She quit, so I guess that means
I'm supposed to start. If you'll open your Bibles to the
book of Joshua, chapter 3. All right, let's seek the Lord's
blessing. Our Heavenly Father, we realize
that every blessing that comes to the sons of men comes from
your hand. Who else can bring a blessing?
And we also understand, Lord, that in the end, The only things that can truly
be called blessings are the things that you give to your people,
your chosen, redeemed, and called people. Lord, we confess that in ourselves,
in our flesh, dwells no good thing. We confess that as pertains
to our natural lives, we are no different than the children
of wrath. But we have confidence, Lord,
that you have not ordained us to wrath, but to receive salvation
through the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe this not because we
think we've acted better or more wisely, not because we think
that we have lived in a more godly fashion than others. because
we haven't. We believe this because your
son has revealed these things to us through his word and through
the things that his prophets recorded and his apostles taught. How gracious you are. Who is
a pardoning God like you? We praise your name, Lord. We
could praise your name for everything, but we praise your name most
of all, that even while we were sinners, Christ died for us. When we were without strength,
you sent your Son for us. We pray, Lord, that these glorious
truths would be once again revealed to us and that our hearts would
be strengthened with grace. In the name of Christ, we pray
it. Amen. Now we begin a lesson on verses
7 and 8 of Joshua 3. Let's just read them. And the
Lord said to Joshua, today I will begin to exalt you in the eyes
of all Israel, so that they may know that I am with you, even
as I was with Moses. Tell the priests who carry the
Ark of the Covenant, when you reach the edge of Jordan's waters,
go and stand in the river. Now these two verses picture
for us how God has exalted his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and
in his exaltation the old covenant has been put
away. It has not been abolished in
the sense that when our Lord said, I did not come to destroy
the law or abolish it. But there are ways of putting
aside a covenant, such as the law was, without destroying it,
and that is by fulfilling it. The old covenant given to the
Jews on Mount Sinai was a contract between God the Jews. And that contract served a purpose. Now our Lord Jesus Christ came
and fulfilled all that the law and the prophets had said. Now most of you realize up until
2012 I made some of my living doing, well, anything from handyman
work to construction, remodeling, whatever. And there were contracts
involved. And these contracts said, you
do this, that, and the other, and you will be paid so much. Now. If I had done the specified
work but not gotten paid, that would be to destroy that contract,
that covenant contract. Or if I tried to get paid without
doing the work, that would be to destroy that contract. However, if I did the work, And
then they paid me the agreed amount for it. We could take
that contract, fold it up, put it in the drawer, and never look
at it again. And we would not have abolished
it. We would not have destroyed it. We would have fulfilled it. And so it is in the old covenant
contract that the time came when its jurisdiction ended because
someone came and fulfilled it. He actually did what the contract
demanded, not only in all of its outward forms, not only in
the manner of religion proscribed by that covenant, not only in
his conduct in life of not breaking any of the commandments, this,
that, and the other. Someone came who kept it outwardly and
inwardly, for he truly loved the Lord his God with all his
strength, with all his might, body, soul, spirit. He never even once desired to
sin. He said, it is my very sustenance,
my food, to do the will of him who sent me. Now, in the legalists
of this world, and I mean by the legalists, I mean those of
any form of religion that believe that by their conduct, they can
gain the blessings of God. This is something that's true
about every one of them. Most of what they do is distasteful
to them. Most of the time when they are
fulfilling or think they are fulfilling the demands of this
works covenant, They are doing not the things they want to do,
but the things they feel they must do to get the promised reward. I guarantee you, when I was insulating
houses for the state of Iowa, I was not enjoying myself. I did not do that because it
brought me a sense of fulfillment. Or I somehow thought that I'm
a better man because I climb in hot attics and blow cellulose
in old houses. It was miserable work. I did
it for one reason and one reason only. I had confidence that if
I did it, there was a payment at the end. And that is the heart
and mind of every legalist. They do what they do, just like
mercenaries who fight in wars that really they have no stake
in. They don't come from the countries that are at war. They're
being paid. But our Lord did, he fulfilled
all righteousness. He accomplished all that God
requires of every human being, outwardly and inwardly, not because
he said, if I do this, I can go to heaven. How do we know
that? He came from heaven. He already
had that. He says he came down from heaven. Now, if you've already got heaven,
you don't come down here to work for it. But that's exactly what our Lord
did. And he did it because he loved these things. The psalmist
said, oh, how I love your law. I'm sure that there were times
that the man who wrote that psalm did appreciate the things he
saw in the law, and that's because he understood them as more than
just a set of commandments to follow. He saw Christ in them. He saw the promised one in them.
I mean, let's face it. know it says on your law I meditate
day and night? Who sits, lays in bed and goes,
thou shalt not kill? Really like that. We might think that those are
good laws, but that's not something we find
a delight in unless we can see everything from the Ten Commandments
themselves And then all the civil laws and all the ceremonial or
religious laws, if we can see all of them as designed to point
to the one who would come and actually do them, then we can
meditate on them day and night. Then we can say, I delight in
God's law. And our Lord Jesus Christ came
into this world, and he loved doing the things that his father
sent him to do. And having done those things, the law had been fulfilled, and
he fulfilled contract. It cannot be abolished, because
to abolish it just means to set it aside. To destroy it means
to rip it up. No, there was no need to set
it aside or to rip it up, because it had been fulfilled. And a
fulfilled contract is no longer in force, because there's nothing
about it to enforce. Right? It's already been fulfilled.
But that brings us up to the point of our Lord's crucifixion. He had fulfilled the law in terms
of obedience to its commands, in terms of establishing a righteousness
that God can accept. But there was one more step in
fulfilling the law and the prophets. He must suffer for the sins of
God's sinful people. He is the priest who offers the
sacrifice. He is the sacrifice itself. And
think of this, he is the God who accepts the sacrifice. In an offering himself for sin
once for all, in absorbing within himself all that a just God can
do in response to sin, The Lord Jesus Christ brought the old
covenant to a full and complete end, for he had done everything
written in it. And God raised him from the dead.
And the apostle says, God has fulfilled the promises made to
the fathers by raising Jesus Christ from the dead. People are always looking over
to Israel thinking that what's going on in Israel is going to
give them some kind of clue as to when the Lord Jesus will return
because they think that there are unfulfilled promises. There aren't. The coming of Christ,
the life of Christ, the death of Christ, the resurrection of
Christ. When these things were accomplished,
everything God had promised to his people from Abraham on down
had been fulfilled. So we have this being pictured
here as the Israelites are about to enter the promised land. Notice that, not the worked for
land, not the earned land, promised land. Moses could not take them
into the land of promise because promises are laid hold of by
faith, not by works. Moses could lead them through
a wilderness. Moses could give them dim representations
of God and how he operates among men. Moses could do all those
things we will not take from Moses the honor of which he is
due, for the book of Hebrews said he was faithful as a servant
in God's household. And therefore, we respect Moses
as a faithful servant in the household of God. But the book
of Hebrews goes on to say, but Jesus Christ was a faithful son
in God's household. The servant can never set anyone
free. Only the Son can. And our Lord
says, if the Son shall set you free, you will be free indeed. And as Joshua has been assigned
As the leader of the Jews to enter the promised land, Joshua,
same name as Jesus, obvious picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, he
leads his people out of the desert, out of the wilderness, and into
the land of promise, away from the land of works and failure. You'll notice if you look at
how the Jews acted all that time they were coming across that
wilderness. I know this, if any of us had
been God, they'd have never made it across that wilderness. We'd
have never opened the Red Sea the way they belly ached about
that. They didn't believe God. They worshipped idols. They engaged
in all kinds of sinfulness and rebellion. Only a very patient
and forgiving God would have tolerated those people. Same
thing could be said of us. But for that reason Moses could
never lead them in because he was the leader of the system
that says, do this and live. And they didn't do that, so he
can't lead them into the land of promise. Joshua can't. And
so God is going to exalt Joshua, and he's going to exalt him in
a way that he never exalted Moses. He's going to exalt him in the
eyes of the Israelites. And he's going to do it like
this. They're right there on the Jordan. The Jordan stands
between them and the land of promise. And God says to Joshua here,
today I will begin to exalt you. This day. What day? The day that
the people of God, the national people of God, are going to cross
that Jordan. Now, Jordan is quite often representative of death,
but it's not so much representative of our death. People think, you
know, oh, when we die, we cross the land into heaven. No. We
cross the Jordan into the promised land of heaven. No, that's not
what Jordan pictures. Jordan pictures the death of
the Lord Jesus Christ. And that death delivers his people
from the bondage of their former existence into the freedom of
the new existence in Christ. Our death is not what delivers
us, it's his death. But Paul tells us that his death is in a sense our death
because when he died we were in him. We died with him, we
rose again with him, and we are exalted with him. And while we
have not experienced all those things within the passage of
time in our lives, yet from the perspective of God, who is a
timeless being, these things are accomplished. And time, as
we experience it, or shall I say our lives, history as we experience
it, is just time catching up with eternity. How is he going to exalt Joshua?
He exalts him by making him commander of even the priests. Now there
were various kinds of priests. There was the high priest, and
the high priest was the only one who was ever allowed to go
back there into the most holy place and meet God. But if he's going to go back
there, He must go back there in a very carefully described
fashion. And the most important thing
was he must never go back there without blood. Because as the
priest, he comes into the presence of God not just with blood. He comes bearing, you remember
the priest? had the names of the tribes on
his hand. He had a breastplate with jewels for each of the tribes. He comes in there bearing the
people and their sin in the presence of God. Now that high priest outfit,
I'm sure it was a remarkable thing to see, especially if you
had Eastern sensibilities when it came to art and things like
that. They wore a kind of a turban,
and there was a plate on there with holiness to the Lord written
on it, and there were beautiful colors, and there were layers
of it, and all kinds of things on it, each one of them representing
some aspect of the essential truth of God, Christ and Him
crucified. And that man went in there, bearing the people and their sin, and
the blood of an innocent substitute. And when he poured that blood
out on what is traditionally called the mercy seat, but as
I understand it, it could be more strictly translated the
atonement cover, atonement was made for the sins
of Israel it was not an eternal atonement it didn't wash away
their sins in an eternal sense but it atoned for the national
sins of Israel such that God's wrath did not fall on them in
this temporal existence and then he would come out. Now our Lord
Jesus went into the most holy place
not made with hands, and he offered himself without spot to God. The high priests of the Old Covenant
had to do that every year, and other priests offered lesser
sacrifices throughout the year. And yet, no one's sin was ever
taken away. So next year, they had to do
it all over again. Jesus Christ entered into the
most holy place once. Once. Why only once? Because he's the only one that
ever got the job done. He's the only one. who could
be the sacrifice and the priest. And in one person, he went into
the presence of God and satisfied everything God ever demanded
from men and women. He satisfied God's demands of
righteousness. He satisfied God's demand for
the punishment of sin. And the priest would come out,
and when he came out, he would bless the people. And when he came out, That would
picture the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he
went in. That blood signified his death.
He comes out. That signifies God has accepted
the blood. And our Lord came out of the
tomb, and he pronounced blessing. And he's been pronouncing blessing
ever since. But here now, Joshua is about to begin this process
of going into the land of promise. conquering it, and obtaining
all of it for the welfare of the people of God. And what does
God tell him to do? He says, you tell the priests.
Who do these priests represent? They represent the people of
God. For we are a kingdom of priests. Now, none of us is a
high priest to offer sacrifices of atonement. But what we do
is continually declare that sacrifice of atonement made once for all.
And Jesus Christ is the only one who has the right to tell
the priests what to do. Now, I pointed this out last
week, but I'll repeat it. Remember, the old covenant had
already told the priests what they were supposed to do. the
most that Moses could ever do, once the Old Covenant had been
written down, all that Moses could do was say, do that. Moses
couldn't come up with a new idea. Jesus Christ can take over the priesthood
and reorganize its work, and Joshua could go beyond what
the old covenant said, and it says you tell the priest, those
who bear the ark, who carried it from place to place, you go
to the edge of the Jordan and you stand in the river. Now that ark pictured our Lord
Jesus Christ because that was where the atonement cover was.
But it's not just that. The ark pictured our Lord Jesus
Christ, because that ark was considered to be the throne of
God. He's enthroned between the cherubim. And so what did the
priests, what were they symbolizing as they come to the edge of Jordan?
And they were simply, I mean, the Jordan's flowing by. And the Jordan isn't all that
big a river, except maybe at flood stage. But it was obviously
at this point something more than what the people felt comfortable
crossing. And so there they were carrying
this ark, an ark which they were not to let fall. And God did not stop the Jordan
and tell them, now go out in the Jordan instead. He said, you go to the edge of
the Jordan, and you stand in the river. Well, what about the
river? I'll take care of that. And the
moment their foot touched the water, the water upstream stopped,
and the water downstream just went on away. And they walked
out in the middle of that river and stood. How often? God has told us just
stand. Like King James says, stand still.
Stand still. We declare the gospel and we
stand still. We stand still in the sense that
we don't go out conquering. It didn't say run across the
Jordan. and carry that ark around with
you to every city and magical lightning bolts will fly out
of it and destroy cities. He said, you go in the middle
of Jordan, you just stand there. We've been standing here now
for 36 years. And God being gracious, that's
what we'll do for the rest of our life. We'll just stand here. Oh, there's temptations to do
more. There's temptation to do more than simply declare Christ
and him crucified, because there are methods by which you can
grow churches. But we've not been sent to grow
churches. We've been sent to stand in the midst of death and declare the glorious gospel
of the living God. It means to stand there and not
move, Now, we grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord
and Savior Jesus Christ. We are to do that. But we aren't
walking around in the dry riverbank of the Jordan saying, well, I'm
over here now and I'm over here there on another day. We stand firm in the grace of
our God. It's this grace that has brought
us to this point. And we trust that it is his grace,
his sovereign, unstoppable grace, that will accomplish everything
else that needs to be done to make us like the Lord Jesus Christ. Stand still. Everything a believer does, to
the glory of God, he does standing still. That's why I don't go along with all this
political stuff that the organized church gets itself involved with.
A fella came by the other day, and he was politicking for Ron
DeSantis. And Bon and I were doing some
landscaping, essentially putting down plastic and throwing rocks
on it. Doesn't involve anything living. We found out we're not
real good at that. Rocks we can deal with. But I heard someone
stop, so I walked around front. Here he comes, young man, nice
deep voice, you know. And he pulls out of the inside
of a jacket or something this great big. It was something you
can hang on a doorknob. And I let him know what I planned
to do. And he said, well, can I put
a sign in your yard? I said, I'm a pastor. I don't do any public politicking. stand still in the middle of
the Jordan. Now, we as individual citizens
of the United States, we have a right to do that. And I wouldn't
tell anyone else, if you want to put up a political sign in
your yard, do it. Fine. I am a preacher. And more than
with you, they look at me as a representative of the things
I preach. And no matter what I may think of some politician,
I'm not his representative. Now, you do what your own conscience
says, but here's the thing. As a church, so long as I'm the
pastor of it and got my wits about me, Grace Community Church
will never take a political stand. Never. Why? What do I care is
going to be the dog catcher when I represent the king? stand still in the middle of
the river. And by doing that, God began
to exalt Joshua in the eyes of the people. They saw him command
the priests. They saw that when the priest
did what he said, the water flowed on. in a way was made for them
to walk into the land that had been promised to their fathers
many centuries before. And God would go on exalting
Joshua in their eyes. And God went on exalting the
Lord Jesus Christ. And He is this day, He exalts
the Lord Jesus Christ in our eyes, doesn't He? Let me ask
you this. If I stood up here and addressed
the social issues of the day as my primary topic, and told
you how we need to go out and protest against that and protest
against something else, if I told you I think that every
Christian ought to vote for so-and-so, would that exalt Christ in your
eyes? But if I, by the grace of God,
and nothing other than the grace of God can make this happen,
If I can stand here and declare to you the glories of Jesus Christ,
who loved us and gave himself for us, if I can lay out in your
hearing Christ and him crucified, I know this, if you belong to
God, Christ will be exalted in your eyes. And it will not be because I
said, all right, everybody stand up and clap your hands and let's
praise the Lord. You will praise the Lord from
your heart because God will have lifted him up in your heart. He will never be exalted among
the people of this world until the last day. But thank God he can be exalted
in our hearts by the simple declaration of who he is and what he did. All right, you're dismissed.