batteries in between. This thing used to last for several
months and now I just put in some new batteries a couple of
weeks ago. All right, if you'll open your
Bibles to Joshua chapter 4. Heavenly Father, bless our study
now. And as we always pray, Lord, so we pray even now that Christ
and his gospel would be made clearer to us, that our hearts
would be strengthened as we take note of the finished work that
he accomplished. In Christ's name, amen. Joshua chapter 4. At the end of Joshua chapter
3, it says that the people completed their journey across the River
Jordan. Now, chapter 4 gives us more
detail about that crossing. Whenever we read the scriptures,
it's good for us to realize that they do not necessarily tell
stories the same way we do. We tend to, like our stories,
okay, here's the first event, here's the second event, here's
the third event, you know, we tell them like that. It's common
in the history of the scriptures to give a general description
of the story and then back up and give maybe some details about
certain sections of the story. That sometimes confuses people
if they don't take that into account. For example, people
who are skeptics of the scripture, in particular to the opening
chapters of the book of Genesis, they will say things like, well,
Genesis has two accounts of creation and they contradict each other.
No, they don't. Chapter one is a general description
of how God brought the universe and the earth into existence.
Chapter two details one part of that work of creation, which
is the planting of a garden in Eden for Adam, and then the creation
of Eve. Well, that isn't a different
account. That's just more of a detailed account of pretty
much the sixth day of creation. Well, the same thing is going
on here. It says that the priests, and this is the end of chapter
three, that the priests stood there in the middle of the Jordan
holding the Ark of the Covenant until the whole nation had completed
the crossing on dry ground. So, they're a cross. Now, verse
one, when the nation had finished crossing the Jordan, the Lord
said to Joshua, choose 12 men from among the people, one from
each tribe. and tell them to take up 12 stones
from the middle of the Jordan, from right where the priest stood,
and to carry them over with you, and pull them down at the place
where you stay tonight." Now, if we look back in chapter 3,
verse 12, It says, now then, choose 12 men from the tribes
of Israel, one from each tribe. And then it goes right back to
about the priests taking the ark into the Jordan River. It
doesn't explain why the Lord told Joshua to choose 12 men. But here it's explained. Choose
12 men. This is chapter 4, verse 2. Now,
this is evidently a reference back to chapter 3, verse 12. It's the same thing. Here is
the point in which the choosing happened. And he chose these
men, or simply that he called forth those who had been chosen.
These 12 men, each one representing an entire tribe. Therefore, these
12 men, whatever they did, is to be ascribed to the entire
nation. I mean, you couldn't have everyone
in the nation picking up a stone out of the middle of the Jordan
River. You'd have one big pile of stones when you got to the
other side and a really big hole in the middle of the Jordan River.
So each man represented his tribe. And therefore, those 12 men together
represented the entire household of Israel. Now, they were to
gather these rocks, these 12 stones, And it says, in verse
4, Joshua called together the 12 men he had appointed from
the Israelites, one from each tribe, and said to them, go over
before the ark of the Lord your God into the middle of the Jordan.
Now when it says go over before the ark of the Lord, that doesn't
mean before in the sense of time. The first thing that went into
the Jordan River was the priests carrying the ark. And you've
got to see the priests are pictures of Christ, and so is the ark.
And so you look at that really as one thing. And so as soon
as the foot of a priest, the sole of his foot, touched the
Jordan River, then the waters were cut off. So no one went
in ahead of the ark. Rather, it's saying go right
there before the Ark of the Lord, which pictures going before the
Lord himself. You are in the presence of God,
in particular in the presence of God as he is revealed in the
Lord Jesus Christ. So you go there and you take
up a stone. In the Bible, stone is often
used as a symbol of that which is eternal, certainly lasting. After all, you build something
out of wood, it probably will fall apart long before anything
made out of stone. When you go back and look at
the ruins of ancient civilizations, well, there's no houses built
out of wood from that time. All of it would be some version
of stone. So stone was used like that.
The law was carved on stone because it was representing a durable
covenant. When you think of our Lord's
burial, what did they do? They put him in that cave. That tomb, cave-like tomb that
had been carved into the hillside there, they roll a stone in front
of it. Why is that? Well, that's kind
of the nature of death, isn't it? It's permanent. And that's
all symbolized by that. Well, they're to go out there,
and then each is to take a rock from right there where the Lord's
presence in Christ is represented. Stones represent that which is
permanent. Stones also represent Christ. Several times, the Lord
is compared to a rock. In the wanderings of the nation
of Israel in the wilderness, there was a time, actually two
occasions, where water came out from the rock. And Paul says,
that rock was Christ. And then there is a prophecy
made in the Old Testament, and Peter picks it up and says that
this is a reference to Christ. For it says, the rock or the
stone that the builders rejected has been made the head of the
corner, the primary foundation stone. Now, the concrete. wasn't invented. The Romans kind
of had a form of concrete. But in most civilizations up
until fairly modern times, if they wanted to build a large
building, the first thing they would do is they would carve
out the biggest stone they could carry. And I remember reading
somewhere that in the temple of, it would have been the second
temple, the one that was still standing when our Lord was on
the earth. But the first and primary foundation
stone, I can't remember how long it was, but they said it was
like 70 tons. Remarkable feat of engineering
to carve that out and move it. But that would be the headstone,
the head of the corner, the primary foundation stone. And our Lord
Jesus Christ is the primary foundation stone, is he not? When I say
primary, he is the foundation stone. But then you also have
that picture of the heavenly Jerusalem, which said built on
12 foundation stones, which were the apostles. But that's picturing
something different. Christ is the foundation stone.
Then Peter says that we, as living stones, are built into a house
of the Lord, a temple for the Lord. So all these things, you
can see them being pictured in these 12 men going and each picking
up a stone and bringing it over and setting it there on the bank. And since there are 12 of them,
you would think that the emphasis would be that these stones represented
the whole of the House of Israel. They were a permanent and lasting
memorial to the fact that all the tribes came across. And that pile of stones, 12 stones,
that pile of stones every time they could pass by. And he said,
that's one of the reasons for the memorials. He says, when
you pass by, your children ask you, what's this pile of stones
for? You can tell them this story, what God did, and miraculously
bringing all the tribes across the Jordan and into the promised
land. Now, In emphasizing this, that
is, in emphasizing this 12 stone memorial, emphasizing all the
tribes, does that not show us the particular nature of our
Lord's atoning work? Now, you know, some call it particular
atonement, some call it limited atonement. I really don't like
either of those terms, not because they're not true. I just think
they're emphasizing the wrong aspect. What it means is completely
successful atonement, completely successful redemption. And in
truth, there can be no such thing as an unsuccessful atonement
or an unsuccessful redemption. You could have an unsuccessful
sacrifice. In fact, here in the next service,
we're going to be talking about the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. And Cain's sacrifice was not
successful. Abel's was. But you can't call
Cain's offering an unsuccessful atonement. Why? Because a sacrifice
is not an atonement until it actually atones. And a redemption
or sacrifice is not a redemption unless it actually redeems. Until redemption is actually
accomplished, it's just an offering sitting there waiting for the
Lord to give his judgment as to whether it is sufficient to
be regarded as a redemption or an atonement. So when we speak of limited atonement
as it's expressed doctrinally, We are talking about the work
of our Lord Jesus Christ and the emphasis is not really on
who is left out. See, that's what people get upset
about. Well, why did he leave someone out? I'm amazed he included anybody. We should be standing in amazement
that our God in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ offered
himself without spot for anyone. But it's not that we're emphasizing
that there's some our Lord did not die for. The emphasis is
this. Everyone for whom he did that work shall be completely,
completely saved. He shall save his people from
their sins. That's what the angel said I
believe it was to Joseph, said, you'll call his name Jesus, for
he will save his people from their sins. And of course, we've
already pointed out, Jesus is the same name as the name Joshua. And here, Joshua, he's also a
picture of Christ in this, and he brought all the Israelites
through. And that's pictured in these
12 stones stacked up on the far side of Canaan, excuse me, the
far side of the Jordan, the side that is the beginning of their
promised land. So all the people were there.
Now here's an interesting thing to note. All the people of Israel
are memorialized by those 12 stones even though not every person
actually crossed the Jordan. Do you remember that there were
two and a half tribes? I believe it was Gad and Reuben
and a half tribe of Manasseh. And they found land that they
wanted to settle on the east side of Jordan. But the promised
land had always been bordered by Jordan. Now here's something where, you
know, if we try to get too idealistic with our theology, we'll have
a hard time understanding those tribes being counted the people
of God, yet they never enter the promised land. And I don't, I'm not going to give
you a clear explanation of it. We did have one lesson on it
and I think that it, um, was as good as anything else I've
heard about it in terms of those represent people. They do believe
the gospel and all. They just are, in a sense, overcome with
worldly interests and things like that. That doesn't mean
that they are outside of God's promise. How do we know? There's
12 stones over there, not nine and a half. 12 stones. In their foolishness, they never
entered into that rest and experienced it to the full. Nonetheless, they, and there
were 40,000 of them, and these were fighting men, 40,000 of
them crossed the Jordan River into the land of promise because
they were told by the Lord, OK, everybody helped you conquer
your territory. You've got to go over into the
promised land and help them conquer their tribal allotments. And
once everybody has rest, you can go back home. There was that
40,000. And out of that 40,000, one had
been chosen. Well, it would have been three
men. But they were chosen, each one
to take a stone representing their tribe. And so the memorial
actually shows us, that 12 stone memorial, shows us something
that wouldn't have been detected by the natural eye, simply looking
at what the 12 tribes did. If we looked at only what the
12 tribes did, we'd say, well, you know, 12 of them left Egypt. Only 9 and 1 half actually made
it to the promised land. Well, that's how we would see
it. But God, in designing that memorial of his saving work,
stones in the promised land. Now what does this mean to us?
While we may look at those some who profess to know the Lord
Jesus Christ and we think they aren't committed enough, it seems
to me they do not fully understand or grasp the blessings in the
promised land. Don't count them out. Really, we don't have to say
anything about them at all. That is, in terms of judging,
are they in or out of Christ? That's not our business. And I point this out because
I see so much of this go on even among, I'd say, otherwise faithful
preachers of the gospel. An easy way to get amens out
of a crowd is to condemn the people who everybody in the crowd
is against already. It's simple to do. And we preachers,
we're just men. And the fleshly desire for positive
feedback can move us to say things motivated by the promise of positive
feedback from the congregation. And I've heard them say, well,
some of them say, if you don't believe the doctrines of grace,
and by that they would mean the five poets of Calvinist, you're
lost. And I think, even if it were
true, why are we bother saying it? Because in all likelihood,
those people aren't present. And even if they were, that's
not going to make them change their theology. But the fact of the matter is,
among God's chosen people, as they live their lives in this
world, there's a whole range of levels of commitment they
have, the clarity with which they understand the gospel. And
it's not our business to find out where that line is that separates
the truly saved from the merely religious. And if we try to draw
that line, we're going to draw it in the wrong place. because
these are matters of the heart. So what we do, what we are called
on to do, is like Paul said, preach the whole counsel of God,
everything we know of the whole counsel of God, the best we understand
it, and then leave people alone. Don't pester them about it. The
truth will accomplish everything that needs to be accomplished. So I don't have to add my voice
of condemnation toward those who believe differently than
we do. If I preach the gospel with simplicity
and clarity, the one who listens will know where he stands in
relation to it without me telling them. That's the power of the
Word of God, and the Word of God is the gospel. The gospel is that living, powerful
word that is able to penetrate a person's heart and make known
the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And it does that without
us trying to make conclusions or draw the conclusions for them. It will also, and this is why
I'm so glad that the Lord was pleased to teach me this principle,
you know I went to Bible school and when I got out of, you know,
got my degree, God treated some church with a remarkable measure
of grace in not sending me there. I was by no means ready to minister
spiritual things to a group of God's sheep. Instead, he managed
things to get me into a church that I'd never heard of, though
it was only a 20-minute drive from where I grew up. I'd never
heard of it. But I know that if I had heard
of it, whoever told me about it would have been saying, yeah,
a bunch of Calvinists, and that's false doctrine, devil's doctrine,
because, well, I heard them say such things, even if they didn't
apply it to 13th Street Baptist Church, but nonetheless, they
hated those doctrines. I ended up over there. Now, I
already believed those doctrines, but what I learned, Took me quite
some time to catch on to what Pastor Mahan meant when he said,
preach Christ. Everywhere you go in the scriptures,
find Christ, preach him. Took some time, but I began to
catch on. And after six years there, then the Lord sent me
to a church in Western Kentucky, and then three or so years later,
he sent me up here. But here's the thing, if you
preach Christ as he's revealed in this scripture, if you declare
the gospel of God's grace, it will draw the dividing line all
by itself. And anyone who will honestly
listen to it, I mean even just with the honesty of a human who
can understand what words mean, and understand what they in their
heart believe, it will reveal to them what side of the line
they're on. Without me telling them. Brother
Mahan talked about a fellow that came to him after the service
one time. And he said, I need to be saved. I'm lost. I need
to be saved. So Henry preached the gospel, explained it the
best he could to that fellow. And he goes, well, how am I going
to be able to tell when I'm saved? And Brother Mahan had such wisdom
and ability to make answers so short. He said, who told you
that you were lost? And he wasn't casting doubt on
whether the guy was lost. He said, you're here saying you're
lost. Who told you that? The gospel,
God in the gospel told that man he was lost. I don't tell people
they're lost. I don't tell them they're saved.
It's the business of God to do that through the preaching of
the gospel. But all of God's people got across the Jordan
is, depending on what translation you use, it will indicate there was one
12-stone memorial. Others will say two 12-stone
memorials. And I had a hard time, to be
honest, figuring out which way to go with it. And really, I
wouldn't take a dogmatic stand on either. Now, I'm not a Hebrew
scholar, but I know it some and enough that I can, generally
speaking, I can use the tools that are available on the internet
in understanding Hebrew. I can figure things out. And
I looked. if you look here at verse 9,
it says, Joshua set up the twelve stones that had been in the middle
of the Jordan at the spot where the priest who carried the Ark
of the Covenant had stood. The only thing is where it says,
it has this phrase, set up the twelve stones that had been in
the middle. actually the word means in the
middle, in the middle. Up here in verse 8 it said, they
took 12 stones from the middle. Now the root word, which would indicate middle,
it's the same in both verses, but the Hebrew language It often will use what we would
think of as three or four words. It'll cram it all together into
one word. You'll have the root word, and you'll have prefixes.
Well, actually, for a Hebrew word, the prefix would be over
here. It gets read backward from the way we read. But it'll have
a prefix, and it may indicate the word the, or something like
that, and they may have a suffix that would indicate what we would
normally communicate with a preposition, like in, or by, or whatever. Well, down here in verse 9, the
preposition part of it is different. So it seems to indicate that
there were two of these 12 stone memorials, one set up there in
Gilgal on the on the Promised Land side there on the ground,
and then Joshua himself got 12 stones and stacked them up in
the middle of the Jordan River right there where the Ark of
the Covenant, the priests were standing there with the Ark of
the Covenant. That's what the language seems to say. And there's
one other thing that kind of makes me lean that direction,
and Brother Tim James pointed it out. He said, this is a beautiful
picture of the two ordinances, two ceremonies, that our Lord
Jesus set up for the church, baptism and the Lord's table. He said, baptism, what is that? Peter says baptism's the answer
of a good conscience toward God. And that answer, that word was
used when people would be in court and they say, how do you
plead? Well, a person with a good conscience would say, not guilty.
But Peter, in saying that baptism is the answer of a good conscience
toward God, well, he had said baptism saves you by the resurrection
of Jesus Christ from the dead. The act of baptism doesn't save
you. What baptism represents is what
saves us, the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and our participation in it with him. But of course,
baptism, it's a thing done in water. And so, you know, Brother
James, in his commentary on it, It says, you know, they went
through that water, even though the walls were held up, but they
go through there, the ark having gone first. And that is illustrating
the same thing. When Jesus Christ died, was buried,
rose again, and even ascended on high, the scriptures teach
us, we were in him, we went with him. And baptism symbolizes that. Some people try to make baptism
to be a symbol of us, you know, putting off our former life.
Well, we don't do that very well. It's us dying in Christ, being
buried with him, and then being raised in him and with him. And so that pile of stones in
the middle of the Jordan River would also illustrate that. And
then those on the other side, that's the Lord's death because
it's a memorial. Those stones were a memorial,
it says. And what does the Bible say? As often as we eat this
bread and drink this cup, we do show forth, we do memorialize
the Lord's death until he comes. In fact, there are some commentators
that believe that John the Baptist was at this very point, very
spot in the Jordan River. And at flood stage, I'm sure
that those stones were covered, but probably at normal run, you
could still see those stones there. And he said to those Pharisees
who said, we have Abraham as our father, And he said, don't
you know God could raise up children from these stones? Now, no ceremony ever saved anybody.
And no lack of a ceremony ever condemned anybody. Or nobody
getting the ceremony wrong in your understanding, because ceremonies
are not the way we're saved. They're supposed to show how
we have been saved. But what do all The ceremonies,
this story, what does it tell us? All the people are a cross. The work of the Lord Jesus Christ
was absolutely, completely, in any other adjective that means
the same thing, that you can pile on, successful. He said,
I will lose none. And he didn't.