Testing one, two, there we go. And I got distracted when I was
moving the paint pail, or the paint pan. It's sitting right
there on the corner. You want to just go dump that
in the, where we're working? My mind is about You know, so
far as handling different things is about as good as I juggle.
I can juggle two things. Beyond that, I lose track of
what I'm doing. Joshua chapter 1. God, our Father,
thank you for this time to meet in the name of your Son, the
Lord Jesus Christ. May we learn of him. May we learn
from you, Father, to go to Christ, for it is written, He that has
heard and has learned from the Father comes to Christ. Lord, even if we've already come,
may we come again and again. For it is not a one-time thing,
Lord. We realize that we are constantly, as believers in our
Lord Jesus, we constantly turn to him, go to him, seek all that
we need from him. We ask this in that name, amen. Now, it cannot be emphasized
too much that the Bible is a book of Christ. From beginning to
end, it is a testimony regarding the Lord Jesus Christ in one
fashion or another. While it does address other matters,
It always does so in the context of Christ and his gospel. Now, I've had preachers ask me,
well, what if Christ is not in the text that I am preaching
on? And I tell them, get a bigger
text. You're not taking on enough. And I realize sometimes in study,
we have to maybe study a particular detail that all by itself does
not have a direct connection to Christ. For instance, as I
was studying here for this lesson in Joshua, I used the resources
available online, I look up the original language, and a lot
of times I end up on a rabbit trail checking out all kinds
of things, but that's kind of like you know, a carpenter going
to the lumber yard to pick up materials. But as a preacher
of the gospel, when I come to you, I'm not supposed to deliver
a load of lumber to you. It is supposed to have been put
together, or if we liken it to a painter. As a preacher, I look
at the various facts of scripture, Like a painter would take his
palette of paints. Well, if you go to an art museum,
you don't expect the artist to be standing there and then just
hand you this palette with a bunch of paints on it. They're supposed
to have taken those individual colors and make a portrait out
of it. The scriptures are, at their
very root, a portrait of the Lord Jesus Christ. This truth
is vital to biblical understanding, and so much so that a person
has not understood a scripture until it's understood in the
light of Christ. We should not be satisfied with
our understanding of a passage of scripture until we have found
Christ in it. And once finding Christ, we must
not look for any deeper meaning. Now, both are dangers. to stop
short of finding Christ. That just leaves you with some
knowledge in your head. And as Paul said, knowledge puffs
up. One of the dangers of, and everything
in this world has some dangers, I understand that, but one of
the dangers that comes from an academic study of the Bible,
such as you get when, I only have a bachelor's degree in Bible,
but there, and then if you go on to seminary, it becomes an
academic exercise, and you become knowledgeable, and that knowledge
can make a person proud. I know more about this. Well,
see, understanding the scriptures is not about understanding stuff. It's about understanding Christ. and not all the knowledge in
the world can make you understand Christ. Not all the biblical
knowledge, in and of itself, cannot make you understand Christ.
That requires, to truly understand Christ, to know him, that requires
personal contact. That requires that Christ make
himself known to you. I saw a documentary recently
about a man who has about seven seconds of memory. He had a brain
virus in his brain at one time, and it killed his long-term memory. So all he remembers is what happened
in the last seven seconds. But this is very interesting.
He knows his wife. He doesn't remember her, but
he knows her. And, of course, she's, the first
documentary I saw about this guy was over 20 years ago. And
this one's more recent. Well, you know, all those years,
he's been in a facility, and she's lived at home. She stayed
faithful to him. She comes to visit, and as soon as she walks
in the door, he brightens up. But he doesn't remember a thing
about her. All he knows is he loves her.
And you know, there are people who have a very, very limited
understanding of scriptural truth, but they know Christ. As I've mentioned before, there
are only two essential points in the gospel. I'm a sinner in
need of a Savior, and Christ is the Savior I need. I'm not
saying we should be satisfied with, oh, I know that, and I'm
never going to try to learn anything else. I know when I met my wife,
I didn't know much about her, but I knew that I wanted to know
more about her. And so it is with the one who
comes to know Christ. He does want to know Christ better,
wants to know Christ more. Paul the apostle said, that I
may know him. So as we look at this scripture
here, we're not looking at the book of Joshua to find out about
the years of conquest. the years when the Jews conquered
the land promised to them and divvied it up among the tribes.
That's not the message of the book of Joshua. Rather, that
is a historical account of some events in the history of Israel
designed to teach us some things about the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, Joshua is one of the more prominent pictures of Christ
in the Old Testament, and it's no coincidence that he bears
the same name as does our Lord. Joshua and Jesus are the same
name. It's a mixture of a shortened version of the name Jehovah,
Yah, and that's quite often found, actually, in the Psalms. Hallelujah
means praise Yah, praise Jehovah. So it's a mixture of the name
Yah and then the name that we normally pronounce, Hosea. In
Hebrew, Yahashua, something like that is how it's pronounced.
There's two ways it can be pronounced depending on where you put the
accent. But it became Iesu in Greek and eventually became Jesus
in English. Now in these verses, verses 3
through 9, God addresses Joshua concerning his work of leading
the Israelites into the promised land and conquering the peoples
there and making that land their own. Now let me make a little
bit of an aside. What is recorded in the book
of Joshua, we'll probably find it offensive to our modern sensibilities. You don't go into another land
and slaughter everyone without mercy. We don't think that's appropriate
to do. Now when I say we, I'm talking
about not we as Americans or anything like that, just people
in Western civilization at this point, for the most part, do
not think it's right to steal someone else's land, and if they're
not willing to leave of their own, slaughter them or anything
like that. They call it genocide. It's considered a war crime. Why was it suitable? for the
Israelites to do this, because God told them to. Now, I know
that there are a lot of genocidal maniacs in history who have said
the same kind of thing, that God told them to do that. Well,
the only reason that we think it was justified, here in the
biblical account, is because we believe indeed that God did
tell them to do it and told them to do it for a reason. And that reason was that culture
had become so utterly wicked, there was nothing could be done
about it except destroy it. And the reason that God said,
don't let anyone, man, woman, or child, remain alive. The reason he said that was because
he knew full well if any of them were left alive, they would infect
the Jews. Not that the Jews needed infecting.
Just like us, they can find plenty of sin on their own. Nonetheless,
there were some cities, some areas that the Jews left untouched. And those groups later on did
cause them trouble and led them astray. When God made promise
to Abraham that he would give him and his descendants that
land, he says, your descendants are gonna spend 400 years in
a foreign land. because the wicked or the sinfulness,
the wickedness of the Amorites is not yet full. In other words,
the Lord is just. He is even what we might call
more than just. Why, one sin is enough to provoke
his eternal wrath. So if he says the Amorite's cup
is not yet full, that means that he has, in mercy, he has a very
large cup. And he doesn't take dramatic
action unless and until, that is, he doesn't take action in
the temporal world until people have wholesale forsaken him and
his ways. And so he had the Jews spend
their 400 years in Egypt, and all during that time, the Amorites,
who also were in that area, part of the Canaanite civilization,
They just kept right on going. Now, to give you an idea of who
the Canaanites are, well, we'll wait a minute. That comes in
another point. But anyway, God gives to Joshua
a list of promises and charges. And this gives us a window into
the will of the Father as expressed to the Lord Jesus Christ. In
verses three and four, He says, I will give you every place where
you set your foot as I promised Moses. Now, Joshua is promised,
oh, supposed to read verse four as well. Your territory will
extend from the desert to Lebanon and from the great river, the
Euphrates, all the Hittite country to the great sea on the west. Joshua is promised success in
the work that is being given him to do. He says, I will give
you every place where you set your foot. He will not fail to
lay hold of all that God has given. Indeed, every place Joshua
goes will become his territory. This is something that doesn't
show itself in English because our second person pronoun, you,
it's no different whether it's singular or plural. Now that's
one of the advantages of the King James Version. There used
to be a distinction between singular and plural. All the thee words,
thee, thou, thy, thine, all that, that's singular. You, ye, yours
and that, that's all plural. But over a course of time, we
lost all the the pronouns. And so whether it's talking to
a second person singular or second person plural, it's always you.
In these two verses, it is all plural. In other words, he's saying,
I will give you, that is all the Israelites, every place where
you set your foot. But it's important to note this,
that while the promises or this promise concerned everyone in
Israel, it was spoken only to Joshua. Joshua relayed the information. And what is that a picture of
to us? Like the promises of God's blessings
are to all his people, but they are addressed to Christ. And our participation in those
promises comes to us only as we are in Christ. Ephesians chapter one, verse
three. This may be the verse I quote more than any other verse
in the scriptures. It's not as though it's the only
place that this principle is taught, but there is no place
it's taught more clearly and succinctly. Blessed be the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with
all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. Everything good that God has
for a sinner is in Christ, and everything that could possibly
be any good for a sinner is in Christ. And he who has Christ
has it all. That's why I don't believe in
this concept of degrees of heaven any more than I do believe in
degrees of hell. Because either you are outside
Christ or you're inside Christ. If you're in Christ, you have
all that God has for human beings. because it's all there. Now, after this, he describes
the very areas that they will conquer. The wilderness, which
would be the southern border, that place of unbelief, grumbling,
and disobedience are outside the promised land. Life under
the law of Sinai, apart from the promise, is a life of weariness,
grumbling, disobedience, and ultimately, unbelief. Now, I
don't have the time to prove the argument here, but when you go to Galatians chapter
5, and it speaks about the works of the flesh and the
fruit of the Spirit, what it's comparing is What kind of conduct
arises from those who are under the law as opposed to those who
are under the rule of the Spirit of God? When it says, the works
of the law are of this, this, and it lists all those sins, anyone who tries to approach
God by means of his own goodness gets worse and worse and worse. And his descendants shall add,
you know, their sinfulness to it unless the Lord intervenes
in grace. That's why cultures always degrade. Every time someone sets up a
new culture, they think this is going to last forever. No,
it's not. God was pleased to allow some
Europeans to settle in this land. And I know plenty went on that
shouldn't have gone on. But it was, or came to be, a
more or less free land, probably had a higher percentage of professing
believers in it than any other country has ever had. But look
where we are now. And it's useless to think that
picking the right president is going to fix anything. No, that's
just the way people are. Everyone outside of Christ is
trying to be good on their own, is trying to please God, whether
it be the God of scriptures or whoever their God is. They are
trying to do things in the strength of the flesh, and that always
leads to corruption. we're seeing a remarkable upsurge,
at least in public uncleanness. That shouldn't surprise us. It's
under the spirit that people have love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
gentleness, goodness, kindness, and this sort of thing. But in
that wilderness, outside the land of promise, yet under the
law, they were miserable. Weak, grumbling, complaining,
rebelling. Here's a thing to note, the land
of promise is immediately bordered by the wilderness. Now I've heard,
I read sometimes in the old timers, you know, they talk about different
states of grace. You know, there's been a sinner,
then there's been an awakened sinner. somebody made aware of
their guilt, you know, and they have these stages of grace, supposedly,
that precede faith and repentance and salvation. No, it is unbelief
all the way up from when you pass from death unto life. There's
a border But there is no such thing as a no man's land between
a land of promise and a wilderness. A person either believes or he
does not. A person either is alive under
God or he's not. You know, none of the metaphors
that the scriptures use to describe being saved can allow for any
such thing as degrees. Alive or dead, you're one or
the other. In or out, you're one or the
other. I don't know how many times in the years that I've
been here, we've had someone come and maybe come for a long
time, and then I'll, you know, I watch people while I'm preaching,
and I'll see them maybe with a tear in their eye or just listening
intently, and I'll think in my mind, oh, God's working with
them. They must be getting close. till a person believes they are
as far away from God as a person can get, and the moment by the
grace of God they believe, they are as close to God as a person
can get. And there is no such thing as
being a better or worse sinner. Now, indeed, God does work with
people, but in all that working and misery they go through, They're not becoming alive. Their sense of sin is a legal
sense of sin. And their response to it is to
try to do better. People think repentance, and
I've been accused of being an antinomian. People like to use
big theological words. But they've listened to some
of my sermons, and they think that I don't exhort people enough. They think that I don't teach
people how they should live. Now those that regularly listen
to me know that's not true, but I fear that they don't understand
how it is that God's people are exhorted to decency and love
and things like that. It's not the same way they were
exhorted to these things under the law. He said, the wilderness directly
abuts the land of promise, and a person goes immediately from
one to the other when the grace of God gives them life. And then
he mentions Lebanon. Lebanon's to the north. At this
time, I don't believe it was considered a nation or anything.
It was an area, the mountains of Lebanon. And the word Lebanon
means white, and they speculate the reason was is there were
snow-capped mountains. White is a picture of purity. And so you find here in this
land of promise, it directly abuts the land of unbelief, the
land of wickedness, the land of rebellion. And then you're
in the land of promise, and at the far end of it is perfection. Now, spiritually speaking, we
are perfect. If a person's been born of God,
That which was born of God does not sin. Remember one time somebody,
well I used to always hear in the church I was raised in about,
you know, spiritual problems. Strictly speaking, believers
do not have spiritual problems. They have fleshly problems. They
have fleshly problems that irritate their spirit, but the spirit
Being born of God is flawless. The Spirit always believes, the
Spirit always loves, the Spirit always rejoices in Christ. It's
the flesh that's messing things up, so far as our experience
is concerned. But the time will come, and if
you want to kind of think of going from south to north, as
indicating, you know, the passage of a believer's life from beginning
to end, He comes in directly out of all that mess of the wilderness.
And when he's done with this life, white. Wash me and I shall be whiter
than snow. And then he mentions the Euphrates
River. The Hebrews call this river peroth,
meaning fruitful. That word is derived from a word
that means to break forth. The Euphrates is one of the rivers
associated with the Garden of Eden, that is, paradise. Under
the leadership of our Lord Jesus, we are returned to paradise.
What did he say to the thief on the cross? This day you will
be with me in paradise. different people have different
views of paradise. And I'll tell you what a person thinks paradise
is, tells you a whole lot about that person's heart. I remember
when the trouble started with the, over there in the Mideast,
you know, and, you know, when they ran the planes into our
towers and then we went over there and fought. And there was
all this talk about, you know, those fellas, you know, they,
those warriors, they didn't care if they died in battle, because
if they died in battle, they went to paradise and there were
42 virgins waiting for them. And I think, well, I know what
your idea of paradise is, and it's a pretty fleshly one. Do you know what paradise is
to a believer? To be with Christ and to be like Christ. And for the believer, those two
things, or the absence of them, is what makes this life most
difficult. He says, no one will be able
to stand against you all the days of your life. I missed one, missed a point.
He says, all the Hittite country to the great sea. Now, we'll
finish with this one. The Hittites are descendants
of Canaan, the son of Noah. Remember, Noah had, excuse me,
Canaan wasn't his son, it was his grandson. Noah had three
sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. And then Ham saw his father naked
in his tent. Now most English translations
say, and he laughed. I remember my philosophy professor
saying he took pleasure in what he saw, implying that he was
perverted. And that's why it says when Noah
rose up, when he woke up from his drunkenness and realized
what his son had done to him, And so it's kind of skirting
around the issue, but more went on than, you know, Ham noticed
his father naked and thought it was funny. And when Noah gave
the blessings or whatever to his children, he mentioned Ham
and Japheth, but he's, excuse me, mentioned Shem and Japheth. But when he gets to Ham, he skips
Ham and curses Ham's son. Canaan. Cursed be Canaan. Why? By the spirit of prophecy,
he foresaw what the land of Canaan would become. Do you know what
cities were in the land of Canaan? Two of them were Sodom and Gomorrah.
Great wickedness in that area. And one of the sons of Canaan
was a man named Heth. And he's the father of the Hittites,
or the Hethites. His word means fear. Now, you
remember that when they first got to the Jordan, some 38 years
previous to this, they sent in spies, and they came back, and
they said, yes, the land is flowing with milk and honey and all that,
but the people there are giants, we're like grasshoppers to them.
What? They were filled with fear. Heth. And that fear bred unbelief in
their hearts. and they refused to go in, and
therefore God says, you will never enter my rest. But here
he gives this promise and says, you will possess all the country of fear, all
the way to the great sea, that is the Mediterranean Sea. In
other words, God promised that that which had caused them in
the previous generation to refuse to go in because of unbelief,
that fear. He said, you'll possess it. You'll
drive them out. And when we are under the leadership
of the Lord Jesus Christ, it drives out fear. Perfect love
casts out fear. Now, because we're still in the
flesh, we experience fear. But you know, it says in the
book of Revelation, in the King James, it says, gives two adjectives, but the
one I recall is the one that said the fearful, or outside,
meaning outside the city of blessing. But that word doesn't mean just
being afraid. It means cowardly. Believers
face troubles in this life, don't they? And they face troubles
that cause us to fear. Our continued sin in the flesh,
that can breed legal fear in us. But you know what? Because of the Spirit of God,
we always prevail in those things. And while we're afraid, we don't
run away. Someone once said, courage is
not being unafraid. Courage is being afraid, but
doing what needs to be done anyway, to realize there's something
more important than the fear. And we, as we live in this world,
we're never going back to the wilderness. The Hittite, the
fear, is not going to drive us out of the Promised Land if we
have followed Joshua in. because he stared fear in the
face, and he did not back down. Therefore,
all in him do the same thing. All right, about to say we'll
pick up there next week, but actually it'll be three weeks
from today, because we'll be here the next two weeks.