Joshua chapter 10. Heavenly Father,
bless us in our study this morning. Make Christ visible to us in
our hearts. It's in His name we pray. Amen. Now, we're just going to do a
quick survey of chapters 10 through 11. And the reason is that these
chapters simply give an account of the continued victories of
Joshua, and they aren't detailed accounts. Most of them is just
a couple of verses went to this city and then into this city. And so to do it like a verse-by-verse
examination of them would not be particularly helpful to us. In chapter 12, we also see that
there's a rehearsing of the victories that Israel experienced before
they entered the Promised Land when they were still to the east
of Jordan. But all of these taken together,
all these battles, and all these victories are designed to teach
us of the complete victory of the Lord Jesus Christ in behalf
of His people, resulting in their complete deliverance from their
enemies and their possession of the land that was promised
to them. Now, the warfare of the people
of Israel in the promised land pictures the salvation of God's
people as a war against all things opposed to God. This is in Joshua
10 through 12. It's good for us if we understand
that the Bible presents the good news of God, the gospel of God,
as more than simply a message that sinners may be saved from
hell. In fact, the gospel of God is
more than a message that God sovereignly saved and saves whom
he will, and that none of his chosen will be lost. Both of
those statements are good news, but that's not all there is to
the good news. The gospel, and that word means
good news. In fact, the English word gospel, I think it was its original form
was something like good spiel. You know, good story is what
it means. In fact, back in the 70s, they
had a couple of rock operas, a form that was Popular back
then, they had one called Jesus Christ Superstar, and then they
came out with one called Godspell. And that was based on the old
way the word gospel was pronounced, and it just meant a good story
or good news. Now, the good news is that all
that was destroyed in Adam's fall will be restored. Take a minute to look over at
Acts chapter 3. Now, in the New Testament in
particular, this point is made several ways. But, for instance,
Paul in one place says, if in this life only we have hope in
Christ, we are of all men most miserable. If what we are experiencing
now is all there is to gospel blessings, then, you know, we're
among the most miserable of people. But look what it's Peter here
preaching in Acts chapter 3 beginning at verse 17. Now brothers, I
know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders. But this
is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the
prophets, saying that his Christ would suffer. Repent then and
turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, that times
of refreshing may come from the Lord, and that He may send the
Christ who has been appointed for you, even Jesus. He must
remain in heaven until the time comes for, now look here, God
to restore everything as He promised long ago through His holy prophets. When this history that we know,
this existence that we know, when it has run its full course,
then the Lord shall return, the Lord Jesus Christ will return,
and everything will be restored to what it's supposed to be. When God created the heavens
and the earth, there was nothing wrong with it. Even what, at least this is my
take on when Paul says that the whole creation was made subject
to corruption, I believe that was just his way to describe
something that's been kind of understood, Isaac Newton put
it into a formal scientific statement. He called it the second law of
thermodynamics. You know, essentially that everything
falls apart. And that's been going on since
sin. Now, when God created the heavens
and the earth, I don't even believe that that principle was involved.
If you built something, it stayed there. Nothing was wasted. Nothing fell apart. That began
after sin. And the Gospel, and the work
which our Lord Jesus Christ did, is not only going to restore
God's elect to a proper spiritual relationship with God, it will
restore the entire creation. And it's going to bring the entire
creation, the entire universe, into a better state than it was
in the Garden of Eden. You say, well, what could be
better than the Garden of Eden? The Garden of Eden could be corrupted. How do we know? Well, it happened.
God's, I hate to call him God's archenemy, because we think of
an archenemy as someone who actually has, you know, a fighting chance
of defeating a person. But Satan, the devil, the serpent,
in the many ways that he's presented in the scripture, he is the most notable enemy
of God. And he, in a sense, well, he
destroyed God's creation. In bringing Adam into sin, and
cutting down God's representative on earth. The entire creation,
Paul says, was made subject to corruption. Now, when God restores things,
as Peter describes it here in verse 21 of Acts 3, He's going
to restore it to a condition that cannot be corrupted. And how do we know that that's
the condition? Well, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians
4, that when the Lord returns, and the dead in Christ are raised,
and we who are alive and remain are changed in the twinkling
of an eye and caught up with the dead in Christ, All of us shall meet together
with Christ, and then it says, and so we shall always be with
the Lord. Now, Peter talks about the creation
of new heavens and new earth, wherein dwells righteousness. And I think that he's broadening
the concept of righteousness, taking it beyond simply moral
grounds or legal grounds. He said, this is going to be
new heavens and new earth where things are right. Things are wrong here, aren't
they? Even if you took all of humanity off the earth, you know,
in present-day environmentalism, they kind of act like man's the
only problem on earth. Well, I'll agree, man's the one
that brought all the problems on earth, but you could take
all the humans off the earth, animals would still die, trees
would die, there would be fires, there would be disasters, there
would be environmental catastrophes, all that would go on. Why? The
universe is broken. It grows, Paul says, as in travail,
waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, that is, the redemption
of our bodies. He's referring to the resurrection,
Christ comes back, restores everything. And restores it in such a way
that it can never be broken again. Now, for anyone who knows His
nature, Isn't it good that He's going
to make it such that it cannot be messed up? I mean, if our Father Adam, in
whom there was no sin, it wasn't natural to Him, like it is to
you and me, if He could be dragged into rebellion, what of us? If we were made That is, if we're
raised from the dead, put with Christ, but we're still subject
to being ruined, we'd be ruined. Somewhere along the line, something
would come up that had the capacity to break us. But new heavens
and new earth will not be like that. Now, you and I live in
just one slice of this battle. Our Lord began that battle of
the restoration of all things. He actually began it the very
day Adam sinned. It says that God appeared that
evening. Evidently, it's written as though
this were His custom to show up in the cool of the evening. And Adam and Eve, in their sin,
their eyes were opened, they realized they were naked, they
tried to make clothes to cover their own nakedness, made them
out of vegetation. Well, you know what happens when
you take leaves and sew them together
and try to make something out of it? Well, that's going to
last a day, maybe, before the leaves dry up and fall off, and
there you are, naked again. But there they are, and they're
hiding. They're experiencing something that they never experienced
before. They're experiencing shame. And
in particular, they knew God would be coming. They were afraid
of Him and ashamed to stand before Him. But it says this, the voice
of the Lord God. Now, it says they heard the voice
of the Lord God walking. Now that tells us something about
what was meant by the voice of the Lord God. If all they meant
was that they heard God say something, it would have said, they heard
the voice of the Lord God saying. But the voice of the Lord God
was not reference to a voice to be heard as such. It was the
name that God used of Himself when He appeared. Just like John
said, in the beginning was the Word. The Word. The voice. The Word. In the book
of Revelation, it refers to our Lord Jesus Christ as the Word
of God. So Adam and Eve heard this One
named the voice of the Lord God. He was walking in the garden. And He brought a promise. Yes, there was rebuke. Yes, there
was the announcing of curses. But the curses that were laid
on Adam and Eve had a remedy in the curse that was laid on
the serpent. And what was the curse laid on
the serpent? He said, the voice of the Lord
God, He spoke concerning the seed of the woman who would come.
And the serpent would strike his heel, but in the process,
this seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent. You know, my dad used to tell
a joke, you know, about how do you kill a snake? And the answer
is, well, you cut off his tail. And, you know, you say, well,
how could you kill something by cutting off his tail? Well,
if you look at a snake, it looks like all it is is head and tail.
So if you're cutting off his tail, you're cutting off his
head, essentially. But the point is, in this crushing the head
of the serpent, what happens? If you crush the head of the
serpent, does only the head No, the entire snake dies. And therefore,
in crushing the head of the serpent, this seed of the woman would
destroy everything the serpent had done. He'd do that through restoring
all that had been destroyed. And he would also destroy all
those heavenly spirits that had joined him in rebellion. And
He would also destroy all those human beings who through rebellious
unbelief did not repent and believe the Gospel. All of it was destroyed
right there. I believe that was done at the
cross. Because there's Satan. He'd entered
the heart of Judas to betray Him. He was already controlling
the hearts of the religious leaders. And He was already controlling
the hearts of Pilate and all of that. And he instigated that whole
thing of the Lord's crucifixion. And in so doing, this great enemy
of God probably thought for a short time that he had finally done
what he could not completely accomplish in Eden. Because now
he not only destroyed the first man, he had killed the one who
had been sent to rescue and restore. But he didn't realize that as
he struck at his heel, that heel was stomped down and crushed
the serpent's head. Now this serpent, his head is
crushed, but if you've ever killed a snake, one of the things you
generally notice is they'll wiggle around and whatnot. It takes
a while before death entirely takes over the the body, you
know, and it just lays there. And we're living in that period.
The snake's tail is wiggling. It causes a lot of trouble. But
in crushing the head of the serpent, that was a mortal wound from
which the serpent could not recover. Now, Satan and all of his allies
continue in their insane path of rebellion, even today. And one reason they continue
that way is that they live short lives, just like you and I do. That is, the human allies of
the devil, you know, what, 70, 80, 90 years, somewhere in that
neighborhood. And in this short window into
the whole perspective of history from creation until the return
of the Lord. We only see, it's like looking
through a little picket fence, little cracks in the picket fence.
And man looks, his little short time period as he is, peering
through that little crack in the fence, and he thinks what
he sees is everything there is. Now look over to Ecclesiastes
chapter 3. One of these days, I'd like to
preach through Ecclesiastes, and I'd actually kind of planned
to do it in this series, but it's kind of hard to get a...
I mean, I know basically what it means, but it's kind of hard
to get an overall picture of the book. But there's some scraps
of it here, and there's such wisdom in them. In verse 10 of
Ecclesiastes 3, we read this. I have seen the burden God has
laid on men. He has made everything beautiful
in its time, or that could be also translated in his time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot
fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Now, Hebrew
is not an easy language to translate, and Hebrew poetry is even more
difficult. Some of these words, they have
a broader meaning than what we can find in the translations.
But where it says, he has also set eternity in the hearts of
men, the King James says he set the world in the hearts of men. But I can't remember where I
read this, but someone said it's actually a reference to the vanishing
point. And you know, you stand on a
set of railroad tracks and you look down there and it eventually
looks like the two of them, just two tracks come together. Well,
no, it doesn't. But that's what it looks like.
And we can't see beyond that. Now, if we were standing on railroad
tracks and looked down and said, well, look, those two tracks
come together down there. This track, well, it's only about
two miles long. That's all there is to this track.
Well, we'd be kind of silly if we said that, wouldn't we? But that's what people do. They
look at this short span of their lives, what's going on within
their own experience, and think that's all there is. Yes, they
know there's some history, and yes, they figure the world will
go on afterwards, but they don't take to heart the fact, I'm only
getting a glimpse You know, we have what they call the new atheists.
I think they, you know, really started to rise up in the 2000s,
but you had guys writing books, you know, promoting atheism,
and actually they were acting quite like many evangelicals,
and they're almost, you know, they're trying to recruit people
to atheism. Acting like missionaries, trying
to spread atheism. But much of their argument comes
from the fact They are taking what little bit of reality they
perceive and act as though that's all there is. They say things like, well, if
there was a God, how do you account for all the evil that goes on?
Well, that's a good question if all you're doing is looking
at right now. You say, you know, you would
say, If that's all God can do, if
this is the best God can do, then He must not be much. But that's from looking at a
moment. That would be like looking at
one punch in a boxing match. And a guy gets a good one right
under the chin, and he starts to go back. And you say, okay,
that's the end of the fight, and you walk out of the stadium.
No, you better stick around. If we look only at what's happening
around us, it doesn't look like God's winning. And, you know,
right here it says God made it this way. Precisely so that men
cannot understand what He's doing if all the information they have
is what they can see and experience. That's why we live by faith,
not by sight. There's more to this story. And the more to this story is
basically the prophetic things told us of what shall come in
the future. Then we begin to understand.
We get a whole picture. And we can say, at least in some
measure, oh, I understand why God made this happen. I can understand. Why did God
allow sin? Why did He allow the devil to
tempt Adam and Eve? Why did he do that? Well, if
you just look at that, and you look at all the horribleness
that has come as a result of that, you might think that wasn't
a very good choice on the part of God. But if you look at the
end of things, if by faith you see how things will be made,
you'll say, oh, it's better this way, because if Adam had never
been tempted, had never fallen, then he would probably have grown
just as proud as the devil himself did, proud of his own glory. Adam would have tried at some
point to rebel against God just like the devil did, and take
the throne from God. But God has made it. so that
no flesh can glory in His sight. You know, when all of us who
believe, all that fear the Lord, are gathered together unto Christ
and we're always with Him for eternity after that, there isn't
going to be a one of us boasting. There's not going to be a one
of us looking at our Lord seated upon the throne, high and lifted
up, and we're going to say, oh, I wish that was me. And it required, in order to
get to that point, it required that man fall in order that those
who have eternal salvation will know that everything they have
is a gracious gift from God. Like the Israelites under Joshua,
our present condition does not reveal the complete victory to
come. The battle is still ongoing. But historical accounts like
Joshua and prophetic accounts like the book of Revelation are
put there to give us assurance that the battle we see going
on around us, and maybe even more importantly, the battle
we feel going on within us, I mean, from your point, does
it look like you're winning? It doesn't, does it? Same things
that you struggled with years ago, you're still struggling
with? Why is that? Some people think that, you know,
Christians just keep getting better and better. Well, if they
do, I'm not a Christian. I'm not getting better. There's
nothing I can discern. But we have the promise. We see what the world cannot
see and what we often do not see because we're so busy looking
at natural things. The battle's ongoing. But we
know, according to what God has promised, When the battle is
over, Christ shall be the one victorious. And all who are in
him will share in that victory. They will be a part of it. The
Apostle Paul said that God leads us in triumph. triumphal procession such as
they used to have for the conquering heroes and generals when they
would come back from their wars. And Christ shall be at the head
of this procession and we among His soldiers and whatnot behind
Him in a display of glorious victory as Paul says, thanks
be to God who gives us the victory Christ. Now next week we'll look
at the two basic things that chapters 10 through 12 of Joshua
show us about this warfare in which we are presently engaged.
Okay, you're dismissed.