Joshua 20
When the
Open the Word to Joshua 10. In
Joshua we are involved in a major section that began in chapter 9 and continues
to the end of chapter 10. This section
deals with the campaign in the center and south of the
And the three basic principles that we learned from the
The second principle we learned from the Gibeonite incident was that the
Gibeonites, like many people today, were trying to enter the kingdom of God
apart from the [can’t understand words sounds like: sense of wrath], in other
words, the Gibeonites knowing they were inside the boundaries of the land, if
you are a member of a city inside you are on the schedule for annihilation; if
you are outside of that boundary then you had a chance at your life. But it also turns out that God in His mercy
would controvert the sentence of condemnation if you had personally trusted in
Jesus Christ, as today you are under the wrath of God and I am under the wrath
of God and I am under the wrath of God if we have not personally accepted
Christ as Savior. The moment we accept
Christ Rom. 8:1 says “There is now no condemnation to them that are in Christ
Jesus.” So we have this principle
illustrated, they were trying to get in, pretending they were not condemned
people, when in fact they were.
Finally last time we learned the principle of two wrongs don’t make a
right or the immutability of an oath, that once you swear or once you oath
before God and use His name, even though it is a bad decision, you are
obligated to stick it out. And I can’t
think of any more painful application of this today than the area of
marriage. Unfortunately what’s being
said is all too often true and the problem is that oftentimes people panic in
this kind of a situation and they say look, back here 20 years ago I made a bad
decision, and so therefore what I’m going to do, I’m going to reverse this
thing; sometimes it’s 2 days ago, I made a bad decision and so now I’m going to
revert. I’m going to go a new direction
and I’m going to go straight from here on out.
You cannot do this and the principle of it is given to you in Joshua 9,
where Joshua had made an idiotic decision, just like the United States has made
idiotic decisions to come to the aid of every nitwit little country that asks
us for aid and we’re getting burned, and the reason is because we made a stupid
decision to start with. But having made
that decision it is Biblical to stick it out.
And the reason is that we’re not sticking it out and the reason Vietnam
is going to end up in communist hands is because we have a lot of crybabies in
this country and a lot of people that are approaching this problem like they
approach their personal problems; they can’t stick it out in their marriages,
they can’t stick it out in their business, they can’t stick it out in their
contacts and therefore as citizens they can’t stick it out either. And we have,
therefore, in this country a group of crybabies and crybabies make the policies
of this country and crybabies vote in the elections in this country. So when you have crybabies making the policy,
crybabies voting, crybabies at all levels of leadership you are bound to have a
crybaby type policy. And that’s exactly
what we have; if the going gets a little rough, avoid the problem, go somewhere
else. There’s only one problem with
that, is that you never can avoid your problems, they’ll always catch up with
you. It’s the same attitude and this
attitude is directly anti-Scriptural as indicated in Joshua 9.
Now tonight we come t the 10th chapter and the 10th
chapter is very parallel to our
Now the principle, I want to take you again to Psalm 15:4 because that’s
our principle; that’s the principle that you find in Joshua 9 as well as other
passages in Scripture, what to do when you get yourself in a jam. I want you to notice that Joshua is in a jam,
he has made a bad decision, it was a wrong decision, it was a foolish decision,
nevertheless he got stuck with it. But
he is a believer and Psalm 15:4, at least the content, it wasn’t written at
that time, but Psalm 15:4 promises that God will bless various people; they are
enumerated in verse 2, verse 3, verse 4, and in verse 4 you will notice, “…He
honors them that fear the LORD; [and He honors them] that swear to their own
hurt, and changes not.” “Swear to their
own hurt” means to take an oath to do a foolish thing and nevertheless God says
I will honor you if you’ll stick it out; all of My omnipotence, all of My
sovereignty, notice who is making this promise.
Again we go to the essence of God; God is sovereign, God is righteous,
God is just, God is love, God is eternal life, omniscience, omnipresence,
omnipotence, immutability, etc. God is
all these things but I want you to notice something about this. God is all of these things and God of this
type of character is standing behind His promise. I don’t care what the situation you face, it
may be involved in this kind of a thing, all of you face it as citizens of the
United States, our country has made foolish things, your sons are going to be
murdered on the battlefield, they are going to be murdered by people because of
asinine politicians. And you’re going to
have to sit there and you’re going to have to take your lumps and we’re all
stuck in the same boat, but God tells us as believers, you stick it out, I will
see to it that the wrongs are righted, etc.
So in Psalm 15:4 is a great promise, “he that swears to his own hurt,
but does not change,” one foolish decision should not be followed by another
foolish decision, so there’s the principle and now we come to Joshua 10:1. And we get immediately involved in a war, a
very unpopular war but a war which was made necessary by his sticking by the
oath he made to God. Let’s read verses
1-14. “Now it came to pass, when
Adoni-zedek, king of Jerusalem, had heard how Joshua had taken Ai, and had
utterly destroyed it; as he had done to Jericho and her king, so he had done to
Ai and her king; and how the inhabitants of Gibeon had made peace with Israel,
and were among them. [2] That they feared greatly, because
Verse 6, “And the men of Gibeon sent unto Joshua to the camp to Gilgal,
saying, Relax not thy hand from thy servants; come u to us quickly, and save
us, and help us; for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell in the mountain
are gathered together against us. [7] So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he and
all the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valor. [8] And the
LORD said unto Joshua, Fear them not; for I have delivered them into thine
hand. There shall not a man of them stand before thee. [9] Joshua, therefore,
came unto them suddenly, and went up from Gilgal all night. [10] And the LORD
routed them before
[11] And it came to pass, as they fled from before
You can begin to see some interesting things began to happen immediately. And I want you to see first, this starts with
a promise. All of this action that
you’ll see in the next 14 verses starts with one promise. One man, because remember the people in this
mob that they had in chapter 9, they wanted to go down there and slaughter the
Gibeonites. Well, with that mental attitude you can imagine what they’d do when
the message for help comes from the Gibeonites; oh brother, the first thing we
do is make a treaty with these clowns and the next thing they do is not they pull
us into a war. We haven’t even got one
meal eaten after we make a treaty and they’re calling, knocking on the door for
help; fine deal we got ourselves into.
And you can imagine the muttering and murmuring that was going on in
that camp. But one man knows God’s will
and one man sticks with it. And as a
result everything in the next 14 verses flows because of one man’s faithfulness
to the promise of God.
In verse 1 we have a king by the name of Adoni-zedek. If you’re sharp with your words you’ll begin
to notice something very strange about this word; you’ll notice this is very
similar to another word of another king, an ancient king in the city of
Jerusalem, Melchizedek. This ending, “zedek” is the Hebrew word for
righteousness. “Adoni” means the Lord, “the Lord of righteousness.” Melchi
is the word, the king of righteousness, that was Melchizedek, who was king of
Jerusalem when Abraham came through. Now
the Jews come back and there’s another man sitting on the throne, Adoni-zedek,
his name means the same thing, the Lord of righteousness, which seems to
indicate that in the ancient world Jerusalem was considered a holy city before
the Jews got there. In other words, this
city has its edition of peculiarity and a religious uniqueness that precedes
the coming of Israel. Why we do not know; evidently in the promise of God… this
is going to be the world capital and God evidently picked it out very, very
early for His capital.
So the kings that ruled in this city had this tendency, had names by the
name of righteousness, except this man is a satanic righteousness; this man has
human good righteousness. Melchizedek
was a believer, this man is an unbeliever and notice they have the same names
which illustrates a satanic principle, Satan always counterfeits and just
because somebody gets up to you and names Jesus a couple of times and talks to
you about the Lord, redemption, resurrection, etc. and uses these words that we
use, don’t forget that Satan transforms himself into a minister of light and
can use the same words, same vocabulary you do, except of course he’s attaching
different meanings to it as this man obviously has done.
And this man is alarmed so in verse 2 notice it begins, “they feared”
whereas verse 1 deals only with one king.
Why is it the plural subject of the verb “fear” in verses 2 whereas we
only have a singular subject in verse 1.
The answer is that it’s the whole group of kings that are fearing. Adoni-zedek just happens to be the one who
evidently is the shrewdest because all the kings get zapped except Adoni-zedek,
he takes off and comes back, at least his city, Jerusalem, doesn’t get wiped
out. He preserved Jerusalem and
Jerusalem is actually preserved for many hundreds of years down until the time
that David wipes out the Jebusites.
Adoni-zedek pulled a fast one here, he got all these kings to go in and
they lost their city, but the city of Jerusalem was preserved.
And “they feared greatly” in verse 2, and notice something else about
verse 2. There are several principles
that we can derive as believers in verse 2, the first thing to notice is that
because the men of Gibeon were mighty, the word here is heroic. And what this means is that these men who
occupied the city of Gibeon were actually tough men who were well suited for
battle, and therefore they did not come to Christ because they were
chickens. They came to Christ because
they realized the issue and it was because they realized the issue they came
across to Israel, they were traitors to their alliance here. But the first thing that I want you to see is
that there was no reason from the human viewpoint why these people had to leave
their alliance. Of all the cities,
evidently this city had the star group as far as their military regiments were
concerned; they had tremendous fighters and there was no reason from the human
viewpoint why these men were any weaker than any else so you can’t explain
their conversion that these people just were weak and they couldn’t take the
knocks of life and so they just accepted Christ as a crutch. That’s not the kind of people you meet here
and these other people know it and they have great respect for them. But they’re afraid and they’re angry, and that’s
why in verse 2 it says not only that they were “royal cities” but cities of the
kingdom, that’s what it says, cities of this federation. And this also illustrates a principle to us
as believers and that is when you become a Christian, when you have trusted in
Jesus Christ you are a traitor to Satan; you are a traitor to his entire cosmos
system and therefore when you become a Christian you begin to incur the wrath
of Satan. Satan is interested in causing
you every kind of disturbance he can to keep you away from the will of God. And you are silly and naïve as a believer if
you just deliberately allow cracks in your armor to develop through carnality
and other things and you are asking to be clobbered because Satan hates you as
much as these kings hated Gibeon. Gibeon
had become a traitorous complex of cities; Gibeon had declared their allegiance
to be shifted from that of the alliance to that of Israel. And now they’re going to pay for it.
So in verse 3 he calls his men together, he’s going to teach them a
lesson. He says this is essentially what
we’re going to do to people who trade off, you people have become traitorous to
this confederacy and so I’m going to teach you people what we do with
turncoats. So therefore he starts in
verse 3.
Now verse 4, “Come up unto me, and help me, that we may smite Gibeon;
for it has made peace with Joshua and with the children of Israel.” The thing to notice here is that the war
starts, not with the enemy attacking Israel, this was didn’t start with them
attacking Israel, this war started with them attacking Gibeon. Gibeon is the target for the war, not Joshua,
not Israel, and at this point Joshua and Israel could sit down in Gilgal and
let them clobber Gibeon, because they’re not being attacked. These armies aren’t going down the hill to
run over Joshua in Gilgal; they’re up in the mountains and they’re going to
clobber Gibeon; it has nothing to do with Israel. But again notice the principle that I pointed
out when I started this chapter, and you’ve got to see this; I keep going back
to this so I’m setting the stage for the final miracle that comes. You won’t appreciate this final miracle until
you realize what led up to it and what led up to it was a tremendous stubborn
obedience to the will of God, even when it meant tears and suffering and
heartache they were stubbornly obedient to the will of God. They had made a treaty and it was going to
hurt deeply to be loyal to that treaty but they were loyal anyway, they toughed
it out. And God is going to bless them.
So now as the kings assemble in verse 5, Gibeon sends a note in verse 6
to Joshua. “And the men of Gibeon sent
unto Joshua to the camp to Gilgal, saying, Slack [relax] not thy hand from thy
servants; come up to us quickly, and save us, and help us;” and this is the
same word; notice the word “slack not,” this is the same Hebrew word that is
involved in God’s promise to Joshua.
Turn back to Joshua 1; maybe you have memorized Joshua 1:5 or 1:9, but
in verse 5 and 9 is this concept. In
verse 5, “There shall nto any man be able to stand before thee all the days of
thy life. As I was with Moses, so I will
be with thee; I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.” Verse 9, “Have not I commanded thee? Be
strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed; for the
LORD thy God is with thee wherever thou goest.”
The point here, the picture you have in the Hebrew is this: Yahweh has
His hand and it’s Yahweh’s hand that holds the believer and Yahweh’s hand will
not slack, that’s the expression. He
holds on with a strong grip to that which is His own. You see the same thing in John 10, the sheep,
the Lord says they’re in My hand and no on is going to take them out, even
people who don’t believe in eternal security.
Nobody is going to take them out, My hand is on My believers and I’m
going to hold on tight.
That’s the concept you have here and the concept is reversed now because
now notice when they come to Joshua in verse 6, they’re saying don’t let Your
hand relax. In other words, you have
this progression; you have the Lord’s hands on Israel, the Lord is not going to
let Israel go, and Israel’s hand is on Gibeon, so Gibeon is being blessed. Notice how this illustrates the Abrahamic
Covenant. What is the Abrahamic
Covenant? Gen. 12:3, if anybody is to be
blessed in history they will always be blessed through or by means of Israel,
and Gibeon is linked to the Lord through Israel and so when she’s in a jam she
comes to Israel, verse 6, don’t let your hand slack, in other words, don’t
release us, “come up to us quickly, and save us, and help us,” notice they
declared a submission to Israel, “thy servants.” Even though these are heroic men, notice the
whole point of this passage is that these are men, and they’re strong men and
they’re smart men; they realize that there are spiritual issues there, that
they are creatures and not creators, and therefore they submit and they
recognize their position, servants.
So in verse 7 we have the immediate resonse. “So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he and all
the people of war with him, and all the mighty men of valor.” Notice Joshua moved immediately because in
verse 9, if you look at the end of the verse, you see Joshua moved his men “all
night.” Now this is another one of these
details I’m going to point out to you because again I want to set the stage
mentally for what’s going to happen at the end here; all fireworks are going to
break loose at the end but you’re going to miss it if you don’t see these
details. Here is another detail that’s
setting you up for this final conclusion.
The detail is that Joshua’s men aren’t going to have any sleep. This word came in the camp, probably in the
late afternoon. Joshua immediately
mobilizes his men, he marches these men 15 miles up into the mountains. Fifteen miles he has to move his men, all
night he moves his men. These men don’t have time to sleep and the battle is
going to begin in the morning and they won’t have any physical endurance.
And we’re going to see a tremendous principle here and that is when you
are busy doing the will of God there’s going to come times when… one of the
questions that came was what about fasting.
Here is an illustration of Biblical fasting, except it’s fasting in a
very interesting thing; this is not fasting from food, this is fasting from
sleep. And the principle is the same,
these men are so busy carrying out the will of God they do not have time for
normal physical function. And so even
though they don’t have this, and this is not advisable, to move your army 15
miles all night and go into battle, even though this is not advisable God is
going to take up the slack. And I want
you to see how God is going to take up the slack.
This sets the stage for the miracle that’s going to happen. But God provides for those believers who are
busy doing His will and who, therefore, do not have time for the normal
functions of life. You see this in
marriage in 1 Cor. 9, Paul forgoes marriage, not because the apostles couldn’t
marry but he could marry, he says so in 1 Cor. 9, but because of his particular
itinerate ministery, exposed as he was to the great dangers, he [can’t
understand word/s] so therefore God gives him the gift of celibacy, 1 Cor.
7-10. You see this incident repeated
numerous times throughout Scripture. There comes crisis times when the believer
is busy doing his Father’s business and God is our Father and He is going to
take care of His children and He is not going to allow His children to go into
physical fatigue when that strength is needed, as here. And these troops are going to have to go into
battle, and after we get through they are going to have gone, think of this,
within 24-36 hours this entire army will have moved some 30 to 40 miles; you
try walking 30 or 40 miles. Now in the
history of warfare this represents one of the great marches in history, verse 9. A more recent example of this, if you saw the
movie Patton, was when the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II,
Patton had moved his armies eastward very rapidly. And the Germans came out in a tremendous
penetration, trying desperately to cut off, the German objective was to move up
here and pinch out the British troops and wipe them out like they did at
Dunkirk. This was their last ditch
attempt and they almost made it, except for a stubborn group of the 101st
Airborne that was right there and Patton who was to the south. And Patton had
just got through fighting a tremendous battle, his tanks were without gas, his
troops were without hot food, and Patton realized that if he was going to save
the remnants of the 101st Airborne that were trapped at the Bulge,
he had to move and he moved his army all night and they marched north all night
without food, and went into battle and won.
This is another one of these illustrations but it is not normal military
procedure. It violates the security of
your men and you can’t ask men to fight and give their lives when they have no
sleep, no food and nothing else.
But this is what Joshua is doing, so this all lays the background for
this tremendous miracle that’s going to happen.
The battle begins in verse 8. Now
let me give you an outline of this section.
Verses 8-10 give you an overview or summary of the battle. Verses 11-14 give you the details, typical
way of Hebrew writing, first you get the general summary and then you get the
details, so take it like this, otherwise you’re going to get your chronology
all mixed up; verses 8, 9 and 10 the general overview. Let’s look at this.
In verse 8, “And the LORD had said unto Joshua,” now again this is
another detail I want to direct your attention to. This promise given to us in verse 8 is the
one that I just read you in Joshua 1:5, 9, and this is an example in the Hebrew
where the tense looks like God just said it then and He did not; this is a
pluperfect and what it means is that the Lord had said to Joshua. There is no indication that the Lord spoke to
Joshua during this battle, none whatever, up until one point. Joshua knew the will of God, there was no
need for God to communicate to him His will.
Joshua knew he was obligated under the terms of the treaty and he knew
that since… notice how he reasoned, he knew first that he was obligated to do
this by the rule of the treaty but he also knew that if he went up there to
help the Gibeonites he will be obeying the Lord and if he was obeying the Lord
it means he could claim God’s promise for help, that this battle was going to
be the battle of the Lord, not Joshua’s battle.
He is in that not because he chose the battleground; he was in it
because he was faithful to God. And
since he was faithful to the Lord he had the right, like you have the right,
every believer in this congregation, if you are operating in the will of God
you have the dogmatic right to claim God’s promises on your behalf. And Joshua is going to claim this promise
here in verse 8.
So verse 8 is put into the text to show you the promise that Joshua was
claiming. “The LORD had told Joshua,
Fear them not; for I have delivered them into thine hand.” Now Joshua claims it and so verse 9 he “came
unto them suddenly, and went up from Gilgal all night.” And verse 10, “And the LORD discomforted
them” literally it means the Lord shook them up, “before Israel, and slew them
with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goes up to
Beth-horon, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah.”
Now to show you what happened here, let’s look at a map. He moved from Gilgal, this is a night march,
very rapidly without supplies, he moved his army to Gibeon. The battle begins at Gibeon; it moves to
upper Beth-horon, lower Beth-horon, it moves to Azekah, and then it moves to
Makkedah, and Makkedah has a very surprise ending that we’ll see next
week. But I want you to notice what’s
happened here, and this is why what’s going to happen is going to happen, it’s
got to happen. Joshua has moved his army
all the way west to Gibeon. When he
starts the battle it becomes a pursuit and now his men, weary from a night
march, are going to have to chase thousands and thousands of these men from the
confederacy, first northwest, down this mountain slope from upper Beth-horon to
lower Beth-horon, then they turn around and start moving southwest and finally
wind up at Makkedah. If you measure that
out on a scale you’ll see that this represents about 30 to 40 miles and it’s an
extremely long distance for an infantry army to operate, extremely long; no
chariots, just their feet. Therefore
operating in this kind of a situation you can see the tremendous problem that
Joshua has at this point.
First let’s examine this word, “the LORD discomforted [routed]
them.” The word “discomfort” is a word
that is used in the Bible for holy war, and from this we can get a tremendous
principle from God. When God fights in
holy way He uses the natural forces. For
the principle turn to Job 38:22. Here’s
the principle, God’s weapon system. In
Job 38:22 the Lord asked Job, “Have you entered into the treasuries of the
snow? Or have you seen the treasuries of the hail? [23] Which I have reserved against the time
of trouble, against the day of battle and war?”
In other words what God is saying is that I am the Lord of creation and
as the Lord of creation I have control over the natural elements. And if you think that man’s weapons systems
are bad, wait until you see the Lord’s.
In other words, what God is saying is He has His ultimate weapons
systems, for He controls the total physical environment. That involves the problem of radioactivity,
it involves electric magnetic fields, etc. it involves all of these things that
men utilize for their weapons systems.
God, at this moment, do you realize, could knock out within seconds,
every major weapons system by both Russia and America by just simply
manipulating the electromagnetic field of the earth because our ICBM’s and
everything else, and many of them are taped in the nose cone and they have
their instructions in tape, change the magnetic field and you erase the
tape. And our modern instrument systems
are grounded on very precarious natural conditions. This is why in prophecy I believe that when
the final time comes and in the battle of Armageddon you find men fighting at a
very primitive level and why it is that problem that you so often wonder about
in prophecy that they’re not using nuclear war and they’re not using rockets
and everything else in the book of Revelation, when it seems like infantry is
in style, it seems like, in fact, very ancient forms are in style. Apparently the answer is that because this
follows the great tribulation these great weapons systems will largely be
rendered ineffective at this point. You
can’t have too many earthquakes before you destroy your runways; how do you get
your aircraft off without runways? You
can’t have too many things before you ruin the silos that your missiles are in;
great earthquakes will destroy these weapons systems. The only weapon systems that could survive
this kind of thing would be surface based missiles. Your submarines, you have problems with
subterranean earthquakes, etc. compression waves, shock waves and tidal waves
operating in the seas. And so it is very
conceivable that by the time of the end of the tribulation after seven years of
disaster the nation’s great armaments will be eliminated and therefore the
battle will be back into the more primitive forms of infantry warfare, etc.
Well, these are the weapons that God uses. On the way back to Joshua stop at 1 Sam. 7:10
and I’ll show you a case where God used these weapons systems just to show you
that this didn’t just happen in Joshua.
Periodically throughout the history of Israel, if you read your Bible
carefully, you will see these verses here and there that shows that God was
always fighting on behalf of His believers and He was able to manipulate the
whole physical environment on behalf of them.
Now apply that to you; you may be in a jam because you have followed the
will of God. And you may be in what may
be a hopeless situation as far as you are concerned. And yet if God is the same today as He was
then, that means that God can manipulate in and through the environment; He can
manipulate economically, He can manipulate politically, He can manipulate in
all sorts of ways to protect His believers.
This is why you need not panic because you can’t elect good
leaders. The way this country is our job
as believers is to mind our spiritual business and you be faithful to the Lord
in your area of responsibility and you get the Word of God out to those who
don’t have it by means of tapes, personal witnessing, etc. you’re doing the
best thing you could ever do for your country, and later on the Lord will take
care of the details.
It’s the same thing here, these men aren’t able to fight off all these
enemies but they do the best they can and when God sees you’re moving He comes
in to help, and this is an illustration.
1 Sam. 7:10, “And as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the
Philistines drew near to battle against Israel:” notice Samuel, faithful, right
in the middle of the battle, he could be occupied with human viewpoint, oh
Lord, how many battalions are we going to station on this hill, that hill and
all the rest, but he knows something, that if they’re going to win this is
going to be the Lord’s battle, and he’s going to get things straight with the
Lord first and worry about the deployment of his troops later and while he is
offering the burnt offering, the Philistines come and they say oh, this is a
good time to get it, notice verse 10, “but the LORD thundered with a great
thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomforted them, and they were
smitten before Israel.”
In some supernatural way God worked with a tremendous noise and
discomfort, etc. and it shook these troops up, etc. and it moved them out. You find the same thing in Hezekiah’s day;
Hezekiah was a godly king; he had made foolish decisions, very foolish
decisions but Hezekiah listened to a man called Isaiah. And Isaiah had taught the Word of God
faithfully in Jerusalem and in Hezekiah’s day hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of the people in the city of Jerusalem had taken in Bible doctrine and
they knew the promises of God and they knew what God’s will was and they rested
in it. And Sennacherib and the powerful Assyrian army came up to do battle
against Jerusalem and in one night 185,000 officers of that army were removed
from duty permanently. How this was done
we do not know but in some way God… and just the officers, all the officers
were removed and the sergeants got up in the morning, and the privates got up
in the morning and said where’s the captains, he’s dead; where’s the
lieutenants, he’s dead; where’s the generals, he’s dead. All the officers died and Sennacherib pulled
back and we have testimony to that in Sennacherib’s own annals. So therefore we have the Lord intervening in history
on behalf of His believers when those believers are faithful and obedient to
the known will of God.
Now if you turn to Judges 4:15 we’ll see another illustration of how the
Lord does battle for those that are His.
The case of Sisera, this is during the time of the judges and there are
several problems here; Sisera is persecuting Israel, or at least a section of
it, and so we have it said in verse 15, “And the LORD discomforted Sisera, and
all his chariots, and all his host, with the edge of the sword before Barak, so
that Sisera alighted from his chariot, and fled away on his feet.” They had one of the most mobile systems of
warfare, Sisera and his legions; they were highly mobile and the Israelites
were on foot. If you’re an infantry man
sitting there with your sword and along comes a guy galloping at you 25 miles
and hour with a chariot on the back with knives sticking out of the wheels,
there’s not much you can do unless you can high jump, and that’s about it,
that’s about your own defense. And at
this time God made up for the lack of those believers. What did He do? He got these chariots so confused and mixed
up in a supernatural way that even the commander had to get off his chariot and
walk.
Now we have a hint of how this was done in Judges 5:20, again it
involved God working against His enemies through creation. Notice it says in verse 20, this is in poetry
in Hebrew, verses 20-21, “They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses
fought against Sisera. [21] The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient
river, the river Kishon, O my soul, thou has trodden down strength.” In other words, it’s a hymn of praise, that
God operated astronomically and operated hydrologically to destroy this army.
Now I think I’ve prepared you to come back and we’ll see what happened
in Joshua chapter 10. That’s what it
means in 10:10, “And the LORD discomforted them before Israel, and slew them
with a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way,” we can look
at the map, this is the area of battle, you can see it’s a long, long period of
battle, it extends all the way from Gibeon north and then back south; that
thing lasts about 35-40 miles. And
notice in verse 10 it says the Lord chased them, now it’s obvious that Israel
chased them, but at this point because the believer’s are identified with the
Lord’s battle, the Bible just simply says the Lord chased them. In other words, the identification of the
believer and the Lord is so tight and so close at this point; they’re such in
the will of God that whatever they do it’s the Lord doing it.
Now in verses 11-14 we have the details.
And here we come face to face with one of the most astounding passages
in God’s Word. This is the time when the
Lord is going to make up for Israel’s lack; keep in mind Joshua’s faithfulness,
keep in mind that the soldiers at this time are tired, they haven’t had any
food, they haven’t had any rest and they’re called upon to engage in a long,
long, extended infantry campaign in a very short space of time. And notice another tactical problem; you’ve
got to knock out this confederacy, you’ve got them on the run, the doctrine of
the principle of war called pursuit requires that he take advantage now, he’s
got them on the run, kill them. This is
his chance to break the back of the confederacy. So as this chapter started out with cursing,
Israel being dragged into a war that she didn’t want to get dragged into
because of a foolish decision, trusting the Lord, look what happened. The whole central highlands are destroyed and
the land of Canaan now can be occupied.
God turns cursing into blessing as a result of faithfulness.
In verse 11, “And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel”
these are the kings, “and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the LORD
cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died; they
were more who died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew
with the sword.” Isn’t that amazing? In other words, the problem was that there
were thousands of these men, Israel couldn’t possibly get these. You can imagine what this must have looked
like, it doesn’t require too much imagination.
Think of a whole army of men chasing another army down a valley; now
notice the miracle here, God is going to have His own artillery and the
artillery is going to be perfect.
There’s going to be no spotter team say you move three degrees right,
increase your range a thousand yards or something like that. Nothing like that, the Lord is going to drop
and boom, the Israelite soldiers are standing here fighting some guy and all of
a sudden a rock drops on his head and so he moves to the next guy, and a rock
drops on his head, and this goes on, the whole thirty miles. God begins to pelt them with stones and the
miracle is the selectivity involved.
None of the stones hit Joshua’s troops; it is perfectly aimed artillery,
using the forces of nature.
What are these stones? This is a
mystery, because these stones are not actually hailstones; I’ve checked every
use of this word in the Bible and I am not satisfied that these things are to
be translated as hailstones. They
definitely are… it’s translated stones of barad
and the problem is what does the Hebrew word barad mean? It seems to mean
cold and could be chunks of ice, but not hailstones. These evidently are chunks of ice that may
have originated from outer space but at that time God rained these ice chunks
down. Obviously hail isn’t going to be
this big; hail, the largest we ever recorded was 17 inches in circumference in
Nebraska, July 6, 1928 and that only measured one and a half pounds. Of course if you get hit in the head with one
and a half pounds at say 5,000 feet you’ll know it. But nevertheless, that doesn’t compare with
this operation.
Now there’s a hint that God is going to do this again and if you turn to
Revelation 16:21, God evidently is going to do the same thing again on a
tremendous scale because during the whole tribulation God is working through
nature to judge the nations, showing that He is the Lord of them. “And there fell upon men a great hail out of
heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent,” just for comparative
purposes, that is anywhere from 50-100 pounds, so just think of getting
clobbered over the head with a bag of cement.
“…the weight of a talent; and men blasphemed God because of the plague
of the hail; for the plague was exceedingly great,” in other words, it’s a
global bombardment that occurs at this point in the tribulation. Not these could be ice; the Albany
astronomical observatory, if you’ve been keeping up with what’s going on, now
seems to confirm the theory that comets are actually made of large chunks of
ice, etc. It sounds strange that a hot
comet can be made of water but nevertheless, this water can get very, very hot
and the atoms separate, etc. and do all sorts of crazy things. But nevertheless it’s been reported in Science Magazine that these comets
definitely have tendencies toward being composed of water. Furthermore from deep space radio emissions
from deep space, again an article in Science
Magazine shows that water is there, and so it is not inconceivable that
these are gigantic trunks of ice that God in His sovereignty had prepared for
just this moment in history.
Now back to Joshua 10 and we go to the second great miracle. The first one is these strange stones, the
stones of barad. In verse 12, “Then spoke Joshua to the LORD
in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of
Israel,” now this sounds like it’s kind of a different text; it is, because in
verses 12-14 is a quote from what is known as the lost book of Jasher, more on
that in a moment. This is coming from
another book, a military book that was used to train the armies of Israel; it
was called The Book of the Upright,
or the Book of Jasher. The Book
of Jasher had various things in it, it had military science, music, poetry
and dancing, so you can see military science had a very interesting thing, they
even taught the soldiers how to dance.
But that was the content of this lost book of Jasher, it was a manual
for military instruction.
So in verse 12 it says “Joshua spoke to the LORD,” this is his
petitionary prayer; notice that this occurs first, before he addresses the sun
and the moon. “Then spoke Joshua to the
LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of
Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel,” and this is one of the most
amazing declarations that any man has ever made in history, “Sun, stand thou
still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” Now Gibeon is here; Joshua is evidently
standing just to the northwest of Gibeon and Aijalon is down here. So we can deduce that this is probably around
ten or eleven o’clock in the morning that this happened, and he realizes that
by ten or eleven o’clock his soldiers are getting tired, he’s having a problem
because the battle has already moved from Gibeon and it’s becoming a
chase. He has already left Gibeon which
shows you the battle has gone into a chasing type configuration and he realizes
that he’s never going to be able to follow up unless something happens, he
needs time and he needs light because obviously at night these troops can
disperse very easily and that’d be the end of it. And he’s going to be in a bad position
because his troops will have been in the field for over 48 hours without sleep
and he’s going to bivouac out here in the middle of enemy territory and they’re
going to be subject to being annihilated.
So he’s in a very bad military situation, so at this point he asks the
Lord for this divine help and it comes.
And so he says to the sun, looking from where he is he looks over the
city of Gibeon and he says “Sun, stand still there,” literally the Hebrew says
be quiet or stop your motion. And the
“Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And
verse 13, “And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had
avenged themselves upon their enemies.”
In other words, they cleaned up the resistance so they could camp in
that area that night without being attacked.
“Is this not written in the book of Jasher?” In other words this is addressed to the
people who would read this book of Jasher, they say if you want to check it, go
to the book of Jasher; in Jasher this is recorded in all its details. “So the sun stood still in the midst of
heaven and hastened not to go down about a whole day.” This is the famous long day of Joshua.
Verses 14, “And there was no day like that before it or after it, that
the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for
Israel.” The last verse, verse 14
contains a terminating statement that is the crux of the whole lesson tonight,
and that is that the Lord not “fought” but it’s a niphel participle in the
Hebrew, the Lord was continually fighting, that’s what the participle means;
it’s an extended movie camera type action.
The Lord was fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting,
fighting that day for Israel, and the sign that the Lord was fighting was that
the elements and the environment cooperated to bring about this tremendous
victory.
While the ushers are handing these things out, which are more details on
the famous long day of Joshua, I’d like to challenge the criticism of this long
day on two counts. First there’s the
philosophical objection and that is such a thing could not happen. I want you to notice that this is a
philosophical objection, that such and such could not happen. This is an objection that is not grounded on
any scientific conclusion; it’s simply saying that this could not happen. Now if you know God’s sovereignty, His
omnipotence, obviously then you have been too much influenced by David Hume;
this is a philosophical objection and invalid.
Once you begin with the divine viewpoint framework of Scripture, once
you begin with this framework then you have the answer to this problem.
Now the second kind of objection is the historical objection. I don’t know, some of you may have problems
in this area. If you feel this could not
happen, then you have a philosophical objection. In other words, you see the universe as
naturalistic, not operating as a creation by the Creator. If you feel this way then actually you have
philosophical presuppositions that argue against Christianity and I would
challenge your presuppositions. The second
type of trouble you may have is that if this occurred, then certainly arguing
this way, the earth, there must have been signs of it all over the earth, and
we don’t have any records, usually it is said, that such a phenomena actually
did occur. However, there’s been a man
in recent years, Immanuel Velikovsky who’s done an extended study of this, and
I have listed here just about 10% of his evidence, his book is Worlds in Collision, and I want to
discuss these, these six items listed in Velikovsky. Now these aren’t all, these are just some.
The first one is that he points out that Habakkuk 3:11 and Amos 8:9 it
clearly says that the stood still, which knocks out the usual interpretation
that well, it was just kind of an optical illusion here or something. Habakkuk 3:11 and Amos 8:9 requires the
believer to hold that there was a real miracle of rather titanic dimensions
going on. The first evidence he cites is
an extended quote from the lost book of Jasher that is found in Ginsburg’s Legends of the Jews. This is a multi volume work found in many
libraries, unfortunately nowhere within our reach. But this is a summation of the ancient
extra-Biblical traditions the Jews had, that in this corpus of extra-Biblical
material is an extended quote from this lost book of Jasher, in which it says,
among other things, “the nations raged from fear of thee, kingdoms tattered
because of thy wrath, the earth quaked and trembled from the noise of thy
thunders,” in other words, something rather catastrophic is going on and
reported in the book of Jasher.
Then he deals with specific materials that are parallel to Joshua. One of these is called the Annals of [not
familiar with word: sounds like Co is tee thlon], these were written in the 16th
century but they contain Mexican traditions going back before 1000 BC and
notice, this is in the western hemisphere and they speak of a hail of stones, a
long night and earthquakes following a previous catastrophe 52 years
before. This is why in Central America
many of the pyramids were added to every 52 years because they celebrated a
cyclic return, they felt that the age 52 years was significant, if they got to
the 52 years without another catastrophe there was a celebration and they add
to these things in intervals of 52 years.
And that’s originally where it came from, there were two titanic
catastrophes, and isn’t it interesting that 52 years fits almost precisely the
dates the Bible gives that separates Exodus from this event. For how many years were the Jews wandering
between Exodus and this event? Forty,
and you can add twelve years, give or take at the end of this, and you come out
very close to 52; it’s remarkable that it’s this close.
So we have this report; it’s very interesting that there’s a similar
kind of report and notice too that it’s not just a borrowed legend from the
Bible some how that leads to the western hemisphere because this isn’t
reporting a long day, this is reporting a long night, which you would expect if
there was a long day in the eastern hemisphere there’d be a long night in the
western hemisphere.
And then the fourth group of materials, and the reason why I include
these is because basically the problem of Joshua 10 is related to this problem
of the Exodus, it’s part of the same complex of events. And so we can find materials speaking of a
protracted darkness, similar to Exodus 10:22 and following. In other words, in Exodus 10:22, forty or fifty-two
years before Joshua and the long day you have a report that during the plagues
there was an extended period of darkness on Egypt, three days the Bible says,
so dark that artificial light couldn’t dispel this darkness, it was a strange
mysterious darkness that came upon the land.
Now it is interesting that we can find testimonies of this, and I just
bring this in to show you that Exodus, not Joshua’s long day but Exodus does
have parallels in the legends of other nations.
And showing this, plus the Annals of [same as mentioned above] however
you want to pronounce it, plus these two sources, we can deduce that there are
evidences within our range of exploration.
Let’s look at Josephus; Josephus, by the way, is an independent witness
to the Bible; Josephus does not use the Hebrew Scripture; he uses them but he
uses other sources materials. After
Josephus got through writing, of course, these sources were destroyed and we no
longer possess them, so Josephus is an independent witness. “On the fourth, fifth and sixth days,”
Josephus says, “the darkness was so dense that they could not stir from their
places. The darkness was of such a
nature that it could not be dispelled by artificial means; the light of the
fire was either extinguished by the violence of the storm or else it was made invisible
and [can’t understand word] up in the density of darkness; it was not of an
ordinary earthly kind.” So there was
some mysterious means God used to discipline Egypt at that time, a very eerie
darkness that could not be dispelled by artificial means.
Second, on the Monolith of El Arish and those of you who have been in
the Framework course, I’ve mentioned this, it also reports this type thing:
“Nobody could leave the palace during nine days,” here it’s nine days, “and
during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men
nor God could see the faces of those beside them.” Talk about a dust storm,
this is really a ripper.
Then we have evidence from the Fins, an ancient Finnish work, the [not
familiar with word, sounds like: Cal eh vay ah], “The wise men of the north
land,” this is poetry and I’ve tried to put it into prose, but nevertheless,
“The wise men of the north land could not know the dawn of morning, for the
moon shines not in season nor appears the sun at noon day,” in other words it’s
all dark.
There are other new ancient world records that Velikovsky records that
indicate a five day duration of darkness, and then strangely enough, in India
and China there are reports of a ten days of light. By the way, you might ask, how did the
ancients know how long the day and the night was if they kept time by the sun.
The answer is they did it by water clocks, so therefore they had an independent
means of telling time so they wouldn’t have to have the sun to tell time. I’ve heard that said, well how could the Jews
tell that this is a long day. Well, they had clocks, they could like you do,
Bulova didn’t exist then but they had clocks.
Now the fifth set of evidences and this is really interesting. People say oh, the earth could never have
stopped; don’t be so sure of that.
Velikovsky has uncovered some amazing… this guy has gone to library
after library across the world. People
laugh at this and explain it all away but it’s interesting why you encounter
this in every culture. Herodotus, Book
2, reports on Egyptian records of four reversals of rotation. By this I mean the sun rose in the west for
two times in Egyptian history, and moved across the sky and sat in the east,
and then it reversed and went from east to west, then reversed again and went
from west to east, and then reversed to the same position. This is a report in Book 2 in Herodotus, and
you should see what the commentaries do with this second book of
Herodotus. If you want to see it, just
read, and come up with all sorts of explanations, you’ll see how they handle
Herodotus in this second book. But this
is one report.
The second report comes from the papyri of [not familiar with words;
sounds like Whoor and Irmatige] which are both Egyptian materials; these are
quotes from these papyri. “The earth
turns over as a potter’s wheel,” now be careful of what we’re saying here, a
potter’s wheel is like this, and what he’s talking about is that the earth is
rotating, and how would the Egyptians know the earth was rotating? Simple, they were astronomers and they could
measure it by the comparison of the constellations. Remember these people aren’t idiots that
we’re talking about, these people are people who were astronomers, people who
named the constellations, people who measured it, people who built the great
pyramids so it’d point at specific [can’t understand word]. These are the people that are giving you
these reports: do you believe them or not.
So these papyri say “the earth is turned upside down,” now this is
interesting because if they believed the earth was flat and they turned the
earth upside down it would reveal a new constellation, you see, a different
position any way, that’s probably what that phrase means. “The earth is turned upside down, that
happens which has never yet happened, south becomes north and the earth turns
over.”
Why are these in an Egyptian record?
Is it just poetic allegory in both papyri of [same as above, this time
sounds like: Poore and Papyri Irmitage], is Herodotus all wet? In the tomb of [sounds like: Sandmus], the
architect of Queen Hatshepsut records both the correct constellations and
records them reverse, and he’s reporting something that happened far, far
before the days of Queen Hatshepsut; he’s recording an ancient tradition and in
his tomb he had all the constellations laid out perfectly and then he had part
of the sky completely reversed, with the constellations in exactly the opposite
place. Why is this? Is it just an
accident?
Plato, in Politicus, says,
(quote) “I mean the change in the rising and the setting of the sun and other
heavenly bodies, how in those times they used to set in the quarter where they
now rise and used to rise where they now set.”
The Talmud says the sun was forced out of its course four times between
the Exodus and the giving of the Law.
[Sounds like: Veluspa] from Iceland, “no knowledge the sun has where her
home should be, the moon knew not what was his, the stars knew not where their
stations were,” obviously showing tremendous disorganization and
disorientation. [Sounds like: Auvus] a
Latin poet in Metamorphosis says, he reports one whole day went without the
sun.
Velikovsky’s remark at the end: “The versions of the tribes and the
peoples of all five continents include the same elements familiar to us from
the book of Exodus: lightning, the bursting of heaven which caused the earth to
be upside down, or heaven and earth to change their place.”
So I submit to you that there is ample historical evidence so that you
do not have to say that Joshua 10 is falsified by the so-called records of
history. It can only be falsified by the
records of history if you are willing to reinterpret what I have given you and
explain all of this other extra-Biblical material away as pure allegory and
literary fantasy.