Now, we'll read beginning in verse 19. Then Joshua said to Achan, my
son, give glory to the Lord, the God of Israel, and give him
the praise. Tell me what you have done. Do
not hide it from me. Achan replied, it is true. I
have sinned against the Lord, the God of Israel. This is what
I have done. When I saw in the plunder a beautiful
robe from Babylonia, 200 shekels of silver and a wedge of gold
weighing 50 shekels, I coveted them and took them. They are
hidden in the ground inside my tent with the silver underneath."
Now, the story in Joshua 7 is of the attempt of the Jews to
take the city of Ai. They had already been successful
in destroying, well destroying is the right word, destroying
Jericho. They killed everyone in it except for Rahab and her
household. They took from it all the valuable
spoil to put in the Lord's treasury. And then they put the city to
fire, burned everything that would burn. So there was nothing
left of Jericho except a heap of rubble. Well, then they had
to go to Ai, which was, in my understanding, a much smaller
city. They went to that city, taking only 30,000 men. They
didn't figure they needed to have the whole army there. After
all, it's a small city. And they got routed. And 36 Israelite men died in
the process. And so Joshua had prostrated
himself before the Lord, asking Him, why? You said you'd give
us this land, and now we run before the face of our enemies.
That's going to bring shame to your name. It certainly disgraces
us. what's happening. And the Lord
told Joshua, he said, why are you down there on your face?
Get up. You know, there's, there's been a violation. The people
have broken the covenant. And while at this point, um,
the specific person who had violated the covenant had not been pointed
out. Um, nor was even the specific sin
involved. It hadn't been pointed out. Yet
he tells Joshua, you gather the people together. And by this,
I suppose he meant primarily the representatives of the people,
you know. But he started going, you know, tribe by tribe, then
family by family, and finally narrowed it down to Achan. You
know, they often discerned the mind of the Lord by casting lots.
As the proverb says, the lot is cast in the lap, but the whole
disposing thereof is of the Lord. And so the Lord was using that
method of pointing out who the guilty party was, and the lot
finally fell on Achan. And what we just read was what Jericho, excuse me, Joshua said
to Achan. Now, this morning, last week,
we kind of looked over the entire chapter, and we noted that God
will have himself held in respect and reverence, and his holiness
acknowledged among his people, or he will visit them with discipline.
Now, it's never truly punishment. Punishment by, I mean, the word
itself, the P-U-N, indicates punitive. In other words, it
is designed to exact a payment or a penalty for a crime done. Now, such, God never takes such
actions as punishment against his people. Why? He's already
done that in Christ. The punishment aspect of dealing
with sin has already been accomplished with Christ, so much so that
Paul could say, there is therefore now no condemnation to them who
are in Christ Jesus. Full stop. No condemnation, therefore
no punishment. But he does exercise chastening,
which is when he brings affliction into our lives in order to make
us more purely devoted to him. You hear the word chaste in there.
And then we have the word discipline, which is not necessarily a response
to doing something wrong. It is simply training to prepare
us for what's coming ahead. The thing is, when it comes to
temporal actions, often punishment, chastening, and discipline, they
look the same and feel the same. But the difference is in the
purpose that they serve. Now, God brings chastening to
individuals. He brings chastening to churches
when they do the kind of thing that Achan had done here. Now, the particular sin of Achan is
that he took that which had been devoted to the Lord and kept
it for himself. Look back at Joshua 6, verse
19, when instruction is being given on what to do in the battle
against Jericho. He says in verse 19 of Joshua
6, all the silver and gold and the articles of bronze and iron
are sacred to the Lord and must go into his treasury. Now we know that the, as the
psalmist said, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. So it's not as though there are
some things in this world that belong to the Lord and some things
that do not belong to the Lord. Everything belongs to Him, but
there are certain things which He has pointed out as specifically
belonging to Him. They belong to Him in a way that
the rest of the world does not belong to Him. And this is the
practical, if that's the right way to put it, this is what is
meant by holiness. Something that has been specifically
set apart to God in a special way. And the holy things of God are
not to be used for common purposes. See, a lot of people think that
the opposite of holy is wicked. No, it's not. The opposite of
holy is common. Holy, set apart. Common, just
part of the bunch. Give you an example of that.
Do you remember the story of the handwriting on the wall when
Belteshazzar, or Belshazzar, The king, he gave this, you know,
one of the kind of parties that they would give back then. And
they were usually not only very sumptuous, but very lascivious. You know, when kings and stuff
would have their big festivals and all. And in the midst of
all of this, and every bit of what he was doing was wicked.
I mean, that whole party was designed to be as wicked as it
could be. In the middle of that party,
he told them, go get the vessels, the various pitchers, bowls,
pots, things like that, that we got out of the temple in Jerusalem,
and bring them, and we'll use them in this party. And when
he did that, then the fingers of a man's hand appeared and
wrote that, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upherson, you have been weighed
and found wanting. and the kingdom will be taken
from you. That's how it was interpreted to him. Now, why did the Lord
all at once get upset? This was already a horribly wicked,
wretched party going on. And the Lord didn't do a thing. Why did the Lord take action?
Because Belshazzar took God's holy things and brought them
in to a common party. Used them just as you would any
other pot, bowl, dish, or whatever. Now, here these things have been
devoted to God, therefore they were holy to God. And this Akin
fella, when he was in there, and let's not be too hard on
Akin, you know, we haven't done this probably because we've never
been confronted with this. Imagine that, you just marched
around the city, one time every day for six days, seven times
on the seventh day, they blew the trumpets, they gave a shout,
and the walls just fell down. And the army rushed in, and it
wasn't a battle in the sense of, we've come to conquer you,
they just put everybody to the sword. They were already defeated,
and then they're going around through all the rubble, finding
what's valuable. Man, if I saw a brick of gold
laying there, let me tell you, come on, the Lord's getting lots
of gold. He won't miss this. And who knows, maybe what he
kept was only a small percentage of all that he had gathered,
and he put most of it in the Lord's treasury. We're really
good at compromising. And I would remind you, Achan
does not represent the unbeliever. He represents a believer. And
the people of God here, the whole house of Israel, you know, it
represents churches and the whole church at large or whatever.
And here the actions of this one man had brought disaster
upon the whole group. You would think, if you listen
to modern religion and its views of what constitutes really bad
sin, you'd think, well, Achen must have been a homosexual or
an abortionist for God to do such a thing. No. Those things
are horrible, don't get me wrong. And in a sense, both of those
touch something which God has called holy. But the problem with what Achen
did was not the value of the things he stole, it was who he
stole from. I remember Henry Mahan making a
point one time. He said, there are no small sins
because there is no small God to sin against. See, all sin
is against God. You can offend me, You can do
things I don't like, but within the context of how the scripture
presents sin, you really can't sin against me. Why? I'm not
the lawgiver, that's why. I'm not the one who says what's
right and wrong. So you can commit an offense
against me, but do you remember when David first took Uriah's
wife, and then to cover it up, took his life. And when he was
confronted with it by the prophet Nathan, you know, and he made
confession, you know, I mean, he said, I've sinned against
the Lord, you know, he just admitted, you know, didn't try to excuse
himself. He didn't say, yeah, I realized what I did was wrong,
but good grief, she was out there in public where I could see her.
You know, what's a guy saying? He didn't do any of that, just
I've sinned against the Lord. And then he wrote Psalm 51 in
response to that sin. And he said, against you and
you alone have I sinned and done this evil in your sight. Now,
we might look at that and say, well, wait a minute. What about
Uriah? Didn't you say he sinned against
Uriah? No, because Uriah is not God.
What he did to Uriah was wrong, and Uriah had a just cause against
him within human courts. But sin, it is sin precisely
because it is against God. And this fella Achan, when he
took the gold, it was not that it was gold, it was not that
it was silver, it was not because it was a beautiful robe from
Babylon. It was because those things belonged
to the Lord. and he took them for himself. He took the holy and made it
common. Let's note some of the things
that the Bible, or that God, you know, says is holy in the
scriptures. He speaks about the holy convocations,
his Sabbaths, wherein no work was to be done. And of course,
this has reference to the rest that Christ has brought to us
by accomplishing, finishing all the labor and work necessary
to bring about our salvation. God speaks of a holy habitation,
which is His church that was purchased by His own blood. In Exodus, He speaks of holy
men, referring to the priesthood, which pictures the priesthood
of every believer. He speaks of the holy garments
given to the priest, which are pictures of the garments of salvation
given to every child of God. The pristine and perfect robe
of Christ's righteousness. God speaks of an atonement that's
most holy unto the Lord. And this refers to the work of
our Lord Jesus Christ as he poured out his soul unto death in punishment
of our sins and in satisfaction of God's judgment. In Leviticus,
he speaks of his people being holy unto him because he has
severed them, that is he's elected them, set them apart from other
people. In the book of Ephesians, it
says that the elect were chosen precisely for purposes of being
holy. You know, this is such an indictment
of what goes on under the guise of evangelism in modern religion.
because in modern evangelism, I say modern, I'm thinking mostly
of the kind of stuff that went on in my youth, but I figure
that similar things are going on now. But most religions look
at the world as a group of undifferentiated people. And we're going out there
trying to make people holy. Where the Bible tells us that
we were chosen to be holy, not to become holy, to be holy. You realize that one of God's
elect, before he ever believes, is holy unto the Lord. And in our efforts in evangelism,
and I I mean, we should do everything we can. Paul said this about
himself. He said, I'm all things to all men that by all means
I might save some. This is not supposed to dent
our efforts in the least in pleading with people and preaching the
gospel, doing whatever God puts in our hand to do. Hoping and praying that people
will hear and believe the gospel and be saved. But here's what
we know is going to happen. As we go out and preach, there
are all these people who, so far as we can tell, they're all
the same. They're just the common people.
But out of that common group, God has chosen a people. He has drawn a line of grace,
as it were. and there are the chosen here
and there are the unchosen. The chosen are holy. They belong
to God in a way that the unchosen don't. And so when we're going
out there preaching, we're preaching to everybody because we can't
see that line. Holiness is not evident from
the outside. What we do is, the scripture
talks about that we've been called with a call of holiness. And
when the preacher preaches, he's calling to the holy. He's calling
to those who have been set apart. And I guess one way to compare
it, it is like a dog whistle. You know, if you want to get
your dog's attention and not disturb the neighbors, you can
get a dog whistle. And a dog whistle, sounds at
such a high frequency, people can't hear it. So you're not
gonna disturb the neighbor. But dogs can hear higher frequencies
than we can, so they hear it. And so that whistle, if you're,
just to keep in, just to stay in keeping with the point I'm
trying to make, imagine those dogs, you know, they're the holy
ones, you know, and then all us people, we're the other ones.
And God, by the gospel, blows the so-called dog whistle. And
the dogs hear it. Nobody else does. So while, I mean, I can't help
it. I wish that everybody who heard
me preach the gospel would believe it the first time they heard
me preach it and lay hold of Jesus Christ by grace through
faith and be saved. That's how I wish it would happen.
But I know what's going to happen. I'll keep right on preaching.
I'll keep blowing that dog whistle the best I know how. And the
dogs will come. and the others will act like
nothing has been said. Holy people, the elect. He speaks of his holy temple,
which is the church. He speaks of his holy one in
the Psalms, referring to Christ. He speaks of his holy promises,
referring to the covenant of promise. In Luke, he calls his
holy promises a holy covenant. He calls all his works holy and
righteous. It is said that the marriage
bed is to be holy and undefiled. And I think there we get a good
example again of what the word holy means. You know, we've just
been raised to think that holy means a particularly high level
of morality and righteousness. Now, there are some uses of the
word in which that would be implied, but that's not the meaning of
the word. When it says that the marriage bed is holy, what does
it mean? It's set apart as part and parcel of a marriage. And it's... For lack of a better
way to put it, the marriage bed is to be set apart so that nobody
is in it except the two who are married. It's set apart for them
and nobody else. The bed itself is just a bed. That's all it is. No different than your neighbor's
bed except this. It's set apart for you and your
spouse and nobody else. But this marriage bed that's
holy and undefiled, it says that the physical love
between a husband and wife is holy because it pictures what
marriage is designed to picture, the unity and oneness of the
relationship between Christ and His church. Now, I've said that
the great sin of Achan was to take those things which are holy
unto the Lord and take them to himself for his own use, for
common use. He just wanted to be rich, let's
face it. He wanted to look good. He wanted to have maybe the best
robe in his family. Well, Achan stole these things
and hid them in his tent. That which God had declared holy
and consecrated to himself, Achan, declared to be holy and consecrated to himself. Now there are many things represented,
or several things represented in the various elements that
were stolen. And depending on which scriptures
you refer to, they can represent different things. Gold can represent
faith. Gold also represents royalty.
Silver, you know, the redemption price of a man was to be paid
in silver, so it pictures the sacrifice of Christ, which is
our redemption. Well, here's what happens. And
we see it going on certainly in broad Christendom. And we
must confess that apart from being restrained by God, we would
do it as well. All these great holy things,
Christ, his church, Christ's sacrifice, Christ's glory, Christ's
blood, all these things, we would take them as our own and glorify
ourselves with them if we were left to ourselves. I'll give you, here's a good
example. I just watched a portion of a video, it's all I could
take last night. But they were trying to, they're answering
a question. Does the new birth precede faith?
Well, these people, they're anti-Calvinistic, you know, and so be it. But they
tried to argue that it wasn't. And I wanted to bang my head
that righteousness comes before the new birth, or before life,
I'm sorry. Faith comes before the new life,
the new birth. And I wanted to pound my head,
you know, but that hurt, so I didn't do it. But here's what they're doing,
faith, holy faith. Paul says, building yourselves
up on your most holy faith. Not like you've got holy faith
and then, you know, a little more holy faith and the most
holy faith. No, all the faith of God's people. is most holy
faith. Why is it most holy? It is directed
entirely, set apart entirely to God. We look to no one other
than God in Christ for our salvation. It becomes an unholy thing if
we begin to spread the faith around. Or we make it an unholy
thing if we act as though that faith by which we lay hold of
the promises of God is a common thing among men, and all that
men have to do is decide to, quote, put their faith in Jesus. Now, people who have not been
born again, yes, they have faith. They believe things they have
not seen. But saving faith is not merely
a matter that we take that faith and turn it to the Lord Jesus
Christ. Why? Because the faith we have
before we are born again is simply a product of the flesh, and there's
nothing good in the flesh. The faith by which we lay hold
of Jesus Christ is the natural outworking of a spirit made alive
by the new birth. We are given a new life, and
from that new life, we express a new and different kind of faith
than that which we had before. We don't merely change the object
of our faith. We have a different kind of faith.
It's a spiritual thing. But men want to take the credit
for their faith. They will take that which is
holy unto the Lord and make it common by saying that Jesus Christ
died equally for every human being. Now consider that for a minute. And how do they do that? Well,
I can understand some do it by misunderstanding certain portions
of Scripture which, outside their context, might look like it's
saying that Jesus Christ shed his blood equally for every person
in the world. A closer study of those scriptures,
you can see they don't say that. Nonetheless, what they are doing
is saying, okay, the blood of Christ, and they'll even picture
it this way. They'll say, you have to accept it. Accept it? You can't accept the
blood of Christ. You know why? It was never offered
to you. You can only accept things that
are offered to you. The scriptures say that Jesus
Christ offered himself without spot to God. God's the only one in a position
to accept or reject the blood of Christ. Well, yes, but you've
got to apply it to yourself. Well, you'll find nowhere in
the scriptures that there is a commandment or even a picture
or illustration of a person applying the blood to themselves. And
you might say, well, what about on Passover when they would paint
the blood on the doors? Well, wait a minute, the Father
did that. as the priest of the household. He took that blood
and he put it on. And you know what? It wasn't
the father's life that was at risk. It was his son's, or his
firstborn son. You see, in the Passover, the blood was not applied by
the one who benefited from it. Christ's blood. is holy, not
only by virtue of the fact that Christ himself is holy, but it's
holy in that it was entirely offered to God for his acceptance
or rejection as an atonement slash redemption. And it was
offered for a specific people. And it is not as though up in
heaven there is a pot full of the blood of Christ, and you
can go there and apply it to yourself somehow. No. Offered before the Lord and accepted
by Him. Well, I could go on for 15 more
minutes, but then Well, we'd have a bigger crowd by then,
but I think we'll close it up. The point is, Achan took something
that belonged especially to the Lord, took it for himself. He
took that which was designed for a specific purpose and used
it for a common purpose. And a couple of examples of that
in the New Testament are when Ananias and Sapphira They sold
some property, and they brought it to the disciples. And what
was happening is a lot of people were selling property, and they'd
bring everything they got for the property, give it to the
apostles to be distributed to the poor, or maintain the work
of the ministry, that kind of thing. And Ananias and Sapphira
wanted to get in on that. They wanted the glory of being,
you know, saying that, you know, we sold
our property and we gave everything to the Lord. And that's what
they told Peter. But the Holy Spirit had let Peter
know that they had held back some for themselves. Now, when
they said, this is all we got for the sale, what they were
saying is all the money from the sale has been consecrated
to the Lord. It's holy unto him. But what
did they do? They kept some of it. and they died in consequence
of that. Ananias and Sapphira and then
the people of Corinth who, when they observed the Lord's table,
the rich folk, they would observe the Lord's table in conjunction
with a regular meal. which was called the Love Feast.
And what was happening is the wealthy people would bring all
their sumptuous foods and their fine wines or whatever would
pass for fine wines in those days, and they all sat by themselves. And then you'd have over here
the poor. Maybe couldn't bring anything.
And they made a division in the church. Well, that Lord's table
It is, in many respects, a holy convocation. We're going to be
observing it here shortly. Now, it's a holy thing. That
doesn't mean we can't enjoy it. That doesn't mean that we suddenly
have to, you know, talk real quiet and all that. That's not
what holiness is about. But one thing it does mean, we
don't change its meaning. We don't make it about us. We don't make it a way to glorify
ourselves over anybody else within the congregation. You know, the
Lord's table was initially observed by our Lord on that last Passover
night. He took one piece of bread and
broke it and passed it around. And they all drank from the same
cup. It just got passed around. What was that indicating? The
unity of the church. We are all united together by
being united to one person whose body was broken and whose blood
was shed. Now, you know, our modern sense
of being sanitary and all that, you know, we use little different
cups for everybody, don't want to pass around disease and all
that. But still, we all understand it all came from one bottle.
But if we divide, what are we saying? that Christ is not sufficient
and the same for all his people. And that's what the Corinthians
did. And you know what the result was? Some of them died. You mean the Lord killed some
people because they did not observe the Lord's table properly? Not
because they didn't obey the rules, but because the way they
observed it exalted themselves. rather than Christ, and put their
brethren at a disadvantage. Well, we'll be discussing