One Hour. One Book: Joshua

and unfortunately in some curriculum some written by Christians you get into this thing well Joshua just sort of Bynes over the people as they took over the land know something incredibly important is happening Moses hands off to Josh the mantle of leadership and has him walk across the river and walk into the land the fathers were given and a transition is about to happen let me suggest that in order to understand the setting of it you have to understand the bigger frame as a big picture guy remember that the earliest picture we have of humanity sociologically is the hunter-gatherer followed by the agricultural frame followed by the industrial revolution followed by the fourth wave which you're a part of which is called the Information Age and you have to understand that when you look into the Bible the Bible gives you the beginnings of how God deals with one nation but it doesn't start with Israel it actually starts in Genesis with God's pursuit of the world and then over the you know that there's an introduction or a prologue in 1 1 2 to 3 followed by a series of Scrolls that begin with the statement these are the generations of Tola doped this is the story of and you'll see a series of scrolls and as you move from chapter 11 middle of chapter 11 into the end of the book it's how God not only worked with mankind but how he decided to fall in love the father in heaven falls in love with one particular people that he says he will have an enduring relationship with forever and in that love story of the father who turns his attention to a people we have to see the formation of that people so we have this kind of from the standpoint of the Israelites they start off as a family that has a certain rabbit Ness to them they become huge okay they start off with this family that grows like rabbits they're unbelievable and they end up in and by the end of Genesis we end up with a story of Joseph who has been that one who was the dead son that rose again the one who dropped off Jacobs radar but then was brought back to him and you have a motif that sort of forms in Genesis when we get to AXA Dassault it starts with there came about a pharaoh who knew not Joseph and in Exodus one two three you have the story of the rise of how God deals with the problem and you know that God never deals with a problem by forming a committee so what he does in one two three is he sculpts the answer to the problem in a little baby boy who is called by the Egyptians Moses one who's drawn out of the water and Moses ends up trying to do God's will his way and in four five and six Moses goes to the Midianites seminary in the desert on the run picks up a wife which is what you do in seminary and then in chapters six through 12 he moves through a time when he comes back without the wife but with his brother and he stands before Pharaoh and ten plagues fall on Egypt you understand already that the point of those plagues was very simple that the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob is stronger than the gods of the Egyptians so it wasn't just merely that God could turn on the plagues because by the way some of Pharaoh's guys in a very unhelpful way could also duplicate the plagues what they couldn't do was shut them off and that's what the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob did by the time you get to chapter 12 you have Israelites leaving lock stock and bagels heading for the wilderness and all of that thing that is happening is happening because by now the Egyptians are throwing money at them please just leave after the death of the firstborn from 12 to 15 they find themselves making their way toward the sea of reeds and their back is to the sea they can't escape and Pharaoh has changed his mind brings out his chariots and God opens up the water and by 15 what you have is a stone three of Moses singing and Miriam breakdancing in the place coming apart and then somebody checks the canteens and realizes they're out of water it's spring they have had the worst travel agent experience you can ever have they sent you to the desert without water bottles from 15 to 19 there's the journey of the 50 days from Passover to the coming to the place of the law so one 219 really tells the story of there came about a pharaoh who knew not Joseph all the way to the point where they're standing in the shadow of Horeb or standing in the shadow of Sinai when they're there God has them cordon off the people put them all in one place with one Accord then the mighty weird weather comes down the wind and the fire and the trumpet of God and Moses goes up for a forty day vacation and nobody hears from them meanwhile back down at the bottom of the hill while Moses is getting chapters 20 21 22 23 the the part of the civil code of law the people down below are running out of you know patients and they're deciding we really need some kind of localization or temple because we had all kinds of temples in Egypt and here we are stuck in this desert with all these tents yeah we got gold but we can't do anything with it there's no mall to spend it in and so they decide they want to put together the golden calf experience and Moses comes down out of the mountain with Joshua going wait a minute I think we're under attack no that's not the sound of an attack that's the sound of a celebration let's get down there Moses comes down with his tablets he's overcome with grief he smashes tablets he calls together the Levites they gird on their swords and 3,000 people die Pentecost one wind fire noise truth of God 3,000 you'll pick it up again in Pentecost 2 and the motif of the same things in Acts chapter 2 much later now the last part of the book 25 actually 24 will be the wearing of the Covenant and then 25 to 40 of Exodus will tell the story of the tabernacle but what it really is is the pattern of worship what it really is is that I want you to organize your camp around one center Square and what's in that center Square the meeting place with God just to the east of it the leader Moses Aaron the families of the high priests and then you will be in a clockwise formation east south west north located around it and at the center of your camp are the silver trumpets that will call you to battle those silver trumpets will be replaced in the medieval period by the church bells which will be the sound of the wafting of it's time to do something I've told you before that one of the ways you can mark the changes sociologically in Europe of people is that prior to the rise of rationalism the center of all squares was the church the Duomo the the cathedral but after that time with the rise of humanist rationalism the the center square gets taken over by the town hall and you can almost rate when a city was built accordingly or when it was last adjusted according to what's at its heart so the pattern of the understanding of the community comes from the civil code of law now we also saw along with that that Molly was up on the mountain Moses received from God not only the civil code of law or how to get along for 40 years on the camping trip but he also received the Criminal Code of law your hearts broke get a goat you're going to need it something's wrong inside of you and so the series of offerings that are given in the first part of Leviticus eventually yield their way to the mill owee more the consecration offering that we talked about that's the one with the blood on the ear and on the right thumb and on the right toe and then it moves its way in chapters 8 and 9 into a series of understanding of the consecration of the priesthood and the inauguration these people that were supposed to stand between God and man these who would invite us into worship and these who would help us deal with the Criminal Code of law and deal with our sin and that's in chapters 8 9 and from from from really from chapter 10 all the way through the rest of Leviticus you're gonna find that the application of criminal law is explored and it's attachment to the sacrificial system bottom line is the atonement system is spelled out when I say at element you should think what word covering so the idea was I you can abate the wrath of God by covering up the sin by acknowledging with your heart that this animal represents me and my sin substitutional atonement and the bottom line is that the animal dying didn't take away your sin your belief in the animal dying abated the wrath of God for a time that has turned his face away for a time and we looked in Hebrews and we carefully studied that that is not the economy that we're under we used to be under an economy of atonement now we're under an economy of cleansing somebody tell me what the difference is your sins are not covered they are washed away they're gone not just the ones you already did but God who exists outside of time doesn't make a distinction between tomorrow and yesterday and he looks at you and sees you through the eyes of a perfect Savior who has taken responsibility for having you make entry to the Father and present your prayers because of the blood of Jesus that has washed away all of your sin so the atonement system is lacking but it's lacking not because God didn't know it was going to be lacking but because God had made a promise all the way back in genesis 3:15 that there was a saviour coming so he set up a temporary system on the way to sending setting up a permanent system this by the way is a methodology God repeats then he sets up a temporary people in the wilderness on the way to bringing them to a permanent settlement this is the way God does he sets up a model and then he builds the city okay so what we have that is Genesis Exodus Leviticus we also looked at the Book of Numbers which follows Exodus actually Leviticus is a freeze-frame of the criminal code of law but what follows is in Exodus you have the first four chapters 20 21 22 23 of Civil Code of law how to get along on the camping trip and then in numbers you have the other chapters the other six chapters of civil code of law who can tell me where they are first ones in numbers five second one six third one 15 the rest of them 28 to 30 and those are your six chapters of civil code that are found in numbers that match with the civil code that's found in Exodus and the purpose of numbers is for ten chapters you're in the shadow of Sinai you're spending the time preparing and taking a census of the people because Moses has cut his teeth in Midian as a shepherd and the first thing a shepherd does before you go off on the journey is count the sheep and you're gonna have to counting's one at the beginning of the story of numbers and one at the end of the story of numbers so that there's an organization of the people now that's the that's the physical reality but we spent three hundred and fifty pages of notes to say that there's a few spiritual realities in the background of numbers right God is doing more than just counting heads he's also giving them the foundational principles that are going to help them to understand how to organize a society you and I take for granted a great many things we take for granted a privacy that didn't exist until modernity people under a slave society did everything in front of other people they just did and in fact we take for granted a number of things that that we don't necessarily understand at the heart of the tabernacle was what what was the important feature to God of the sacrifices okay it's true that at the heart of the holy of holies was the Word of God the gold box that's true but what was from God's perspective up in heaven what was he enjoying of the tabernacle the smell and for most of us we in our modern life discount smell but you have to understand in the history of humanity there was something that people believed about the smell in the air bad air was actually a big problem all the way through the Middle Ages if you stole on market day the handkerchief of a wealthy person in a medieval city that was a capital offense they killed you for it why they put smelling oils on their handkerchief and they walked through the streets where there's human waste and animal waste and market days is a cacophony of sounds and a very large number of smells some of which are good but most of which are not and they would walk through and they'd hold this to their face and this was a way they protected themselves you have to understand that in antiquity smell is one of those features of a society that you and I don't think about much why because we get in our own car we have our own air conditioning system we live of an individuality that is unprecedented in the history of the world I want to put you back in a camp I want you to be surrounded by people you sneeze and people three tents over No you throw up and the guy in the next tent knows you're sick everybody knows everything about everybody it's almost like the dorms you're living in seriously hi you know I have spent some time there and I do know that there is a certain blessing of the separation wall between the girls and the boys okay there just is now the first 10 chapters enter the preparation in the census and then you get to the center section and that's moving from Mountain to mountain and and really from chapter 11 they get the wagons ho going and as they move the wagons from Mount Sinai the key critical pivotal chapter of the book of numbers is what chapter 13 and it's pivotal for what reason that's the choice and they chose the 40-year plan B and Moses wept and between 11 and 20 you're gonna see the worst time in Moses life it's the time when everybody thinks that they know a better way to lead than the leader and everybody thinks he's not entirely qualified and we're not really sure god why you called him to lead and he agrees with them and multiple times says god I know what you're doing but I don't think I have the qualifications to lead and God brings him back over and over you have the two things that are necessary the revelation of my truth and the power of my presence so get over yourself we're doing this together now we're at Mount Nebo you're across from Jericho high above the Dead Sea and Moses views the promised land and in Deuteronomy 34 tells the story of him viewing the promised land and actually he does while he's up there take the opportunity to review now what is now called the constitutional code of law Moses is not the forward thinker God is but God Clues Moses in that the Civil Code of law isn't all you need to settle down a society and so when we got to do Romney what he does is he uses a the outline of a suzerainty treaty of vassal king treaty and he he starts to give a review of the journey and he says I'd like to do a sermon today on where we've been now for some of you you'd be sitting there going well wait a minute why do we need to go where we've been well it's exactly the reason I'm doing this this morning I'm walking you through where we've been because for some of you you went boy I didn't think that was an important part of the story now I do because the teacher went over it so it must be something I'm going to be quizzed on okay so he goes over the journey and that in chapters 5 to 26 he gives us what are called the 15 codes of constitutional law the 15 codes of constitutional law will break out not just what's civil it reminds you of civil code of law but that's not what it is it's when you get into the land when you get out of those tents and get into fortified cities when you build a city this is how to deal with everything from a well to warfare this is how to deal with women and this is how to deal with with criminal negligence this is how to deal with overt rebellion and mutiny against God these are the things you're going to need to do as a society these are capital crimes these are not capital crimes and then he'll predicate all that on the bat the law of the balances or law of the scales what is the law of the scales I for nigh what does that mean let the punishment equal the crime it doesn't mean retribution it doesn't license revenge vengeance is mind what it does is says please don't make a standard of law where you cut off someone's head for stealing an orange make sure the punishment and the crime balance why because at the heart of the constitutional code is the sense of justice not not the ever changing ephemeral sense of fairness that changes every time society changes what's fair is all in how you frame it but justice what does justice look like okay and so you'll find that in the codes of law then you have this the confirmation of the Covenant showing that God had a people that the father continued to be in love with this people and that they were confirming their marriage as it were as they come into the land and what's important then is Moses will summarize in great last words his commandment to the people which has things like when you get into the land and you're taking over the people and you're running out the Canaanites and you're cutting them down and you're smashing their cities stop stop I want you to file a single-file line up to the mountain of eval and garrison and I want you to PUC people on both sides of the mountain and I want you to do a little cantata I'd like them to stand up here and pronounce the blessings of following God and I would like all of you people to say oh man and then I'd like them to go up and say the curses of denying this the the constitutional code of law and the congregation should sing oh man and I want you to all come together and have a ceremony that recall you're covenant agreement and then we find out that that's what they do in Joshua right all right what's important here is this is the Torah this is it this is the backbone of who God says he is to the people of Israel you know me by what I care about then you get to these next set of books and unfortunately in some curriculum some written by Christians you get into this thing well Joshua just sort of binds over the people as they took over the land know something incredibly important is happening Moses hands off to Josh the mantle of leadership and has him walk across the river and walk into the land the fathers were given and a transition is about to happen see you started off as a family then you became this camp then you became these slaves then you became these Wanderers and now the transition is settling down and actually getting control of a society can we all agree the Christians do a whole lot better under the boat of a society rather than being in charge of it whenever we take over we are at our worst as long as we're victims we can be the kind of rebel army teaching what what you ought to do to have a relationship with God but as soon as we codify into law and become the guy who's both the the priest at the church and the guy who's running civil government the whole thing runs amok so a transition is occurring in Joshua Joshua has to understand things that Moses never had to deal with Moses could instruct the people while they were basically isolated except for an occasional Midianite or Amalekite basically most of the pastoral leadership of Moses was without them living near anybody now of course I told you they're only a couple days away but it's a long hot walk okay so basically they they're they're sort of isolated there's a time early on in the formation of the community where God wants them untouched by the world josh is going to have to plop that thing right into a world and Joshua and judges and Ruth are the story of a transition it's a powerful transition let me make this personal for some of you some of you grew up in a home school environment you went to a local church and you had your you know mom or dad or somebody teach you and you basically learned in the confines of your home you have passed through this wilderness experience where you were basically isolated from most points of view not that you didn't see the occasional movie you shouldn't have her snickered at a YouTube that was ungodly I'm not saying that you were like you know pure as the driven snow and floated above the earth what I'm saying is that you've had a relatively simple exposure to the world outside now we take we take a Tiffany and we drop her into a State University and now all of a sudden her life is over run by pagans everywhere she looks as a pagan philosophy and a pagan ideology she'll get it in class she'll get it in textbooks she'll get it in the alternative readings she'll get it in roommates she'll get it in Friday nights she'll get it in parties she'll get it in sororities she'll get everything about life will be inundated by paganism that's Joshua judges and Ruth what it is is the preparation under Joshua to take and and deposit believers into the land surrounded by unbelievers they weren't supposed to be but that's what happened then in judges you're going to see how having the boat in the water is fine but having the water in the boat isn't and they take on too much water and start going down and seven cycles of sin play through the story of Judges now we're going to get into the text I promise I'm dancing around it but we're going to get into it but I need you to understand the importance of what you're looking at Ruth then sort of pulls off and gives you a little personal story that God is at work that before Naomi knew it God took from her hands Elimelech MOT alone hailey own took her sons took her husband took her farm left her without anything but a friend ray lute Ruth and she comes back kicking to get Orpah and ray oats leave me alone because that's what we do when we're hurt and then she comes back to Bethlehem and there God threw Ruth who says Oh know where you go I will go your God will be my god lady I'm hanging on your leg and I'm not moving she will drag Ruth back and then God will use the unlikely person to do the impossible thing that's the story of the Bible God using the unlikely to do the impossible right so this unlikely Moabite us will be invited and what's the end of the story the end of the story will be that there's a kinsman redeemer a redemption of God she never could have seen coming in Naomi's personal biography and the end of the story will be because of that God begat through this one this one this one this one down to King David and you would add to it down to King Jesus and the Omi's testimony is bad stuff happens and I don't know why but what I do know is this there was a plan going on before I got here and it's gonna go on after I'm gone and my job is to run my little part of the race without an understanding of where the whole thing goes but what I do know is that God saves and what I do know is that his promises are fulfilled and also what I do know is that my role isn't always fun see that's written into the text my role isn't always about peace prosperity sometimes it's about loss because God can't put in my hands what he wants to be there until he takes out all the other stuff I already have as soon as I wrap my hands around the things that are there it makes it painful when God has to peel my fingers off the things I have come to possess rather than steward and the Lord gets and the Lord takes away and you have another job esque story in the Naomi story but in the time period of Joshua and judges what Ruth does is provides a little bit of hope it's not supposed to be easy it's supposed to be significant let me say it this way your life isn't supposed to be easy it's supposed to be powerful impacting significant because you learned that the Lord gives and the Lord takes away and I'm running my run of the race without a knowledge of what it was before I got here and without a knowledge of where it goes Roberts gonna say something to somebody today and he has no idea that the word fitly spoken that he drops into that person's life is exactly what God wanted him to do if he's walking with God and the Spirit of God is leading him he's gonna speak into the life of somebody else and have no idea where they were five minutes before or where they're gonna be five minutes after stop trying to figure out how God puts the whole thing together just be used of him and let him do the God part and you just do the you part okay Joshua then will grow can I can I make the argument that Joshua is kind of like the book of Acts it's the Acts of the Hebrew Scriptures what is that do you remember that in the book of Acts what's gonna happen God's gonna take a small group of people touched by the Spirit of God energized by the the story that Jesus has cleaned them and has made them a people and that story's gonna get pulled out into a pagan world like a drop of dye in water it's gonna spread out into the pagan world but the problem is it's gonna define a whole new set of problems that they never had do you know how easy the New Testament could be if all we had to do was become Jews would have been a very simple thing do see Moses okay just a cross-reference that's it but when you start dropping a relationship of living God from the life of the Jewish person into a Gentile that was never called to keep a Sabbath or or have a circumcision but was nevertheless supposed to have a dynamic living relationship with God what's he supposed to do the day after he say and so all of a sudden you have this complicated church where this guy has to keep Sabbath because God told him to do it for all his generations and he can't eat him and the other guy never knew anything about Sabbath and Han was his main diet if you lived in Greece or Rome ham was your main diet so now we got to be one in Christ but to in the way we work that out well then we've got in the group males and females and there's rules for males and there's rules for females and how we're going to keep that together and then we've got slaves sitting down and having a love feast together with a senator how is that going to work and what I want you to understand is that Joshua is to the physical people of Israel and the bringing of God into the midst of a pagan world what acts is to the gospel and the bringing of the truth of God into a pagan world there's a pattern so what you're going to see in the book of Joshua is the same kinds of problems for instance you'll get about five chapters in and you're gonna find out that somebody on your team is lying and the end of it will be body bags the Ananias and Sapphira story is the Aiken story part two what I want you to see is that it's not your imagination they line up because their problems are the same all right now let's go to the book of Joshua go to the front flop of Joshua let me take a few minutes and see if we can't make some clarity out of the beginning of this first of all how do we know Joshua wrote it well it's got his name right across the tab yeah but that's not really evidence we do know that in the history of Jewish literature for instance in the mission and Talmud particularly in the Talmud it says that that Joshua wrote these events and that they were followed up by other writings added of Eleazar who is the son of Aaron and Phineas who's the son of Eleazar in other words two high priests and Josh put the book together according to the Talmudic evidence is there any internal evidence that Joshua wrote the book well yeah there is the parts where he says he wrote the book that's that's an important part of it but not only does he have a self claim but if you look at places like Joshua 8:32 or Joshua 2426 Joshua says he wrote parts of the book himself 8:32 is a good place to say that then I want you to notice in places like five one and five six there are references where it will say we did this or us and so you have what seems to be written by Joshua in parts and written by others who are at the time of the events that are happening there are also some vivid descriptions particularly in the first part of the book there are vivid descriptions of the cities now here's my argument see just ride this one out Jericho is one of the cities that is burned is destroyed not burned I is a city that is burned hots or is burned but but I want you to see that when Jericho is destroyed to give a very good description of what Jericho was like before it was destroyed would sort of anticipate that somebody was there before it was destroyed if you're writing the book 500 years later how do you know what it looked like before it fell down okay so that's part of my argument let me just say this there are other things that are in the book that are little tricks this one you might want to write down Joshua 13 references the Phoenician city states as being under the city of Sidon by the time of the Kings tyre had taken over Sidon and had taken over those places so in other words the contemporary politics as is mentioned in Joshua 13 appears to me to be at the time of Joshua not later so at least an element of the book has to be very very early I'm not arguing that Joshua started saying Joshua chapter 1 verse 1 obviously editorial work has been done the question is what part of this is actually the story of Joshua and what's not and here's what I think you're gonna find the bulk of all of the material is Joshua in its orientation at the time chapter 6 verse 25 Rahab still alive in the book so you're thinking that whoever's writing at least chapter 6 verse 25 is anticipating that it's not that long after the events that they're talking about now in Chapter 9 verse 27 9:27 the tabernacle has not found its permanent place at Shiloh yet so it's still a transportable device for much of the period of the Hebrew Scriptures the tabernacle was located at sheilo and like under the stories of 1st Samuel 1 2 3 you had that so anticipate that this book has to be before the time of Samuel or somebody's going to say oh yeah back then that was before it was at Shiloh it's obvious that in 9:27 it's still a moveable tabernacle um there's other things for instance the city of Jerusalem before it was Jerusalem was the city of Jews and second Samuel v David takes over the Jebusite city in Joshua it's still Jebus so if this is written like in the divided Kingdom period much later as some commentators argue I'm wondering why that jabya sites are still there this has got to be an early argument there's a couple of place names for instance in chapter 15 you have the name Betty LA in 59 for Kiryat yam or Kiryat Arba instead of have roan in other words the place names in chapter 15 are still the earlier Canaanite names not the later Hebrew names you would think if it was written later it would have the later Hebrew names now where does where does Joshua fit in the Hebrew Canon what what part okay we know that these genesis exodus leviticus numbers deuteronomy are the torah then you begin a period of what are called the early prophets Nevi'im rishonim we shown like rosh like head Nevi'im na VIU's pop prophet the early prophets why would joshua be linked together with early prophets i mean that doesn't seem like it should be there in fact joshua through 2nd kings is really called the former prophets or the early prophets and then you end up with isaiah through Malachi which are the Navi imahara named the later prophets or the after prophets what why are they why is he considered a prophet any thoughts he took God's Word to people and in fact he does stand up and give full out preaching prophecy from God to the people but remember prophecy in the scripture doesn't only mean cool stuff about the future nobody else knows unless God told me it also means God's view of the news the prophecy is is a bestowed title by God of a person who becomes the anchor for the news from God's viewpoint that's what a prophet is in other words just like ABC gives you a little thing or CNN and makes you an anchor this is God's anchor of the news Joshua is important because God sculpted him out to do the transition from camping in the wilderness to set a you know settlement or sedentary lifestyle and when he's doing that he's got to have a strong view of God's view of the news one of the things I want to pick up the Tiffany said though is that as incredibly helpful is to remember if you're gonna go out there and lead people in such a time as to be killing other people and destroying a higher society than the one you're bringing in you better have a very clear understanding of the word of God and know that God has called you to do that Josh can't get up there and waver about whether or not they're supposed to be doing this guy's this book is bloody this book is hard what what God was asking them to do was difficult and I want I don't want to spiritualize it but I do want you to understand something the book of Acts that brought the message of Jesus to the world condemned most people that was given in front of and so it will be from you as well it's an aroma of life to those who believe but it's an aroma of death to those who reject it and so you have to understand when you walk out with the message you're gonna give a message of Jesus Christ to people and you're gonna do it in a winsomeness and a loving way but most people aren't going to follow the fact that some people will will show the grace of God in your life day after day but if you think that what we're setting you up to do is walk out there and become rich and famous by doing this you don't know what the kingdom is about that's not the kingdom we're preaching we're preaching a kingdom this when I when my daughter went to high school in Jerusalem she came home one day I saw her kind of pensively sitting there looking at something I said what's the matter and she said I know the message that we are preaching but if the message we are preaching is true every friend I have in high school if they die today is lost because she was the Christian kid in her 2,000 kids at school it's very obvious in Jerusalem because they vet rather defiantly tell you they don't want Jesus and don't talk to them about Jesus and the bottom line is you gotta understand that if you're gonna do this and think we're going to go out there and people are just going to come running to Christ there will be moments when that happens because the spirit of god has been stirring in a people but that's not the norm the norm is that the majority of people are falling as a result of this message and that's what makes it hard that's what grips your heart you're gonna sit in a village and look at people and they're lost and there's an you you can preach the gospel but you can't make them listen to it you can't you can try to get to not be an obstacle you can try to say it in a language they can hear it but you can't make you can't save anybody that's God's job and I would just remind you that God had exactly two kids put him in a garden and was over to okay he had to create a salvation story to get any of them back it's not just about your technique or how you do it it's about the deep desire of man to mutiny if we know that about 966 Solomon started the temple and we know that first Kings chapter 6 tells you that it had been 430 years since they had been in Egypt to the time that this happened you can backdate to 1446 1445 the Exodus this is after that so a good place to put this I could rather complicated ly put it together for you but a good place to put this would be right around 13 99 1,400 okay BCE and the important thing is if you get down to the time it's going to take 20-30 years to do this work of Joshua and here's what I want you to see that means that this thing's gonna be written down somewhere around between $13.99 and 1350 alright interestingly enough a couple things we know about that time period one of them is that Pharaoh Amenhotep the third and Pharaoh Thutmose the fourth were the Pharaohs that were sitting on the throne in Egypt and we do know that one of them follows up and writes in fact Amenhotep writes a series of letters called the Amarna letters I'm not trying to burden you with this I'm just trying to give you for the guy who's gonna walk into the university classroom in a year hell this was also much later that in the Amarna letters they mentioned some of the names of the tribal peoples of Israel 1350 in other words by 1350 we have an Egyptian correlating text that says Israel's in the land and that's important because obviously by mentioning a couple of the tribes they mentioned Asher they mentioned Reuben if that weren't true we would have a hard time correlating this look if somebody's gonna come in and take over a country do you think the next door neighbor might write something about it and they did and we do have that by the way you get all the way down about 1350 and just following that is the very famous King Tut of the King Tut exhibitions he'll be down closer to 1300 but he's actually after the time Joshua's come into the land the complaint the Egyptians are writing about during that period is that they're getting assaulted by sea people people are coming in from the sea beware of Greeks bearing gifts because they don't leave and so what's happening is those people will end up on the shores of Israel and during the time that Joshua and judges are coming in Joshua is coming in from the east and the judges are settling the land or unsettling the land as it were the Philistines are not yet a force why because they're just arriving the Philistines are the Palast the educator and the Sheridan we just call them the Palast of Philistines but there are actually Greeks they will land on the coasts of Lebanon and Phoenicia and give us the alphabet and all kinds of other good stuff okay but the important thing for us is they're not there yet Egypt is tied up messing around with Philistine invasions while Israel is coming and cleaning the clock of the Canaanites that means that the strongest power in the neighborhoods tied up right then and when the cat's away the mice will play all right there are five boxes for this book and the first one is in the first this is Randy's arbitrary way of understanding Joshua it's not there's nothing holy about it it's me dividing it up but it's about entering Canaan and this is going to be the fabulous story how you take a tent culture of low quality we know this archaeologically the Canaanites had better dishes the Canaanites had nice houses better dishes and nicer wells the Israelites look like a bunch of Appalachian Yahoo's coming in like coming in with their like tents and whatnot how do you take over a high culture from a low culture and really what happens the entering Cana segment Acadians segment is all about God preparing the people this is akin to what you saw in the beginning preparation in numbers it's a it's a long story about how they walked in the door I don't know if you my favorite writers are the ones who know how to move the story along the beginning beginning of Joshua is like and then we took a left step then we reached our hand out and took a right step and then we extended our hand toward the other you know it's like this detail get over it get in the land well yeah then you start the actual part that I really go for the cool part and it's gonna be told in a very specific specific format the conquering of Canaan is going to be from Central than south then north and then they're going to actually summarize it in chapter 11 11 and 12 there's this big long summary it appears to me that these are separate Scrolls that this seems to be its own story and it stands alone my suggestion to you is that Joshua writes the initial material for the first one in great detail he writes the essential material for the second scroll for conquering Canaan both both central South and the north and that he's also going to be integral involved in the dividing up Canaan why is the dividing Canaan section so big it took a long time well the number of verses is not directly corresponding to the length of time thankfully otherwise every time there's a 400 period the four hundred year period we'd have lots and lots of verses right no really what the issue is is this these become legal section three becomes legal documents of inheritance why are documents of inheritance important those of you studied the Torah know this answer why are documents of inheritance important tells you who gets what okay documents of inheritance do in fact tell you who gets what you are correct why is that important okay there are several issues and you brought up one of them one of the issues is although they have a title to the land in perpetuity they have a domicile agreement that says and by the way you're going to be kicked out of the land at various times so you're gonna want to know who owns what because you're not always going to be there to know whose fence is what so there's a record a permanent record of what tribal areas belong to which tribe but there's something else do you remember the thing about the ladies end of numbers they were all squabbling what was their what was their beef Anna do you remember what their beef was they wanted inheritance but they're all girls in the family but they didn't want their father's name to die out but what was the problem that that in numbers 36 did that brought up anybody remember right if I if I as a woman would marry a man the inheritance would be surrendered to the priesthood of that family and the problem is this was my father's and now we're gonna have a transfer of property so by marriage we could erode the permanent inheritance lines of the land and God steps in and says okay then you can only marry within your tribe keep it in your tribe yes you can marry yes you can have an inheritance I see that that's a problem but I want you to keep it within the tribal boundaries here's the point God thought that the settling of the land in actual physical boundaries was an essential thing to spend ten chapters of the Hebrew Scriptures explaining here there's a few chapters but if you go back to numbers they've already had this if you go to Leviticus it has a chapter of it if you go to Deuteronomy it has three chapters of it in other words God thinks and inheritance is important now there's a reason for that you have to understand there's one of the differences between us and the ancient people if you lived in the time of the Bible the pair of shoes you have on is the only pair of shoes you own the clothes that are on your back are the only clothes you have if you are wealthy you have a change of raiment meaning you have a second set of clothes but most people lived a life that had very few things in this world and in in antiquity most people never saw their name written down ever in their life it wasn't a visual culture it was a verbal one and they lived and they died and they were dust and gathered together with their fathers and virtually nothing it's like you take a glass of water and you stick your finger in the glass of water at this place is the water you take your finger out and and and a minute later you don't know the finger was ever in there that's how people view their life I'm not significant on my own but the effect of how God works in all of us is changing the cycles of history and I'm leaving behind something that's big and important part of something I'm part I may not have anything but I'm part of something the emphasis in modern Christianity that you should have something is robbing the communal spirit of our movement because now it's about me not about us but the communion of the Saints was always about us not about me I want you to see that for the ancient person the inheritance laws were the one statement they made on the planet after they were gone it's one of the few things they ever left behind their kids and a piece of ground where their kids could be at home and God uses this all the way through to the Millennium in Scripture this is an important factor we're gonna run this all the way out all right now we've got dividing Katie and then we've got this the egg verses and most of you have this 21 all the way through 24 33 I'm splitting off a box I'm doing that because it bugs you I'm doing that because some of you go wait a minute we only have four boxes because Sarah only put four boxes in our boxes there's a fifth one but it's actually a sub box so we're gonna make this like a tinier box it's not on my drawing but you know what I mean okay this one is settling Canaan and it is Judges the period of the judges begins at the end of Joshua meaning they're they're actually knit over top of each other it's nice that we have these boxes and now we have Joshua then Joshua dies and then we have judges but there's already a sense in which ever since Jethro in the wilderness there's been tribal leadership and other voices that have come along with us Joshua is the most profound anchor of the news from God but he's not the only one running everything he's actually splitting up things and they're whole armies fighting in some part of the country wall and armies fighting in another part of the country and Joshua's not omnipresent okay so what we have is the settling of Canaan and then we have the three burials and this is going to tie it all the way back to Genesis the burials will include Josh will include eleazar and eleazar is who high priest who followed errand and Phineas follows him second high priest and then we're gonna bury some bones the bones of Jo and that's gonna tie this all the way back to the end there the bones of Joseph and they will be brought in and buried in the central part in scam or Shechem in the central part of the northern part of what's later called Sumeria all right Joshua is the story of a transition it's not a marginal story it's an a gripping story an important story what's interesting is that we know pretty much that Caleb stated he was 40 years old when he was a spy he says that in Joshua 14 seven Caleb says I was 40 years old when I went out to spy the land okay follow me if the wilderness wanderings lasted 38 years after Caleb who was 40 at the time did his little reconnaissance and came back and said go in it means he was how old when they got into the land 78 right so he's 40 years old 38 years later after the wanderings he's now 78 years old and Caleb stated that he was 85 years old at the end of the conquest in 1410 so he came into the land at 78 but by 85 they had conquered the land that gives us a pretty good idea of how long that conquest takes and it all comes from verses that are taken out of Joshua 14 you'll skip over them in your reading but they're important mark in your Bible 14 7 and 14 10 and just put next to it the Caleb formula for the conquest that's he'll tell how long it will take the Caleb formula for the conquest tells us that it happened between his 78th birthday and his 85th birthday from 14 14 7 14 10 so you have what's that the Caleb formula for the conquest and we just it's just a little kind of interesting detail what I want to do then is when we come back we're going to talk about the stages of preparation for Joshua but let's just stop for a minute and look at the beauty of what God gave us in this book God gave us the beauty of a book of how to face a transition when you're going to get out of that bubble of Christian formation I'm going to use it that way and walk out into a pagan world and suddenly be surrounded by voices that are very different talk to a missionary who leaves this country and drops themself into a European sea city and they understand this concept well suddenly you're the only person who sees it not only from the biblical standpoint but even has a biblical sense of morality the truth is that the moral tenants have already been eroded in so many formerly Western countries post Christian Europe becoming post Christian America so here's the thing keys that we're gonna study in Joshua are gonna help you to know how to walk onto a university campus keys that we're gonna study and Joshua are gonna help you know how to sit in a dorm room and have a conversation with a person of a pagan mind just remember this no part of it is I I don't want to overplay the the imagery because I don't want you to walk out there hacking people down that's not what you're supposed to be doing but there's a battle to be fought and it's a very real battle and ours is a battle of ideas and spiritual truth but it's nevertheless a battle you're also gonna find that some people who are on your team are gonna lie some of them are gonna reverse direction and many many many will compromise to become more like the people you're trying to reach than the people they're supposed to be Joshua is a gift to us don't lose heart I'm coming back I went away to find a place for today and I'm coming back I'm coming soon so leave the light on if your

Channel: One Hour. One Book.

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Length: 56min 0sec (3360 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2014