately makes a prayer for
confession at this point. And we have
from verse 20 that God has pardoned. The
nation is back in fellowship, the pardon is finished, they are restored. But watch what happens.
Later on God adds a little phrase and we’d do well to look at the
additional phrase, because in verse 31-33 He says, “But your little ones, which
you said shall be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land
which you have despised. [32] But as for you, your carcasses, they shall fall
in this wilderness. [33] And your
children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms,
until your carcasses be wasted in the wilderness.” I want you to notice something, that came
after, after there’s pronouncement of
forgiveness. Now let’s look at this more
carefully and expand this time scale so we can actually see this. This is God’s actual words and works in history,
not some abstract Bible story somewhere.
This is real flesh and blood people this happened to and the principle
carries over to you if you are a believer.
All right, God sets up His discipline starting here, and He is going to
discipline all the way over to the year 1400 BC, 38 years of discipline, 38
years of spanking He is going to do on this thing. Now I want you to notice something else about
God’s discipline; the punishment always dovetails with the crime. If you turn back to Num. 14 do you notice
verse 3, this was the accusation of these believers against God. God, “the LORD brought us into this land, to
fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be a prey?” Now that is phony, and like oftentimes when
we are out of fellowship we can put on the phony front. Now they’re not concerned with their wives
and children, they’re concerned with themselves. This is just a little thing tacked on to make
it appear like we are so concerned, why, we’ve got these little children, now
God, you wouldn’t let these poor little children, these babies out here, you
wouldn’t let them die in the wilderness, etc.
And the accusation, this phony front, is made before God on the basis of
children and wives.
Now watch what happens; go to verse 31, what does God do? He’s going to exactly reverse this statement. He says Oh, I’m so glad to know that you’re
concerned about your wives and children, in fact, do you know what I’m going to
do? I’m going to let your wives and
children survive you so you can drop dead and your wives and children will be
perfectly taken care of. And that’s what God did. So for 38 years they ran a daily obituary,
John Q died today, John A died today, Charlie Brown died today, etc. all the
way down for 38 years until every one of the males 20 or over were dead. And ironically, their wives and their
children were still alive. So the
discipline fits the crime. Now these
people were acceptable because God had pardoned and nationally the nation was
acceptable at this point because God had pardoned. But I want you to notice that the disciplined
continued all the while for 38 years, even after they had been scarcely
accepted with God, and not until they had the circumcision which we are
studying now in 1400, not until the circumcision is the discipline removed.
What can we say about this discipline?
Why does God discipline believers?
Are there principles that God uses as selective discipline in our own
lives? The reason why you ought to be
interested in this is that I have learned from Scripture that you can minimize
discipline in your life if you pay attention to what the Word of God says. And
if you can, then there will be a lot less miserable believers running around
with long faces, a great testimony to Jesus.
And so you can decrease your misery by your own choice, paying attention
to certain things that the Word of God tells you. Now there’s a hint given to us in the first
part of chapter 14; in verse 11 there’s a question that God addresses to the
congregation. This question that God
addresses has another question in it.
Look what it says, “How long will it be before they believe Me,” the
walk by faith, “believe Me.” Notice it’s
not obey but believe Me. Do you remember
what it was at Kadesh-barnea that got them out of fellowship? They faced an adversity in their life; they
faced a situation where they were called upon to trust the assets that God had
given them and they rejected those assets, tried to go on their own and got
clobbered and then they turned around and blamed God for it. They faced an adversity in life that was greater
than their faith.
What do we mean by this? Let’s
develop this because this is the key as to why God took 38 years to discipline
them. There’s a number of reasons, of course, but this is the underlying one. God is going to, in these 38 years, bring
about faith. He is going to bring about
faith and the end goal of discipline… now watch out, think carefully here
because this is discipline of God as the Father toward His children, not God the
holy righteous judge toward the non-Christian outside of Christ. There’s a
difference, there’s judgment upon the non-believer which is legal, but the
judgment upon us as believers is not legal; the judgment upon us as believers
is familial or family. It has to do with
teaching us something. So discipline is
basically a teaching process.
Now, the object and end goal of all discipline in the Christian life is
to develop your faith and this is what God is going to do here. He is going to develop their faith so that
when they are finished with the 38 years of intensive training, they are going
to be able to take the hard knocks without getting out of fellowship. Their faith will have been strengthened to
the point where they can look life in the face and take their knocks and move
on. So this is going to be the fantastic
result of what looks like 38 long years of absolute misery and poverty. But the end result, keep in mind, is all to
build faith.
Now how is God going to build faith; how do you build your faith? How do you build your faith so that you can
withstand the assault upon you as a Christian?
This building of faith is related to truth. You cannot believe that which you do not know
for sure to be the truth. Where do I get
that? Turn to Rom. 14:23, the context is
doubtful things, and there’s laid down for you a principle that you can apply
24 hours a day in your life even though in context it’s applying to doubtful
things, nevertheless, it gives you the principle. “He that doubts is damned if he eat, because
he eats not of faith; for whatever is not of faith is sin.” The point here is that if you cannot in good
conscience do something, then you are not walking by faith. Simple test: God has given you a conscience,
you know when it is operating, and if you can’t do it in good conscience then
you cannot be doing it by faith.
So Romans 14:23 is talking about doubt is damned, the word “damned” here
means discipline; this is the believer, the New Testament saint, who has been
spanked, and he’s going to be spanked if he engages in some activity that may
be right in itself… now here’s the ironic thing. Here is one case, ironic as it may seem,
where if I give you a quiz tonight and ask you one question, which is the
absolute you follow, conscience or the Word of God, you would have to answer
conscience, not the Word of God because in Romans 14 the point is that it’s all
right to eat any food. It’s not wrong;
it doesn’t violate anything in the Word of God to have a hamburger at the joint
down the street, even if it’s run by a bunch of idolaters. Paul says you can go down there and have an
idolatrous hamburger, it doesn’t make any difference, an idolatrous hamburger
is just like any other kind of hamburger, it’s made of meat, tastes good, has
the same number of calories, and the same number of grams of protein, no
difference in the nutrients of idolatrous hamburgers versus Christian
hamburgers. So you have non-Christian
hamburgers and Christian hamburgers and it doesn’t make any difference, they
are both hamburgers. But you can have some
believers and in Romans 14 you did, who along with those in 1 Cor. 8-10,
couldn’t eat non-Christian hamburgers; had pangs of conscience. So they would open a package and say
non-Christian hamburgers, can’t eat them, I just cannot trust the Lord in this
matter.
So Paul’s instruction to them is don’t eat non-Christian hamburgers,
don’t get out of fellowship if you eat non-Christian hamburgers, eat Christian
hamburgers. But the point is that if it
knocks you out of fellowship, then don’t do it.
And later on, as the believer matures, he would realize that he could
eat non-Christian hamburgers and it wouldn’t bother him a bit; there’s no
poison in non-Christian hamburgers. To the point here is that while the
believer is growing there will come times when he cannot perform some things
that is objectively all right according to the Word of God.
By the way, this is something that we have to keep in mind. Throughout
church history we have had this problem.
Throughout church history we have had two kinds of believers, the kind
that concentrate on the objective and the kind that concentrate on the
subjective. It seems like Christians
can’t stay in the middle. On the one
hand you have people that concentrate highly on the objective; for example, a
lot of the Reform people are this way.
They make wonderful theologians, brilliant theologians; these people are
tremendous when it comes to organized thought systems, etc. When it comes to
moment by moment leading of the Lord they can’t open the door. Why?
Because they haven’t got a balanced concept such as you see in Rom. 14,
which is a subjective aspect of listening to your conscience. In other words, they can be punctilious, they
can be perfect when it comes to stating a theological proposition, there’s only
one problem, they have problems in carrying on their personal relationship with
the Lord moment by moment. Why? No subjective aspect and here it is in Rom.
14.
In Rom. 14 objectively there is nothing under the sun wrong with
non-Christian hamburgers except you and your conscience just cannot take it at
this point of growth. So therefore you
are to be deliberately subjective and bear down and obey your conscience and if
your conscience won’t give you the clear light, stay away from it. That’s one of the great signals, great
principles used in divine guidance in doubtful things. If your conscience bothers you, stay away
from it until you’ve got clear light from the Word of God. The principle is due
to something; it’s due to something inside called conscience. Conscience is designed to operate on a basis
of absolute truth. And you can have
absolute truth and you can have it down like this: let’s say we have all
absolute truth in your brain, it’s in one little box here and you have all
sorts of ideas, etc. that don’t line up with this. Your conscience is trained to start ringing
bells and to draw a line all the way around the absolute truth that you know,
that you know at that moment. So
therefore anything that doesn’t fit, you get a red light on the
conscience.
The conscience is a built in signaling device that God has put in your
heart and so it will swing into action whenever something comes into your life
for which it has no absolute truth to grapple with it, your conscience will
raise a red light, red, red, red, red, red, don’t do it, and it may be
wrong. But the solution is not to defy
your conscience; if you defy your conscience then you make it a weaker
mechanism and you don’t want it to be a weaker mechanism, you want it to be a
more sensitive mechanism. So the
solution is not to ignore your conscience, the solution is to build more
absolute truth so you can deal with hamburgers, Christian or non-Christian, as
in Romans 14. But don’t defy your
conscience; stick with your conscience and then give it something to use in a
situation. Here these Christians didn’t
have enough inside to allow their conscience to operate. Think of the
conscience, if you want to, some cars have this on their speedometers, think of
is when you set it to go off at 45 or something, and so there you are and this
thing triggers at 45 mph, but you want to drive at 50 so what do you do? You drive at 50 and ignore the blasted
thing. You become tone deaf to it; you
don’t see it or hear it. But what’s
going to happen? You’ve rendered it
ineffective. So now if you want to use
the thing and you want to set it at 50 it becomes useless because you haven’t
listened to it.
So this is why conscience must be followed in areas of divine
guidance. If there’s a doubt, you don’t
do it. Let me show you one more area in
the Word of God where this comes forth.
1 John 3:20, “For if our hearts condemn us,” there’s conscience
operating, “God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” In other words, if your conscience is signaling
something’s wrong you’d better be sure God is going to know something is wrong.
[21] “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not,” in other words, conscience gives a
green light, “then have we confidence toward God.” Notice, it is subjectively based on the
conscience. You cannot walk by faith in
the Christian life on a red light conscience.
If your conscience is on red you cannot walk by faith; it is absolutely
impossible, there is no way under the sun you can operate. You’ve got to have a green light in your
conscience in order to walk by faith.
Now let’s come to Deut. 8 to see how God used this principle to teach
Israel during those 38 years. Let’s
review; 1440 they come out of Egypt; 1438… these years are somewhat arbitrary
here, I have not given you the plus minus era on them but let’s just for the
sake of argument use these dates tonight; their relative value is okay. 1440, 1438, 1400. In 1438 they are out of fellowship as a
nation. Maybe they’re out of fellowship
for a week or something, but they’re out of fellowship and then they come back
in fellowship, but discipline continues for 38 years. Why is this discipline there for 38
years? Because do you remember what God
said, “How long will it be before they will believe Me.” If God is going to move them into a position
where they’re going to believe, what has He got to deal with? Conscience.
If God is going to deal with conscience what’s He got to do? Build in absolute truth. So for 38 years these people are going to get
taught and taught and taught and taught and taught truth until it comes out of
their ears. And then when they go back
in the land for a second try they’re going to make it. And Joshua’s generation
was the greatest generation Israel probably ever saw. The generation after Joshua went down the
drain very rapidly; the book of Judges gives you the story, very pathetic
generation. But Joshua’s generation, in
his day they had tremendous… because for 38 long years God trained and trained
and trained and trained so for 10 years they could conduct holy war and
annihilate most of the Canaanites.
I want you to notice, by the way, the ratio of training to ministry;
four to one. So next time you’re in some
Christian organization where they say they can gear you up in a week’s training
so you can have a whole ministry the rest of your life and go on in some naïve
way, you are listening to some false line, I’m sorry to say, because when you
discover the norms and the ratios in God’s Word training usually takes more
than the years of ministry. You
constantly have to train. A pastor
constantly has to train and train and train himself. There’s no end to the training; you never get
over the training stage, you always have to have training, training and more
training in order to carry on a ministry.
So in Deut. 8 we have one of the lessons in this training program. There
were two basic lessons and I’m glad these two lessons were taught because these
two lessons we all have to know over and over. Every problem that you have in
your Christian life is related to one of these two areas, so you can lay ten to
ten odds on this one, and that is that you’ve got a problem in one of these
areas. All right, one of them is the
area of Deut. 8; the other area is Deut. 9.
These two chapters are in the heart of the Law to point to these two
fundamental problems believers have.
The first one in Deut. 8 has to do with answering this question. Can God
do thus and such? CAN God do thus and such?
And we have the verb “can,” can He.
And what this means is not the memorizing of some theological
proposition, oh yeah, I believe God’s omnipotent. What it is, you see the situation and the
adversity you face, is God omnipotent then?
This is an existential confrontation with omnipotence; in the situation
are you able to say God is omnipotent.
And so in Deut. 8 God observes to Moses, verse 2, “you will remember the
way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to
humble thee, to test thee, to know what was in your heart….” [3] “And He
humbled thee,” to do what, verse 3, “that you might know that man does not live
by bread only, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of the LORD
doth man live.” The point is that God
drilled them, drilled and drilled and drilled and drilled by situation in life
after situation in life after situation in life. This is why I say in the Framework course,
don’t kid yourself, you’re not going to learn that material by reading notes;
you’re not even going to learn that material by doing a few assignments. You are only going to learn that material as
you can learn the Word of God in any way, shape or form, and that is by putting
it into practice in your daily life.
That is the only way you will ever learn it. You cannot learn it in a classroom. You can be introduced to it but you cannot
learn it, not scripturally. And in Deut
8 is another key point, God had to take 38 years in a laboratory experience
before they realized that God can do it: the question of God’s omnipotence.
Now every area of life that we have is basically due to this or this
other problem. For example, you may be out of a job, you may have some other
problem, you may have some catastrophe that’s come to you and basically the
thrust and the battle that you’re having to face is the question, a theological
one, is God able in my situation, is He able to work in space/time history to
change circumstances, to lead situations and set things up to solve this
problem? Is He able? Is He able!
And it’s a tremendous lesson and you have to learn it.
The second lesson, Deut. 9, and this is also put in the heart of the Law
and this is also the other part of the lesson that the Jews had to learn
throughout these 38 years. Verse 4,
don’t you speak, Moses said, “Speak not thou in thine heart, after the LORD thy
God hath cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD
has brought me in to possess this land; but for the wickedness of these nations
the LORD does drive them out from before thee.”
This is the problem of “will” He, and that’s the problem of grace; will
God do it, I know He can but will He, does He love me enough to do it. That’s the point, do you have a grasp of
God’s grace. Does He love me enough to
do it?
Lubbock is full of believers that have learned neither of these two
lessons. We have believers that are so
sensitive that if you look at them cross-eyed they immediately think that
something is wrong and they jump to conclusions and start maligning you behind
your back and all the rest of it. People
wear their feelings on their sleeves; you show me a believer who is wearing his
feelings on his sleeve and I’ll show you a spiritual idiot, a person who is not
trusting the Lord, a person who has no concept that God can take care of him
and that He, God, loves him with an infinite amount of love and cares for the
innermost details of his life. If a
person has this he doesn’t worry about what other people think because he’s too
absorbed rejoicing in the fact that God loves him and he could care less what
other people think. If you get the
concept of the Creator of the universe loves you with an infinite amount of
love such that He will take care of you, He will go to the cross to die for you,
He will provide anything you really truly need, if you get that concept across
you won’t have to worry about what other people think about you. What other people think about you is beside
the point; if God loves you that’s what counts.
So you have these two things, omnipotence and grace, these two aspects
of God’s program. That is the lesson
they had to learn; that is the lesson that we have to learn as believers. For 38 years this lesson was drummed into
them, so after those 38 years they come down to this time, they are ready; they
are going to be circumcised and they conduct the Passover for the third time in
their history. In other words, they
begin to have an active ministry. To see
this principle in the New Testament turn to 2 Cor. 1; this is the explanation
for suffering in the believer’s life.
All suffering is not just due to the fact you’re out of fellowship. You may be in fellowship but you may not yet
have learned a lesson that God wants you to learn. And so you continue to feel the suffering, or
this pressure, or this adversity, but the meaning of it is that God is trying
to teach you through that to trust Him, trust Him, trust Him, trust Him. He’s given you His Word, the promises of
God’s Word, He’s given you those and He expects you to test Him, and I mean in
theoretical fashion, He expects you to test Him in actual life.
In 2 Cor. 1:4 we have one of the reasons why Christians suffer. “Who comforts us in all our tribulation, that
we may be able to comfort them who are in any trouble, by the comfort with
which we ourselves are comforted of God.”
This is one of the many reasons the New Testament gives why we suffer
and one of the things in verse 4 it says is that suffering will be like this: God
will train you and train you through the school of suffering until you get over
here to point X and when you get at point X you will now have the insight
necessary to counsel somebody else in a similar situation. And you will have the ability as one believer
to minister to another believer.
Now ministry, by the way, in the New Testament means believers helping
believers; that’s what the word “ministry” means, it’s service, one believer to
another believer. And it means that in
order to conduct this service in the energy of the Spirit instead of the flesh
you have to be in a certain degree of maturity, which only comes by this long
process of getting beaten around. And verse 4 describes that process. God may put you through the wringer because
it’s necessary for you to get into shape, such that you will be ready to do
what He wants you to do; preparation before ministry.
Now there are thousands of principles we could derive from this but one
of the principles but one of the principles, and this is the only one I’m going
to touch as we go back to Joshua is this.
You can save yourself a whale of a lot of hurt and a whale of a lot of
heartache if you’ll just follow a certain concept and that is get to know God
the easy way. Study Him, study His Word,
study how the Word fits in the environment and the situation, begin now to
build a divine viewpoint framework so God is in the center, you have Bible
doctrine around and you are able to move into history, philosophy, art,
science, and all these areas, you are able to move out in personal life, your
relationship with people, with loved ones, with friends, you can work on your
job, health, sex, and all these other areas, you can have Bible doctrine
flowing out into them. So you have a
whole unified field of knowledge out here and God’s at the center, and you’re
able with confidence to move into any area with open conscience, sensitive to
His leading, knowing what He wants you to do.
And all of this can come by a strong program, almost a fanatical program
of studying His Word and applying it. It
doesn’t do any good to come and hear it and then write it in a notebook and
then store the notebook on some shelf X some place. That means knowing His Word and applying it;
knowing His word, applying it, knowing His Word and applying it; knowing His word,
applying it, discover some more of the Word, applying it, applying it, falling
down, making a mistake, picking yourself up by 1 John 1:9, moving on, falling
down again, 1 John 1:9, moving on, this kind of thing. And this is how you can develop yourself to
the maximum as a believer. You do this
and God won’t have to put you through the wringer. God doesn’t relish making people suffer but
God does do one thing: He is going to get us in shape and it’s going to be an
easy way or it’s going to be a hard way, but it will happen. So given that option, if you have common
sense, I would try to select, if I were you, the easy way. If He’s going to get me in shape I’d rather
have him do it the easy way than the hard way.
This is what logically flows out of predestination, He will get you in
shape so easy way or hard way, it’s up to you, but you will get in shape. That’s the point here that Joshua’s made.
Turn back to Joshua 5 and we’ll see this nation come back into its
own. Remember they have been fully accepted
38 years ago; they have been accepted in fellowship but they have not been
acceptable for divine service. They’ve
been capturing sand out in the dunes somewhere for 38 years but they have not
been able to minister the way God wants them to minister. They have not reached the position of
maturity. Any time you see Christian organizations running around and having
somebody won to the Lord and five seconds later he’s dishing out the gospel to
somebody else, there’s something wrong somewhere. Then six weeks later he’s teaching a class to
believers; there’s something wrong somewhere and it’s not with the Word of
God. The Word of God always follows the
principle that we have to sweat through preparation before He puts us in a spot
of ministry. And every person is
different; you can’t program for me, I can’t program for you. You are you and I am I and that’s the way it
is. And I have my own rate geared to my
personality and you have your rate geared to yours, and you can’t put everybody
in a mechanical class and elevate them through.
You can try in certain areas but you cannot automatically grade
believers; it’s just individual, led by the Lord and they mature at their own
rate.
In Joshua 5:10-12 we have the other half of this. We have the celebration of Passover. We’ve had circumcision which is analogous to
baptism in some ways and we have Passover in 10-12. “And the children of Israel encamped in
Gilgal, and kept the Passover on the fourteenth day oaf the month at evening in
the plains of Jericho. [11] And they did eat of the old grain of the land on
the next day after the Passover, unleavened cakes, and parched grain in the
very same day. [12] And the manna ceased on the next day after they had eaten
of the old grain of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any
more, but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.”
This is the third time the nation Israel had their Passover. Going back to our time line again, in 1440
they had one Passover, the night of the Exodus in Egypt. They had another Passover again around 1439,
that year they had a second Passover.
They never made it to the end of 1438, they fell out of fellowship and
from that moment on they never had another Passover until here, so this is the
third Passover in their national history.
It is not celebrated until that nation is operating in full steam ahead
in God’s plan, and then they’re allowed.
You remember when we covered Deuteronomy. Go back to Deut. 16 and I’ll take you to the
section of Deuteronomy that deals with a national calendar. Israel was an interesting nation; she had a
national calendar of national holidays.
And their holidays were set up to teach Bible doctrine, so her calendar
taught God’s prophetic program of history.
The calendar of Israel, every twelve months repeated all of
history. All the great acts of history
were repeated every twelve months. This
is why we are premillennial because Israel’s calendar is premillennial.
You go back to Israel’s calendar it works this way. It starts out with Passover, the fourteenth
of Nisan, or roughly April; that’s where the new year starts. The Passover speaks of what great event? The Exodus; it looks forward to the cross of
Jesus Christ. The next great national
feast was called Pentecost, “penta” meaning fifty, fifty days from First Fruits
which followed Passover. Pentecost was
celebrating a near event, and that was the harvest of the first fruits. So you had your spring harvest celebrated at
Pentecost. But it looked forward to the
coming of the Holy Spirit. Now they had
a fall calendar. On the fall calendar
they had a third great feast and that was the feast of Tabernacles. What did Tabernacles speak of? The final harvest. Now, we know in history that the first or the
spring half of the year has been fulfilled by real events, namely: Passover has
been fulfilled in the year 33 AD.
Pentecost was fulfilled in 33 AD, just shortly thereafter in the
spring. But the fall calendar of Israel
has never yet been fulfilled. It will be
and the fall calendar of Israel and the feasts of Tabernacles speaks of the
millennial reign of Jesus Christ. Christ
returns and then His millennial reign.
And that also tells us something else, that the millennium will start in
the autumn of whatever year it’s going to start, just as Passover was in the
spring and Jesus died in the spring.
Pentecost was in the spring and the Holy Spirit came in the spring. So the millennium will begin in the fall of
some year when it starts. It will begin
exactly on the Feast of the Tabernacles by Israel’s calendar.
Now we have these three feasts that the nation was to go through and
celebrate, celebrating these great things.
The first one is the Feast of Passover.
Deut. 16:1, “Observe the month of Abib, and keep” or prepare “the
Passover unto the LORD thy God, for in the month of Abib” or literally Nisan,
“the LORD thy God brought thee forth out of Egypt by night. [2] Thou shalt,
therefore, sacrifice the Passover unto the LORD thy God, of the flock and the
herd, in the place which the LORD thy God, of the flock and the herd, in the
place which the LORD shall choose to place His name there. [3] Thou shalt eat
no leavened bread” for seven days. Now
if you want to look at the calendar of the day of Passover it looked like this: here’s the 14th, the 15th,
16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th,
and the 21st over here. Here
is the time when the Pascal lamb was killed.
Jesus Christ died on the cross in the afternoon of so-called Good
Friday. He perfectly pictured the
Passover.
Later on, on some years it was the 16th, other years it was
on out here, three days and three nights literally out beyond, one of these
days you had a Sabbath, the day immediately following the Passover we call
Sabbath, Sabbath convocation, but then this was geared to the day of the month,
you also have a second Sabbath that came in that was geared to the week, so
that the weekly Sabbath would come in here and after that weekly Sabbath you
would have First Fruits. And that would
mean that they would go out into the field and they’d take the first harvest,
the first thing they can grab that’s harvestable, and they would bring it
before the Lord and they would hold it and they would wave it before the great
throne of God. And by waving this feast
they would be saying we thank you God because you have provided this, our first
fruits of the harvest. They haven’t
harvested it all but this is the first fruits.
Jesus Christ rose on the third day as the first fruits of God’s
program.
So we know that this calendar is locked into history; we know therefore
that universal history is proceeding on the same circuit in synchronization
with Israel’s calendar. So these
so-called feasts are very important to bear in mind. Now Passover deals with this problem of first
fruits, or deals with Exodus, it deals with God’s reject of Egypt and
acceptance of Israel out of the land. If
you’ll turn over to the New Testament you’ll see how this is applied to the
Christian. 1 Cor. 5:6-8. Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a leaven leaveneth the whole
lump? [6] Purge out, therefore, the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as
ye are unleavened. For even Christ, our
Passover, is sacrificed for us.” Now if you don’t understand the Old Testament
you’re going to be lost here. Christ is
our Passover, He’s been sacrificed, if you take these days beginning at the 15th
and work through the 21st, this was the time of the unleavened
bread. All right, you have unleavened
bread. Why did they not have leaven in
their bread? There was one basic reason; the Bible says you are to eat this in
haste. The leaven speaks of continuity
with their past, because you would take leaven from the old bread and carry it
in and so you’d always have continuity.
They were forbidden to have continuity with Egypt, and they were to
start totally new. So therefore they
were to have unleavened bread showing that they had broken the continuity
between them and the world. This is the
point that Paul is using here, “Purge out, therefore, the old leaven,” get rid
of your sin nature patterns, etc. just dump it out. Verse 8, “Therefore, let us keep the feast,
not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with
the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”
In other words, that which is new.
Paul applies it, it’s typology of this feast to the Christian.
But there’s another area in which we are related to Passover, a more
direct one, in fact, one of our rituals.
That ritual is communion. Turn to
Matthew 26:17, I just want you to get a glimpse of how it started. “Now on the first day of the feast of
unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto Him, Where will thou
that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?”
So Passover is the problem, and they go on and they go through the
bread, verse 26, and the cup, verse 27, and then later on, when they had sung a
hymn, verse 30, “they went out into the Mount of Olives.” That’s the end of it. But notice what happened before they had sung
the hymn and went out. Verse 29, Jesus
closed the feast by saying this: “But I say unto you, I will not drink
henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with
you in My Father’s kingdom.”
And what Jesus is saying is drink that wine and remember when you drink that
wine that I will be with you one day to drink it with you. This is the resurrection body; in the
resurrection body evidently eating is obviously possible. And so Jesus is promising to return; He is
promising to come back and He is promising that He too will take the wine and
He will drink it with us in personal fellowship. This is a promise that is connected, this is
why He says when you celebrate communion don’t just look back to the past
cross, look forward to the fact that I am coming again and I too can sit down
before you with the bread and the cup and I will drink with you. So this is the offer of Jesus Christ coming
along with communion. This all ties
Passover to communion so I want you to see that link as last time we saw the
link between circumcision and baptism in Col. 2.
Now we have one more thing to turn to and that’s Psalm 23:5 where we
have a famous promise. You’ve all heard
of and read Psalm 23 many times.
Remember one of the phrases, a promise that God has given to His
children. “You prepare a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup runneth
over.” That’s speaking of blessing and
notice “a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” that’s a promise that
God has promised. In other words
prosperity in the face of those who would oppose Christianity and the gospel
for Christ’s sake.
Now turn to Joshua 5 and look what happened, for we have God at the
termination of this 38 year period of discipline in which He has drilled and
drilled into these people’s mind, over and over again, I will and I can, I love
you and I am omnipotent, able to carry forth My love into history. And notice what happens, this great promise,
verse 11, appears in Joshua 5. As He
said to David in Psalm 23, “I will prepare a table before you in the presence
of your enemies,” what has He done with Israel?
“And they did eat of the old grain of the land;” where did they get that
old grain from? That isn’t old grain at
all, that is the freshly harvested grain of their enemies. God has prepared a table before them in the
presence of their enemies, as He always does to believers who are active, who
are in the ministry who have gone through the hard school of preparation and
are there in the front lines for Jesus Christ.
He will prepare you a table before your enemies as He prepared this
nation right here, even the very grain, and he had taken the very grain that
the people inside the city of Jericho had spent all that spring trying to grow,
and just at the harvest time God brings His people into the land, all these
people flee, get inside the city, so the believers just go and they take all
the grain and eat it; have a wonderful time because God has prepared for them
“a table in the presence of their enemies.”
Finally verse 12, “And the manna ceased on the day after they had eaten
of the old grain of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any
more, but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.” That’s the economy of miracles principle, God
will not provide for you supernaturally when natural means are available. And that is a key to it, God provided manna
during the time of testing, during the time when He wanted to illustrate His
supernaturalness in history. They have
learned the lesson, they are ready to move.
Next time the commander of the army comes and takes personal
command. His army has been trained. For 38 years they have been through boot
training and He is going to show forth on the scene next week.