Joshua 22
Final Stages of Conquest – 10:29-43 &
11:1-23
Last time we terminated at verse 27, actually verse 28 and we said that
that ended the discussion in the book of Joshua as to the details of holy war
and we tried to summarize these under eleven topics, eleven principles of
eleven points. Just briefly those eleven
again, first, the first principle of holy war is that it starts from a position
of victory so therefore it is only actualizing what is already there; there’s
never any doubt about the outcome of true holy war. It’s just a question of the details of how it
outworks itself in history.
The second principle that we found is that we must know the truth. God ordered Joshua to meditate upon the Law
day and night. And you recall too that
the Law to Joshua did not just mean Deuteronomy; it meant Deuteronomy and
Genesis, which meant therefore Joshua had a total framework for putting things
in order. This is something you need to
conduct the holy war that you are called upon as a believer to do in our day
requires that God be at the center; around this we have Bible doctrine and
around this we have the various subjects, science, history, art, philosophy,
etc. and the details of life, your relationship with loved ones, friends,
family, society, job, health, etc. all these details of life coming off of this
centralized thing. So Bible doctrine
then becomes the center of your life, it controls every area in other words and
for that reason it is very important.
The third principle of holy war was divine guidance, and we said Joshua
used this principle over and over again, and it was basically moving from the
known to the unknown via two methods; one that you remain within the divine
viewpoint framework at all times and two, you use the data that you get from
Scripture as well as from man and the world.
In other words, truth is unified in the Biblical Christian, whether it’s
scientific truth, historical truth, philosophical truth or Scriptural truth it
all should fit together perfectly. Then
we found that oftentimes in exercising divine guidance you will come to a
critical point. This critical point is
the time you reach when using divine viewpoint you can’t go any further, yet
you do not yet have your solution to the problem and you get in a bind and you
just have to cool it. You just have to
hold it and wait.
The fourth principle of holy war was evangelism; evangelism results when
the words and works of God are clearly known and set against the great
questions, or general revelation, we saw that with Rahab. The fifth principle, faith increases as more
of God’s words and works are known. The
sixth principle was that to do God’s work requires a point of transition which would
be analogous to Romans 6 for the believer.
In other words, only dead men resurrected can do Jesus Christ’s
work. And only you, as you are
spiritually dead, spiritually killed you might say at the point you receive
Christ and you are resurrected will you be in a position of doing the Lord’s
work. The seventh principle was that this must become something real in your
experience. We saw that in Joshua circumcising his army where this became a
real thing to them. The eighth principle
was that the battle is the Lord’s and we saw this time and time again, as the
ninth principle, also since the battle is the Lord’s, spiritual battles involve
spiritual weapons against spiritual enemies.
The tenth principle was one way to fail in the holy war is due to sin;
we saw that with Achan, and God, even though He is omnipotent, you can actually
stop omnipotence by your sins. God
declares that His omnipotence is behind His promises yet there is one thing
that will stop omnipotence and that is your personal sin. The eleventh principle of holy war was
satanic deception and this means that you will have times when you’ll be led
astray by Satan as Joshua was led astray by the Gibeonites.
Now in verse 29 and following, through verse 43 we have another section
of the book of Joshua, very short, describing the southern campaign. And this campaign is a follow up to the
Nevertheless, when we are faced with these idiotic policies, the
Christian is obliged to abide by treaties, no matter how foolish they are and
Joshua in Joshua 8, 9 and 10 made a wrong decision but God said that decision,
you vowed My name to this treaty and therefore you are stuck with it and you’re
going to have to trust Me to get you out of the bind. And Joshua trusted the Lord to get him out of
the bind and not only did God supernaturally bombard the enemy in verse 11 when
we found out that we had these large hailstones come down from heaven, about 50
pounds a piece, and they always hit just the Canaanites. So you had perfect aiming, there was no need
to have an artillery spotter out there saying 500 yards to the right, and bring
it down, decrease your range, etc. it was exactly on target, and the result was
so fantastic that more of the Canaanites were killed by this artillery barrage
that the Lord laid down than all of the swords, etc. of Israel.
And then we found that even the sun stood still in verse 12 and I gave
you historical reasons why this is an authentic event. There are two basic objections to this
miracle, one is a philosophical objection against miracles period; if that is
your problem then it’s your presuppositions and I would challenge your
presuppositions. If your problem is
historical, then the question is to do some historical research uncovering many
of the materials that I handed out.
Now we have come to the destruction, the total destruction of this
complex. Joshua has first moved north to
Ebal and Gerizim; he has penetrated west through Ai and
Now beginning at verse 29 through the end of the chapter we have one of
the hidden assets. Not only are they going to win this battle, which they’ve
already won, they’ve knocked out everything down from Makkedah, but you are
going to see beginning at verse 29 that this opens the way to a total southern
campaign, and this breaks the backbone of this centralized block. There was a centralized block here and in the
center, just blocking this whole land, was a strong military block. What has happened is that this block has been
totally destroyed by a divine miracle.
This now opens the way for Joshua to move south and he begins to do so
in verse 29. “Then Joshua passed from
Makkedah, and all
Now in verse 31, And Joshua passed from Libnah, and all
And then in verse 33, “Then Horam, king of
In verses 40-43 we have a summary of what Joshua did; the entire
southern area. “So Joshua smote all the
country of the hills,” this whole highlands, from the central plains on down,
from the central area of Gibeon on down, “south [Negev], and of the Shephelah
[vale], and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but
utterly destroyed all that breathed,” that is a reference not to animals, just
the men, “as the LORD God of Israel commanded. [41] And Joshua smote them from
Kadesh-barnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon.
[42] And all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time,” this is
one concerted campaign.
So you can see that a lot of thing flowed out of the fact that God
turned cursing into blessing because Joshua was faithful. As this war started
out Joshua didn’t want the war but Joshua got into the war through a bad
decision, He trusted the Lord and the Lord provided; with the result that
Joshua had a fantastic breakthrough to the south.
Now we have chapter 11 and the northern campaign. The northern campaign really opens up on a
very powerful note. This northern
campaign is going to be described in the next 23 verses of Joshua is a campaign
that took from five to six years. All
that you have so far seen in the book of Joshua, up to 10:43 has probably taken
place in less than a year. So you can
see that it was a very, very fast, a very rapid assault, and by this he secured
a great amount of land. But beginning in
11:1 things begin to slow down.
Now why is it that when your read your Bible chapter 11 is not of the
same order of space as all the rest; why is it looks like everything is
condensed here? The reason is that the
Holy Spirit, when He saw fit to record this section of history, evidently
thought that we have already seen the principles of war and so the only thing
that’s left to do in chapter 11 is simply describe the closing phases of the
conquest. So though this takes about 5-6
times as long as the previous ten chapters, it’s actually for us condensed only
down to one chapter.
[11:1] “And it came to pass, when Jabin, king of Hazor, had heard those
things, that eh sent to Jobab, king of Madon, and to the king of Shimron, and
to the king of Achshaph,” this is a complex, let me show you what’ happening
here. This is the eastern Mediterranean,
here’s the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, and Joshua has taken out all this
territory. He hasn’t got the coastal
strip but he’s got it all the way basically down to here; all this now is basically
in Israelite hands. And Hazor is up
here, so we now begin to have a northern campaign. He’s got his central blocked, he’s got the
south, and now he begins to turn north.
But I want you to notice something; Joshua does not attack them, they
attack Joshua. This is something that is
new to this book, if you think about it for a minute. Do you remember Jericho? What did the people do when Joshua was
closing on Jericho? They fled behind the
walls, in other words, they were defensive.
When we come to Ai, it was the same kind of thing. When we come to the central block, if you
turn back to 10:1 you’ll see that in that central block you’ve got a situation
where they didn’t really come out after Joshua, they came out after Gibeon, not
Joshua. So in 10:1 we have, again not a
real declaration of war. But by chapter
11:1 we have a tremendous satanic counterattack upon Joshua, notice the
intensity and how it increases. And this
illustrates to us a principle that the more the kingdom of God moves into
history the more violent Satan’s resistance becomes until finally during some
future time, unknown to us but at the rapture of the church, it’s seven plus
years between the time the Church is raptured and the Second Advent of Jesus
Christ, you are going to have one of the most violent last-ditch stands that
Satan is going to pull off in all of history.
It will be violent in every respect.
You see, as the Kingdom of God is ushered in it must come in with
violence, and this goes intellectually in our day. I don’t think there’s a person sitting here
who has thought through what we have been teaching in the Bible that has not
come to the conclusion that the only way that the Christian can be victorious
in their personal life is to be engaged constantly in a struggle that is
mentally violent. Constantly there must
be a head-on collision between the ideas of humanism that control our school
system and the Biblical position of the Bible.
Constantly there has to be a struggle here. And that is in the mental area what this is
in the physical area.
So we have these two joined together and in verse 4, a statement is made
here which we can know from Josephus; we have help from Josephus on verse
4. “And they went out, they and all
their hoses with them, many people, even as the sand that is upon the seashore
in multitude, with horses and chariots very many.” And these kings gathered together here in a
valley that pours into the Sea of Galilee and that is called in verse 7 “the
waters of Merom.” It’s a small wadi that
pours into the Sea of Galilee and it’s in that valley that they gathered their
armies together and the armies are very, very vast as we see in verse 4. Josephus gives us the following figures for
this army: infantry totaled 300,000, which would be equivalent today to 25-30
infantry divisions, which is more than we could muster right now to go to
Vietnam, thanks to all the disarmament people.
10,000 horses; 20,000 chariots, so that is a tremendous, tremendous
army; think of that, over a quarter of a million men massed in this
valley. And they’ve come from all of
these sundry places listed in verse 2-3.
Now this represents approximately 25-30 divisions. Joshua, at most, has 15, so he’s outnumbered
about two to one. But that’s not the
first or the last time that Christians are outnumbered. You will always, if you are a Christian
fighting for the Lord you will always be outnumbered in the battle, generally
speaking you will be outnumbered, and so what God says to Joshua in verse 6
should apply to you. “And the LORD said
unto Joshua, Be not afraid because of them; for tomorrow about this time will I
deliver them up all slain before Israel: thou shalt hamstring their horses, and
burn their chariots with fire.” So God
gives him a promise in verse 6 and Joshua is going to take Him up on the promise.
Verse 7, notice Joshua exercising faith moves, and this is a principle
we’ve seen over and over in this book, that you cannot use sovereignty against
free will. Sovereignty and volition go
together, God’s sovereignty has given him a promise but Joshua’s volition
begins to move on that promise, so in verse 7, “So Joshua came, and all the
people of war with him, against them by the waters of Merom suddenly, and they
fell upon them.” Notice again the quick
tactics of Joshua. This is the same kind
of tactic used at Bethel and Ai, it’s the same kind that he used at Jericho and
in particular it’s the same kind used against Gibeon. So Joshua is relying on military mobility,
this is his tactic that he’s using. I
want you to see this because you as a Christian are called upon to do holy war,
and this means that you have to use tactics; it means that you have to study
the Word of God; it means that you also have to have some idea of where you’re
being attacked. Joshua had to perform a
little reconnaissance, and Christians ought to have at least a basic
understanding of where they are being hit in their day; very few do. We hope in the months to come at Lubbock
Bible Church more and more believers will understand where we’re being shot at,
where the shells are coming from so we can fire back into that area.
So that’s the point of verse 7 where Joshua came and he came quickly, so
he is not relaxing on verse 6. Verse 6 is your promise but verse 7 is your
action based on that promise.
Now in verse 9 he comes there, he wipes them out in the valley, “And
Joshua did unto them as the LORD bade him; he houghed [hamstrung] their horses,
and burned their chariots with fire.”
The word “houghed” there means to cut the back tendon of the horse; this
renders him completely useless. Why did
God do this? There’s a very interesting
reason here why God did this. Chariots
were the super weapons of the ancient world; now you don’t think of a chariot
as a super weapon unless you happen to have seen Ben Hur recently, and you’ll
never forget the chariot race with those little scythes on the wheel. In the ancient world, what they used to do,
these Canaanites were famous in the valley…these Canaanites were all in the
valley, up in the hills chariots are no good obviously. But you get down in the valley and this whole
place was controlled by whoever had the largest chariot force. They used to take an infantry force and
they’d chop it up, they’d have these knives and they’d just go as fast as they
could right into the soldiers and you can imagine big hairy blades rotating
quickly around these wheels made mincemeat of infantry units. On a high plain you didn’t have any place to
go so these chariots usually left a bloody mess of broken legs and torn bodies
all over the battlefield when they got through running the chariots
through.
So this represents a super weapon.
One of the reasons, of course, it is fast. Another reason why this makes a tremendous
weapon is its shock value. One of the
great measures of effectiveness of a military weapon is its shock; if you can
hit and hit hard and hit fast you have a much better chance of creating
shock. In a small way, even your
firearms show this. This is why a .45 is
a very good military weapon because you don’t even have to hit somebody to hurt
them with the thing; you hit somebody with a .45 and there’s no problem about
wounding him, you usually tear his arm off or something. A .45 is a very powerful pistol, it’s of
course more powerful than a .38 if you can hold it and fire it and fire it
accurately. But it represents therefore
a pistol that has greater shock value; it’s a more effective weapon in this
sense. And here the chariot was a great
weapon.
Now isn’t it interesting that God did not say to Joshua capture the
chariots and use them for yourself.
Notice, he is to permanently destroy them; he mutilates the horses, and
he burns the chariots. Those of you who
love horses probably get a little angry at this and think of all the many, many
dollars that went down the drain when he got through mutilating these
thousands, about ten to twenty thousand horses were destroyed in this
valley. But that’s what happened; it was
a complete mass bloody destruction. You
can imagine the casualties, etc. By the
way, this is very close to another battle that’s going to be fought in the
future, the battle of Armageddon.
So we have this complete destruction and God insists in verse 9 that
even Israel will not have this super weapon.
Notice this, they are to remove the super weapon out of the hand of the
Canaanites but Israel is not permitted to have these super weapons. Why? Because God, as a rule, usually keeps
His people un-blessed in certain areas.
The only way I can say this is there’s a danger in too much blessing and
oftentimes you’ll see this. For example,
you see believers who are financially in a bind, now this is not always the
case so don’t apply what I’m saying just promiscuously, but oftentimes I have
come to the conclusion that Christians and Christian organizations are not
blessed financially from the Lord because they do not take care of what funds
they already have. I have seen this
operate in several instances; I’ve seen this operate right in Lubbock Bible
Church. When I came to this church there was no financial record except the
cancelled check book. Well, would you
put your money in an organization that didn’t keep any financial records? I wouldn’t.
So where you have people that are not taking care of the property they
have you have people that are not going to be blessed by God. Now, same principle here, we see it in 2 Cor.
12.
Now in verse 13 he moves to Hazor; Hazor is the capital city of this
confederacy and he takes Hazor, [10] “And Joshua at that time turned back and
took Hazor, and smote the king thereof with the sword; for Hazor had been the
head of all those kingdoms.” [11, “And they smote all the souls that were
therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there was not any
left to breathe: and he burned Hazor with fire. [12] And all the cities of
those kings, and all the kings of them did Joshua take and smote them with the
edge of the sword, and he utterly destroyed them, as Moses, the servant of the
LORD, commanded. [13] But as for the cities that stood still in their strength,
Israel burned none of them, except Hazor only; that did Joshua burn.”]
And verse 14, I want you to notice the destruction again. “And all the
spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took for a prey
unto themselves,” in other words, they took everything that was not human, “but
every man” and this means man, woman and child, every person “they smote with
the edge of the sword until they had destroyed them, neither left they any to
breathe,” total annihilation. Someone
was telling me about missionaries causing cultural shock, now here’s cultural
shock for you; this is cultural shock in a total sense, they just destroyed the
whole culture, period and it was ordained by God to do so, so cultural shock is
no problem.
In verse 20, notice this, and the intermediate verses are just saying
how he conquered all these people. Now
we get down to verse 20, “For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that
they should come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly,
and that they might have no favor, but that he might destroy them, as the LORD
commanded Moses.” So God worked in
history to make them hate Joshua and Israel so they could be slaughtered. We have a case where God in His sovereignty
is working in history to deliberately bait them, deliberately bait them into
the trap. And we’re going to come back to that at the end as to why God baited
these people, why He deliberately irritated them and deliberately brought them
into a confrontation in which He knew they would be destroyed. But before we get to solve that main problem
in the passage we have to take a sidestep and deal with verses 21-23.
Verse 21, “And at that time came Joshua, and cut off the Anakim,” now
here’s one of those glorious times in the King James where they wanted to make
sure that you got the point that it was a plural, but there are two plurals in
this, when you want to make a plural in the Hebrew language you add “im.” When you want to make it in the English you
add “s” so the translators did a double for you, so literally this would be
translated Anakss, two “ss”, and they wanted to really get this plural across
but literally it’s only the Anaks “from the mountains, from Hebron, from Debir,
from Anab, and from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of
Israel; Joshua destroyed them utterly with their cities. [22] There was none of
the Anakim left in the land of the children of Israel; only in Gaza, in Gath,
and in Ashdod, there remained some.”
Now who are the Anaks? Turn to
Deut. 1:28, this is one of those little details in the history of Israel, but
it is a very rewarding one, to show you how God is faithful to take care of the
needs of those who will trust Him. It
goes back to the spy incident forty years ago.
Forty years before this you remember the famous spy incident. They had
sent spies north, including Caleb and Joshua and these spies were supposed to
spy out the land and report back to the weakness and strong points, etc. Now in Deut. 1:28, “Where shall we go up? Our
brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people are greater and taller
than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and, moreover, we have
seen the sons of the Anaks [Anakim] there.”
Who are the sons of the Anaks?
This involves a little diversion but I want to show you how in history
God is always faithful to answer His promise.
Keep in mind the problem here; these people are giants; some of these
men were probably 11 feet tall. We have
these gigantic people in the land and when they come back, these spies take one
look at these guys and they look around the walled cities, in fact in
extra-Biblical tradition they were walking up to one city one day when [can’t
understand words] and they looked and here’s this guy with he legs down on the
ground and his bottom is up on top of the wall, and they said what kind of land
is this that the Lord has led us into.
And they reported back that these strange giants were throughout the
land and the name of these giants were the sons of Anak. Now we’re going to examine these a minute.
Turn to Deut. 2:10, this involves a mysterious chapter of history that
you never get in the history books, a mysterious lost race that has appeared
from time to time in history and then disappeared, and whether it’s due to a
genetic distortion, or whether it’s due to the fact that this race actually
hides some place and comes out at certain times we don’t know. But in Deut. 2:10, another division, “The
Emim,” now if you drop the “im” off you have the real word, it’s the “Em,”
that’s the name, “The Em dwelt therein in times past,” this is the area of
Moab, “a people great and many, and tall as the Anaks.” So again you have this tremendous gigantic
stature.
Then you come down further in this chapter in verse 20 you get into the
Zamzummim, “(That also was accounted a land of giants; giants dwelt therein
formerly, and the Ammonites called them the Zamzummim,” the real name of course
would be the Zamzumms. Where they got
these names we don’t know but there they are, the Ems and the Zamzumms. And there was a third division of this race
called the Rephaim, so there’s three parts of the race, and actually the fourth
part, the Anaks. So these four peoples
in the ancient world were all known as tremendous giants.
Now let me show you a rather fascinating thing in history. We have one man at the table of nations
called Terah. Terah fathered three sons;
one of these sons is Abraham, the other son is Nahor, and the other son is
Haran, from which we have a place actually called by that: Nahor, Abraham, and
Haran. Abraham has two sons, Isaac and
Ishmael. Isaac has two sons, Jacob and
Esau. And Jacob goes down and out of him
finally comes Joseph. Nahor we’ll forget
about for a moment but Haran has a son called Lot. Lot has two sons, one is called Ammon and the
other is called Moab, and you’ll notice in Deut. 2:10 the people that displaced
the Emim are none other than Moab in this family line. In other words, the people that flow out of
here are destined to replace the real estate of the Em’s. Then the people that flow out of the
Ammonites are destined to replace these Zamzummim.
Now there is one last remaining people, the Rephaim; who are they? They had died out by the time of the conquest
until there was only one man left, king Og, King Og, his bedpost is given to
you in Scripture, his bed was 13 ½ feet by 6 feet, so talk about king size
sheets, how would you like to buy sheets and make that bed; 6 feet across and
13 ½ feet long. It was a real job making
his bed in the morning. We have all the
dimensions given in Scripture and that is a sign of the tremendous size of
these people. King Og is destroyed by
Moses, and now Joshua is the one that is going to be the one that destroys the
Anaks. It’s very interesting; the race
of giants was suppressed in world history wholly and totally by the Semitic
line coming from Terah.
Let’s look at the history of the Anakim for a moment; let me summarize
this quickly for you. The Anakim started
at a place called Hebron. Hebron is the
tallest city in Palestine at the time, 3,000 feet; this Hebron was one of the
cities mentioned in the text in Joshua 10.
It was one of the congregating points of this mysterious giant race that
lived on the west side of Jordan. All
the other three races, here’s the Jordan River, here’s the Dead Sea, you have
the Anakim over here, the Rephaim here, the Zamzummim here and the Em’s down
here, so all three of those divisions lived east of Jordan and the one lived
west of Jordan, the Anakim. And these Anakim
dwelt not on the plain but they dwelt in the highlands for some reason. We
don’t know why but they preferred to live in the mountains, maybe people
laughed at them less there or something, and they kept by themselves, or to get
the fresh air or something, but they all lived in the mountains.
Then Joshua came and of course when Joshua came, forty years before,
they saw these Anakim and they got scared.
Now I want you to notice how God vindicates. He says those Anakim scared My people; I’m
going to mutilate them. So later when
they come back these Anakim are completely wiped out. And there’s a psychological reason for this;
God actually moves in and totally destroys these people whom His people
feared. Why do you suppose that
happened? Because God wants His people
to see that no matter how tall the giants, they can be smashed if you are
obedient to the Lord. And that goes
whether it’s an intellectual giant, whether it’s some system that you’re
fighting, no matter how great the system, it will crumble if you are faithful
to the Lord and a faithful warrior for Him.
Well, after Joshua gets through, in Joshua 10 and 11 and we’ll see this
later on, these Anakim flee southwest to the pentapolis of the Philistines; the
pentapolis was five city states of the Philistines and they went there to a
place called Gaza and it’s described here in the latter part of chapter 11; we
read in 11:22 the fled in “Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod.” Now if you know yore Bible history this
should immediately start ringing bells with you. What is the city that later on produced a
giant that David fought; it was exactly this area? Goliath came from this area, 400 years later;
the Bible is consistent here. In other
words, so many critics like to say the Bible makes up all these stories but
it’s interesting if you just take the time to study these stories out you see
there’s a marvelous historic consistency to this thing. It’s not just a story here and a story there;
these stories have a flow to them that lasts from book to book in the Bible,
and from century to century. This is not
something made up; this is a pure testimony to history, what was really
happening.
Now most people read David and Goliath and they remember the sling shot
incident but they fail to remember that Goliath had brothers; actually Goliath
had four brothers and we have three of their names in the Bible; one was
Goliath, the other was Ishbi-benob; the third one was Saph, sometime known as
Sippaii the fourth one was Lahmi and the fifth one was unknown but he’s
designed as a person who had six finger and six toes; the listing is given in 1
Chron. 20:4-7 and 2 Sam. 21:16-21. So we
have this large family that is produced 400 years later, again from this same
racial stock. So periodically throughout history these giants seem to
appear. The giants appeared later on,
they appeared in other parts of the Mediterranean world and we have witnesses
to them. For example, Sir Henry Howorth
in his book, The Wooly Mammoth and the
Ice Age, speaks of giant bones discovered in Europe in 1691 that measured
22 ½ feet tall, a human skeleton. How
would you like to meet one of those on a dark night? We also have from
Palestine skeletons ranging from nine to ten feet tall. So you have clear archeological evidence,
very minute, true, but we have enough to say that the Bible knows what it’s
saying when it’s reporting the existence of this lost race of giants. Who they were nobody knows; what eventually
happened to them as far as we know from Scripture is that Israel killed most of
them off.
Let’s look at the last verse of Joshua 11, verse 23, after the
annihilation and extinction of this lost race of giants, “So Joshua took the
whole land, according to all that the LORD said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it
for an inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by their
tribes. And the land rested from war.”
Now this last word “rest from war” is a word that is used again and again. Do you recall where it’s used in the New Testament,
a very famous passage where it talks about the rest that Joshua could not lead
his people into. Heb. 4:8 where it says
that there’s a rest to the people of God but Joshua was unable to bring them
into it. Why? Even though it says the land rested from war,
because at this point history looked like this.
History always has a future moment to it; here’s your time line of the
past up until the moment of Joshua and at this point Joshua had his heritage to
the Jewish continued they could have, ideally, gone into the eternal
state. The eternal state is the rest,
the final rest. But they did not because
they did not conquer the land and you see, history is a process of gradually
putting obstacles between where we are and the eternal state. So at this time there were no obstacles.
Theoretically the millennium could have actually happened and phased in the
eternal state, theoretically. But of
course it didn’t, it was resisted, and then after the captivity it seemed as if
there had to be an interval and gradually this interval is expanded in very
much detail. But at that time that’s why
the rest, temporarily at this point in verse 23, “the land rested from
war.”
Now we want to solve the moral problem of this whole first half of
Joshua so we will give some of the principles as to why this entire culture was
destroyed. We’re going to see three
reasons why God destroyed a culture. God
has destroyed cultures at other points in history because of these three
reasons. Usually all three of these have
to be there. God usually doesn’t destroy
cultures for obvious reasons because we all have these three problems. But when all these three are locked together
in an unholy triumvirate the culture generally becomes doomed before God. And at that point God annihilates the entire
culture; it becomes rotten in His sight.
Look at Joshua 11:14 and 20 again to refresh your minds. In verse 14 remember what he did; this is to
make you face the problem. Some of you
Christians who’ve heard Joshua all your life, maybe you’ve never been
challenged on this, but I don’t know where you’ve lived because every
non-Christian I’ve ever talked to usually at some point in the discussion
brings up the question, how can you have this bloody God in the Old Testament
going around killing everybody or something, how can you preach a God of love
with this kind of stuff going on in the Old Testament. So you should be able to answer this, and in
verse 14, one of the things he’s killing all the men, and in verse 20 God is
hardening their hearts. Usually you will
get a moral objection to a slaughter and the answer would be that you cannot
have a moral objection to this. It
sounds strange but there is no moral objection to this kind of thing. The reason is that you have no moral base unless
you have a God who reveals Himself; the only God who reveals Himself is the God
of the Old Testament, therefore you cannot have any moral base that you can
solve that is not linked to this very God who is killing.
The issue is why did He kill; that’s the issue. Does He have a reason to
kill? I want to take you to three
passages in the Old Testament, each develop three reasons why God eventually
sentences an entire culture to damnation.
The first one is in Lev. 18:3.
These are the three reasons why God destroys a culture and why in
particular He destroyed the entire Canaanite culture at this point. There are three basic things the Bible
emphasizes; the first one, Lev. 18:3, “After the doings of the land of Egypt,
wherein ye dwelt, ye shall not do; and after the doings of the land of Canaan,
to which I bring you, ye shall not do, neither shall you walk in their
ordinances. [4] You shall do My ordinances, and keep My statutes, to walk
therein: I am the LORD your God. [5] Ye shall therefore keep My statutes, and
My ordinances,” etc. Then he goes on and
in the list, beginning at verse 6 on down through you have practically every
sexual crime that you can think of. In
other words, the emphasis is on sexual decay.
Now we want to get this straight first; there is nothing wrong with sex
in the Bible, and I want to clarify this because often times I’m discovering
Christians have imbued their children, and this is hard to do, to have a
healthy attitude toward sex and not a promiscuous one is very hard, but you
don’t solve the problem by teaching your kids that sex is bad. All you’re doing is you’re setting them up
for permanent misery in their marriage.
When they marry you are sentencing them to hell on earth by your
negative attitude toward sex. And you’d
better get straightened out and if you need it, I can give you passages in the
Bible to read. 1 Cor. 7 is one; the Song
of Solomon is another one. The Bible
describes sex and there’s nothing wrong with it, you wouldn’t be here without
it so don’t knock it.
But in verse 7 and following you have all the deviations of sex and I
want you to notice they are linked with the practices of the Canaanites. Before we look at some of these, look at
verse 24, “Defile not yourselves in any of these things; for in all these the
nations are defiled, which I cast out before you. [25] And the land is defiled,
therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomits
out its inhabitants.” So it’s clearly
linking these abhorrent sex practices with its decadent culture. And it is a matter of archeological fact, one
of the courses I had at seminary was a study of the Ugaritic language and we
had to read some of this stuff. It’s
kind of funny reading because we had a professor that got very embarrassed, and
of course we’d always emphasize the embarrassing things, so and so, what does
this say, we can’t quite get the noun here, etc. the poor guy, we drove him
nuts. But nevertheless, Ugaritic
literature would be equivalent to pornographic literature today; absolutely
pornographic and of all the ancient findings this literature is the most
sexually occupied of all the religions of the ancient east. You can read, for example, the Assyrian, the
Akkadian type literatures and you don’t get stuff that is this abhorrent, the
Canaanites really went for things like this.
So all the things you begin to see listed here are things that are
considered wrong. For example, let’s
take a few that are common today. The
ones that are listed as far as deviations, there’s a lot of incest, incest
covers a lot, close relationships that are wrong in Scripture; a second are of
sexual depravity is bestiality or sex with animals, and the third one is
homosexuality. And I want you to notice
something, homosexuality, as far as God’s Word is concerned is a sin. Now we have people running around today
trying to give psychiatric help to the homos; but let me tell you something,
it’s not psychiatric, the problem is sin and they are responsible for this and
you can come up with all the biological theories of why they have chemicals in
their body, etc. I can come up with a
lot of things too, man has bodies that are destroyed by the fall but that
doesn’t absolve me from my guilt. I have
a chemical destruction in my body because of my father Adam; when he at that
apple there was actually a destruction of the genetic seed in my body and
therefore I can’t have children without passing the sin nature on to them, but
I am still held responsible. Homosexuality
is an abomination to God, and it’s not, by the way, something that is to be
pitted or open against other kinds of sin, it’s just simply described as sin in
the Bible, and it’s a breakdown in true sexuality. So we have homosexuality, bestiality, and
incest basically emphasized in these verses.
Now if you come to Lev. 20:2-5 we’ll go to a second listing and this
shows you a second great reason, besides sexual depravity, as to why cultures
go down in history. “Again, thou shalt
say to the children of Israel, Whosoever he is of the children of Israel, or of
the strangers that sojourn in Israel, who gives any of his seed unto Molech, he
shall surely be put to death; the people of the land shall stone him with
stones. [3] And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among
his people, because he has given of his seed unto Molech, to defile My
sanctuary, and to profane My holy name.”
Do you know who Molech was? They
had a statue, a hot metal statue with his arms out like this and they built a
fire inside this statue until that thing got red hot, and women would have to
take their babies and put the baby on the arms of that thing and watch their
infant be burned to death in front of them.
And to keep the screams of the babies who were burned to death they
would beat these drums over and over, to keep the drums going so the screams of
the children would be wiped out. And
what you have here is apostate religion.
So the next thing beside sexual depravity is apostate religion. You begin to get the unfortunate parallel with
the United States at this point but nevertheless, they’re here, apostate
religion and the sin of Molech. We have
historical incidents of other cultures who have gone the way of human
sacrifice; their religion becomes gradually depraved to the point they engage
in human sacrifice. We have part of the
Canaanites leaving, a very famous group of Canaanites left, a place called
Phoenicia; they left in their ships and they went westward through the
Mediterranean and settled on the North African shore and were known in history
as the Carthaginians. Many of you have
probably read the story of Hannibal and how Hannibal was such a great warrior,
etc. and the Romans had problem with him. Actually the good people were the Romans
and the bad people were the Carthaginians because the Carthaginians are nothing
more than transplanted Canaanites. And
the Carthaginians, all during the Roman history practiced human sacrifice and
this is why they were doomed to lose, even though Hannibal was a great general,
even though he came through the Alps with his elephants and undid the legions,
etc. in northern Italy, in spite of that great campaign Carthage was doomed to
be destroyed from the face of this earth because God pronounced His sentence of
judgment on any culture that goes in for this kind of practice. The Carthaginians [can’t understand words]
took the Romans two or three hundred years, when the Romans got through with
the Carthaginians they were a destroyed civilization. So you can see this operating, and you could
probably do an historical analysis of the cultures that have become rotten on
these two points, sexual depravity and apostate religion.
Now we come to the most serious of all, Deut. 18, the third reason why
cultures go down in history. God is the
sovereign Lord of history and you might compare this to inoculation. Better yet, you might compare this to
preventive surgery or surgery where you just take out rotten tissue, this kind
of thing, incision of some sort; it’s like a rabid dog, you shoot it, get rid
of it and that’s the way God works with cultures that are rotten, you just get
rid of them. You don’t try to improve
them, a culture will reach a certain peak and when that peak is reached the
culture must be destroyed; there is no way of redeeming that culture. They reach a theological point called beyond
redemption and when a culture reaches this, where men’s hearts have grown so
hardened that they engage in these three activities simultaneously, that
culture has reached a point that it is unreachable with the gospel of Jesus
Christ. And we have had sad
illustrations in past history of where certain pockets of mankind have gone
into this kind of thing.
In Deut. 18:9 and following we have the third great component, spiritism
or demonism, engaging in the occult. “When thou art come into the land which
the LORD thy God gives thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations
of those nations. [10] There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his
son or his daughter pass through the fire,” this of course is fire divination,
the idea was you start a fire and you send your children through it and if they
get through without being burned it’s yes, and if they get burned it’s no. The second one is, “or who uses divination,”
and the word here means to use any kind of chance divination, such as headless
arrows were used in the ancient world; you would have a man take a quiver of
arrows, and they’d put these arrows in and they’d mark something on each one of
these arrows, and then they’d take the quiver and they’d sling it around and
drop these arrows out and the arrow that went the furthest was the will of the
gods.
Incidentally some great historical battles were fought because of this
method, one of them was Nebuchadnezzar.
Nebuchadnezzar was moving from the east, he came towards Jerusalem and
he had to make a decision, should I conquer Jerusalem or go to Egypt? And he had his men prepare very carefully one
of these systems of divination, headless arrows; the book of Ezekiel describes
this, and the arrow headed for Jerusalem and that’s why historically in 600 BC
Nebuchadnezzar moved into Jerusalem, because of this method. It’s, in other words, divination by
chance. Modern analogy would be such
things as automatic writings, pendulum swinging, Ouija boards, etc. Even some
Christians try this, chance passage in the Bible, blindfolds and see what
passage of Scripture, and that’s God’s will for me. You can get some very ridiculous situations
with the blindfold method of Scripture.
You know, you wake up in the morning at 6:00 and you open the Bible, and
it just falls open to a verse and that’s your verse for the day. Now that’s nothing more than a superstitious
occultic practice of manipulating God’s Word into a chance type thing. That’s what’s meant by divination.
The third thing is an “observer of the times;” an observer of the times
is a word in which in the Hebrew means to go into a trance and utter
noises. This would be the crystal ball
gazer types, séances; this would be such things as the classical Oracles of
Delphi, etc. It would also be the modern
pseudo tongue movement falls in this category.
So you have these people going into a trance and uttering all sorts of
thigns. And the fourth one is an
“enchanter,” an enchanter is a word which means to look at the arrangement of
things; these people would look at the arrangement of livers, planets, events,
flights of birds, palm reading, tea leaf reading, and of course today would
come down into astrology.
So you have these four areas that were an abomination to the Lord
because they were using, or you might say requesting the help of demonic
direction. Then we have two more words,
one at the end of verse 10, one at the beginning of verse 11, “a witch” and “a
charmer,” both of these words stand for practitioners of black magic. This means through the use of herbs and so
they are able to put curses on people. And some of you who don’t have any
background in history or anthropology may sit back and laugh at all this; all
you have to do if you want to see black magic in operation is go to Haiti. Haiti is one of the centers in black magic in
the western hemisphere today. So you
have this kind of operation going on and they are able to curse people at a
distance. I talked to a missionary once
who said that the man who came into his church had been cursed and he had lost
the use of his hand, his right hand from the wrist down because of this kind of
thing, cursing at a distance, black magic.
So these two things.
And finally two more words in verse 11, “a consulter of familiar
spirits, or a wizard,” there is no such thing in the Hebrew as a “wizard,”
that’s something just in the English text, so it should read: “a consulter of
familiar spirits or a necromancer.” Now
what is a necromancer? A necromancer or
a consulter is familiar spirits is a person who has contact with the demons,
and is able through these contacts with demons to so-called speak with the
dead, such as Bishop Pike on Canadian TV, etc. he supposedly spoke to his son. He didn’t speak to his son, it was a demon,
and I’ve heard Dr. Chafer say later that Pike has had second thoughts about
what it was that he spoke with, whether that was his son or not, before he
died. But the point is that people are
able to make contact with demons and through this contact with demons actually
have a demon that will impersonate the dead person. Now don’t think a demon can’t do it; demons
have been around since creation so they have had a long history of observation
and they are able to impersonate you or impersonate your loved one and tell you
things that you say wow, this must be my loved one because nobody else would
know these things. That’s not true,
that’s wrong, a demon who is active and alert and so on, I don’t know what kind
of file Satan keeps but evidently they are able to impersonate.
Now the point here to summarize Deut. 18:9-12 is this third major thing
that destroys cultures and that is flirting with spiritism. Now in conclusion, I don’t think it takes too
much imagination to see how all three of these things are coming in at an
increase in the last fifty years in this country. You have nothing to look at the sexual
depravity, you have nowhere but to look but apostate religion, and certainly
within the last several years, on the college campuses, this spiritism thing is
coming in like crazy.
Those are the three reasons why