Joshua 25

Allotments of Judah and Joseph - 15

Turn to Hebrews 4, and then we’ll go back to Joshua. We are in Romans 8 in the morning service and faith will come up again and again, so between the morning service and the evening service you should have some idea what the Bible means by faith and have a balance between sovereignty and volition, between God’s doing it and man’s doing it, the two roles in their balance. Every area, basically in theology comes from some imbalance, somebody is over-emphasizing something over here and letting something else go over here and this is basically the heart of every theological error. In Hebrews 4 we break into the middle of this discussion on faith and it has to do with a principle we are learning from Joshua. So we go to Heb. 4 first and the verse we want to look at is verse 11, because a statement is made in a very peculiar way. “Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief.”

It’s kind of interesting that you have a paradox, apparently, between the word “labor” and the word “rest.” It seems that you would think that you cease from your labor and then you enter the rest, yet here in verse 11 we are commanded to work in order to enter that rest. In other words, the claim of verse 11 is that there remains work to be done between now and the time you can relax.

In verse 8, just before this verse, Joshua is mentioned, excepting if you’re reading the King James you’ll note it’s “Jesus,” the reason for this being Joshua and Jesus are exactly the same in the original, but that is really referring to Joshua, “For if Joshua had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day. [9] There remains, therefore,” in the future, “a rest to the people of God.” The point being made here is that Joshua, though he appeared to give them a rest, it appeared on the surface of the history of the events in the 14^th century that Israel had gone in, had conquered these tribes, had broken the back of the resistance. Nevertheless, this New Testament commentary says, un-huh, Joshua did not bring them into rest, there was a problem of unbelief, and the unbelief is the last part that’s mentioned in verse 11 of this 4^th chapter; they fell after unbelief. In other words, unbelief prevented them from entering into the rest.

Now this is interesting because immediately it should show you certain things about faith, what faith is and what faith is not. If you have the rest over here, and in order to get into the rest you have to work, and the obstruction to doing this is lack of faith, it evidently implies that faith and work go together. And that’s what we’re going to see tonight, that faith does not mean crawling around with some zombie expression on your face saying that I’ve got peace. This again is a fallacy taught by this so-called deeper-life movement, where you kind of let go and let God and all the rest of it. And it really paralyzes Christian work. In other words, God is going to do it all, you don’t have to do anything, you just sit. And if this is really the case, then you should also sit when it comes to getting rewards because the doctrine of rewards credit you with [can’t understand word]. You say wait a minute, I thought faith is the absence of works. Faith is the absence of works done with a certain attitude, but faith itself is 100% confidence that God is with you in what you’re doing; that’s one way of defining faith: 100% confidence that God is with you in what you are now doing, so that God is there and that He is laboring with you. It also means, of course, as Philippians says in a mysterious way, hard to understand, that God is working in you to do that which is His will, etc. All these things come in here and they’re very difficult to keep in balance.

But this is not sanctification by works; we’re not saying in the Arminian sense of the Word that you earn your sanctification by doing works, basically what you do is that you work out the salvation that is already there. I used the expression, the new nature that God implants inside you at the moment of salvation is called the sperm of God in 1 John 3, and that’s exactly what the Greek says, “His seed remains in you” and it’s the Greek word “sperm” and its obviously the whole picture of sex, and this becomes a picture of faith, and this sperm of God that abides inside the believer must grow and be produced out into the life, and that producing out into the life involves our walk by faith. This is what it means to walk by faith. Notice there’s a verb there. You still do walk, you don’t float by faith, you walk by faith, left right, left right, left right, one foot in front after the other. Some people have problems but most people do know left and right.

So you walk by faith. Walk by faith, it involves a real verb with real action. A better way, perhaps of phrasing this would be “walk” and then take this phrase and convert it to an adverb in the English language, so that we would have “walk confidently.” Now if I translated it that way I think you’d get the balance, there wouldn’t be a tendency there if you saw it translated that way, there wouldn’t be the tendency to become absorbed in a lot of this deeper-life stuff where you just kind of float and I’ve seen businessmen who in one sense were right; they tried to relate the doctrine of Scripture to their business, but usually what happens or what sometimes happens is that a man will get hold of this idea and he’ll say oh, God’s going to bless my business, he gets away from the wrong idea, oh God, oh God, I vow that if I give you 18% of my income then you’re going to bless my business; he gets away from all the gimmicks, but then they turn around and do the other thing, and that is they sit around and say well, God’s going to bless my business so that means that I can just sit here and it’s just going to drop right in my lap. And it never drops in his lap and many of these men wind up not providing for their families and loved ones, and 1 Timothy 5 declares such a person to be worse than an infidel. So this is the wrong balance. In other words, they have taken the faith and made it a wrong kind of resting.

So this is why I don’t use the word “faith-rest,” though I think it’s a good term to express it. My problem had been that too often people convert that to mean I faith-rest, ho-hum, and this kind of thing. In other words, you deny the existence of action. Now this is wrong; this is wrong! On the one hand you have to keep this balance, you don’t want to work to produce brownie points with God, etc. to earn something that is future. You’ve already been given all the assets in Christ. The indwelling Holy Spirit, when does He come to indwell? At the point of salvation or after? Do you have to earn Him? No, you don’t earn Him, He’s a gift, He’s given to you at the point of salvation. So you have all the operating assets already given to you, you don’t have to earn anything more. So you take what already has been given to you and develop it, again using the illustration of a tumor. The new nature in Jesus Christ is like a tumor that grows, it’s like new tissue, and this has to grow. The illustration in the Bible is that of a baby; a baby has the gift of life in it, but the baby can’t manifest this life right away. He has to learn, he has to struggle. My little boy is learning how to walk and he goes through a struggle, he tries to lift himself up and pull himself up; that’s activity on his part, but he didn’t earn that life, the life is a gift. So what is he doing? He’s taking the life that’s already his but he’s training himself to express it in an adult way, namely by walking and later on by other activities.

The same way in the Christian life, you have already, if you’re sitting here and have received Jesus Christ, and you have the indwelling Holy Spirit as a result of trusting in Him, you have a personal relationship with the Lord, then this means you already have the life in you. It’s a question now of the fact that, not automatically, but like the baby has to learn to walk, he has to learn to talk, and how does he learn? By trying, trying, trying, falling down, doing it the wrong way, trying again, doing it the wrong way, trying again. One of the great modern sciences is called cybernetics, [can’t understand name] a mathematician at MIT once said that one of the most fantastic acts that man can do to contemplate is to reach out with his hand and pick up the pack of cigarettes on the table. Why did he say that? Simply because involved in that action there are many, many muscles in the arm that have to be programmed to do that, with perfect coordination. How does he learn to do that? By programming himself in action; one time when he was little and he started to learn to reach, to correlate the eye movement, the eye image with his arm movement, he missed, and if you watch children very carefully when they’re learning you can see this; they’re always experimenting because they’re training their eye to work with their arm. Not that’s the working; in this analogy that is walking by faith. He already possesses the life but he’s a baby in how to express it, he grows by trying to use it, and this is the point that Hebrews is making in verse 11, “Let us labor, therefore, to enter into that rest,” in other words, you have to mature and grow, and growth comes by sometimes going ahead and trying to do something and you fall flat on your face; so what? You’re one step ahead of the person that didn’t try at all. This goes for whatever activity there is.

Now let’s go to Joshua and we emerge into all these details but I want to give you the principle first so you won’t lose it. Now we’ve got to go back to the details of this thing. We don’t want to lose the forest for the trees, but nevertheless, in this case the forest is going to be shown by some very interesting trees. So Joshua 15, we’re going to try to do three chapters in about half an hour so necessarily we’ll have to proceed rapidly.

In Joshua 15 we have a continuing section that began in chapter 13, the distribution from Gilgal. Now Gilgal was a place, this is a map of Israel, Gilgal is located here, it was Joshua’s base of operation just west of the Jordan. He had moved his campaign to the center, he made a treaty that he shouldn’t have got involved in with the Gibeonites, and as a result of this treaty he got involved in a war which he didn’t want to get involved in, had no business getting involved in, but nevertheless, a principle: he had sworn to keep the treaty and he kept the treaty. Application to marriage, application to other areas of life where you may make a stupid decision and you’ve made a decision, it’s been a bad one and you’ve got yourself involved in some activity but there’s no way out of that activity without violating, say, a vow to God. When two people come down the aisle they’re making a public declaration before God and the state that they love one another and wish to be committed to one another. And that’s a vow made to God and it may have been a bad one; maybe 24 hours later you realize you picked one of the great all time losers. So you realize this and you’re stuck with it; tough! The Bible says, remember we have the principle from the Psalms, “Blessed is the man who swears to his own hurt,” what does that mean? It meant that the man vowed a vow that resulted because of a poor decision in his own hurt. But God says “Blessed is the man who keeps that vow,” because the Lord will enable him to turn cursing into blessing.

So you remember Joshua didn’t want to get involved but he was faithful to that treaty, he moved his armies all night up to Gibeon and what happened? God blessed him in two ways; two of the most phenomenal blessings that any military commander has ever had in all of history. First, he had perfect artillery and air support. That was a bombardment from heaven which annihilated only the Canaanites; it was miraculous. Here you have the Israelites intermingling with the Canaanites, the stone would drop, bang, minus one Canaanite; the Israelite would be standing there, bang, minus another Canaanite, and so as the casualty list came in these Canaanites are getting wiped out by divinely direct rocks. And Joshua and his men stood by with all of this artillery support that they had from the Lord. That was one miracle.

The second miracle was that he had these people fleeing down this valley, the valley of Aijalon, and you remember they would flee into the caves, and Joshua had a problem because once they got to the caves they could come back out at him. So in order to do this the Lord left the lights on all night; so they had all the light they needed. Today if the infantry was involved in this kind of operation they would drop magnesium flares with parachutes from aircraft and so on to produce the same thing. God didn’t bother with magnesium flares, He just stopped the earth in its rotation until the sun… and so you have perfect light, etc.

So that was one of Joshua’s campaigns. The second campaign was south, the southern campaign, he went down here, cleaned these people out and that all happened, probably within 12 to 18 months. Then in the northern campaign it was a little tough; remember these kings gathered together and they really got a confederacy together that was something that was absolutely formidable in human terms. So they had this big confederacy up to the north, Joshua moved up there, and in seven years total time he had broken the back of the resistance in this land.

So that after these seven years there remained only three basic pockets left in the nation; first you had pocket #1 called Philistia. This was the pentapolis of Gaza, Ashdad, etc. and these cities down here. The Philistines were the Sea Peoples, apparently, in ancient history, a mysterious people that at one time ruled the entire eastern end of the Mediterranean, they invaded Egypt, etc. and have left quite a name for themselves. However, a lot of questions remain about the Philistines, who they were we don’t know; their religion we don’t know; their language we don’t know. But do know they existed and they occupied this strong area. They apparently were somehow related, although they were Hamitics from Misraim, they nevertheless seemed to be interacting with the Greeks. So we have this area. In other words, Joshua had broken the back of all of the resistance up in through here except this one area.

Then #2, we have the coastal zone of the Canaanite Phoenicians. Now history, if you’ve read history, you are probably more familiar with the word Phoenician; that is the name for the Canaanites; the Phoenicians are Canaanites. And the Phoenicians in history, if you understand this and understand the book of Judges, how Israel was ordered to annihilate the Phoenicians, the reason was, we said, demonism, false religion, etc. and we know this historically because these Phoenicians later went west in their ship, they were tremendous merchants. They went west and settled in a place called Carthage. And at Carthage, the Carthaginians are also Canaanites and these Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice; we know that from Roman sources. So they were a very debased people, and finally God didn’t accomplish their extinction with the Jews so He used the Romans and they finally conquered Carthage.

Then north is a 3^rd zone that extends almost up to the head waters of the Tigris-Euphrates system, and this would be the third area, the northern area. So these three zones are left unconquered; the major area they have secured. Also one zone here, Jerusalem, and numerous little pockets throughout but the picture you want to see is that this is the way it looked when Joshua finished his conquest. He had broken the main back but notice, there remained many areas yet to conquer. This is the position as we begin chapter 15. “This, then, was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah by their families: to the border of Edom, the wilderness of Zin southward,” etc. So tonight we start with one of the first lots. The lots are the way the inheritance was distributed. Remember God had promise this whole area to the twelve tribes. Two and a half of these tribes had a temporary abode in what we call Transjordania, Reuben, Gad and half of Manasseh. Now the rest of the tribes were promised all this area; they took over the Promised Land in this area. These could two tribes could have had their thing, as we’ll see later on in the book but they took Transjordania because it was cleaned out from Ammon and so on.

So we have these areas depicted in this fashion. And this is all going to be distributed in the book of Joshua. Again, recall why, as you read through, 15, 16, 17, you get all these cities and boundaries and 25 cities here and 30 cities there, and the boundary went by the brook over here and went up the mountain over there, and you wonder why all these details. The reason for all these details, there are several reasons; one and very importantly is to show that when God promises you something, He keeps His Word. God had promised occupation of the land out to these boundaries, and He therefore had the book of Joshua written to record the fact that in actual historical experience he gave them this land out to those exact boundaries. So the first reason is that prophesy is verified in history, and it verifies exactly… this is teaching us how to interpret prophecy, you don’t allegorize prophecy. There’s no allegory to prophecy, you interpret it literally, as any person would in a straightforward fashion reading that particular literature.

So that’s the first reason for this; the second reason you have is to show us that the arena of conflict in the spiritual realm is not off in some mystical place somewhere, but it’s inside space time history. The battle is here in front of our noses. This is where the battle is; it’s not off in some abstract area; it’s concrete and it’s starring us in the face. So all these details are to lend reality to the inheritance.

There are going to be two main distributions, tonight we are going to see these two tribes attain their inheritance, the first one in the south, Judah, the one in the north Joseph. Now you’re not going to see Joseph actually said that way or worded that way tonight because Joseph is actually known by two names, Ephraim and Manasseh; Joseph split as we’ll see in a moment. But these are the two main tribes that received their portion from Gilgal. In chapter 18 of Joshua and following we’ll get another distribution but this time it’s done from Shiloh and all the other tribes get their little places around these two major ones. These are the two major distributions for various reasons and we’ll see one of those right now.

The first distribution goes to Judah, let’s see why. Turn back to Genesis 49. Keep in mind that the Bible is a continuous logical unit, it doesn’t have contradictions in it. If you see a prophecy some place in God’s Word, look a little bit later on in the chronology and you’ll see how this works out; there’s a flow to the Old Testament. Now back in Genesis 49, to give you an idea time wise of what we’re looking at, Joshua is living about 1400 BC, and what you’re looking at here happened in about 1800, approximately 400 years separation between these events. 1800 is the time of Jacob and his sons; 1400 is the time of Joshua. So you have four centuries separating these events. But before this you have this statement made, Gen. 49:3, now the man is dying, and it was customary in the ancient orient that he would read his will as he died; hopefully he died under conditions where he could, but as a man knew he was about to die he blessed his sons. Now how was this blessing done? We do not know all the details; I’d like to know more how this was done but apparently the father judged the character of his sons. And in this sense the Bible actually anticipates the laws of heredity because he sees his sons have certain character and he sees weaknesses in his sons and he sees strengths in his sons. And so the blessings are apportioned among these sons according to their character.

Now in verses 3-4 we have Reuben, the first-born. Now by the laws of the custom of that day you would think Reuben would get the blessing, but when he goes to start with Reuben and you would atnticapte certainly Reuben, the first-born son would receive the blessing, he says: “Reuben, thou art my first-born, my might, and the beginning of my strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power. [4] Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel, because you went up to your father’s bed; then defiled thou it; he went up to my couch,” etc. referring to certain events in the life of Reuben. “Unstable as water,” in other words, this first-born son of his had a very unstable character and so this man made the statement, “you shall not excel.” Now is that a cursing? Not really, it’s more of a prophecy that based on this person’s character he is not going to excel. But it stands for more than just Reuben standing in front of him, it’s not just that boy, it’s Reuben’s line down through history. So Reuben, the tribe of Reuben has a rather unspectacular history.

Then we come to verse 8 and he turns to Judah, who is his fourth son. Reuben is the first, Judah is the fourth. And in verse 8 he says, “Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father’s children shall bow down before thee. [9] Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he crouched as a lion, and as an old lion. Who shall rouse him up?” And then he makes this significant statement in verse 10, and Bible scholars down through the centuries have said here is an anticipation of Messiah, for it says “The Scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be.” In other words, Judah will have the prime function of ruling in Israel.

Do you recall in the framework course that Israel split in half? Do you remember what the seventh kingdom was called? It was called Judah. Do you know why? Because that was the tribe of Judah. Do you remember which was the authorized part of the kingdom? The south, and so Judah has always been in this lineage: Judah, David and Christ; Christ came from Judah. So have this prophecy of Jacob, back 18 centuries before Jesus Christ, that “the Scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come.” And then verse 12, “His eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth white with milk.” Now milk and wine were part of the production in the ancient economy and he is saying here that Judah will prosper economically, “his eyes shall be red with wine” means he will have such great production of vintage that he’ll be bombed out of his mind. And this just the way of doing it. Now you wouldn’t expect to find this kind of a prophecy in God’s Word, and yet nevertheless, here it is, it is a simile for production. In other words he’s going to have wine; his eyes are going to be red from it he’s going to have so much. And “his teeth white with milk,” and I don’t knew whether they knew about calcium or not but nevertheless, you have some anticipation here in verse 12.

Now that’s about Judah, what about Judah subsequently. Go back to the time interval. When did the Jews go down to Egypt? Here they are in Egypt and they came out of Egypt in 1440, so from here down to this point they were in bondage to Egypt. During this bondage in Egypt Judah and his wives produced, and their children produced, and finally you had the tribe of Judah at the Exodus consisting of 74,600 people. This is one of the arguments, by the way, why you have to have at least 400 years from the captivity; you can’t produce 74,000 people in 200 years. So you have Genesis 49 as one of your pegs for this 400 year time span of the captivity, 74,600 people. By the way, one of the great characters that we are reading about came from Judah, his name was Caleb. So Caleb comes from Judah.

Now there are going to be two large tracts, and if you turn back to Joshua 15, we can skip over most of the first twelve verses, this is simply a boundary list, from verses 1-2, if you have a King James version that word “border” sometimes the King James translates it coast, they did it border here most of the time, but if it’s coast that’s the Hebrew word for border. It just means the boundary line. So those first twelve verses have to do with the boundary list. And I want you to notice, if we trace this boundary list out on the map you see what a large area this occupies. Actually if you compute the area of the Promised Land that’s about one-third of it right there; one-third of the land went to Judah when you had 11 other tribes. That’s how big Judah’s portion was. Now he later shared this with some other tribes but we won’t get into that right now.

From verse 20 on down through verse 62 you have city after city listed. So we have these cities listed and these fill in the center of the area. Why are these mentioned? Why all these details? Because evidently the prophetic historian, again we do not know who exactly wrote this book; we do know the Holy Spirit inspired them so it is an inerrant historical record, but nevertheless he obviously used real estate sources and records and he compiled this to give us an overview. This is not a complete record; this is an overview to show us how God was careful to maintain His promises.

Now I want you to notice verses 45-47 in this city list. Notice some of the cities that are included in some of Judah’s territory. “Ekron,” that’s the city of the Philistines, “with its towns and its villages; [46] From Ekron even unto the sea, all that lay near Ashdod, with their villages, [47] Ashdod with its town and its villages, Gaza with its towns and its villages, unto the river of Egypt, and the Great Sea, and the border thereof.” Philistia is included in the territory of Judah. So this means that Judah has been allotted her inheritance, part of the inheritance she occupied but part of the inheritance she does not; part of the inheritance that is allotted to the tribes is not yet available and they have to exercise faith and drive them out. Now this is an important principle; God gives them the inheritance but they have to drive out the Philistines. That is the job of Judah and we’ll see in a minute how effective they were.

Also notice verse 63, “As for the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalelm, the children of Judah could not drive them out; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day.” “This day” refers to the time this book was written, obviously before the time of David because David threw the Jebusites out of Jerusalem. So you have this, you have at least two areas of enemy territory within her inheritance; zone one Philistia and area two, the city of Jerusalem. They were responsible to eliminate these areas.

Again, hold the place and turn back to Deut. 20. I want you to see very clearly what the will of God was for Judah. In Deut. 20 we have the policies of warfare for the nation Israel. And if you’ll notice in verse 10, “When you come near unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.” But those are not the cities of Philistia; the cities of Philistia are covered in verse 16, “But of the cities of these people,” “these people” are the Canaanites, “which the LORD thy God does give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing alive that breathes, [17] But you shall utterly destroy them,” they are in your territory, your job as believers he is saying whatever tribe occupies this territory, your job go in there and clean them out, that’s your job. So now that’s the background for Judah.

And I want you to see the closing notice of chapter 15, “the Jebusites, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children of Judah” were not able to drive them out. The implication being they tried, the implication is they tried and they were unable. Now there’s nothing wrong with trying and not having the strength to do it. All this is saying is that they apparently tried but up to this point had been unsuccessful.

Now there are two things to notice at this point. When we start getting these inheritances passed out the thing to notice is that the conquering is still left; Joshua didn’t do it all. It’s like the work of Jesus Christ. Joshua is a type of Christ. Christ did all the basic work for us at the cross; Christ did all the work in the resurrection and He did it by giving us the assets; giving us an inheritance in Himself, but that does not absolve us from required activity by faith and we have unconquered territory of which we’ll speak more of in ensuing time.

So the tendency here is that there must be conflict, it’s God’s will for conflict for the believer in his inheritance. The second thing, a minor point, is that this is the last time, this chapter is the last time in the Old Testament where you have the nation Israel operating on a unified basis. From chapter 15 on, the rest of the Old Testament, Israel never gets together as one complete national entity with all twelve tribes operating as one unit. From this point on it’s diverse.

Now let’s go back and look at verses 13-19, there’s a little parenthesis stuck in this chapter, a little notice and it relates to Caleb. Why? Because Caleb is part of Judah. Caleb had his inheritance at a place called Hebron, which is located just about here. Caleb, as a member of the tribe of Judah, he happens to have his territory inside Judah, though it was by special grace on the part of the Lord. In verse 13, “And unto Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, he gave a portion among the children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua, even the city of Arba, the father of Anak, which city is Hebron.” And you remember my discussion of the Anakim, this strange race of giants, this lost race of giants. [14] And Caleb” threw them out. Why do you think this little notice, verses 13-19 is stuck in this chapter? To contrast with verse 63. You see, it’s ironic, here is Caleb, an old man of 80 years, he goes into Hebron and he bounces the giants out of the way and all the rest of the tribe, the whole tribe can’t even take on the Jebusites in Jerusalem. See, the historian here of this book is trying to show you something, and you’ve got to be sharp to pick the lesson up that these historians are trying to get to you because they never tell you exactly what they’re trying to say. They give it to you by lessons of history and they let you draw the conclusions, and they do by these literary efforts, they’ll put this little parenthesis in there to deliberately contrast with a pessimistic tone. It’s optimism, there’s a light in the middle of the darkness because Caleb is a man of faith. Do you see the difference?

What is the difference? Is Caleb more numerous, his family and his sons-in-law, are they more numerous than the rest of the tribe of Judah? No, not in numbers. Did they know more about war? No. The tribe of Judah has more men than they do. Well what is the difference? The difference is simple attributable to only one thing: Caleb is a man of faith and the rest of the men inside Judah are not, and this is shown up empirically by observing their behavior. Now this is where faith and works come together; faith is something, if it’s real, that can be observed. Not always but if it’s there sooner or later there’s going to be evidence of it. If there’s no evidence of it you have all the reason in the world to doubt its existence.

So we have this historical notice. There’s one cute little thing here about how daughters should treat their fathers, in verse 14, “Caleb drove out” these “three sons of Anak,” in verse 16, “And Caleb said, He that smites Kiriath-sepher, and takes it, to him will I give Achsah, my daughter, to wife.” Wouldn’t you love that for a daughter’s name, Achsah? [17] “And Othniel, the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it, and he gave him Achsah, his daughter, to wife.” Now this sounds kind of tyrannical, and some of you girls think that your father would give you away like this. One historical notice about it, and that is that the fathers were the kings in the family and they had ultimate authority who their daughter was going to marry. If she didn’t like it she could just take off somewhere, but as long as he was sitting on the throne of that home he and he alone would choose who his daughter would marry. I don’t know if they had any hair length codes or not, but the point was that the fathers had absolute say in the Old Testament family about who their daughters were going to marry. You say well isn’t this dictatorial, and doesn’t this produce non-love marriages.

Here you have a very interesting thing. We have been raised in American culture where we have been brought up from the cradle to believe that the divine order is that you fall in love and then you marry. In many tenses, if you are going to read the historical material, the way they are presented in the Word of God, these people are paired off and they learned to love one another. How do you like that, you people who like all this sentimentalism; it was a learned response. They learned. Now I’m going to qualify this is in a moment but I want you to see something. There was the form and then the love came into it in certain areas. Now in practice we do know how this operated for we have in the book of Judges several examples. When the fathers would give their daughter away it wouldn’t be a kind of situation where he ignored his daughter’s wishes; we know this from the way, for example, Samson approached his parents. By the way, the boy didn’t have much choice either; his parents determined who the girl was that he would marry. You see why? Because in the Old Testament Law what does it say? Don’t let your son marry one of those Canaanite girls. Why? Because they were apostate, and so the parents had the right to pick, but in practice we do know that the parents had communication with their children and if somebody was making eyes at their daughter, of course they would kind of work into the plan. That’s what happened with Samson; Samson even maneuvered his mother and father to get him to marry Delilah, the Canaanite Philistine girl. So in that situation we know that the children were able, in practice, to influence their parents.

Now you see a case of it here although it doesn’t look obvious. Evidently in verse 16, we draw this inference because Othniel, the boy in this case, happens to be the cousin, going to marry a cousin, “and Othniel, the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it,” now it’s apparent from events that later on happen in Judges, etc. that probably Othniel had his eyes on Achsah for some time. And obviously Caleb knew that he was looking at his daughter. And he obviously knew that Othniel was a good warrior, so he was kind of shrewd about it, he said all right, in this next war I’m going to ask for a volunteer, and whoever is a volunteer, he can have my daughter, apparently knowing beforehand that Othniel would probably be the one to do it. But nevertheless notice this, he was testing Othniel. If you really love my daughter, then you’re going to do something to prove it. So here is one of the tests of love, so this operates and qualifies what I said earlier; though the parents have the ultimate say in practice they often saw to it that love did exist before they allowed their children to marry off and oftentimes they had this test. Your recall Jacob, he had to work seven years for his wife, and so oftentimes this happened, that the parents would test the love. Why is this? Primarily because the children married at a very early age. Some of the kings in Israel married at the age of 14 and 15 which would be equivalent today to about 18 and 19, and no person that young has any discernment so therefore the parents have the discernment for them, and the parents would conduct these kinds of tests.

Now verse 18 shows you that this daughter was one who really loved her husband because in verse 18, “And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field; and she alighted from her ass. And Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou?” Now evidently, you see, they had already their territory here, and this girl said now look, Othniel, daddy should give me some territory, it turns out this was kind of dry land and she wanted irrigated pasture, so she said now look, why don’t you go to daddy and see if he will give you a place with a well on it so we don’t have to dig wells, and all the rest of it. How about doing that? Evidently Othniel was kind of afraid of Caleb so he put his wife up to it and that’s why the subject changes when you go from the first part of verse 18 t the last part. The first part she is moving him, that’s her husband, to go ask daddy for the well, but it turns out that she comes up, “she alights off her ass. And Caleb said to her, What do you want?” And she answered, [19] “Give me a blessing; for thou hast given me the southland. Give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs, and the lower springs.” It’s just an incident, just to show you these are real people, and just to show you, incidentally that the father, Caleb, though he was the absolute ruler in this family, in practice he wasn’t a dictator, in practice he did take into account the desires of his own children. But nevertheless, keeping the balance, something that’s awful hard to do in a family, keeping the authority intact and yet being flexible enough to work with the desires of the people involved. And this is the balance that you see in the Word of God.

Now let’s go to chapter 16, Ephraim. Ephraim is part of Joseph; chapter 16 and 17 are going to deal with this small area on the map labeled Joseph. Joseph has two children and these two children are called… here’s Joseph, he’s in Egypt, and he has two sons by an Egyptian priestess, you might say. Joseph has two sons, one is Manasseh and the other is Ephraim. By the way, what was the northern kingdom known as? It was Ephraim. That was one of the names for the northern kingdom. Now verse 1 of chapter 16, “And the lot of the children of Joseph fell from the Jordan by Jericho,” and it goes on, the next four verses outline the boundaries of their territory.

Now I want to take you back to Gen. 48 for one of the details that are so precious in the Word of God. We’ll go back in that time graph again; here we have an activity in 1400 BC predicted 400 years before, 1800 BC. Now in Gen. 48:8 Jacob comes to Joseph. Remember we said Reuben was Jacob’s first son; Jacob’s fourth son was Judah; his eleventh son was Joseph. Now Joseph at the first was a spoiled brat. He was a young brother and all of his other brothers had grown up and he was daddy’s boy, and oftentimes in Sunday School literature how they ganged up on the little monster and threw him in a pit. Well, if you read carefully the story in the original you could see why the kid was a brat. Every time his brothers would do something he would tattletale to daddy and mommy about it, and he just generally created trouble in the family. Now of course I’m not trying to justify the treatment he got except to say that it was stimulated by Joseph himself, and probably one of the reason why he went down to Egypt was to get rid of some of his brattiness, etc. he was the kind of person, incidentally this is how God works in many families, he was the kind of child that was being destroyed by his father’s attitude toward him. Now oftentimes parents do this and they do this unwittingly. They try to express their love to their child but because they express their love to their child in the wrong way they actually ruin the kid, because they do things for the kid and they shouldn’t. In fact, in some areas it’s good not to do something for the kid, make him do it himself and that way he learns.

So evidently father Jacob was doing everything under the sun for Joseph, he was spoiling him. So very interestingly God worked it out so that Joseph would be divinely separated from his father. And so Joseph, not any of the other children, only Joseph, is the one that Jacob loses, the one son that he loves most dearly. And I think, studying the life of Joseph one reason was because God wanted to develop Joseph’s character and he couldn’t as long as the old man was in the way. And He had to separate the son from his father to get him straightened out. And this is what he did here with Joseph.

Now he comes later on, years later, and in verse 8 we pick up the narrative of Gen. 48. Here Jacob says, and he looks at Joseph, and Joseph’s married and he has two sons. And he says “Who are these?” [9] And Joseph said unto his father, They are my sons, whom God has given me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them. [10] Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see. And he brought them near unto him; and he kissed them, and embraced them. [11] And Israel” that’s another name for Jacob, “And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face; and, lo, God has shown me also thy seed. [12] And Joseph brought them out from between his knees, and he bowed himself with his face to the earth. [13] And Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel’s left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward Israel’s right hand, and brought them near. [14] And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim’s head,” now that’s why in verse 13 you have all this left right left business. Notice which hand of Jacob is pointing toward Ephraim. It is his left hand but in verse 14 he crosses his hands when he goes to bless, and this little notice here is going to be important. He crosses his hands, and he reaches with his right hand and he stretches it out and he lays it upon Ephraim, “who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh’s head,” who obviously was the older, “guiding his hands knowingly; for Manasseh was the first-born.”

Now the right hand should go on the firstborn. Why is he switching the blessings at this point? The explanation is given to us. Verse 15, “And he blessed Joseph and said, God, before whom my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, did walk, the God who fed me all my life long unto this day, [16] An angel who redeemed me from all evil,” which refers to Christ, and verse 17, “And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the head of Ephraim, it displeased him; and he held up his father’s hand, to remove it from Ephraim’s head unto Manasseh’s head. [18] And Joseph said unto his father, Not so, my father; for this is the first-born; put thy right hand upon his head. [19] And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, I know it; he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great; but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations. [20] And he blessed them that day.”

And later on in the history of the nation, we have that Ephraim starts out smaller than Manasseh. See, Manasseh is older. Manasseh should have the blessing, but Jacob’s predicting here that Ephraim is going to get the bigger of the blessing, and we can trace this in the sheer population statistics. Manasseh, true, is greater than Ephraim population wise as they proceed through the Exodus, but by the time of this chapter, Joshua 16 and 17, it switched and now Ephraim is bigger than Manasseh. So we have fulfillment of this small little prophecy by the time of Joshua.

Now let’s turn back and finish chapter 16. The rest of this chapter is devoted to the details of the boundaries, verse 9 has to do with the fact that the separate cities for the children of Ephraim were among the inheritance of the children of Manasseh. Why that little notice? Because Ephraim has grown in response to Jacob’s prophecy and is now spilling over into Manasseh’s territory, so you again have a literal fulfillment of prophecy. The significant thing about this chapter again is the last verse; remember the last chapter we had that little notation, the last verse; look at this one. “And they drove not out the Canaanites who dwelt in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites even unto this day, and serve under tribute [have become slaved to do forced labor.]”

Now again you have the failure of believers to operate by faith. In zone two, the area of the Phoenicians that extends up the coast, part of this is Gezer and that’s the thing that’s mentioned in verse 10; they have been given a territory, that they have inherited legally, but they must exercise the confidence to throw them out in practice; they must walk by faith. “And they drove not out the Canaanites in Gezer; but the Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites unto this day,” and that last notice is important. That little notice at the end, “they served under tribute,” shows the lack of faith. How do I know this? If they are strong enough to move in and subjugate the land then they are strong enough to carry out the dictates of Deut. 20, but they don’t do it. In other words, the whole complaint was early, oh, we can’t do it, we’re not strong enough. All right, when they got strong enough what did they do? Did they drive them out? No. They exacted tribute.

Why do you suppose they did this? Because they were humane? No, it was because they wanted money and this is one of the other problems we’re running into here and that is not only is there laziness among believers to walk by faith but there is a lust for wealth. You see this in Christian organizations, you see this in local churches, you see this in individual believers. These are the two key enemies for Christian endeavor, laziness and a lust for material things. And exacting tribute means, listen, instead of killing off all these Canaanites on the coast, I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll just tax them, tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, and make money off of them. Why not make money off of the non-Christian, the unbelievers, we’ll just live off of them. So this last phrase is a depiction of the complete apostasy of their mental attitude. At this point they were interested in living off the produce of non-Christians.

We don’t have time to go into this in detail abut in 3 John verse 7 and Gen. 14:23 you have two verses in Scripture that specifically say no believer is to ever take money from any non-Christian. So you can judge; that should give you a criteria, when you walk into a Christian organization or Christian church and you see them soliciting funds, you ask yourself, who are the soliciting funds from. Who are they? I know how some of them work because I have businessmen in the city of Lubbock that I could witness to for Jesus Christ and to this day I can’t; do you know why? Because clergymen have walked into their offices, some are very prominent businessmen, and to this day they won’t even listen to the gospel because ministers have walked into their officers, and brother so and so, can you give us some funds for this and for that, and they would write out a check for two or three thousand dollars and give it to them to get the guy out of his office. Then the minute that guy was out of the office every four-letter word in the English language was used. Why? Because those ministers had the opportunity to minister to those men and they never did; all they did was exact tribute from them, just like these tribes are doing here. They acted in a very unscriptural way. The Scripture way in this instance you know, Deut. 20, annihilation. The Scriptural way in our generation is never to accept money from unbelievers. So you just put that down on your check list and next time some Christian agency comes to you for financial support you do a little checking, where are they getting all their money from. And you have a right to be nosey; you have a right to be nosey to find out where we’re getting our money from. This is why we have a financial statement; don’t you ever get involved in an organization where you don’t know where the money comes from and you don’t know where the money goes. That’s just a little lesson built on verse 10.

Chapter 17, this is Manasseh and again this is a lot of portion description, verses 1-13, these are just the boundaries. Again, using our chart this is just the northern side here, Manasseh is on the northern end of this, Ephraim is on the southern end, that’s all you need to know about verses 1-13. However, actually verse 12 we begin to pick up a problem and again we have a sad notation. “The children of Manasseh were not able to drive out the inhabitants of those cities; but the Canaanites would dwell in that land.” Notice again this area and notice the way the King James puts it; isn’t that sweet, “the Canaanites would dwell in that land.” Except the Hebrew doesn’t say that; in the Hebrew it means the Canaanites determined to live in their land. In other words, the Canaanites were giving them a rough time; the Canaanites didn’t want to be killed, that’s obvious, and they were fighting for their survival.

And the Canaanites were determined they were going to dwell in that land and yet it came to pass, notice this, verse 13, “Yet it came to pass, when the children of Israel had become strong, that they put the Canaanites to forced labor, but did not utterly drive them out.” “Utterly drive out” refers back to Deut. 20 and that was the will of God. When they were strong enough to do the job they slacked off and goofed off, with the result that these areas that I have shown on this map, as we go on and study this historical literature, this is going to become the zones of cancer that will eat the guts out of this nation. And the reason why this nation is going to go down and is going to be destroyed centuries later is because they failed at the foundation to destroy and annihilate every source of false doctrine.

Now today we can’t do this as believers, our job is not to go around killing non-Christians. But our job is to go out into the arena of ideas, into conflict with them. Jesus Christ gave us our salvation as Joshua broke the back of this resistance but we in our own personal life have unconquered areas. When we become Christians we have a sin nature and we have a lot of learned behavior patterns we’ve picked up from our pre-Christian days and those behavior patterns have to be replaced by righteous behavior patterns. We have to stop producing human good and start producing divine good. We have to modify these unconquered areas in our own life. And then having done this we have to move out into the area of our fellowship as believers and cut out this maligning and the gossip and the criticism, etc. that goes on among believers. And then moving out into the third area, moving out into the world, we have to go out and challenge these ideas and it may be, as in verse 12 here, we are not going to be strong enough when we first start, but when we are strong enough we have the mandate from the Word of God to tear down in ideological conflict all areas of non-Christianity. This means when we go into areas such as evolution and humanism the areas of certain moral systems, areas of government, economics, art, science, music, whatever the field, we have a mandate from heaven to impose the Word of God in all areas.

Now this is not bringing in the kingdom; I am premillennialist, I do not think we will ever bring in the Kingdom of God. I am saying, however, that each believer in his own individual sphere is responsible to destroy the unconquered areas. And if you don’t think this works just look at western civilization; the blessings that you are enjoying today as Americans in this country came because Christians 300 years ago did this; because Christians 300 years ago took the Word of God as a standard for society and law and imposed it and set up all of the great legal traditions of western thought. It comes out of British common law, which in turn is a result of Christianity. We have believers who in this country set up the most fantastic system of government and it’s systematically being destroyed from the Supreme Court on down by people who do not think sympathetically with the Christian position.

And you can see it enacted and you are seeing the results of this activity, the unconquered areas in American thought because they were not attacked, because they were not conquered, are the cancers that are eating away. The defiance of authority, where did that come from? Because men first learned that they could defy the living God and get away with it, they thought. So therefore men were not compelled to bow the knee to God in any area of life and therefore they do not bow their knee to any human authority and now we wind up with anarchy. It was an unconquered area that has now become the cancer that has turned upon us to destroy us. Certainly our generation, if there’s any generation in American history, is going to see this. We’re going to see the results of unconquered areas that Christians two and three hundred years ago did in their day but that was the last time it was ever done. If we want peace and victory in this country, the only way to have it is that we’re going to have to walk by faith. And that doesn’t mean floating, that means taking up the tools of battle and going into these areas and wiping out the unconquered area.

With out heads bowed….