if you'll open your Bibles to
Joshua chapter 15. Joshua 15. Our Heavenly Father, thank you
for this opportunity to Open your book and read it. And we thank you that you give
to us the grace to understand it. For Lord, we realize that
that ability doesn't come from within us. And that there. Well, the majority of this world.
Could read this Bible and have no idea what it means. So we
thank you for that blessing, that grace. Extend it to us again
this morning, in Christ's name we pray, amen. All right, let's
read verses 18 and 19. One day when she, and that's
Aksa, daughter of Caleb and now wife to Othniel, one day when
she came to Othniel, She urged him to ask her father for a field. When she got off her donkey,
Caleb asked her, what can I do for you? She replied, do me a
special favor. Since you have given me land
in the Negev, give me also springs of water. So Caleb gave her the
upper and lower springs. Now, the previous story in the
verses just before that relate to us how that Caleb, having
conquered Horeb, went on to conquer, or wanted to conquer, the other
cities in the area that were under, that had been given to
him by Joshua. And one of those cities was called
Devir, Oh, big long Hebrew word, but
it meant the city of records or the city of writing or something
like. In other words, the city had more than one name. But he
said, anybody who conquers that city, to that person I will give
my daughter, Aksa, in marriage. So Othniel did exactly that. He conquered Devir or Dever. Therefore, Caleb gave to him,
gave to Othniel his daughter, Axa. And Caleb, who is the father
of the woman, gave to, or gave Axa, the bride, to Othniel, the
conqueror. And that pictures for us how
the father gave to his conquering son, the bride, the daughter of the
father. Now the bride's name, or excuse
me, Othniel's name means the lion of God. A name, or similar
names given to Christ in the book of Revelation who's called
the lion of the tribe of Judah. The bride's name is Aksa, which
means a trinket, an anklet, or a bangle, something like that.
Something worn on the ankle which makes the sound of bells. But the root word of ox's name means
to sound out or to expound or disclose, and may even refer
to the bell on the hem of the garment. Now, in the Old Covenant,
the priest wore bells on the hem of his garment for a specific
reason. He would go there, go into the
most holy place once a year with the blood of the sacrifice. Now,
no one else was ever allowed to go back there, and even he
wasn't allowed to go back there except that one day each year. And I can't recall if this, I
don't think this is written in the scriptures, but tradition
says that they would actually tie a rope to his ankle because
if he approached God without the proper sacrifice, whatever,
he could die. Well, nobody else was gonna go
in there and get his body, so they would have a rope on him
so they could pull him out if he was unsuccessful. But the
only way they would know whether he was still living was that
he had bells on the hem of his garment, and as long as they
could hear those bells, you know, making their little noise, they
knew he was still alive and going about the work in there, and
then he would come out. But what those bells signified, if nothing
else, was that the priest is alive, that God has accepted
him. Well, oxen. Her name could refer
to those bells. And does not the Church of the
Lord Jesus Christ, is not her primary message that this high
priest lives, that his work has been accepted, redemption and
atonement have been accomplished. AXA represents The church and
thus also represents the gospel because in this world, that's
what the church ought to be to the world. That is, that's the
face, that's the only face that the church ought to present to
the world. Where the church is not to be in the business of
politics, social change, that is, you know, advocating for
it. Certainly they do works of charity and things like that.
The only message we have for this world is the gospel of the
Lord Jesus Christ. And when the church does that, the
elect hear it. Now, no one else hears those
little bells tinkling, but the church that is the elect of God
will hear it. And then, We can then make this conclusion,
this summary. Our Lord Jesus Christ, in this
world, our Lord Jesus Christ is known by the sound that the
church makes. I realize that the Holy Spirit
is required and he's the one that truly makes Christ known. But we don't want to discount
the means by which God causes this to happen. Christ is not revealed through
science, observation, any natural observation at all. The only
way he is known in this world is when his people declare him. And that's one thing I think
that can be demonstrated by this, the meaning of this woman's name.
Now in verses 18 and 19, we have a record of Aksa seeking a blessing
from Caleb and being granted her desire by Caleb. And this picture's the bride
of Christ seeking a blessing from the father. Now this blessing
is not born of fleshly desire. but is born of need. You know,
there are some promises given to the church concerning prayer,
and many people misunderstand them. I was baffled by these
promises for a long time, but the Lord said things like, if
you ask anything in my name, it will be given to you. If two
of you agree on anything, it will be granted to you. If you
pray believing, it will be granted to you. And people look at those
promises and say things like, well, then whatever I pray for,
as long as I end it in Jesus' name, then I should believe that
I'm gonna get it. Or if I'll work myself up into
some kind of faith that what I ask for, I'll get, then I can
get anything I want. Or if I can just get someone
else in the church to agree with me on this, I can have it. Well, that's the kind of interpretations
you get when you take those verses clear out of their context. All
of them, the context of all of them is going to limit us in
our praying, or limit us in our appropriation of that promise. It's gonna limit us to the things
which God has promised to give. In other words, we may believe
with all our heart that God's going to give us a new car. That doesn't mean we're going
to get it. Why? He never promised us one. Faith cannot exist apart from
a promise. Now, that doesn't mean you're
not allowed to ask for a car if you think you need one, but we have no reason to believe
that he will give us one. We can just hope for it. Asking
in his name, well, that doesn't simply mean to tag that little
phrase on the end of your prayer. In Jesus' name we pray, as though
that's some kind of spiritual abracadabra that makes things
happen. To ask in His name means truly
from the heart to approach the Father through the mediator,
the Lord Jesus Christ, fully aware that that's your only real
entry into His presence. It's a sober thing to do. It's
not light and insignificant to invoke the name of Christ. That
should not be done lightly. But we'll move on. What Aksa asked of her father, Caleb,
was not simply something that she wanted or would make her
life easier. It was something that she needed. She had been given the Southland. Now, our Bible, Our translation
calls it the Negev, but that's what the Negev is. It's the southern
region of the land of promise, and I looked it up, and it is
desert and semi-desert. I mean, you know, it's not really
the land you would pick out if you wanted to grow things there.
And it's dry and arid. It does not have in itself the
capacity to fulfill the need of its inhabitants. If you live
there and that's the only, all that you've got is what's right
there, you're not gonna make it. Well, that's a great picture
of the child of God in this world. The world is where he lives,
but it is not his home. You know, we should become concerned
if we find too much satisfaction here. You know, you think about
that. If you can find your satisfaction
here, you know what that means? This is your home. Now, we're speaking here in generalities. We can be content here, but contentment
and satisfaction are different things. We are content even if
we don't have everything we want. Why? Because we live in the assurance
that someday we shall have that which will satisfy us. But for
the time, you know, we can enjoy our lives here to a certain degree
in the sure and certain hope of being in the presence of Christ
and being made like Him in the future. But those who can find
satisfaction in this world, it suggests that they are of this
world. And that's not a good thing. C.S. Lewis made this statement,
and I thought it was a good one. He says, does not the fact that
I can find no satisfaction in this world, demonstrate that
I was made for another world. And that's the believer. Our
citizenship is not here, it's in heaven. It's in the presence
of God, faultless and full of joy. That's where our citizenship
is. So we're not really going to
feel at home here in this world. The need of a believer is such
that nothing here can truly meet that need. His need can only
be fulfilled by God. His need is that God make this
world a habitable place for him so long as he must live here. Our need is not to leave this
world, that will eventually come, But our need is simply that for
the time that we must remain here, God makes it a habitable
place for us. Now Aska, that's kind of interesting,
Aska asked for a field. Let's read this here again. In
verse 18, one day when she came to Othniel, she urged him to
ask her father for a field. Now, the next words, when she
got off her donkey, Caleb asked her, what can I do for you? Well,
we've got to realize this significant time transpired between those
two sentences. Because she first goes to Othniel
and asks for a field. Then the next thing we read,
she's at Caleb's tent. She has traveled wherever it
is that Caleb lives. She gets off her donkey. And
then she says to him, you gave me a field. So she already asked
and received the field. Or either that or often he'll
went and asked in her behalf. But that which she requested
in the first part, that's what she requested from her husband,
Othniel, has already been accomplished when the next sentence begins.
And she goes to Caleb and Caleb says, what can I do for you?
Now, the Jews were much more willing to talk about things
that we may feel uncomfortable talking about, intimate things. And even if they would couch
them in what we call euphemism, there wasn't any question about
what they were talking about. Here about, well, not quite a
year ago, but we finished up that series on the Song of Solomon.
And when you look at the Song of Solomon, it's quite obvious,
you know, the situations and the, relationship between Solomon
and that woman named Shulamith and their relationship with each
other. Well, there's some things in this first verse that if they
weren't so glossed over in the translation, it would give us
a little better insight and some better understanding of how Acha
got what she wanted. We read in verse 18, excuse me,
verse 17, Othniel, son of Kenaz, Caleb's brother, took it. That is, he took the city, so
Caleb gave his daughter, Oxa, to him in marriage. Now, our
translation says one day. That's not what's written there.
It essentially says it came to pass. You could actually put the word
so in there. When she came to Othniel, what's
this a reference to? Caleb gives his daughter to Othniel
and she goes to him as his bride slash wife. This isn't just saying,
you know, somewhere down the line, on some day, Oxa decided to go and talk to
her husband. This is likely, very likely, a reference
to her actually being given to Othniel and the two of them being
married. And here's one of the things
that kind of bolsters that. It says, it came to pass, when
she came to Othniel, she urged. That word urged. I look this up, look in the original
languages, just see if there's any significance. The word means
to allure or entice. This wasn't just her saying,
hey, Othniel, I want you to get my father to give me a field. She evidently went to Othniel
as his wife in a way that only a wife can approach her husband
legitimately. And she just didn't ask him,
she enticed him. Now, we look at those things
and we think, well, is that right for a woman to use her womanly
attractions to get what she wants from her husband?
Well, I'm not gonna answer that question. I'm just gonna say
this. It's what's being indicated here. And if we take it out of
the simple fleshly aspect of it.
What's it saying? Well, that relationship and that
approach of her to her husband, it pictures the most intimate
relationship between believers and their husband, the Lord Jesus
Christ. And there is no more intimate
expression of that relationship than when we communicate with
Him in prayer. When we sequester ourselves from the
rest of the world and approach the Lord Jesus Christ one-on-one as His beloved bride. He rejoices in that approach. In the Old Testament, and I can't
give you the chapter and verse at the present time, but there's
a point at which God says, let me hear your voice. Now, how
many times have we prayed, God, let us hear from you? Isn't it
remarkable? that our God, our Savior, our
Heavenly Husband says, let me hear your voice. I want to hear
from you. Prayer, worship, all of this,
these are times in which the church and each individual believer
within the church approaches Christ in the most intimate way,
a way that no one else in the world is able or even allowed
to approach Him. And just as an earthly husband
is likely to be receptive to such approaches, so our heavenly
husband, when we draw near him with our hearts open and bare
in his presence, we are alluring to him. We are enticing. You say, I can't
imagine that of myself. That's the wonder of the gospel. We might think, how could the
Lord Jesus Christ look on me and see something He wants? How could my presence before
Him be alluring? Well, it says that we are made
comely, beautiful. by His comeliness. The work of salvation does not
merely put us in a situation where we are called righteous. It certainly does that. That's
justification to be declared to be righteous. But He actually
causes us to become righteous. The new birth brings about a
spiritual rebirth. It is the work of God. And as
John says in 1 John, the one that is born of God does not
sin. You say, well, I'm born of God
and I sin. Spiritually speaking, you don't. That which has been born again,
it's a work of God. There is no flaw in it. The reason
we continue to transgress, the reason we still fight with confusion
and doubts and fears is that which is reborn in us is not
all there is to us. We've still got all the old stuff
to go with it. But prayer is a spiritual work. It's something done from the
heart. And the heart of the believer, the reborn spirit of the believer
is alluring to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is enticing. We come
to Him not trying to manipulate Him, as a woman may do with her
husband, simply to get what she wants. We come to Him as He has
made us to be, enamored of His beauty, knowing
He'll be enamored of ours, and we shall have what we ask of
Him. So certain was it that she would
get what she wanted from Othniel, which was either that he would
approach her father on her behalf or give her permission to do
so. So certain was it, the scriptures do not even record the event. It just says she asked him. And
the next sentence, already assumes the fulfillment of that request. Well, she says to her, she's
already gotten the field, and so it says, when she got off
her donkey. So maybe Othniel went and approached
Caleb and says, your daughter wants this field. And Caleb says,
fine, she can have it. Othniel goes back and tells her,
well, she's seen the field. Remember, it's in the desert.
There's no water. All she has is dry land. So,
having already been represented by her husband in securing the
field, she now gets on her own donkey and goes to her father
herself. You know, our Lord said some
startling things to his disciples. He said at one point, I'm not
saying that you shall ask in my name, for the father himself
loves you. And you may go directly to him.
Now, I know that we say that we need a mediator to approach
God, but we've already done that. We've already come to the Father
through Christ and been accepted. And now the door to the Father's
house is open to us at all times. We are not in the sight of the
Father, a criminal against His kingdom, a rebel a rebelling
slave. No, we are His children, and we're welcome in His household
all the time. I'm kind of stunned by those
words of the Lord because We often think that we're always
coming to the Father through Christ, and our Lord says, the
Father himself loves you. Let us never get the idea that
even though we come to the Father through Christ, the Father is
in any way reluctant to receive us, and he only does it because,
well, I told my son, anybody that comes through him, I'll
let them in, so I guess I gotta let you in. The very reason the
Son came to be the Mediator is because the Father, full of love,
sent Him. So we approach Him through the
Mediator, Christ Jesus. We approach Him and we find,
we receive His grace, we find His favor. And having done that,
the door is always open to us. Well, Caleb asked, what can I
do for you? Oh, if we could learn that when
we come to our Father, He is a generous Father. I remember being told that it's
very important for fathers to exhibit a gracious attitude towards
their children because for the most part, at least on the natural
level, children are going to perceive God to be like their
father is. That's why he's called the heavenly
father. Now, none of our earthly fathers
were perfect, but I had a really good father. And therefore, I grew up knowing
that I deserved the judgment of God, but then Never really
being terrified by that concept because I knew that through Jesus
Christ, the Father loved me. I cannot remember ever thinking
seriously about God apart from my acceptance in the presence
of God through Jesus Christ. You know, I've heard some people
say, well, you've got to know your sin and tremble under the weight.
Yes and no. We've got to know that we deserve
God's wrath. But how that affects us depends
in great measure on how quickly God reveals his son. At any rate,
she goes to him and she asks for water and he gives it to
her. The Lord said, if any man thirst,
let him come unto me. Let him drink of the water of
life freely. And what is Aska asking for? She's saying, I'm in a dry and
thirsty land. I need water. And it's interesting
that, um, It says Caleb gave her the upper
and lower water. Now I don't know exactly what
that meant in the context of the land, but
it's clear what, at least it is to me, it's clear the spiritual
significance of it. He gives to us, water here, the
lower springs. Here on earth, he causes his
truth to bubble up for our sake. He waters our spiritual garden
from, you know, it says in the Garden of Eden, it said there
wasn't rain, but a mist came up and watered that garden. And so here we are in what would
otherwise be a dry and thirsty land for us, a place in which
we could not live, and yet God has made it habitable for us. And then he gives us from the
upper springs. He makes this world habitable
for us by His restraining work, that He restrains the world from
being as awful as it could be. And then yet, that heavenly manna,
I'm using another picture here, but the heavenly food comes down
to us. Peter put it this way. You have,
through the knowledge of Christ, everything you need for life,
this life. and godliness, things spiritual. Our Lord said, ask or seek and ye shall find. Ask and it will be given to you. Knock and it will be opened.
Let us never hesitate to approach our Father. Our heavenly husband has already
gotten our field for us and opened the door to his father's household.
And we are welcome there. And our father will hear us. And if we come to him. Expressing
the need. He will give it to us and give
it to us in a measure we did not expect. Upper and lower spring. All right.