Joshua 17
Covenant Ratification Ceremony – 8:30-35; Deut.
27
Tonight we actually have in these five verses that terminate chapter 8
the sequence to about a year and a half of study in the book of
Deuteronomy. In these 6 verses, 30-35 of
Joshua 8, we have the coming into effect the entire book of Deuteronomy, all
the things that we ran into in Deuteronomy are not put into operation. This actually is an important point; this is
actually why we want to spend all tonight on these last six verses of chapter 8. This is when the book of Deuteronomy becomes
the Law. And Moses has preached it up
until this time but now this is the point when it becomes Law. We have so far covered in this section which
we have identified in Joshua, from chapter 5-11, oftentimes scholars refer to
this as the book of the wars of Yahweh, or Jehovah. And this doesn’t mean it’s a separate book,
it just means that this is a tally of the war that God is waging, and certainly
the book of Joshua should leave in your mind a clear understanding that there
must be holy war in the believer’s life.
A believer cannot walk along at peace with everyone. The believer walks along all right, but not
at peace with everyone; he’s making his waves and these waves must be there and
at times there must be friction, at times there must be discord and this is
what Jesus meant when He said I have not come to bring peace but I have come to
bring a sword; I have come to divide man from man, father from son and mother
from her daughter because this is the issue, these are the issues that must
come to the surface if we are to adhere, by obedience, to what God has told us
in His Word. There must be added
conflict at times.
We have come to a section, chapters 5-6 which we dealt with
And then chapters 7-8 dealt with Ai and a particular problem of the sin
of Achan. Now the problem here was to
show you that God’s protection is not automatic and therefore when there is sin
that is unconfessed and un-dealt with, God’s protection dissolves. And the storms of life and pressures descend,
etc. and God is disciplining, and God is not leading in holy war, etc. So this is put in as a warning to believers,
that just because God is on your side, that statement has to be highly
qualified. God is on His own side, not
yours. And if you want to experience the
victory in the holy war, you have to be on His side. He’s not fighting for your battles; the
battle is His and it’s going to be fought on His terms and if you want to be on
the winning side you get on His terms; and if you want to be a loser you stay
on your own terms. But this battle over
Ai is a living illustration of this.
Now we come to the end of this and for background I want you to see that
he has just finished burning Ai in verse 28, “Joshua burned Ai, and made it an
heap forever, even a desolation unto this day.”
“This day” is not the day of 1971 but it is the day in which the
prophetic authors wrote the book of Joshua.
The word “Ai” in the Hebrew means desolation and it is observable,
people could walk up there, take their picnic lunch if they wanted to and say
look, here’s the desolation, do you see all this rock, do you see all that
rubble, that’s leftover from the Ai campaign.
And if you look in 9:1, the other side of this passage, you see: “And it
came to pass, when all the kings who were on this side of the Jordan, in the
hills, and in the valleys, and in all the coasts of the Great Sea over against
Lebanon, the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Perizzite, the
Hivite, and the Jebusite, heard thereof, [2] That they gathered themselves
together, to fight with Joshua and with Israel, with one accord.”
Now this is an astounding thing and you want to see what Joshua is doing
here while this confederacy is building up.
Here he is involved in the conquest of
This fight is still going on; it’s not been resolved. The Samaritans broke away from the Jews after
the exile, the return from the exile, and they even set up their own Bible
called the Samaritan Pentateuch. And to
this day there are Samaritans that do not believe in the state of
But be that as it may I want you to notice what’s happening
militarily. Here he is, he has moved his
army right into the center of almost the geographic center of the
And this passage, from verses 30-35 is bracketed. On the one side, verses 29 and before that
you’ve got this problem of the destruction of Ai, and then 9:1 this passage you
see all about these marauding armies. So
you have this problem and this illustrates the first principle we want to learn
tonight, and that is Joshua’s faith.
Again you see a man of fantastic faith, and faith in the Bible form the
first basic doctrines taught. In the
Basic Framework course we’re working with Abraham and faith and faith is not
believing what you’re not sure is the truth. That is an existentialist liberal
definition of faith. Any Christian who
believes that faith is believing in something that you can’t find out for sure
to be true is believing exactly the way the liberals believe. That is liberalism through and through.
The liberal has defined faith as a leap in the dark. You can’t know the truth so therefore you
just believe. The way the modern liberal
approaches Abraham, for example, when Abraham comes to offer Isaac, what does
the liberal say? He says look at this,
just look at this, isn’t it murder to kill a son. And so the liberal says aha,
Abraham was called by God to sacrifice his son or to commit murder, and so the
liberal says you see, the absolutes are in logical collision. On the one hand there is an absolute, “thou
shalt not kill” but on the other hand there’s the absolute that thou shalt
kill. And you can’t have two conflicting
absolutes so therefore Abraham, being a hero of faith, just goes ahead [can’t
understand words] anyway because the absolutes are in collision, and when the
absolutes are in collision your mind has to turn off, you flip a switch, mind
stays out, and you just believe. And
that’s the liberal picture of faith. Of
course, it’s a misunderstanding of Gen. 22; God didn’t commission the murder of
his son. It has nothing to do with
murder.
But nevertheless, that’s the point that liberalism makes about faith and
you have to be careful that you don’t absorb this. This is why Christians that don’t know their
environment are liable to getting sucked up by the very environment they’re
trying to avoid. Faith in the Bible
means confidence in what you know to be true.
Knowledge always precedes faith and assurance is faith; faith is the
assurance that this is the truth, 100%, that’s it! And so faith in Scripture always rests
in knowledge, so the trials of faith,
again if we use the diagram that we so frequently use, here’s the top circle,
when you become a Christian God puts you in union with Christ, this is the
bottom circle, the circle of fellowship or we define it the will of God. The
battles that you will have in your life as a believer are the same kind of
thing that Joshua is facing here, and the battles are always at the fringe of
the circle.
As you become more and more mature your knowledge of the will of God
expands. This is maturity. As you grow, the known will of God
expands. But as this will of God begins
to expand, the circle expanding in all directions, a horrible thing begins to
happen because suddenly you begin to realize it’s God’s will that I do such and
such; all of a sudden, maybe it’s God calling you to do some job that you never
have done before; maybe God is calling you to do something else. God, maybe is putting a pressure on, and you
know this is His leading, you know this is the will of God, and now the
pressure comes in. But the pressure is
not an intellectual pressure. It’s not
a pressure over rationality or irrationality, it’s a pressure over whether you
believe that God is logically consistent; it’s precisely the other way
around. The liberal says faith is I leap
when I don’t have reasons. What we’re
saying is faith is exactly the opposite; faith is that I have trouble bowing my
knee to God and making sure the reasons are really true. It’s precisely the opposite.
For example with Abraham, the issue is that God had on the one hand
promised Abraham that his seed would be forever; on the other hand He tells him
now, Abraham, I want you to sacrifice your son.
God has the power, incidentally, as Creator, to take life and give life
so it’s not murder; it is His prerogative to withdraw life at His disposal;
sovereignty, prerogative of God! So He
says I commission you to take the life of your son, I want it back; but God has
promised Abraham that his seed would be forever. So how do you resolve the two? Well, this is
the struggle and the sweat Abraham has to do.
And the New Testament gives us the key because in Hebrews 11 it says
that Abraham believed that God would resurrect his son. Now here’s where the sweat of faith comes
in. If you haven’t dealt with one of
these things, I wonder if you’ve really matured as a Christian because
somewhere along the line you’re going to encounter some little thing that as
this circle expands you have this… kind of like an obstacle in your life. And the issue that you’re facing here is
whether you really believe that the promise of God is logically consistent with
what He’s doing in history. In other
words, it’s precisely opposite; it’s whether you believe that He’s rational,
not whether it’s irrational.
It’s whether you really believe that God is able to carry out in
practice what He has promised you. For
example, you have some pressure and some trial and immediately the temptation
is there to say well I know that God has given me these promises; I know “all
things work out together for good to them that love God, to them that are
called according to His purpose.” I know
that God has promised that He will supply my every need. I know that He has done these things and I
know that God is omnipotent, therefore He is able to do it; I know that God is
love and I know that He wants to do it.
Fine, but will He and can He in that situation. In other words, the tension we face is one
whether God is going to do what He said He was going to do. And in this situation, when you make it
really specific and concrete, at some crisis point that’s reached: will God be
consistent with His promise, that’s the point. And so there’s the problem on
the trial of faith.
And this is the trouble that Joshua is having right here in verse 30
because now what he’s got to do, exposing his whole army, he’s going to have to
accept and trust that God is king of the land of Canaan, and that King, with a
capital “K” is bigger than the kings with a little “k” and all the little kings
in 9:1 don’t equal His one big King, Jehovah.
And that’s the test. So we see
him do this and remember in chapters 4-5 he circumcised his whole army, [can’t
understand words] them for at least a period of 72 hours in a tremendous
predicament. And so we have that
situation where Joshua almost repeatedly risked his entire army on these
promises of God, showing his tremendous faith as a military commander.
Now we have said that the book of Joshua illustrates various principles
and tonight we move from faith to the problem of sin and the definition of it
and we move particularly to two of the themes of the book of Joshua. There are
actually three themes in the book of Joshua, the continuity of God’s plan, the
authority of the Word and holy war.
Tonight we see just the first two, the continuity of God’s plan and the
authority of the word.
In 8:30 it says “Then Joshua” after this battle, he stopped right here,
and it says Joshua “built an altar unto the LORD God of Israel in Mount
Ebal.” Now to see what happened you have
to have a little knowledge of geography.
The battle he just got through fighting is here. Ebal is located up here; the distance between
the two is about thirty miles, and to lead an army, complete with everybody,
remember this ceremony involves all the babies and the wives and the children,
everybody has to be moved thirty miles deep into the heart of enemy territory
when he’s only knocked off two of the key cities. All the rest of the cities are still armed,
the kings are gathering around to do battle, and he exposes all of the
children, all of the women, and his whole army to this kind of thing. Now you say isn’t he a mad man? Isn’t this kind of a maddening thing to
do? No, because Joshua operates on
divine viewpoint. There are two military
principles that have been known in history that Joshua is utilizing; two
military principles, and he is going to use these inside the divine viewpoint
framework.
Let’s look at this. There are two
ways of operating in your life; inside divine viewpoint framework or inside
human viewpoint framework. Joshua has
two military principles known to him, known to soldiers all down through
history, one is the principle of pursuit and the other is the principle of
logistics. There’s another principle
that operates in here too, defense. But
pursuit and logistics are the two principles; the doctrine of pursuit says that
when the enemy has been partially routed, that is the time to pursue him to total
victory. Do not let the enemy get a chance
to regroup, pursue your advantage and so the doctrine of pursuit means that
the military commander, if he begins to get a breakthrough, the doctrine of
pursuit would be to take advantage of that breakthrough, move, kill him while
he’s running, shooting him in the back, that’s the doctrine of pursuit. It’s much easier because that way when he’s
running away from you he’s not going to shoot you so you shoot him, and that’s
pursuit. But in the history of warfare
the doctrine of pursuit always has to be balanced by logistics, because armies
have been wiped out because they followed the doctrine of pursuit without
watching how their supply lines are getting stretched out.
For example, three illustrations; one time Napoleon lost a whole entire
army in Egypt, because Napoleon began to invade from the Nile moving south up
the Nile and as Napoleon did this he was depending on the French fleet to
supply his army with logistics and the logistics [can’t understand word]. The British fleet saw that the French fleet
was there and the British came into the eastern end of the Mediterranean and
wiped out the French fleet; that left Napoleon with thousands of men in the
desert where they couldn’t get any supplies.
So Napoleon lost one army there, and of course you all know the second
time Napoleon lost an army over the same thing, he followed the doctrine of
pursuit too fast and failed to keep up his logistics and that is when he was
pursuing the Russians into Russia, as the Germans did it in World War II, they never
learned you can’t fight Russia with a ground army moving in from western Europe
because your army moves and if they’re too scattered and the Russian winter
comes in and your supply lines go out and then
your army goes out, so there’s no way of doing this. And so Napoleon
lost two armies.
The United States did the same thing in Korea; remember in the Korean
War when MacArthur made the Inchon landing and got behind the North Korean
troops and there was a whole route and the North Koreans fled up and kept on
going up toward the Yalu River, and the Americans and the United Nations forces
after them and they kept going and kept going and kept going and it was during
the fall and the temperatures were dropping in Korea and they were getting
involved in wintertime conditions and the soldiers did not have winter
uniforms, they had no preparation for the winter, they got up to the Yalu
River, thinned out with summer uniforms, summer equipment, lack of food, lack
of ammunition, and the Chinese communists moved across and pushed them all the
way back down to this DMZ where it is in Korea today. Because the Chinese commander, besides
knowing that he would be helped by certain spies and traitors in the United
States government, he also recognized the principle that the Americans had
failed in their logistics, they followed the pursuit but they had stretched out
their supply lines and there was no way of resupply, and that’s how the Chinese
communists were able to cross; their troops were all winterized, they had the
winter uniforms, they had all their equipment winterized, and they were able to
shove the Americans back, back, back, back because our troops were not
winterized. So these are at least three
illustrations in history where that happened.
Now Joshua could operate on divine viewpoint or human viewpoint with
this pursuit. And here’s how it would work.
Joshua could reason from the human viewpoint and say this: I’ve got Ai
and Jericho knocked out; this carved in the eastern section, it carves a niche
out of the land of Palestine because now I have Gilgal, I’ve got Jericho and
I’ve got Ai. This establishes a
beachhead. Now I’ve got these guys all
shook up so what I ought to do is keep my central penetration going and move
all the way to the sea and cut the land of Canaan in half. Now from human viewpoint this would have been
sound. It would not have overtaxed his
logistics because Gilgal is his supply, supplied by troops he had left on the
east side of Jordan. It wouldn’t have
violated the logistics principle and certainly would never have violated the
pursuit principle, so Joshua could have done this had he been operating on
human viewpoint.
But Joshua realized, as Paul tells us in Eph. 6, that “we wrestle not
with flesh and blood, but with spiritual powers” and so on. And this kind of war, though it still uses
these principles, uses them in a spiritual dimension. And Joshua realized that true… here’s the
picture again, divine viewpoint; Gilgal, Jericho, and Ai, but he realized
something. If he pursued out this way he
would be exposing his logistics in another way because Joshua realized that
ultimately his supplies were from the Lord and if he didn’t maintain his
relationship with the Lord, in that time Jehovah, if he didn’t express and
preserve this communication link with God, then he would be over extending his
supply line.
And I, unfortunately have to say that in many, many Christian operations
this is the truth, this is what happens.
The Christians get so busy fighting the Lord’s battles that they violate
this logistics principle. They get laid out so busy, busy, busy, busy, fighting
the Lord’s battle that they don’t maintain their communication with the Lord,
with the result that they’re too busy, they over-extend their supply lines and
don’t think that Satan doesn’t [can't understand word/s] that. Satan loves that, he is a lot more militarily
astute than the British were knocking Napoleon’s fleet out. He’s a lot more astute than the Russian army
was in taking advantage of the Russian winter and knocking Napoleon’s army out.
And he’s a lot more astute than the Chinese commander who knew MacArthur would
be gypped by certain people in the White House and on down, and he knew
this. Well, Satan is more knowledge than
even that, and when he sees the Christian so busy fighting him on all the
fronts he watches; he looks behind you to see how are your supply lines with
the Lord; oh, they’re over-extended—bang, and he moves in. And this is what so frequently happens.
You can trace this in church history through the great revivals. It’s apparent in the last 200 years every
great revival in church history has been destroyed by Satan. He destroyed the
last one through the charismatic movement in England and every time it’s been
the same old story and I see it repeated time and time again in organizations
down to this present day and that is this:
never learning from the last 200 years.
We had a great revival going in England in the 19th century
and it was completely destroyed. Why?
Because believers were won to Jesus Christ, no follow up was done, the local
pastors were not teaching the Word systematically, and with the result that you
had 10,000 babes in Christ without teachers, and when you have that many babies
there are bound to be Satan’s men, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and they came in
in the form of various organizations, etc. and completely ruined the whole
thing. Why? You didn’t have trained people, and I cannot honestly,
and frankly I cannot violate my conscience and pray for revival when I look
around and see Christians whose state of preparedness fail us.
My conscience doesn’t permit me to ask the Lord for revival at this
time. Why? There aren’t enough believers trained to take care of the [can't
understand word/s], where are you going to put them all. If you’re anticipating a Biblical revival, a
Biblical revival of great dimensions, when people spontaneously receive Christ
all over the place, this jazz you hear about preachers holding revivals is
totally unbiblical. The Holy Spirit holds revivals. Any church that says they’re having a revival
is in need of a revival because the revival that you hear about in this part of
the country has nothing whatever to do with a Biblical revival. A Biblical revival is spontaneous, it has
nothing to do with human organization, it is almost a simultaneous breakout of
the Holy Spirit working here, here, here, here, here, and it’s not one
organization. The great revivals of
history are usually started in the most obscure areas and just spread like wide
fire. In this country before the Civil
War we had at least three million people receive Jesus Christ within ten
years—three million, and or course it was God getting ready for the Civil War
because many of those men who accepted Christ would die within 3-4 years in one
of the greatest slaughters of history.
God is prepared; what would we do if 3 million people accepted Christ in
the United States. We don’t even have pastors and teachers trained enough to
handle what we’ve got. We don’t need 3
million more Christians; we need about 3 million more pastors.
This is a problem and so today we have over extended our supply lines
and we’re in danger of the same thing that Joshua realized that they would be
in danger of here and so Joshua stopped the holy war; he actually called it to
a stop and said now wait a minute, we’re going to establish our vertical link
with the Lord and get this settled. So
right here in verse 30 he stopped, in danger… keep in mind 9:1, he’s constantly
in danger of military attack on all flanks, and right in the middle of this he
stops the war and says I’m going to get my vertical relationship with Jesus
Christ, as known then, straightened out.
So he makes an altar in Ebal, and this introduces us to the book of
Deuteronomy, for what Joshua is doing here is following instructions from
Deuteronomy.
Turn back to Deuteronomy 1. In the next 10 minutes we’re going to survey
the entire book of Deuteronomy. The book
of Deuteronomy is the background for Joshua 8:30-35. As we said so often during the Deuteronomy
series, Deuteronomy was written in the form of a suzerainty vassal treaty. This means that you have a suzerain which
equals GK, the great king. The great
king makes treaties with all of these lesser kings, in this case Israel and the
tribes and the families in Israel. The
Great King is Jehovah. This says
immediately, who is the king? Is it a
person or is it God, I mean is it a man or is it God? It’s God, always in the Old Testament the
King is God. The later kings that come
on are poor substitutes but they are not really the real King of Israel. This, by the way, has implications when Jesus
Christ claims to be King of the Jews.
When He claims to be King of the Jews just don’t think He’s going to be
human King of the Jews; the King of Israel was always looked upon as Jehovah
Himself. Now when you have Jesus Christ come eventually He’s going to fulfill
this great line of prophecy that comes out of this, He becomes the King.
But this also defines something else for us; it tells us what the Bible
means when it uses the following phrase.
And you hear this phrase battered around and battered around but this
defines for you the words, “the kingdom of God.” What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is what Deuteronomy is
talking about, a political social kingdom existing inside history. The kingdom of God is not some ethereal thing
floating out in the tenth dimension somewhere.
The kingdom of God is a literal political and social kingdom, governed
by the King. And within that kingdom you
have law and order established by His Law.
Now in Deut. 1:5 Moses begins to speak to them at a place called
Moab. Again your geography; Moab is over
here, this is before Moses dies.
Remember the last chapter of Deuteronomy, Moses drops dead. By the way, not from disease; Moses dropped
dead because God killed him at that point, that was it, God called him
home. So in 1:5 before Moses dies God
instructs him to establish the procedures for transferring the treaty. We know now from ancient studies that the
suzerainty vassal treaties had to be transferred from father to son, and so you
have the old king here. This is the
sequence; first the old king writes up and prepares the treaty in its new form. The old king secures the vow of the vassal
kings to obey the new treaty, and he says to these vassals, look, I have done
such and for you, I have done this for you, now I want you to obey my son; my
son is going to sit on my throne and he’s going to replace me, and I want you
to accord him the same obedience you accorded me. That would be one half of the covenant
ratification. There would be a
preliminary ceremony while the old king was still alive. Then when the new king, after the old king
died and his son took the throne, the new king would have a covenant
ratification ceremony in which he would assemble all the vassals again to a
second meeting, and this time the vassals would pledge their allegiance to him
who rules on his father’s throne. Why
all this ceremony? To provide continuity. In other words, the treaty would not be
violated by human succession.
Now we have the same thing with Deuteronomy and Joshua. Moses, in verse 5 is at Moab beginning this
first ceremony. If you want to look at
it this way, Moses is acting as the old king.
The reason why Moses is the old king and Joshua is the new king is
because both of these men are actually types of Jesus Christ; Moses does one
thing Christ does, Joshua does another.
In other words, they both share the ministry of Christ in one sense,
Moses looking forward, etc. and Joshua afterward. But you have Moses at Moab; Moab is the cite
of the first ceremony. That is the whole
book of Deuteronomy. When you reach the
very end of Deuteronomy you haven’t gone one foot geographically. For the year and a half we studied
Deuteronomy we didn’t move at all geographically. So Moses, in 1:5 begins to declare or exegete
the Law. He begins, in other words, to
explain the Law to them.
And in Deuteronomy 11:26 you see where he had given instructions for the
second part of the ceremony. Before he
died he told Joshua what he wanted done.
And in Deut. 11:26 he addresses the people here and he says, “Behold, I
set before you this day a blessing and a curse:” now keep that in mind because
as we go back to Joshua that is going to be a key expression. [27] “A blessing,
if ye obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you this day;
[28] And a curse, if you will not obey the commandments of the LORD your God,
but turn aside out of the way which I command you this day, to go after other
gods, which ye have not known.” Verse
29, “And it shall come to pass, when the LORD thy God has brought thee in unto
the land where you’re going to possess it,” notice the instructions, very
detailed, this is why Joshua did what he’s doing, that when you go into that
land, “that thou shalt put the blessing upon Mount Gerizim, and the curse upon
Mount Ebal. [30] Are they not on the other side of the Jordan, by the way where
the sun goes down, in the land of the Canaanites….” Verse 31, “For ye shall pass over the Jordan
to go in to possess the land which the LORD your God gives you….”
Now turn to chapter 27; we have the exact ceremony that Joshua is going
to use in Joshua 8. Just be alert as we
go through here to pick out details, particularly watch for the following kind
of details because this carries over into the Christian life. Watch how many times “curse” is used. Watch how many times “cursing” comes in here
because this is going to be a trick when we come over and apply it to the
Christian. Watch this, watch how many times cursing…cursing, cursing, cursing,
cursing, cursing is mentioned here.
So in chapter 27, “Moses, with the elders of Israel, commanded the
people, saying, Keep all the commandments which I command you this day. [2] And
it shall be on the day,” now that literally does not mean “on the day,” this is
b’yowm in the Hebrew and b’yowm, just like in Genesis 2, this
[b’]is the Hebrew participle beth, it means in the day or equal to “when.” It
doesn’t mean in the literal day, it is just as a group expression, when; “when
ye shall pass over the Jordan unto the land which the LORD thy God gives thee,
that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and plaster them with plaster.” In other words, after you secure a
beachhead, notice what is not said here?
Moses doesn’t tell Joshua when to do it; he’s just saying when you cross
the river then do this. It’s left up to
Joshua’s insight and Joshua’s responsibility to seek the Lord in this matter
when to do it.
So Joshua decides, and this is where Joshua accepts responsibility;
Moses doesn’t just say Joshua, here’s an IBM card and it’s got your life on
it. He doesn’t hand Joshua that kind of
a will of God; some of you want the will of God this way, you want to come in
my office and me to say at 9:30 it’s God’s will for you to do something. That’s
not the way God works. Moses is giving
the general perspective to Joshua; it’s up to Joshua to be a mature enough
believer to fill in the details.
So Joshua crosses, he sees he’s got a beachhead and he says to himself,
now I think this is the time when it would be most honoring to the Lord, and he
checks this out, that this is the time that I should obey this commandment. The commandment itself doesn’t tell him
exactly the moment to obey, but he says now that I’ve gotten Jericho and I’ve
gotten Ai I want to do this immediately because one thing verse 2 does
say…pretend you’re Joshua now, you’ve just knocked out Jericho and Ai, and
you’ve got your eyes on all these kings around and they’re ganging up on you,
and then you begin to study your Bible and look what verse 2 says, “when you
pass over the Jordan” then you’re going to do this. But Lord, what about the kings out there, I’m
getting kinda nervous, they’re gathering together all their armies. This is a struggle of faith that Joshua is
facing here.
He looks at the Bible and he’s taking his guidance from the book. Remember he’s got the book, Joshua is the
first man in Scripture that has the Bible; this is why the book of Joshua
starts a new era; he’s the first man that has the Bible. And his Bible is the first five books of your
Bible, so he has this much Bible. And he reads his Bible and it says thou shalt
do this. But he looks out in the land
and he says good night, I’m going to rip every child, every woman, everything,
to carry out this command of God. But
then he probably says well, but if I’m really serious about my claim that God
is the king and if I really met God on the road and He was the man that was
standing there with the sword, if that’s really God, then I don’t have to sweat
it; so I guess what I’ll do is I’ll just follow the Word of God out and I’ll
obey the Word of God, even though from the human viewpoint it looks like a suicidal
military operation. So Joshua, again
honoring the Lord, carries out the Word of God.
So in verse 3 the following instructions are given him: “And thou shalt
write upon them all the words of this Law,” incidentally, the plaster that you
see mentioned in verse 2 tells us something about the ceremony. It was not a
permanent monument erected in Joshua 8; plaster was gypsum and it was put on
the outside of these rocks, they just put it on the outside and then they took
bone black and wrote on it. So what you’re
looking at here is just a ceremony, no permanent monument was erected, it was
just for the sake of the ceremony. “And
thou shalt write upon them all the words of this Law, when thou art passed
over, that you may go into the land which the LORD thy God gives you … which He
has promised thee.” Verse 4, “Therefore,
it shall be when ye are gone over the Jordan, that ye shall set up these stones
which I command you this day, in Mount Ebal, and thou shalt plaster them with
plaster.” See the specifics, there’s
your specific. The Word of God didn’t tell him when to do it but it did tell
him where to do it. Sometimes the Word of God may tell you when to do something
but not where to do it. But here the
Word of God gave him where to do it but not when to do it; Joshua had to fill
in the details.
Verse 5, “And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an
altar of stones; thou shalt not lift up any iron tool upon them.” Why do you suppose that he wasn’t supposed to
use a human tool when he made an altar?
This goes back to an Old Testament doctrine that you cannot be saved by
man’s works. The altar is the place
where God is propitiated and He doesn’t want any human works in His altar; take
natural stones. You are saved by grace
and no man can ever add to it and God doesn’t want His altar tampered with, no
human works count. So the altar was to be just stone. Verse 6, “Thou shalt build the altar of the
LORD thy God of whole stones, and thou shalt offer burnt offerings thereon,”
etc.
And then in verse 8, very interesting instruction, “And you shalt write
upon the stones all the words of this Law very plainly.” That is same word used in Deut. 1:5 for
exegesis, and what it means is to make the Word of God clear so people can
understand. And then in verses 12-13
Moses gives the instructions about Gerizim, “These shall stand upon Mount
Gerizim to bless the people, when ye are come over the Jordan” the following
tribes and he lists them. Verse 13, “And these shall stand upon Mount Ebal to
curse” the following tribes. One set of tribes blesses, the other set of tribes
cursing. And then in verse 14 and following you have the pledge of
allegiance. This is the pledge of
allegiance that was used in Israel.
Wouldn’t you love to say this pledge of allegiance every morning? This is the pledge of allegiance they had;
this is not part of blessings and cursings, Deut. 28 is the blessings and the
cursings, this is the second part of the ceremony.
Verse 15, “Cursed be the man who makes any carved or melted image,” now
the word “cursed” is a powerful, powerful word in the original. This word would be equivalent today of us
saying literally “to hell with you.”
That’s how strong it is, to hell with the man; if you want to get a
contemporary translation that’s what he’s saying. “May the man be damned that makes any graven
or melted image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of the
craftsman, and puts it in a secret place.”
Notice “secret place” because the pledge of allegiance is a pledge to follow
obediently the Word of God even when somebody can’t see what you’re doing. Do you see what a powerful pledge of
allegiance? It isn’t just saying be a
good citizen because the policeman might get you. Rather it’s saying be a perfect citizen so
that whether there’s a policeman there or not it doesn’t matter; there are no
policemen in Israel, one of the most fantastic countries we’ve ever seen; then
never had a policeman to enforce the Law because the citizens had the sense of
law and order themselves, they enforced the Law.
So in verse 15 we have one of the first things, the central pledge of
allegiance, “May the man be damned that makes any idol or any false god,” this
is absolute loyalty to the King of Kings.
And then in verse 16, “May the man be damned that sets light by his
father or his mother. And all the people
shall say, Amen.” When they say “amen”
here it means this is the truth and I believe it, not some little thing that
you tack on to the end of a prayer. This
is actually a statement. And what verse
16 is doing, “any kid that’s a brat may him be damned,” that’s what it’s
saying, all the brats were damned because verse 16 said that any person that
violates the authority of the home is damned.
That was part of the pledge of national allegiance to Israel; that’s how
they solved their juvenile delinquency problem.
Verse 17-19 is their pledge of allegiance in the area of volition,
“Cursed by he who removes his neighbor’s landmark.” The reason going into this
is that the land make was the legal data which was necessary to solve court
cases, and so you can’t have a judicial operation going on in the country when
all this stuff is mixed up, the legal records are all fouled up. In other words, volition can’t touch the
truth when the legal records are tampered with.
Verse 18, “Cursed be he who makes the blind to wander out of the
way.” In other words, this is
deliberately taking advantage of people.
You see this is all stuff, if you notice carefully, all these things in
the pledge of allegiance can’t be really enforced, except maybe the one with
the land mark, but how are you going to ever enforce like something like 16,
unless it becomes explicit; or how are you ever going to enforce something like
verse 18. These are all things that the
citizens have to take upon themselves.
So in verse 18, the blind, this means take advantage of somebody that’s
poor. This, of course, would eliminate
many people today for our government has taken advantage of people right and
left, tax, tax, tax, tax people, taking bread from their table to feed some
hippies. When I was in Denver two weeks
ago they were telling me that these hippies are supposedly revolting against
the system; well they’re not true hippies, they’re just a bunch of bums and
this food stamp program is going on and one lady was telling me she went in the
grocery store in Denver to buy some meat and she couldn’t afford the meat for
her table and one of these hippies walks in with some food stamps and buys it. This is what goes on, all of us who pay taxes
are getting penalized, we’re paying for our food plus all the bums. So this is the kind of thing, “cursed be the
one who causes the blind to wander out of the way.”
Verse 19, again is the area of justice, “Cursed be the one who perverts
the judgment due the stranger, fatherless, and widow.” Those three categories would refer to people
who would be most helpless in that society.
The widow, the woman was in a very pathetic situation without her
husband or without her son. The woman had a very difficult problem because of
lack of title to her property. The fatherless, that’s an orphan, a child
doesn’t have any parents whatever, just to be manipulated and thrown around;
and the stranger was one who had no rights either.
Then verses 20-23 deal with violation of the institution of marriage,
“Cursed be he who lies with his father’s with his father life….” [21] “Cursed
be he who lies with any manner of beast….” bestiality, and [22] Cursed be he
who lies with his sister, the daughter of his father,” etc. incest. These are the areas of sexual violations.
[23] “Cursed be he who lies with his mother-in-law,” etc. Now verse 24-25 refer to the sanctity of
life, “Cursed be he who smites his neighbor secretly,” see the emphasis in the
pledge of allegiance, “secretly.”
Remember the word back in verse 15, he makes this idol and he puts it in
a secret place. In verse 24 the ambush,
where no policeman is ever going to find out.
“Cursed” be the man who does that.
Verse 25, “Cursed be he who takes a reward to slay an innocent person,”
this would be bribery in the court system.
Then in verse 26, “Cursed be he who confirmeth not all the words of this
law to do them.”
Summary: what this pledge of allegiance is, is a pledge to total 100%
obedience and by making this pledge to 100% obedience, every man that made it
cursed himself because who could say I fulfilled verse 26. Every man who made this pledge of allegiance
was pledging himself to damnation because he couldn’t keep all of this section
of the Law. So it’s a very, very solemn ceremony and this is why they had to
have the consciousness that God in grace would solve.
But turn back to Joshua and apply this to the ceremony. Notice what God has done very faithfully; God
has told him to do this so he follows it out literally, no allegorical
interpretation. Verse 31, “As Moses, the servant of the LORD, commanded the
children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses,” there
you have the Law, those of you who get this stuff and it seems like every day
more people in this congregation get exposed to this higher criticism and I’m
glad I put this in the Framework course because about half a dozen people have
said thank you because this is exactly what my friend has gotten into,
etc. There you are, one of the
references why we do not accept the higher liberal criticism of the Bible that
says that JEDP wrote Moses and the Law, because in Joshua 8:31 who does it say
wrote it? Moses wrote it! So either the liberals are right or Joshua is
right and I’ll take Joshua. So you’re in
the section where Moses wrote the Law.
And notice he says, “an altar of whole stones, over which no man has
lifted up any iron; and they offered thereon burnt offerings unto the LORD,” in
the Hebrew it’s almost a verbatim quote from the Law. See what the author is trying to say: look,
do you know why Joshua is so successful? Because he obeyed the Word of
God. It’s simple; the reason why Joshua
was honoring to God is that he took the Word of God literally and obeyed it
even when the chips were down and when from human viewpoint it looked like he’d
sacrifice everything, [can’t understand word/s] he obeyed the Word, period, no
matter what it cost. And ultimately it really didn’t cost him anything because
God always took care of him.
Then in verse 32 it speaks of [can’t understand word/s], “And he wrote
there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses, which he wrote in the
presence of the children of Israel. [33] And all Israel, and their elders, and
officers, and their judges, stood on this side of the ark and on that side
before the priests the Levites,” you have a formation ready for the
cursing/blessing ceremony. This must
have been a magnificent thing to see.
But you have Mount Ebal over here, you have Mount Gerizim here, half of
Israel lines up here, half of Israel lines up there, the Levites stand there
and the ark is here. And they shout the
curses across the valley and it ricochets back and forth across the valley and
then as they get through shouting the cursings then these people shout the
blessings and the blessings ricochet and echo throughout the valley. It must have been a tremendous demonstration. As this ceremony went on, this is what the
setup was in verse 33. Notice, “half of
them over against Mount Gerizim, and half of them over against Mount Ebal, as
Moses, the servant of the LORD, had commanded before,” see everything is done
according to the book of Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy becomes the control for the rest of this history.
And then in verse 34 he does something; notice he doesn’t have a party,
he doesn’t use all sorts of gimmicks and everything else, he simply used the
Word of God. And in verse 34, “And
afterward he read all the words of the Law, the blessings and cursings,
according to all that is written in the book of the Law. [35] There was not a
word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua read not before all the
congregation of Israel, with the woman, and the little ones, and the strangers
among them.” Notice the emphasis in
verse 35, “all;” all, ALL, ALL, ALL, ALL, ALL the words that Moses commanded
before ALL the congregation of Israel, whether women, the little children and
the strangers, not [can’t understand word/s] but “who walked with them,” in
other words who assembled with them.
Everybody, it was a total blanketing of the Word of God. And he didn’t dress it up, etc. He simply read the content of the Word of God
and these people had a span of concentration that must have far exceeded the span
of concentration of 20th century Americans.
First of all they didn’t grow up on the boob tube; that saved their
power of concentration so they could sit and they could understand when someone
read something to them. Many of these
people couldn’t read themselves, but they were able to sit there by the hour…
if you want to realize how long it takes go home and start with Exodus 20, read
continuously, take a watch and find out how long it takes you to read from
Exodus 20 through Deuteronomy 34, and you think of two million people of
whatever it was, standing on this thing… I don’t know what they had to do, they
couldn’t run to the tinkle or something while this was going on, I don’t know
what they did, they didn’t have the problem we have, but they had all sorts of
these children, babies and everybody else and all this time Joshua and the
priests were reading this Law and they sat there until he was finished. I don’t know how they did it but they did it,
and they didn’t have confusion and they didn’t have everything else, people
jumping up and running around, Johnny sees Suzie going so he goes and all the
rest of it. They sat there and they
listened and they listened and they listened to the Word of God.
What can you say about this? I
want to conclude with two points, applying this to our life. The first one in verse 34, notice that the
Law itself is called “the blessings and cursings.” The thing I want to apply is have you ever
thought of the will of God being a cursing?
Look at this. Here’s the will of
God for your life; the will of God acts like the Law did to Israel because if
you know what God wants you to do and you don’t do it, do you know what the
will of God becomes at that point? It
becomes a cursing on your life. It’s far
better for you never to know what God’s will for you is than to know it and
disobey it. The will of God, when once
you know it and you turn deliberately from the will of God for your life, that
will of God no longer is a blessing, it is a cursing. What do we mean by this? We mean that you are going to have misery,
misery, misery, misery, misery as a believer until you get back in the will of
God, and God isn’t going to let you alone and He’s going to chase you and chase
you and chase you and chase you and that will of God… you’re going to wish you
never knew the will of God.
I graduated with a boy who was definitely called by God into the
ministry; he knew the will of God as I knew the will of God and he disobeyed
and that man wound up several years later in the nut house. Do you know why? Because he refused to go in the ministry when
God called him; he was going to go into engineering and he didn’t care what
mattered, he was still going to be an engineer.
All right, he did, and he lasted about two years, and then God worked in
his life, one disaster after another until he finally wound up in the funny
farm. It wasn’t very funny, because that
will of God acted as a cursing in his life, and that’s what this means when it
says the Law is both a blessing and it’s a cursing.
It’s a blessing because it means that in the will of God you can have
happiness, you can have stability, you can have blessing and outside the will
of God you’re going to have misery and worse than any non-Christian. And you’re going to regret the day you became
a Christian because as a non-Christian you could have enjoyed it and you could
have gone on and never have been bothered but now that you are a Christian and
you’re God’s child He isn’t going to let you get away with it and you’re going
to be miserable, miserable, miserable, and you’re going to resent the day that
you ever became a Christian, you’re going to say oh I wish that I could have
been a non-Christian because I could have enjoyed this but every since I’ve
become a Christian I’ve been miserable, miserable, miserable. Do you know why?
Because the will of God in your life is a curse, and it’s a curse because you
haven’t gotten under it, you haven’t obeyed it; you’ve deliberately rebelled
against it. And that’s the same thing
that he’s teaching here in verse 34.
Finally in closing I want you to turn to Matthew 28:20, but don’t be too
happy to find out the will of God for your life, don’t be so quick, think it
over, but the will of God is going to be a weight around your neck if you don’t
get with it. Jesus Christ is going to do
in verse 20 the same thing that we see in Moses moving to Joshua. When Moses moved to Joshua we have the
covenant ratification, which I told you is a signal that God is in the same
relationship, it doesn’t change because Moses dies off and it’s replaced by
Joshua. Well, Moses becomes an antitype
of Christ in His incarnate ministry.
Joshua becomes a type of Christ in His resurrection ministry. And so
even though Jesus Christ dies and rises again from the dead, the promises He
made before He died still hold. The
emphasis here is not only from the time before He died and rose but the
tendency is to say yes, but that’s minimal, my real problem is from the time He
rose until the time He ascended into heaven and got out of sight, until the
time He disappeared from history. And
the tendency always is to say oh, we only lived in the days of Jesus. Now if you think this way you’ve got a long
way to come because Matt. 28:20 says “I am with you always, even unto the end
of the age” or the dispensation, not the “world” the age. And this is a promise that the relationship
that Jesus Christ had with the apostles in His resurrection body will be valid
now in 1971. And there is no change in
the relationship, it’s just as tight as though He were personally bodily here;
it has not changed. If the Church has
failed there’s only one reason; she hasn’t been in union with Christ properly
because Christ is the same, and Christ is not old-fashioned.
One more reference in Revelation, I want you to see Christ’s attitude
toward the local church today; it’s the same as it was in the book of
Revelation. Just as we have the
continuity from Moses to Joshua so we have the continuity here, from pre-ascension
to post-ascension. Remember the
inspection report, how Jesus Christ judges the churches. Jesus Christ is not letting the churches get
away, look at what He says, for example in Rev. 2:8, “And unto the angel of the
church in Smyrna write: These things saith the first and the last, who was
dead, and is alive. [9] I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty (but
thou art rich); and I know the blasphemy of them who say they are Jews, and are
not, but are the synagogue of Satan. [10] Fear none of those things which thou
shalt suffer.” These are instruction
that He’s giving to a local church that existed at one point in history and may
be an antitype of a whole period of church history. “…Behold, the devil shall cast some of you
into prison, that ye may be tried, and ye shall have tribulation ten days; be
thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. [11] He that
has an ear, let him hear,” and He says this as a word of encouragement to a
church that’s undergoing persecution. He
says I will be with you until the end of the age.
Then He makes another promise, verse 12, “To the angel of the church at
Pergamos,” this is a different situation, different kind of local church,
therefore a different relationship with Jesus Christ. “These things saith he who hath the sharp
sword with two edges. [13] I know thy works, and where you dwell, even where
Satan’s throne is; and you hold fast my name, and have not denied my faith….”
“But” verse 14, “I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there them
that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balak to cast a stumbling block
before the children of Israel…. [15] So hast thou also them that hold the
doctrine of the Nicolaitans, which think I hate.” And then in verse 16, here is
where the will of God becomes a curse, He threatens the church, and He says you
“repent” and get rid of those people “or I will come unto thee quickly, and
will fight against them with sword of my mouth, [17] He that has an ear, let
him hear.”
What is Jesus saying? He’s
threatening with a curse local churches in the Christian church in each
dispensation and if you want some examples from history to show that Jesus’
prophecy is verified, you don’t have to go but to North Africa. In North Africa at one time we had one of the
greatest churches of all history. It was
out of North Africa that we had men like Jerome and Augustine and that church
entertained false doctrine and Jesus Christ came and judged the church by a
very unusual method; a method in history was a change in climate and the hordes
of Islam, and Jesus Christ abandoned that church and to this day the Christian
church has never again been established in that area. Oh, there are people converted to
Christianity, but never again has there been a vibrant church in that
land. The same thing happened in China
in the 700s, the Nestorians converted such that there was a local congregation
of believers in every province of China and something went wrong, the Nestorian
theology for one thing was very weak and they had false doctrine and Jesus Christ
threatened them, you repent or I come quickly, and what happened. The Nestorian church died out and from 700 AD
to 1800 there was not a witness or believer in China as far as we know; eleven
centuries passed by.
Don’t think that the