if you'd open your Bibles to
Joshua chapter 13. Our Father, bless us as we gather
here in the name of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Make him
known to us. his gospel known to us as we
look at this portion of scripture. And it's in the name of your
son that we pray this. Amen. Now, last time we were
together, which was a couple of weeks ago, we started on Joshua
13, and I had everybody turn to Joshua 13. My wife pointed out sometime
this past week, I had you all turn there, and then we never
read anything during the whole lesson. But that's because we
didn't get to the part of the lesson that I wanted, that the
scriptures would refer to. Most of it is just speaking about
how the land was divided among the various tribes. But we are
going to take particular note of the inheritance given to the
tribe of Levi. And that's what we'll deal with
this morning. In verse 14, it says, but to
the tribe of Levi, he, that is Joshua, gave no inheritance,
since the offerings made by fire to the Lord, the God of Israel,
are their inheritance as he promised them. And then you can go down
to verse 32, verse 33. But to the tribe of Levi, Moses
had given no inheritance. The Lord, the God of Israel,
is their inheritance as he promised. So we have two verses in this
passage of scripture, in this chapter, that speak of the inheritance
of the tribe of Levi. And in one case, it says they
have no inheritance, and by that it meant that they had no tribal
allotment. There was not going to be an
area within the Land of Promise designated as the tribe of Levi. Each Levite did have land, but
it says, you know, they were dispersed throughout the land,
and they just had, you know, their own little patch of land
here and there throughout all the tribes. It says first they have no inheritance,
meaning they have no tribal allotment. But then it says there in verse
14, their inheritance is the offerings made by fire to the
Lord. And then in verse 33, it says
their inheritance is the Lord himself. Bonnie, could you have this microphone
on also? I still don't know what makes
this wireless mic cut out once in
a while, but if we use this as a backup it'll at least get something
on the recording. So you have the Levites have
the inheritance of the offerings to the Lord and the Lord himself. Now who Do the Levites picture? Well, the Levites are a picture
of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, the tribe of Levi
was the tribe of priests. All the priests came from Levi. Now, the ones who actually offered
blood offerings, blood sacrifices, and all the high priests, according
to the Old Covenant, they are supposed to come from... I want to make sure and get this
thing fixed because it's... yeah, okay. The Levites, excuse me, all the
priests that actually offered blood offerings came, they were
from the tribe of Levi, but they all descended from Aaron, the
brother of Moses. So all the high priests and all
the ones that, as I understand it, that would offer, you know,
someone brought a lamb or whatever. In other words, sin offerings.
All of them came through the descendants of Aaron. But there
was other work at the temple. There was taking care of the
building. They were seen to the altar of incense and other things
like that. And this is what the other members
of the tribe of Levi would take care of. And this pictures us. That is, we are not like the
priests descended from Aaron, but we are of the sons of Levi. If you look over here, at Revelation
chapter one. Now, I've gone through the book
of Revelation, I believe, twice. Once in the Sunday morning services,
and I think once I went through it again on Wednesday evenings.
A wonderful book, a very encouraging book. Once you get past all the
phantasmical stuff that people attach to it, And here in Revelation
1, beginning at verse 5, it says, and we'll start halfway
through verse 5, To Him who loves us, and has freed us from our
sins by His blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests,
to serve his God and Father. To him be glory and power forever
and ever. Amen. Now, our Lord is our high
priest, and he's the only one that offers a blood sacrifice
to put away sins. But we are the other workers
in God's temple, so to speak. And if you look over here again,
we see this repeated in Revelation 5, beginning at verse 9. Most people, it's funny, they
like to talk about the apocalypse. You know, and if something horrible
happens, they said, oh, it was a disaster of apocalyptic proportions. They don't understand what the
word apocalypse means. Actually, it's, I'm not sure
if in Greek it's the first word, because Greek doesn't always
have its words in the same order as English, but I think it's
the first word in Greek. It just means to take the cover
off of something. In English, if you want to be
real strict about it, it's discover, to discover something, uncover
something, to reveal it. and it says it's the revelation
or the uncovering of Jesus Christ. Now, it does reveal Him, but
what that means is not so much that this is a revelation about
Christ, it's a revelation coming from Christ, a revelation given
to Him to give to us, and the whole, or the overall meaning
of it, as one child put it, Jesus wins. That's what it's about.
Jesus wins. He has been victorious. He has
been victorious. And in the end, absolute victory. But what does this mean for you
and me who are in Him? Now, does that make us conquerors? You know, some people think that
we are... that believers should seek to
take over the world. so to speak. And we see it going on in American
politics and all that? No. We are not kings of the world. And maybe they get that mistaken
because the King James, I think, where ours translation says kingdom,
It says kings, and well, we're not really kings in the world,
are we? But notice what it says here,
now beginning in verse 9 of Revelation 5. And this is the church praising
the Lord Jesus Christ, and they sang a new song You, meaning
the Lord Jesus Christ, are worthy to take the scroll and to open
its seals because you were slain and with your blood you purchased
men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. You have made them to be a kingdom
and priests to serve our God and they will reign on the earth. Now, believers are priests in
this world. But among believers, there is
no special class of believers who are called priests. All believers
are priests, and they are all priests in the same way. You know, I have trouble with
churches that refer to their ministers as priests. Now, it'd
be perfectly suitable to call their ministers priests if they
called everybody else in the church a priest. But they think
that their ministers have, that they're able to act as mediators
between, quote, the people and God. None of us are priests in
that fashion. There's one God, says Paul, and
one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. And
you can take all the rest of the saints of God and we pray for one another, but
none of us can make an offering to God that will put away the
sins of anybody else. We can't even make an offering
that will put away our own sins. Jesus Christ, the high priest,
already did that. But if we are priests, we must
have some kind of offering. So look over at 1 Peter, excuse
me, turn over in Hebrews chapter 13. Verse 15, Hebrews 13 verse 15, through
Jesus. Now see, we're priests. We still
need a high priest, don't we? We still need a mediator. But
through Jesus, Therefore, let us continually offer to God a
sacrifice of praise, the fruit of lips that confess His name."
So here we are, we're priests. But does that mean that we should
wear special clothes to let everybody else know that we have some kind
of in with God, some kind of special access to Him that others
don't have? No, as priests, one of the things
that the Levites did, the ones of them that were qualified to
do so, they were singers. They sang the songs at the temple. We, likewise, as the sons of Levi in this world,
we offer the fruit of our lips. That's the sacrifice we offer. Praise to God, not to ourselves,
not to our church, not to our ministers. We praise God. We praise him through our Lord
Jesus Christ. That's our sacrifice. And this sacrifice is to God. It's a sweet-smelling sacrifice
to Him, and it's to be offered continually. Continually. Not a once-a-year offering, not
just once a week when we gather for worship, though we do it
then. But within the heart of a believer and coming from the
heart of the believer should always be these priestly sacrifices
of praise to God. Why? He's God, for one thing. He's worthy of it, isn't he? And who better to know that he's
worthy of praise than us sinners who have been saved by his grace?
I watched a bit of a video where one of the well-known atheists
of our day, you know, and he thinks the video was entitled,
you know, the worst thing in all the scriptures or something
like that. But he believed that the worst thing the scriptures
had to teach was that we were born sinful and we needed Christ
to die for us. Of all the bad things he thinks
the scripture says, he thinks that's the worst. Of course, you can't talk back
to a video, but I'd have said to him what I've said from the
pulpit a few times. If you don't think people are born sinful,
you've never had kids. And secondly, if you don't think
you need a Savior, it's because you've never been saved. I was
talking to Brother John Chapman pastor in North Carolina this
last Friday, and he made this remark. He said,
you don't know that you're dead until you're made alive. You
don't know that you're deaf until you can hear. You don't know
you're blind until you can see. How do we know that we are sinners? Well, we could have known it
by the law, and people do understand it to that degree. I mean, they
can look at the law and say, well, I've not been that good.
But when God causes us to be spiritually reborn,
and creates a righteous nature within us. And the scriptures say it's created
to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. It's then that
we find out what sinners we are. And then our mouth is opened
in praise. To think. that one so righteous
as God is and just and holy took pity on us who are so sinful. How can that do anything other
than cause us to open our mouths in praise toward him? We praise him at all times. not because we have this silly religious thought that we're
supposed to go around with a smile on our face no matter what's
happening. No, the believer goes through times which the only
proper response is abject sorrow. I mean, we are subject to all
the troubles that anybody in the world might experience. We might lose family members. Those dearest to us can be taken
from us. We may go through horrible illnesses. We may go through
an illness that causes us to, as the world would say, die early.
I mean, all these things happen. We suffer sorrows, and the fact
that we are to continually praise God does not mean that in such
times we're supposed to go around acting as though we are unaffected
by the difficulties that we are facing. No. What it means is,
in the midst of all of that, in the midst of our tears and
our sorrow, we still praise God. Joe, I... I don't know how the
man stayed alive after all that God allowed Satan to do to him. I mean, he lost everything that
a normal person would consider good in this world. And he said
things like, naked I came into the world and naked I'll leave. And then it says, but in all
of this, in all of his bitterness over his troubles, it says, he
did not charge God with foolishness. Now he later on said some things
he shouldn't have said, but that was only after his so-called
friends came and tried to help him out. But so long as Job was left alone,
yes, he poured out his sorrows. How did he praise God? Later
on, he said, though concerning my flesh or concerning my body,
worms shall eat this flesh. In all reality, I think he was
kind of hoping that would happen. Not that he would, you know,
get worms that way, but that he would die. And that's what
he's talking about, that he'd die, and his body would be buried,
and the worms would have their way with his flesh. He said,
even though that's true, yet in my flesh, I shall see God. I shall see him with my own eyes,
not with the eyes of another. And why did he believe all that?
All that had been prefaced with, I know that my Redeemer lives. And in the latter day, he will
stand on the earth. And though concerning my body,
worms shall eat my flesh, yet in my flesh I will see God. That's praising God in the midst
of trouble. And we, as the spiritual sons
of Levi, that's how we praise him. What is our inheritance? Our
inheritance is the sacrifice made by fire to the Lord. That was, according to Joshua
13 verse 14, that was the inheritance of the sons of Levi. And that's
our inheritance. And what sacrifice is that? There's
only been one sacrifice made by fire unto the Lord. One real
one. And that was the sacrifice of
the Lord Jesus Christ. And I know they didn't set his
body on fire, but what the burnt offerings meant was accomplished
by the Lord, because they would kill the sacrifice, the priest
would kill the sacrificial animal, pour out its blood, and then
burn it up. Why? This illustrated the result
of the wrath of God against sin. What does it do? It utterly destroys. And our Lord Jesus Christ, everything
about him was consumed by the wrath of God. He was burnt up, so to speak.
Whatever hell means, and hell is often pictured by fire, whatever
hell means, that's what our Lord endured. And that sacrifice of
His, that's our inheritance. And brethren, what more inheritance
do we need? If such sacrifice is ours, offered
in our behalf, bringing to us all the benefits of such a sacrifice,
what more could we ask for? And what more do we need to bring
forth the sacrifice of praise? And then looking at verse 33
of Joshua 13. But to the tribe of Levi, Moses
had given no inheritance. The Lord, the God of Israel,
is their inheritance. As he, that is the Lord, promised
them. So first we see the sacrifice,
the burnt offering is our inheritance. Christ is our inheritance. Christ and him crucified, that's
the inheritance of God's people. But then God himself is our inheritance. I have heard people say, boy,
I can't wait to get to heaven and get my mansion. And they
say things like that. First of all, because all they
read is the King James, and so they say, in my father's house
are many mansions, and they don't interpret that word in the light
of what would have been, well, the King James, nearly everybody
uses, was edited in 1769. Back then, mansion just meant
a house, a dwelling place. Now it's come to mean, you know,
like a palace, huge place. And that's what they're thinking.
And they have dreams in their mind that when they get to heaven,
I'm finally going to be able to get a huge place to live in. There's
even a song. that they taught us young people
when I was a kid. I'm satisfied with just a cottage
below, a little silver, a little gold, but someday yonder I will
never more wonder but walk the streets that are made of gold.
I've got a mansion just over the hilltop. Really? Is that what you're looking for?
Why would God make heaven out of the very things He told us
not to seek on earth? It just doesn't make any sense.
Those are just symbols. But the mansion, that just means
a dwelling place. Our great blessing, our great
eternal inheritance is God Himself. I am my Beloved's. And my beloved
is mine. We sing that song, I think it's
number 56 in our hymnals. Difficult for me to be able to
sing all of it because it's so powerful. But one of the lines
is, but while God and I shall be, I am his and he is mine. What a wonderful inheritance
we have. Nothing can be added to God to
improve on it. After Abraham had defeated the
kings of the plain, rescued his nephew Lot, and he refused to
take any of the spoils for himself, And in a dream, he came to Abraham,
and he said, Abraham, now God had already, and I think I got
all my chronology right, had already told Abraham, I'm gonna
give you this land and all that kind of stuff. But that day,
he said to Abraham, I am your shield and your exceeding great
reward. I'm the one who defends you.
And when the battle is over, the spoils you get, the reward
you get is me. That's why I know that Abraham
was not all that concerned about the land that is now called Palestine
and was content to live in a tent. Why? His reward, his inheritance,
he understood it was God. and we have that inheritance,
what a blessed people we are.